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Originally posted by HalfMooner

My question is, does it taste like chicken?

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common young earth creationist (YEC) misinterpretation of the discovery of surviving organic molecules in ancient bone is that this "proves" that the Earth is young and that geological and radiometric data should be ignored. The ancient surviving materials they commonly refer to are fragments of hemoglobin and osteocalcin (a bone protein) extracted from dinosaur bone. There are many problems with their position, but ultimately it reduces to nothing other than they just don't think that organic molecules can last a long while. The "Creation Science" approach is to deny the independent results of geology, chemistry and astronomy because these molecules exist.

I will not take the time in this essay to address the problematic origins of "creation science" in the United States or elsewhere and instead refer the interested reader to The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism by Ron Numbers (1992). Some YEC creation scientists promote their "evidences" for the modern, even contemporary existence of dinosaurs. The popular young earth ministry of "Dr. Dino" Kent Hovind promotes videotapes of his talks that purport that there are recent dinosaurs. A similar ministry is by Carl Baugh of the Creation Evidence Museum, who claims to have excavated paleontological evidence that humans and dinosaurs co-existed throughout time. Publications by the Answers in Genesis Ministry (AiG) claim that evidence of recent dinosaurs refute both relative and absolute geological dating of the dinosaurs' extinction at ~65 million years ago which is many millions of years prior to the appearance of modern primates. Part of their argument is that fresh red blood cells, and hemoglobin have been recovered from dinosaur bone.

In the case of the dinosaur "red blood cell" argument aggressively promoted by Dr Carl Wieland, CEO of Answers in Genesis Ministry, Australia there is an active denial of fact that is astounding. Wieland has particularly focused on popular magazine stories, and short news items concerning the graduate school research by Mary H. Schweitzer on the organic residues from a single Tyrannosaurus rex bone. However, his misrepresentations have gained wide dispersal, and presumably acceptance within creationism. They have even been presented publicly to school boards in the United States as "scientific proof" of a 6,000-year-old Earth, and reason to replace science education with supernaturalism. We will leave the dating issues for a future analysis where we may examine the related creationist claims that the survival of other biomolecules, such as the bone protein osteocalcin, demonstrate that the Universe is young. Instead, we focus below on the observation that creationists have not even correctly read or represented the scientific literature concerning the results from Schweitzer and colleagues' research.

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