‘In December 2019, the journal Expert Review of Proteomics published a paper I authored with Stephen Taylor titled “Proteomes of the past: the pursuit of proteins in paleontology.”1The article features a table that lists 85 technical reports of still-existing biomaterial—mostly proteins—discovered inside fossils.
Can proteins last millions of years? Not according to decay rate measurements. Five incriminating trends emerged from these 85 secular reports. Our review sharpens the tension between how short a time biochemicals last and the supposed age of the fossils that contain them. We wrote:
Collagen decay rate experimental results build a temporal expectation that restricts bone collagen to archeological time frames, yet many reports of collagen and other proteins in older-than-archeological samples have sprinkled the paleontological literature for decades. Tension between the expectation of lability [susceptibility to chemical breakdown] and observations of longevity has fueled steady debate over the veracity of original biochemistry remnants in fossils.1 Image credit: Thomas, B. and S. Taylor. 2019. Proteomes of the past: the pursuit of proteins in paleontology. Expert Review of Proteomics. 16 (11-12): 881-895.
The 85 reports included descriptions of original skin, connective tissues, flexible and branching blood vessels, bone cells, and probable blood cells. Original biochemistry includes tattered but still-detectable osteocalcin, hemoglobin, elastin, laminin, ovalbumin, PHEX, histone, keratin, chitin, possible DNA, collagen, and collagen sequence—all inside fossil bones.
The first trend we found noted biomaterials from all kinds of different fossilized animals, not just dinosaurs.2 Thus, researchers need not restrict their searches for fossil biomaterials to any specific plant or animal type.
The second trend from all of these reports, which span over a half century of exploration, found no better preservation in one ancient environment over another. Whether living in air, oceans, lakes, swamps, or forests before they were fossilized, fossils could still contain biomaterials.3
Third, a bar graph of the number of relevant publications per year showed an increased interest in this field within the last two decades. Additionally, Figure 5 from our paper plots discoveries onto a world map to show that biomaterials in fossils occur virtually worldwide. We predict that future investigations could discover original biomaterials wherever fossils are found.
The fifth and final trend presents the biggest obstacle for those who insist that rock layers represent vast eons. We found reports of original biomaterials from seven of the 10 standard geologic systems plus one report each from the Precambrian and Ediacaran layers—the bottommost sediments on Earth. As one of our anonymous peer reviewers protested in response to these findings, having biomaterials last over 70 million years—let alone 500 million—is simply fantasy.
Proteins decay relentlessly and relatively fast. Yet protein discoveries keep piling up. Thus, “it is likely that contention will persist.”1 Our secular colleagues now have a sharper look at the vast depth and wide spread of young-looking biomaterials from fossils.
References
Thomas, B. and S. Taylor. 2019. Proteomes of the past: the pursuit of proteins in paleontology. Expert Review of Proteomics. 16 (11-12): 881-895.
Tissues or biochemistry were reported in dinosaur, eggshell, turtle, bird, marine worm casings, sponge, clam, mosasaur, tree, insect, arachnid, frog, salamander, and crinoid fossils.
‘Evolutionary scientists recently claimed to have discovered bacteria that are 101.5 million years old. In 2010 researchers collected deep-sea sediment cores in the South Pacific as part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, with the goal of examining seafloor life and habitability in one of the lowest-productive ocean areas. Sediment samples used in the analysis were taken from depths of up to 75 meters below the seafloor at several sites in water between 3,700 and 5,700 meters (12,100 to 18,700 feet) deep.1
Publishing in Nature Communications, Yuki Morono of the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and his colleagues added a special blend of nutrients to nearly 7,000 individual bacteria collected from the sediments. This food source contained a unique mix of carbon and nitrogen isotopes that allowed scientists to see if the bacteria were actively feeding.1 Co-author Steven D’Hondt, a University of Rhode Island oceanographer, said of the bacteria, “We didn’t know whether we had fully functioning cells or zombies capable of doing very few things.”2
Within 68 days, the distinctive tracer isotopes began showing up in the bacteria cultures, indicating the bacteria were feeding on the nutrients. The bacteria also reproduced, “increasing total numbers by four orders of magnitude” during the study.1
The scientists found this truly amazing since the bacteria had been taken from mud trapped between layers of impermeable porcellanite, a microcrystalline variety of quartz that no microbe could penetrate.1,2 This led the study’s authors to suggest the microbes could be as old as the sediments they were found in, essentially having been trapped in a time capsule. Colin Barras of NewScientist observed:
Many biologists are unsettled by the idea that individual bacterial cells could survive for 100 million years. There have been a handful of claims for even older microbes on Earth. One team claimed in 2000 to have resurrected microbes trapped inside 250-million-year-old salt crystals, but some researchers suspect that the microbes were seen as a result of sample contamination, which is unlikely to be the case in the new study.2
Claiming that bacteria can survive trapped in sediment for over 100 million years seems like science fiction. And yet, scientists have found cells, proteins, and flexible blood vessels in dinosaurs and other animals dated by secular scientists at 66 to over 500 million years.3 These discoveries question the great ages assigned to these creatures and instead suggest these fossils are just thousands of years old.
In light of these other fossil discoveries, there appear to be two possible solutions for these deep-sea bacteria: 1) the bacteria were not trapped for 101.5 million years, suggesting that there were fractures or conduits in the porcellanite that allowed bacteria to migrate in at a more recent date; or 2) these sediments and the bacteria found in them are not really millions of years old.
Either one of these scenarios better explains the presence of living bacteria in deep-ocean sediments compared to the tale spun by secular scientists. However, the earlier discoveries of so many original proteins and cells found in so-called ancient rocks makes solution number two the most likely one.
These bacteria, if indeed trapped in sediment at the time of deposition, are only thousands of years old. The ocean sediments, and possibly the bacteria too, were deposited during the global Flood described in Genesis. Claiming these bacteria are over 100 million years old is not based on empirical science but on a secular, deep-time worldview.
“And for the chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills,”
‘There is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding what carbon dating actually is and does. For example, we mentioned in a previous Creation Moment that, contrary to popular opinion, carbon dating is not used to find a date for fossils because such fossils do not usually contain the original material of the organism.
Carbon dating relies on an isotope of carbon with a mass of 14, whereas normal carbon atoms have a mass of 12. About one in every trillion carbon atoms is carbon-14. It is just as well that the amount of carbon-14 is so small because it is radioactive, having a half-life of 5,730 years. Carbon-14 is produced in the atmosphere by bombardment by cosmic rays. These rays produce thermal neutrons which crash into atoms of nitrogen (mass 14), dislodging a proton in a microscopic game of pool, thus producing a carbon-14 atom. As carbon-14 acts chemically the same as carbon-12, it gets into carbon compounds and enters the food chain. Both plants and animals are constantly both taking in and emitting carbon-14, so its quantity is assumed to remain constant. On death, however, the existing carbon-14 will simply decay, so the amount of carbon-14 left can be used to calculate how long ago it died.
Used correctly, carbon dating is actually a useful technique, but it relies on the assumption that atmospheric bombardment has been constant. This is an unsupported conjecture, and the devastating effects and aftermath of the biblical Flood would have greatly affected calculated carbon-dates.’ https://creationmoments.com/sermons/what-is-carbon-dating/?mc_cid=5ef30aa0f2&mc_eid=00c1dcff3c
Genesis 1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
‘According to secular scientists, the Moon is roughly 4.5 billion years old. It supposedly formed right after the Solar System did. But there’s a growing body of evidence that this old-age assessment is incorrect.
The Moon’s supposed age of billions of years was never correct, of course. But it was easier for secular scientists to make that claim a few decades ago—back when we didn’t know as much about the Moon as we do now.
The challenges arise from simple, well-understood physics:
Hot things cool off.
Small hot things cool off more quickly than large hot things. (Small objects have a high surface-area-to-volume ratio. Thus, they lose heat more quickly.)
The Moon is a small object. According to secular theories, it should have cooled from its formation long ago. A small, cold body would have no source of energy for geological activity. (Although there are tidal interactions between the Moon and Earth, these don’t supply significant amounts of energy.)
Therefore, the Moon’s geological activity also should have ceased long ago.
But apparently it didn’t. Here are three indicators of recent tectonic activity within the Moon:
Volcanic eruptions
TLP (Transient Lunar Phenomena)
Seismic activity (moonquakes)
Here’s why these discoveries are interesting.
If the Moon is (or recently was) geologically active, this activity indicates that it’s still hot inside. And if it’s still hot inside, it hasn’t cooled off yet.
Praise the Lord He has given simple folk like me access to those men and organisations that believe His Word and are able to explain the sciences, such as biology, in light of Biblical creation. This is a portion of an article from the Institute for Creation Research and is just another apologetic for our Creator.
‘For more than a century, biologists have appealed to Darwinian natural selection to explain how living organisms adapt to different environments. But research over the last several decades has consistently dethroned Darwin’s view of natural selection. Rather than corroborating the concept that environments mold creatures through “survival of the fittest,” the research supports the astonishing idea that to a great extent creatures actively sense their environments and adapt accordingly.
Recent discoveries indicate that something radical and impressive is happening. Adaptation is a result of brilliant biological engineering rather than trial-and-error death and survival, which flips the mechanism of adaptation completely on its head. This approach views biological adaptation as primarily occurring through internal mechanisms (the ability to actively sense the environment and adapt) rather than external influence (the environment molds creatures through Darwinian natural selection).
Abundant evidence can be found that creatures actively sense their environments and responsively adapt. Many such adaptations occur within one generation or less, which is far too rapid for Darwin’s notion of trial-and-error natural selection. Here are only a few examples of what studies have shown:
• Darwin’s famous finches rapidly adapted their beak shapes by sensing the environment rather than strictly through inherited genetic changes.1
• A species of carp expeditiously changed its morphology in the presence of predators. These changes made the carps’ bodies more difficult to devour and increased their speed and acceleration.2
• A study of over 1,000 pythons and boas demonstrated that they expressed similar traits to adapt to their environments, with no recorded mutations.3
• Certain populations of mice vary their tail lengths in response to eastern or western prairies and forests. This appears to happen by specific genetic mechanisms—not mutations.4
• Clutches of eggs for various reptiles sense environmental temperature and sand content and produce different ratios of male and female. The changes occur after the eggs are laid and are not a result of mutations. Specific sensors for this process were discovered in 2015.5
• When a certain species of sighted river fish lays eggs in a cave environment, the larvae indirectly sense the cave environment and produce fish with greater eye and orbit size variations. No inactivating mutation in regulatory genes have been identified.’6
References
1. Cabej, N. R. 2013. Building the Most Complex Structure on Earth: An Epigenetic Narrative of Development and Evolution of Animals. New York: Elsevier Publishing, 200; McNew, S. M. et al. 2017. Epigenetic variation between urban and rural populations of Darwin’s finches. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 17: 183; Skinner, M. K. et al. 2014. Epigenetics and the Evolution of Darwin’s Finches. Genome Biology and Evolution. 6 (8): 1972-1989.
2. Stabell, O. B. and M. S. Lwin. 1997. Predator-induced phenotypic changes in crucian carp are caused by chemical signals for conspecifics. Environmental Biology of Fishes. 49 (1): 139-144.
3. Esquerré, D. and J. S. Keogh. 2016. Parallel selective pressures drive convergent diversification of phenotypes in pythons and boas. Ecology Letters. 19 (7): 800-809.
4. Kingsley, E. P. et al. 2017. The ultimate and proximate mechanisms driving the evolution of long tails in forest deer mice. Evolution: International Journal of Organic Evolution. 71 (2): 261-273.
5. Yatsu, R. et al. 2015. TRPV4 associates environmental temperature and sex determination in the American alligator. Science Reports. 5: 18581.
6. Rohner, N. et al. 2013. Cryptic Variation in Morphological Evolution: HSP90 as a Capacitor for Loss of Eyes in Cavefish. Science. 342 (6164): 1372-1375; Gore, A. V. et al. 2018. An epigenetic mechanism for cavefish eye degeneration. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 2 (7): 1155-1160. https://www.icr.org/article/exploring-adaptation-from-engineering-perspective/
I became a born again Christian at the young age of ten. I attended public school all the way from kindergarten through high school. Thankfully, my high school science teacher did not believe in evolution and spent only one hour on evolution itself. However, she was sick for several weeks and we had two students from Iowa State University fill in and they pushed the theory of evolution as fact. Even now at the age of 74 I remember their trying to make evolution sound true.
Sadly, there are probably not many teachers in the public schools today like the one I had. The two evolutionary students from Iowa State University have filled the positions. But, God is still on the throne and there are some students who are confronted with Bible creation and they get saved and some of them become scientists who believe the Bible account of creation. This is the testimony of such a man.
Image credit: Thomas, B. and S. Taylor. 2019. Proteomes of the past: the pursuit of proteins in paleontology. Expert Review of Proteomics. 16 (11-12): 881-895.
‘There is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding what carbon dating actually is and does. For example, we mentioned in a previous Creation Moment that, contrary to popular opinion, carbon dating is not used to find a date for fossils because such fossils do not usually contain the original material of the organism.
Praise the Lord He has given simple folk like me access to those men and organisations that believe His Word and are able to explain the sciences, such as biology, in light of Biblical creation. This is a portion of an article from the Institute for Creation Research and is just another apologetic for our Creator.
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