Creationism News -- October 2012 创造 论新闻 – 2012 年 10 月

1. Creationism News -- October 2012创造论新闻 – 2012年10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 the Lord’s guidance and help in his excellent websites. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 10/30/2014 1

2. Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 • Toddlers express the basic aspects of scientific thinking: finding cause and effect by the experimental method. • Put a 2– to 4-year old in a sandbox with a shovel and a pail, and left to experiment, the child will figure out what works to get sand in the pail or move it to a bigger pail.  Give the child a music machine that turns on or off with two independent switches, and the child will find how to turn it on and off at will.  These are the findings of Alison Gopnick, who performed experiments with children at play and became convinced that, contrary to beliefs that children act irrationally and chaotically, the basics of scientific reasoning are present in the brains of young children.  She wrote in Science, 10/30/2014 2

3. Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 • New theoretical ideas and empirical research show that very young children’s learning and thinking are strikingly similar to much learning and thinking in science. Preschoolers test hypotheses against data and make causal inferences; they learn from statistics and informal experimentation, and from watching and listening to others. The mathematical framework of probabilistic models and Bayesian inference can describe this learning in precise ways. • Source: Alison Gopnick, “Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications,” Science, 28 September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6102 pp. 1623–1627, DOI: 10.1126/science.1223416. 10/30/2014 3

4. Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 • The paper was summarized on Medical Xpress, “What looks like play may really be a science experiment,” and on Live Science, “The Preschool Laboratory: Young Children Think Like Scientists.” • Live Science posted another article, “Why politicians need to think like scientists.”  Various inferences can be drawn by comparing the two articles. 10/30/2014 4

5. Children Act Like Scientists孩子们像科学家 • It’s not surprising that children have the basic instincts to reason about the world in a rational manner and “think like scientists,” because they are created in the image of a rational God.  What’s surprising is that some scientists act like children.  Take away their Darwin dollie and they throw a tantrum. 10/30/2014 5

6. Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D“大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 • Scientists continue mining the biomimicry bonanza, but some still give all the credit to time and evolution. • Here are three new biomimetics articles about plants. • Sunflowers as solar energy models:  A clever short video on Live Science finds nature, once again, providing the optimum solution to a problem.  The problem is arranging mirrors in a giant solar collection facility so as to minimize shadows.  The solution: mimic the sunflower.  The spiral arrangement of florets in the center of a sunflower, following the Fibonacci series, turns out to pack the most light collection in the smallest space while minimizing shadows on other mirrors.  The video did not mention another property that solar farms would have difficulty imitating: sunflowers exist on stalks that can turn and follow the sun. 10/30/2014 6

7. Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D“大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 • Diatoms can feed, speed the world:  We are surrounded by bounteous resources we can hardly imagine: microscopic organisms in water that live in glass houses, called diatoms. PhysOrg writes, “Ancient diatoms could make biofuels, electronics and health food—at the same time.”  Researchers at Oregon State are creating a “photosynthetic biorefinery,” the article says, getting the little nanofactories to make customized products by special order.  Give them water, some minerals and sunshine, and they could make a steady stream of affordable, eco-friendly products: biofuels, biomedical products, and even semiconductors.  “The key to all of this is the diatom itself, a natural nanotechnology factory that has been found in the fossil record for more than 100 million years.” 10/30/2014 7

8. Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D“大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 • Drugs on demand from plants:  Plants make a host of aromatic compounds they use for signaling, defense and symbiosis.  Now, mimicking “a crucial but obscure biochemical phenomenon,” scientists at Scripps have “followed nature’s lead” to figure out how to make terpenes, compounds hard to synthesize in the lab but made routinely by plants.  This could lead to faster and cheaper manufacture of drugs like the anti-cancer agent Taxol.  Science Daily quoted the senior investigator who said, “It’s exciting for us because we’re now making molecules that have never been made in the laboratory before, and we’ve done this by first observing what nature does.” 10/30/2014 8

9. Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D“大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 • Biomimicry on a Roll • One article really excited about biomimetics can be found on PhysOrg from Mother Nature Network, titled: “Biomimicry: Science inspired by nature could feed the hungry, reduce impact of technology.”  This implies that many of our problems in civilization are not for lack of resources, but lack of know-how.  That know-how is all around us in plants and animals.  Whales, butterflies and fungi are just three of the examples in the article that can lead to more efficient machinery, more productive food crops, better medical devices and much, much more. 10/30/2014 9

10. Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D“大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 • “Biomimicry looks for how nature performs a function,” Marie Zanowick, a certified biomimicry professional for the Environmental Protection Agency, told Boulder Weekly. “It mimics natural strategy and the best design principles on this planet.” • “Design principles” as humans devise them usually require many brain cycles of research and development (R&D).  That’s true in nature, too, the article said.  In order to adapt, be resource-efficient, integrate development with growth, be eco-friendly and responsive to the environment, living things have learned R&D.  “It’s based on 3.8 billion years of research and development, and the only organisms that survive are the ones that follow life’s principles.” 10/30/2014 10

11. Nature: 3.8 Billion Years of R&D“大自然”的 3 十 8亿年的研究与发展 • Need we keep repeating that neo-Darwinism is completely, totally, and irrevocably incapable of R&D?  Evolution is blind.  It has no foresight.  It has no purpose.  It cannot, therefore, come up with “design principles.”  Giving it billions of years doesn’t help; it makes things worse. • Once we purge the last remaining fallacies out of biomimetics, it is poised to usher in a golden age of science grounded on what should be its foundation: intelligent design. 10/30/2014 11

12. Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 • Animals and microbes continue to inspire technologies that could provide better health and security. • Cell switches and diagnosis:  Want to get faster results from that blood test?  Science Daily has a headline to perk your interest: “Bioengineers Design Rapid Diagnostic Tests Inspired by Nature.”  It only gets better from there: • By mimicking nature’s own sensing mechanisms, bioengineers at UC Santa Barbara and University of Rome Tor Vergata have designed inexpensive medical diagnostic tests that take only a few minutes to perform. Their findings may aid efforts to build point-of-care devices for quick medical diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), allergies, autoimmune diseases, and a number of other diseases. The new technology could dramatically impact world health, according to the research team. 10/30/2014 12

13. Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 • All living things use “nanoswitches” to respond to the environment, the article continued.  “The key breakthrough underlying this new technology came from observing nature.”  Cell surfaces, for instance, are covered with receptors that switch on and off depending on molecules detected.  The technology is not only effective, it’s beautiful: “The beauty of these switches is that they are able to work directly in very complex environments such as whole blood.”  In a few years, we may be able to get results of diagnostic tests in mere minutes instead of days. 10/30/2014 13

14. Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 • Enzymatic assembly lines:  “All systems go at the nanofactory,” reads another headline on Science Daily.  Researchers at LMU have created “little green men” in the form of fluorescent proteins that can help them guide delicate parts into position with nanometer precision.  “Green light on protein assembly!” the subtitle exclaims.  Assembling parts at this scale is like working in a hurricane, with all the thermal motions and molecular interference.  As the researchers attempt to imitate what cells do routinely, they are also gaining insight into how cellular machines work.  “If we can efficiently build mimics of these ‘enzymatic assembly lines’ by bringing individual proteins together, we could perhaps make a significant contribution to the exploitation of sustainable energy sources.” 10/30/2014 14

15. Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 • Go to the ant, lesson #17:  Ants make good teachers, an article on PhysOrg implies.  They avoid “information overload” by sharing information in efficient ways.  Complicated decisions, like comparing nest sites, are resolved by the entire colony rather than by lone geniuses.  “Living in a group is costly in many ways, so ants must get some benefit from doing it,” said Stephen Pratt at Arizona State University.  “By sharing the burden of decision-making, colonies avoid the mistakes that a solitary animal makes when taking on too much information.  What’s great about these ants is that we can see exactly how they do this, by making sure that no ant has to process more information than it is able to.”  If you’re reeling from too much multi-tasking, tell your boss you want to go to ant class.  “Pratt added that this is one problem ants can solve, but that there are other problems ants face that we might be able to learn from.” 10/30/2014 15

16. Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 • Robo-tuna:  Tuna is not just for eating in sandwiches, but for improving security.  Live Science said, “Speedy tuna capable of swimming tirelessly in the Earth’s oceans have inspired the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to fund a lookalike robot for underwater patrols.”  The shape of the tuna’s body, combined with its strong muscles and short turning radius, make it an ideal model for maneuverability and efficiency.  Astrobiology Magazine said of humble tuna fish, “they’re one of the fastest and most maneuverable creatures on the planet, having extraordinary abilities at both high and low speeds due to their streamlined bodies and a finely tuned muscular/sensory/control system.”  A developer of the battery-powered surveillance device called BIO Swimmer said, “We’re using nature as a basis for design and engineering a system that works exceedingly well.” 10/30/2014 16

17. Animal Models for Technology 使用动物模型的技术 • What’s a biomimetics article doing on the evolution-saturated NASA Astrobiology site?  They had to get their Darwin hooks into the story somehow.  “These technologies could also have applications in exploring some of Earth’s most extreme environments, helping astrobiologists understand the limits of life on Earth,” the article ended.  “In the future, biomimetic robotic technology could also have many uses in exploration beyond our own planet.”  Pathetic.  Exploration requires intelligent design.  Evolution is of no use to your story; drop the quaint Victorian myth, chuck Chuck, and get with the I.D. program that is driving the Biomimetics Revolution. 10/30/2014 17

18. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Fossils are doing just fine, but the scientists who interpret them are having a rough week (or century). • Vege-Fang • It looks like a dinosaur in a scary Halloween costume, but it’s just a nice little guy that ate vegetables, Science Daily announced: “New Fanged Dwarf Dinosaur from Africa Ate Plants.”  Live Science even identified the costume: “‘Dracula’ Dinosaur Had Bristles and Fangs.”  Sure enough, the artist gave it the scariest demeanor possible.  Trick or treat: toss it a radish.  Even with scary fangs, Pegomastaxafricanus, found in South Africa 50 years ago but “languished in a museum drawer” till recently, was apparently a vegetarian.  This goes to show one can’t always tell carnivory by the teeth. 10/30/2014 18

19. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • It was small, too, weighing less than a house cat.  National Geographic said, “New Fanged Dwarf Dinosaur Found—‘Would Be Nice Pet’.”  Paleontologists think it might have used its porcupine-like bristles and fangs for defense or display, but mostly the teeth and jaws worked like “self-sharpening scissors for shearing plant parts.”  Live Science promised the little critter “may shed light on evolution,” but didn’t say exactly how; neither did Science Now.  Evolutionary paleontologist Paul Sereno [U of Chicago] ventured some light in National Geographic’s article:  “What’s more, the study revealed that P. africanus’ sophisticated jaw structure was ahead of its time, Sereno noted. Such structures evolved again millions of years later in mammals.”  Sereno did not point out where his light was shining. 10/30/2014 19

20. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Vege-Behemoth • Speaking of vegetarians (and speaking of animals ahead of their time), evolutionists now say that duckbill dinosaurs were better equipped for eating plants than horses are (sidebar: grazing mammals supposedly evolved much later).  Charles Choi reported on Live Science that “Vegetarian Dinosaurs Were Champion Chompers.”  He began, “Giant plant-eating dinosaurs may have been champion chewers up there with the likes of mammals such as horses, bison or elephants, researchers say.”  Some hadrosaurs had 1400 teeth with flat, grinding surfaces perfect for grinding tough plants – and they could replace them when they wore out.  Their teeth were composed of six types of tissue that migrated, “exposing different surfaces as the teeth migrated across the chewing surfaces in the mouths of the dinosaurs over time.”  With teeth like that, “The finding could help explain why these behemoths dominated the plains of Europe, Asia and North America during the last part of the age of dinosaurs,” Choi speculated. 10/30/2014 20

21. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Hadrosaurs were “as sophisticated, if not more sophisticated, than any known mammal,” one paleontologist said.  This makes it sound like evolution has been going downhill.  They thought dinosaur teeth would resemble those of other reptiles, like alligators, but found something quite different.  “The complexity of hadrosaurid teeth would have proved excellent tools for handling tough, gritty plants,” but can we trust their opinions?  Evolutionists can look a gift horse in the mouth, but “We still don’t have a good understanding even of how horse teeth work,” one of them confessed.  PhysOrg posted a cross-section of the “remarkably complex architecture” of one tooth of a hadrosaur (Edmontosaurus).  10/30/2014 21

22. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Six tissues is four more than reptiles have, and two more than horses.  Some of the tissues apparently functioned to prevent cavities and abscesses.  Not even vegan humans can boast that evolutionary innovation. • One more thing.  These teeth avoided decay for a long, long time, in their view.  “We were stunned to find that the mechanical properties of the teeth were preserved after 70 million years of fossilization,” Gregory Erickson on Mark Norell’s team said, “if you put these teeth back into a living dinosaur they would function perfectly.” 10/30/2014 22

23. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Lemur-Fish • Whoops; a fossil thought to be that of a lemur (a primate) for over a century has now been reclassified as a fish.  No kidding.  “That’s No Primate: It’s a Fish!” Science Daily exclaimed. PhysOrg echoed, “Fossil—thought for over a century to be the only trace of a prehistoric primate—is actually that of a fish.”  Paleontologists often pride themselves on how much they can tell about a creature from just a fragment.  They had even given this one a name: “Arrhinolemur scalabrinii – which translates literally to ‘Scalabrini’s lemur without a nose’.”  Pedro Scalabrini would be really embarrassed right now (he was a fossil hunter for whom it was named in 1898). 10/30/2014 23

24. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • George Gaylord Simpson had doubted the classification half a century later and suggested it was fishy.  In 1986, Alvaro Mones agreed, even specifying the fish family.  But it wasn’t until two years ago that Argentinian scientists looked into it with more detail and settled on the fish identification.  Evolutionary paleontologists took credit anyway, saying, “It also helps us analyze evolutionary transitions — we can look at in the past and compare them to similar fish today to see what features have changed over time and try to understand why.”  It would seem that proper identification is a prerequisite for understanding.  114 years of misidentification is a rather long time. 10/30/2014 24

25. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Mammoth Boy • An 11-year-old Russian boy made the find of a lifetime: a nearly complete mammoth carcass in the tundra of northern Russia – one of the best-preserved mammoths ever found.  Paleontologists claim it is 30,000 years old.  The article indicates that DNA is not expected to survive such ages for resurrecting a mammoth, even though cloning experiments are underway elsewhere.  “A big obstacle, of course, is degraded, ice-damaged DNA,” New Scientist’s report said, even though it would seem an ice freezer would offer the best possible preservation. 10/30/2014 25

26. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Evolutionary Weight Gain • For neo-Darwinism to be true, mammoths had to have tiny ancestors, maybe like mice (note: this is not an Aesop’s Fable; at least, not intentionally).  PhysOrg stepped to explain to the world about “Small winners in the mammalian race to evolve.”  Speaking for evolutionists at Monash University, PhysOrg explains how they examined the fossil record through evolutionary glasses (“We chose the generation as our basic measure of evolutionary time, as it is the shortest interval over which evolutionary change can occur”) , and deduced that it takes 24 million generations for a mouse to become an elephant, but only two million to shed all that weight and become tiny again.  10/30/2014 26

27. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Tom Weller’s cartoon of a pond hippopotamus on a lily pad comes to mind.  Where are the mouse-sized elephants, if they can lose weight much faster than gain it?  “Bigger is not always better,” the reader is informed, except when it is, or else elephants would not have “appeared” from tiny creatures by evolution.  Alistair Evans almost expected incredulity: “Believe it or not, the ancestors of elephants were once as small as mice,” he said.  The option to disbelieve it is therefore held open. 10/30/2014 27

28. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • Molluscs: Complex to Simple • A new fossil has been dubbed the ancestor of molluscs.  One problem: it is more complex than its descendants.  The “armoured aplacophoran” name Kulindroplax, described in Nature,1 is touted as the “a kind of missing link with a worm-like body, bearing a series of shells like those of a chiton or coat-of-mail shell” by co-author Derek Briggs of Yale, according to the write-up on Science Daily.   The reader is assured this “discovery reinforces previous findings from molecular sequencing studies and helps clarify the evolutionary relationships of mollusks,” only to be told later that mollusc evolution has been controversial for a long time – particularly the worm-like group called aplacophorans (without armor): 10/30/2014 28

29. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • The evolutionary relationships of worm-like mollusks, known as Aplacophora, has been a subject of controversy. Previously thought to be a product of the explosion of diversity during the early Cambrian period, they are now shown to have evolved probably 40–50 million years ago by losing shells like those on Kulindroplax. • What this means is that the more complex animals came out of the Cambrian explosion, and the simpler ones evolved much more recently.  Kulindoplax is said to be 425 million years old, younger than the Cambrian explosion but much older than “40–50 million years ago”.  That’s why the article’s headline asked, “Which Came First, Shells or No Shells? Ancient Mollusk Tells a Contrary Story” – contrary, that is, to what evolutionists expected. 10/30/2014 29

30. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • How this fossil helps evolutionary theory is not clear, particularly when “The interrelationships of the Mollusca — one of the most diverse and species-rich animal phyla — have been contentious,” according to the Editor’s summary of the paper in Nature.1 Indeed, the authors concurred that “relationships among major molluscan taxa have long been a subject of controversy.”  Putting the more complex animal at the beginning, and the simpler animal as the more recent one, does not seem a good way to reduce contentiousness. • 1. Sutton, Briggs et al., “A Silurian armoured aplacophoran and implications for molluscan phylogeny,” Nature 490, 04 October 2012, pp. 94–97, doi:10.1038/nature11328.) 10/30/2014 30

31. Lemur-fish, Vege-fang and other Fossil Follies 狐猴鱼，蔬芳和其他化石的愚蠢 • The implication for molluscan phylogeny, and all phylogeny, is that Darwinism is tosh (10/25/2011).  Its followers should say Bosh! and quash it.  We keep putting the evidence out there, right out of evolutionists’ own discoveries, hoping it will lead to a new Darwinian revolution from inside out, i.e., a revolt against sloppy speculation in the name of science in support of a predetermined naturalistic worldview. 10/30/2014 31

32. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • The Great Salt Lake and other large extinct inland seas in the desert remain a challenge to explain by conventional geology. • A press release from Stanford University suggests that “Tropical rain may have formed Utah’s Great Salt Lake, says Stanford Researcher,” but problems appear further down.  First, we learn that this is an old problem: • Between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, the deserts in the American Southwest were covered with enormous lakes. How all that water got there has long puzzled Earth scientists, but new work by a group of scientists that includes a Stanford climate researcher could provide an answer. 10/30/2014 32

33. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • These lakes “covered about a quarter of both Nevada and Utah.”  Till recently, the leading explanation called for a shift in the jet stream that dumped more precipitation in the southwest in the past.  Problem: that theory should show increased wetness from the coast inland that is not found.  That explanation has been “ruled out,” the press release indicated. 10/30/2014 33

34. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • The researcher to the rescue is appropriately named: he is Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences.  His theory calls for tropical rains from storms coming inland from the Pacific and Gulf.  These storms conspired to dump vast quantities of water in Utah and Nevada that formed giant lakes that dried up after the stormy period. Noah and colleagues published their idea in Science (Lyle et al., “Out of the Tropics: The Pacific, Great Basin Lakes, and Late Pleistocene Water Cycle in the Western United States,” Science 28 September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6102 pp. 1629–1633, DOI: 10.1126/science.1218390). 10/30/2014 34

35. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • “We think that the extra precipitation may have come in the summer, enhancing the now weak summer monsoon in the desert southwest. But we need more information about what season the storms arrived to strengthen this speculation,” said Mitchell Lyle, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M University and lead author of the study. • They plan to drill dry lakebed sediments for clues. Nevertheless, as it stands, their hypothesis leaves many unknowns, betrayed by the number of times they used words like maybe and perhaps. 10/30/2014 35

36. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • With the data now in existence, it is impossible to determine whether summer precipitation was more enhanced than winter precipitation between 17 and 14 ka. However, if winter storms were the major precipitation source, it is difficult to understand why coastal California remained dry.… The evidence suggests that precipitation in the glacial western United States originated from the tropical eastern Pacific, perhaps via stronger spring/summer precipitation fed by tropical air masses rather than higher numbers of westerly winter storms. 10/30/2014 36

37. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • The hypothesis, or speculation as Lyle called it, leaves unanswered why the storms brought in so much precipitation then and not now, and why they impacted the Great Basin so heavily but not the coast of California.  Is there any other place on earth where inland seas have been observed to grow year after year from tropical storms in a restricted region?  If so, they didn’t refer to any modern analogues.  They just invoked the trendy phrase “climate change.” 10/30/2014 37

38. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • The Flood explains these lakes in a straightforward and plausible manner.  After the global flood, any landlocked basin retained its water.  In addition, increased precipitation during the (one) Ice Age kept them filled.  As climate conditions subsided and stabilized over the next few centuries, some of the lakes breached their dams and drained out.  Many remnants of these escape channels can be seen today, such as the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington.  10/30/2014 38

39. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • The Grand Canyon is likely a relic of a colossal dam breach, as both Walt Brown and Steve Austin have proposed.  Smaller dam breach events are recognized by secular geologists, like the cascade of lakes from Owens Valley down to Lake Manly, now the parched playa in Death Valley.  Austin also found evidence for a catastrophic dam breach that explains the Santa Cruz river canyon in Argentina, a river that had misled Charles Darwin to believe in Lyell’s slow and gradual millions of years (see video on YouTube). 10/30/2014 39

40. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • Creation geologists ascribe these lakes to effects of a one-time event, the global Flood.  From small-scale analogues we can extrapolate to the kinds of forces necessary to create the lakes and canyons.  The required forces are far beyond anything observed today, undermining Charles Lyell’s concept of “the present is the key to the past” (uniformitarianism), a Victorian myth largely discarded today anyway (5/22/2003,11/04/2003, 4/30/2009).  By contrast, the calculated forces fit well with the global flood model. 10/30/2014 40

41. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • The problem Noah Diffenbaugh and Mitchell Lyle face when attempting to provide a secular, materialist hypothesis for the dried-up inland seas is coming up with a “law of nature” that can account for them.  If tropical rains or jet streams cause giant lakes, why are they not building up vast inland seas today?  Why aren’t hurricanes creating new Lake Bonnevilles in Louisiana that we can watch grow year by year?  Why then, and not now? What was different?  Don’t just say “climate change.” 10/30/2014 41

42. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • Secular scientists generally discourage ad hoc mechanisms in theories.  While the Flood is a singular event, it is not ad hoc.  It has written testimony for support: the detailed record in Genesis 6–9.  Textual evidence suggests the record could have been originally written by Noah, an eyewitness, then handed down through his son Shem and his descendents, eventually compiled by Moses (the Babylonian and other accounts, with their absurdities, being corruptions of the real event). 10/30/2014 42

43. Explaining Inland Seas Without a Flood使用没有洪水来解释内海 • Contrasted with all the failures of Darwin and Lyell, the Genesis explanation should be taken seriously on its merits, whether or not the secularists mock, as they were predicted to do nearly two millennia ago (2 Peter 3:1–9) – another independent corroboration.  Which Noah is more trustworthy – one who wasn’t there, who leans on Charlie & Charlie, or one who was an eyewitness and told us what happened, with effects we can still see today with our own eyes? 10/30/2014 43

44. Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 • Ethicists are becoming alarmed at the explosive increase in scientific fraud cases – and those are just the ones that were caught. • Fraud on the Rise • It’s a truism that scientific research requires honesty (as with any intellectual endeavor).  For some reason, fraud cases have increased dramatically.  Is it due to better detection and reporting, or to a disturbing trend that no longer values honesty in academia?  Some recent articles weigh in on the problem. 10/30/2014 44

45. Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 • In Nature News Oct 1, an article headlined, “Misconduct is the main cause of life-sciences retractions.”  That’s misconduct in contrast to slipshod error, as Zoe Corbyn expressed: • Conventional wisdom says that most retractions of papers in scientific journals are triggered by unintentional errors. Not so, according to one of the largest-ever studies of retractions. A survey published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that two-thirds of retracted life-sciences papers were stricken from the scientific record because of misconduct such as fraud or suspected fraud — and that journals sometimes soft-pedal the reason. 10/30/2014 45

46. Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 • Results of the survey were published in PNAS (Fang, Steen and Casadevall, “Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications,” PNAS October 1, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109).  Of the 2,047 retracted papers surveyed, 43% were fraud cases and 24% were due to either duplicate publication or plagiarism.  And this was from leading journals, including Nature, Science, and PNAS itself.  Only a fifth, Science Insider said, were due to mistakes.  Science Magazine (Random Sample, Oct 5) noted that while plagiarism predominated in China, fraud predominated in the United States.  New Scientist said these numbers were “higher than thought.”  The Scientist speculated about the reasons: 10/30/2014 46

47. Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 • The disproportionate number of fraud-related retractions from high-IF journals likely reflects the pressures on scientists to publish impressive data in prestigious journals. “There’s greater reward,” said Resnik, “and more temptation to bend the rules.” • But lots of people work under stress without bending the rules, and temptations hit everyone.  Scientists are supposed to be models of integrity, aren’t they?  Whatever the reason, research misconduct is not a victimless crime.  One of the ethicists conducting the survey wanted to “dispel any notion that scientific misconduct may be a crime that only affects the perpetrators.”  Scientists often publish on issues society really cares about. 10/30/2014 47

48. Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 • Science Insider tried to whitewash the problem with statistics: • Although retractions are on the rise, they remain relatively rare in science. Well under 0.1% of papers in PubMed have been retracted, the study found; the database contains more than 25 million papers going back to the 1940s. • The problem with that analysis is that nobody knows how many papers should have been retracted but were never exposed for fraud, error, or misconduct.  That’s not just an idle concern.  “What’s troubling is that the more skillful the fraud, the less likely that it will be discovered, so there likely are more fraudulent papers out there that haven’t yet been detected and retracted,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, lead author of the paper (quoted in Science Daily).  And then there’s the question, why are retractions on the rise?  Why now? 10/30/2014 48

49. Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 • Science Daily listed Casadevall’s suggestions for improvement: such as, more emphasis on quality over quantity, less rating for impact, more cooperation and collaboration, and better funding processes.  These would undoubtedly help, but one can imagine whole groups conspiring to commit fraud if honesty is not valued. 10/30/2014 49

50. Peer Reviewed Research: The Fraud Explosion 同行审查的研究：诈骗爆炸 • Shocking Self-Promotion • The Scientist uncovered another trend in fraud: self-congratulation.  Some scientists are logging in under another name and writing great reviews of their own work. • At least four scientists have been cheating the peer review system in a whole new way: when submitting a paper to a scientific journal, they suggest reviewers with email addresses that track back to themselves; then they write a glowing review.… “I find it very shocking,” Laura Schmidt, an Elsevier publisher, told The Chronicle. “It’s very serious, very manipulative, and very deliberate.” .… • This “has taken a lot of people by surprise,” Irene Hames, a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics that advises journals on how to handle misconduct, said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “It should be a wake-up call to any journals that don’t have rigorous reviewer selection and screening in place.” 10/30/2014 50