Dinosaur Soft Tissues Raise Tantalizing Questions

For the past six years curators at the Royal Tyrell museum in Alberta, Canada, have spent more than 7,000 hours preparing a remarkable dinosaur for display. (Michael Greshko, “The Amazing Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada,” National Geographic, June, 2017).

What makes this nodosaur so special, is that it was buried with a ticking clock inside.

Of course, I don’t mean it swallowed a pocket watch. Rather, initial reports indicate that it is loaded with original biological material, called soft tissues. Such tissues (mostly proteins) decay at scientifically measurable rates, which can be compared to their actual state of decay to calculate the age of the carcass.

Normal Carbon-14 dating methods do not work for dinosaurs. Since the half-life of C-14 is only 5730 years, it is only useful for dating things less than 20,000 years old. Dinosaurs are currently believed to be tens of millions of years old.

In fact, it turns out that this nodosaur is not the only specimen with soft tissues. Over the past couple of decades, scientists have found various kinds of soft-tissues in about 200 different specimens. This first came to my attention when Dr. Mary Schweitzer discovered something like marrow inside the femur of a T-Rex found in Montana. Another famous discovery is well-preserved hadrosaur skin also found in Montana.

With so many discoveries and with a quarter-century to test them and publish the results, what conclusions has science drawn? Crickets, mostly. Even this remarkable nodosaur has been in the possession of scientists for six years, but there is still no peer reviewed study of its tissues. Why not?

The answer seems pretty obvious. There is, currently, no known mechanism that could preserve soft-tissues for more than a million years, and most would have decayed within a few thousand. Such results are radically different from current assumptions about the age of dinosaurs.

So, rather than publish results that contradict current scientific consensus, many are feverishly looking for a way that these soft-tissues could be preserved tens of millions of years longer than every scientific expectation.

While a few vague proposals have been suggested, none have been proven. After all, we’re not just talking about putting something in the deep freeze. The decay rate of protein is not caused by microbes eating the tissue, it is caused by the inevitable breakdown of inherently unstable chemical bonds. Time has its way with these tissues even in a sterile environment.

If the current science were accepted at face value, would it contradict any other scientific certainties? No. Dinosaurs are still real. The fossil record still is the fossil record. The fact that fossils are buried by thousands of layers of sedimentary rock remains undisputed. The only assumption that is really challenged is the question of how fast the layers of sediment were laid down.

The story of our nodosaur remains essentially the same: On the lush, tropical plains that were then western Canada, a plant-eating nodosaur was having its last meal. This eighteen foot, three thousand-pound behemoth, covered by armored plates and with twenty inch spikes protruding from its shoulders, was well protected from assailants. But not from weather. Especially not this storm.

A flood, like we have never seen, poured torrential rains, and opened geysers. Likely earthquakes and volcanos added to the cataclysmic flooding that swept the dinosaur downstream. Carried out to sea in the river of mud, vegetation, and debris, it escaped the usual fate of waterlogged carcasses.

While most carcasses bloat and are picked clean by scavengers before falling to the bottom, this one doesn’t have a single claw or tooth mark on it. It must have been buried quickly amidst millions of tons of vegetation, sand and aggregate. Even the ever-present bacteria which should have eaten its stomach contents and internal organs were stopped in their tracks.

There it remained, undisturbed, until 2011. The only question is whether this all happened 115 million years ago, or a few thousand years ago. That’s the nature of archeology. We have no eye-witnesses to the actual events, so we make guesses and spin a story out of our assumptions.

In fact, an earlier date would not only fit the facts that we have, it also fits with volumes of cross-cultural literature detailing a world-wide flood. It wasn’t all that long ago that this was widely held. Scientists understood that every uneaten and undecayed fossil discovered must have been buried rapidly. Hence, it was scientific proof of a cataclysmic flood not unlike that described by cultures around the world.

So how could early evolutionists counter this mounting evidence? Answer: Tell a different story. Men like Charles Lyell (1797-1875) claimed that every thin layer of the earth’s crust was laid down over the course of hundreds and thousands of years.

Naturally, there was plenty of scientific objection to this new story. Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that layers of sediment with no vegetation between them, had to be laid down rapidly? In the real world, what topsoil ever remains undisturbed for centuries?

These objections still haven’t been answered by scientific proofs. But they have been muscled out of the public square by a series of court cases in the 20th century.

As recently as 1925 it was illegal to teach the new theory of evolution in our nation’s public schools. Then, an atheist teacher (John Scopes), encouraged by the ACLU, defied the law and took the state of Tennessee to court. This is the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial.” But he lost his case and the law was upheld.

Nevertheless, four decades later, the U.S. Supreme Court, through a new interpretation of the Establishment Clause, overturned those very same state laws across the nation (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968). Twenty years after that, they went farther still. The activist court even struck down all the state laws which called for the traditional science to be given equal time as the new evolutionary theory (Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987).

In the space of 60 years, legal activists accomplished what science could not. They replaced one scientific point of view by another. Now, after roughly 50 years of evolutionary theory being taught to us as children, there are few left who question it. Many even assume that evolution has always been taught. It hasn’t.

Today the leading evolutionists refuse to call it a scientific theory. That’s not because it has become a fact. It has, rather, become a dogma. The dating of the earth’s sedimentary layers and hence, of the fossils encased in them, depends entirely on whether you accept the quick deposit theory, or the slow deposit theory. That’s what makes the discovery of our nodosaur so intriguing.

Assumptions about how fast the earth’s sedimentary layers were deposited can now be tested by the clocks that we are digging up within them. As our understanding of these clocks improve, they can only get more accurate. Who knows how all this will cause future scientists to rethink long-settled assumptions?

The truth will come out eventually. That’s the great thing about science. It is not about opinions, or consensus, or wishful thinking. It is about facts. It is about what we can know and what we can’t know. Theories may come and go, but the truth won’t change. Seek the truth and you’ll never be disappointed or threatened by the crumbling of a theory.

Furhter Reading: University settles lawsuit with scientist fired after he found soft tissue in dinosaur bones. August 11, 2017

On the Closing of Wyoming’s only Planned Parenthood Clinic

Our Common Belief

Your life is the deliberate choice of an almighty and good Creator. That is not only my belief, it is probably yours as well. Even if you don’t think about it much, you make this assumption. Because apart from this basic starting point, there is little purpose in life, and even less hope and love.

Once you believe that God deliberately created you, you also know that your existence is not due to random chance, and certainly not bad luck. You were planned. God Himself wants you to exist. And the same goes for everyone you meet.

If your life matters to God, it also matters to me. This truth binds us together into a community that cares for each other. Get rid of a common creator, and you are left without any logical reason to care for anyone but yourself. On the other hand, if we are all children of the same creator, every human life, from the greatest to the least, deserves the protection of everyone else.

And there’s more.

An integral part of God’s plan for you, was for you to grow in the womb of your mother. Instead of an egg in the nest, or a tadpole in the pond, human babies gestate in the womb of female human being.

What a special person she is! Mother’s Day is a day for flowers, and thankfulness, and love. Only half of the human race is capable of motherhood, and not all women become mothers. Still, every single one of us has a mother.

Like you, she is vulnerable and flawed. But she is also infinitely precious to the same One who created you. You and she both are divinely planned. Both mother and child are God’s gift to the world. They are planned by God, even if they weren’t planned by their parents. People have accidents, but God never does.

Because God cared enough to plan both, we should care enough to take care of both. That is our special privilege as a caring community of neighbors. And, if God has planned both, then God Himself certainly gives a way to love every pregnant woman, while also loving her child.

These two loves are in deep harmony and not in conflict. Our job is to find that harmony. Dr. David Reardon, Director of the Elliot Institute, articulates it well, “only the mother can nurture her unborn child. All that the rest of us can do is to nurture and protect the mother.” That is true care.

The Competing Belief

Sadly, some believe otherwise. Those who assume that their life is an unplanned accident, tend to think that everybody else is a potential problem. They are “mouths to feed,” “drains on my time and energy,” and “competition for limited resources.”

That’s the worldview of Planned Parenthood. As a result, they act as though women are best cared for by pitting them against their children.

Planned Parenthood preaches this theology with the help of 500 million federal dollars every year. Through your taxes, their preaching is amplified more than any church. Not only do they use your money to lobby for more money, and to campaign for those who give it to them, they also use it to convince more than 320,000 American women to abort their children every year.

And they make millions of dollars on these abortions.

When a woman finds out that she is pregnant, she is filled with powerful emotions, some delightful and some scary. Often it is a mixture of both. If the woman is nurtured and cared for, the joy will usually win out over the fear.

Surveys of post-abortion regret vary widely, depending on the length of time after the abortion, which indicators are measured, and the bias of the researchers. Even the most conservative estimates find that 30% of women report regret their abortion, some as high as 90%. On the other hand, at least one survey of women who have decided to carry the child to term find zero regret. (Reardon, Makimaa, Sobie, Victims and Victors)

A 1989 L.A. Times poll found that 74% of post-abortive women believed that abortion was morally wrong, but had one anyway. Why? Because they are overwhelmed by pressure from others. Authority figures like parents, partners, or Planned Parenthood counselors made them feel hopeless and forced into abortion against their wishes.

Even Planned Parenthood’s former research arm, the Guttmacher institute, reports that 89% of post-abortive women would have liked to keep the baby. Nobody should be forced to violate their own deepest convictions. We should all find ways to address their needs and counter the forces which make women feel powerless.

Pregnant women seeking support should be shown the full array of services that we have created to serve them – from WIC to food stamps, from childcare subsidies to church support groups. Responsible counselors should give them information on every federal, state, and local program that can offer help in carrying and raising their children.

Medical information should also be given them. They need to know the risks of infection and the risk of sterility. They need to know the facts about breast cancer and abortion. They need to know the longitudinal studies about PTSD, substance abuse, and an increased suicide risk. They need to be provided an opportunity to see by ultrasound, what they are being pressured to abort -- an opportunity Wyoming now gives them by law.

Planned Parenthood lobbies against every one of these proposals. Meanwhile the Guttmacher Institute spins the research that contradicts its narrative, doing little real research of its own. After more than 44 years of legalized abortion, large-scale, random-sample studies of these risks have still not been done.

Worse still, there is not even one, single study proving either medical or mental health benefits from abortion. Planned Parenthood’s entire business model is based on unproven assumptions. That is a crime.

A Better Way

Thankfully, America has around 2,200 pregnancy resource centers, including ten in Wyoming, that operate according to the belief that both lives are precious. This is far more than the 665 clinics run by Planned Parenthood.

They are funded by the donations of people who care about women and children. They are not in the business of making money, so they won’t be leaving Wyoming when their clientele drops below 500. They are not run by CEOs making an average of over $186,000 annually. Nor do they have a corporate overlord like Cecile Richards, who makes more than a half a million every year.
They serve thousands of Wyoming women every year -- all without the help of government funding.

Planned Parenthood pretends to have a monopoly on caring for women, and your tax dollars are lavished upon them accordingly. It is high time for the federal government to break this monopoly. Congress needs to look carefully at every organization which cares for women and rethink their funding.

No one should be forced either to fund, or support a business actively opposed to their fundamental beliefs. Any organization that cannot acknowledge the humanity of half the people who enter its doors, should not be called a humanitarian organization.

Beyond that, Congress should consider the benefit to women for each dollar spent. The percentage of money that goes to rich CEOs should be another consideration. And no organization receiving federal money should be allowed to campaign for the very politicians who give them money.

By any of these measures, the US House of Representatives was right to pass an amendment which would free 390 million dollars from the Planned Parenthood monopoly and give local agencies the opportunity to compete for these funds on a merit basis. Whatever else happens to the AHCA in the Senate, we should encourage our senators to enact this reform.

Caring for the women and children who find themselves in difficult times is the business of all of us. As children of the same God, we are all in this together. That is the basis of our common humanity, our common government, and our Wyoming neighborliness.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-rocky-mountains/patient-resources/wyoming-abortion-fund

https://www.care-net.org/abundant-life-blog/informed-consent-or-slick-marketing

Executive Order on Free Speech Falls Short

Thursday, May 4, was the National Day of Prayer. The Trump administration took the opportunity to invite prominent religious leaders to the White House for the signing of an Executive Order on Free Speech and Religious Liberty.

Reportedly, Vice President Pence has been pushing behind the scenes to resurrect the issue after an earlier draft was spiked in February. Washington insiders blame Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, for leaking a draft of the executive order to hostile press and forcing the president to distance himself from it.

More than three months later, the resurrected Order doesn’t hold a candle to the earlier version. The provisions that most raised the hopes of the religious leaders and raised the hackles of progressives, have been stripped out and replaced with promises that others will write them.

The meat of the Order is found in the first four sections. These address, 1) General Policy, 2) Religious and Political Speech, 3) Conscience Protections and the HHS Mandate, and 4) Guidance from the Attorney General.

Section 1 starts off well, “It shall be the policy of the executive branch to vigorously enforce Federal law's robust protections for religious freedom.” It explicitly recognizes that “Federal law protects the freedom of Americans and their organizations to exercise religion and participate fully in civic life without undue interference by the Federal Government.”

These are welcome words. Since 2009, the Obama Administration began to consistently use the phrase, “Freedom of worship,” in place of the First Amendment’s language of the “free exercise of religion.” This subtle change was designed to undermine protections for religious citizens in government positions and in public businesses. It worked.

After eight years of pushing this new and false view of the First Amendment, we have seen business owners told what they may or may not say to their customers regarding moral and religious beliefs. We have seen government employees and elected officials fired for religious reasons or commanded to speak and act in contradiction to their faith.

It is reassuring to hear, once again, that President Trump understands Federal law to protect not only worship, but full participation in civic life. It is high time to protect not only churches and religious corporations, but all religious Americans as individuals.

To further bolster this understanding, the Order reminds us, “The Founders envisioned a Nation in which religious voices and views were integral to a vibrant public square, and in which religious people and institutions were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by the Federal Government.”

Bravo, Mr. President. I only wish that you had retained the bright and clear language of the earlier draft: “Religious freedom is not confined to religious organizations or limited to religious exercise that takes place in houses of worship or the home. It is guaranteed to persons of all faiths and extends to all activities of life.”

While asserting a vigorous policy is nice, it actually accomplishes nothing unless policies and guidelines are put in place. So, Section 4 of the Order directs the Attorney General to “issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in Federal law.”

You would think that the Attorney General could have written some of those guidelines into the Order. In fact, the earlier draft contained some sound guidelines from the First Amendment Defense Act. However, these were stripped out of Thursday’s Order. This is ominous. We can only hope that some will be reinserted by the Mr. Sessions.

Section 2 deals with the Johnson Amendment. This law passed in 1954 threatens to take away a church’s tax-exempt status if they endorse or campaign for particular candidates. It was an unjust law from the start.

While I certainly agree that churches should stick to the word of God and not descend into personal politics, the federal government should not be in charge of judging what can and cannot be preached from the pulpit. Churches are accountable to God, and are more than capable of keeping false teaching and inappropriate politicking out of their own pulpits.

Besides, the Johnson Amendment gave rise to three more problems.

First, no one can deny the biased application of this law. How many times have you seen presidential candidates endorsed by churches, or even allowed to preach in them, while other candidates are derided for using the word “God.”

Second, the Johnson Amendment has had a chilling effect on all preaching. Lest they be accused of endorsing any particular candidate, most churches are too paranoid to address any issue that may be called “political.” This unintended consequence has been a major contributor to the degradation of public life.

Third the IRS, under Lois Lerner, used the Johnson Amendment as political cover to hamper the work of 501(c)3 organizations which advocated policy at odds with the Obama administration. This was a horrifying abuse of executive power.

For all these reasons, I wish the alarmists were right who say that Trump’s Executive Order is against the Johnson Amendment. But, alas, it is not. All it does is to restate that the Johnson Amendment allows churches and religious organizations to speak “about moral or political issues from a religious perspective.”

It does correct the most egregious abuses of the IRS by directing that the Secretary of the Treasury “ensure that… it does not take any adverse action against any individual, house of worship, or other religious organization” which are not breaking the law. This is an order that should not have to be given. The fact that it is necessary at all is a real black-eye to the IRS.

Section 3 of the Order addresses the “HHS Mandate.” This is the law written by HHS Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, which forces religious institutions to provide coverage for birth control and abortion-inducing drugs in their insurance policies. This outrageous mandate has been the center of contention since 2012.

Whenever you have the government forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to buy birth control, you know that something is seriously wrong.  Recently, the Supreme Court directed the HHS to amend these regulations.

One might have thought that this Executive Order would have spelled out those amendments. Instead, it merely tells the HHS to “consider issuing amended regulations.” Once again, the Executive Order kicks the can down the road.

I am grateful for the fairly strong language in the first Section of the Executive Order. It provides us with a good opportunity to talk about the First Amendment and its function in American civil life. But that is about all that this Order actually gives us.

The remainder of it is severely disappointing. After three months of behind-the-scenes wrangling, this is the best that they could do. It is not as though they forgot to consider including more specific protections. Rather, after considering them for three months, they could not generate the political will to include them.

The more I read and think about the Executive Order on Free Speech and Religious Freedom, the more troubled I am. The First Amendment deserves a more robust defense than this. Now, all we can do is wait to see if the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of HHS will come up with guidelines which reinsert what was stripped out of the earlier version.

Better yet, contact your congressional delegation and encourage them to pass the First Amendment Defense Act and to repeal the “HHS Mandate.” These actions would be better and more permanent than the mere stroke of a pen.

The Politicization of Decency

After a two-year investigation, the Department of Justice announced charges against 15 people who have been trafficking in eagle body parts. “U.S. Attorney Randy Seiler …described one operation as basically a "chop-shop for eagles" in which eagle feathers were stuffed into garbage bags. He said it was clear that it was a moneymaking operation and that the feathers and eagle parts such as talons and beaks were treated as merchandise. ‘There was no cultural sensitivity. There was no spirituality,’ Seiler said. ‘There was no tradition in the manner in which these defendants handled these birds.’" (April 24, 2017, 15 Indicted in Eagle Trafficking Case, James Nord, AP).

As yet, none of these charges allege the actual killing of an eagle. They are purely centered on the merchandizing of carcasses already dead. As I was told after a very unfortunate encounter on the highway, even if the killing of an eagle is purely accidental, it would be a federal offense if you left the scene with even a single eagle feather on your person or in your vehicle.

The Bald Eagle Protection Act was originally passed in 1940. In 1962 it was amended to include Golden Eagles. Under this law, there are criminal penalties for anyone to “take, possess, sell, purchase, barter, offer to sell, purchase or barter, transport, export or import, at any time or any manner, any bald eagle ... [or any golden eagle], alive or dead, or any part, nest, or egg thereof.”

As an indication of how seriously this law is enforced, our own Lyman High School provide a curious case study. At some point in the distant past, a well-meaning citizen found a dead golden eagle. Knowing that Lyman’s mascot is an eagle, he had it mounted to decorate the High School’s trophy room.


No one is quite sure when this trophy was acquired, but retired teacher, Allen Jaggi, clearly remembers that when he first arrived in Lyman in 1968 it was already there.

After decades of dust and decay had their way with the beleaguered bird, the school decided to have it refurbished. Since the bird was apparently donated before the 1962 addition of golden eagles to the Protection Act, there was no reason to have the mount documented for legality. But now, no taxidermist will take it in without documentation.

For quite some time, Lyman’s principle, Todd Limoges, has been handed off from one federal agency to the next in his good-faith effort to document the mount. Reportedly, a special agent from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is coming near to a solution. We hope this comes to pass. I would hate to see the Lyman school district swept up in the next round of indictments.

All local color aside, what piques my interest in eagles is the thoroughly religious tone of Mr. Seiler’s remarks at last Monday’s press conference. The U.S. Attorney, rather than presenting their crimes in the terms of the law, “sell, purchase, barter…,” said, “There was no cultural sensitivity. There was no spirituality. There was no tradition in the manner in which these defendants handled these birds.”

All of this is in stark contrast to another headline from last week’s news cycle. “Lamborghini” Mary Gatter was back in the news. She was the medical director of Planned Parenthood in Pasadena, CA who, last year, was caught on tape joking about her desire for a Lamborghini while haggling over the prices she charges for various baby parts.

The April 26th video, released from the Center for Medical Progress, again features her working the angles to increase the asking price from $50 to $75 dollars per specimen. In the process, she first says that she will not offer any baby parts past the 16th week of gestation. Then quickly changes her mind when the potential customer wants older babies.

Whether or not she violated any of the statutory language of the state of California, I am interested in something else. As an observer of culture, my interest lies in the way these two events were covered.
For starters, the Associated Press attended the news conference about eagle feathers, and published a national story about it. Yet I can find nothing from Reuters, AP, or any of the major media outlets that even mentions the latest haggling over baby parts.

Honestly, this does not surprise me. For the better part of two years we have seen an orchestrated news blackout on the work of the Center for Medical Progress. Clearly Planned Parenthood has a good deal of clout in America’s news rooms.

Abortion has become so politicized that many ordinary, decent people are culturally conditioned to ignore anything and everything that might call its ethics into question. Simple questions that are treated as “no-brainers” when applied to eagles, must not even be raised if it could touch on abortion in any way.

Is it culturally, spiritually, or traditionally insensitive to treat eagle parts as merchandise? The U.S. Attorney from South Dakota is so certain of it, that he said so in a press conference without need to prove his point.

Is it culturally, spiritually, or traditionally insensitive to treat human parts as merchandise? Any sane person or society would instinctively answer that whatever is true of an animal is infinitely more true of a human being. We, however, have come to a place and time where this question is unasked, and unaskable.

It’s time for us all to step back from the political fray and seriously ask: what has happened to us?
This is an especial poignant question on the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and its coinciding with Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 24. These occasions offer a substantial time to set down our frantic activities and think more deeply than the shallow condemnations of Hitler, or the Ottoman Empire.

Yes, Hitler did murder 11 or 12 million Jews, Russians, Poles, and “undesirables.” The Ottoman Empire was merciless in slaughtering 1.5 million Armenian Christians. But have you ever wondered what happened to the millions of ordinary Germans and ordinary Turks. How did they ever come to a place where they would quietly turn a blind eye to such evil?

If you had been living in those days, would you have spoken out at the risk of your livelihood and life. Would you have boldly called out the evil? Of course, we all would like to think of ourselves doing just that. But now ask yourself seriously if there are any things that you, personally consider evil that you don’t publicly condemn, or don’t really want to know about, for fear that it might undermine your public standing, or your job prospects, or your party’s strength.

More to the point, many of us are sick and tired of politics altogether. We would like to find a place that is purely non-political. We want to be left alone to live our lives without being drawn in to every internet screaming match and every conspiratorial conversation.

But you must recognize that this, too, can become the very mechanism which stifles your opposition to evil. If my highest goal becomes “to avoid politics,” all that’s needed to silence me is for someone to say, “that’s political.” As a pastor of an historically non-political church body, I have seen this work on me.

At some point, even the well-meaning non-political people need to question the label. When, exactly, did this, or that issue become “political”? Would I have been called “political” if I spoke up about it a decade ago, or a century ago? If not, what changed: the truth, or my environment?

Back to question of eagle feathers and people parts. When did the decent treatment of a dead human being become “political”? I am not the first to ask this question. In pre-Christian Greece (441BC), Sophocles wrote the play, Antigone, which explores this very question.

At the beginning of the play, two of Antigone’s brothers died fighting on opposite sides of a civil war. King Creon, of the victorious side, decided that he would honor the one who died fighting for his cause, while publicly shaming the brother who fought against him.

Lytros Nikiforos - Antigone before the body of Polyneices

He gave the order that Polyneices’ body should remain unburied on the battlefield to be eaten by eagles and dogs. By this decree, he makes the proper burial of Polyneices’ body a capital offense. Anybody caught burying it, or treating it with reverence would be sentenced to death by the king.

Antigone is the leading character in the play who recognizes that such a decree – even if backed by the highest political order in the land – is simply wrong. It is against all culture, spirituality, and tradition. In several brilliant dialogues, Sophocles explores why she was willing to give her own life and speak out for decency that politics should never touch.

Read the play, and be Antigone.

Follow up:
The Federalist: Basic Human Decency Shouldn't Be Political, But It Is
Breitbart: Department of Justice Fails to Respond to Criminal Referrals into Planned Parenthood, Indicts 15 in "Chop Shop for Eagles"