Exercise, Gardens, and Ancient Camels: Fascinating Discoveries and Health Benefits

Creationism News – March 2013创造论新闻 – 2013年3月 Dedicated to David Coppedge who sacrificed his career as the Head Systems Administrator for the Cassini Spacecraft in JPL to honor the Creator of the Universe. He also spent literally thousands of hours to make his excellent websites. The contents of this presentation were taken from David Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. Pray for his fast recovery from cancer surgery. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 1/2/2020 1

More Reasons to Exercise and Plant a Garden更多运动的原因和种花园 • Three new studies show more benefits to exercise and home-grown food. • The Endocrine Society has compared active and sedentary children in stressful situations. The sedentary children had elevated levels of cortisol, a stress indicator, when put into the same stressful experiences as active children. Even though the interactions are not well understood, the researchers feel “These results suggest exercise promotes mental health by regulating the stress hormone response to stressors.” 1/2/2020 2

More Reasons to Exercise and Plant a Garden更多运动的原因和种花 • The British Journal of Sports Medicine published results of multiple studies that correlated exercise with self-control. The correlation held not only for pre-adolescent children, but for adolescents and young adults. “This is particularly important for children and teens, because well developed higher brain functions are important for academic achievement and other aspect of daily life, say the authors.” 1/2/2020 3

More Reasons to Exercise and Plant a Garden更多运动的原因和种花 • Schools that encourage children to grow “kitchen gardens” at home are getting an A+, according to a press release from Elsevier. Kids who watch their seeds develop at home are more likely to try new foods—healthier foods. The study reported a noticeable improvement in the nutritional level of school lunches from kids who participated. 1/2/2020 4

More Reasons to Exercise and Plant a Garden更多运动的原因和种花 • These studies are healthful and encouraging. The more we can encourage people to get off the sofa and out into the world, to learn more about the value of fresh fruits and vegetables and exercise, the better we will all be – physically, mentally, and to some extent, even morally. 1/2/2020 5

Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝 1/2/2020 6

Arctic Camel Found北极发现有骆驼 • Fossils from a large species of camel living in Canada’s high arctic contain soft tissue. • What’s an iconic desert creature doing in the freezing wastes of the north? The BBC News reported the discovery of 30 fragments of camel leg bones found on Ellesmere Island. Some of them had collagen, even though dated in the evolutionary scheme at 3.5 million years old. Evolutionists date the earliest camels at 45 million years old, but were astonished to find specimens this far north. 1/2/2020 7

Arctic Camel Found北极发现有骆驼 • The ancient camels would have had to cope with long and harsh winters, with temperatures plunging well below freezing. There would have been snow storms and months of perpetual darkness. 1/2/2020 8

Arctic Camel Found北极发现有骆驼 • The camels appear to have been 30% larger than modern camels. The article says they probably had shaggier coats. Their splayed feet, researchers surmise, would have been just as adapted to walk on snow as on sand, and their large eyes just as useful for arctic low-light conditions as for modern desert habitats. • Researchers claimed the collagen shows the fossil camel was a “direct ancestor of modern camels.” Mike Buckley (U of Manchester) said the fragments provide “new insight into the evolution of this animal.” 1/2/2020 9

Arctic Camel Found北极发现有骆驼 • If this is evolution, it’s backwards. The fossil camels were larger and more adaptive to more habitats. Nothing was stated about half-camels. Did they just “appear” on the scene fully evolved? This is another example not of Darwinian progress, but modern impoverishment from a richer, more diverse biosphere in the past. Ignore the millions-of-years dates; they’re plot elements of the Darwinian story, not facts of nature. 1/2/2020 10

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • Early-man researchers continue to weave fantastical tales on flimsy evidence. • A story making the rounds now is that big eyes doomed the Neanderthals (see PhysOrg, Live Science, and the BBC News). Some Neanderthals had larger eye sockets than those of modern humans. Even though they also had larger bones, muscles, and brains, some paleoanthropologists reasoned this way: bigger eyes take away brain power from “higher-level processing.” Without sufficient higher-level processing, they might not have devoted as much time to social networking. So without the cave equivalent of Facebook, they couldn’t compete with the socially-adept newcomers, and died out. This sounds preposterous given the many tens of thousands of years evolutionists believe they thrived over wide areas, cooked food, hunted successfully and made ornaments. 1/2/2020 12

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • Another story on Live Science is claiming that it could make “evolutionary sense” for male humans to spend more time helping their sisters’ progeny than their own. This takes a key Darwinian principle of selfishness and twists it into a new counter-intuitive possibility, adding to criticism that Darwinism can explain opposite outcomes with equal ease. 1/2/2020 13

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • And in a third story, Live Science reporter Tia Ghose suggested that Homo erectus must have been smarter than the average hominid to be able to use fire. The black figure accompanying the article was “surprisingly smart,” opening Ghose to charges of racism. Her expert of the day is Terrence Twomey, who reasoned that it takes a lot of brain power to keep a fire going. Imagine all those smarts one million years ago. Why didn’t group fire-maintenance improve their social skills? And why didn’t they pass that on to the Neanderthals? These questions don’t matter to the early-man crowd, because apparently anything goes when it comes to fantasizing about human evolution. 1/2/2020 14

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist with more skepticism than most of his colleagues about just-so-stories like this, enjoyed a new book he reviewed in Nature by Marlene Zuk entitled, Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. He agrees with Zuk that much of what passes for early-man science is little more than “pseudoscience based on an imagined past.” The “paleofantasist” uses meager archaeological evidence mixed with assumptions about the ability of natural selection to weave his tales. 1/2/2020 15

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • By presenting the state of evolutionary science, Zuk shows that palaeofantasies cannot be justified across a range of environments or with a range of behaviours. She details the evolutionary analysis of human mating patterns, showing that monogamous mating goes way back. Human childhood is long compared with that of our ape relatives, and the palaeofantasy explanation is that cognitive development necessitates a long childhood. Zuk runs through extensive data on the supply side, establishing the credibility of the alternative hypothesis that humans have maintained high rates of reproduction by reducing maternal energy investment in children, instead recruiting grandparents and other relatives to help care for them. 1/2/2020 16

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • But then, after some refreshing sermonizing, Hawks proceeded to justify paleofantasy. He claims it is the scientific process at work. • “As an anthropologist, I observe that Zuk’s use of the term ‘fantasy’ is just an emphatic way of describing the hypothesis-forming that is essential to evolutionary science. We play with hypotheses, explore their predictions and try very hard to falsify them. So it is, in a way, unremarkable that so many hypotheses proposed by anthropologists about ancient environments now seem to be wrong — and, in a few cases, even ridiculous.” 1/2/2020 17

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • “It means that science is working. Genomics, high-resolution climate records, and microscopic and isotopic evidence have changed our understanding of what the past has to offer. With that in mind, let the next round of palaeofantasies begin.” • This came from a man Nature said “enjoys a debunking of myths about our evolutionary fitness for the twenty-first century.” See also the 2/22/2008 entry that mentioned the term “Paleofantasy.” 1/2/2020 18

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • No, John! Not you, too? We had hope that you were a voice of reason amid the Vanity Fair of evolutionary storytellers. But then, after you chastised your fellow storytellers, you encouraged them to do more! • My darling, what big eyes you have. • John, don’t you realize that there are infinitely more wrong stories than right ones? Don’t you realize that one can never get at the truth with wrong assumptions? Thinking, for instance, that random, unguided processes can take a brain from grunting to logic is logically self-defeating. You will never get the truth of human history that way. 1/2/2020 19

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • Oxymoron: “Evolutionary sense.” • We don’t need more paleofantasies; we need scientific truth. Get your machete and cut the fantasies out. Paleofantasies are not even hypotheses; they are stupid stories. You err to think that paleoanthropologists try hard to falsify their fantasies. On the contrary, their habit is, the bigger the whopper, the better. 1/2/2020 20

Paleofantasy Runs Amok古幻想大闹 • The better to see your Facebook page, my love. • Don’t you also realize, John, the harm done by these paleofantasies in the media? Secular science reporters, who could probably not keep a fire going if their lives depended on it, suck up these sugary stories and barf them back out uncritically. Is this the kind of educational diet you want to give impressionable children about science? For shame! You should be teaching a science that cannot endure fantasy, but holds truth, integrity and logical justification as its highest values.* • *Exercise: Explain why these values cannot evolve, and could not have evolved. 1/2/2020 21

Nature Writer Points to Mao as Source of Wisdom自然作家使用毛泽东为智慧的之源 • Are there any circumstances in which it would be appropriate to honor Chairman Mao as a source of wisdom? • In “The unlikely wisdom of Chairman Mao,” Nature reporter Colin Macilwain acknowledged that many in the West see Mao as a “monster.” That is understandable, since the Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the greatest mass murderer in history. “But,” Macilwain continued, “he had at least one good idea — and it’s one that those who speak for science should pick up on, and fast.” That’s the wisdom of self-criticism, “a virtue seldom possessed by men, and never by the leaders of Western science.” 1/2/2020 23

Nature Writer Points to Mao as Source of Wisdom自然作家使用毛泽东为智慧的之源 • It may seem odd for a science reporter to speak of the “virtue” of a totalitarian dictator who murdered millions, starved millions, tortured dissidents, imposed the pseudoscience of Lysenko on the population of China with devastating results, threatened the world with hydrogen bombs, and left a whole generation impoverished while he himself lived a lavish, wanton lifestyle. If there’s “virtue” in a man like that, it needs to be considered in context. 1/2/2020 24

Nature Writer Points to Mao as Source of Wisdom自然作家使用毛泽东为智慧的之源 • What attracted Macilwain was a supposed “doctrine” of “self-criticism” that Chairman Mao proposed. It is indeed strange that Macilwain could not find another proponent of self-criticism to point to. If Mao was self-critical, he didn’t exhibit it very well. He never criticized himself for the vast swath of death and devastation he caused. Instead, he was sorry he didn’t impose more misery on his country. Macilwain conveniently left out any reference to Mao’s mass murders of some 77 million people (see 11/30/2005). 1/2/2020 25

Nature Writer Points to Mao as Source of Wisdom自然作家使用毛泽东为智慧的之源 • Clue for Colin Macilwain: one does not ever use Chairman Mao as an example of “virtue” under any circumstances. Nor does one use Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Kim family of North Korea, or any of the other despicable despots of mass murder (all Darwinians) who left the 20th century stained with blood like no other. What would happen, Mr. Macilwain, if you had pointed out some supposed virtue of Hitler? Wouldn’t you have hell to pay? How, then, can you find something good in a tyrant who left 10 times as many dead from state-sponsored democide? 1/2/2020 26

Nature Writer Points to Mao as Source of Wisdom自然作家使用毛泽东为智慧的之源 • It is inconceivable Colin would write this. Why not point to the Apostle Paul or some other truly virtuous person as a proponent of self-criticism? Given what Mao did, there is nothing good one can say. Macilwain has written some good material in the past, but this piece is way out of line. The only worse thing is that Nature’s editors did not reject it out of hand. Another telling part of this story is that many Nature readers who left comments agreed with Macilwain! One reader, though, had a pointed criticism worth reading: 1/2/2020 27

Nature Writer Points to Mao as Source of Wisdom自然作家使用毛泽东为智慧的之源 • With all due respect, you do not know Mao Zedong and China at all. • Mao was the biggest hypocrite. He asked Chinese intellectuals to criticize the communist party and the government, only to have them branded rightists and sent down to the countryside for re-education through labor. • Mao called for self-criticism, but never admitted his own mistakes in creating some of twentieth centuries worst disasters (the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, to name a couple) which claimed tens of millions of lives. • To use Mao as an example of a man capably [sic] of self-criticism is an insult to the memories of those people. 1/2/2020 28

Gold, Earthquakes, and Time 黄金，地震和时间 • How long does it take to form veins of gold in the rock? (a) millions of years; (b) less than a second. • If you guessed (b), you overestimated. It might just be a few tenths of a second. So reported Richard A. Lovett in Nature News about a new study in Nature Geoscience on the relationship between heat, pressure, precipitation, and earthquakes. • Scientists have long known that veins of gold are formed by mineral deposition from hot fluids flowing through cracks deep in Earth’s crust. But a study published today in Nature Geoscience has found that the process can occur almost instantaneously — possibly within a few tenths of a second. 1/2/2020 30

Gold, Earthquakes, and Time 黄金，地震和时间 • The process takes place along ‘fault jogs’ — sideways zigzag cracks that connect the main fault lines in rock, says first author Dion Weatherley, a seismologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. • The idea is that hot fluid flashes into vapor in the fault jogs during earthquakes, causing nearly instant precipitation of the fluids within them under rapid depressurization. This is called “flash vaporization.” Small earthquakes appear to be more efficient at gold vein formation than large ones. A slip of merely 130 micrometers in a 90-centimeter fault zone can result in a 50% pressure drop, allowing the rapid precipitation of gold and quartz. 1/2/2020 31

Gold, Earthquakes, and Time 黄金，地震和时间 • The caption in a photo of a gold vein accompanying the article says, “Veins of gold, such as this one trapped in quartz and granite, may deposit when the high-pressure water in which they were dissolved suddenly vaporises during an earthquake.” • Lovett still promoted the idea that large veins of gold might take hundreds of thousands of years to form out of the “tiny” veins hypothesized in the study. 1/2/2020 32

Gold, Earthquakes, and Time 黄金，地震和时间 • That, Weatherley adds, might be one of the reasons that the rocks in gold-bearing quartz deposits are often marbled with a spider web of tiny gold veins. “You [can] have thousands to hundreds of thousands of small earthquakes per year in a single fault system,” he says. “Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, you have the potential to precipitate very large quantities of gold. Small bits add up.” 1/2/2020 33

Gold, Earthquakes, and Time 黄金，地震和时间 • Nevertheless, it’s still a “flash in the pan” to use Lovett’s clever double metaphor. Given that so many small earthquakes can occur in a few years, it would seem hundreds of thousands of years are not necessary to find gold in them. The authors of the original paper said, “Multiple earthquakes progressively build economic-grade gold deposits.” • See also the 10/15/2006 entry, “Gold Can Form in a Geological Instant.” 1/2/2020 34

Gold, Earthquakes, and Time 黄金，地震和时间 • It takes a lot of findings like this to overcome the programming many students receive in school that everything on earth takes millions of years. Darwin was enamored with the idea of slow and gradual processes accumulating large changes over time. That, however, is a worldview preference, not a fact of nature. 1/2/2020 35

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • Why aren’t philosophers of science shaming origin-of-life researchers out of the science department? • OOL theories depend on imagination, not empirical evidence, for their broad-brush conclusions. 1/2/2020 37

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • Astrobiology Magazine promised “New Insights into the Origin of Life” but delivered only imaginary inferences. • Researchers studied living archaea, assuming them to be ancient, then used “could” and “may have” to conclude that DNA came late in the evolution of cells. But then the article mentioned 526 genes essential to life in a simple archaeal cell, and 121 essential proteins the scientists knew nothing about (see online book for the probability of getting even one gene by chance). Added to that, one of the OOL researchers admitted that DNA without all its complex machinery is useless. “DNA by itself is a rock,” he said. “You need all these other systems to make the DNA become a living cell.” He provided zero evidence that those systems could have arisen from a primordial soup. 1/2/2020 38

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • Another entry in Astrobiology Magazine promised “Evidence that Comets Could Have Seeded Life on Earth” (the word could being the tip-off for imagination). But the reader will not find the word evidence in the body of the article–only talk of a simulation in contrived lab conditions. Even so, the Berkeley team manufactured nine amino acids and a couple of dipeptides at best, not specifying if the amino acids were used by living cells or were one-handed (see online book). Amino acids by themselves are as far from life as individual letters are from a sophisticated book. 1/2/2020 39

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • A third Astrobiology Magazine article asks, “How Did Primordial Cells Evolve?” (not “did” primordial cells evolve). This article used could 7 times and may have 3 times, with a smattering of other escape words like possible or plausible. The guts of the story, about whether bacteria can switch between walled and unwalled states, was the least of the worries facing the researchers’ imaginary thesis. 1/2/2020 40

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • Science Daily teased its readers with the headline, “Untangling Life’s Origins,” confessing a tangled mess exists or has existed till now. The untangling operation, though, required postulating a “protein big bang” at the beginning. The researchers, additionally, used bioinformatics (an intelligent design method) to infer how proteins might have evolved. One researcher confessed, “The complexities of the biological functions of molecules are still poorly understood.” Maybe they should focus on understanding function before speculating about origin. 1/2/2020 41

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • Could is the first word in a Space.com article, “Could Life Have Evolved on Mars Before Earth?” The imagination is sent whirring with such suggestions. As for evidence, all that was proposed was some prior wetness in a certain crater on Mars where the Curiosity rover happens to be digging. No signs of Martian microbes were presented. Speaking of a “tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth,” this article again used its suggestion wand: “New observations by NASA’s Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past.” 1/2/2020 42

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • A story on PhysOrg borders on divination with test tubes acting as crystal balls. Many of us remember from chemistry class the mineral “gardens” one can make by pouring certain solutions into a test tube of liquid. The original source article at Chemical and Engineering News now claims that these non-living, abiotic structures “could hold the key to understanding the origins of life on Earth.” An editor of C&EN advocates “using them as “inspiration for origin-of-life research at hydrothermal vents.” Why? Because “Some scientists regard hydrothermal vents as places where life may first have originated on Earth.” Maybe staring at the minerals long enough will bring forth the desired visions. 1/2/2020 43

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • If you are still dazzled by the “tantalizing possibilities” told in these kinds of articles, you must get over it! Deprogram yourself. Stop being duped. Science is supposed to deal with objective reality—that which can be observed, repeated, and demonstrated. All the “possibility thinking” you see (may have, could have, might have possibly, probably, likely, sheds light, insight) has to be jettisoned. It’s not science till it’s demonstrated. Yet how can one possibly demonstrate the origin of life? OOL divination practitioners need to invoke bizarre, unobserved conditions in some mythical “distant past” where processes that could never happen in today’s world “could have” happened. This is pure wizardry, shamanism, shame. Its fOOLishness built on the foundation of sand that evolution cannot be questioned. Do not be deceived. Be angry that such fluff passes for science these days. 1/2/2020 44

OOLishness: The Imaginary World of Origin-of-Life Studies生命起源想象的世界的研究 • Astrobiology Magazine is one of the most useless, stupid boondoggles in the federal government. It merely regurgitates press releases from other sources with “possibility thinking,” putting out garbage like this day after day with your tax dollars. Don’t forget that NASA’s Astrobiology Institute began in the 1990s with the hype over alleged microorganisms in a Martian meteorite, a claim soundly debunked in the years since. Like other useless federal programs, this one is hard to dismantle, but should have been first on the chopping block with the government as broke as it is. Astrobiology is a sham, with no evidence to validate its existence. Let the astrobiologists turn in their junk badges and go get a real job that can actually do something useful to help their fellow humans, like finding a cure for cancer. 1/2/2020 45

Scientific Organizations Promote Leftist Social Causes科学组织促进左派的社会 • What on earth does a science journal have to do with abortion or gay marriage? Some editors and reporters are actively pushing for social revolution. • In “A Pope for Today,” Nature’s editors hoped that newly-instated Pope Francis would push social causes near and dear to their own Darwin-worshiping leftist hearts. The editors spoke of “the backwards unscientific belief in creationism of many US evangelicals and lawmakers” (undoubtedly including any Darwin doubters in that category), hoping Pope Francis would not be one of those. 1/2/2020 47

Scientific Organizations Promote Leftist Social Causes科学组织促进左派的社会 • “Moreover, recent popes have substantially increased efforts to engage in dialogue with scientists on a host of issues, from embryonic stem-cell research and genetically modified crops to in vitro fertilization, abortion and euthanasia — and in the future will no doubt increasingly do so on advances in neuroscience and genetics, including prenatal screening. Scientists who have taken part in such discussions tell of thought-provoking and constructive debates, with the Church being open to ideas and often changing doctrines as a result. A damaging exception is its long-held opposition to the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, and it can only be hoped that Pope Francis will have a more enlightened approach.” 1/2/2020 48

Scientific Organizations Promote Leftist Social Causes科学组织促进左派的社会 • It is hard to imagine any legitimate philosophy of science that would insert “science” into abortion, euthanasia, or prenatal screening. Such positions presuppose a backdrop of support for eugenics. Embryonic stem cell research cannot evade serious ethical questions, and the editors know it. Why did Nature classify all these things with Darwinism as “enlightened” while “creationism” is called “backward”? (see loaded words). If Nature were being truly scientific, it would seek balance on such hot topics or avoid them altogether as political matters for the domain of ethicists and theologians. 1/2/2020 49

Scientific Organizations Promote Leftist Social Causes科学组织促进左派的社会 • At Live Science, Stephanie Pappas is on a crusade to promote gay marriage. One of her pieces, “How Straight People Paved the Way for Gay Marriage,” tried to blame straight people for the apparent rise in support (depending on polls used) for homosexual “marriage”. An even more egregious advocacy piece she wrote for Live Science is called “5 Scientific Reasons Gay Parents Are Awesome.” There, Pappas tried to promote the idea that homosexuals are better parents than traditional moms and dads. In these articles, Pappas put no fingers in the dikes to distinguish her preferences from those who would use the same arguments to support polygamy and other social experiments. By rubberstamping her advocacy pieces, Live Science has endorsed her crusade. 1/2/2020 50

Exercise, Gardens, and Ancient Camels: Fascinating Discoveries and Health Benefits