So, an APÂ story about the Pope laying the smackdown on evolution appears in the Bradenton Herald yesterday.
[Benedict said,] “But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”
Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.
“We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.
And then another AP story appears in the Bradenton Herald today. Ummmm, yea …Â does the Pope have any clue what he’s talking about when it comes to science?
Researchers have decoded genetic material from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, an unprecedented step once thought impossible.
…
“Most people believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that’s all based on the architecture of the bones,” said Asara. “This allows you to get the chance to say, ‘Wait, they really are related because their sequences are related.’ We didn’t get enough sequences to definitively say that, but what sequences we got support that idea.”
“The fact that we are getting proteins is very, very exciting,” said John Horner of Montana State University and the Museum of the Rockies.
And, he added, it “changes the idea that birds and dinosaurs are related from a hypothesis to a theory.”
To scientists that’s a big deal.
Actually, scientist haul many, many generations of bacteria and fungi in the lab all the time. Escherichia coli can multiply in about half an hour, and 10,000 generations would only take a little more than 200 days. That is not hard at all.