Creationism News -- January 2012 神创论新闻 -- 2012 年 1 月

1. Creationism News -- January 2012神创论新闻 -- 2012年1月 I am indebted 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 directly from Dave’s website http://crev.info. All credits are due to him. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 6/4/2014 1

2. Loving Dark Matter Rather Than Light爱暗物质，而不爱光 • Still in the dark about dark matter (PhysOrg): “Dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up about 80 percent of matter in the universe, has become even more inscrutable.” • Variable dark energy could explain old galaxy clusters (New Scientist): Astronomers don’t even know what dark energy is, but now a Spaniard wants to twiddle with it. • Little galaxies big on dark matter (PhysOrg): “Dark matter… It came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang.”  That’s how to talk with chutzpah about something nobody understands. 6/4/2014 2

3. Loving Dark Matter Rather Than Light爱暗物质，而不爱光 • Revolutionary new camera reveals the dark side of the Universe (PhysOrg): Now here’s an article about real stuff: ordinary electromagnetic radiation in the submillimeter range, being detected by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. • Nobel Winners Keep Eyes on the Real Prize: Solving Dark Energy Riddle (Live Science): Three men got a lot of money from the Nobel Committee for “discovering” dark energy.  Now they want to discover what it is they discovered; “the force has yet to be directly detected, and the concept remains shrouded in mystery.” 6/4/2014 3

4. Loving Dark Matter Rather Than Light爱暗物质，而不爱光 • Could dark matter not matter? (PhysOrg): Some Italian has come up with a way to explain the rotation curves of galaxies without appealing to dark matter, but others are skeptical. • Back to the dark ages (Live Science): A tiny smudge of red light boasts great things: “The newfound galaxy is so ancient that it and others like it may have played a role in the transition from the so-called ‘dark ages’ of the universe — a period before the first stars formed when a thick hydrogen fog permeated the cosmos — into the universe we see today.”  Remember that the early medieval period was called the Dark Ages by those who felt themselves enlightened.  Is history repeating itself? 6/4/2014 4

5. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • Get a tail:  Extinct velociraptors, the terrors of the Jurassic Park movies, are inspiring robot designers.  Live Science and PhysOrg told about how Tailbot, developed at UC Berkeley and modeled after “leaping lizards,” can right itself after stumbling and can jump without tumbling.  “Engineers quickly understood the value of a tail,” said Thomas Libby, a grad student involved in the development of Tailbot.  “Robots are not nearly as agile as animals, so anything that can make a robot more stable is an advancement, which is why this work is so exciting.”  The PhysOrg article includes two entertaining video clips showing the robot clumsily attempting to duplicate the leaps a lizard does naturally.  Prof. Robert J. Full remarked, “Inspiration from lizard tails will likely lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots, as well as ones having greater capability to more rapidly detect chemical, biological or nuclear hazards.” 6/4/2014 5

6. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • Good design in bad water:  A briny pond at the lowest spot in the western hemisphere has a simple but descriptive name: Badwater.  Yet in this pond in Death Valley lives a microbe worth noting.  Science Daily says the “Death Valley Microbe May Spark Novel Biotech and Nanotech Uses.”  Why is that?  Dennis Bazylinski (U of Nevada) is impressed at the ability of the microbe to orient itself to magnetic fields.  The magnetic bacterium BW-1 has genes that produce nano-sized crystals of the minerals magnetite (a form of iron oxide) and greigite (a form of iron sulfide); BW-1 is the first microbe isolated capable of synthesizing greigite.  Bazylinski sees treasure in these microbes: their magnetosomes make them “useful in drug delivery and medical imaging.”  The article states that “Magnetotactic bacteria are simple, single-celled organisms that are found in almost all bodies of water.”  6/4/2014 6

7. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • A bird, a plane:  In the tradition of the Wright Brothers, another aeronautical engineer has taken inspiration from birds.  PhysOrg calls “Queensland University of Technology PhD student Wesam Al Sabban” a genius for his “unmanned aerial vehicle that uses wind power like a bird.”  Does that imply that birds are even more intelligent for coming up with the design first?  To develop his Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) called the Green Falcon II, Al Sabban had to learn from the masters. “As part of my PhD topic we are studying the way birds make use of wind energy to fly with minimum power, the way they glide and use all types of wind to move and change their flight path.”  He boasts, “The Green Falcon II will be a zero-emissions UAV capable of round-the-clock service.” Birds are kind of like that.  6/4/2014 7

8. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • Outdoing plants?PhysOrg reported, “Researchers figure out how to outperform nature’s photosynthesis.”  The body of the article, though, reveals that they didn’t invent a light-gathering engine from scratch.  Rather, “They frankensteined together proteins from Synechococcus sp. with those from Clostridium acetobutylicum using molecular wire to create a ‘hybrid biological/organic nanoconstruct’ that was more efficient than either on their own.”  So, even though “These researchers have created a tiny solar-powered device that works twice as fast as nature to produce hydrogen biofuel,” it would be more impressive if they got their own dirt. 6/4/2014 8

9. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • Slimy computers:  Some Japanese researchers became fascinated with slime molds.  “A brainless, primeval organism able to navigate a maze might help Japanese scientists devise the ideal transport network design,” PhysOrg wrote.  “Not bad for a mono-cellular being that lives on rotting leaves.”  Somehow the cells of amoeboid yellow slime mold can find the most direct route through a maze to get to their food:  “the cells appear to have a kind of information-processing ability that allows them to ‘optimise’ the route along which the mold grows to reach food while avoiding stresses – like light – that may damage them.”  This means that we have something in common with slime.  Toshiyuki Nakagaki sees a bright future: “it could provide the key to designing bio-computers capable of solving complex problems.” 6/4/2014 9

10. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • Butterfly materials:  The blue mountain swallowtail butterfly is not just pretty; it’s downright inspiring.  “Butterflies have inspired humans since the time of ancient Egypt, but now they’re also inspiring researchers to look toward nature to help create the next generation of waterproof materials for electronics and sensors,” reported PhysOrg.  That’s why researchers in America and South Korea are looking carefully at the wings of this butterfly.  “The wings shed water easily because of tiny structures that trap air and create a cushion between water and wing which allows water to roll easily off the surface.”  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cell phone that repels water, instead of shorting out when doused?  One team member said, “Mimicking biological surfaces in nature is an important part in a variety of practical applications.” 6/4/2014 10

11. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • Spider silkworm:  The desire to imitate spider silk was one of the first biomimetics stories reported in these pages.  In the years since, scientists have had only partial success at duplicating the strands, or at genetically engineering goats with the silk genes to produce it in their milk.  Now, researchers from Wyoming, Indiana and China have succeeded in transplanting the genes for spider dragline silk into silkworms.  Since ancient times, humans have farmed silkworms, so we know about their care and feeding; wrangling spiders is much more difficult.  6/4/2014 11

12. Nature Does It Right大自然是正确 • Spider silkworm:   Reporting in PNAS (Jan 3, 2012, 73/pnas.1109420109), they announced, • The development of a spider silk-manufacturing process is of great interest. However, there are serious problems with natural manufacturing through spider farming, and standard recombinant protein production platforms have provided limited progress due to their inability to assemble spider silk proteins into fibers. Thus, we used piggy Bac vectors to create transgenic silkworms encoding chimeric silkworm/spider silk proteins. The silk fibers produced by these animals were composite materials that included chimeric silkworm/spider silk proteins integrated in an extremely stable manner. Furthermore, these composite fibers were, on average, tougher than the parental silkworm silk fibers and as tough as native dragline spider silk fibers. These results demonstrate that silkworms can be engineered to manufacture composite silk fibers containing stably integrated spider silk protein sequences, which significantly improve the overall mechanical properties of the parental silkworm silk fibers. BBC News announced, “Spider-Man web closer to reality.”  6/4/2014 12

13. Hear Ye: Another Darwinian Prediction Falsified by Fossils化石否认达尔文预测 • In a classic test of evolutionary “post-diction” (predicting what should be found in the fossil record), scientists made a bold prediction of what insect ears would look like before the evolution of bats.  Believing that the presence of bats, a new predator with sonar, would spur the evolution of insect ears, the scientists predicted that earlier insects would have less-developed ears, or none at all.  Then they found exceptionally-preserved insect fossils from the Green River formation in Wyoming, and compared the fossil evidence with their prediction.  What was found? 6/4/2014 13

14. Hear Ye: Another Darwinian Prediction Falsified by Fossils化石否认达尔文预测 • Tympanal ears in insects are important for both intraspecific communication and for the detection of nocturnal predators. Ears are thought, based on modern forms, to have originated independently multiple times within insects and can be found on multiple regions of the body. Here we describe and document the exceptionally well preserved tympanal ears found in crickets and katydids from the Eocene Green River Formation of Colorado, which are virtually identical to those seen in modern representatives of these groups. These specimens are among the best preserved insect ears in the fossil record and establish the presence of ears in two major clades of Orthoptera 50 million years ago. Also discussed and evaluated are previously described insect ears from the Mesozoic and the implications of the findings of the present study for studying the evolution of ears within insects. 6/4/2014 14

15. Hear Ye: Another Darwinian Prediction Falsified by Fossils化石否认达尔文预测 • Well, the NSF needs to close up shop at the NESCent, now that Darwinism has been falsified (again).  Two paleontologists went hunting, but returned wanting.  The insect ears are identical to modern ones on live insects, they found, despite having 50 million years (in their timeline) to do the Darwin thing.  Not only were those ears working just fine long before bats “came to be” (did you catch that cute little miracle phrase?), but they want us to believe that “Insects have evolved ears at least 17 times in different lineages.”  Let’s see what this means.  If one miracle has the probability of 1 in 10150, then 17 different miracles occurring by evolution should have one chance in (10150)17. 6/4/2014 15

16. Hear Ye: Another Darwinian Prediction Falsified by Fossils化石否认达尔文预测 • Plotnick wrote with a straight face about the “appearance of hearing” and the “appearance of bats.”  Tell us, Dr. Science, how did they appear?  Out of a magic hat?  To evolutionists, saying that something “evolved” is synonymous with saying it “appeared.”  No evidence is necessary.  Evidence can even contradict it, but Darwin marches on, working miracles out of thin imagination.  Stephanie Pappas at Live Science told her readers this wondrous fairy tale: “Now, a new examination of 50-million-year-old cricket and katydid fossils finds that these odd ears evolved before even the appearance of the predators that these ears can hear.”  Let’s try to understand this sentence.  Darwinism has no foresight, no plan, and no ability to even get one mutation right, but it was able to equip insects with complex organs they would need millions of years later.  What did the bugs  listen to in the meantime?  The bee gees? 6/4/2014 16

17. Hear Ye: Another Darwinian Prediction Falsified by Fossils化石否认达尔文预测 • Another thing you should notice about the story is the amazing preservation of detail in these fossils.  “You can see every tiny feature down to the veins in their wings and the hairs on their legs,” Smith said.  Try this experiment: drop a cricket in mud, wait 50 million years, and see how much detail remains. Odds are, grasshopper, after the winter rains, you would find nary a hair, even if you were knee high to a cricket. 6/4/2014 17

18. A Young Moon for Life生命需要年轻的月球 • Our moon is unique in the solar system.  Just the right size and just the right distance, it is positioned to stabilize the tilt of Earth’s axis, providing stable seasonal cycles.  Science lacks data so far to know just how unique the Earth-moon relationship in a habitable zone is among other stellar systems.  We know from the planets of our own solar system that moons come in all sizes, from tiny Deimos to massive Titan, and orbit in apparently arbitrary radii from their host planets.  What astrophysicists can do is predict what would happen on earth if things were different.  That’s what one scientist did.  Another discovery could change the view of the moon’s surface being unaltered for billions of years. 6/4/2014 18

19. A Young Moon for Life生命需要年轻的月球 • Our Earth-Moon system is unique in the solar system. The Moon is 1/81 the mass of Earth while most moons are only about 3/10,000 the mass of their planet. The size of the Moon is a major contributing factor to complex life on Earth. It is responsible for the high tides that stirred up the primordial soup of the early Earth, it’s the reason our day is 24 hours long, it gives light for the variety of life forms that live and hunt during the night, and it keeps our planet’s axis tilted at the same angle to give us a constant cycle of seasons. • A second moon would change that. • Here’s he says would happen if Earth were to capture a second moon he names Luna: Luna’s arrival would wreak havoc on Earth. Its gravity would tug on the planet causing absolutely massive tsunamis, earthquakes, and increased volcanic activity. The ash and chemicals raining down would cause a mass extinction on Earth. 6/4/2014 19

20. A Young Moon for Life生命需要年轻的月球 The moon and Mars, however, lack the protection of a global magnetic field.  That may be why Mars has such a thin atmosphere – whatever it had before has been eroded from the onslaught of the solar wind.  What’s new about the NASA study is the finding that the proportion of charged helium rises from 4% to 20% in coronal mass ejections (CMEs).  Because of their greater mass, helium ions can sputter away ten times more material from the lunar surface.  A NASA scientist at Goddard said, “The model predicts 100 to 200 tons of lunar material — the equivalent of 10 dump truck loads — could be stripped off the lunar surface during the typical two-day passage of a CME.” Although the article did not explore the consequences over the assumed lifetime of the moon (4.5 billion years), it would seem, since almost every part of the moon except possibly at some spots near the poles is exposed to “the wrath of the sun,” that the lunar surface would have been subject to considerable reworking by CMEs over that time. 6/4/2014 20

21. Flowers in Your Nerves你的神经花朵 • Without a central nervous system, you would be dead.  But how does the nervous system work?  Nerves are composed of cells called neurons that rely on communication – signals they send and receive.  Those signals come into a neuron by means of channels in the cell membrane.  Cells have a variety of channels in their membranes.  Some of the most important in neurons are the potassium channels that raise and lower the electrical voltage inside.  Among these are calcium-activated potassium channels, which not only let calcium in, but export it out when the inside calcium concentration is too high.  These channels make nerves communicate, make muscles work, and improve your hearing, among other things.  Scientists have not understood how the inside calcium was able to activate the channel to let excess calcium back out.  Now, a leading channel researcher has figured it out: the calcium binds to a gating ring inside the cell, and makes it open like a flower. 6/4/2014 21

22. Flowers in Your Nerves你的神经花朵 • They used the flowery metaphor again inside the paper: “Viewing an interpolative movie in which the Ca2+-free gating ring is morphed to the Ca2+-bound gating ring, it seems that Ca2+ binding causes the N-terminal lobes of the RCK1 units to ‘open up’ on the membrane-facing surface of the gating ring in a way akin to petals opening on a flower (Supplementary Movie 1, part 1).” • One thing still remaining to understand is how the binding generates force: “Precisely how the free energy of Ca2+ binding in either the BK or MthK gating rings is transduced into mechanical work remains an important outstanding question that will require further experimental and theoretical work to understand at a deep level.” • But now, at least, we know now that your muscles, your heart, your digestive tract, your ears and your nerves operate with flower power. 6/4/2014 22

23. Flowers in Your Nerves你的神经花朵 • Only at the end of this paper did the authors suggest that this particular eukaryotic channel with its moving parts evolved from a simpler prokaryotic channel that uses a different opening mechanism: “This comparison presents a fascinating example in which the evolution of molecular structure has given rise to new or modified mechanical properties within a class of molecules,” they said.  (This is known as fact-free speculation.)  The paper needed evolutionary theory like a checkpoint gate in Iraq needs a suicide bomber.  Give credit to the Designer of elegant machinery, not to blind, unguided, purposeless concourses of mindless atoms.  Next time you lift weights, digest a good meal, listen to music or check your heartbeat, thank God for calcium-activated potassium channels with flower-petal activation gates. 6/4/2014 23

24. Body Talk身体讲座 • Muscle milk:  Whether you’re brawny or scrawny, you care about muscle.  The most assiduous bodybuilder, though, should thank a tiny little signaling molecule that makes that burn lead to a good flex.  Next to a photo of big belts and biceps, Stephanie Pappas on Live Science explains: • The secret lies with a chemical factor produced by muscle cells during work (such as during weight lifting) that signals muscle stem cells to multiply and take on the load. The substance, serum response factor (Srf), apparently triggers muscle stem cells — dormant cells capable of differentiating into muscle cells— to proliferate and become muscle fibers. More muscle fibers means bigger overall muscles and more strength. • A researcher in France called this “unexpected and quite interesting.”  Gym rats can hope that what works in mice will also work in men (women, too). 6/4/2014 24

25. Body Talk身体讲座 • Eye stash:  Speaking of stem cells, there’s a good source of adult stem cells right in your eye, reported PhysOrg. • In the future, patients in need of perfectly matched neural stem cells may not need to look any further than their own eyes. Researchers reporting in the January issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, have identified adult stem cells of the central nervous system in a single layer of cells at the back of the eye. • Amazingly, these cells are produced in the embryo and remain dormant throughout life; therefore, “You can get these cells from a 99-year-old,” a researcher at the Neural Stem Cell Institute in New York.  The cells can be isolated and grown into other body cell types.  “It’s kind of mind boggling.” 6/4/2014 25

26. Body Talk身体讲座 • Talk the dog:  Your dog understands you better than you think.  You can do a kind of mind-meld with your dog; Fido is already judging your intent before you tell him to fetch.  How Hungarian scientists found this out is explained on PhysOrg.  Apparently they track your eyes and read your intentions.  Live Science described dog aptitude at about the level of pre-verbal infants, but added this strange Darwinian twist without elaboration: “The study suggests that dogs have evolved to be especially attuned to human communicative signals, and early humans may have selected them for domestication particularly for this reason, the researchers said.”  Didn’t dogs evolve long before humans in the evolutionary timeline?  Did the humans who selected them use intelligent design or natural selection? 6/4/2014 26

27. Body Talk身体讲座 • Walk the jog:  Why do we find it more comfortable at a certain walking speed to switch to a running gait?  Researchers at North Carolina State, publishing in PNAS, (73/pnas.1107972109 PNAS January 4, 2012), found that the calf becomes more efficient when switching to a run at about 4.5 miles per hour.  The summary on PhysOrg explains: • The high-speed images revealed that the medial gastrocnemius muscle, a major calf muscle that attaches to the Achilles tendon, can be likened to a “clutch” that engages early in the stride, holding one end of the tendon while the body’s energy is transferred to stretch it. Later, the Achilles – the long, elastic tendon that runs down the back of the lower leg – springs into action by releasing the stored energy in a rapid recoil to help move you. • The study showed that the muscle “speeds up,” or changes its length more and more rapidly as people walk faster and faster, but in doing so provides less and less power. Working harder and providing less power means less overall muscle efficiency. • When people break into a run at about 2 meters per second, however, the study showed that the muscle “slows down,” or changes its length more slowly, providing more power while working less rigorously, thereby increasing its efficiency. 6/4/2014 27

28. Body Talk身体讲座 • Blood back-talk:  How does your body know to produce more blood cells?  The blood cells tell the bone marrow, and the marrow talks back.  Medical Xpress reported that scientists at UCLA heard the conversation: • In a new study, they show that two-way signaling from two different sets of cells is necessary for bloody-supply balance, both to ensure that enough blood cells are produced to respond to injury and infection and that blood progenitor cells remain available for future needs. • According to the subheading, “this balancing act requires a complex ‘conversation’ involving more parties than originally thought.”  Presumably what they found in fruit flies has a counterpart in us humans. 6/4/2014 28

29. Body Talk身体讲座 • Hang on to your appendix when you can:  Bill Parker thinks your appendix could save your life.  Interviewed in a guest blog by Rob Dunn on Scientific American, Parker, a professor of surgery, explained that the appendix is not a vestigial organ, but a vital part of the immune system: it “serves as a nature reserve for beneficial bacteria in our guts.”  Dunn cited recent evidence that people who have had appendectomies tend to get re-infected more easily. 6/4/2014 29

30. Body Talk身体讲座 • Amazing recovery:  A student at the University of Arizona, in a coma since an October 19 car crash, had been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and other life-threatening injuries.  According to Medical Xpress, his surgeon overruled staff recommendations to take him off life support when surgery was ineffective, and recommended keeping him alive another week.  In the St. Nick of time, Sam Schmid woke up, and is now speaking and walking again.  “It will be a special Christmas for the family of a 21-year-old University of Arizona student who was nearly taken off life support but is now recovering after waking up from a coma,” the Dec. 23 article said. 6/4/2014 30

31. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • Was there a Late Heavy Bombardment?  You can give a prehistoric event a name – even an acronym, like LHB – and it begins to take on a life of its own.  Papers and articles on earth history routinely refer to a “Late Heavy Bombardment” of the inner solar system by large impactors some 3.8 billion years ago, long after the planets are thought to have formed.  Where did that idea come from?  Did it really happen? • The LHB was an inference from radiometric dating of Apollo rock samples from the moon.  Two basins, one thought to be the oldest (Imbrium) and another thought to be the youngest (Serenitatis) turned out to be relatively close in radiometric age.  Scientists “invented” the LHB theory to try to account for the surprising data.  Now, however, Astrobiology Magazine and PhysOrg are saying the LHB never happened.  New evidence from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has undercut the thinking on which it was based. 6/4/2014 31

32. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • When did ichthyosaurs go extinct?  Consensus thinking about marine reptiles named ichthyosaurs (fish-lizards) was that they went extinct at the end of the Jurassic, 145 million years ago.  Now, according to PhysOrg, evidence suggests they did just fine, continuing to thrive and diversify, for another 50 million years.  According to the article, a new paper by European scientists “considerably changes our understanding of the evolution and the extinction of these dinosaur age sea reptiles”.   Notice how drastic the reinterpretation is: • Whilst it had been thought that these Jurassic ichthyosaurs died a little later at the end of the Jurassic, the new discoveries show that in reality almost all of these lines survived across the Jurassic-Cretaceous Boundary…. the team has been able to show that the extinction rates were very low during the Jurassic-Cretaceous Boundary. • The BBC News went so far as to say the new data “rewrites [the] fossil record.”  But what would cause selective extinction in the oceans?  The statement that the find “considerably changes our understanding” raises questions whether “understanding” that “considerably changes” was ever understanding in the first place – and, by extension, whether what they’re saying now, if it is a mystery requiring future research, constitutes understanding. 6/4/2014 32

33. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • Snowball Earth never was:  As mentioned in the 10/22/2011 entry and on Science Daily, some scientists think “Snowball Earth” (a period of global freeze said to have occurred 710-630 million years ago) is another myth.  It never happened, say some French scientists, based on inferred carbon dioxide concentrations in certain rock strata.  Yet “Snowball Earth” was more than just a hypothesis, to many evolutionists.  They even named a geological age after it – the Cryogenian Period. • The article went on to state that “Earth has experienced several extreme glacial events,” including not one, but two Snowball Earth episodes during the so-called Cryogenian.  But then the article admitted, “Today still, the question of how this episode came to an end remains unanswered, given that ice reflects more solar radiation back into space than rocks do.”  If carbon dioxide levels could not provide enough global warming to melt the ice, the Earth should have remained frozen ever since.  How, then, could anyone believe it happened not once, but multiple times? 6/4/2014 33

34. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • Overconfidence?  One would think that upsets like the previous two would cause scientists to humbly hedge their bets about other theories, but another article on PhysOrg gave good press to Hamed Sanei, a Canadian researcher, whose new explanation for the Permian extinction was stated as a matter of settled scientific fact.  His co-author, Benoit Beauchamp of the University of Calgary said, “this study is significant because it’s the first time mercury has been linked to the cause of the massive extinction that took place during the end of the Permian.”  How anyone could replicate or test this new notion was no hindrance to his chutzpah.  He even tied it to global warming: “We are adding to the levels through industrial emissions. This is a warning for us here on Earth today,” he preached.  Simultaneously, though, he was encouraging geologists to re-interpret five other assumed separate extinction events, suggesting earlier theories have left out a key cause.  He left it unanswered how mercury could have had selective effects on different organisms, removing most marine animals while preserving ichthyosaurs for 50 million years, till some other cause (more mercury?) did them in. 6/4/2014 34

35. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • Seeing is believing:  Geologists deal so routinely with theories of millions of years of slow processes, it’s not often that geology can be watched in real time.  It happened on December 19.  From the sea and satellites, eyewitnesses watched the birth of a new island in the Red Sea on one day.  PhysOrg has the pictures to prove it: before-and-after images from the Earth Observing Satellite 1 of “an apparent island where previously there was none.”  The article added, “According to news reports, fishermen witnessed lava fountains reaching up to 30 meters(90 feet) tall on December 19.”  Instantaneous island formation, like that of Surtsey in 1963, are reminders that geological effects can occur quickly, depending on the forces applied.  There’s nothing like eyewitness testimony. 6/4/2014 35

36. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • One of the big problems in creation-evolution discussions, often, is failing to question the assumptions of the evolutionary timeline.  Evolutionists have succeeded in generating a large vocabulary of so-called events that are incestuously tied to the long-age, slow-and-gradual, bottom-up, evolutionary world view.  These events take on a life of their own and are frequently never questioned.  But they should be, as the examples above show.  Here are a few of their hypothetical pseudo-events masquerading as facts: • Big Bang Inflation • Primordial Soup RNA World Origin of Life • Snowball Earth • Late Heavy Bombardment • Great Oxidation Event • Cryogenian and all the other assumed periods, epochs and eras • Permian Extinction • Jurassic Extinction • Cretaceous-Tertiary Impact • Out of Africa 6/4/2014 36

37. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • If they answer that this is how science makes progress, point out that it was not progress at all.   It was a rabbit trail, a dead end.  It never happened, but it was spoken of as scientific fact.  It was used to misinform the whole scientific community and the public.  TV documentaries and textbooks were produced about a mythical event that never happened.  That’s no different than teaching Alice and Wonderland as scientific fact.  Pound the point home: How do you know?  How do you know?  How do you know?  Point them to Surtsey, now hosting a diverse community of plant and animal life, and ask them, if you landed on this island for the first time, knowing nothing about it, how old would you say it is?  Memorize some of the major recent upsets in evolutionary theories.  Don’t accept their terms, their acronyms, their assumptions.  Get them to realize they may be living in Fantasyland.  Ten thousand Frenchmen in Fantasyland (sorry, French readers) do not constitute a society of knowledge.  The consensus might just be collective believers of a popular mythology. 6/4/2014 37

38. What Do Scientists Know About Prehistory? • Another comeback from some evolutionists is that you have no right to criticize the consensus without coming up with a better model yourself. That’s fallacious. There is nothing in science that requires replacing one myth with another. What are we supposed to do, replace Alice in Wonderland with Harry Potter? Science is supposed to represent knowledge, not speculation. It is perfectly fine to criticize a theory as implausible without proposing an alternative.  Saying “I don’t know” is better than serving up myths as if they were facts. Better no LHB, no RNA World, than introducing visions of fictional fantasies as if they were realities. Admitting what science doesn’t know, and cannot know, is a more honest form of progress. 6/4/2014 38

39. Titanosaur Bones Found in Antarctica • Strange as it seems, large sauropods of the Titanosaur variety have been found in Antarctica.  This is the highest latitude sauropod ever found.  It means that the large reptiles inhabited every continent; they walked the globe. • A short article on New Scientist describes how Ignacio Cerda from the National University of Comahue in Argentina uncovered the fossil on James Ross Island, about 700 miles from Cape Horn, Argentina.  He surmises that the beasts got there on an ancient isthmus that connected the island to South America.  A previous post by PhysOrg about this discovery calls it an “advanced titanosaur.” • The PhysOrg article states, “Although they were one of the most widespread and successful species of sauropod dinosaurs, their origin and dispersion are not completely understood.” 6/4/2014 39

40. Titanosaur Bones Found in Antarctica • What did they eat, ice?  Think of the tons of plant material these giant animals require.  No such large plant-eaters inhabit Antarctica today.  Finds like this speak of a very different world.  It doesn’t require millions of years to change the world; just sufficient hydraulic energy.  The Bible speaks of a very different world, with different climatic and geographic conditions, that would have allowed the migration of large animals like these to polar latitudes.  It also speaks of a global hydraulic catastrophe that had the energy to bury titanosaurs suddenly, else their bones would have decayed on the surface when they died. 6/4/2014 40

41. Darwinian Explanations: Show or Snow? • We all know the proverbial “snow job.”  That’s putting on an entertaining song and dance without doing the assignment.  A college sophomore (wise fool) writes a 15-page term paper full of jargon that, on closer inspection, didn’t follow directions or didn’t answer the question – it reveals ignorance of the subject.  A job applicant makes an impression with humor or appearance without demonstrating ability to do the work. A junior makes up a fanciful story to cover up why he didn’t mow the lawn.  Scientists are supposed to explain things based on observation and testable hypotheses.  If Darwinians really believe that an unguided, impersonal, purposeless mechanism led to the diversity of life on Earth, they need to show the evidence.  Here are a few recent examples of evolutionary explanations.  Check whether they “show” evolution, or distract attention with a “snow” job. 6/4/2014 41

42. Darwinian Explanations: Show or Snow? • Introducing: TNA! (ta-daah).  An article on New Scientist purports to show that you don’t need to start life with the familiar DNA or RNA.  A “simpler” molecule called TNA that uses threose instead of ribose might have gotten things started.  In fact, the early earth might have been a “hodge-podge world” of many different molecules that could store genetic information.  The imagination goes wild with the possibilities. • Only by getting into the nitty-gritty of the article do you come to realize that this is all guesswork.  (1) TNA is “not found in nature today.”  (2) TNA “would not have arisen on its own.”  (3) There is “no trace of TNA or its cousins in modern organisms.”  (4) “no one has actually made it in the conditions that existed on Earth before life began….”  (5) John Chaput and team at U. of Arizona intelligently designed TNA molecules and “evolved them” in their lab with purpose and intent.  (6) “Chaput points out that we still know very little about what TNA can do, because the technology to evolve the molecules in the lab is so new.”  Yet reporter Michael Marshall titled his exploration of TNA, “Before DNA, before RNA: Life in the hodge-podge world.”  Did he show any life? 6/4/2014 42

43. Darwinian Explanations: Show or Snow? • Witness evolution in an English quarry:  Reporter Carl Yapp of the BBC News is going to “shed light” on evolution through amazingly-preserved fossils found in an abandoned quarry.  They’re 450 million years old, he tells us.  Eagerly, the reader looks into the quarry for the evolution, with the powerful flashlight beam Yapp is holding, and sees amazing things: complex hydroids (related to sea anemones), chambered nautiloids, sponges – a whole “community that was entirely new and surprising.”  These animals, the reader learns, were buried alive so quickly that they fossilized intact – a unique, “spectacular,” “astonishing” collection of animals, some so delicate they rarely fossilize. 6/4/2014 43

44. Darwinian Explanations: Show or Snow? • Witness evolution in an English quarry:  • Yapp said, “Scientists believe they shed new light on how ocean communities have evolved.”  Sufficiently dazzled by the fossils, the impatient reader asks about the promised evidence for evolution, only to hear paleontologist Dr. Lucy Muir say (watch for the operative word imagined): • “It’s not a discovery that you can point to and say: ‘This proves such-and-such,’” said Dr Muir. • “Rather, it’s a question of adding a large new chunk of knowledge, and in turn suggesting that there are many more chunks left to find. • “This type of ecological community type was simply unknown from rocks this old, and for it to suddenly appear makes paleontologists wonder what else they’ve been missing. • “It shows us that Ordovician ecosystems were even more diverse and complicated than we imagined.” 6/4/2014 44

45. Darwinian Explanations: Show or Snow? • Your inner fish, v.2:  Alfred Romer’s old idea of fish evolving legs as they hopped between drying desert ponds is implausible. Tiktaalik is a has-been.  But now, thank Charles Darwin, “A new theory emerges for where some fish became four-limbed creatures.”  Let’s let PhysOrg set the stage from a University of Oregon press release: • A small fish crawling on stumpy limbs from a shrinking desert pond is an icon of can-do spirit, emblematic of a leading theory for the evolutionary transition between fish and amphibians. This theorized image of such a drastic adaptation to changing environmental conditions, however, may, itself, be evolving into a new picture. 6/4/2014 45

46. Darwinian Explanations: Show or Snow? • Your inner fish, v.2:  Hero of the new “evolving…picture” is University of Oregon scientist Gregory J. Retallack.  He’s motivated to provide a new “scenario,” because “such a plucky hypothetical ancestor of ours probably could not have survived the overwhelming odds of perishing in a trek to another shrinking pond.”  So out with the old, in with the new: the ancestor wasn’t in a desert after all.  It was in a jungle.  “Judging from where their fossils were found, transitional forms between fish and amphibians lived in wooded floodplains,” Retallack explains.  “Our distant ancestors were not so much foolhardy, as opportunistic, taking advantage of floodplains and lakes choked with roots and logs for the first time in geological history.” 6/4/2014 46

47. Darwinian Explanations: Show or Snow? • Now, the evidence, please.  It sounds too good to be true: “eight-foot-long, 395-million-year-old tetrapods in ancient lagoonal mud in southeastern Poland.”  Wow!  That would be the evolutionary fossil find of the century.  PhysOrg informs us that the tetrapods were announced a year ago – Oh, that was the story about tetrapod tracks we reported on 1/06/2010 (to be making tetrapod tracks, they had to be tetrapods, not fish).  The reader looks for other corroborating evidence, such as Softpedia.com, only to find that Retallack studied “ancient soils,” not actual tetrapods.  The soils had “tracks” of fish and other animals that he assumes were evolving.  This is old news, anyway; the actual paper in the Journal of Geology came out last May.  The abstract didn’t announce any new tetrapod transitional forms; just fossilized soils where he thought showed the transition took place.  “A woodland hypothesis of evolution is presented here,” the paper says.  So why did this make news in late December on PhysOrg?  Elementary; it’s the theory, you recall, that is evolving, not necessarily the fish.  But that’s OK; finish with a rhetorical flourish, and no one will notice: “The Darwin fish of chrome adorning many car trunks represents a particular time and place in the long evolutionary history of life on earth.” 6/4/2014 47

48. Cosmologists Forced to “In the Beginning” • The late astronomer Robert Jastrow detailed in his 1978 book God and the Astronomers how cosmologists were repulsed by the idea the universe had a beginning.  He found it quizzical that they would have such an emotional reaction.  They all realized that a beginning out of nothing was implausible without a Creator.  Since then, various models allowing for an eternal universe brought secular cosmologists relief from their emotional pains.  It now appears that relief was premature. • In New Scientist today, Lisa Grossman reported on ideas presented at a conference entitled “State of the Universe” convened last week in honor of Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday.  Some birthday; he got “the worst presents ever,” she said: “two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.”  Of the two, the latter is most serious: a presentation showing reasons why “the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.” 6/4/2014 48

49. Cosmologists Forced to “In the Beginning” • It is well-known that Hawking has preferred a self-existing universe.  Grossman quotes him saying, “‘A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God,’ Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.” • In her article, “Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event,” Grossman explains that “For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future.”  These models were consistent with the big bang, she notes.  Unfortunately, “as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead.”  Here are the models in brief and why they don’t work: 6/4/2014 49

50. Cosmologists Forced to “In the Beginning” • Eternal inflation:  Built on Alan Guth’s 1981 inflation proposal, this model imagines bubble universes forming and inflating spontaneously forever.  Vilenkin and Guth had debunked this idea as recently as 2003.  The equations still require a boundary in the past. • Eternal cycles:  A universe that bounces endlessly from expansion to contraction has a certain appeal to some, but it won’t work either.  “Disorder increases with time,” Grossman explained.  “So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered.”  Logically, then, if there had already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe would already been in a state of maximum disorder, even if the universe gets bigger with each bounce.  Scratch that model. • Eternal egg:  One last holdout was the “cosmic egg” model that has the universe hatching out of some eternally-existing static state.  “Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed thatthe egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096).”  No way could the egg be eternal. The upshot of this is clear.  No model of an eternal universe works.  Vilenkin concluded, “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”  An editorial at New Scientist called this, “The Genesis Problem.” 6/4/2014 50