General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Yes, Creation!

Kwabena Donkor

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians

Paleontology and the Bible, science in action.

If we're talking about research that we're doing today, wow that's a broad topic too.

We have Adventist scientists all over the world doing research.

We have Jean Sauveillon in France, and Roberto Viaggi in Argentina.

We have people in Brazil, Colombia, not to mention how many schools in the United States.

So how do I focus on all that in 20 minutes or less.

I'm going to focus in on 2 that I'm involved with since I was asked to do the talk.

Anyway, there's a number of institutions working together on this project.

We've been working on it for more than 10 years.

This is the area in northeastern Wyoming, And this is the geology of the area.

The green is Cretaceous, so that's going to be dinosaur age stuff.

The browns are part of the mammal bearing layers above the dinosaurs.

And it's kind of a bowl that's sitting there.

And that's why you see it on both sides, because you've had a bowl filled with the sediments, tipped up, and then shaved off.

This is an area where we developed a new technology for studying fossils.

We presented this, the results of our work, to the Geological Society of America and to the Vertebrate Paleontological Society.

It's combining survey grade GPS with GIS to be able to plot these things.

Now, survey grade GPS is not the same as you carry in your wallet.

Survey grade is plus or minus a few millimeters.

By the way, this is what eastern Wyoming looks like.

And then we have a rover that then measures everything in relation to that base station.

Now originally you had to do it that way because the US government invented the GPS system for what?

Yeah, so they could drop 2 bombs down the same hole.

And so they don't want the Russians to do that to us using our satellites, so they scrambled it.

And so the only way you could use it was to have some place that was surveyed that you knew where it was and then compared the signal where it said you were and correct for it.

Now they have shut it off and so it's not as scrambled.

Here is a drumstick of a dinosaur, the leg bone or femur.

This bone is about 4 feet long and probably weighs about 200 pounds.

When we find a bone, then a technician with the rover comes through and they measure, they take several readings on each bone and they paint a red dot on the bone, actually using fingernail polish, and keep track of where it is and they measure each of a number of different positions on the same bone.

So here are the positions for that femur that you saw sitting in the ground.

So you have your femur, take a picture of it, cut out the picture.

Now you've got all these little red dots on there.

So you line it up with the red dots, and you know in three-dimensional space where that dinosaur bone existed.

These are where all of these bones were found above this big femur.

So the area where we're doing this research is about 80-85 acres around this mesa, and the dinosaur bones all go underneath the mesa.

We have 8 quarry sites, and the red marks places where we have found dinosaur bone weathering out of the rock.

So if we look at quarry site 1, this was the year 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, etc.

You can see that we can build a virtual quarry.

So you can look at those dinosaur bones just as they existed without any soil in there.

By the way, that femur that we started with, that's it right there.

And you can compare that to the number of dinosaur bones every year the team excavates about a thousand dinosaur bones Now you can see they're not all big leg bones, you have all kinds of little bones that made up dinosaurs as well.

If you go to the second quarry site, you'll get the same kind of picture.

Quarry site 3 down at the south end, hadn't been worked very much.

Quarry site 4, quarry site 5 is up there, quarry site 6, et cetera.

Now we can take and make some predictions.

We know that where our quarry sites are here, we know where the layer goes that has all of these dinosaur bones, and so we can do some reconstruction.

So here are the dinosaur bones that were found at Quarry Site 1, Quarry Site 2, Quarry Site 3, etc.

Based on that, and this quarry site here, you can predict what's underneath the cliffs.

So that's what it would look like on a number of dinosaur bones that are preserved at this locality.

There had to be at least 25 to 35 individual, thousand individual dinosaurs that got buried in this 1 layer.

So now let me go on to another research area.

The search for ancient DNA, we just did this 1 last year.

And we have several other institutions that are cooperating with us.

Danilo Vosklovit from Loma Linda is working with us on this as well.

People that study forensic science want to know how long DNA hangs around after an organism is dead.

So they have spent a lot of time investigating that.

And all of your genes and genetics come from some combination of those 4 base pairs.

1 of those base pairs is cytosine, and it has a half-life of 345 years at room temperature.

That means if in 345 years from the time it died only half of the cytosine would be left.

By 10 half-lives, there's essentially none left.

When it's frozen, the half-life goes to 17, 000 years.

So after 10 half-lives or 170, 000 years, there should be no DNA.

So the presence of ancient DNA can be a test between old life and young life models of earth history.

If the earth really is millions of years old, There should be no cytosine on anything that's older than 170, 000 years.

The ice age boundary, the pleiopleistocene boundary, is 1.8 million.

So anything before the ice ages has to have be more than a hundred half-lives if it's been frozen the whole time.

On the other hand, If the earth is less than 5 or 6 thousand years since the flood, that's less than 1 third of 1 half life, therefore there should be abundant DNA in it.

So we went to, wanted to go to the Arctic where you have frozen plant fossils that are supposed to be middle Miocene or 17 million years old.

People have tried to, and maybe successfully, get DNA out of old things.

There's a big controversy about whether they've gotten DNA out of dinosaur bone.

The problem is when you make many, many copies of it, if you get a dandruff flake in there, it'll make a million copies of your DNA.

And so how do you know it's not a contaminant?

Plus bone crystals make a real tight bond around the collagen which has the material with the DNA in it.

So you can people have made the argument that bone can possibly preserve things longer than this half-life because of the special relationship of bone crystals to that DNA.

There's no way to make that argument for plant DNA.

Furthermore, if we only use the DNA that are in the chloroplasts, the little organelles that actually capture the sunlight.

If we only look at DNA from them, it can't possibly come from me.

So we decided to look for specific genes that are called barcoding genes in this fossil plants that we go to collect do what we call the PCR reaction, polymerase chain reaction.

That's just a way of making millions and millions of copies of just a few strands of DNA.

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Series

Yes, Creation!

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

The Oldest Canaanite Sentence Ever Found

56m

ASI 2009 Plenary Meetings

Creation

58m

How to Use Science-Based Creation to Win Confidence- Part 2

1h 24m

The Bible and Geological Time

53m

Sean Pitman ~ The Emperor Has No Clothes: Creation vs. Evolution

The Fossil Record

56m

Wilderness Living in the End Times

6. Cordage

1h 6m

Q&A Session

1h

Sound Doctrine