Recent Studies Challenge the Assumptions of Vast Ages - News from December 2012

Creationism News -- December 2012创造论新闻 – 2012年12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 1/1/2020 1

Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 • Two articles in secular science literature point to possible upsets in long-age assumptions for the earth and mankind. • Most Human Mutations Are Recent • A press release from the University of Washington states, “Harmful protein-coding mutations in people arose largely in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years.” The Exome Sequencing Project, a consortium of evolutionary geneticists, surveyed a million single-letter changes in the human “exome” (protein-coding genes) for 6,515 people. “Overall, the researchers predicted that about 81 percent of the single-nucleotide variants in their European samples, and 58 percent in their African samples, arose in the past 5,000 years.” 1/1/2020 2

Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 • The researchers were able to fit this surprise into the “out-of-Africa” hypothesis by claiming that mutations became fixed more rapidly among Europeans after they migrated. “The Out of Africa bottleneck led to inefficient purging of the less-harmful mutations,” one explained. Still, if 150 mutations are passed from parent to offspring on average, it would seem that rate of damage could not go on for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. See also the Science Daily article on this, that states, “The researchers pointed out that the results illustrate the profound effect recent human evolutionary history has had on the burden of damaging mutations in contemporary populations.” 1/1/2020 3

Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 • The consortium agrees that their results indicate most harmful mutations in the human gene pool are “of recent origin, evolutionarily speaking.” Without supporting evidence, though, the researchers used standard Darwinian talking points to hope for a positive outcome, hoping that the large number of recent mutations “may have created a new repository of advantageous genetic variants that adaptive evolution may act upon in future generations.” Whatever the meaning, Science Daily said that the researchers stated, “The recent dramatic increase in human population size, resulting in a deluge of rare functionally important variation, has important implications for understanding and predicting current and future patterns of human disease and evolution.” 1/1/2020 4

Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 • Tree Rings Point to a Recent Cosmic Ray Event • What on earth happened in 768 A.D.? Charlemagne was busy building his empire, unaware of something happening over his head. The “Charlemagne Event” was not caused by him; something beyond earth sent a shower of cosmic rays our way. PhysOrg asks some pointed questions: • Until recently, the years 774 and 775 were best known for Charlemagne’s victory over the Lombards. But earlier this year, a team of scientists in Japan discovered a baffling spike in carbon-14 deposits within the rings of cedar trees that matched those same years. Because cosmic rays are tied to carbon-14 concentrations, scientists around the world have wondered about the cause: a nearby supernova, a gamma ray burst in the Milky Way or an intense superflare emanating from the Sun? 1/1/2020 5

Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 • In the article, Adrian Melott (U of Kansas) presents his argument that the spike came from a coronal mass ejection from the sun. This CME could have been 10–20 times larger than the largest spike observed in recent times (1859), called the Carrington Event. Stars beyond our sun have been observed to have very large flares. Other cosmic sources might include a gamma ray burst or nearby supernova, though the latter would have been observable in the sky. • If an extra-large CME occurred during Charlemagne’s battles, it might not have been noticed. It might have caused a slightly higher risk of skin cancer. But today if one that size occurred, it would disrupt the world’s power grid and blow out transformers over a wide area. We’d only have a few minutes warning before our civilization would become seriously disrupted. 1/1/2020 6

Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 • We offer these findings as stimulations for further research by asking some questions. If a CME or other cosmic source could dramatically increase carbon-14 production in the atmosphere, what does that do to the calibration profile for radiocarbon dating? What could be the impact of a large shower of cosmic rays on the atomic clocks used for radiometric dating in general? Could a cosmic event stimulate accelerated nuclear decay, lowering the activation threshold to give a false reading of longer ages (e.g., more fission tracks) than actually occurred? If not, how would we know? Open-minded physicists may want to look into this. 1/1/2020 7

Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 • Regarding the mutation rate, the finding appears to add more impetus to Dr. John Sanford’s theory of genetic entropy, that the human race could not purge harmful or nearly-neutral mutations fast enough to avoid extinction in very many thousands of years, let alone tens of thousands. The evolution-talk in the article seems concocted to rescue Darwin’s long ages rather than face the clear implication that humans have not been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. Even with lower population sizes, genetic entropy takes its toll. And if you think bullets to the genome provide a pool of variants that natural selection may act upon in future generations, good luck outrunning extinction while the bad ones add up. 1/1/2020 8

Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ • Scientists are only people, and most people do or say dumb things sometimes. You can decide how to classify these “scientific” ideas. • Overhyped Martian claims of the past: While the world eagerly awaits NASA announcing “something big” about Mars next week,* Clara Moskowitz reminds us on Space.com that there were at least five overhyped claims in the past: (1) the canals on Mars, (2) flowing water on Mars, (3) the face on Mars, (4) microbes in a Martian meteorite, and (5) claims of possible life from Vikings 1 and 2. Many of these were taken very seriously by renowned scientists of the day. 1/1/2020 9

Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ • Alien Breck: A long time ago in a beauty salon far, far away: We may be able to detect aliens by their hairspray, Charles Q. Choi announced on Space.com: “Alien hairspray may help us find E.T.” Presumably space babes would wish to keep their locks in place with chloroflurocarbons, which astronomers might detect in a planetary atmosphere. That’s probably enough said, except to note that NASA considered this story newsworthy enough to give it good press on their Astrobiology Magazine website. 1/1/2020 10

Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ • Organized ignorance: When you don’t know what you are talking about, does it help to organize your ignorance? Apparently Claudio Maccone thinks so. Astrobiology Magazine said Maccone took another look at the Drake Equation for calculating how many aliens inhabit the galaxy. • But the Drake equation must not be evaluated only by the numerical values it produces. Some say the Drake equation is a way to organize our ignorance. By exposing the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis mathematically, we limit the real possibilities to each term and approach the final answer: how many alien civilizations are there? 1/1/2020 11

Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ • Maccone massaged the ignorance with new inputs and came up with a new estimate of how many alien civilizations there are, which nobody can check. He simultaneously solved another problem of organized ignorance: why hasn’t SETI detected any aliens yet? Answer: the average distance of these unknown civilizations might put them too far for our current detectors to find. How convenient; maybe we can use that method to explain why we haven’t found ghosts. 1/1/2020 12

Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ • Minds by mistake: Someone didn’t think this through. Maybe Darwin made him do it. Take an ape brain and zap it: instant intelligence! That seems to be the gist of a story on Science Daily, “Origin of Intelligence and Mental Illness Linked to Ancient Genetic Accident.” What does the prestigious University of Edinburgh think of one of their own, Seth Grant, proposing that a genetic accident led to his brain? He proposes that a mistake caused a gene to make multiple copies of neurons, which led to both intelligence and mental illness. This makes mental illness the flip side of intelligence, leading readers to believe that Grant may not be able to tell one from the other. • *We learned later the latest Mars hype was due to a misunderstanding; see Live Science’s explanation. 1/1/2020 13

Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ • What’s disturbing is that nobody in the press called these people on these claims, although Clara Moskowitz came close. • Evolutionary scientists have the gall to declare their critics ignoramuses. We simply show you what they say; you decide. 1/1/2020 14

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • An evolutionary dogma is that land dinosaurs evolved into flying birds. When the claims are acid-washed with critical analysis, what evidence remains? 1/1/2020 15

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • 1. Early bird tryouts: One claim going around now is that Archaeopteryx and other “early birds” were poor flyers, implying that they were transitional forms to falcons and hummingbirds that later progressed to perfect the art of flight. PhysOrg, for instance, titled a recent article “Early birds had an old-school version of wings.” Complete with artwork that makes them look awkward, the article is based on analysis of fossils of Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis by Nicholas Longrich of Yale, who examined the feathers and decided they were “configured differently” thereby showing progressive evolution: “Now it’s clear that early birds were more primitive and represented transitional forms linking birds to dinosaurs.” Other than saying so, what did he find? “We can see the wing slowly becoming more advanced as we move from Anchiornis, to Archaeopteryx, to later birds.” OK, but what were his criteria for ranking them? 1/1/2020 16

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • “Archaeopteryx has this weird design with multiple layers of long flight feathers,” Longrich said. “The dinosaur Anchiornis has tons of simple, strip-like feathers that overlap—the only bird that has anything remotely similar is a penguin.” • That means that early wings probably worked effectively as simple airfoils for gliding, and perhaps for very primitive flapping flight at high speeds, the researchers say. But the feathers on those wings couldn’t separate and twist in the way they do in a modern bird. Low-speed flight and ground takeoff may have been difficult, or even impossible, for them. 1/1/2020 17

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • But penguins are very advanced birds with feathers well adapted to their habitat. On what basis can Longrich say that these individuals either had specialized feathers for their needs, or represented degenerate stages of feathers, as seen in some modern flightless birds? Instead, he built a progression from feathers on dinosaurs for warmth, then for display, then for gliding, then for flying, without providing the dates or locations that would illustrate an actual progression. 1/1/2020 18

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Moreover, he had to tweak the rates of evolution to keep the story flying: “The researchers propose that the wing feather arrangement seen in modern birds may have evolved within a period spanning perhaps a few tens of millions of years and then remained largely unchanged for the last 130 million years.” That seems a case of special pleading, but Nature News gave the work a short, positive statement, and so did Live Science. 1/1/2020 19

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Longrich’s original paper appeared in Current Biology, where he and his team proclaimed, “The avian wing represents one of natural selection’s most remarkable inventions” and praised it profusely. After presenting his transitional sequence, though, problems entered to confuse the picture: • There are a number of issues that complicate this scenario. First, the phylogenetic positions of Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis remain uncertain. Most studies recover Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis as successive outgroups to modern birds, but a recent analysis suggests that Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis may be more closely related to the Deinonychosauria. If so, this would require that either the long, asymmetrical remiges shared by Archaeopteryx and modern birds were acquired convergently, or that the short and symmetrical remiges of Anchiornis are derived. 1/1/2020 20

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • It could also mean that the multitiered feather arrangement is derived for an Archaeopteryx–Deinonychosauria clade, rather than primitive. Further complicating the scenario presented here is the fact that the dromaeosaurid Microraptor gui also has the long, asymmetrical primaries seen in Archaeopteryx and Neornithes (the morphology of the coverts, however, remains unknown for Microraptor). Microraptor may have independently evolved the advanced feather morphology, or again, Anchiornis may represent a reversal. It is also possible that the derived morphology of the remiges seen in Archaeopteryx and Microraptor is primitive for Paraves, and that Anchiornis actually lies outside of this clade. To resolve these conflicts, we require both a better understanding of maniraptoran phylogeny and new information on the plumage of basal maniraptorans such as Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx. 1/1/2020 21

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Curiously, the news articles failed to mention these potentially falsifying problems. Longrich also entertained a “punctuated equilibria” evolutionary scenario: rapid development of flight, followed by 130 million years of stasis. So: all that can be said, based on the evidence is this: “Regardless of the precise scenario invoked, it is clear that Archaeopteryx and nonavian dinosaurs have a wing feather organization that differs from that of modern birds.” If the evidence is that limiting, other “scenarios” could accept these differences without invoking progress sequence from dinosaur to bird. 1/1/2020 22

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Then, shockingly, he compared bird evolution to airline engineering, and claimed they are similar: • Strikingly, a pattern of stasis is found in manmade aircraft as well: following rapid advances in aircraft design in the early 20th century, progress slowed in later decades, such that many aircraft designed in the mid-20th century still operate. The processes behind the evolution of vertebrate wings and aircraft wings may be the same. The constraints imposed by fluid mechanics mean that a relatively small number of possible wing configurations are effective airfoils; once these geometries are discovered either by natural selection or aeronautical engineering, only small refinements are possible. 1/1/2020 23

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • The irony was apparently lost on Longrich’s team that engineers work by intelligent design, not by natural selection. If the constraints of physics mean only working machinery will fly, how could he claim that natural selection is capable of what engineers took decades of intelligent planning to execute? The popular science articles left this flawed argument from analogy out, too. 1/1/2020 24

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • 2. Composite explanations: A very confident-sounding article by Michael Balter in Science Magazine on Nov. 2 was titled, “Flying Dinos and Baby Birds Offer New Clues About How Avians Took Wing.” It began, • Most scientists agree that birds are living dinosaurs, survivors of the mass extinction that did in all other dinos at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago. Birds are also the result of a remarkable series of evolutionary events that transformed dinosaurs from mighty masters of the land into light and feathery lords of the skies. At a meeting of vertebrate paleontologists here last month, researchers pondered fresh clues about the origins of flight from studies of feathered dinosaurs and baby birds. 1/1/2020 25

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • The “most scientists agree” statement is, of course, a mere appeal to authority and bandwagon arguments. Discounting those, what evidence did Balter present? The said “baby birds” are none other then Ken Dial’s partridge family chicks he’s been promoting for nearly a decade (see (1/16/2003, 12/22/2003, 5/01/2006, 1/25/2008, 6/26/2011). Critics could argue that looking for evolutionary clues from living birds is a throwback to Haeckel’s Recapitulation Theory (2/18/2011#4, 10/31/2012), a technical foul in modern evolutionary theorizing. And since bird chicks come with the genetic program to make them extend their wings in preparation for a life of flight, it would seem nothing could be said about how unobservable dinosaurs behaved – and even if they extended their flightless arms, a mechanism that doesn’t get the genetic mutation for this behavior into the gametes could be criticized as Lamarckian. 1/1/2020 26

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Other than that, Balter’s report included a dispute about whether Microraptor was a flyer or glider, or a transitional form from dromeosaurs at all. Apparently it had enough equipment to fly fairly well, whether or not it had the same turning radius as some modern birds. Kevin Padian entered the fray to criticize the arboreal (tree-down) taint of the discussion. He claims the debate ended in favor of the cursorial (ground-up) theory when none other than Ken Dial introduced his “wing-assisted incline running” hypothesis (WAIR) with the partridge family. Thomas Holtz thought that makes “evolutionary sense” because “there would have been selective pressure to ascend into the trees and then get out of them once you got up there.” No evidence was cited that it really happened that way. 1/1/2020 27

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Ashley Heers came prepared to respond to criticisms that WAIR conjures up the ghost of Recapitulation Theory – but did she succeed? • In Raleigh, Dial’s graduate student Ashley Heers argued in a widely applauded talk that paleontologists should search for clues to the origins of flight by studying the stages that young birds go through as they begin to fly. Although the 19th century idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” has been widely discredited, Heers said, many young animals do retrace key evolutionary steps between birth and adulthood. For example, she argued, young birds such as chukars, a member of the partridge family, have many features that are typical of extinct carnivorous dinosaurs but are not present in adult birds. 1/1/2020 28

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • They include unfused thoracic vertebrae and a small pelvis and very small keel, an extension of the sternum that protrudes outward from the ribs. Young chukars and other juvenile birds also have symmetrical feathers that give way to asymmetrical ones in adult birds, a pattern that reflects differences between early and later feathered dinosaurs. And Heers and Dial have documented wing-assisted incline running in baby chukars; although they cannot yet fly, if their wings are clipped or blocked, their ability to run up inclines is greatly reduced. 1/1/2020 29

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • This sounds like she rebuked Recapitulation Theory only to embrace it. If she had a response to the fact that baby birds have a genetic program to fly, while dinosaurs did not, Balter didn’t report it. Yet her presentation was “widely applauded,” he did notice. 1/1/2020 30

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • 3. Heavy-set pre-birds: Other than mentioning imaginary feathers, another article on Science Daily avoided the question of the origin of flight while undermining a different evolutionary assumption: the idea that bigger is better. “For Some Feathered Dinosaurs, Bigger Not Always Better,” the headline reads. The falsifiable notion in question was whether diet contributed to dinosaur size. “Now researchers have started looking at why dinosaurs that abandoned meat in favor of vegetarian diets got so big, and their results may call conventional wisdom about plant-eaters and body size into question.” 1/1/2020 31

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • “The largest feathered dinosaurs were more than 100 times more massive than your average person,” says Zanno. “The reality is that for most of us, it is downright difficult to imagine a feathered animal of gigantic proportions.” 1/1/2020 32

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Apparently it takes a scientist who has practiced imagination to get good at it. Anyway, a simplistic, clear-cut “evolutionary advantage” toward larger size disappeared in the data. “They found that these theropod groups were experimenting with different body masses as they evolved, with some getting bigger, while others were getting smaller,” the article anthropomorphized. “In short, there was no clear-cut drive to get big — size seemed to provide no overwhelming advantage during the evolution of these animals.” Flight was certainly not on their experimental curriculum. 1/1/2020 33

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • 4. All praise to natural selection’s engineering perfection: Perhaps the most jaw-dropping juxtaposition of praise for engineering design and for natural selection can be seen in a recent paper in the CEAS Aeronautical Journal. First, here’s what Hans Försching and Holger Hennings have to say about the power of evolution: 1/1/2020 34

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Avian flight is one of the remarkable achievements of vertebrate evolution.… The enigmatical flight of birds with their inimitable flight capabilities has at all times attracted our attention. Flying animals have populated the sky already since more than hundred million years. Here, the birds evolved in their long evolution, from dinosaurs to bipedal feathered flying reptiles, to perfect flight machines of nature. They dominate in exemplary manner the fundamental requirements for an efficient flight—propulsion, aerodynamic lift, flight stability and control, and extreme lightweight construction. Thus, in the early pioneering time of aircraft design, birds were the pilot instructors of the Homo sapiens in his efforts to realise the ancient human dream to fly, finally with the aid of technical resources. 1/1/2020 35

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • That’s essentially all they had to say about evolution. But then, in their conclusion, they waxed nearly ecstatic about the design perfection in avian flight: • The study demonstrates conclusively, that concealed aeroelastic effects contribute essentially to the marvellous flight capabilities of birds. Certain structural wing asymmetries and specific anatomic peculiarities of the bony wing skeleton play thereby a fundamental role. An extremely precise coordination of the complex wing beat motions, together with a perfect flight guidance and control performance, are additional basic requirements for an efficient active flight. The birds dominate all of these requisites in a masterly manner. 1/1/2020 36

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • In a flight-mechanical control circuit, the large flight muscles, and many others in the wing, serve as actuators, the extremely marked sense organs act as flight sensors, and the extremely developed cerebellum takes the function of a computer as guidance and control centre. These biological elements communicate with lightning speed like an autopilot as a biotechnical marvel with unimaginable precision. Thus, the birds can precisely adjust and control their flight in all styles and situations without flow separation in a stable flight-mechanical and aeroelastic equilibrium. With their spectacular flight capabilities, birds are really the inimitable flight artists of nature. They are equipped with unique flight skills, all mysteries of which are obviously still not yet completely known. • No Darwinian aftertaste in that paragraph. 1/1/2020 37

Evolution of Flight: A Story Looking for Evidence飞行进化：寻找证据的故事 • Darwinists are a club of ideologues whose mission is to maintain a naturalistic “scenario” at all costs, even if it means committing various evolutionary no-no’s, such as (1) Recapitulation Theory, (2) Lamarckism, (3) Just-So Storytelling, and other no-no’s for general science like (4) big lie, (5) half-truth, (6) non-sequitur, (7) card stacking, etc. (see all the tricks of the trade in the Baloney Detector). Observations are mere props to keep their story going. It’s not that they are blind to the evidence; they are without excuse, because it is clearly seen all around them (Romans 1:16–25), even overhead in a passing flock of birds. Because they know design in their hearts, they hate everyone who points it out. Pray for them. 1/1/2020 38

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • If everything evolves, then profanity evolves, and it’s no big deal, even if it warms the atmosphere. • In “The Evolution of Profanity,” Heather Littlefield, a linguist at Northeastern University, gave a completely relativist perspective on profanity in an interview by Linda Ogbevoen posted on PhysOrg. After all, if the human intellect evolves, like Medical Xpress reported, then it’s just neurons firing. And if animals are just as moral as we are, as Live Science proclaimed, we are not essentially different from animals. And if cooperation evolves, as Science Daily and PhysOrg keep saying, then so does non-cooperation – which could include profanity. Why wouldn’t Littlefield believe and teach, therefore, that the only content we give to “bad” words is arbitrary and socially determined? It evolves over time, and nothing is really right or wrong with it. Littlefield did not mention the kind of profanity that blasphemes God, but there were no indications she felt any different about that. 1/1/2020 39

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • It’s not surprising, then, that a scientist at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting, scheduled a talk with the F-word in the title of his paper, even though it’s a word associated with violent rape. It’s not even surprising that Science Now thought it was funny – at least, they did not condemn it, but put the word (with some asterisks) into their headline. 1/1/2020 40

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • Brad Werner of the University of California, San Diego, has livened things up with a suggestive title talk, scheduled as part of a session tomorrow called “The Future of Human-Landscape Systems II.” Drawing on Werner’s computer modeling of the relationship between human society and environmental systems, “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism” makes some disturbing conclusions. (Asterisks are included in the official title of the talk, which can be accessed by search.) “[T]he dynamics of the global coupled human-environmental system within the dominant culture precludes management for stable, sustainable pathways and promotes instability,” Werner’s abstract says. This appears to suggest the answer to his provocative question, then, is yes. 1/1/2020 41

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • It’s also not surprising that if scientists believe the world is [expletive deleted], that they should get in your face about it. Nature on Nov 14 gave good press to Jeremy Grantham so that he could preach, “Be persuasive. Be brave. Be arrested (if necessary).” He praised James Hanson who has “screamed” warnings for 30 years about global warming, and Gus Speth, whose protests landed him in jail. Why wouldn’t Grantham’s ending appeal call for violence and profanity? 1/1/2020 42

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • Overstatement may generally be dangerous in science (it certainly is for careers) but for climate change, uniquely, understatement is even riskier and therefore, arguably, unethical. • It is crucial that scientists take more career risks and sound a more realistic, more desperate, note on the global-warming problem. Younger scientists are obsessed by thoughts of tenure, so it is probably up to older, senior and retired scientists to do the heavy lifting. Be arrested if necessary. This is not only the crisis of your lives — it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be brave. 1/1/2020 43

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • The irony seemed lost on Grantham that appeals to ethics fail, because ethics evolve (according to the same scientific consensus he trusts), and is therefore socially constructed, because we are just animals. It wasn’t even necessary for him to know that man-caused global warming is true – just that most scientists agree it is (argument from authority, and bandwagon). “I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago,” he began. “The seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public.” He might have a pulpit as a theist, but evolutionary processes are about power and reproductive success, not truth. 1/1/2020 44

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • If anthropogenic climate change were so clear as to demand immediate, even law-breaking, action, why do studies by scientists keep casting doubt on it? On Science Now, for instance, Sid Perkins reported that “Recent drought trends [are] not so cut and dried.” He began, • The picture of expanding drought painted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not be quite as arid as it looks. A technique commonly used to estimate the severity of a drought may actually overestimate the effects of dry spells, new research suggests. Worldwide climate data combined with a more refined technique for assessing droughts reveal that they haven’t expanded as much in recent decades as previously thought. 1/1/2020 45

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • On Nov. 15, Nature weighed in on this, saying “A new assessment of drought trends over the past 60 years finds little evidence of an expansion of the area affected by droughts, contradicting several previous estimates.” – estimates the IPCC had relied on for its conclusions about the seriousness of global warming. • In another global warming reassessment in Nature on Nov. 29, a team explored “The mystery of recent stratospheric temperature trends,” and concluded that “The new data call into question our understanding of observed stratospheric temperature trends and our ability to test simulations of the stratospheric response to emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances.” Despite the uncertainties, PhysOrg worried that drought might happen, and PhysOrg preached we must act now, facts or not. 1/1/2020 46

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • The issue here is not whether global warming is indeed man caused, or even whether the scientists mentioned above believe it is. The issue is the ability of any human to make such sweeping conclusions based on unreliable, changing interpretations of data. Even worse is the self-refuting nature of a corrigible relativist’s appeal to ethics to get his fellows to change their ways. That thought alone is enough to make an amoral, unbridled animal shout, “@%#!!” 1/1/2020 47

Secular Scientists Excuse Profanity世俗的科学家借口粗话 • The bitter fruit of evolutionary thinking has not yet reached its limit of toxicity. The limit could well be The Abolition of Man. 1/1/2020 48

Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） • A historian tells science teachers that “To Teach Evolution, You Have to Understand Creationists.” Should that advice apply both ways? • In The Chronicle of Higher Education last month, Adam Laats seemingly advised a kinder, gentler treatment of creationists than the usual outrage from the secular Darwinian camp. There was no name-calling of them as ignorant, anti-science flat-earthers (or worse) from this historian and author from Binghamton University: instead, he urged that science teachers try to “understand” them. Cool your jets, he advised; attack-dog responses to creationist comments are uncalled for, as are the even milder (but no less virulent) comments from the likes of Bill Nye the Science Guy (see 8/27/2012). 1/1/2020 49

Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） • Laats’s reasons for moderation seem open-minded. He acknowledges that some creationists are not ignoramuses: U.S. Rep. Paul C. Broun Jr., Republican of Georgia, for instance, who took a “ferocious” beating after criticizing Darwinism and the Big Bang (he called them “lies from the pit of hell”), has a bachelor’s in chemistry and is an M.D. (Secular scientists are up in arms that he sits on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee of the House). A number of leading creationists have scientific credentials, Laats pointed out. He even praised William Jennings Bryan as a well-travelled man of letters with many degrees, who remarked that he had never been called an ignoramus “except by evolutionists.” 1/1/2020 50

Recent Studies Challenge the Assumptions of Vast Ages - News from December 2012