Half-Life of DNA Revealed: The Unscientific Method

by Chris Parker

Researchers measure how long it takes for DNA from bone to degrade, confirming that genetic information from dinosaurs could not last to the present day.

This study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B was published back in 2012 but I for one was unaware of it.

While it might have sent excited shockwaves through Christians/creationists its impact was blunted by the scientific community by utilizing an ironic, unscientific type of group think to try to quickly make it a non-issue.
Creationists seized upon the study (those who heard about it) because from a “scientific” viewpoint it was a result that was “predicted” by the belief that the world is young and that creation, the fall, and the great flood all took place within the last 6 or 7 thousand years.

The half-life of DNA from bone was found to be approximately 521 years, meaning that to find DNA in dinosaur bone as more than a few scientists had done, proves that dinosaurs lived only a short time ago and did not go extinct 65 million years ago.

Not so for science! They put their blinders on and eliminated (in their minds) this finding as a problem for evolutionists and other old earth agers by refusing to consider all its implications.
They simply proclaimed that any assertion that DNA had been found in dinosaur bone was false on its face! The scientists who made that claim and who would dare to make it in the future will be seen at best as; mistaken, but also as rank amateurs, liars, charlatans, publicity seekers or possibly, creationists.

"This confirms our suspicion that claims of finding DNA in dinosaur bones was made by hysterical liars"..(a paraphrase) They never considered for one second a possibility that would cause consternation in scientific circles; maybe their colleagues were correct; that they had found dinosaur protein and DNA in dinosaur bone and that the dinosaur went extinct 65 million years ago paradigm needs to be reexamined.

But that would be actual science.....s8intcom

Half-Life of DNA Revealed..TheScientist

By Dan Cossins | October 11, 2012

Few researchers ever believed that DNA could survive long enough to make Jurassic Park a reality, and yet there have been no reliable models for how long the molecule takes to degrade. But a study published this week (October 10) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B estimates that DNA from bone has a half-life of 521 years: after that amount of time, half of the nucleotide bonds that hold it together are broken, and after another 521 years, those bonds are cut in half again, and so on.

To determine this rate of decline, an international team of paleogenetisicts examined DNA samples from 158 leg bones belonging to three species of Moa, extinct giant birds from New Zealand.

The bones ranged from 600 to 8,000 years old, but all had been preserved in almost identical conditions, which meant the researchers could make comparisons between the ages of the specimens and the state of the DNA.
Based on their calculations, the team predicted that even under perfect conditions for DNA preservation, it would take a maximum of 6.8 million years for every bond to be destroyed. And even before that time—after around 1.5 million years—the remaining strands of DNA would be too short to be readable.

So a dinosaur bone, which would be at least 65 million years old, could never yield useable genetic information. 

“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the study, told Nature.

 
 

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