Talk:Mary Higby Schweitzer

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[edit] Creationist claims

At present this article seems to be giving rather much credence to creationist claims about her work, and missing their obvious misinterpretation of the state in which she found the traces of soft tissue within the fossilised matrix, and the point that the bones themselves could be dated, as could the formation in which they were found. For more detail, some links worth reading are [1], [2] (also available here[3]) and [4]. Note that care has to be taken with WP:BLP standards, and that Creation Magazine is not a reliable source for anything Schweitzer might find derogatory. ... dave souza, talk 16:43, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Do you think it should be removed? It doesn't seem to me like it's giving much credence to creationist claims, it only mentions what they are and then refutes them.--Cúchullain ^t/c 16:53, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I think the refutation's a bit inadequate, and the article should be focussed on Mary S's biography rather than expounding on this side issue. A better approach might be to go into more detail about her work, including the ways of dating the specimens, then state at the end of the paragraph that Mary S rejected YEC claims that the soft tissues could only be a few thousand years old. It might be worth taking the main points from the paragraph from the Smithsonian article This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.” . . dave souza, talk 17:08, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Any stub can do with expansion. That looks like some good material to use.--Cúchullain ^t/c 23:07, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I tried to add a bit.--Nowa (talk) 01:29, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I cleaned up your additions. Mostly I converted lists to prose and took out some of the sections headers were the information was pretty thin. There doesn't need to be a dedicated section on Schweitzer's religious beliefs, let alone the idiosyncratic Creationist interpretation of her work. Good work expanding it, though.--Cúchullain ^t/c 17:50, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Nice job. Thanks.--Nowa (talk) 23:02, 20 February 2008 (UTC)