Mary Higby Schweitzer, Zhiyong Suo,Recep Avci, John M. Asara, Mark A. Allen, Fernando Teran Arce, John R. Horner. Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein Science 13 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5822, pp. 277 - 280
J. M. Asara, M. H. Schweitzer, L. M. Freimark, M. Phillips, and L. C. Cantley Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex Revealed by Mass Spectrometry. Science 316, 280-285 , (2007)
Cue the ever-clueless creationists, who will cry in mindless unison, "This proves a young earth!" The facts always burst their bubble:
- Dino Blood and the Young Earth
- Dino Blood Redux (he cites Schweitzer's find above)
- Ancient Molecules and Modern Myths
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Technorati tags: Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism
2 comments:
Yeah, but then the CNN article botches it with their chicken emphasis. The thing is, other possibly comparable sequences were not available. They might have been more similar than the chicken match, which wasn't exactly perfect to begin with. Short stretches of sequence (like in the T-Rex) paper, have a much greater likelihood of "being similar" than longer pieces. The key part of the quote is: "Based on all of the genomic information we have available today." It's unfortunate that we're going to be talking about dino-chickens for a while now.
Sigh... How to cover true science in the popular media, without having to make exagerated statements to attract the public's attention? If it wasn't for the chicken connection, would the average Jane/Joe have paid attention to this excellent, truly ground-breaking work?
In other science news, plant resistance to pathogens uses proteins that are similar to human innate immunity proteins. It's bad enough to have to tell a creationist that they share a common ancestor with apes. Try telling them they share one with plants. And that this occurred many millions of years before they split off from other primates.
You're quite right that it's unfortunate how the chicken was emphasized over and above that of any other birds, most likely for dramatic effect. However, the collagen sequences were run against some other samples -- newt, fish and frog to name a few. And, now that the sequences are known, it would be rather easy to perform BLAST searches to look for a nested hierarchy of homology.
Regarding the plant study -- I saw that. Amazing how developed some immune responses were *that* long ago.
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