Thursday, January 24, 2008

Irreducible Complexity: Three Species Wide

I've written before about the topic of Irreducible Complexity: the idea that some systems in nature are too complex and interdependent to have come together by method of gradualism. Each part of the system relies on all the other parts of the system to have any function or meaning. Therefore, this system can't have come into existence by slow gradual improvement. This still hasn't stopped researchers from trying to compose a story line for how it happened anyway.

Irreducible Complexity is bad enough a problem for Evolutionists to try to explain; but researchers have stumbled upon an even greater challenge to the evolutionary faith. What do you do when the irreducibly complex system in question spans three different species!?!

A species of ant called Cephalotes atratus was discovered looking much like a berry of the bush it was climbing. This seemed odd to the researchers since his million or so cousins and nephews had black abdomens. As it turns out, the berry-ant was infected with a certain round worm's eggs that made it's abdomen inflamed and reddened. What else is odd is that the ant tended to stick it's abdomen up in the air each time it stopped, which had the effect of making it look even more inviting to passing birds. The birds would come by, eat the infected ant thinking it was a berry. The bird would excrete the digested ant a day or so later, and the eggs previously occupying the ant's abdomen would be hatched in a fertile pile of the bird's droppings, where they would mature, wallow a bit, and lay new eggs (very high ik factor).

This involuntary symbiosis was destructive to the ant, irrelevant to the bird and critically important to the roundworm. But the question is, how does a system like this get started? A keen observer would see that the ant and bird would naturally have existed before this entire symbiosis existed if evolution were true. But then how could the reproductive cycle for the roundworm have gotten started. There's no reason to believe that the roundworm couldn't have live elsewhere in other conditions as well, pads of bat guano, for instance would provide large fields of persistent housing for these dung-fairing roundworms. The ants might have wandered into a cave where they sampled a bit of the bad guano smörgåsbord and become infected. Thus, the cycle could have come together gradually!! A victory for evolution!

But wait. Then how come the eggs make the ant's abdomen look like host berries? A roundworm on the outside of the ant's abdomen could see what the abdomen of the ant looked like, but didn't stand to effect the ant's appearance. A roundworm on the inside could affect the ant's appearance, but couldn't see what change he might affect from in there! Besides, the roundworms don't even have eyes, let alone know what the berries look like, or how an ant could be made to look like a berry, especially to passing birds! And even if it could, how does this worm coax the ant into sticking his abdomen way up in the air to appear like a stemmed berry, y'know, like the rest of the bush's berries? Perhaps one of the worms wiggles his way to the ant's eardrums and sings Elvis hits into his ear? Do ants have ears? Hmm. It does beg some questions.

Some systems in nature are so obviously the handiwork of a Designer that any attempt to explain them in other terms sounds desperate; bias, might one say?

If the ants worms and birds could talk and reason (like in Narnia), then scientists would congratulate them on their cooperative intelligence and ingenuity. Since they can't, scientists mysteriously detect no intelligence at work at all. How convenient. My recommendation to the scientists, don't look down the barrel of your intelometer, you might not like what you find.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Feathered Dinosaurs: That Didn't Last Very Long

I cannot be held responsible for the poor quality of this oil painting.Have you ever met someone who is impulsive? I suppose we all have impulsive tendencies about some things. Some guys have a different girl friend every time I see them. Others are driving a new car every time I talk to them. A friend of mine got a new, black 2007 Mustang, a lightly driven, black Hummer H2, and a new black 2008 Mustang in about 5 months. (I just wanted to draw out how consistent he was in his love of the color black).

But paleontologists have, once again, tweaked...er...altered...er...swapped out their theory on the whole feathered dinosaur issue. In a recent article from the National Geographic Online (the only one I read consistently when time is tight), paleontologists have unearthed a dinosaur whose skin was fossilized intact. They even believe that they can make out teeth marks in the skin of this "130 million year old" dinosaur named Psittacosaurus (last name not provided).

Now normally a grand dino showing a little skin wouldn't excite even evolution-espousing paleontologists all that much, but this one tends to refute the recently acquired, but deeply-held belief that dinosaurs had feathers (especially around 130 million years ago!)

So what's the big deal? Scientists swap out the pillars of their evolutionary faith about as often as Hollywood actors adopt African children against their parents' will. But this time is a little different. The article entitled "Amazing" Dino Fossil Found With Skin, Tissue in China states that:
The research also suggests that some dinosaurs had thick, scaly skin like that of modern-day reptiles, refuting the theory that dinos had primitive feathers.
So dinos didn't have feathers, big deal. But this discussion impacts more than simply whether dinosaurs carried combs or sunscreen. The whole point of gluing feathers to dinosaurs was to account for the rise of modern birds!

This new discovery effectively orphans all birds everywhere as surely as being adopted by Madonna or Tom Cruise orphans an African child!! Help! Help! ...Man! There's never a PETA member around when you need one!

Upon the topic of dinobirds, wikipedia has this quote in one discussion of feathered dinosaurs:
The presence of unambiguous feathers in an unambiguously nonavian theropod has the rhetorical impact of an atomic bomb, rendering any doubt about the theropod relationships of birds ludicrous.”[3]

However, not all scientists agreed that Caudipteryx was unambiguously non-avian, and some of them continued to doubt that general consensus. Paleontologists like Alan Feduccia, who opposes the theory that birds are theropods, sees Caudipteryx as a flightless bird unrelated to dinosaurs.[7] Jones et al. (2000) found that Caudipteryx was a bird based on a mathematical comparison of the body proportions of flightless birds and non-avian theropods. Dyke and Norell (2005) criticized this result for flaws in their mathematical methods, and produced results of their own which supported the opposite conclusion.
Setting aside my guilt about being "ludicrous", I guess my question is this: if the issue is still unsettled, then why did the I-Max here in Utah show a lengthy, multi-million dollar movie about how birds evolved from dinosaurs? The movie was targeted at young children and included cute scenes of affable, feathered dinosaurs hopping around the Barremian age. The advanced, computer graphics were stunning and convincing to young eyes and the story line was explained in no uncertain terms to educate someone with a first grade understanding of the world (that translates to 8th grade for most public schools). They even named the dinosaurs with cute, child-like names and gave them endearing personalities. The movie, like all modern scientific material for public consumption, left no room for discussion as to whether dinosaurs evolved into birds over the course of 50 or so million years!

As is typical in the scientific world, consensus is easier to establish than proof. People are fascinated by dinosaurs for the same reasons that they liked the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings: it stimulates the imagination (and ten million dollars of computer graphics doesn't hurt either).

So where did the birds come from? Do we have any eye witnesses? Hmmmmmm. Oh, here's one, yes, You, on the back burner of society:
Gen 1:20-23 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
To accuse evolutionists of simply lying is like accusing Judas of trespassing on temple property. These snakes are actively trying to heist a fabricated account of our origins on the public, and particularly undiscerning children, so that they can accomplish their ends of destroying God and turning men against God.

The lesson from all this? Hold your head high and speak with confidence and a percentage of people will buy what you're selling (thus "cat people"). But...
Gal 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
Sorry to those of you who bought "authentic dinosaur feathers" from the travelling paleontologist. I fear they're doomed to the same devaluation as Beanie Babies, and stock in Countrywide.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Rapid "Evolution": New Fish Sighted!!

Evolutionists get all excited about the strangest things. Of course, often the only reason they're even surprised is because they believe in evolution and all it's presuppositions and derivative axioms.
Publish Post
One such supposition is that "evolution" (variation) happens very slowly, over the course of millions or even hundreds of millions of years. In a recent article by the National Geographic Online, scientists show themselves, once again, to be all bubbly about the mundane. The opening paragraph states:
It's a miracle! Blind cavefish, despite having adapted to their lightless environment for more than a million years, can produce sighted offspring in just a single generation, a new study reveals.
Um............duh!

They mated blind fish from one cave with blind fish from another cave and whala...the offspring could see!! Evolutionists weren't surprised simply by the fact that blind fish could produce sited fish. They expected to find that. What surprised them was that it could be done in a single generation, undoing some million years of evolution!!!

Of course, they're wrong about the million years of evolution. They could alway acknowledge that God created the world 6,500 years ago, and so all variations seen today happened during that time (I'm just sayin'). Lately, it seems that what is provable is true; what is unprovable is science. Hardly anything in the scientific world gets much press and attention unless it is unprovable and believed only by faith.

Evolutionists need to acknowledge that variation happens much more rapidly than they have convinced themselves. They need to acknowledge that they will continue to find more and more examples of this as time progresses. Whomever of them embraces this truth first will be an early adopter, cutting edge, so to speak. The remainder of them will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, across the flat earth to the finish line. Just kidding about that flat earth part.

Note: I've renamed the article entitled Like Watching Water Boil to Rapid "Evolution" Like Watching Water Boil to align with this post and start a new category of posts. It looks like there will be plenty of them coming.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Lazarus Effect: Goblin Shark

We reported a while back that a rare "Frilled Shark" was found swimming around in the coastal waters off Japan. Once again, another "Lazarus" species has been spotted, as reported by National Geographic Online. For review, a Lazarus species is one that is "back from the dead", thought extinct, but now found swimming/walking/crawling around: a creative choice of names by someone who doesn't believe in God or the Bible.

This species closely resembles sharks that have been unearthed long before in the fossil record. Antique biological journals record that it went extinct around 57 million years ago in the Eocene epoch, until, that is, it was found swimming around the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Twelve breeding grounds have been identified spanning the globe. Evolutionists had grand ideas about how it evolved and why it became extinct. But their ideas have shown to be mere speculation.

The Goblin Shark is remarkable in that it can grow, some believe, to a maximum length of around 6 meters! Species of 3.9 meters have been caught in deep-ocean nets or washed up on shore. At that size, you'd think someone would have seen one before the last century or so. But it's no real surprise they've been able to escape humanity's attention for the last 6,500 years; they live and die at depths below 200 meters, where no sunlight can penetrate.

If you are interested in the topic of Biology and species identification, then the oceans and Indonesia are, by far, the hottest places to look. Dozens of new species are being identified each month.

While many species remain known only from the fossil record, similar methods were used to identify their origins and status as were used for the Frilled and Goblin sharks. One could expect that an equal amount of artistic license and subsequent inaccuracy plagues those species' biographies as well. These many Lazarus species, so called, demonstrate that evolutionary biologists really have no special powers of post-constructing the pre-historic past any more than Sister Destiny has the power to pre-tell the future.