by Most of his arguments didn’t take long for me to discredit, but one in particular did bother me. He’s said multiple forums and his website that dinosaur bones and egg shells have been found to contain far to many Left handed, unracemized amino acids, indicating they must be young. What I found was probably the most dishonest quote mine I’ve ever come across, and as a result I lost what little respect I possibly had for Bob as a fellow Christian. I’ll elaborate on what exactly amino acid racemization is before exposing this dishonesty.
Amino acids are Chiral, meaning there are versions of each molecule with the same composition but formed like mirror opposites of each other. A good image showing this is:
Racemization is the process in which one enantiomer of a compound, such as an L-amino acid, converts to the other enantiomer. Basically, over time, you’d see the L form of an amino acid and an R form of an amino acids reach an equilibrium. With a few exceptions, this usually takes no more than 10 million years.
Now, let's take a look at Bob Enyart's claims here:
Kgov wrote:England's Royal Society published a time range for this physical process which, "produces totally racemized amino acids in 10(5)-10(6) [100,000 to 1,000,000] years in most environments on the Earth." So researchers have even begun dating whale carcasses by the spherical growth patterns in the eye by measuring the percent of left-handed acids in each lens layer. However, a paper published in a Royal Society biology journal reports regarding T. rex specimens obtained from the University of California at Berkley that, "in the dinosaur eggshells... all of the detected amino acids have low D:L ratios..." (emphasis added), i.e., they are not millions of years old. Yet, even more unexpected for the evolutionist, allegedly far older insects in amber also yield mostly left-handed amino acids! This led evolutionist researchers, shockingly, to suggest a half-life of a billion years for racemization in amber!
The quote will be broken down into several pieces below, each with it’s own refutation.
Kgov wrote:England's Royal Society published a time range for this physical process which, "produces totally racemized amino acids in 10(5)-10(6) [100,000 to 1,000,000] years in most environments on the Earth."
The key word here is most environments. There are several cases where racemization has been shown to be severely slowed when there is no water present, and stopped altogether when it’s dry and very cold.
The paper says this:
Preservation of key biomolecules in the fossil record... wrote: If no contaminants have been introduced to the system, based on the racemization half lives obtained from known age fossils, all amino acids should be totally racemized in <5-10 million years in cold depositional environments. In temperate regions a racemic mixture of all amino acids would be in <1 million years.
So, temperature alone can extend the time ten fold, extending the amino acid racemization half lives into the millions of years range. What if other factors, such as oxygen or water are removed completely? That's how it is in amber, so their calculation of much longer half lives isn't as big a stretch as he'll try to make it. This is discussed further down.
Kgov wrote:So researchers have even begun dating whale carcasses by the spherical growth patterns in the eye by measuring the percent of left-handed acids in each lens layer.
Yep. Jeffery Bada (who also wrote most of Bob's references) and his team were the ones who did it. Of course, they only used one amino acid, which decays slightly quicker, and even then there wasn't much change. I'm surprised how sensitive technology is at detecting these changes.
Here is the link discussing racemization and the dating of whale carcasses.
According to Bada, aspartic acid was used because it has the fastest racemization rate. “Unfortunately, none of the proteins’ amino acids racemize as fast and thus, there is, in general, no detectable amounts of racemization other than for aspartic acid,” he explains.
Let's use his link again, as this will be important later. (This bit pertains to Jurassic amino acids)
In response, Bada explains that as long as the samples have not been contaminated by amino acids of recent origin, the relative racemization pattern should follow the order aspartate>alanine>leucine. “That is what makes the racemization studies so unique,” he says. “Deviations from the expected relative racemization pattern are a sure sign of the presence of contamination.”
See that? There's a particular pattern racemization follows. If you find amino acid concentrations deviating from this, regardless of age, you've got a solid case for contamination. Moving back to our creationist...
Kgov wrote:However, a paper published in a Royal Society biology journal reports regarding T. rex specimens obtained from the University of California at Berkley that, "in the dinosaur eggshells... all of the detected amino acids have low D:L ratios..." (emphasis added), i.e., they are not millions of years old.
Ahahah! Blatant quote mine!! Let's read what the actual paper says, shall we?
Preservation of key biomolecules in the fossil record... wrote:However, the expected compositional changes observed during diagenesis of Pleistocene eggshells are not observed in the dinosaur eggshells that serine was found to be one of the more abundant amino acids present. In addition, all of the detected amino acids have low D:L ratios, and alanine is more racemized than aspartic acid. The presence of relatively unracemized amino acids and abundant serine in our dinosaur eggshell samples indicates that the amino acids are exogenous contaminants which were added fairly recently based on the predominance of L-amino acids.
Clearly, as the full quote tells us, the ratios of the amino acids compared to each other don't match the pattern of racemization. Serine is very unstable, and for it to be found in abundance is an excellent indicator of contamination.
This ties back into what I meant earlier about there being a particular pattern of racemization. The amino acids that Bada found weren’t just unracemized, but the ratios of amino acids relative to one another do not match the pattern of racemization. Serine should not be abundant, and Asparitic acid decays faster than Alanine. So then why is Alanine more racemized than Asparitic acid? The only explanation for these ratios is contamination, and if anyone actually read the papers he cited, they'd see his whole case fall apart. It's no wonder he quote mined the papers, he needs to give his audience the impression those silly scientists are just trying to defend their dogma.
When, in fact, the only dogma surrounding this paper is his. The “quote” from Kgov is a blatant quote mine, wherein he blatantly snipped two sentence fragments out of context and slapped them together to say something they don’t. That’s creationism for you. If you can’t find evidence to support your claims, lie about what the evidence actually says.
Kgov wrote:Yet, even more unexpected for the evolutionist, allegedly far older insects in amber also yield mostly left-handed amino acids! This led evolutionist researchers, shockingly, to suggest a half-life of a billion years for racemization in amber!
Uh huh. This isn’t surprising to the actual scientists. Racemization half-lives can vary wildly depending on temperature, the presence/ lack of water, metallic compositions in the environment, etc. It's very, very complex, not a one size fits all decay rate. Even a cursory glance at some links on Google scholar and Google books reveals there are several different racemization kinetics and lack of water, like in amber, retards hydrolysis, which will prevent peptide chains from breaking down into free amino acids, thus severely slowing the racemization rate in amber.
Let's look at the abstract of Bada's paper of this specifically (I have no way to access the full thing):
Amber Paper wrote:
We have investigated the amino acids in both the bulk matrix and in insect inclusions in tree resins ranging in age from <100 years to 130 million years. The amino acid content of the resin matrix averages about 5 ppm and does not systematically vary with the age of the resin. The amino acids in the matrix are likely derived from either plant cells, or microorganisms, encapsulated when the resin solidified. The amino acid content of the insect tissues entombed in amber is less than that in modern insect specimens; this loss may be the result of oxidation reactions. The amino acid compositions of a fly and bee entombed in 30-40 million year old amber are somewhat different from the amino acid profiles of modern insects; this finding suggests that the preserved amino acid pattern under anhydrous conditions may not be the same as in aqueous environments. The amino acid racemization rate in amber insect inclusions is retarded by a factor of >10(4) compared to other geochemical environments on the surface of the Earth. This is also apparently due to the anhydrous properties of the amber matrix. The excellent preservation of amino acids in amber insect inclusions suggests that other biomolecules would also be preserved much better than in other geochemical environments. This conclusion is consistent with the reported successful retrieval of DNA sequences from amber-entombed organisms.
And further:
Amino acids in amber have retarded racemization rates, with the observed stereochemical preservation attributed to the anhydrous nature of amber (Poinar et al. 1996)...
So there was some racemization in the entombed insects, but the lack of moisture in the amber was a retardant to the racemization process. The hypothesis of anhydrous conditions greatly retarding racemization was later supported when similar results of amino acids in asteroids showed a similar trend; amino acids on a dry asteroid racemized much, much slower.
Other calculations have shown further support that lack of water will greatly retard racemization. So it's decently supported lack of water, like in amber, can retard racemization. Thus, there is no problem with finding little racemization in amber entombed insects. It does not imply the amber is young. Rather, it shows that under certain conditions, the decay rate is slowed, which is supported by the above.
Should he ever claim lack of water can't explain the amino acids in amber, whom is one supposed to side with? The actual scientists doing the experiments, who are experts in the field? Or the creationist who has already been shown to have lied about the scientists previous findings to support his agenda?
Next, Bob claims that left handed amino acids were found in the eggs found in France and eggshells from the Pleistocene (the link for the latter does not work, but looking at the URL it’s simply the abstract of Bada et al., 1999, the paper he’s lied about several times above). I couldn't find a hard copy of the paper on French eggshells, but it's good these eggshells are already mentioned in Bada's paper. As the article tells us:
Preservation of key biomolecules in the fossil record wrote:Amino-acid analyses of other dinosaur eggshells from France have found D:L alanine and D:L valine ratios near 1, and the amount of serine was below detection, so original amino acids may be still preserved in some dinosaur eggshell specimens.
By saying the values of these amino acids were near 1, and the amount of serine was not even detectable, these were indeed racemized amino acids. They were the exact opposite of what Bob claimed that they were. Now, I could not access this original paper of the France eggshells (it was behind a pay wall). However, it's abstract could be found
here
Amino acids recovered from fossil eggshells of dinosaurs showed two kinds. One is antique and small in amount showing the D/L ratio nearly one. The other is more abundant and seems Recent in origin. The antique ones might be residue of peptides at the shell formation.
That's all I could access. However, it confirms A. The endogenous amino acids were racemized, the exact opposite of what Bob claimed, and B. The unracemized amino acids were most likely contaminants. Also, if all are endogenous, we should either find all the amino acids are racemized or none are. Finding both guarantees this is contamination.
As for the Pleistocene eggshells, the paper confirms the amino acids in them are racemic, not unracemized.
He then makes the bold statement that future dinosaur bones will have lots of unracemized left handed amino acids. I guess he missed the part of the article that talks about Cretaceous T. rex bones directly.
Preservation of key biomolecules in the fossil record... wrote: The dinosaur bones we analyzed have amino-acid contents similar to the Pleistocene bones, but their relative compositions resemble neither the modern nor the Pleistocene bones, nor can the compositional patterns be readily explained by invoking diagenetic alteration pathways. Surprisingly, the dinosaur bones were found to contain extensively racemized amino acids, suggesting that these amino acids are ancient.
So, out of all the bones they dated, the amino acids were highly racemized. However, like the first set of eggshells, the compositional changes were deviants from the standard pattern. This indicated they're probably contamination as well, if ancient ones.
The authors sum it up greatly:
Preservation of key biomolecules in the fossil record... wrote:In summary, the dinosaur bones and eggshells we analyzed contain only trace amounts, if any, of their original amino acids, along with exogenous contaminants. Any endogenous amino acids that are present have undergone extensive diagenesis as evidenced by the presence of highly racemized amino acids. The general lack of unaltered, original amino acid components and the presence of contaminants in these dinosaur samples implies the possibility is remote that other bimolecular information such as nucleic acid and protein sequences would be preserved.
Contrary to Enyart’s claim, they found no unracemized amino acids that were endogenous to the samples of bones and eggshells. All present unracemized amino acids in the study he quote mined are contaminants with little to no original amino acids, as demonstrated above. As for the amber, the ahydrous conditions are the likely reason for seeing little racemization. As per usual, Bob misrepresented the science.
Not only quote mined the paper, in my eyes he flat out lied about what it said. He snipped two little sentence fragments out of context, slapped them together to say something they don't, and parades his misinformation to the gullible. This required he read the paper in the first place. That means the quote mines and misrepresentation above are deliberate, and therefore inexcusable. I don’t know if Bob will ever read this, but personally I do not care. I won’t argue with someone who’s just proven that he is a total liar when it comes to science.
