Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Debunking Jurassic Park

It turns out that DNA only has a half-life of 521 years.

The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.

“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.

6 comments:

  1. Jurassic Park is a fun film to watch with my grand sons. I have good discussions with them when we watch, and they proclaim the whole "evolution" teaching as fact, and yet we have the Holy Word which is verified in the Lord's death and ressurection, proclaimed by Peter and Jesus' other disciples in the Gospels.

    Thanks for sharing this about DNA. Good stuff to know.

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    1. Thanks Don. My kids and I have watched a lot of dinosaur movies in our day, too, and we continue to need to have those kinds of discussions.

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  2. Does this support the claims of certain YECs that soft tissue found in T Rex bones is evidence of, at least, a recent existence of dinosaurs? http://creation.com/real-jurassic-park

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    1. Hi Pseudo-A, thanks for the link. I don't claim any more than to "see through a glass darkly", but it certainly seems to tend in that direction.

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  3. Heck. You don't even have to go to "creationist" websites, see here:
    http://phys.org/news160320581.html

    Recently heard one research with Creation Research Society tell us how they are researching a triceratops horn that has "sheets of soft tissue and red blood cells." Further data is forth coming.

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    1. Thanks Fred, that's a pretty cool site :-)

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