Soft tissue?

[forgotten observer]

Firstly let me start off by saying that the title of the thread may seem redundant, but I feel this thread is important so please take the time to read it.
In the debate between Bob Enyart and Aron Ra and the plethora of following threads, A great many discussion have taken place about the phenomenon known as " soft tissue". This thread is essentially a request for a conclusive information.
I would like to state that my knowledge of geology is pretty much non-existent and my knowledge of biology is limited to a high-school level, and as such I have met much confusion upon reading the threads I mentioned previously. So I would like to ask any forum members who have an understanding of this subject to answer the following questions:
1. what is "soft-tissue"?,how do you define it, could you give some examples?
2. Has it been conclusively discovered?
3. What would be the implications of it's discovery? How would it affect the scientific understanding of related criteria (I.E fossilisation, evolution perhaps even the age of the earth?)
4. Why has there been so much arguing over this topic, where does the misunderstanding lie?
I may post more questions in a later post, I thank those who took the time to read this post and especially those who may reply.

 

[australopithecus]

1. Soft tissue, I would define, as any biological tissue that would not noramlly fossilise. Muscle tissue, bone marrow, collagen, fats...etc. Though those more paleontologically inclined may be able to present a more definitive definition. As for why it was argued over so much was that Bob and Will were conflating terms, almost willfully so.

 

[Inferno]

1) The real problem lies with the definition of "soft tissue". It's fairly clear that Schweitzer et al. used it in quite a different way than creationists. The clue to solving the mystery lies in the title of her 2005 paper: Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex

I've highlighted the relevant word. Basically, Schweitzer et al. found remnants of soft tissue (soft tissue being skin, blood vessels, tendons, etc.) and described that they had to de-mineralize the whole thing. The largest piece they found was 1.5-2mm long. They found break-down products of various proteins, osteocytes, etc.

On the other hand, creationists seem to think of "soft tissue" as "soft-tissue meat". What you think you're getting is a T-bone steak. Some creationists have also edited away the size signs, to hide the fact that they were only millimetres in length instead of whatever you might think when you see a blob of meat. They think that actual blood cells and haemoglobin was found.
None of that is true. As I described above, what was found were break-down products of haemoglobin and proteins, as well as mineralized soft-tissue.

2) The creationist version? No. The real version? Yes. But up to this point, nobody's exactly sure what it is (it looks like protein break-down products, but what was it? etc.) nor exactly why it survived that long.

3) Not much would change. We'd just have to slightly modify our understanding of fossilization. Maybe special fossilization conditions applied to those particular specimens. (That's what the evidence indicates atm.)

4) It's obvious: Creationists misunderstood the discovery and used it to attack evolution. The rest is, as they say, history.

I may have made a mistake on the whole thing because it's been discussed so many times, I may have retained false information.
That being said, I think I'm mostly correct on that. Does the above answer your questions?

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Inferno is correct, but I want to flesh out one thing.

This is true for me and I am not sure about anyone else, but the main confusion about this topic came from BobEnyart et al. using the term soft tissue interchangeably with other turns, such as original biological material. None of the soft tissue finds discovered original soft tissue; they found breakdown products. To make matters worse BobEnyart supplemented the actual articles about soft tissue with articles that either found soft tissue fossils (e.g. feather impressions) or articles that found original biological material which is not soft (e.g. fossils found with Zn and other heavy elements).

So, to better answer your fourth question, the reason their has been so much arguing is because creationists have misrepresented these findings and are attributing things to these findings (i.e. the fossils cannot be millions of years old because of the soft tissue) that are not apart of the findings. Thus, the misunderstanding lies squarely on the creationist’s side. They truly do not wish to understand the significance of these discoveries and wished to spin them in order to fit their preconceived notion.

 

[forgotten observer]

Thank you Austra, HWIN and inferno I appreciate the responses and they have clarified my understanding, I will post any more questions I have about the debates here If they arise, but for now I will stop posting on this thread.

 

[Rumraket]

Although you've already been given some pretty good answers I'll take a shot at this one.

3. What would be the implications of it's discovery? How would it affect the scientific understanding of related criteria (I.E fossilisation, evolution perhaps even the age of the earth?)

The implications could go two ways:
Either what we thought we knew about preservations is wrong.

Or

What we thought we knew about the age of rocks is wrong.

Just on the face of it, which one do you think is the most well supported and studied field of science? Preservation of organic material during fossilization, or the dating of rocks? It's pretty obvious rock-dating is a much more well-studied and rigorous field.

On the other hand, very little work has been done on tissue/organic material preservation. The Schweizer et al. papers that first reported soft tissue preservation, cited a few key studies that (if my memory is correct) more or less amounted to someone taking some protein, putting it in various freezers(some colder than others) under various conditions of humidity and then measuring the rate of degradation over a couple of months. Then they tried to extrapolate their results in order to estimate how long it would take protein to degrade.

Of course, different proteins are different. Some are much more resistant to various forms of degradation than others, and collagen happens to be an extremely tough substance and highly resistant to hydrolysis. So, this coupled with rare conditions conducive to preservations happening during fossilization, means that instead of the rough estimate gained from the few experimental studies that seemd to suggest protein could last maybe out to about a million years(depending on quantity and so on), well it turns out under special conditions it can actually last a lot longer.

So, instead of what creationists fantasize: old protein falsifies everything we know about geology and the age of the entire planet, not to mention the universe, in actuality old protein just falsifies the extrapolations of the experiments that tried to estimate protein degradation rates.

And then, of course, there's the fact that none of this protein was fully intact. They didn't find fully intact collagen fibres, they found fragments of it, 8-20 aminoacids long AFAICR. These were long enough to be reckognized by as collagen by immunoessays, and the full protein amino acid sequence could later be pieced together from multiple fragments.

And, expectedly, they found that dinosaur collagen fibres were most similar in sequence, meaning most closely related, to birds. Which just lends support to the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

They didn't find any DNA, they didn't find intact cells, they didn't find flesh, or muscle, or skin. They found tiny fragments of collagen proteins, in degraded husks and shells of what looks like it might once have been bloodcells.