It took me a while to appreciate just how amazing it is that scientists have “discovered soft tissue”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/, including possible blood vessiles, in a 70-million year old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil.
This is another one of those things that plays havoc with my sense of time. It is incredible to me that we have preserved flesh soft flesh from millions of years ago, even more so than seeing “100 year old color photographs of the russian empire”:http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/, which was a head-trip when I first saw it, and still sends my head spinning.
Over on “Slapnose”:http://slapnose.com, Anthony wonders “how Inteligent Design proponents will spin this”:http://slapnose.com/archives/2005/03/24/godless_scientists_discover_dinosaur_soft_tissue/. I don’t know, but their fellow-travellers in faith, the creationists, must love it, because in their minds its “more evidence for their young earth hypothesis”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-51%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=dinosaur+blood+%22young+earth%22. By their reasoning, there is no way that anything like blood cells (or other soft tissue) could possibly be preserved for millions of years, and that therefore the earth is young and the story of Genesis is the real deal.
Of course, I don’t see why 70 million year old marrow is any harder to believe than say, turning water to wine.
exactly, which leads me to believe this is not an issue of reason but of faith, either I believe in the preposterous notion that intense order comes from chance or I believe in the preposterous notion God became a man and the first miraculous thing He did was turn water into wine.