T. rex was no Chicken

Gerald McKibben

A partial truth can be just as bad as an outright lie. A case in point is the media coverage of a recent article in Science showing that T. rex  protein sequence analysis matched that of the common chicken more closely than that of any other species tested. USA Today reported the results in an article entitled Yesterday’s T. rex is today’s chicken.  MSNBC, Fox News, BBC News, National Geographic News, The International Herald Tribune, Reuters, The Boston Herald, and probably others also reported the results.  All of them that I read stated or implied that the results from the study reinforced the conjecture that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

 The report stated that, in available protein databases, the closest match to the dinosaur collagen (from bones) was to that of the chicken. They showed it to have a 58% “sequence identity”, and a 51% match to both a frog and a newt. They admitted that protein databases available to them were limited. There was no protein from the alligator, for example, a creature that would be expected to be similar, since dinosaurs were reptiles.

 You wouldn’t know it from reading the media accounts of the research, but the team also reported some interesting results with human protein comparisons. They reported, on page 282, an 81% match between human and frog collagen, and a 97% match between human collagen and that of the common cow! They called these results “an extraordinarily high similarity.”

 I’ll say. And if a 58% match between dinosaurs and chickens is evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs, then a 97% match between humans and cows must make a much stronger statement about our relationship with the bovines. And the 81% match between humans and the frog is a much better match than the 58% match between T. rex and the chicken. I wonder why the media ignored this part of the study; one begins to suspect that they didn’t report it because it might conflict with what they wrote about implications of the dino/chicken matches. And they know most people won’t read the original article anyway.

 Many in today’s society seem to hate the idea that there is a God who created everything, and they go to great lengths to promote the opposite viewpoint that life has no meaning. It’s becoming quite obvious that some in the evolution crowd are becoming more and more desperate in their attempts to convince everyone to abandon the Biblical view of the creation and embrace their materialistic dogma. And they are working at it with true religious fervor.

 In the final analysis, the Biblical account of the Creation best \describes what we find in the fossil record: a wide array of different kinds of organisms, with no intermediate forms. Evidence that all life – including humans – evolved from some one-celled organism is still not supported by the evidence found in fossils.