Thirteen years ago Charles Darwin was toppled from his lofty pedestal. His namesake-ism was given a fatal blow. Nevertheless, he remains a plaster saint in the reliquary of the rationalists.
It was 2005. Dr. Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, was given a splinter of a 68-million-year old fossil of a T. Rex. Schweitzer gave it to her assistant to clean in preparation for an examination.
Her aide placed it in a mild acid bath and promptly forgot about it. A lapse of memory that was to have profound implications.
Two weeks later she recalled the fossil fragment. "Too late," she thought. "By this time all the minerals will be dissolved. Nothing will be left."
She was wrong. There was something left. It was soft and spongy. It looked for all the world like biological tissue.
She told Schweitzer: "That's impossible!" Schweitzer knew that organic material could not survive thousands of years, let alone after geological epochs.
So she repeated the prolonged acid bath with other remains of the same T. rex fossil. Results: the same. After 17 trails, there was always a small mass of dino flesh on the bottom of the Petri dish. She could no longer deny the impossible.
Schweitzer published her results in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal, Science. A storm of protests erupted.
Darwinism and some academic disciplines are dependent upon vast expanses of time, necessary for the presumed transformation of life and geology. Darwin's revered status was above questioning. Schweitzer's article was not just wrongheaded: it was blasphemous.
But Schweitzer, an evolutionist, confounded her critics by conducting experiments on a variety of fossils. "Soft tissue was present in about half of the samples, going back 200 million years," said Schweitzer.
To date, scores of fossils containing soft tissue have been documented. Other investigators found bio-tissue in "beard worms" that was alleged to be 530 million years old.
Additionally, carbon-14 tests have verified their ages to be in thousands, not millions of years.
Carbon-14 dating is based on the ratio of radioactive C-14 and stable C-12 in a living organism.
With death, C-14 is no longer ingested with food. Every 5,570 years after death the amount of C-14 is halved, while the C-12 remains stable. The remaining C-14 is compared to the unchanging C-12. This indicates the age of the specimen.
In tissue that is 100,000 years old or older, the amount of C-14 is too small to be measured. However, all of the dino tissue samples contained C-14 measuring between 22,000 and 39,000 years old.
Moreover, microscopic examination of fossil tissue revealed transparent, hair-thin capillaries. Inside these micro-tunnels were red blood cells lined-up in single file. After death, their circulatory race was arrested. The cells remain frozen in time, along with other cells like osteocytes.
Also, DNA, which is especially fragile, has been recovered but forget about Jurassic Park: that only works in the movies. And Schweitzer's original tissue? It proved to be collagen.
Persevering biological tissue can be a herculean task.
The body of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the former Soviet Union, has been on display since his death in 1924. His body requires daily care by a six-man team of preservation specialists and the annual expenditure of $200,000.
Lenin's remains lie in a temperature and humidity controlled sarcophagus with glass sides to permit viewing. Under his clothes is a double-layered rubber suit, saturated with embalming fluid.
Every 18 months the corpse is removed and soaked in a chemical bath for one month. And every other year the body is re-embalmed.
Despite these efforts, Lenin's body continues to deteriorate. Today the corpse is a cyborg of plastics, wax and other materials used to replace skin and flesh. Considering that his internal organs and brain have been removed, only 25 percent of the actual body remains.
Soon the hopeless task of preservation will have to be abandoned. Lenin will be interred and go the way of all flesh; this within a century.
What, then, is the probability of tissue surviving hundreds of millions of years? To quote Mary Schweitzer, "That's impossible!"
But the alternative to believing the "impossible" and abandoning the atheistic Darwinian paradigm is to admit Divinity in their rationalistic philosophy, and that's just not going to happen.
Sincerely, Bob Scroggins, New Milford, PA