Like almost all my posts about evolution, this post is primarily about dishonesty and slander, because honesty is a Christian virtue and Jesus is the Truth … it’s not about science.

As a side effect of explaining the dishonesty and slander continually perpetrated by young-earth creationist organizations, which I write about because too many of my personal friends have participated in it, I have to talk about evolution. As a side effect of writing about evolution, I have to write about Hebrew and Ancient Near East scholars who say that Genesis 1-3 has nothing to do with evolution, nor science at all, but that there is one good God who created everything and wants to fellowship with humans. Wes Huff is popular nowadays; he’s a scholar who teaches this.

I saw a post on Facebook saying that paleontology was shaken by the discovery of blood-vessel structures inside a Tyrannosaurus Rex rib bone. Here is my (edited) response to the misinformation in the post.

What’s true is that paleontology is amazed by this discovery and was a little bit shaken when Mary Schweitzer first found soft tissue in a dinosaur fossil in 2005. Mary Schweitzer IS A CHRISTIAN, and she is a paleontologist who began her career in biology. She still teaches, with all other paleontologists, that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and that the soft tissue she found is 68 million years old. The following is from an interview in which, among other things, she complains about young-earth creationist misuse of her research.

Were you nervous before publishing about soft tissue in dinosaur bones?

Yes, very. After we had the data, I didn’t publish for over a year. I was terrified. First of all, I don’t like attention or the spotlight and I knew this was going to get a lot of attention. I’m not surprised that the response of the community has been skeptical, and I guess I’m grateful for that because the scrutiny has made me much more cautious and therefore, made me a much better scientist. I go above what is usually required to validate my data before I publish—my colleagues are just doing their jobs to be skeptical, a scientist’s job is not to prove things but to question them.

One thing that does bother me, though, is that young earth creationists take my research and use it for their own message, and I think they are misleading people about it. Pastors and evangelists, who are in a position of leadership, are doubly responsible for checking facts and getting things right, but they have misquoted me and misrepresented the data. They’re looking at this research in terms of a false dichotomy [science versus faith] and that doesn’t do anybody any favors. Still, it’s not surprising they’ve reacted this way—the bone that I first studied I got from Jack, and when I gave him our initial results he was rather angry—I called him a few times and by my third call he said, “Dammit Mary the creationists are just going to love you.” But I said, “This is just what the data say— I’m not making it up.