Why?...Bill Nye vs creationism debate

Seems like a waste of time...each side is entrenched.

"Bill Nye will debate founder of Creation Museum"

Bill Nye, science education advocate and TV personality, will visit Kentucky in February to debate Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum. The event will be titled, 'Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?'

by

Dylan Lovan

January 4th, 2014 

The Christian Science Monitor

Bill Nye "The Science Guy" is set to visit Kentucky to debate evolution and biblical creation with the founder of the Creation Museum.

Ken Ham wrote on his Facebook page Thursday that he will square off Feb. 4 with Nye, the former host of a popular science TV show for youths.

The event is likely to attract plenty of attention in scientific and faith circles, as Nye is a high-profile advocate of science education and Ham is a respected leader among Christians who believe the Bible's origin story is a factual account of the Earth's beginnings.

Ham had been hoping to attract the star of TV's "Bill Nye The Science Guy" to the northern Kentucky museum after Nye said in an online video last year that teaching creationism was bad for children. The video was viewed nearly 6 million times on YouTube.

"Having the opportunity to hold a cordial but spirited debate with such a well-known personality who is admired by so many young people will help bring the creation-evolution issue to the attention of many more people, including youngsters," Ham said in a release Thursday.

The Creation Museum has been lauded by supporters and prodded by scientists for exhibits that assert the Earth was created in a few days about 6,000 years ago. It also has displays with dinosaurs and humans living alongside each other, in contradiction to scientific findings that the two species were separated by more than 60 million years.

Nye said in an Associated Press interview in September that steering children away from evolution and teaching creationism would hurt scientific advances. Science has demonstrated that the Earth is billions of years old, and "if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs," he told the AP.

Nye, who is executive director of the Planetary Society, said in that interview that he would be willing to travel to Kentucky and debate Ham if the museum paid his travel expenses.

An email message sent to Nye's assistant was not returned Thursday. Nye agreed to participate in the debate early last month, said Mark Looy, vice president of outreach for Answers in Genesis, the ministry that operates the Creation Museum.

Ham said some "mocking, strident evolutionists" have invited him and other Creation Museum staff to debates in the past, but they have declined. Ham wanted to engage with Nye because, "as a serious advocate for his beliefs, Nye's opinions carry weight in society," Ham said in the release.

The event will be titled "Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?" Tickets to the evening event at the museum's Legacy Hall will be $25.

Raptorex--T. Rex precursor and how science works

This is a fine example how some areas of science are subject to change. Science is an evolving disciple of knowledge.

"Fossil Find Challenges Theories on T. Rex"

by

Henry Fountain

September 18th, 2009

New York Times

Paleontologists said Thursday that they had discovered what amounted to a miniature prototype of Tyrannosaurus rex, complete with the oversize head, powerful jaws, long legs — and, as every schoolchild knows, puny arms — that were hallmarks of the king of the dinosaurs.

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about five times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

“The thought was these signature Tyrannosaur features evolved as a consequence of large body size,” Stephen L. Brusatte of the American Museum of National History, an author of a paper describing the dinosaur published online by the journal Science, said at a news conference. “They needed to modify their entire skeleton so they could function as a predator at such colossal size.”

The new dinosaur, named Raptorex kriegsteini, “really throws a wrench into this observed pattern,” Mr. Brusatte said.

The nearly complete fossil was found in northeastern China and bought by a collector, Henry J. Kriegstein, who alerted Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and lead author of the paper. The fossil, which was illicitly excavated, will be returned to a museum in China.

Dr. Sereno said the fossil was that of a young adult, about 5 or 6 years old and near the end of its growth period. Besides the oversized head, jaws and legs, it had long shinbones and long, compressed feet that helped it run fast after smaller dinosaurs and other prey. “We see this all, to our great surprise, in an animal that is basically the body weight of a human,” Dr. Sereno said.

Raptorex, like T. rex, would have killed animals with its teeth and jaws. The forelimbs would not have been the primary means for attacking prey. In fact, Dr. Sereno said, the forelimbs would have gotten smaller as the head got larger. “This is an agile, fast-running animal,” he said. “By adding a lot of weight at the top, something has to give way. What gave way was the forelimb.”

Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the work, said the discovery helped “clear up the origin of the characteristic features of the Tyrannosaurs.”

Dr. Holtz, who cautioned that the findings needed to be independently confirmed, noted that there had been a gap in the family tree between earlier, more primitive Tyrannosaurs that had relatively short legs and long arms and the later giants with opposite features. “This clarifies the sequence,” he said.

Good science among paleontologists

This is a healthy approach to a recently discovered find regarding 65+ million year old dinosaur tissue.

"Scientists question dinosaur soft tissue find"

by

Maggie Fox

July 29th, 2008

Reuters

Soft tissue taken from preserved dinosaur bones may not be dinosaur protein at all, but bacteria, paleontologists said on Tuesday.

Dinosaur experts made headlines around the world when they found what appeared to be soft tissue in a broken Tyrannosaurus rex thighbone.

Last April, a team at Harvard University in Massachusetts said they had analyzed a small amount of protein from the sample and shown it had characteristics of living bird and, more distantly, alligators.

But paleontologist Thomas Kaye of the University of Washington in Seattle challenges this idea and says he has seen similar structures and shown them to be bacteria. Specifically, he said, the structures look like bacterial biofilm, a slimy substance that the microbes often form.

"We are not experts in the field," Kaye admitted in a telephone interview. "We are not disagreeing with the fact that their instruments detected protein. We are offering an alternative explanation."

Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University had analyzed the material taken from the 68-million-year-old thighbone and found not only what looked like collagen, but structures akin to tiny blood vessels.

Kaye, who looks at ancient material using an electron microscope, said he was trying to duplicate their findings. He said he went to the same formation where Schweitzer's sample came from, dug up a 65-million-year-old dinosaur bone, cracked it open, and looked at it.

Writing in the Public Library of Science journal PloS One, he said he dissolved tissue in acid just as Schweitzer had done.

"What had been identified as remnants of blood cells were actually structures called framboids -- microscopic mineral spheres that contain iron," Kaye's team reported.

They tested a variety of other bones, including a turtle's, and found similar structures.

"We determined that these structures were too common to be exceptionally preserved tissue. We realized it couldn't be a one-time exceptional preservation," Kaye said.

He believes what was really inside the T. rex bone was biofilm created by bacteria that grew inside now-disappeared blood vessels and cells.

Schweitzer's team said they had found unusually well preserved tissue and said it was unlikely to have survived in many samples.



Dinosaur soft tissue find—a stunning rebuttal of "millions of years"

Dinosaur Soft Tissue Sequenced; Similar to Chicken Proteins

NC State Paleontologist Discovers Soft Tissue in Dinosaur Bones