Answers in Genesis Articles

News to Note, May 26, 2012

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

1. Nature News: “Chimps’ personalities are like people’s, study says”

Psychologists say observations of chimpanzee and orangutan behavior in zoos support the primates’ evolutionary relationship to people.

This week:

Monkey see, monkey do
Brilliant doctor: doesn’t understand science?
Jurassic ink
Tectonic times
And don’t miss … that June 1 deadline!

Did you miss it? Catch last week’s News to Note or any other!

Do chimps in zoos have the same personality types as people? Or do humans project their own perceptions onto ape behavior? Psychologists using surveys collected from observers around the world say they have proven ape personalities really have evolved like their human cousins. “All too human? Chimpanzee and orangutan personalities are not anthropomorphic projections”¹ declares their study, published in the journal Animal Behavior. Dr. Alexander Weiss, the lead author, asserts the results are a natural consequence of the primate evolutionary relationships with humans.

“[Chimpanzees] have the same social problems that we do, they want to make friends and find mates and sort of gain position within their society,” says co-author Mark Adams. Dr. Weiss says chimpanzee personalities are “highly similar” to humans in that they can be described scientifically in five categories: “neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.”

Because orangutan personality can only be accurately rated in three of these categories—extroversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness—chimps can be considered more similar to humans than orangutans. And, he says, the number of “shared personality dimensions are best explained by our genetic similarities.”

“Humans and chimps share a common ancestor about 4 to 6 million years ago,” Weiss says. The orangutans are supposed to have diverged from the primate evolutionary tree 15 million years ago, however, which explains, Weiss says, “why chimpanzees and humans are more similar in personality than orangutans and humans.”

Humans tend to anthropomorphize animal behavior. As psychology professor Clive Wynne of Florida explains, “Human beings have a very natural tendency to project human agency into almost anything that moves. It’s very deeply ingrained into our ways of trying to understand the world around us.”

This research team actually did this study to test the degree of observer bias that influences human assessment of animal personality. “There’s sort of a fear that human observers and ‘raters’ are projecting their own ideas about personality on to these animals,” says co-author Mark Adams. This study was designed to rate the “raters” of great ape behavior.

To do this, the team asked 230 people visiting zoos in the US, Canada, Australia, and Japan to rate chimps and orangutans on 40 to 50 personality traits using a seven point scale. Then, statistical analysis was used, researchers say, to eliminate observer bias. “What we found,” Adams says, “is that controlling for these differences among observers made no difference, which suggests that the observers are not projecting their own ideas about personality onto the animals.” Weiss says this study “vindicates both the view that chimpanzees have personalities and perhaps the more controversial statement that their personalities are quite similar to those of humans.”

Since human perception of personality influenced the design of the questionnaire, it might be fair to say that the 230 people filling out the surveys tend to see things the way humans do. It is unlikely that any observer actually knows what the apes were thinking, though we might puzzle over how the apes would design a questionnaire to rate their human observers.

Of more significance, however, than amusing musing about how much humans anthropomorphize anything that moves is the fact that this study is being offered in support of the evolutionary relationships between primates and humans.

Evolutionists claim genetic similarities between primates and humans are the results of common ancestry. Biblical creationists—and even intelligent design proponents of other persuasions—understand genetic similarities as the natural result of having a common Designer. Furthermore, much circular reasoning and bias are built even into the claims of genetic similarity. God’s own Word tells us that He made Adam and Eve in His own image on the sixth day of Creation week, the same day He made land animals.

Our Creator has made it clear therefore that there is no evolutionary relationship between apes and humans. To consider the human surveys of animal behavior in any setting—much less the unnatural setting of zoos—evidence in support of an evolutionary tree of unverifiable past events while rejecting the eyewitness account provided by the Creator of the universe seems to represent the height of elevating man’s fallible opinions over the Word of the infallible omniscient God. Using such anthropomorphic games to continue justifying the replacement of the Creator by evolution represents a denial of truth that every person—according to God’s Word (Romans 1:18)—knows in his heart. Scripture teaches in Romans 1:18–20 and Romans 2:14–16 that every person understands he is morally accountable to his Creator no matter how much he suppresses that truth.

For more information:

2. The Washington Post: “Ben Carson’s creationist views spark controversy over commencement speech”

Creationist doctor’s understanding of science and ethics called into question

Controversy erupted at Emory University when 494 disgruntled faculty, students, and alumni signed a letter complaining about the university’s selection of Dr. Ben Carson as commencement speaker. Why wouldn’t they want the Emory Community to be inspired by the world-renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon who made history as the first doctor to successfully separate conjoined twins attached at the back of the head? Because, they feel, Dr. Carson doesn’t really “understand science.”

Dr. Carson is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a noted philanthropist, the director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, co-director of the Craniofacial Center there, and a professor of neurology, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics.

But Dr. Carson is also a creationist who has publicly spoken against evolution. Speaking at a National Science Teachers convention, Dr. Carson said, “Evolution and creationism both require faith. It’s just a matter of where you choose to place that faith.”

The letter of complaint misrepresented Dr. Carson, saying he “equates the acceptance of evolution with a lack of ethics and morality.” However, what Dr. Carson had actually said in his published interview with the Adventist Review was the following:

By believing we are the products of random acts, we eliminate morality and the basis of ethical behavior. For if there is no such thing as moral authority, you can do anything you want. You make everything relative, and there’s no reason for any of our higher values.

The letter of complaint further derided Dr. Carson for “not seeing a difference between science, which is predictive and falsifiable, and religious belief systems, which by their very nature cannot be falsified. This is especially troubling since his great achievements in medicine allow him to be viewed as someone who ‘understands science.’”

The complaint asserts that Dr. Carson is “incorrect” in his denial of the “overwhelming” evidence for evolution. It goes on to say, “Our understanding of the evolutionary process has advanced our ability to develop animal models for disease, our ability to combat the spread of infectious disease and, in point of fact, the work of Dr. Carson himself is based on scientific advances fostered by an understanding of evolution.” The complaint concludes by saying, “Dismissing evolution disregards the importance of science and critical thinking to society.”

This writer is personally amazed that anyone could question Dr. Ben Carson’s understanding of science or morality, much less suggest that Dr. Carson disregards the importance of science and critical thinking to society. His medical achievements demonstrate the contrary. He understands the differences between experimental and origins science. He understands the way a person’s starting assumptions determine the way he views scientific data about unobservable untestable events long past. For instance, in the area of craniofacial surgery, Dr. Carson’s understanding of embryological developmental errors that produce birth defects is not hampered by his “refusal” to believe embryologic development recapitulates an evolutionary past. He understands human anatomy and development and therefore has been able to develop innovative ways to ameliorate human suffering.

Furthermore, Dr. Carson has spoken clearly and logically about the importance of an absolute source of morality beyond man’s opinions. He certainly does not deny that non-believers can be ethical people, but he articulates the fact that they lack a logical basis for their ethics. In response to the attack, Dr. Carson told the Emory University newspaper the following:

It would have been extremely courteous if they had asked me whether it was true that I said people who are evolutionist are unethical, which I never did. Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God’s word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people.

While Dr. Carson was not dis-invited, Emory president James Wagner has assured the faculty that he will henceforth mandate background checks on potential recipients of honorary degrees “lest,” as one website noted, “another Darwin doubter or other undesirable escape detection.”²

During Dr. Carson’s stirring address he pointed out the danger of political correctness, saying that it “threatens the prosperity and the vitality of our nation.”² In the wake of so much discussion about limiting academic freedom in schools and this nonsense in which a man like Dr. Ben Carson could be accused of not understanding science and morality, it is worth noting Dr. Carson’s warning:

There was a time in the history of the world when there was great intolerance for anybody who thought differently than the mainstream. It was called the Dark Ages.²

It has become common for many evolutionists to imply that no real scientist could believe in biblical creation and that modern medicine is the byproduct of evolutionary thinking. And with this episode it appears that even those creation scientists who have most distinguished themselves are to be marginalized, ignored, insulted, misrepresented, and viewed as a threat to societal progress. Let us hope that the American people will heed Dr. Carson’s warning.

For more information:

Evolution and Medicine
Two Very Different Looks at the Role of Evolution in Medicine
Why Would an Evolutionist Become a Doctor?
Modern Medicine and Ancient Authority, DVD by Dr. Tommy Mitchell

3. Phys.org: “Squid ink from Jurassic period identical to modern squid ink, study shows”

Jurassic squid’s ink is chemically identical to melanin in modern cuttlefish.

Ink recovered from two giant squid fossils found near Bristol in England has resisted degradation despite the passage of years. One fossilized ink sac was even intact. Most organic material degrades over the years, and this is the first successful effort to subject ancient melanin to direct chemical analysis.

Fossilized ink sac in fossilized giant squid, believed by evolutionists to be 160 million years old, contains ink chemically indistinguishable from the ink of modern cuttlefish.³

Melanin is a pigment found in many kinds of organisms—bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals. There are several different kinds of melanin distinguished by the molecular structure. Melanin-containing granules have been identified in other fossils but can be mistaken for fossilized bacteria. The actual chemical analysis achieved by this team is therefore an important achievement. An international team of scientists led by University of Virginia chemistry professor John Simon analyzed the ink recovered from the fossils using a variety of techniques. Their conclusions appear in the May 21 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The melanin proved to be the eumelanin type, identified by the amino acids present and their arrangement. Further analysis showed the ink is chemically identical with the ink found in the living cuttlefish Sepia officinalis. (Both squid and cuttlefish are cephalopods, said by people who eat them to taste the same.)

“Though the other organic components of the squid we studied are long gone, we’ve discovered … the melanin has remained in a condition that could be studied in exquisite detail,” Simon says. “Out of all of the organic pigments in living systems, melanin has the highest odds of being found in the fossil record. … We had to use innovative methods from chemistry, biology and physics to isolate the melanin from the inorganic material.” He says this combination of techniques should be applicable for recovering organic material from other fossils providing “ways of identifying organic components in fossils that might have been missed using standard methods.”

“As we look back and think about what we know about life before our time, it’s mostly through skeletal info,” Simon explains. Preserved soft tissue, however, offers “a whole new window into species that are extinct and their relationships to modern-day [organisms].”⁴

The results show, Simon says, “that the pigmentation in this class of animals has not evolved in 160 million years. The whole machinery apparently has been locked in time and passed down through succeeding generations of squid. It’s a very optimized system for this animal and has been optimized for a long time.” He adds, “The ‘aha moment’ for me was when we looked at the techniques for chemical bonding and we couldn’t find anything that distinguished the pigment in the fossil from the pigment in a modern-day cuttlefish, which suggests the pigment hasn’t changed in 160 million years. When I think about other evolutionary transitions that just amazes me.”⁵

So can organic materials really persist for millions of years? A few years ago the discovery of intact red blood cells from dinosaur bone and subsequent recovery of keratin and collagen from other ancient fossils has certainly raised that question. While the chemical analysis of this ink and other organics recovered from fossils is a matter that can be subjected to repeatable direct scientific testing, the assignment of age is indirect and dependent on various unverifiable assumptions.

There is nothing about these organic molecules that suggests any particular date or age.

Most of the prolific fossil-bearing portion of the geologic column (the so-called Phanerozoic), including the Jurassic section where these squid were found, can be explained by Flood geology. Therefore, we can say based on biblical history that the melanin in this squid’s ink has survived chemically intact for over 4,300 years. Not millions, but impressive nevertheless.

Evolutionists believe this ink evolved to its optimal state long ago, though they have no evidence that this ink evolved from some “primitive” ink (whatever that may mean). Since evolution depends on the accumulation of countless mutations through deep time, it is always a little surprising from an evolutionary point of view to find a substance that remained impervious to any changes at all for those many millions of years. From a biblical point of view we understand this ink to be a substance designed by God and unchanged for merely a few thousand years.

4. Smithsonian magazine: “When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience”

Smithsonian’s account of tectonic history is significantly short-sighted.

The June 2012 issue of Smithsonian magazine reports six seismologists are on trial for manslaughter due to their failure to predict a deadly 2009 earthquake in the Apennine Mountains. Journalist Richard Conniff reports a couple of ironic aspects of the case:

The charge is remarkable partly because it assumes that scientists can now see not merely beneath the surface of the earth, but also into the future. What’s even more extraordinary, though, is that the prosecutors based their case on a scientific insight that was, not long ago, the object of open ridicule.

Conniff goes on to recount the saga of German scientist Alfred Wegener’s 1912 proposal that the earth’s continents were once “massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart.” Wegener’s ideas elicited international scorn. What the article fails to mention, however, is that half a century before Wegener developed his ideas, creationist Antonio Snider-Pellegrini published his proposal that continental sprint produced the earth’s present geography.

Antonio Snider-Pellegrini published Le Création et ses Mystères Devoilés (The Creation and Its Mysteries Unveiled) in Paris in 1859. It went largely unnoticed. Perhaps the bulk of the scientific community that year was preoccupied with Darwin’s new book.

Snider-Pellegrini based his idea on Genesis 1:9–10, which suggests that God created the earth’s original dry land as one large supercontinent. Like Wegener, Snider-Pellegrini noticed the earth’s continents seem to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. But Wegener’s proposal was greeted with international ridicule, partly because he failed to offer “a credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents.” Snider-Pellegrini, on the other hand, recognized the global Flood described in the historical account of Genesis 6–8 could provide the power to remodel the earth’s crust.

The Bible does not specifically describe plate tectonics, but the initiation of the global Flood was associated with a major tectonic event. According to Genesis 7:11, “on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up.” Snider-Pellegrini surmised that the breakup of the supercontinent was followed by the rapid horizontal shifting of the plates of the earth’s crust into the configuration we see today.

The idea of plate tectonics didn’t get off the ground until the 1960s. Modern technological methods uncovered several phenomena inexplicable by old ideas of a stable crust. Maps of seafloor topography revealed trenches, mid-ocean rifts, and undersea volcanoes. The record of many chaotic reversals in earth’s magnetic field was found recorded in deep-sea volcanic rock. And modern seismographs showed most earthquakes originate at boundaries between plates, suggesting the plates move relative to each other.

Secular scientists are generally committed to the uniformitarian assumption that geological processes on earth have always proceeded at current rates. They extrapolate from today’s rate of continental drift (around 4 inches per year) to support the idea of an earth billions of years old. But their models of slow-and-gradual subduction of the seafloor into the mantle fail to explain a number of geological observations.

A catastrophic plate tectonics model, developed by well-known creation geophysicist John Baumgardner, is based on the Flood geology model. In this sophisticated multi-variable computer model, simultaneous cracks in the crust in the pre-Flood ocean basins and at the edges of the pre-Flood supercontinent triggered a domino effect of rapid seafloor spreading, subduction and tectonic movements. Once the great forces triggered by the initiation of the Flood had remodeled the earth’s surface, the tectonic effects soon slowed to the rates we see today.

The catastrophic plate tectonics model explains those findings which were left unexplained by the slow-and-gradual model. For instance, a collision between continents travelling at today’s speeds measured in inches per year would barely amount to a fender bender. Baumgardner’s model, however, based on Flood geology, calculates continental speeds in feet per second, quite sufficient to push up huge mountain ranges like the Himalayas. The catastrophic plate tectonics model also explains how layers of sediment laden with marine fossils came to be deposited all over the earth. The chaotic patterns in the record of earth’s magnetic field reversals also make sense in light of this biblically based model. (See Can Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Explain Flood Geology? and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History to learn more.)

Baumgardner’s 3-D supercomputer code for modeling of the activity in the earth’s mantle, which takes into account what is known about the way mantle rock can deform over time, is used by secular scientists worldwide to model plate tectonics. This model demonstrates the feasibility of rapid tectonic movements as originally suggested in 1859 by Antonio Snider-Pellegrini. Of course, Snider-Pellegrini lacked seismographs, computers, and maps of the ocean floors. Nevertheless, he was able to use the scientific and geographic knowledge of his day to deduce a model of the earth’s history based on biblical history. Baumgardner’s valuable model of catastrophic plate tectonics is the legacy of Snider-Pellegrini’s biblical model.

The Smithsonian article also notes the seismologists are being held legally liable for their inability to peer into the future. The case will certainly explore the predictive expectations of modern seismology. In essence, the scientists are being held responsible for their interpretative predictions of observable seismographic data. The subsequent patterns of earthquakes can prove such predictions right or wrong.

By comparison, origins science involves scientific interpretations of observable data in an effort to peer into the past. Only eyewitness accounts of past events, however, can determine the accuracy of scientific conclusions concerning origins. Those past events cannot be subjected to empirical scientific tests. God’s eyewitness account of earth’s origin is found in the Bible. Biblical history concerning Creation and the Flood are not at variance with the observable facts of science, only with the interpretations made by those who reject the history in God’s Word.

For more information:

And Don’t Miss …

Don’t miss the June 1 deadline for submitting your feedback on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)! As we discussed last week , this project updating a proposed set of science teaching standards for K–12 is currently accepting public comments. While a number of the proposals could improve the teaching of critical thinking skills and the depth at which topics are taught, those aspects dealing with origins science could easily undermine those improvements. Moreover, if states choose to adopt these standards in their present form, recent gains in states that have passed academic freedom legislation for public schools could be lost. A recent analysis by a pro-evolution author quotes some relevant portions. He comments that the middle school standards are “not bad, all things considered” but hopes for even stronger evolutionary teaching in high school. As we mentioned last week, molecules-to-man evolution is treated as factual and placed alongside the teaching of observable phenomena such as natural selection, blurring the distinction between experimental (operational) and origins (historical) science at just the time when students need to learn the distinction. As you explore the PDF, be sure to practice that discernment yourself. You may use the search engine on the NGSS site to go straight to topics of particular interest, searching for keywords like evolution, ice ages, radiometric, big bang, solar system, natural selection, ancestry, Darwin. As always, we do not suggest that creationism should be taught in public schools but only that students and teachers should be free to examine topics critically. And if you’re tempted to let the activity of Memorial Day weekend get in the way of offering constructive feedback, remember… if you’re offered the opportunity to comment on these educational standards that could affect the future of millions of American children and don’t, then you must hang your head in shame if standards that could make it difficult to teach those children true discernment are adopted.

For more information: Get Answers

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News to Note, May 19, 2012

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

1. Digging up the Past: “Jewish Shrines for David” and Bible History Daily: “Breaking News—Evidence of Cultic Activity in Judah Discovered at Khirbet Qeiyafa”

Impressive fortress at Khirbet Qeiyafa likely represents the Jewish challenge to Philistine power 3,000 years ago.

Did you miss it? Catch last week’s News to Note or any other!

Khirbet Qeiyafa is an archaeological dig site overlooking the Valley of Elah where David defeated the Philistine champion Goliath in the time of King Saul. Its discovery in 2008 challenged those who claimed no powerful centralized Jewish authority existed 3,000 years ago. Newly discovered evidence suggests Khirbet Qeiyafa was a strong fortress under the control of a newly established Jewish monarchy, possibly the biblical King Saul or King David.

“This is the first time that archaeologists uncovered a fortified city in Judah from the time of King David,” Hebrew University’s Yosef Garfinkel explains. “Even in Jerusalem we do not have a clear fortified city from his period. Thus, various suggestions that completely deny the biblical tradition regarding King David and argue that he was a mythological figure, or just a leader of a small tribe, are now shown to be wrong.”

Fortress town of Khirbet Qeiyafa on the ancient Philistine border overlooking the historic Valley of Elah (1 Samuel 17:19).¹

At the time of the David and Goliath encounter, the Philistines were attempting to reassert dominion over King Saul and his people. The Philistine dominion over the Hebrews had lasted several decades. Khirbet Qeiyafa, dated about 1020 to 980 B.C., was an imposing fortress town strategically located near the Philistine border, perhaps the very sort of fortress that would draw a military response from the affronted Philistines.

Writing found at Khirbet Qeiyafa has not named its ruler, but the writing is in ancient Hebrew, not Philistine or Canaanite. In contrast to the artifacts of typical Canaanite sites, those at Khirbet Qeiyafa have two Jewish distinctives: the religious artifacts are conspicuously lacking in graven images, and the garbage is conspicuously lacking in pig bones.

Garfinkel and Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority consider their new trove of religious artifacts the first definitive archaeological evidence of architectural styles and Jewish religious practices from 3,000 years ago. Although the site pre-dates Solomon’s temple, two miniature “portable shrines” are carved with elaborate external architectural details—an elaborate façade with lions and birds. In fact, experts believe the models may help interpret some of biblical details of Solomon’s temple.

Portable clay shrine with pillars and elaborate façade with stylized drapery and three birds above the entrance and a lion’s head at the bottom left.²

Such “portable shrines” were common religious objects of the era and usually contained idols. These, however, are empty. Garfinkel says, “Over the years [since 2008], thousands of animal bones were found, including sheep, goats and cattle, but no pigs. Now we uncovered three cultic rooms, with various cultic paraphernalia, but not even one human or animal figurine was found. This suggests that the population of Khirbet Qeiyafa observed two biblical bans—on pork and on graven images—and thus practiced a different cult than that of the Canaanites or the Philistines.” Thus the archaeologists infer the occupants of Khirbet Qeiyafa were Jewish.

Ostraca are shards of pottery on which the ancients wrote. According to translator Émile Puech of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, ostraca from Khirbet Qeiyafa imply the rise of a strong new monarchy. For instance, one text expresses the necessity of acceding to higher authority and refers to those who “have established a king.”³ Various ostraca concerning taxation and judicial matters imply centralization of authority “beyond the powers of a ‘petty chieftan.’” Puech’s interpretation would fit either King Saul’s or King David’s administration.

Because the Bible is the complete written revelation of God, not every detail of it appears in the fragmentary findings of archaeology, nor do we rely on archaeological findings to “prove” the Bible. However, archaeological findings confirm and illuminate biblical history. This debris left by people long dead testifies to the truth of God’s Word and their part in His plan. The stones of Khirbet Qeiyafa cry out its ancient inhabitants’ determination to live and worship in a way distinct from that of their neighbors. These people chose to follow God. They were part of God’s ongoing plan to sanctify a people through whom He would preserve written revelation of Himself in the Bible. And through this people, descended from King David as the Scriptures say, God ultimately sent Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.

2. Next Generation Science Standards: “Review the Draft Standards”

You are invited to influence the Next Generation Science Standards.

Next Generation Science Standards is a project commissioned by 26 states to develop K-12 science education standards for the next generation. With a goal of improving the quality of science education in the United States, the proposed standards are modeled on the National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education.⁴ Until June 1, the developers of the standards are inviting public input.⁵ Many states are likely to adopt the new standards. This is your chance to let your voice be heard, perhaps influencing the face of science education in the United States for years to come.

The proposed standards suggest teaching each discipline in greater depth while showing how scientific principles apply across all disciplines. As such, they should increase both the knowledge base and critical thinking skills.

The new standards stress “understanding the Nature of Science.”⁶ By this they mean using evidence to build scientific explanations of the natural world. However, the standards do not distinguish between observational and historical science or explain the role of observer bias in scientific interpretation.

Several examples of observational science are provided to illustrate the way scientific models are developed, but the document fails to mention that scientific explanations offered in the area of historical (or origins) science are inevitably dependent on worldview-biased assumptions. No one can perform repeatable scientific tests to elucidate the origins of life, the earth, or the universe. Those events already occurred in the past and cannot be reproduced in the present. Thus any conclusions about the origins of life, the earth and the universe depend upon the starting assumptions of the investigator, including his acceptance or rejection of God’s eyewitness account in the Bible.

As to specific teaching standards regarding origins, molecules-to-man evolution is presented as fact alongside observable principles of natural selection and speciation, without distinction. Just before a high school standard concerning natural selection, the draft states:

Genetic information, like the fossil record, also provides evidence of evolution. DNA sequences vary among species, but there are many overlaps; in fact, the ongoing branching that produces multiple lines of descent can be inferred by comparing the DNA sequences of different organisms. Such information is also derivable from the similarities and differences in amino acid sequences and from anatomical and embryological evidence.⁷

Natural selection and speciation are observable in the world today. But unverifiable “common ancestry” based on the fossil record, genetic information, and embryonic development is presented as if equally observable. In reality, for example, “embryological evidence” cannot offer support for evolution of new kinds of creatures but only for the development of young creatures. Any other evolutionary interpretation is imaginatively imposed on the evidence.

The middle school section states evolutionary history can be documented and its specifics inferred from anatomical homologies and the fossil record. The draft states:

Anatomical similarities and differences between various organisms living today, and between them and organisms in the fossil record, enable the reconstruction of evolutionary history and the inference of the lines of evolutionary descent.⁸

Neither the fossil record nor homologies demonstrate the transitional forms necessary to support evolutionary claims of one kind of creature changing into a different kind (e.g., a reptile into a bird or mammal or an ape into a human). Furthermore, evolutionary dogma cannot account for the origin of new genetic information required for upward evolution.

Additionally, the draft unequivocally states the earth and the solar system were formed 4.6 billion years ago⁹ and has experienced multiple ice ages.¹⁰ It explains the solar system’s origin by the nebular hypothesis¹¹ and says, “The universe began with a period of extreme and rapid expansion known as the Big Bang.”¹² These ideas, though commonly held among evolutionary scientists, again rest on unverifiable assumptions about the past. Furthermore, the fact that commonly accepted explanations for the formation of the solar system and the universe are at variance with some laws of physics is ignored.

While these proposed standards are no great surprise, they will become standard in states that ultimately adopt them. If they are adopted in their present form, a mandate to teach molecules-to-man evolution and evolutionary cosmology could potentially de-rail the recent gains in some states now allowing open discussion of the scientific problems with evolutionary thinking. Many aspects of these standards should promote critical thinking skills, but the failure to distinguish between observational/experimental science and historical/origins science and the difference between observations, assumptions, and interpretations will have the opposite effect.

We have never advocated the required teaching of creation science in public schools. However, teaching conventional evolutionary origins science without the opportunity to critically analyze assumptions on which it is based restricts academic freedom and robs children of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills and to really see the “nature of science.”

Until June 1, the public has an opportunity to offer input. Here is a chance to make a difference by letting your voice be heard. You can go to www.nextgenscience.org read the draft and submit your comments.

For more information:

3. Science Daily: “First Ever Record of Insect Pollination from 100 Million-Years Ago”

Tiny insects pollinated plants in the “age of the dinosaurs.”

Amber from Lower Cretaceous rock in the Basque country of northern Spain has preserved several pollen-covered thrips. Thrips today eat pollen, mites, or plant juices. They may be considered pests, pollinators, or both. Of course there is no way to know the lifestyle of the varieties in the amber, but scientists consider them the first fossil proof of primitive pollinators.

Synchrotron X-ray tomography reveals pollen grains covering these thrips trapped in amber.¹³

Pollen attached to the abdomen and wing of a thysanopteran insect in amber.¹⁴

Close-up of pollen attached to ring setae.¹⁵

High-resolution images reveal these 2 mm long flying insects were well equipped to collect and carry pollen. They have “highly specialized hairs with a ringed structure to increase their ability to collect pollen grains.” Bees are similarly equipped.

“We also see these ring setae, or ring hairs, in modern pollinators such as domestic bees and some flies,” explains X-ray synchrotron tomography expert Carmen Soriano. “At very high magnification, we can see that these hairs are mostly in the dorsal part of the thrips and that’s also where we observe most of the attached pollen. So, our theory is that these hairs would have been used by the female thrips to gather as much pollen as possible to take back to their larvae.”¹⁶

Although “older” thrips have been identified in Permian rock, these pollen-encrusted specimens are dated 105-110 million years old by evolutionary reckoning. They have been assigned to a new genus, Gymnopollisthrips. “This is the oldest direct evidence for pollination, and the only one from the age of the dinosaurs,” says Soriano. “The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story. It began about 100 million years ago, when this piece of amber fossil was produced by resin dropping from a tree, which today is the oldest fossil record of pollinating insects. Thrips might indeed turn out to be one of the first pollinator groups in geological history, long before evolution turned some of them into flower pollinators.”

Researchers suspect the pollen came from gingko trees. Evolutionists believe flowering plants evolved about 90 million years ago, but gingko trees appear lower in the geologic column in Permian layers. So do thrips. The researchers suggest the insects could have used gingko ovules for a shelter and nursery, transporting pollen from male cones to female ovules to feed their young, thus pollinating gingkoes in the process. The pollen collecting equipment would thus be mutually advantageous for thrips and the sheltering gingko.

Admittedly, this scenario is speculative. The pollen on the insect is a “smoking gun” that can only hint at the whole story. As co-author Conrad Labandeira admits, “To some degree all the evidence we have for insect pollination is indirect because we don’t have any insects ‘caught in the act’, so to speak. That would involve finding a structure, an ovule, with a reward such as nectar or pollen, and the insect with its mouth parts preserved inside that structure. That has yet to be found in the fossil record. So, we must build a circumstantial case that pollination took place. And I think our ambers are a good bet because we have these structures on the insects’ bodies that would only be the most parsimoniously interpretable as structures used for pollination.”¹⁶

Notice this researcher acknowledges the behavioral conclusions about these insects are conjectural because they cannot be observed. Yet the same should be said about the evolutionary conclusions. Flowering plants, gingkoes, thrips, and pollen all exist in the fossil record. And they likely interacted with mutual advantage within their (pre-Flood) ecosystems as living things do today. But there is no record of the evolutionary rise of any of them or any observable evidence that new kinds of organisms can evolve from simpler kinds. The fossil record documents the catastrophic burial of many living things but not their evolutionary appearance.

These well-preserved insects appear to have functioned prior to the Flood just like their modern counterparts. God created both plants and insects during Creation week, about 6,000 years ago, already able to reproduce after their kinds. We have His Word on it. Therefore, specialized features to facilitate pollination could have been provided by God whether or not the insect “needed” them, though we can infer from living thrips that pollen was a likely food source. Either way, neither the specialized insect features nor flowering plants had to evolve. Much of the fossil record reflects the order in which pre-Flood habitats were destroyed during the Flood. Flowering plants appear higher in the geologic column, suggesting the pre-Flood habitats in which they were prominent were engulfed a bit later than those in which the gingko and other nonflowering plants dominated.

For more information:

4. New Scientist: “Zoologger: Bug evolved a self-propelling corkscrew”

Secret of self-propelled cyanobacterium’s internal corkscrew unveiled.

Ubiquitous in the world’s oceans, the tiny Synechococcus, a kind of cyanobacteria, motors mysteriously along without benefit of flagella or cilia or any other visible means of propulsion. How does it do it? Kurt Ehlers and George Oster have figured it out.

They developed their model by comparing electron micrographs of Synechococcus to the unusual internal mechanics of a microorganism that wriggles through slimy dirt. Mathematical simulations confirmed their proposed model could generate the swimming speed Synechococcus achieves in water. Furthermore, by observing the handicap imposed by a mutation, they elucidated the function of an integral part of the locomotor mechanism of this unusual microbe.

Ehlers and Oster discovered that inside Synechococcus is a continuous looped helical molecular track—a sort of a corkscrew. Powered by proton transport, tiny protein motors seem to travel along this helical track causing outer surface distortions. These distortions generate coordinated waves on the surface. By themselves, however, these waves would not be powerful enough to propel Synechococcus forward.

The microbe’s surface is covered with a layer of crystalline molecules called an S-layer. These crystals are placed at precise 60° angles. The crystals in the S-layer amplify the wave motion of the surface distortions, enabling the microbe to motor through the water. The S-layer is an expression of a gene called SwmA. If SwmA is mutated then the microbe can spin in place but not travel forward, confirming that without both the S-layer and the helical motor, Synechococcus could not swim.

The researchers who discovered the secret of Synechococcus’s success make no evolutionary claims in their published work.¹⁷ However, the journalist covering the story for NewScientist, after mentioning that the rotating axles of flagella “drive creationists nuts,” wrote, “It seems nature didn’t just evolve the rotating axle: it also evolved a self-propelled corkscrew.”

The flagellum is an irreducibly complex molecular machine. It is made of many essential parts, and it will not function as a means of locomotion unless all are present. The flagellum’s parts include a rotating axle, a power source utilizing proton transport, and a whip-like structure made of many proteins.

Evolutionists try to get around the problem of irreducible complexity by claiming each part of the flagellum evolved for other uses. Then, they say, when all the parts finally finished evolving, they were co-opted to make functional flagella for locomotion. However, from an evolutionary point of view there is no reason a part transitioning to its new function would be preserved in its intermediate state until all parts were ready. Many complex components require additional complex molecular machinery for their assembly. And at least 30 of the 40 essential components are unexplainable by co-option. (Read more about flagella at The Amazing Motorized Germ.)

Similarly, these newly described molecular corkscrew wave-generators appear to be another marvelous example of irreducibly complex design. Evolution cannot explain the source of all the information to build flagella or the Synechococcus’s locomotive mechanism. Even the fact that the mutation of just the gene responsible for the wave-amplifying S-layer reduces the Synechococcus to an aimlessly spinning paralytic hints at the irreducibly complex design of our creative Creator God.

For more information:

5. ScienceNews: Traces of Inaugural Life”

The stone starter for a nourishing primordial soup remains as lifeless as ever.

Like the fabled stone soup, a well-garnished primordial soup is being built by geological and biological contributions. In the ancient fable, villagers readily contributed nourishing additions to a pot containing only boiling water and a stone. Why? Because they believed the pot already contained a yummy organic soup starter. Though the end product was tasty, the stone that got everybody excited never had any life of its own.

A featured ScienceNews essay recounts the mutual enthusiasm of geologists and biologists seeking to discover the chemical origins of life. As evolutionary biologist Bill Martin explains, “We’re conditioned to see what we’re looking for, and if no one knows what to look for in terms of these signs of life, they won’t find them. What I think is really exciting is that we know what to look for now, and we have expectations of finding these biosignatures that could extend back to the Hadean [pre-Archean]” (supposedly more than 3.85 billion years ago). Yet chemical signatures paint only the picture evolutionists already believe and inevitably fail to breathe evolutionary life into lifeless chemicals.

The essay recounts several fronts in the search for “traces of inaugural life.” Evolutionary biologists compare modern life forms to deduce what a Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) must have been like. Since the most necessary proteins would have required potassium ions to function, they postulate life started in a potassium-rich place. Referring to research by Armen Mulkidjanian, as discussed in News to Note, February 25, 2012, the essay describes the role of interdisciplinary cooperation. Mulkidjanian needed a potassium-rich place for life to start because, he explained, “We know that original membranes were very leaky. Cells could keep proteins or nucleotides inside, but not potassium.” Geologists offered ancient warm volcanic ponds rich in potassium, zinc, and phosphate, made to Darwinian order. “That geochemical knowledge is really what fed our biology story,” says Mulkidjanian.

Other scenarios point to hydrothermal vents as the primordial chemical cradle. The essay describes a particular kind of hydrothermal vent in which methane and hydrogen spewing into the ocean cause chemical reactions to produce porous limestone chimneys, acetate, and a life-friendly alkaline environment. Acetate can be used as a biochemical energy source, and, according to Martin, “These microcompartments [pores in the limestone] serve the function of providing a way for chemicals to be concentrated in a physical way without cellular membranes.” Evolutionary biologists hope geologists can spin scenarios in which similar sites could have existed on the early earth.

The essay also explains that biologists want geologists to search for evidence of ancient minerals that would be consistent with metabolic products and their effects on primordial rocks. Evolutionary scientists believe life must have evolved before the Archean rocks were laid down because those rocks contain carbon-rich rocks and bands of rusted iron suggesting photosynthesis and oxygen production had already evolved.

The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences lists several “chemicals in rocks that could be key signatures of ancient life.” The geobiological challenge is increased because of the way in which earth’s crust and mantle mix in “the planet’s geological mixing bowl.” Thus, many minerals are subjected to high heat that can change their characteristics. The minerals believed sufficiently impervious to heat to offer geochemical evidence of conditions on the early earth are primarily zircon crystals embedded in other rocks. According to geophysicist Norm Sleep, I consider it my duty to provide a shopping list of early environments to these biologists. … Basically all the direct evidence that we have from the Hadean is a collection of crystals that you could fit on the tip of a thimble.”

“Ideas about where life began, whether it was in an ocean or a pond or somewhere else entirely, are still just proposals, hypotheses with bits of evidence,” the writer acknowledges. “The same is true for existing views about when life emerged and what it looked like. But as geologists and biologists continue to learn from each other, they’re turning up new evidence that can strengthen existing scenarios and lead to new ones.” However, the essay reflects the common evolutionary certainty that life did evolve from the random interaction of chemicals billion of years ago.

Though the “how” and the “when” life evolved from lifeless chemicals are subjects for exciting research, the question of “if” is not even entertained. Why? All these questions involve historical science and therefore attempt to draw scientific conclusions without the possibility of performing empirical repeatable scientific tests. The conclusions therefore depend upon the worldview-based assumptions of each scientist. The evolutionary worldview rejects God as the originator of all life and therefore must violate observable biological laws that demonstrate life never randomly emerges from nonliving elements. Evolutionist Martin speaks volumes when he says, “We’re conditioned to see what we’re looking for.” The scientist’s worldview always determines his interpretations in the realm of origins science.

Archean rocks described in the essay are thought by many creationist geologists to have been formed very early in the Creation week.¹⁸ Zircons, cited in the essay as a source of information about the early earth, have characteristics most consistent with a young earth, not one billions of years old.¹⁹

God created the earth “to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18) and populated it with living things about 6,000 years ago. An oxygen-rich atmosphere and the process of photosynthesis were created during that week. Therefore, the presence of “chemical signatures” of early life in ancient rocks is not a surprise. But assertions that chemical evidence of life on the early earth demands a still earlier evolutionary source is nothing more than worldview-based speculation that denies God’s eyewitness account in Genesis.

For more information:

And Don’t Miss …

“A significant step forward in using pluripotent stem cells to repair and replace bone tissue” reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that it may be possible to “grow compact bone in quantities large enough to repair centimeter-sized defects.” The actual study was conducted using human embryonic stem cells but in order to avoid the tumors that are “consistently observed when undifferentiated hESCs are implanted,” the mouse immune systems were suppressed. The bone grafts were grown on scaffolds that guided development and then transplanted into the immunodeficient mice where they continued to produce healthy bone for 8 weeks. Knowing that the new scaffolds are able to successfully guide the pluripotent cells in bone formation, lead author Dr. Darja Marolt is developing technology to use induced pluripotent stem cells to grow bone grafts in patients with traumatic injuries and birth defects. The induced pluripotent stem cells can be produced from a patient’s own cells and therefore should avoid problems of graft rejection. This bone graft engineering technology will represent another therapeutic opportunity to use a patient’s own stem cells, thus avoiding potential immune system problems. There is no need to destroy innocent human life to make this treatment available for patients. In fact, despite headlines hailing the success of embryonic stem cells in this laboratory’s research, the embryonic stem cells have proven impractical for therapeutic use due to their tendency to form tumors.
Kentucky U.S. Senator Rand Paul drew criticism from gay activists, conservatives, and political allies when he tried to make a witty comment about President Obama’s declaration in favor of “gay” marriage. (See News to Note, May 12, 2012 for last week’s discussion.) Proponents of gay marriage naturally objected, and some conservatives felt the issue is too serious to warrant a humorous sound bite. But Senator Paul’s serious comments on the issue deserve more attention. Like us, Senator Paul, who came to office last year, found President Obama’s assertion that his views favoring legal recognition of gay marriage were based on the biblical “golden rule” quite a stretch. Then Senator Paul offered some genuine biblical thinking. He said, “Now that doesn’t mean we have to be harsh and mean and hate people. We understand sin and if we believe it’s a sin ... then people sin. We’re not out there preaching some sort of hateful dogma against people. But that doesn’t mean that we have to go ahead and give up our traditions. We’ve got 6,000 years of tradition.” The senator’s words remind us that we all are sinners, that God hates sin but loves sinners, and that we are to imitate Him. The senator’s words also reflect the biblical truth that the true foundation of marriage—as established by the Creator of all about 6,000 years ago—is found in the book of Genesis.

For more information: Get Answers

News to Note, May 12, 2012

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

1. ScienceDaily: “Rare Protozoan from Sludge in Norwegian Lake Does Not Fit On Main Branches of Tree of Life”

Ancestral tree’s branches proliferate while seeking their roots.

This week:

Primordial protozoan
Brainy mutants
Sutters Mill meteorite
Reason Day
Dinosaur diversity
And don’t miss . . .

Did you miss it? Catch last week’s News to Note or any other!

Collodictyon, a protozoan from sludge in a lake near Oslo, is in the headlines because researchers believe it represents a brand new—or rather an extremely ancient—branch on the evolutionary tree of life. They do not believe it fits into any of the existing biological kingdoms.

Collodictyon is unusual because it has four flagella for locomotion, can form pseudopods like an amoeba, and consumes its food through a groove like a paramecium. Evolutionists say it offers a “glimpse into primordial times.” (Credit: UiO/MERG) from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120426104853.htm

Collodictyon’s genomic analysis does not match known genomes. Furthermore, Collodictyon itself has intracellular structures resembling those of several different microbial categories. “Collodictyon shares cellular characteristics with Excavata [single-celled parasitic protozoans] and Amoebozoa, such as ventral feeding groove supported by microtubular structures and the ability to form thin and broad pseudopods,”¹ the authors write in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi of Oslo’s Microbial Evolution Research Group says, “This further supports the hypothesis that the species from this lake belongs to a primordial group. Perhaps it descended from the antecedents of both the excavates and amoeba?”

”It evolved around one billion years ago,” Shalchian-Tabrizi says. “We have found an unknown branch of the tree of life that lives in this lake. It is unique! So far we know of no other group of organisms that descend from closer to the roots of the tree of life than this species. It can be used as a telescope into the primordial micro-cosmos.”

Though genomic matches suggestive of common ancestry are absent, researchers are confident they just mutated away long ago. Shalchian-Tabrizi explains, “It is often the case with such ancient organisms that features they share in common with other known species have been wiped away from the DNA sequence because of long-term mutations.”

Evolutionary scientists believe eukaryotes (organisms with nucleated cells) can be divided into those with two flagella, like algae and excavates, and those with only one, like some amoebae. Humans are classified as descendants of the amoebae because the human sperm has a single flagellum. But the Collodictyon has four flagella, fitting into neither category. That, along with the lack of genomic matches, earns it its own branch on the evolutionary tree of life.

Biological classification schemes are periodically modified to accommodate life forms that don’t fit easily into existing categories. Separate kingdoms for prokaryotes (bacteria and blue-green algae) are based on observable distinctions: those microbes have no nuclei. Protozoans (like the paramecia and amoebae schoolchildren find in pond water) and fungi have also occupied their own kingdoms. These categories reflect observable characteristics. But in recent years, schemes seem to have diversified more rapidly than the organisms they categorize.

Classification schemes are being modified to reflect genomic analyses. Why? Not to provide a descriptive system grouping similar things but to build a system in which unobservable evolutionary inferences about ancestry are reflected in the branches. In other words, organisms in the same branch should share the same ancestor.

Shalchian-Tabrizi, explaining “how the tree of life can provide fundamental answers to great evolutionary mysteries,” says, “In order to understand what a species is today, we have to understand how they have changed genetically. The tree of life allows us to explain cellular change processes by connecting the genome and morphology (appearance) with its way of life.”

The evolutionary tree of life is being redrawn based on evolutionary assumptions. Shalchian-Tabriz says the evolutionary tree of life—to which his research has just added another branch—can answer evolutionary questions. Yet those very evolutionary “answers” are the assumptions on which the tree of life is constructed in the first place. This reasoning is circular and therefore invalid.

The researchers also place this protozoan in its own kingdom category on the basis of its unusual genome. Since it lacks genomic information matching even parts of its supposed descendants, the absence is considered a consequence of DNA changing over time. Thus, if some matches were present they would ”prove” Collodictyon’s ancestral place, but since they’re not there the researchers assume the matches used to be there but went away. This seems to be an example of choosing a conclusion and insisting the evidence supports it.

This study bases its conclusions on evolutionary assumptions. Discovery of greater biodiversity—such as a protozoan that moves with four flagellae, eats through a groove like a paramecium, and forms pseudopods like amoebae—is a fascinating mosaic of observable characteristics. But the presence of different sorts of microbial features does not show Collodictyon has an evolutionary relationship to multicellular organisms. This study increases our knowledge of microbial diversity but does not lend support for molecules-to-man evolution.

For more information:

An Evaluation of the Myth That “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”

2. ScienceDaily: “Extra Gene Drove Instant Leap in Human Brain Evolution”

Does a designer DNA duplicate or a lucky genetic goof make the human brain do what it does do so well?

Two studies just published in Cell reveal the way a uniquely human genetic nuance probably helps the human brain develop the efficient interconnections needed to support its complex functions. The studies propose an evolutionary history of that gene, which is a modified duplicate of a neighboring gene. They believe the gene is a randomly mutated, truncated duplicate that transformed our ape-like ancestor’s brain into human form.

Franck Polleux and Evan Eichler led two research teams examining a human gene called SRGAP2. They say the gene has “been duplicated twice during the course of human evolution, first about 3.5 million years ago and then again about 2.5 million years ago.” Happily for the evolutionary model, the latter just happens to be about time evolutionists believe human ancestors diverged from Australopithecineancestors.

The duplicate gene actually has some differences and is also incomplete. That incomplete copy inhibits expression of it counterpart. The researchers believe the incomplete version evolved from the full version and was helpful in hominid brain evolution. In mice, SRGAP2 accelerates the migration of neurons during brain development. Inhibition of the gene causes mouse neurons to grow knobby extensions and interconnect more freely. Polleux and Eichler believe these spiky knobs help neurons to interconnect more efficiently.

The researchers suggest this and similar “human-specific gene duplicates” helped ape-like ancestors leap to more efficient brain function and scamper up the evolutionary intellectual tree, leaving their cousins in the dust.

”We may have been looking at the wrong types of mutations to explain human and great ape differences,” Eichler explains. “These episodic and large duplication events could have allowed for radical—potentially earth-shattering—changes in brain development and brain function.”

Gene duplication can occur, but the presence of genes in duplicate or variant form does not prove they resulted from random mutation. The similarity of molecular structure in such a partial duplicate would make it ideally suited for its regulatory role by making it recognizable by the loci affected by the primary form of the gene. Nothing about the existence of such an important duplicate demonstrates its evolutionary or random origin in deep time.

Furthermore, the time when the duplications are supposed to have occurred derive from molecular clock estimates. Molecular clock estimates are based on the unverifiable constancy of mutation rates and some statistical fallacies by which molecular clocks are calibrated. And the supposed fossil proof of Homo evolution from ape-like ancestors is dated in accord with the same assumptions used to calibrate molecular clocks. Since these hypothetical evolutionary events are dated according to the same assumptions and are mutually dependent, their agreement is an expected result of circular reasoning. The agreement of the dates therefore gives only the illusion of reliability and confirmation.

Many people don’t realize how much bias is built into these numbers. Molecular geneticist and creationist Dr. Georgia Purdom says, “People need to understand that many assumptions by the scientists, like human evolution from an ape-like ancestor, have a direct effect on how the scientists compare the genomes. They compare them in a way that will achieve the conclusion they have already determined is true—that humans and apes share common ancestry. It's truly a case of circular reasoning!”

If the animal model here is accurately demonstrating the function of the partial gene duplicate, this discovery could be genuinely useful in understanding neurological abnormalities characterized by “bad connections” between neurons. Such conditions include autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia. But the role of this gene in human brain development has nothing to do with presumptive evolutionary history. The neuronal connections and the genetic functions exist in the present and do not demonstrate anything about their own history through deep time. Our only reliable information about human origins is the eyewitness account in Genesis telling us He created Adam and Eve in his own image distinct from the animals by His own perfect design.

For more information:

3. Discovery News: “Zeppelin Hunts California Meteorite Debris”

“Precious particles” popping in again?

SETI may be perpetually frustrated in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but at least it got to celebrate Earth Day by mounting a Search for Extra-Terrestrial rocks. On April 22, sonic booms announced the arrival of a minivan-sized meteorite into earth’s atmosphere practically in the SETI backyard, breaking up with high heat and dropping its remains over the Sierra Nevada mountains near Sacramento, California.

Led by SETI astronomer Peter Jenniskens, scientists from NASA and SETI rapidly mounted a search effort to recover chunks. The small ones found so far at Henningsen-Lotus State Park near Sutter’s Mill reveal the meteorite to be the rare CM carbonaceous type. Dubbing the carbon-containing chondrite the “Sutters Mill Meteorite,” they hope to find large pieces in which they can search for alien organic compounds.

Sutters Mill is aptly named as it represents a potentially rich resource for scientists. This is the same kind of meteorite as the famous Murcheson meteorite that fell over Australia in 1969. Murcheson proved organic compounds could come from space to earth. The organics existed in both mirror image forms—typical of non-biologic origin—and showed a predominance of carbon isotopes inconsistent with terrestrial origin. Evolutionary scientists consider carbonaceous chondrites a source of organic compounds that seeded the early earth, providing raw material to get the chemical origins of life underway.

“This is the meteorite you want to find!” exclaimed Jenniskens. “This particular type of meteorite—that forms only 1.5 percent of all falls—is really interesting for research at the SETI Institute and NASA. The material carried in this type of meteorite is what made life possible on Earth. The carbon atoms that your body is made out of, and all life on Earth is made out of, arrived on our planet shortly after its formation via meteorite impacts and comet impacts.”

Scientists are eager to find larger pieces before the compounds inside have time to react with earth’s environment. Because a fragment of even one kilogram speeding to earth with “residual cosmic speed” would leave a crater, they chartered a zeppelin hoping to spot fragments from the air. The trajectories of incoming fragments are random, making their landing sites unpredictable. So far no pieces larger than 19 grams (0.7 ounce) have been recovered.

Sutters Mill Meteorite fragments represent another kind of riches. “The meteorites are invaluable to science but on the open market can also fetch $1,000 a gram, or more for larger, pristine pieces.”² Some lucky locals have already cashed in and others are pondering their plans.

So what do scientists hope to learn from the meteorite? By gathering information about organic chemicals some think seeded earth, they hope to gain insight into the chemical origins of life on earth and possibly in outer space. For example, we recently discussed one scientist’s ideas about the implications of a slight imbalance in the chirality of the Murcheson organics (see News to Note, April 21, 2012). And nucleobases—vital parts of DNA and RNA—as well as amino acids and other alien organics have definitely been found in meteorites. Yet even if alien organic compounds had been dropped on the earth, nothing in nature has shown how living organisms could randomly emerge from non-living chemicals. The origin of life took place in the unobservable past and cannot be subjected to objective scientific testing.

God tells us in the Bible He formed the earth, the plants and animals, and the rest of the universe from nothing. Then He made Adam from the dust of the ground and Eve from part of Adam. God required no alien organics to help Him get started with His Creation. Neither did He require vast amounts of alien raw material.

For more information:

4. Washington Post: “Christians mark National Day of Prayer, atheists host National Day of Reason” and Religion News: “Secularists counter National Day of Prayer with National Day of Reason”

“Come now, and let us reason together” says the Lord. . . .

That message from the Creator God urging people to acknowledge their rebellion against Him rings as true today as when He delivered it through the prophet Isaiah around 2,700 years ago. And with that call to reason came a message of hope through Jesus Christ, whose coming and crucifixion Isaiah was also privileged to prophesy. The verse continues, “. . . Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18).

From God’s point of view, it is reasonable for human beings to recognize their limitations and their sin. It is reasonable for humans to accept God’s grace and be reconciled with Him. God made humans in His image, and they are therefore able to reason. But ever since Adam reasoned that he could challenge His Creator and build a better world his own way, human reasoning has been severely corrupted and has continued along the same rebellious line.

The National Day of Reason (NDR), proclaimed by the American Humanist Association in protest of the National Day of Prayer, thus provides a picture of 6,000 years of human history. “Our day puts the focus back on people and what we can do for ourselves,” said spokesman Paul Fidalgo. “We are trying to make a better world on our own by emphasizing good works and good deeds on the day” (emphasis ours).

Those good works included blood drives, training sessions on how to lobby politicians, voter registration drives, and the “opportunity” to trade Bibles for copies of Darwin’s Origin of Species. We would note, however, the curious standards by which these “reasoning” skeptics determine what is “good.” In this case, “good works” included blood donation, which, while generous, philanthropic, and generally good for other people, is counterproductive to ultimate human evolution. After all, blood might be used to promote survival and subsequent procreation by “weaker” members of the human race. Lobbyist training and voter registration drives, while possibly open to all comers, would surely more freely benefit those of like-mind. Therefore, those “good works” are self-serving. And swapping out Bibles for Darwinian writ likewise promotes only the humanistic point of view.

Indeed, without a standard for “good” from beyond man, each person decides for himself what is “good.” God’s Word, however, says that even “the way of a fool is right in his own eyes” (Proverbs 12:15). God, as Creator of all, is the one with the authority to determine what is truly good. Furthermore, even the human ability to reason is a gift from our Creator, not an evolved attribute. And so is the freedom to use that reason to rebel against the God who created us.

The rich tradition of the National Day of Prayer echoes the call by Benjamin Franklin during the constitutional convention to pray for God’s help and a prior call by the 1775 Continental Congress asking people to pray for them to have God’s wisdom as they shaped this nation. The National Day of Prayer officially originated in 1952 when democratically elected officials chosen by the American people, led by President Harry S. Truman, declared it would be held annually. More elected officials later passed legislation ratifying that decision by designating the first Thursday of May to be the National Day of Prayer.³ President Obama issued his proclamation for May 3, saying,

On this National Day of Prayer, we give thanks for our democracy that respects the beliefs and protects the religious freedom of all people to pray, worship, or abstain according to the dictates of their conscience.

The National Day of Prayer, though briefly de-railed in 2010 when a judge declared it to be a violation of separation of church and state, was restored in 2011 when that ruling was overturned by a judiciary rightly recognizing that nothing about the law concerning the day compels anyone to participate and thus does not violate anybody’s First Amendment rights.

As part of the National Day of Prayer observance, Americans are encouraged by private groups such as the National Day of Prayer Task Force to pray for our government leaders. Scripture directs Christians to pray for “all who are in authority” (1 Timothy 2:2). As 40,000 groups gathered around the country to pray, many prayed for our leaders to have wisdom. Since the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10 and Proverbs 9:10 ), it is appropriate that mega-church pastor Harry Jackson, during a gathering at Capitol Hill, after critiquing the present administration’s failure to defend existing federal laws restricting same-sex marriage, urged people to pray for the president to have “clarity of mission.” In light of the president’s three previous official proclamations for June 2009, ⁴ 2010,⁵ and 2011⁶ to be Gay Pride month and this week’s statement endorsing same-sex marriage,⁷ those prayers are even more urgently needed.

Historically, our Founding Fathers, operating on Christian principles and led by Christians such as James Madison, put in place a written guarantee that all Americans would have the freedom to choose how and whether to worship without compulsion by the federal government. So perhaps if those who choose not to gather in prayer don’t want to thank God for their freedom, they should at least consider being thankful for the Christian principles used by the Founding Father to support freedom of conscience that guarantee citizens’ rights to protest and reason as they choose.

5. American Museum of Natural History: Were Dinosaurs Undergoing Long-Term Decline Before Mass Extinction? Research Shows That Massive Herbivores Were Declining, Carnivores and Smaller Plant-eaters Were Not” and Discovery: Dinosaurs On Road To Extinction Before Asteroid Strike”

Were dinosaurs an endangered species before the K-T disaster? Enquiring minds want to know.

“The extinction of . . . dinosaurs . . . is a perpetual topic of fascination, and lasting debate has focused on whether dinosaur biodiversity was in decline before end-Cretaceous volcanism and bolide [large exploding meteor] impact,” write the authors of a statistical survey of dinosaur diversity published in Nature Communications.⁸ Evolutionists debate the significance of the study.

Although the authors do not deny the popular evolutionary belief that a meteor caused dinosaur extinction, they suggest that certain types of large plant-eating dinosaurs in North America may have already been on their way out.

”Did sudden volcanic eruptions or an asteroid impact strike down dinosaurs during their prime?” lead author Stephen Brusatte asks. “We found that it was probably much more complex than that, and maybe not the sudden catastrophe that is often portrayed.” He explains, “We know a large asteroid or comet hit the planet about 65.5 million years ago, right when the dinosaurs completely disappeared from the fossil record. . . . We now also know that at least some groups of dinosaurs were undergoing long-term declines in biodiversity during the final 12 million years of the Cretaceous, at least in North America.”

The authors explain that a creature’s biodiversity indicates its evolutionary well-being. In other words, a highly diverse kind of creature is conducting successful evolutionary experiments, filling many ecological niches, and preparing to evolve into other kinds of creatures. Less diverse kinds, on the other hand, were losing their grip on the tree of life, soon to fade from significance on the evolutionary scene.

But how is diversity measured? Usually dinosaur diversity is assessed by counting the number of species, but “results can be biased by uneven sampling of the fossil record,” Brusatte says. “We wanted to go beyond a simple species count.” Therefore, this statistical analysis evaluated diversity not by counting the number of species but by quantifying anatomical variations within each.

They found triceratops and duck-billed⁹ dinosaur fossils from North America’s upper Cretaceous rocks were more anatomically uniform than similar dinosaurs in Asia. “Something was going on with large herbivores in the late Cretaceous, at least in North America. Maybe it was the fact that the local environments were in flux,” Brusatte says. The rest of the world’s dinosaurs displayed plenty of anatomic diversity, so Brusatte suggests these big North American herbivores were the first victims of a more general decline. He says, “Maybe, given a few more million years we would have seen declines in other dinosaur groups higher up in the food chain.”

”Dinosaurs were hugely diverse,” co-author Richard Butler adds. “Different groups were probably evolving in different ways and the results of our study show that very clearly.”

Other evolutionists question both the significance and interpretation of this analysis. Paleobiologist Paul Upchurch of University College London points out a more extensive survey may demonstrate many similar declines during dinosaur history. He says, “The decline in disparity during the final 12 million years might merely be ‘evolutionary business as usual’ and have little to do with the true final extinction.” Furthermore, “Only some dinosaur groups show reduced disparity . . . while other groups continue to do well. So this study could actually be taken as evidence in favor of a sudden extinction.”

Diminished diversity “does not automatically mean that dinosaurs were doomed to extinction,” co-author Mark Norell admits. "Dinosaur diversity fluctuated throughout the Mesozoic, and small increases or decreases between two or three time intervals may not be noteworthy within the context of the entire 150-million-year history of the group.”

For those who interpret the fossil record in the context of biblical history, unverifiable evolutionary assumptions should be apparent on both sides of this argument. Biodiversity within a species (which is observed) does not show new kinds of animals can evolve from other kinds (an unobserved phenomenon). Furthermore, while variations within created kinds occur and may relate to the adaptive ability to fill various ecological niches, less biodiversity does not necessarily mean a pre-Flood group of creatures was an endangered species. Perhaps they just lived in a habitat that did not demand a lot of adaptation. Nothing in this study demonstrates anything in support of the unbiblical notion of the evolutionary rise of new kinds of animals.

Finally, while dinosaurs are now apparently extinct,¹⁰ their extinction is not recorded in the fossil record; what is recorded are the deaths of many dinosaurs. The global Flood caused massive death among all kinds of creatures, and many were buried and preserved in the fossil record. But representative dinosaurs, like all kinds of land animals and birds (Genesis 6:19–20 ), were present aboard the massiveNoah’s Ark. They, like many other animals, later became extinct, often because of harmful human activity.

For more information:

For more information about the sorts of pre-Flood habitats that may have influenced the findings in the geologic column, see Sinking a Floating Forest.
Learn more about so-called mass extinctions and the biblical interpretation of the fossil record at Dinosaur Killer
News to Note, May 5, 2012
News to Note, October 29, 2011
News to Note, July 16, 2011
New Answers Book 2, Chapter 31: Doesn’t the Order of Fossils in the Rock Record Favor Long Ages?
For more about a possible link between meteors and the global Flood, see “Did Meteors Trigger Noah’s Flood?” by Dr. Andrew Snelling in Answers magazine volume 7, number 2 (Jan.–Mar. 2012).

And Don’t Miss . . .

President Obama announced this week that his views regarding gay marriage have been “evolving.” His position in recent months has waffled enough to draw criticism even from the liberal side of the political fence. While seeking presidential election in 2008, he stated, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” However, back in 1996, he had endorsed same-sex marriage. Perhaps we should consider his “new view” which is really just his “old view” to be an example of “reverse evolution.” Or perhaps it is difficult even for a sitting president to determine how to be all things to all people in an election year! As discussed by Al Mohler, President Obama has instructed his Attorney General not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. This 1996 law defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman. The law does not regulate the sexual behavior of adults. The law protects states from any requirement to legally recognize same-sex marriage and denies recognition of same-sex marriage for such purposes as federal taxation and benefits. President Obama, like all U.S. Presidents, has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Article 2 of the Constitution enumerates the President’s duties and states in Section 3: “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” By instructing the Attorney General to ignore the federal law, President Obama is ignoring this sworn duty. Furthermore, during an interview with ABC TV, President Obama offered his own biblical commentary. He said, “When we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.” Taken to its logical conclusion, of course, wouldn’t everyone like to pick and choose what laws he must be subject to? Besides ignoring a great deal of Scripture related to this issue (see The Evolution of the Views of a President for an extensive discussion), the president is twisting Scripture. While the Apostle Peter said “untaught people twist” various “hard” Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16), there is nothing particularly hard to understand about the Golden Rule. Not even the youngest child would think that Jesus Christ meant people should be able to violate laws they don’t happen to like. We do not imply the president is unable to understand simple Scripture. But he is twisting the Golden Rulein an attempt to gain biblical support for an unbiblical position.
British scientists have scaled up estimates from the current cattle contribution to greenhouse gases to get an idea of sauropod emissions. They estimate the dinosaur contribution of digestive methane gas produced substantial Mesozoic global warming, making the world warmer by about 18 degrees Fahrenheit. David Wilkinson and colleagues have published their results in Current Biology. Wilkinson explains, “The ecology of microbes and their role in the working of our planet are one of my key interests in science. Although it's the dinosaur element that captures the popular imagination with this work, actually it is the microbes living in the dinosaurs guts that are making the methane.” By calculating comparative body mass and estimates of sauropod population—admittedly having to make a number of assumptions—Wilkinson says, “Cows today produce something like 50-100 [million tonnes] per year. Our best estimate for Sauropods is around 520 [million tonnes].” By comparison, “Current methane emissions amount to around 500 million tonnes a year from a combination of natural sources, such as wild animals, and human activities.” Wilkinson adds, “There were other sources of methane in the Mesozoic so total methane level would probably have been much higher than now.” The testimony of the Genesis account of Creation declares God made all the land animals the same day He made Adam. But since evolutionists insist human beings did not share this world with dinosaurs, at least in the eyes of those who insist human activity is the primary cause of current climate change, we’re off the hook for that one.
How to get more power from light is described in a recently published study in National Photonics. Not, as Star Trek fans might initially think from the title, through android intelligence, but through biomimicry. (Of course, in the fictional world photonics were biomimics too, so the metaphor does work.) Princeton’s Yueh-Lin Loo’s engineering team reports a biomimetic way to boost the electrical output of low-cost solar panels by 47%. Loo’s team modeled their folds on the design of the leaf, surely nature’s most efficient utilizer of solar energy. They write, “Some of the simplest light-harvesting systems in nature rely on the presence of surface structures to increase internal light scattering. We have extended this concept to increase the efficiencies of man-made solar energy harvesting systems.”¹¹ The engineers designed “wrinkles and deep folds” into cheap plastic surfaces, which is more economical than the more brittle and expensive silicon commonly used to capture the sun’s energy. The plastic is “flexible, bendable, light weight, and low cost,” says Loo. Most solar energy research to date has focused on improving the efficiency of the photovoltaic material, but Loo’s approach instead uses a biomimetic design to alter the shape of the material to “create a kind of [light] wave guide. And that leads to a greater chance of the light’s being absorbed,” Loo explains. In our efforts to be good stewards of the world God has given us, the Creator’s design of the leaf may thus offer a clue to help mankind derive more clean energy from the sun.

For more information: Get Answers

News to Note, May 5, 2012

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 GMT

1. Smithsonian: “Pachysuchus Actually a Hidden Dinosaur”

Choice of timeline determines the story.

This week:

Jurassic jaw
Footprints in the sands of time
Egg-stinction
Chemical evolution
New clock
And don’t miss . . .

Did you miss it? Catch last week’s News to Note or any other!

The Jurassic jawbone of a long extinct creature has resurfaced in China to add a new chapter to the saga of its mysterious identity. In 1947 paleontologist Yang Zhongjian (aka C. C. Young) initially identified the “single badly damaged partial snout”¹ as part of a sauropod dinosaur named Lufengosaurus magnus. However, Young later decided the bone belonged to a phytosaur, not a dinosaur, and renamed it Pachysuchus imperfectus. The fossil was found in early Jurassic deposits near Lufeng, China, but phytosaurs “should” have been extinct by the end of the Triassic era. Thus the fossil “became an important milestone for phytosaurs.” Somehow it then was misplaced in China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology, hindering further investigation. Its recent re-discovery and re-re-identification as a dinosaur has restored the evolutionary version of dinosaur development to its commonly accepted form.

Pachysuchus jaw fragment, viewed from the left (A) and the right (B). Image by XU Xing from english.cas.cn/ST/RE/re_project/201204/t20120428_84399.shtml

Shape of the rediscovered Pachysuchus skull fragment is shown in grey, set into the outline of a typical sauropodomorph dinosaur skull. Image by R. Laws from english.cas.cn/ST/RE/re_project/201204/t20120428_84399.shtml

Phytosaurs, extinct crocodilian creatures distinguished by nasal openings set far back on the skull near the eyes, are currently classified as archosaurs, along with dinosaurs, crocodiles, and even birds. However, the archosaur branch containing phytosaurs has only one still-living representative, crocodiles. The phytosaurs are believed by evolutionists to be victims of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, so discovery of Jurassic members is controversial.

Paleonotologists Paul Barrett and Xu Xing found the fragment and have determined Young’s original dinosaurian assessment was correct. “The damaged skull piece exhibits many traits never seen in phytosaurs but that closely match what paleontologists have documented among sauropodomorph dinosaurs,”¹ Xu Xing says. Too little remains to determine the species.

The reclassification restores the story that phytosaurs “lived alongside and probably preyed on early dinosaurs, were wiped out at the end of the Triassic” and so were out of the way as “dinosaurs rose to global dominance.” In fact, Barrett suggests that rock layers containing post-Triassic phytosaurs elsewhere in the world are erroneously dated and should be re-dated as Triassic.¹ (This illustrates the somewhat circular approach to assigning dates in the fossil record.)

While demonstrating the difficulties of identifying some creatures from their fossilized remains, putting Pachysuchus back to a more acceptable spot in the evolutionary timeline does not prove the authenticity of the evolutionary story. The geologic column is viewed by evolutionists as a record of the evolution and extinction of life forms over millions of years. This interpretation is dearly held despite the lack of the transitional forms to authenticate it or observable evidence of biological evolution of new kinds of creatures to show its feasibility.

The biblical account of the global Flood—resulting in catastrophic burial of billions of creatures beneath tons of water-borne sediment as their habitats were wiped out—tells the true story of most of the geologic column. The creatures buried were descended from the kinds created by God in the beginning. Their presence in those rock layers does not mark their evolutionary emergence or extinction. A person’s worldview determines his interpretation of the story in the rocks.

For more information:

Get Answers: Dinosaurs

2. ScienceNews: “Ancient walking gets weirder”

Weird walkers weigh in on supposed hominid evolution.

April’s annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in Portland, Oregon, devoted a half-day to fossilized footprints. As a part of this “Pleistocene scene”² graduate student Kevin Hatala presented a comparison of the footprints of barefoot Kenyan herders with five Pleistocene footprints from Kenya’s Ileret site.

Fossilized footprint from Ileret, Kenya, said to be suggestive of a bipedal gait differing slightly from modern humans. Image from Matthew Bennett/Bournemouth University at www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/339950/description/Ancient_walking_gets_weirder

Believed by evolutionists to be 1.5 million years old, the footprints were initially thought to “reflect a thoroughly modern walking style.” Comparison of the footprints with those of 38 habitually barefoot Daasanach Kenyan herders, however, with measurements of print depths at ten pressure points, suggested a difference in gait.

“We can infer that the ancient Ileret individuals had a normal, functional gait, but they may have walked differently than we do,” Hatala said. He indicated that it’s uncertain just how these hominids walked and whether they belonged to Homo erectus, a possible direct human ancestor, or to the side-branch species Paranthropus boisei.

The Kenyan herders placed their prints in moistened sand thought to mimic the quick-setting sand in which the original prints were made. Analysis suggests the prints’ owners were walking, not running, and that they were about 5 feet, 6, inches tall, weighing 110 pounds, matching Daasanach people of today.

Other highlights of the AAPA’s focus on feet included a discussion of Burtele foot we discussed recently³ as well as analysis of the likely gait of Australopithecus sediba, another ape fossil we discussed last fall in “Sediba with a little sleight of hand.”⁴ The Burtele fossil is dated by evolutionists at 3.4 million years ago, and Au. sediba, around 2 million years. Both of these skeletal specimens differ from humans, but anthropologists suggest they were somewhat bipedal. The Burtele foot could grasp with its big toe and Au. sediba feet, according to Jeremy DeSilva, suggest the owner was prone to hyperpronate (turn its feet inward) as it walked.² DeSilva said Au. sediba had “a really weird foot. Diversity in upright stances must have extended for a long time during hominid evolution.”

We are not surprised that the anatomy from two ape specimens differed significantly from that of modern humans, and we’ve recently examined the questionable nature of attributing a legitimate bipedal gait to the Burtele fossil and Au. sediba. (See News to Note, April 7, 2012 and Sediba with a little sleight of hand.)

And as to the footprints from Kenya, if they belonged to a truly bipedal individual as Hatala suggests, then they likely were not made by Paranthropus boisei, an extinct ape commonly known as “Nutcracker man” although it was neither a nutcracker nor a man.⁵ If they belonged to Homo erectus, then slight differences in the pressure patterns on the bottom of the foot do not indicate a less evolved kind of human. We saw last fall a report of some relative shortening in the legs of Neanderthals.⁶ Slight variations in gait or leg proportions of different groups of humans does not make any of them less than human or show they were evolving on a path toward full humanity. Both Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis were humans who descended from Noah’s family following the Flood, people who have disappeared today but were no less human than we are.

Imitating an upright walk would not make an ape more human, and apes are not designed to walk upright efficiently. The skeletal structure of their hips and legs is unsuitable. The preoccupation of evolutionary anthropologists with bipedality springs from a determination to exploit differences between apes and humans in an effort to prove evolution happened and show how. But neither cooking food,⁷ nor sleeping on the ground,⁸ nor walking upright could transform a hypothetical apelike ancestor into a human being.

God created the first two humans in His image, having unique mental and spiritual attributes, on the 6th day of Creation Week. He made land animals, including apes, the same day, according to Genesis chapter one. And while our Common Designer gave us some similar physical features, He created apes and humans with distinct intellectual and spiritual differences. Nothing in the fossil record or genetics demonstrates human evolution from apelike ancestors. Humanity’s ancestors were Adam and Eve, created by God about 6,000 years ago fully able to walk—no evolution required.

For more information:

Answers magazine volume 7, number 2 (April–June 2012) contains several articles and helpful diagrams explaining how “cavemen” can be explained within the biblical timeline in the special feature: “Finding a Home for Cavemen: Who were they? When did they live? How are they different?”
Chapter 8: Did Humans Really Evolve from Apelike Creatures?
Evaluating the Gait Analysis of Ardi
News to Note, March 17, 2012
News to Note, March 31, 2012
A Giant Leap for Lucy
News to Note, November 12, 2011
News to Note, February 12, 2011

3. MSNBC: “Why huge dinosaurs had such tiny babies”

Big dinosaurs won the battle but lost the war, and the real winners took to the skies.

The latest evidence, according to a Swiss researcher, suggests dinosaurs did not evolve their gigantic sizes due to the richness of their environment.⁹ Therefore, the dinosaurs needed another reason to evolve enormity. A new evolutionary model proposed by Zurich’s Daryl Cordon suggests dinosaurs grew big to outcompete other dinosaurs. Being successful, these big dinosaurs ruled the world by the time catastrophic mass extinction struck (possibly in the form of a meteor).

“The most successful (dinosaurs) were the very large ones that were able to escape the competition trap and replenish their numbers. After the mass extinction, they again tried to evolve large size, but to escape the competition trap they had to become multi-ton animals,” says Codron.

But having won the battle for supremacy, these same big dinosaurs lost the war for long-term survival of their species. Dinosaurs laid eggs. Egg size is limited by shell thickness. “One cannot have a very large egg with a very thin shell, otherwise it would simply break open,” Codron explains. “The shell itself is limited in thickness. It cannot become so thick that gas can no longer diffuse through it, which would deprive the embryo of oxygen. For a very small egg-laying animal this is no problem, but it does mean that very large animals have to produce relatively small eggs.”

The giant dinosaurs’ eggs therefore had to remain small despite their large adult size. Small hatchlings, to reach adulthood, then had to grow through many size categories and consequently survive competition in many ecological niches. Codron’s model proposes the big dinosaurs had won the battle before the big catastrophe struck, destroying—as the popular scenario goes—all creatures above about 22 to 55 pounds.

“The question that haunted some people including me is . . . why did the mammals survive and why did the dinosaurs not. I think we have a very good answer for that,” says co-author Marcus Clauss.¹⁰ Following the catastrophe, the majority of those left to replenish the earth would have been the large species. With reduced numbers, their small fry became crunchy critters for mammalian neighbors. (The fossil record does contain evidence of a juvenile dinosaur in the stomach of a large mammal, a Repenomamus.) Meanwhile, mammalian young survived on mothers’ milk. Thus, having placed all their eggs in one basket—metaphorically speaking—dinosaurs finally went extinct.

The final chapter in the story proposed by Codron explains the proliferation of birds. Many (though not all) evolutionists believe dinosaurs evolved into birds. Therefore, after the catastrophic extinction, Codron proposes some smaller dinosaurs learned to fly and “slipped the surly bonds of Earth”¹¹ to fill the ecological niches of the air.

Codron bases his model, published in Biology Letters, on mathematical simulations of populations with a variety of body sizes. The model represents an attempt to explain the fossil record within the evolutionary worldview and thus demonstrates the influence of worldview on the way evidence is interpreted. A biblical worldview would assign a different timescale to the geologic column’s fossils—noting the majority of them to have been deposited over a matter of months and not millions of years—and would identify the catastrophe not as death striking from the sky but rather the global Flood.¹²

There is no reason to doubt that after the Flood animals descended from those preserved on the Ark faced competition and environmental challenges. Many weathered those challenges and replenished the earth, but some of those became extinct later just as animals go extinct today.

To suppose “the most successful dinosaurs were the very large ones” reflects an evolutionary interpretation of the fact that, in the fossil record, the dinosaurs represented in the higher rock layers are primarily the larger ones. However, the Flood model interprets much of the geologic column as a record of the order of burial during the time of the rising floodwaters. As such, larger size may have helped some to evade rising water longer, with their “success” being measured in weeks, not eons.

But to agree that environmental challenges and competition contributed to the extinction of some species after the catastrophic global Flood—just as we see in today’s world—is NOT to agree that some kinds of animals evolved into other kinds. For instance, the aerial success of birds does not require them to have evolved upward from dinosaurs but only to have flown off the Ark at the end of the Flood year.

Likewise to agree that egg size is limited by various physical and biological constraints does not prove why some dinosaurs grew so big, only why big dinosaurs had to lay small eggs. This is an interesting biological phenomenon but in no way supports the idea that dinosaurs had to evolve from anything or into anything. The population models Codron proposes are not unreasonable, but their application to evolutionary scenarios is just so much storytelling. Reliable answers in matters of historical science require an eyewitness account, and, for questions of origins of life and various kinds of animals, the only source is the Creator’s eyewitness account in the Bible.

For more information:

Dinosaur Killer
News to Note, October 29, 2011
News to Note, July 16, 2011
“Did Meteors Trigger Noah’s Flood?” by Dr. Andrew Snelling in Answers magazine volume 7, number 2 (Jan.–Mar. 2012).

4. Winnipeg Free Press: “Scientists create chemicals that can undergo evolution”

Molecular magic still requires a “magician.”

The chemical origin of life remains the “holy grail” of evolutionists seeking to explain how life randomly emerged from lifelessness. Biochemists led by Philipp Holliger report in Science they have synthesized six DNA analogues (called XNAs) and demonstrated that corresponding enzymes can copy them and let them evolve.

Holliger’s group writes, “Beyond heredity, specific XNAs have the capacity for Darwinian evolution and folding into defined structures. Thus, heredity and evolution, two hallmarks of life, are not limited to DNA and RNA but are likely to be emergent properties of polymers capable of information storage.”¹³ By showing that molecules other than those in the genomes of earth’s life forms can carry reproducible genetic information and evolve, they believe they’re solving the mystery of the chemical origins of life.

DNA and RNA are polymers with nucleic acids (“NA’s”) attached to backbones of sugar molecules. The “D” and the “R” stand for the type of sugar. XNAs are synthetic polymers that use the same nucleic acids as DNA but different sugar molecules (“X”) for the ladder stringing them together. Since the nucleic acid (NA) sequence encodes information, an XNA copy of a DNA strand is analogous to using the same words but recording them on papyrus instead of paper.

Normally, in cells, DNA molecules are copied by unzipping the DNA double-helix and attaching a series of corresponding nucleic acids to the DNA templates. DNA polymerase enzymes read and copy DNA. DNA stores the genetic blueprint for living organisms. Therefore, for life to evolve from non-living chemicals, some sort of information-containing, self-replicating molecules would first have to form by random processes (and, of course, to then build the organisms called for in the cellular blueprints).

Holliger’s group made XNAs by finding several DNA polymerases able to bind to both DNA and a particular XNA. Those enzymes made XNA copies from DNA originals and also then made DNA strands from corresponding XNAs. Thus the XNAs proved to be copy-able by the sort of process cells use to copy ordinary DNA.

To demonstrate XNAs could evolve, an XNA was “designed to cling to a particular . . . target [and] those that failed to do so were washed away.” After several rounds of selection, each copying only molecules able to stick to the targets, the resulting copies contained faithful representations of any variant or mutation present. Since the process preserved those variations, the researchers say the XNAs evolved.

“We've been able to show that both heredity—information storage and propagation—and evolution, which are really two hallmarks of life, can be reproduced and implemented in alternative polymers other than DNA and RNA,”¹⁴ Holliger explains. In other words, he contends life could as well evolve from other nucleic acid polymers, with there being nothing so special about DNA and RNA.

Holliger does not claim to have either synthesized life or seen life evolve in the laboratory. Despite headlines suggesting the contrary—like “Scientists show that manmade nucleic acids can replicate and evolve”¹⁵—XNAs cannot replicate themselves. Living things must be able to reproduce. But an article in the Winnipeg Free Press states, “There may be no moment when the first life emerged, but instead an evolutionary process by which chemicals most of us would consider non-life gradually gave rise to living cells through natural selection.”

Molecules-to-man evolution, on the other hand, would require random interaction of chemicals producing molecules able to store information and replicate themselves. Furthermore, those lifeless randomly interacting chemicals would have to be able to create the informational blueprint for an actual organism and the code to transmit that information as well as a system for deciphering and implementing those coded instructions. Nothing in biology has ever been observed to do this. This study does not change that fact.

Additionally, the authors claim XNAs undergo Darwinian evolution because their culling process resembles natural selection, selecting the “best” copies to replicate. However, these “evolved” XNAs, by copying genetic variations, did not produce new genetic information but merely altered some of the original information. Evolution of new kinds of life would require creation of new information, something natural selection cannot provide.

Furthermore, the writer for the Winnipeg Free Press, explaining this connection between natural selection and life, writes, “Scientists don’t have a universal definition for life, but they do agree that to qualify as life, an organism must be subject to natural selection.” The implication is that since living things must respond to natural selection, to follow the rules of natural selection is to “evolve” and to therefore come closer to primordial life than ordinary molecules. However, being subject to natural selection does not conversely constitute sufficient grounds to be considered evolving and somehow lifelike. This connection represents a logical fallacy.

“That molecules other than DNA and RNA can successfully carry information does not solve the problem of where actual genetic information came from. This study has simply shown that other molecular components could work in a genetic system. But XNA replication does not demonstrate how randomly produced genetic information could direct the formation of a living organism,” explains molecular geneticist Dr. Georgia Purdom of Answers in Genesis. The XNAs only contained the information or the non-sense codes provided by their intelligent designers. Like a Xerox copy machine, the “evolution” observed in Holliger’s laboratory produced nothing new but only copied that which was previously created.

Without a Designer to supply genetic information, life from chemicals can neither sneak nor leap into existence. Showing other molecules can carry information fails to demonstrate a source for that information. And even if a molecular polymer (such as RNA “ribozymes”) can replicate itself, it contains no information unless that information is supplied by an outside source. From the Bible’s eyewitness account, we know that the source of all life and all the information contained in living things is the Creator God.

For more information:

Be sure to watch for Dr. Purdom’s blog next week for more information.
Origins of Life: A Simple Approach?
Is Natural Selection the Same Thing as Evolution?
Hasn’t Evolution Been Proven True?
News to Note, January 21, 2012
News to Note, January 28, 2012
News to Note, July 16, 2011

5. ars technica: Recalibrated DNA clock suggests we can stop looking for early primate fossils

When the clock’s answers don’t meet expectations, get a new clock.

Molecular clock predictions of the time required to evolve humans and their supposed primate relatives from apelike ancestors have long made demands the fossil record could not meet. According to evolutionists, the oldest primate fossils just weren’t old enough. Evolutionary anthropologists Michael Steiper and Erik Seiffert have devised a new model recalibrating the clock along completely new criteria. According to their model, the known fossils are old enough. In the minds of evolutionists, this method demonstrates the accuracy of their evolutionary model. Though the method was only applied to primate fossils, the authors suggest their method could be used to reconcile numerous other such discrepancies in the mammalian fossil record.

Molecular clocks are calibrated in accord with dates assigned to fossils and the mutation rates of DNA. Since evolution of new life forms supposedly occurs by accumulating favorable mutations, knowing the mutation rate is essential to evolutionary time estimates. Conventional molecular clock estimates have demanded primate ancestral forms date back to 82 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous part of the geologic column. Unfortunately for evolutionary paleontologists, the oldest primate fossils are only 56 million years old. The new model, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, recalibrates the molecular clock used for primates. It eliminates the gap by indicating “young” primate fossils really are old enough.

Steiper and Seiffert propose that the mutation rate and therefore the speed with which evolution happened slowed down as body size and brain size increased. (Perhaps larger animals reproduced less often and thus provided fewer opportunities for inheritable mutations to occur, or perhaps the higher metabolic rate of little mammals cooked their DNA and made it mutate faster, they surmise.) Noting that measurable mutation rates in primates are very variable, they write, “Relaxed clock methods are especially appropriate for primates, because this clade exhibits large and systematic variation in molecular rates both within and among groups.”¹⁶

To prove the “hominoid slowdown”¹⁶ in mutation rate correlated with increasing body and brain size, they statistically analyzed skeletal and skull sizes of various primate fossils. They then compared those sizes to the accepted fossil dates. By thus calculating a new rate of evolution, they reassessed the expected times various primates should have appeared in the fossil record and found times closer to their new estimates.

They write, “In other words, we predict the molecular rates of long-extinct primates using our knowledge of their phenotypic attributes rooted in the fossil and extant data. This is a significant departure from the traditional method of generating molecular rates using fossils as calibrations. Because our method estimates molecular rates by using paleontological, phylogenetic, geological, and neontological sources, we feel that it has strong advantages over traditional calibration techniques.”¹⁶

The authors recommend their new method as an easy and accurate method of assessing the expected speed of evolution. After all, fossil sizes are measurable and therefore more accessible than predicted mutation rates in the deep past. We’ve written here a great deal about the unverifiable nature of such molecular clock assumptions. (See Circular Clock for discussion of the statistical sleight of hand noted even by evolutionists and Molecular Clock Off-Line and Gorilla genome’s surprises for more about variations of mutation rates.)

On the surface, the idea of measuring something physical in the present instead of predicting what mutation rates should have been in the unobservable past sounds like observational science instead of historical science. However, the new method is still based on the assumption that evolution of new kinds of animals from simpler ones occurred. The fossils are real, but estimates of their ages are fraught with unverifiable assumptions, and the notion that one kind evolved into another is imaginary. Such evolution has never been observed. Accumulation of mutations has never been shown to produce the gain of information required to evolve a new kind of creature. Therefore calculations of the “rate of evolution” are based on imagination, not fact, and are of no real value.

So why, if primates didn’t simply evolve as late-comers in earth’s history, are they absent from the deeper parts of the geologic column? We are often asked, similarly, why fossils of humans who died in the global Flood are not found but only fossils of people who died in the Ice Age, preserved in the uppermost rock layers. The answer, provided by the biblically consistent Flood model, sees the geologic column is a record of the order of burial. During the weeks in which the Floodwaters rose and violently destroyed and buried the occupants of habitat after habitat under tons of sediment, humans and animals most capable of fleeing—such as monkeys and apes and birds—doubtless did so. Ultimately they were of course overwhelmed, and most would have decayed. By that time, the bulk of the fossils in the geologic column had been entombed. Thus the Bible provides a historical record that is consistent with the findings in the fossil record, and no new clock is required.

For more information:

And Don’t Miss . . .

The identity of Godzillus, the large Ordovician fossil found in Kenton County, Kentucky, remains a mystery. As we discussed last week, the fossil is definitely not a bony creature like a fish. According to geologist David Meyer, who has written a book on Ordovician fossils of the Cincinnati area, experts are still convinced the fossil has a biological origin. It may not be an ordinary animal or even a plant, however. “In general, we’re heading toward this being some sort of microbial structure that was preserved on the sea bottom, and it preserved some unusual patterns in the rock,” Meyer told FoxNews.com. Thinking the fossil could be “a mat or membrane made up of algae or bacteria that somehow captured enough dirt and debris that it could form into an unusual fossil,” Meyer adds, “It’s not the kind of thing that you would expect to fossilize.” The marine fossils of the Ordovician rock layers do show evidence of burial associated with violent catastrophe and are thus consistent with the turmoil present during the early stages of the global Flood. For more information see Cincinnati—Built on a Fossil Graveyard.
Is dark matter a figment? Is dark matter detectable? Does dark matter matter? Analysis of data from Chile’s European Southern Observatory has failed to find evidence of any dark matter near our solar system. Dark matter has never been observed. (That’s why it’s called “dark.”) Current cosmological theories hypothesize the existence of dark matter to explain gravitational effects that cannot be accounted for by the amount of visible matter. Dwarf galaxies, for instance, are thought to be composed almost entirely of dark matter, and cosmologists estimate that as much as 80% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. Authors of the study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, however, found that the motion of stars “within 13,000 light-years of Earth, are gravitationally attracted by the visible material in our solar system . . . and not by any unseen matter.” As lead author Christian Moni Bidin says, “The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun. But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”¹⁷ The official ESO press release reports, “The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighborhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.”¹⁷ While cosmologists worldwide are proposing a variety of explanations, most are not ready to throw out the existence of dark matter altogether as other evidence points to its reality. And while dark forms an integral part of current big bang cosmology, creationist cosmology models work whether it exists or not. For more information, see News to Note, September 24, 2011 and News to Note, May 14, 2011.

For more information: Get Answers

News to Note, April 28, 2012

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

1. Yahoo News: “New purple crab species found in Philippines”

Now you’ve seen a purple crab . . .

This week:

Purple crab
“Godzillus” rocks!
Out of the hammock without any fire
Louisiana Science Education
Deep resistance
And don’t miss . . .

Did you miss it? Catch last week’s News to Note or any other!

Bright purple with red-tipped claws, a newly discovered species of crab has been added to the list of truly photogenic creatures. German taxonomist Hendrik Freitag has carefully catalogued the characteristics of crabs collected in the Greater Palawan province of the Philippines and found four new species of the freshwater crab genus Insulamon, bringing the total known species to five. (The other four vary in color but are mostly shades of purple.)

Insulamon palawanese, male specimen of a newly discovered species in the Philippines. Image from Hendrik Freitag rmbr.nus.edu.sg/rbz/biblio/60/60rbz037-055.pdf through news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/species-purple-crab-discovered-philippines-223744176.html

Another male specimen in the Insulamon genus. This newly discovered species is Insulamon johannchristiani. Image from Hendrik Freitag at rmbr.nus.edu.sg/rbz/biblio/60/60rbz037-055.pdf

Greater Palawan consists of a mainland region and several nearby islands, probably providing opportunities for geographic isolation that facilitated speciation. Freitag’s analysis focused not on color but on the structural characteristics of the five species, which differ slightly from each other in fairly subtle ways. “Insulamon palawanense . . . is the most widely distributed species on Palawan Island and might therefore be more variable than the other species of the genus that appear more restricted to intra-island biogeographical subregions,” Freitag reports.¹ No information is yet available regarding the question of interspecies reproduction, but there is no reason to assume they couldn’t still interbreed. The size of the five crab species varies, but all are in the one to two inch range.

Though Freitag’s study published in Raffles Bulletin of Zoology makes no ancestral evolutionary claims, he told National Geographic, “The particular violet coloration might just have evolved by chance, and must not necessarily have a very specific function or reason aside from being a general visual signal for recognition.”²

“It is known that crabs can discriminate colours,” Freitag explained. “Therefore, it seems likely that the colouration has a signal function for the social behaviour, e.g. mating. This could explain why large males of various Insulamon species are more reddish compared to the generally violet females and immature males.”

Indeed, to say the purple color “might have just evolved by chance” is just a statement of what all evolution is supposed to be—the accumulation of randomly occurring changes. Three of these species, are restricted to specific creeks, geographically cut off from other Insulamon crabs because they can only survive in freshwater.³ Such isolation can promote speciation. But that has nothing to do with evolution of new kinds of creatures.

These new species and their fantastic photographs provide an opportunity to appreciate the biodiversity that can develop within a created kind. Creationists are sometimes wrongly accused of claiming that animals don’t change. In reality, variation and speciation do occur within created kinds, but no evidence shows new “kinds” evolving. Nevertheless, impressive variation can occur, especially when isolation of creatures with particular characteristics occurs. No new information is created, and some may even be lost, but the result can be greater biodiversity, all without benefit of either eons of time or upward evolution.

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2. Yahoo News: “Ohio man’s fossil find in Kentucky stumps experts”

Dry Dredger’s local fossil stumps experts.

“This is the ultimate cold case,” says Dayton’s Ron Fine, who after nearly forty years of fossil hunting has found a fossil that baffles the experts. Fine, a member of an association of amateur paleontologists known as the Dry Dredgers, spent all of last summer digging the huge fossil from a hillside in Kenton County, Kentucky, by Route 17 (in the next county over from Boone County, where the Creation Museum is located). Fine has found many fossils over the years, but nothing this big. “When I finally finished [excavating,] it was three-and-a-half feet wide and six-and-a-half feet long. In a world of thumb-sized fossils, that’s gigantic!”⁴ In fact, University of Cincinnati geologist Carl Brett says, “This is the largest fossil that has ever been extracted from this age of rock in this area or maybe even in the world.”⁵

Lobe-shaped portion of the Godzillus fossil showing the texture paleontologists note distinguish this fossil as a biological specimen rather than a smooth nodule formed from mud and shale. (AP Photo/The Cincinnati Enquirer, Gary Landers) Image from news.yahoo.com/photos/man-s-fossil-find-stumps-experts-slideshow

Godzillus fossil, substantially larger than ordinary Ordovician fossils, has been reconstructed from many pieces excavated from a road cut in Northern Kentucky. (AP Photo/The Cincinnati Enquirer, Gary Landers) Image from news.yahoo.com/photos/man-s-fossil-find-stumps-experts-slideshow

“I knew right away that I had found an unusual fossil,” Fine says. “Imagine a saguaro cactus with flattened branches and horizontal stripes in place of the usual vertical stripes. That’s the best description I can give.”⁴ Fine put his “Humpty Godzillus” back together with “eight bottles of Super Glue”⁵ and presented his find to the Dry Dredgers in Cincinnati and then to the regional meeting of the Geological Society of America in Dayton.

Fine dubbed the big multilobed, “goose flesh” textured fossil “Godzillus.” “I picked that name to make it sound more scientific,”⁵ Fine says. “Like Godzilla, it’s a primordial beast that found its way to the modern era.” And although experts from Purdue and the University of Cincinnati think the fossil represents something biological, as University of Cincinnati geologist David Meyer says, “We just don’t know yet exactly what it is.”⁴

“The Dry Dredgers bring in some amazing finds,” agrees Brett, “but we’ve never been stumped.”⁵ Suggestions have included a sponge or a seaweed, and Meyer adds, “This thing is not boney. It is not a fish.” Meyer, co-author of A Sea without Fish: Life in the Ordovician Sea of the Cincinnati Region, explains, “Cincinnati was covered by a sea, 100 to 200 feet deep. Primitive shellfish lived in it. But no fish.”

Fine found the fossil in Upper Ordovician rock conventionally dated 450 million years old. The Cincinnati area is rich in fossils, particularly invertebrate sea creatures (like the trilobite fossils that are stuck onto Godzillus⁶), so much so that similar strata are called “Cincinnatian” elsewhere in North America. This region has intrigued fossil hunters since the 1790s, and the Dry Dredgers has just celebrated its 70th anniversary.⁶ According to Answers in Genesis geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling, this area’s Ordovician rock layer is “one of the most well stocked and uniquely well-preserved ‘fossil graveyards’ on the planet.”⁷

Our region’s Ordovician fossils, mostly extinct sea creatures, are preserved in alternating layers of limestone and clay mudstone. These fossils appear to have been ripped asunder and, like Godzillus, are commonly found near road cuts. Secular and creationist scientists agree the fossils in this area were subjected to violent storm conditions. Today, the Cincinnati area is 500 miles from the sea. Secular scientists speculate that the ocean rose such that this region was actually submerged near the coastline.

Biblical history of the global Flood explains these findings—the violent storms, the submergence of the whole region, the types of fossils, and the patterns of burial. Ordovician rock, like the Cambrian layer just below it, is deep in the geologic column and contains fossils of the first creatures to be torn from their habitats and catastrophically buried during the global Flood. As the fountains of the deep broke up (Genesis 17:1), volcanic activity would have generated violently surging ocean waters initially destroying and burying sea creatures living on or near the sea bottoms. These are just the sorts of creatures preserved in the Cincinnatian strata. The geologic column doesn’t tell us when these creatures evolved but rather when they died and were buried in the Flood. Much of the geologic column is a timeline of the tumultuous Flood year in earth’s history, not a timeline of the evolutionary emergence of life.

For more information:

Cincinnati—Built on a Fossil Graveyard

3. PhysOrg: “Chimpanzee ground nests offer new insight into our ancestors descent from the trees”

Easing out of hammocks into earthbound beds presumably helped apelike ancestors awaken to new possibilities.

Evolutionary anthropologists presume apelike ancestors had to learn to walk upright to become human, but once they stopped hanging out in trees they had to change their sleeping arrangements. “It has long been believed that coming down from the trees was a crucial evolutionary shift,” says Cambridge anthropologist Kathelijne Koops. She led a team studying the unusual nesting behavior of chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, West Africa, to discover whether those apelike ancestors slept in trees or on the ground.

Tree-nesting chimpanzee. Photo credit: Kathelijne Koop. Image from phys.org/news/2012-04-chimpanzee-ground-insight-ancestors-descent.html

Orangutan (tree) nest. Photo credit Adam van Casteren. Image from www.livescience.com/19706-orangutan-chimp-nests.html

All great apes build some sort of nest, typically by interweaving tree branches. Gorillas build on the ground, but orangutans and chimps build mostly in trees. A separate study of orangutan nests reports these one-time-use engineering marvels are made from bent branches. According to author A. Roland Ennos, “It’s very similar to weaving a basket, they have to break the branches, weave them together and form a nice, strong, rigid structure. . . . They are almost as complex as a man-made shelter you might make. They [the orangutans] know how the wood is going to break, and they have a feel for how strong they have to make it (the nest). That shows the apes have intelligence and have a feel for the physics of their environment.”⁸

Some chimps in the Nimba Mountains build around 20% of their nests on the ground. (Normally over 95% of chimp nests are arboreal.) Koop and company went to Guinea’s Seringbara forest to discover why. They hoped to learn whether the earliest humans had already made the transition to ground-based snoozing before they evolved or had to develop their modern nocturnal habits later.

“We believe that, like modern apes, the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans also slept in the trees 6 million years ago,” said Dr. Koops. “However, these nests are not preserved in the fossil or archaeological record, so it is impossible to study directly the ancient transition from sleeping in trees to building shelters on the ground. Recording this rare behaviour in the chimpanzee, our closest relative, may provide vital clues.”

Similar chimps in the Congo build nests on the ground despite the prevalence of leopards,⁹ so lack of predators doesn’t explain the cavalier camping behavior. Some evolutionary anthropologists have speculated early humans learned to ward off predators with fire to get a good night’s sleep, but these researchers discount this explanation for ground sleeping since they reckon the earliest controlled use of fire occurred 1 million years ago, almost a million years too late to keep the night beasties away from the most primitive humans (evolutionarily speaking), Homo erectus.¹⁰

Noting that there are plenty of trees available in Seringbara, Koop wondered if ground nests belonged to males guarding females in the trees above. However, DNA testing of hairs found in 46 ground-based nests and 7 nearby nests in the lower tree branches showed that while the majority of the ground nests were built by males, they were not necessarily associated with female nests above.

“These chimpanzees offer a rare opportunity to investigate why a population of wild apes chooses to sleep on the ground,” Koops explains. “We showed that ground-nesting was not caused by male mate-guarding behaviour, a lack of trees in which to nest, or because of fire. This suggests that our direct ancestors were neither the only, nor the first, species to come down from the trees. . . . This chimpanzees’ behaviour suggests a more deep-seated, gradual transition from tree-to-ground sleep.” The 46 ground nests examined belonged to only 12 individuals, indicating the ground preference was habitual. Koop’s team concludes, “We showed that terrestriality is not a necessary condition for habitual ground-nesting, which raises the possibility that ground sleep may have been practiced in some populations of pre-erectus humans.”⁹

Since the male-built ground nests apparently do not represent an early evolution of chivalry, the researchers suggest the males, being heavier, are at greater risk for a branch-breaking rude awakening.⁹ Expanding on the liberating concept that hominins stepped out of the trees without the need for a night-light, Colorado evolutionary anthropologist Thomas Wynn, commenting on the study, suggests the transition from hammock to pallet allowed our distant ancestors to get more REM sleep “which he says is important for memory consolidation and cognition.”¹⁰ Carol Ward, a Missouri evolutionary anatomist, explains that “a common feature of REM sleep is muscle paralysis, which make it precarious for apes that sleep in trees.”¹⁰ However, she adds that there are “too many differences between chimps and early hominins to draw firm conclusions about early human behavior from chimp studies.”¹⁰

Dr. Ward, an evolutionist, notes that all of these conclusions are speculative.¹⁰ We would go a step further and say “imaginative.” This entire scenario is based on the assumption that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors. Yet so-called hominin fossils are either ape or human, not transitional creatures. And just as neither bipedality nor cooked food gave a non-human creature the leg-up to become human, neither did the ability to sack out on the ground.

Biblically we know that God created animals (including apes) and humans as separate creations on the 6th day of Creation week. God made humans in His image with unique mental and spiritual attributes. And while our Common Designer gave humans and apes certain similar physical features, He also created many distinct physical differences (not to mention a huge gap in intelligence and a different spiritual nature). Nothing in the fossil record or genetics confirms humans evolved from ape-like ancestors. Whether chimps sleep on the ground or not tells us nothing about human ancestry.

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4. The Republic: “Senate panel rebuffs repeal of La. Science Education Act, criticized as promoting creationism”

Louisiana’s Science Education Act weathers challenge.

The Senate Education Committee for the second straight year has rejected a proposal to repeal Louisiana’s groundbreaking Science Education Act of 2008. The effort to repeal the bill was rejected 2-to-1. Louisiana led the way for similar academic freedom laws in other states, the most recent being the Tennessee Teacher Protection Act, which went into effect April 20.

Louisiana’s law (LSEA) encourages school officials to “foster an environment within the public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”¹¹

Under Louisiana’s law, teachers must “teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner.”¹¹

Zack Koppelin, a graduate of Louisiana’s public schools who is now a college freshman, declares, “These supplemental materials will be creationist materials.” Koppelin says the LSEA “opens the door for the unconstitutional teaching of creationism to be snuck [sic] into public school science classes under the guise of letting teachers provide supplemental materials to critique evolution with absolutely no oversight.”¹² Without academic credentials or professional experience, freshman Koppelin was nevertheless allowed to share his opinion with the senators during his testimony before the committee and said that “the law was hurting Louisiana’s reputation.”¹³

Despite such accusations that LSEA sanctions religious teaching in science classrooms—as depicted last year in a Doonesbury cartoon¹⁴—the LSEA does not permit teachers to promote any religious doctrine, and the information they present must be “scientifically sound and supported by empirical evidence.” State and local school officials are encouraged by the LSEA to offer teachers guidance in choosing these materials. Furthermore, materials (such as lists of thought-provoking questions at www.textaddons.com) are readily available to encourage critical thinking skills in the analysis of controversial scientific positions.

The Louisiana governor’s office stands behind the LSEA. Governor Jindal signed the bill into law in 2008. Regarding the recent attempt at repeal, the governor’s representative stated, “Repealing the Science Education Act would show no benefit for children, has no evidence that it would improve educational outcomes across the state, and all it would do is seemingly limit educators’ ability to teach other viewpoints in their classrooms.”¹²

Since LSEA went into effect, according to Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum Action, “To date, not a single complaint has been filed, not a single school board has moved to address a related concern and not one lawsuit is on record to correct inappropriate action on behalf of a Science Education Act infraction!”¹⁵ The Senate Education Committee Chairman Conrad Appel and an education department official confirmed that there have been no complaints about creationism being taught. “In other words,” as Mills told the committee, “this repeal that is before you today is a political solution in search of a problem.”¹²

Ironically, those that oppose allowing teachers to teach students to critically examine controversial scientific ideas typically deny any controversy exists. For example, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) claims LSEA “opened the door for scientifically unwarranted criticisms of evolution and climate science to be taught.”¹³ (As we discussed in our coverage of Tennessee’s Teacher Protection Academic Freedom Act,¹⁶ even secular scientists disagree about these issues, and scientists and teachers willing to examine the scientific weaknesses of popular positions do not forfeit their credentials.) Yet opponents of laws protecting academic freedom must vociferously maintain—amid all the controversy—that no controversy actually exists. Why? Because discussion of “scientific critiques” of “any explanation of life”¹⁷ are legally discussable in public school classrooms. The ACLU has said so. Thus, to stifle discussion and restrain academic freedom, experts who hold popular opinions must declare, in effect, “Science has spoken, we believe it, that settles it.”

Incidentally, the United States Supreme Court has made clear in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that “teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.” And that—the teaching of critical thinking skills—the ability to objectively analyze even the most popular scientific notions—is the goal of the LSEA and similar laws springing up around the country. What better way to raise up a generation of creative scientists, problem-solvers able to think “outside the box”?

We are obviously pleased to hear the LSEA and the academic freedom it represents have survived this challenge. That said, we remind our readers that we have never suggested public school teachers should be required to teach creation. Such a policy would not only violate existing laws, it would be counter-productive to insist an instructor with an evolutionary worldview abandon it to teach a creation science position.

Questions about origins are matters of historical, not observational, science. Every person has a bias affecting the way he or she interprets scientific evidence concerning origins. We encourage Christian parents and churches to teach not only critical thinking skills but also the truth of the Bible as God’s Word. At church and at home, students need to be taught that the Bible is confirmed by science even while they are given the freedom to critically examine conventional textbook content at school.

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5. Laboratory Equipment.: Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Found in Untouched Cave

Carlsbad collection carries kinds of antibiotic resistance beyond the reach of modern medicine’s wonder drugs.

Deep in Lechuguilla Cave, a large isolated cave within Carlsbad Cavern National Park in New Mexico, researchers have collected bacteria demonstrating resistance to at least 14 different antibiotics. With no possibility of human contamination, long cut off even from the possibility of water penetration from outside the cave, these bacteria have never been exposed to man-made antibiotics. Therefore, the researchers believe their findings support the idea that, while pharmaceuticals don’t trigger the evolution of drug resistance genes, natural antibiotics and antibiotic resistance “evolved over millions of years.”¹⁸

McMaster University’s Gerry Wright and University of Akron professor Hazel Barton’s team found many strains of bacteria that are harmless to humans but resistant to many antibiotics. One carried in its genome the blueprint for resistance to a modern antibiotic-of-last-resort. All the bacteria harbored some antibiotic resistance, and practically every class of modern antibiotics was represented in the resistance genes of some bacteria in the cave. These ancient resistance genes could show up in dangerous bacteria and, through natural selection, become a major problem.

“Our study shows that antibiotic resistance is hard-wired into bacteria,” Wright says, “It could be billions of years old, but we have only been trying to understand it for the last 70 years. This has important clinical implications.” Barton explains, “We can say to doctors, ‘While this isn’t a problem right now, it could be in the future so you need to be aware of this pre-existing resistance and be prepared if it emerges in the clinic. Or you are going to have a problem.’”

“Most practitioners believe that bacteria acquire antibiotic resistance in the clinic,” Wright says. “As doctors prescribe antibiotics, they select for members of the community that are resistant to these drugs. Over time, these organisms spread and eventually the bacteria that commonly cause these infections are all resistant. In extreme cases these organisms are resistant to seven or more drugs and are untreatable using traditional treatment. . . . The actual source of much of this resistance is harmless bacteria that live in the environment.”

Many microorganisms horizontally transfer genetic information among themselves. Thus, harmless bacteria, such as those deep in Carlsbad, could provide pathogenic bacteria with the genetic information to resist medicine’s best weapons. Many practicing physicians are well aware of the role of natural selection in promoting the survival and selection of bacteria that already harbor genetic information equipping them to resist antibiotics. That bacteria already possessed information for antibiotic resistance long before the modern pharmaceutical industry began producing wonder drugs was demonstrated in 1988 when explorers frozen since 1845 were found to harbor resistant bacteria in their colons. The present research team last year proved antibiotic resistance frozen in Ice Age permafrost was carried in ancient bacterial genomes. (See News to Note, December 31, 2011: Year in Review for more information.) Nevertheless, antibiotic resistance has become one of the most popular “proofs” of evolution as evolutionary promoters fail to distinguish between the selection of pre-existing information and the production of new genetic material.

On the other hand, antibiotics are often derived from or modeled on natural substances that have long been present in ordinary ecosystems. Therefore, the team writes, “The mechanisms of antibiotic modification and inactivation [strategies bacteria “use” to resist antibiotics] are evidence of highly specific evolutionary adaptations to evade the cytotoxic action of these antibiotics.”¹⁸ From that standpoint, the discovery of such widespread resistance genes suggests, Wright says, “that there are far more antibiotics in the environment that could be found and used to treat currently untreatable infections.” Wright and Barton’s research “supports a growing understanding that antibiotic resistance is natural, ancient, and hard wired in the microbial pangenome.”¹⁸ They add, “Such elements are the result of evolution through natural selection; this therefore implies that antibiotic resistance has a long evolutionary past.”¹⁸ There was a time when people thought bacteria evolved resistance because they “needed” to. But—as demonstrated by this group’s work and by the 1988 study—variations and mutations that confer resistance are already in the genomes of some bacteria. The “resistance information” does not necessarily develop in response to the antibiotic threat. But the pre-existence of that genetic information for resistance does not demonstrate evolution over millions of years. The “growing understanding that antibiotic resistance is natural” is a confirmation of the role of natural selection acting on microbes that horizontally transfer information. None of this research supports any sort of molecules-to-man evolutionary concepts or even the “deep time” implied in the phrase “long evolutionary past.”

As the research team suggests, models for more useful antibiotics may be found in nature because natural selection has likely facilitated the persistence of resistance genes in isolated bacteria in response to the existence of natural antibiotics. Yet the more ominous flip side of their news is a reminder for vigilance, not in expectation of an “evolutionary war on humanity” but rather alertness for the “sobering successes of natural selection” in a sin-cursed world.

Antibiotic resistance not only fails to prove the evolution of new kinds of organisms but actually demonstrates our Creator’s wisdom. God created microbes for important functions, and the majority are still harmless. The existence of biochemical means to keep bacterial populations in check as well as the genetic information to enable microbes to resist such “natural antibiotics” likely provided a balance in the pre-Fall world. Changing conditions in the post-Fall world have allowed helpful bacteria to become dangerous (see The Genesis of Pathogenic E. coli). A combination of mutations, horizontally transferred genes, environmental changes, and host changes can transform harmless microorganisms into pathogens. Frankly, from an evolutionary point of view, killing the host is a particularly bad idea! Biblical understanding explains the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance.

For more information:

And Don’t Miss . . .

Yesterday marked the close of “40 days of prayer” promoted by Planned Parenthood and a Unitarian clerical association and supported by a variety of denominational groups. Promotional materials included “40 different prayers for those involved in the ‘sacred care’ of abortions to continue protecting, providing, and embracing the procedure—including mothers, escorts, [and] abortionists.” Among the 40 prayers, there were none for the unborn. The Humboldt County Clergy for Choice, co-sponsor with the Eureka, California’s Six Rivers Planned Parenthood, stated, “We are religious leaders who value all human life. . . . We believe that human life is holy. That’s why we believe in your right to choose to be a parent or not.”¹⁹ The lack of a prayer for the unborn and the Clergy for Choice’s statement would indicate that Planned Parenthood and those clergy who support their cause do not consider the unborn human. This of course is no surprise, as it would be difficult to promote the willful killing of a “holy life” while claiming to follow anything resembling Christianity. Apparently the Clergy for Choice, among its other creative interpretations, has re-defined “living a holy life” to mean “doing as you please without any regard to the standards set by God.” God would differ. And His assessment of the actions of those clergy who joined in the this mockery of genuine prayer and concern can be summed up by Isaiah 5:20—“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.” For more information Chapter 29: When Does Life Begin?
As Tennessee’s new Teacher Protection Academic Freedom Act went into effect April 20, a New York radio station conducted a live interview with the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) representative Josh Rosenau and a public school general science teacher from Brentwood, Tennessee. NCSE’s determination to deny the existence of valid scientific controversy was abundantly clear in the Rosenau’s comments. He said, “Encouraging critical thinking is great . . .” but then said, “Scientifically speaking, evolution is just not controversial. . . . To talk about the strengths and weaknesses of it [evolution] assumes there are legitimate scientific weaknesses. . . . There just aren’t.” NCSE’s Rosenau expressed concern because he said students in the 7th or 9th grade are still learning “what science is and what science isn’t” and that the new law “blurs those lines,” as students need to understand how “science over centuries has developed a set of systems for testing things about the world.” Rosenau fails to distinguish between observational and historical science. That “system for testing things about the world” rests in the arena of observational science in which observable, testable, repeatable examinations of evidence are made. We can observe the world around us. We cannot observe the world at the time life began and how creatures supposedly evolved over time. Nothing in the past can be subjected to repeatable observable tests in the present. Therefore the science of origins is an example of historical science, and interpretation of evidence concerning the past is strongly worldview-based and worldview-biased. This fact alone generates genuine controversy regarding the interpretation of scientific information in a number of areas, as the Tennessee legislature has acknowledged. The Tennessee schoolteacher, glad of his increased freedom to actually educate his students, explained that a proper understanding of education demands divergent scientific viewpoints be open for examination. He said that teaching only one viewpoint is “not education, but indoctrination.” For more information see The Teacher Protection Academic Freedom Act.