More fossilized soft tissue

Ken Ham is excited about another discovery of traces of collagen in dinosaur bones. Me? I’m saying ho-hum, it’s mildly interesting, but it’s not what you think it is. Kenny-boy thinks it’s evidence that the bones are only 4,000 years old. I’m just wondering what processes protected collagen from degradation.

In this new study, researchers* used advanced mass spectrometry and protein sequencing to detect bone collagen in a well-preserved hip bone from an Edmontosaurus uncovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. This unexpected find is encouraging other researchers to pull fossils out of storage and look at them with these new technologies. And why?

The popular science article explains:

Furthermore, experts could uncover the biochemical pathways that enabled the preservation of organic compounds over millions of years. “The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” said Taylor.

Yes, how these proteins could remain for millions of years is a big mystery. Evolutionists, try as they might, have yet to be able to present a plausible explanation for the existence of soft tissue in supposedly ancient fossils. Now the popular science article quoted Dr. Taylor, who is a creation scientist involved with this new find, saying this research will help us understand how proteins can last for “so long”—creationists too want to know how proteins can last a few thousand years. We don’t have the problem of millions and millions of years but there’s more work to be done to understand the processes that preserved them since the flood, 4,350 years ago.

The original paper doesn’t ask the question Ken Ham thinks it does. It has a narrow, specific scope: is the collagen part of the bone, or is it a product of external contamination? They show that it really is in the fossil.

They say nothing about the age of the fossil, except to briefly acknowledge it was “excavated from the Upper Cretaceous zone of the Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, USA.” They don’t dwell on that fact (it’s not the focus of the paper), but I know that there’s a huge amount of data screaming that it is 70 million years old. Any explanation for the preservation of soft tissue has to include all those facts. You know, the facts that Ham ignores.

Collagen is there. I’m willing to accept that. The bones are 70 million years old. The science demonstrates that. And we have plausible explanations for its preservation.

We previously demonstrated that the treatment of extant microvascular tissue with haemoglobin, an Fe-coordinating protein, can significantly enhance stability over multi-year time frames10, in effect acting as a preserving agent. Here, we extend this experimental observation to propose that enhanced resistance to degradation is due in part to Fe-catalysed non-enzymatic crosslinking of molecules comprising structural tissues, with haemoglobin suggested as the primary source of such Fe in vessels undergoing diagenesis.

This is just another example of Answers in Genesis cherry-picking the data they like and then misinterpreting/misrepresenting it.

The only thing you need to know about Paddington in Peru

My wife and I went on a date to this movie last night. It was OK, not as amusing as the previous one, but you knew from the beginning that everything would be fine.

I had one moment of concern, and I wanted to warn you in case you also wanted to watch it, especially if you take any children with you. There is a scene with a spider, which they said was a purple tarantula, Avicularia purpurea, in which it was resting on an important crank that needed to be turned by a character who had admitted to disliking spiders, and there was a minute of tension. I feared the spider would be harmed, and there was a flurry of slapstick in which the spider ended up on the character’s face, no doubt an unpleasant and terrifying scene for the spider, but it ended with the crank being turned and then the tarantula being returned to its home with a kind word.

It was briefly stressful for me, but I’m happy to report that I was able to uncover my eyes and that the movie is safe for everyone to watch. Eight tarsal claws up.

Maybe I’ll stay home for a few years

Fortunately, salvage crews work for free.

My wife & I have discussed flying out to Washington state, maybe with a side trip down the Oregon coast, but I may have to rethink that.

The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Probationary workers were targeted in late night emails Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement.

The impacted workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

ATC was already understaffed. In what muddled, evil mind does firing more improve air travel safety? Unless…maybe it’s not about safety.

One FAA employee who was fired over the weekend suggested he was targeted for his views on Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, not as part of a general probationary-level sweep. Both are owned by Elon Musk, who is leading Trump’s effort to cut the federal government.

Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander posted on LinkedIn that he was fired just after midnight Saturday, days after he started getting harassing messages on Facebook.

“The official DOGE Facebook page started harassing me on my personal Facebook account after I criticized Tesla and Twitter,” Spitzer-Stadtlander wrote. “Less than a week later, I was fired, despite my position allegedly being exempted due to national security.”

He added: “When DOGE fired me, they turned off my computer and wiped all of my files without warning.”

I’ve criticized DOGE and Tesla and everything connected to Elon Musk. Will they try to revoke my tenure next?

At least innocent people wouldn’t die if I lose my job, unlike those air traffic controllers.

Back to the Miocene

It’s getting harder and harder to find something optimistic about. Seeing science knee-capped and obnoxious snots under Musk’s employ rifling through the IRS files and plotting to destroy Social Security (Hey! That’s my money! It’s not for billionaires to steal) is incredibly discouraging. I found something that looks on the bright side of climate change, though. The Miocene might be a good model for our future.

The Miocene, roughly 5-20 million years ago, had CO2 levels similar to where we’re going as we blast past recommended limit. It was generally warmer and wetter! That has some appeal as I sit here in a region at -30°C. It wasn’t a terrible world at all — primates were diverse and thriving, we had all these interesting mammals, “From Dryopithecus, a lineage of extinct primates that included forerunners of humans, to the toxodonts, large-hoofed mammals with long, curved incisors, to mammals similar to sloths, armadillos and anteaters, to marsupial carnivores”…it was great!

Significantly, the Miocene was a nearly 18 million year epoch full of change, albeit far slower change than ours. It started with a period of glaciation that must have been a chilly change from the greenhouse-like Oligocene, and ended with a prolonged period of glaciation, too. But through much of the Miocene, it was a warm world compared to today’s, a high CO2 planet that gradually cooled over millions of years until ice sheets developed in the Northern Hemisphere and Antarctica.

Around the middle of the epoch, we reached what is called the Miocene Climate Optimum (MCO), a roughly two million year-long greenhouse period when the world experienced its last period of sustained warmth, and the CO2 level was at least 500 ppm. This is the period we’re talking about, most specifically, when we talk about the Miocene as a proxy for our future, although changes throughout the Miocene are relevant: basically, from the middle Miocene Earth went through a process roughly opposite the one we are experiencing (and causing) today.

See? How can you dislike something called a “Climate Optimum”? It looks like paradise! Sign me up — these Minnesota prairies would be so exciting with little horses and hippos and Thylacosmilusand chalicotheres gamboling about in the lush vegetation.

The plants are going to love it.

Carbon dioxide levels affect plants by allowing for greater photosynthesis rates, and by increasing water use efficiency, in that plants can achieve the same amount of photosynthesis with less loss of water through the pores in their leaves, because higher availability of CO2 absorbed through open pores means they can keep them closed more of the time. Thanks to all this, it was also “a globally greener Miocene world,” as Reichgelt and West write in the 2025 paper. Various forms of evidence suggest that the biosphere was more productive during the Miocene compared to now, and that at higher latitudes, this effect was more pronounced.

Except for one major problem: evolution does not run backwards. No chalicotheres await us, especially since we’d be entering a neo-Miocene with a depauperate fauna.

Sadly, the taxodonts will not grace our future world. The long-armed, horsey Chalicotheriidae, reminiscent of Bojack Horseman, won’t be joining us at the bar. Smilodon, the catty predator whose ancestors emerged in the early Miocene, will not smile on us again. Nor the “bizarrely specialized” family of carnivorous marsupials, Malleodectidae, which used their massive ball peen-like third premolars to crush snails. Not the dog bears, Hemicyoninae, who emerged before and lived through the Miocene, nor the bear dogs, Amphicyonidae, which died out by the late Miocene. Evolution doesn’t work like that. Barring the odd de-extinction attempt, what’s lost is gone forever (that includes, thank goodness, the terror birds.)

Expect wild pigs and deer, already doing well, and novel species exploring new environments: I expect the descendants of raccoons and rats to thrive. Humans, not so much. We don’t do so well in the face of widespread environmental disruption, we like nice stable tame-able places where we can rely on crops to come in dependably. We’ll be starting with ecological wreckage and then amplifying the swings of climate and weather, which is a recipe for radical destabilization.

It’s also possible that we’re being seduced by the idea that the Miocene might represent a “happy medium.” As Steinthorsdottir and colleagues write, “More pessimistic scenarios of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions quickly move us beyond the Pliocene state, pushing Earth’s systems into a potentially vulnerable position where many of its ‘tippable’ subsystems such as glaciers, sea ice, forest biomes, deserts and coral reefs will be permanently destabilized […] an ‘intermediate’ deep-time climate analog, where boundary conditions are close to modern but extreme climate changes occurred, is therefore of great interest.”

As humans we have a notorious tendency to believe that whatever’s in the middle of two given extremes is moderate, cozy, all around OK. (In politics, this results in the Overton Window.) But Miocene-style hydrological or water cycles favor high altitude wind events, like cyclones and hurricanes, that transport heat and moisture evaporating from the tropics to higher latitudes, or California’s intense seasonal rainstorms. The future may be lush, sure, but it’ll also be erratic and dangerous for us. And the “tippable” subsystems Steinthorsdottir mentions may have tipping points that occur well within a Miocene-like context, as scientists have warned.

Whenever a paleoclimatologist tells you a scenario is “of great interest”, it’s time to run.

Sorry. I told you it’s hard to find anything to be optimistic about.

I’m not banal enough to be a NYT columnist

I have no idea what he’s trying to say with this illustration on the column. God has a whip? He’s a bastard to make you behave?

But I could try, if the New York Times would give me a sinecure as their atheist columnist, and if I were willing to discard any self-respect I might have. After all, they do employ the most insipid theist they could find, Ross Douthat. He tried something slightly creative this week, trying to steel-man an atheist argument, badly. He presents his idea of The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God. It’s the problem of evil.

One interesting point about this argument is that while it’s often folded into the briefs for atheism that claim to rely primarily on hard evidence and science, it isn’t properly speaking an argument that some creating power does not exist. Rather it’s an argument about the nature of that power, a claim that the particular kind of God envisioned by many believers and philosophers — all powerful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find ourselves, and therefore that this kind of God does not exist.

That is correct. No one uses the problem of evil to disprove a god, but only the idea of a benevolent god, or more specifically, the perfectly good being most Christians promote. When I see it deployed in an argument, it’s usually to make the narrower point that I don’t believe in your god.

Douthat follows the usual out — refusing to deal with a direct criticism of his version of god to ask, “what about this other god?”, a weaker god than his magical being. And then falls back on general apologetics.

You can’t fully counter the argument from evil with evidence of God’s existence because the argument doesn’t fully try to establish God’s nonexistence. And you can’t fully counter it with an argument for why God might allow suffering — as a necessary corollary of free will, for instance — because the claim isn’t about the existence of suffering but its scale and scope and excess.

What you can offer, instead, is a set of challenges rather than straightforward rebuttals. The first challenge emphasizes the limits of what the argument from evil establishes even if you fully accept it: not that God doesn’t exist, not that the universe lacks a supernatural order, but just that the traditional Christian or classical-theist conception of God’s perfect goodness is somehow erroneous or overdrawn. This still leaves you with the converging lines of evidence for some kind of cosmic order, some kind of crucial human role within that drama. And it still leaves you with various theological alternatives to make sense of that evidence: You could be a pantheist or a polytheist, a gnostic or a dualist, a deist or a process theologian, and more. The argument from evil might be a reason to choose one of those schools over traditional Christianity, without being a good reason to choose atheism.

He really just doesn’t like atheism. Anything else but atheism. He doesn’t bother to say what those the converging lines of evidence for some kind of cosmic order are, though. But OK, sure, the problem of evil says you should be anything but a traditional Christian, I’ll take it.

Douthat is a traditional Catholic.

Does he even read what he writes?

The straw he grasps at is that any good exists, and you can’t explain that, therefore God.

But it makes the problem of good — real good, deep good, the Good, not just fleeting spasms and sensations — at least as notable a difficulty for the believer in a totally indifferent universe as the problem of evil is supposed to be for the religious believer.

Which suggests that even if that evil makes it hard for you to believe in a God of perfect power, you still shouldn’t give up hope that something very good indeed has a role in the order of the world.

Except that we don’t need an all-powerful supernatural being to explain how the world works.

The ball is in your court, New York Times: I’m available. I don’t know if I could write anything as stupid as Douthat’s scribblings, though. If I read enough Douthat will that make me ignorant enough to take his place?

I get email

This email was long and particularly vapid, so I’m not going into detail on it, but I do include the whole damn thing below the fold for your entertainment. To summarize it briefly, my correspondent is a friendly Muslim who wants me to know that he accepts evolution…for other organisms, but not humans. Humans are special. To make his point, he provides Evidence of the Divine.

This evidence consists of long, practically obsessive descriptions of how beautiful Mohammed was. His eyes were large, with deep black irises and bright whites, and his eyelashes were long and how good he smelled, I never smelled ambergris or musk or anything as fragrant as the scent of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Also, he knew that horse hooves could strike sparks when galloping over stones, but there are no stones in the desert! How can you not be convinced of the existence of god and the falsity of evolution when you learn this?

He concludes by telling me how persuasive his argument is.

I want to let you know that I’ve shown this to scientists and they were utterly convinced that God didn’t exist and that we evolved from a common ancestor with primates. But after I showed them this proof that the Quran has Divine origins. They started to rethink their whole world view regarding God and atheism.

I include the entirety of his “proof” below, despite the fact that apparently it’s going to convince all of you to leave this site and go running to your nearest mosque. After all, how can you resist when Mohammed bats his lovely eyes at you?

[Read more…]

Libraries rule, Amazon drools

I took a break and visited my local coffee shop for the first time in a few weeks, and I sat down with a cup and thought I’d read for a bit. I had my tablet with me, and I figured I could grab some quick, free reading from Kindle Unlimited, and I slurped in a sci-fi novel. I wasn’t making a big commitment to something complex, just an hour of light reading, and I figured anything would do.

To paraphrase part of the opening scene in this “book,” in which our intrepid hero has crashed on an alien world…

Fortunately, days on this planet were exactly 24 hours, just like Earth days, but unfortunately, hours were 100 minutes long.

Aaiieeee. My brains curdled in my skull. If I had a soul, it would have withered at this taste of Hell. I closed that sucker up and just finished my coffee while glaring at the wall.

This is a problem with Amazon. They have this program to pay “authors” for generating content for Kindle, but there is absolutely no quality control. There are people churning out multiple schlocky novels a week and dumping them on Kindle, creating a swirling cesspool of terrible writing, and the bad content is overwhelming the work of any sincere authors who are trying to get published, somehow. I’m not going to bother with Kindle Unlimited anymore.

I do have a better alternative. In my region, the Viking Library System provides e-book services through an app called Libby, and I can get good books at home or at the coffeeshop. Availability is significantly more limited that what Amazon offers, but I’m learning that drowning in dreck is not better than having to wait for a book I’ll appreciate to become available.

Also, did you know that public libraries positively impact community health and well-being? Take advantage of them before the Republicans close them all.