Lawsuit: CSUN Scientist Fired After Soft Tissue Found On Dinosaur Fossil

@farmerman,

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and its the one youve been ignoring..

You think that's a valid question, Farmer? Then I will say the same thing to you that I said to Parados:

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I have NEVER argued that. Your conclusion that I have merely reveals your completely inability to understand a number of things.

I will add that, to my knowledge, Armitage has NEVER argued that either according to anything I've read or seen, including anything that has been said in this thread.

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@layman,

Then you are really an idiot. Im sorry. If you cannot unerstand nwhat Armuitage was saying (and the mere fact that he had C14 run AFTER HIS PAPER WAS PUBLISHED)< He was setting you and other audience members (the students) up for buying into a fraud.
AS I previously said. The actual formation from which the fossil was taken has had a host of dates associated with the underlying and overlying ash. So why would what is contained within these strata be of a greatly different age???

YOUVE missed the entire point and I now know your just dickin with us to see how long we would keep up in a"push me pull you" argument.
If you dont understand, dont try to misrepresent, its dishonest.

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@farmerman,

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Then you are really an idiot. Im sorry. If you cannot unerstand nwhat Armuitage was saying (and the mere fact that he had C14 run AFTER HIS PAPER WAS PUBLISHED)< He was setting you and other audience members (the students) up for buying into a fraud.
AS I previously said. The actual formation from which the fossil was taken has had a host of dates associated with the underlying and overlying ash. So why would what is contained within these strata be of a greatly different age???

YOUVE missed the entire point and I now know your just dickin with us to see how long we would keep up in a"push me pull you" argument.
If you dont understand, dont try to misrepresent, its dishonest

Heh, I can't help can't help but chuckle at how rapidly the accusations of idiocy and dishonestly come out, Farmer.

Can you show me one place where Armitage claimed these fossils were 40 million years old? That's the pending question.

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@farmerman,

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He had it all plnned nd overseen by his own puppetmsters.
NOW, you seem to want to justify all the fraud

I had overlooked this post until just now, Farmer, but you have certainly expressed, directly or indirectly, this "conspiracy theory" involving "puppetmasters' and "all the fraud," before. I think I get where you're coming from on this.

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@layman,

Really? So what part of my question is an unjustified assumption?
Are you claiming Armitage's published paper never states in any fashion that the horn is millions of years old?
Are you claiming Armitage never discussed the horn being only 4,000 years old with students?

Unless you can point to a specific part of my question there is no evidence for then my question is NOTHING like "Did you stop beating your wife?"

Because you can't answer the question without showing you are being dishonest in your argument doesn't make my question a logical fallacy. Rather it points to your logical failings.

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@layman,

You are seriously going to argue that Armitage has never presented the age of the horn as being millions of years old? Or are you seriously going to argue that he has never presented the age of the horn as being a few thousand years old?

Neither of those arguments hold water unless you are willing to argue that Armitage misrepresented things in his paper or he lied when he filed his lawsuit.

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@farmerman,

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If Armitage only had sought publication for his "juried" paper (sans any contextual references and geology as it was), It was a clearly a METHODS paper and entirely justified to be published.

Sorry, but I don't even understand what you are trying to say here. Can you put it any other way? I am particularly puzzled by the intended meaning of the parenthetical material: "(sans any contextual references and geology as it was)." But even without that, your grammatical structure makes it hard to interpret (for me, anyway).

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@layman,

You have been shown his published paper. You completely ignore the words and the context represented in that paper.

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@parados,

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Are you claiming Armitage's published paper never states in any fashion that the horn is millions of years old?

I am claiming that, as far as I am aware, he never argued or "claimed" that it was millions of years old. Do you have some evidence to the contrary?

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You completely ignore the words and the context represented in that paper.

What particular words do you think I am ignoring?

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@layman,

When was the Cretaceous period? How many millions of years ago? Does the word Cretaceous appear in his paper?
Is Triceratops Horridus considered a taxa of dinosaurs? Does the paper mention the word taxa and dinosaurs?

This is from the published article.

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a major focus of recent work been the sampling of fossils from various taxa (dinosaur and otherwise) depositional environments, and geological time frames to determine the extent of soft tissue presence in Devonian, Triassic and Cretaceous strata in comparison with recent specimens.

What exactly does that mean to you layman? Does it mean that Triceratops is a taxa of dinosaur from the Devonian, Triassic or Cretaceous period?

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@parados,

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This is from the published article....

Is this post supposed to contain the segments you were referring to when you said:

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You completely ignore the words and the context represented in that paper.

Is there anything else you had in mind? Because nothing here seems relevant to the question being posed.

Your question at the end asked me what I think. It doesn't say a thing about what Armitage thinks, does it? Not to mention that it is irrelevant to the question, to begin with.

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@parados,

Let me try to make a distinction that some people may not bother to make.

Suppose I say: "Many people believe that Jesus is the Son of God." And that's all I say on the topic.

Now suppose I am an atheist. Given that:

Is what I said untrue?
Have I lied in any way?
If I say that, does it mean I claim to believe the conclusion the statement contains? That I believe that Jesus IS, IN FACT, the Son of God?

Not in my mind. I have merely made a statement of descriptive fact. I have not done any of the foregoing things.

I can distinguish those things from what's implied (if anything) by the words I DID say. Can you?

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@layman,

Now then, to take it the next step. Let's suppose I say "Jesus said X" (fill in whatever you want for "X").

Some Christian concludes that if Jesus said it, it MUST be true.

Later I say something that indicates that I don't agree with X.

Now the Christian says: "You're a damn fraud and an outright liar, then!"

Does he have a good argument?

Assume that Jesus did say what I said he said. Does me stating what he said necessarily entail a claim that I believe it to be indisputably true, just as the Christian does?

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@layman,

Again you completely ignore what was published. You are arguing that Armitage put things completely unrelated to his science in his article. Utter hogwash. But since you want to pretend that statement has nothing to do with it then explain away the several different citations of other works that deal with millions of year old fossils that he claims to be building on with his work?

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recent analyses seem to confirm that original soft tissues possibly original molecules do exist in incompletely fossilized of extinct animals, including dinosaurs.

So, Armitage doesn't know the age of dinosaurs based on his previous statement about the Triassic, Denovian and Cretaceous periods? That seems a little odd, don't you think? You are now arguing that Armitage is a complete idiot.

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Light electron microscopic studies have tentatively identified tis- components of dinosaur remains as red blood cells, endothelial osteocytes and collagen fibers (Schweitzer et al., 2005, 2007a

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parallel fibers densely populated with microstructures 8–10) was identical to osteocytes found in compact bone of rex femur (Schweitzer et al., 2005, 2013)

So now he is comparing his fossil to the work that found similar structure in a T-rex. Again, you want us to believe that Armitage has no clue as to when T-Rex roamed the earth based on his previous comments about the Devonian, Triassic and Cretaceous periods.

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The Hell Creek Formation has been a well-characterized and studied rock unit since first described in the early 1900s (Brown 1907)

Armitage even goes so far as to cite that the Hell Creek Formation has been well-characterized. That characterization would include the time frame of the time periods of when it formed.

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Discovery of soft tissue in Triceratops horn provides additional into the nature of fossilization, and extends our understanding on the prevalence of preserved original dinosaur tissue.

Once again, you would have us believe that Armitage's statements about when the dinosaurs fossils were created have no bearing on his statement about how those fossils were formed.

Based on all the other works that Armitage cites you would have us believe he either didn't know what was in those works or he was disagreeing with them without informing us in his paper.

Your analogy doesn't even make sense in light of Armitage's use of the work of others in providing a basis for his own work. Armitage tells us the time frame when dinosaurs were alive. He tells us he is using a dinosaur fossil. He tells us the work he is doing is building upon work that many others have done using dinosaur fossils which by his earlier statement must be from that time period he referenced. He also tells us the history of where the fossil was found is well known and cites work by others that would tell us when those fossils were formed.

1 Reply

@parados,

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recent analyses seem to confirm that original soft tissues possibly original molecules do exist in incompletely fossilized of extinct animals, including dinosaurs.

Are you claiming that this is untrue? If so, how? Are dinosaurs not really "extinct?" Is anything else he says false? In ANY of the excerpts you quoted, I mean?

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...you would have us believe he either didn't know what was in those works or he was disagreeing with them without informing us in his paper.

I don't make any attempt to "have you believe" any such thing. I think this is true, and I think he has said as much:

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he was disagreeing with them without informing us in his paper.

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Armitage tells us the time frame when dinosaurs were alive.

Really? I will ask yet again. Where does he "tell" us that? He doesn't say that in any of the excerpts you have posted so far. WHERE does he say that?

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@layman,

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he was disagreeing with them without informing us in his paper

But that's probably overstating it. What is "them" supposed to mean here? I'm saying that he did not give his personal conclusions about the age of dinosaurs in his paper.

I'm also saying that there is (and should be) no requirement that one discuss his religious convictions in a scientific paper. Nor is he (or should he be) required to disclose his religious beliefs when submitting a paper.

That said, they knew them. He had a well-established prior history, which was publicly revealed, of being a "creationist" long before he published this paper.

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@layman,

You are saying he purposely kept his opinion out of his paper. Is that correct?

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@parados,

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You are saying he purposely kept his opinion out of his paper. Is that correct?

Yes, correct. That's my understanding, anyway.

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@layman,

OK, so we can agree that his religious opinion had no place in a scientific paper. He was correct in keeping that out of the paper.

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@layman,

Way back on Page 1 I made this post:

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Armitage acknowledges that he did that by keeping his views on the age of the fossil out of the paper. Sneaky. He published his bare findings, and it was only afterwards that he promoted his young-Earth interpretation.

Armitage freely admits that he often engaged students in conversations, giving his opinion on issues such as the age of the remarkably well-preserved cells in the triceratops horn. “To me, the obvious conclusion is they’re young. They can’t be 68 million years old,” he says.

In terms of getting his job back, those conversations might be Armitage’s undoing. [original emphasis]

What extremely tolerant atheist wouldn't fire the "sneaky" bastard? How DARE he state the "obvious" conclusion to be drawn from a paper he published.

That was my indirect way of saying that this was just the kind of attitude that would win Armitage's case for him if it was expressed by University officials. He is supposedly "sneaky" because he "published his bare findings, and it was only afterwards that he promoted his young-Earth interpretation." As if he were REQUIRED to disclose his (utterly intolerable) "young-Earth interpretation" BEFORE he published a paper. To do otherwise is to expose a person of low character ("sneaky").

The implication is that, HAD he disclosed it, his paper would have been, and should have been, rejected for publication. Some posters here seemed to run with that idea, and approve of it.

Farmer has tried to bring in things he said on his personal blog. Many professors have blogs. Many of those same professors discuss, on their blogs, their personal beliefs, of both a religious and STRONGLY ANTI-RELIGIOUS, nature, as the case may be.

Should they all be fired for that? Or just those who aren't atheists?

The reports are that administration officials decided to fire him on the very day his paper was published. He is presumably claiming that the university wanted to disassociate itself from his religious beliefs, even though (or is it supposed to be BECAUSE) those beliefs were not published in his paper.

2 Replies

Lawsuit: CSUN Scientist Fired After Soft Tissue Found On Dinosaur Fossil

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