Clear Evidence

In My Fantasies, I'm the Hero Too!

2009-10-12T09:00:00.000-06:00

I know just what to do if the Russians invade. I know this because I spent a substantial portion of my childhood thinking about it. Ask my brothers. I've shot camouflaged commies from every angle. I've taken the weapons off their still-warm corpses and continued the fight until I saved the country from certain tyranny and destruction! And then I woke up.

Many, many scientists need a similar awakening, even though sleeping is so pleasant. Most scientists are taught an anti-God worldview during their formative years in high school and college. Those that go into research (as opposed to applied sciences, such as chemical engineering or national defense) never escape the scholastic environment that taught them their humanist faith. Humanism, of course, teaches folks everything should be judged on how it benefits mankind. Ultimately, it teaches that man is God.

It should be no wonder, then, that in scientists worldview, they are the super hero.

If you're a microbiologist or some variant working at the CDC, then you're trying to find the next super bug that will wipe out half of earth's population. Even relatively benign viruses like Swine Flu are good candidates to underscore your importance to all of humanity!

So we must: Cover out mouths, wash our hands, don't drink after anyone, use a paper towel to open the bathroom door, use hand sanitizer!

If you're a climatologist, then you're sacrificing a quiet life to convince the hordes of distracted sheeple that they need to dramatically change the way they live in order to avoid consigning humanity to the fossil record!

So we must: Recycle, walk, car-pool, buy a hybrid, drink tap water, don't eat beef (I choked here), buy offsets, sell your private jet (to whom? Al Gore?) and fly coach, drip irrigate your garden, install solar panels, turn your thermostat to 80 degrees during the Summer, use electric hand dryers, don't consume electricity...with..your..electric hand dryers!

If you're a astronomer, then you want obscene amounts of money and political clout in order to find the next big rock flying through space that might wipe out all life on earth! In your worldview, you're the hero and can't understand why the world doesn't see how important your work is.

So we must: Strangely, I don't think there's anything you can do. Good bye, then.

At least the astronomer will have the satisfaction of being right, just one last time. Super!

So this Halloween, when many of the super-hero costumes aren't returned to the costume shop, you might want to run down to the college campus an check the science department. They don't like to wear white lab coats! That's just a cover up to conceal their secret identity!

Altered Beast: So Much From So Little 2

2009-10-05T15:38:00.003-06:00

Story telling is a gift to those that have that talent. Story writing is even more of a gift, for I've never seen someone who couldn't tell a story they themselves wrote.

Some stories fascinate me. Without having had the experience of being marooned on an island, how could one sit in his attic and write a book like Robinson Crusoe? Even less likely, how could a man from the 20th century write a series of books like the Chronicles of Narnia? As a side note, how could he sell them given and odd name like "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe"? It must be intrigue...Anyway. But C.S. Lewis and Daniel Defoe must bow their heads in reverence to the talents of our next authors.

In a recent article in the National Geographic, scientists published their findings gleaned from a newly found insect. The insect was the largest insect on record: larger than a man! The scorpion-like insect was a heavy-weight champion weighing in at 8.2 feet in length! It fed on fish, and even each other. It was the alpha predator of its day! Its legs were too weak to lift its body without the buoying effect of the water. Contemporary sea creatures, such as fish, developed hardened heads and mouths to contend with the pressure from these mammoth sea scorpions! These terrible claws were designed for shooting out and grabbing any nearby prey, much like the Praying Mantis of today! The largest lobsters of our day would be mere bite-sized morsels for Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, the given name of this ancient insect!

Now, wait a second here. What did they say they found? A fossil? So a rock, then? It must have been a big rock, since Jaekelopterus rhenaniae was 8.2 feet in lengh and all. Oh, wait a second, they didn't find the whole creature...just an 18 inch claw. Hm. Well, all the flourishes did make it more readable! I might not have even read the article were it not for all the made-up parts. I kinda' think that was the point. Intrigue, I guess.

This is the first novel I've read from this emerging author, but he has a bright future, especially as much as the world of evolutionary biology appreciates good fiction these days!

The Forgiving Darwinist: Hope for Me!

2009-10-04T16:20:00.001-06:00

In reading a recent article on the National Geographic Online website, I came across a startling admission. In previous posts, I've protested the sub-sub-categorization of fish species. Every time Evolutionary biologists come across a specimen who's fin is slightly smaller or dots are slightly lighter, they want to declare it to be a new species, give it a Latin surname and celebrate the onward march of evolution, right before our very eyes!

Now, my argument, and that of many others, has been that this is not an example of evolution, but is only a slight variation in what the Bible calls a 'kind'. God proclaimed that each should reproduce after it's kind. Evolutionists haven't been able to show that to be untrue, and never will. The variation between trout species does not make them each their own 'kind', just variations within a single 'kind'.

Now this article continues to push the evolutionary faith just like everything else on the National Geographic website. But it also contains a shocking admission that I've never seen before: that out of zeal for the evolutionary faith, past scientists tended to find many species in the fossil record where few or one actually existed. Here's the full text of the admission in question:

Mistakes Made

Andy Currant is a paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.

"Most large fossil herbivores tend to tune down to a smaller number of taxa [biological classifications] when you look at them closely," he said.

But, he added, the mistakes made by early investigators are easy to forgive. Researchers used to be hypersensitive to variation in specimens and did not really understand how much variation there can be between males and females within a population, he said.

Marcelo Sánchez, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, said: "Solving such a specific taxonomic problem may not seem important. But individual-species research like this is ultimately what major claims about evolution depends[s] upon."

Now let's quickly break down what this man is saying.

First, he's pointing out that when paleontologists and taxonomists look "closely" at the evidence, what was once thought to be evidence of many species is found to be very few. There is a pressure on paleontologists to discover new species of dinosaurs to fill in the "gaps" in the evolutionary tree! Their theory is not benefited by fewer unique animals. They need more!

But, thankfully, Kaplan has struck a conciliatory tone with past scientists for skewing scientific evidence to support their evolutionary presuppositions. Magnanimity on this scale is rare to the scientific community. Perhaps it's part of a rising trend of a traditionally Christian valu...er...never mind.

I haven't found the website where you register to be forgiven by the scientific community, but perhaps there is now hope for me!

Software and Genetics: A Comparative Analysis

2009-07-09T16:29:00.004-06:00

As I've been reading about and discussing evolution over the past year or so, I've noticed a disconnect in people's minds concerning genetic variation and origins. People seem to gleefully state that variation in a species over time somehow shows that evolution is happening, and thus, the Theory of Evolution must be true!

But there's just one problem. The Theory of Evolution does not simply state that lifeforms change over time. It states that these changes, going backward in time, account for the origins of the species. As I count it, however, these folks have not thought through things very thoroughly.

I'd like to make a comparison between two things. The one must be genetics, since that's what contains the data being passed onto the offspring of a specimen. The other is computer software. At first, this might seem like too simplistic a comparison, but I think you'll see where I'm going with it if you'll persevere.

The genome of any species is merely an extremely long set of repeating chemical sequences known as base pairs. These base pairs are arranged in a certain order that is meaningful to some interpretive mechanism that uses these base pairs to know how to build all the building blocks of a particular cell, and indeed, the entire organism. Even though each cell has only one "type" (with the obvious exception of stem cells), every type of cell has all the information contained in it to rebuild the entire organism if called upon (which it's not).

Now, these base pairs aren't consumed while building the pieces of the cell such as the chloroplasts or the golgi vesicles. Rather, they are interpreted the way a builder uses a blueprint. After the vascuole of a new cell is constructed using the DNA, the DNA is still 100% intact, having all the base pairs in place and in the same sequence.

The many, intricate parts of the cell are described by DNA in a method known to geneticists and bioinformaticists as "coding". They use this term because the way DNA codes for the body is very similar to the way the binary numbering system, the building blocks of all computer programs, codes for software. The user of the software thinks in terms of windows, buttons, pictures, menu items, etc. The organism thinks in terms of fingers, toes, ears and eyes. But beneath each set of abstractions (windows and toes), lies a language that describes to an interpreter how to build them. The interpreter for computer software is called the CPU or Central Processing Unit, manufactured by Motorola, Intel or AMD. The interpreters for DNA coding are several fold. Most internal components of the cell (15 or so categories) in some way interpret either the DNA or the biproducts of the DNA produced by other interpreters.

"Coding" is a good word for the information contained in DNA, because just like the 1's and o's of computer code are not windows, buttons, images, and browsers, so the A, C, T and G of the human genome are not fingers, eye balls, lungs, or brains. But where the computer code needs and interpreter and a hundres or so external hardware devices to manifest anything meaningful, the DNA is interpreted, literaly, by things produced by...DNA! So DNA is the code, the interpreter, the manufacturer of the interpreter, the manufacturer of the whole organism and the source of new DNA!

Software development is a very involved and deliberate process that takes years to master, is fraught with pitfalls and is very much a trial and error process. It can take years to develop a complex software system into something that is featured, performant and robust enough to deploy into a production environment.

The comparison between DNA and Software breaks down at some point. The place where DNA and software breaks down is that the software running on the CPU does not describe how to make, maintain, repair and alter the CPU. That is a whole different level of intelligence which modern technology has not been able to broach.

Science fiction often imagines a world where thinking machines improve themselves and "evolve" independently of their creators. They suppose that once a machine reaches a certain level of complexity, it will be able to continue its upward progress independent of its designers.

While that assertion is yet to be proven, it's interesting that they assume that a very high degree of complexity is required before a machine is able to change independent of its original programming. And they are correct. An even higher degree of complexity would be required for a machine to reproduce itself and upload a copy of its own software to the new unit. Interestingly, if you copied computer software with random copy errors, it would cease to function. DNA doesn't. It manages to cope in nearly all cases. Only when the copy errors are large and dangerous to the offspring does it react defensively and cause the offspring to be sterile, preserving life, but ensuring these errors don't further promulgate into the larger populace. This tendency towards defensive sterilization is also a design feature, not intended by the specimen, but engineered into it's very fiber by its designer.

To pause a moment, consider that when arguing that variation in a modern form shows the origin of that form, one must assume that the unit of life was already at a sufficiently complex state so as to begin the upward progression to its current form. Without that assumption, you have no explanation for how that cycle of creation, variation, reproduction got started. It's like saying, "If I was really smart, I wouldn't have to go to school!" You have to assume the first part for the second part to be true. But the debate on origins is not a discussion of how mankind lost control of some futuristic robotic monster which reproduced and took over the world (i.e. how environmentalist talk of humans), it's a question of how the futuristic robotic monster came together in the first place without the aid of a designer?! How did it achieve the level of complexity and sophistication where it had the ability to decide on its own, envision a more capable self than its current form and design a sequence of events that would lead to that improved state.

When one begins to understand the unfathomable complexity of the inter workings of even a single cell, then the idea of it coming together without an intelligent designer is shown to be a simple impossibility. Bringing a machine (organism) from crude materials (iron, silicon, water, carbon, etc) to the level of being able to recognize non-toxic foods, adjust its behavior to match its environment, consume matter to produce energy, repair itself, reproduce itself and improve in reproduction is ALL of the problem of explaining origins. Once it has reached that level of complexity, variation is a matter of carrying out its original design, whether in direct obedience to its programming or as a byproduct of unintended side affects.

With millions of engineers adding their lives, experience and expertise to the problem of making autonomous machines, we are just now beginning to produce what is called "semi-autonomous" machines which can make simple decisions of navigation with only occasional guidance from humans, but without the ability to self-repair, reproduce or self-improve. We are not even close to this level of sophistication, and the self-improve part is only theoretical. It is not certain that it is even possible. And sophistication alone does not automatically bequeath the abilities listed above. Those machines that have these semi-autonomous characteristics were designed with those abilities in mind. It has never happened accidentally. Most sophisticated machines and systems have none of these traits.

My whole point is this: Many people accept and offer observable variations in species as proof of origins. This is a false assumption. Variation is a deliberate design feature that is currently beyond the technology of or even the dreams of modern scientists and engineers. To think that any entity, mechanical or biological, could achieve this level of targeted sophistication is far beyond faith, its belief in the mathematically impossible. Those that have this faith despite this fact either rebelliously wish to orphan themselves from their Designer or haven't thought things through very well.

Evolution of Evolution: "The New Theories of Evolution"

2008-04-17T10:07:00.010-06:00

A recent post at telegraph.co.uk purported to offer updated "proof" for the theory of evolution. You know, the "utterly proven" theory about the origin of the species that millions of scientists have dedicated their life to re-proving, much the way they do other "Laws" of science such as gravity, entropy, and displacement...er...oh, wait.

Be sure to read his article before continuing.

As proof, the author offered several contrived examples: from modern technology to insect and bacterial behavior to show how the evidence is mounting in such a way that, soon, even the "most hardened skeptics" will become convinced of the truthfulness of evolution. Waiting...waiting...hm...still no.

The first absurd claim comes when the author claims that, "Computers have long been used to model biological evolution." Since I am a computer programmer, let me offer my opinion on this. The computer that could truly model even the splitting of a single cell into two cells has not yet been invented. No computer existing today has the memory or processing power that it would take to even begin the insanely complex task of modeling biological reproduction, the foundation for "evolution". Though you may read about today's super computers being used to simulate "protein folding", keep in mind that protein folding is to single-cell division what memorizing your ten decimal digits is to quantum physics and doctorate level calculus. The two can hardly be compared, even though the first is a building block to the second. Secondly, all digital system that simulate physical systems must do so a pre-determined "resolutions". In the world of 3D graphics, for instance, as a car speeds towards a wall, the picture of the car and wall may be drawn 10 times, 100 times, or 1000 times depending on how fast the "real time" engine is capable of satisfying the "geometry engine's" will to keep the car in the right place given the amount of time elapsed. For instance, if the computer can re-draw twice every second the complex vertices and shaders that make up one frame, then a very choppy presentation will show the car hitting the wall in 3 seconds. If the computer can draw 10 frames per second, the display will show a much smoother rendition of the car hitting the wall, but still in just 3 seconds. If the display can render 32 or more "fields" (half-frames, every other "scan line"), then the display will actually fool the human eye into believing that it is watching a "full-motion" rendering of the car hitting the wall. However, this isn't actually true. In fact, in 3 seconds time, only about 100 frames could be rendered at 32 fields per second. But it you've ever seen high-speed photography of a crash dummy hitting an air-bag or a bullet flying from the barrel of a gun, then you know that even at a million frames per second, small changes are reflected in EVERY FRAME! So how many states you choose to measure in a second determines how many states you capture, and take into account. In biological and physical systems, these states are the moments in time that you are watching. But between these moments, the vast majority of time passes without observation. If you're watching a tortoise crawl through the sand, then 32 frames per seconds will certainly suffice. You can pretty much guarantee that the tortoise didn't run off and get a burger and fry between frame 17 and 18. If, however, you're watching the blindingly fast reaction between molecules that make up proteins that make up a strand of DNA interacting with an mRNA strand, then a million frames per second doesn't really do it justice at all. The only way to model such complexities in our day is to elongate time.

A former manager of mine used work for Amdol designing I/O bus architectures. He said that they ran a weeks-long software simulation of one of their chips, but only simulated a total of 6 seconds worth of actual I/O once the chip was finally constructed. Software is much, much slower than hardware. Even much more so, software is infinitely slower than the real world. No matter what resolution you choose to measure a physical system, virtually all time passes between your measurements. Any attempts to circumvent this method of modeling and optimize the output is merely a model of one's assumptions, not of the real world. The more optimized the output, the less of a true model it is and the more of a model of one's assumptions it is.

All that to say this: if someone today claims to use computers to simulate evolution, you must parse their words. They purport to have modeled unspeakable numbers of creatures over eons of time and arrived at a result in short order. In order to do that, your "model" would have to be nothing BUT assumptions. Thus, if you write a program to tell you that evolution is true, then don't be surprised if it does!

The second absurd claim is that network and telephony networks exercise "evolution" when passing data through them. Now, every network programmer knows what a "trace route" is. In windows, the tracert command echoes back the "route" used for data to travel from your computer to some remote computer and back and the elapsed time between each hop. Most also know that if you tracert the same host on different days, it will often result in a different route than before. If I'm getting data from a computer in India, the data might make 20-30 "hops" from one router to another along the internet backbone. The request for the data goes from my computer to my local router, usually in the same building. From there it "hops" to my internet service provider: Comast, Earthlink, AOL, or some other provider. After a couple 2 or 3 "hops" at Comcast, it goes out to the real internet and finds it's way to the host computer via a series of hops that tend to move it geographically closer and closer to it's destination. Finally it's received by their internet service provider, forwarded to their company's router and finally to the specific computer that has the data I want. The data then takes the reverse route, usually, but not always identical to the request route. But all those "hops" hit routers in between Comcast and say, Bangalore Electronics's routers. Those public routers are "learning" systems in that they are constantly measuring the response times from various other routers and re-routing packets of data around slower or over-burdened routers to keep the total "latency" (response times) rather low. When routers fail to auto-optimize routes, human administrators can go in and define "static routes" to override the router's artificial intelligence and assert a better plan.

Breathe! Ok, now what Dr. Chimp is trying to hoist on the public is that this auto-optimization, similar in all digital networks, is proof of evolution!!! These systems were designed from the ground up to do exactly what they do, and this is proof of evolution! Yikes!

The third absurd claim is that the behavior of colonies of ants proves evolution! Now admittedly, when he claims it proves evolution, he's talking about the tendency of randomness to produce an improved system. The problem is that the things he states as randomness could easily be rephrased as "applied design". The scent trail, foraging specialists, carriers, and sudden, mass, hunger-based movements of colonies that he observes are all programmed responses using intricate instruments that pre-exist the duration of his experiment. In this clever, misleading way, the bar for "proving evolution" gets set so low that a child cutting across a field to get home proves evolution!!!

The fourth example is not any better. That bacteria in clusters suddenly change their behavior in a way that kills their host and thus, ultimately themselves is, by no means, producing a better system. I think he kind of lost focus towards the end of his chat.

If this is what passes for proof of evolution amidst the echoes of learned professors in the higher halls of learning these days, then I'm not all that worried about a sudden shift towards the hopeless world view of evolution. And by the way, Steve, your article is misnamed.

P.S. - Keep an eye out for Ben Stein's new movie, Expelled. It is documented proof of the slight of hand and scholastic intimidation that is commonplace in the scientific community today.

Irreducible Complexity: Three Species Wide

2008-01-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Feathered Dinosaurs: That Didn't Last Very Long

2008-01-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Rapid "Evolution": New Fish Sighted!!

2008-01-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Lazarus Effect: Goblin Shark

2008-01-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

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.

More Slight of Hand: Reverse Engineering

2007-11-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

Reverse engineering happens when one group of engineers takes the finished product of other engineers, say a missile, and disassembles it, noting the size, shape, weight, materials, color, density and other properties they find along the way. Done thoroughly, the reverse engineer is able to produce blueprints that may be used to build many more missiles without having to do the normally requisite research and development work. The one thing the reverse engineer is not able to reproduce is the manufacturing processes necessary to fabricate the component parts.

Reverse engineering is a well-known technique in the technology world. If the Chinese can't steal the process documentation to build a Stinger missile, they will simply try to acquire a working missile through shady channels and reverse engineer it. Their final product will look a little different and have slightly different behavioral characteristics than the superb U.S. Stinger missile, but will do most of the same job as the stinger.

One problem that evolutionists have is explaining how complex systems like the human eyeball, the bombardier beetle's explosive defense mechanism, or the amoeba's flagellum came into existence by gradual and accidental means. The flagellum on an amoeba has some 27 components (plus or minus) that had to exist all at the same time for the flagellum to work in the job of propelling the whole amoeba through a liquid medium. If only one of those components were missing, the flagellum would not function. So did all the components come into existence at once? Wouldn't that kinda' hint at design rather than accident? Well, yes, but...

This problem for scientists is called irreducible complexity. Now don't get too excited and call up your evolutionist buddies. Evolutionary biologists treat anything exuding irreducible complex characteristics as merely a matter of time. Because their faith precludes the existence of God, they will never yield because of it. Rather, they "hold judgment" until science gets around to solving the problem. One technique they've used for defeating irreducible complexity is to say that the complex system must have served other purposes in the past than it does now. They'd say that only when all the components were in place did the complex system serve the purpose it does today. They couldn't say what, but it musta' been!!

Another mechanism evolutionists use to defeat the problem of irreducible complexity is reverse engineering. Evolutionary Biologists are renown reverse engineers. They'll start by breaking they eyeball into it's component parts and dissecting each of them. They'll catalog all of the unique chemical compounds that make up the part. Then they'll go in search of other natural means that produce those chemical compounds. When they've done all their research, they'll start a "musta' been" story line that explains how the human eyeball came into existence. Whatever they come up with (which is usually completely different than another group of scientists on the other side of the world), MUST be the truth! That's how it happened. Never mind the amount of human input into the formula, never mind the unlikely or impossible nature of many of the steps in their hypothesis, never mind the total lack of evidence to support their claims!! It's settled! To argue with them would be...well...unscientific.

Sound exotic? It's exactly what's happening in a laboratory near you! The most unlikely mechanisms are being used to explain what we see (or see with) in today's organisms. Their only merit: They did it without having to admit that there is a God who designed these extraordinarily complex systems.

Now to illustrate their technique, let me explain how the H3 Hummer came into existence:

The hummer has an impressive cam shaft weighing approximately 65 pounds. It's made of heat tempered iron, chrome alloy and can withstand extreme temperatures. This kind of metal mixture was discovered in 1892 in South Bend, Indiana. Therefore the most logical assumption as to where the modern Hummer rose is that approximately 420 million years ago, a volcano erupted spewing lava over a cliff hang that would some day be South Bend, Indiana. The lava super-heated the granite in the cliff until the iron ore inside the granite liquefied and dripped onto the valley floor below making a crudely shaped metal spike pointing upwards. Tens of thousands of years later, a rock came crashing down from the cliff above, smashing the spike into a tempered-iron bar. The rock on top of the bar slowly eroded over the course of a hundred thousand years and left the bar there exposed. During a flood shortly thereafter, it was washed off the face of the hill into the stream at the floor of the valley where it was tumbled over and over for tens of thousands of years, giving it the shape we now see. (The Journal Hummer, Issue XXXIV, vol. 12, p. 87)

Get the picture? The fiction I just made up follows the same reverse logic they use, but my invention is MUCH simpler than the ones evolutionary biologists come up with. You see how absurd it is. Yet this is just the kind of slight-of-hand they employ in explaining away what they can't explain. They'll drown you in details too obscure and impossible to test, so field-specific, that anyone reading couldn't possibly substantiate or refute their claims. Readers can only choose to believe it or not believe the scientist.

Hey, that dilemma seems familiar somehow! Oh, yes, that's what God asks of us concerning His Word!! We can either choose to believe It or not believe It: Believe God or not believe God. No refutation, no substantiation, just believe.

In digesting the nonsense that scientists publish, a little logic goes a lot farther than years of book study. The techniques alone that evolutionists employ to prop up their claims should make them the targets of much scrutiny and suspicion. King David proved more educated than all Evolutionary Biologists when he cried out to God: "I am fearfully and wonderfully made"!

Missing Link! A Trip Through the Woods

2007-10-03T09:50:00.000-06:00

An recent story by the National Geographic magazine online proudly announced the discovery of a new dinosaur species with the never before heard headline of "Missing Link" Dinosaur Discovered in Montana!

First, the title. According to evolutionists, EVERY species is a "missing link" species! Can we stop saying "missing link" at the beginning of every sentence?! Missing link, missing link, missing link! There, it's been said, can we drop the prefix???

Second, they dropped in a couple Freudian slips into the article. The first one was in this paragraph:

An unusual new species of dinosaur discovered in a Montana fossil provides a long-sought link between a primitive group of dinos in Asia and those that roamed North America, experts say.

Now how can this fossil be a long-sought link, when it had never been seen before? Isn't this what we call "pre-judging the evidence"? It's like a defense attorney hired to defend a murderer: he's already decided that the knife, the footprints, the gloves, the blood in the white blazer...oops, am I betraying my thoughts? Anyway, he's already decided that they were planted and fabricated by the police. These guys have already decided.

Also, note how they only tell us about the "missing link" that they "knew" was there when they find it! How do we know they knew? Have you ever been lost in the woods following someone who claims to know where he's going? It's like that. Every so often, he lets out an "Oh, yes, there we go!" and then marches boldly toward some tree or rock. After about ten OhYes's, you start to catch on that this guy has no clue where we are! Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch?

The second gem was in this paragraph:

"We knew that [the two groups] were related, but we didn't have any fossils that showed a mixture of characteristics like this and thus [demonstrated] the split between the Asian group and the North American group."

So, if you didn't have any fossils showing characteristics of both groups, then how did they know they were related?!? Oh, that's right, we're all related, I forgot. How about this:

"We knew that [humans and Pediculus humanus (body louse)] were related, but we didn't have any fossils that showed a mixture of names like this and thus [demonstrated] the split between the tiny insect group and the North American, listening-to-ipod group."

There. Mine is as valid as theirs. Filled with slight of hand, self-aggrandizing affirmations, and ridiculous, unproven assertions. And, best of all, now everyone thinks I'm smart!

Rats! One More Extinction

2007-10-02T13:27:00.000-06:00

In a recent article published by Reuters, the author dropped a scientific bomb while discussing the need to wipe out rats on one of the Aleutian islands. What did he say that was so stunning to read? Here goes!

Once informed about the environmental destruction wrought by rats, citizens are generally determined to avoid them. Rats are blamed for causing about half the extinctions of various species worldwide since the 1600s and are persistent nuisances once established, said Clarke.

Did you catch it? Now I thought that mankind was the chief evildoer in our delicate ecosystem! But it appears we've been playing second fiddle for quite some time now!

Now with species like cockroaches and skunks and termites still plaguing the planet, I think that mankind must redouble his efforts to reclaim his dominion over the pests of the world.

So I'd like to applaud these scientists for their role of improving the planet by means of unnatural selection.

Rapid "Evolution": Like Watching Water Boil

2007-08-29T10:10:00.000-06:00

Something very interesting has been simmering in the world of evolution fantasy.

First some groundwork. We, at least I, believe in variation and a tiny bit of natural selection. I believe that the great-great-great-great grand lizards of today's lizards may look slightly different than today's lizards. Longer tongues, shorter noses, more brown, less green, larger scales, rounder claws, etc...

What I don't believe in is evolution: the belief that the great^60,000 grand lizards of today's lizards will be butterflies.

Now one tenant of evolution is the belief in the old age of the earth (anything longer than 10,000 years would fall into that bucket, but normally it's hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions of years). This belief is in stark contrast to the Biblical truth that states that mankind is only a couple days younger than his primate and especially his eukaryotic, earthly co-habitants, somewhere around 6,500 years. By hanging all evidences upon a framework of many millions of years, evolutionists try to circumvent the presuppositional belief that the universe has far more ancient origins than it actually does.

Using Biblical chronology and genealogies, the Bible sets forth a world around 6,500 years old. Many evidences in science corroborate this rough age, but they don't get much press because of the agenda of atheistic scientists. After all, the whole point of teaching evolution is to establish as consensus a world view that excludes the possibility of a literal Biblical Creator. Certainly, if there is a Creator, then homosexuality and other moral blights are sins, rather than evolutionary aberrations; and homosexuality is a deliberate act of rebellion rather than a natural behavior out of our hands.

Thus, one front in the battlefield of creation versus evolution has long been the age of the earth.

Closely tied to that issue is the argument about how rapidly living things change generationally. The extreme variation seen in living things can only be explained in a hand full of ways. Biblically, God created the world in 6 literal days. We know this to be true from God's Hold Word. But evolutionist believe that the living things we see in the world are the survivors of a huge tree of living things dating back to the first living thing that came together accidentally in the primordial goo.

Within the big-tree crowd, there are two camps: the Gradualists and the Punctuated Equilibrium...ists. The Gradualists believe the species changed ever so slowly into their current form. The Punct...the other guys believe that stable ecosystems tended to keep the species stable for millions of years, and then suddenly, cataclysmic events (volcanoes, asteroids, ice ages, Democratic takeovers of congress) caused abrupt changes in ecosystems which forced anatomical and genetic changes in hosted species.

The punctuated equilibrium theory is useful to Darwinists because it helps explain what they've coined the "Cambrian Explosion". The Cambrian Explosion is a time way back there, when supposedly, after hundreds of millions of years of relatively slow evolution producing only algae, nematodes and trilobites, suddenly in 53 million years or so (yes, that little), nearly all known types of life suddenly appeared, presto chango!! They attribute this explosion to a sudden and abrupt change in the worldwide ecosystem. But does that hold water?

One factor I've never seen them take into account is migration. They assert that ecosystems had to change in order for host species to change. But I noticed something recently to which I've never seen them pay much attention, but I think is very relevant! In walking a short distance here in Utah, the kind of ecosystem changes very rapidly. You can go from deciduous forests (leaf bearing trees), to conifer forests (pine trees) in a hour's walk. You can move from high stony mountains to low sandy deserts in a short walk. You can go from lush river-side fauna to scorched, broken earth where nothing grows in a short drive. In a few minutes you can ascend above the tree line on surrounding mountains.

What's my point? There are many different ecosystems in a relatively small area. If ecosystems played the central role in punctuated equilibrium, then wouldn't migration tend to be a far more prominent player in speciation (multiplication in species) than global climate change?

I think that scientists that hold to global climate change as the primary mechanism of speciation show, not only that they are easily fooled, but a tendancy to play to whatever modern political correctness dictates.

Additionally, studies (here, and here [read both]) have shown that species can change very quickly, though always within boundaries. A single species of lizard placed on several different islands developed short or long legs depending on the type of vegetation on each island. The entire study lasted only 10 years, yet the results were conclusive and apparent. Migration was the mechanism; the changes were sudden, by evolutionary biologists' expectations.

If migration is a more powerful means of speciation and speciation is vastly more rapid than evolutionists think, then 6,500 years should be plenty to turn the thousands of "kinds" created in Genesis into the millions of "species" we see today.

Darwinists measure evolution in terms of "darwins". The changes that occur in an organism in millions of years may amount to only 1 darwin in traditional, evolutionary thinking. The studied lizards evolved at a rate of 2000 darwins!! Clearly, evolutionists are wrong on this count. The original reason for insisting upon billions of years is because they thought they needed that amount of time to explain the changes in the species through gradualism.

If evolutionists would invent a term like, say, "ecos" that measured how much the climate was changing globally, then you could conclude that there are areas here in Utah that are thousands of "ecos" different from each other.

What is observable is rapid change due to varied ecosystems, exclusively observed by means of migration, not global ice ages and meteor strikes. The thousands of species God created have, each of them, the ability to vary according to the climate, diet, vegetation and cohabitants in any particular ecosystem. By the time the Eden butterfly reached the other end of the globe, it may have speciated into thousands of distinct species. But this isn't evolution. It's variation. As some men are midgets and others giants, so the potential exists in all living things to survive in a broad spectrum of ecosystems and vary accordingly.

God made it that way. Evolutionary Biologists have yet to even discover it.

Scholastic Intimidation

2007-08-21T10:18:00.000-06:00

Scholastic intimidation is rampant in colleges and in the professional scientific community. Students, professors, researchers; few dare break ranks with the party for fear of the retaliation they'd suffer.

In several of my past posts, I've made statements that presuppose that a scientist would be excoriated by his peers and funding sources if he were to propose anything outside the accepted dogma. If, for instance, a scientist were to purport that there was no ice age, or that the effects currently attributed to an ice age were possibly the effects of a global flood, he would suffer all forms of intimidation and protest. Un-Darwinistic ideas aren't even allowed to be considered as possibilities in the scientific community. Proposing something potentially Christian would draw even greater ire. The message they send: "It's not worth it! Just tow the line!" And the message could not be clearer. Don't debate contrary ideas upon the merits. Ridicule the authors and the ideas. Accuse them of being unenlightened. State that they probably think the earth is flat or that leeches should be used by surgeons!

This casts a shadow of doubt on all scientists. Which are conducting themselves ethically, reporting their observations, and which are cow towing to their own interests, or at least their own fears? Which ones are intimidated and which are intimidators?

I've seen many stories like this, but it finally occurred to me to post these things on my blog. This story is of a scientist who is being called every kind of Hitler for simply stating that trans gender behavior is a product of one's own perverted mind (that's not what he says, but I think anyone with brain can recognize the symptoms in this article) rather than being "born a woman in a man's body", thus making it God's fault if there is a God (Even Christians are buying this sort of garbage these days!).

When I come across other links, I'll post them here as well. In the mean time, Oh be careful little mouth what you say!

National Geographic Corroborates Bible...Accidentally.

2007-07-30T09:50:00.000-06:00

I know this is a little off topic for an evolution blog, but I found it too interesting to ignore.

In a recent article by the National Geographic, archaeologists have discovered substantial evidence of a "volcanic eruption" around 1500 BC that leveled several cities in or near Sinai. They don't document precisely where the volcanic rock came from, a known volcano or eruption. Rather, they have different theories about how the Mediterranean Sea washed the lava rock onto Egyptian soil, either through a tsunami caused by the alleged eruption or gradually over many years. I think this second theory arose when they realized that tsunamis are Japanese (I looked it up), and that back then tsunamis weren't so fashionable the way they are today.

The Bible tells of the Hyksos king that was not of the previous dynasty which knew of Joseph. The Hyksos are known historically as Egypt's 15th dynasty.

Exo 1:8 Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.

The actual plague is recounted in Exodus 9.

Exo 9:22 And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch forth thine hand toward heaven, that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt, upon man, and upon beast, and upon every herb of the field, throughout the land of Egypt.
And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt.
So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation.
And the hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the field, and broke every tree of the field.

Some date the plagues of Egypt at 1491 B.C. That's fits pretty well with their description "around 1500 B.C.". Of course they will try to explain everything in natural terms, and I can't say that God didn't use some volcano to cause this plague (though it makes the hail hard to explain), but I do believe that these guys have uncovered evidence of God's hand of judgment on Egypt in the days of the Hyksos Pharaoh.

They've pegged the place, the time and the plague, but I'm sure it's all just a coincidence.

You just gotta' laugh...

2007-07-27T10:37:00.001-06:00

First, read this article.

Sometimes you just gotta' laugh at the reasoning of evolutionary biologists (formerly scientists), in how they choose to interpret new archaeological findings. In this article about a recently uncovered Mastodon, learned team leader Evangelia Tsoukala of Aristotle University expresses her high hopes in this paragraph:

The scientists hope the rare find might shed some light on why mastodons went extinct in Europe about two million years ago, even though the mammals continued to roam North America until about 11,000 years ago.

Did you catch it?

This Mastodon was found in Greece. Greece is in Europe, in case you didn't know.

The learned scientists are of the firm persuasion that Mastodons went extinct 2 million years ago in Europe. Yet here one is buried in 4-5 feet of dirt. "But it's 2 million years old!", right? Wrong. Look at the tusks. They are laying right where they were uncovered (thus the red and white scaling bar above the tusks). They are inverted (pointing in opposite directions, yet parallel)! This Mastodon was buried by human hands! But...in Greece...2 million years ago???

No, this animal was buried much more recently than that. They'll never admit it, but this find dashes their belief that the Mastodon became extinct in Europe 2 million years ago. Again, they've disproved their previous assumptions but dare not say so for the retaliation they'd suffer.

The theories that evolutionary biologists entertain might as well be Dinotopia for the little light they shed and fiction they contain.

Extreme Variation: Alot of explaining to do!

2007-04-24T00:17:00.000-06:00

In a recent visit to Fairhaven Baptist Church, the church/college I attended in Chesterton, Indiana for many years, I discovered I had at least one reader left. That being true, I felt bad for my long sabbatical from writing on the topic of evolution versus science. So here is my next installment, I hope you (singular) enjoy it.

One thing that has been holding my attention recently is the number of highly unusual anatomical features, behaviors and other facets that must be explained in terms of gradual development if we are to believe evolutionists fairy tale about the origin of these species.

For a simple example, consider nest-building instincts. How did the inclination, ability and proficiency to build a nest come to any one set of animals? Would the inclination mean anything without the ability (strength, dexterity, skill)? Would the ability mean anything without the inclination? Even more, how did the inclination, ability and proficiency to train their offspring come to them? How did the offspring develop a mechanism by which to learn and remember the behavior once demonstrated?

A nest must be made of certain materials, constructed a certain way, at a time right for the offspring, not too early not too late. It must be located in a place safe from predators and accidental injury to the offspring. The temperature must be just right. Not in the direct sunlight, nor if full shade. It must be sturdy, and constructed of materials that don't attract the attention of unwanted eyes. And what's the point. If I (the parent bird) got here alright, then why do I need to build a nest for my eggs? Nest building is akin to basket-weaving, but with only a vague sense of symmetry. Where would one go to school for weaving? How will I transport the materials? And how will I secure them in the tree until they are all collected? Should the edges of the nest go up or down? Will this branch sway too much in the wind? It's not so simple as it seems!

Even if you come up with a story that explains all these problems, what is the mechanism of memory? If you say that it is simply mental memory, then how do you explain orphaned animals that exude the same basic characteristics and behaviors as their parents without ever having known them? If you say that it's genetic memory, then the problem only worsens! Since evolution's storyline relies upon accidental changes in the genome, then how could a learned behavior possibly be accidentally coded into the genome within the same generation as it was learned, so as to pass that behavior on to the ensuing generation. I'm not a gambling man, but I'd take odds on that one!

If the genetic alteration came before any learned behavior, then why aren't we seeing birds attempting to speak and elephants attempting to fly....without Disney? If they hold to the genetics-first method of passing on behavioral characteristics to offspring, then their whole theory on "gradual improvements" is lost. A thousand deleterious changes should occur for every one beneficial change!

Evolutionary Biologists would certainly come back with the ol', "only beneficial changes get passed down, because non-beneficial changes cause the host to die out" line. But these people have never raised children. Any parent knows that both good and bad behavioral characteristics are passed to our children without either dying out. And scientist can's explain any reason why that would be different in the rest of the natural world.

But if the God of Heaven created these creatures by special creation, then none of these things present any problem. As God is infinite, so do we see His infinite nature reflected in the natural world He created. Through the vastness of space, the speed of light, the complexity of life and the power of the atom, we see things so vast that our mortal eye cannot discern between these and things infinite. Truly, "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Psalm 19:1

To Come on the topic of Extreme Variation:

Vastly differing habitats of extant species (extremophiles and the like)
Vastly differing forms of communication of extant species
Vastly differing forms of navigation of extant species (where are the bees going?)
Vastly differing diets of extant species (You eat what?)
Vastly differing forms of housing of extant species (You built that....yourself?)
Vastly differing forms of predation of extant species
Vastly differing defense mechanisms of extant species (zap, kaboom, vanish, bloat, poke, and die)
Vastly differing methods of reproduction of extant species (hover-craft)
Vastly differing interdependencies of extant species (I'd lichen it to co-habitation)
The vast number of fully unique behaviors and mechanisms found in extant species (this one's very interesting!)

Lazarus Effect: Frilled Shark

2007-01-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

I came across another Lazarus species that I thought I'd try to chronicle for the sake of those who care. I've posted a link at the bottom of this post.

If you recall from past posts, the Lazarus Effect is the phenomenon that happens when our learned evolutionary biologists discover a species that was known only from the fossil record until someone found one walking/swimming/crawling around. Lazarus species often appear not to have changed in the past hundred million years or so. Evolutionists often try to say that these species have changed very little over the eons, but that is merely an exercise of their faith. In fact, they can't easily quantify how they've changed. Typically what they call "little changes" are far less in magnitude than the variations present in, say, modern humans.

Of course, we know that God created these animals less than 8,000 years ago pretty much as they are today. When we read that the fossil record appears identical to a walking, breathing (swimming) creature, it comes as no surprise to us. The flood of Noah covered the earth. Entire regions were covered in sediment and mud in a cataclysmic event that changed the face of the entire earth.

Evolutionists also try to appear somewhat composed when this kind of news comes out. They straighten their jacket, put on a good face and pretend they expected that. They merely lack an explanation! Give them time, they'll concoct something.

A recent, anonymous reader accused me of being "against science". Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe that science is a worthy profession. But science gives solutions, not answers. I debated fellow a few weeks ago who believed that science was owned by Illuminati types and we weren't hearing the whole story. He said that everything we've been told is a lie. I pointed at my Ford pick-up truck and said, "My truck is a product of a thousand concrete scientific inventions! And it runs!!" Science is real. It gives us useful solutions to nagging problems. But only faith gives answers. In order to find answers in science, you have to read into things a bit. Better to do your soul searching with someone who believes you have a soul!

Hopefully I'll have time to comment on my recent trip to the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. It's a hoot!! Wait till you find out how asexual reproduction swerved into sexual (2 part) reproduction!

It takes a big man to admit when he is wrong. In modern science, there aren't many big men.

Shark Species Filmed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frilled_shark

Global Warming: Mankind = .04 % of the problem?

2006-09-06T13:09:00.000-06:00

In a recently published article, global warming alarmists have discovered that huge amounts of Methane are being ejected from soil and ice deposits they believe to have been frozen for 40,000 years. While we all know the earth was created by God just 6.5-8,000 years ago, they don't.

One more detail we know about global warming, and why we must combat it now by exchanging our Hummers for bicycles, right? Not quite. What the article inadvertantly does is to show how slight a contribution fossil fuel burning vehciles and power plants make to the overall "greenhouse gas" mixture. How slight? Well, the article points out that the Methane leak could be as much as 100 times more than all fossil fuel burning on earth. So during a single year, that means that only 1% of all greenhouse gasses come from energy-greedy humans, and 99% (roughly) from innocent old permafrost.

To complicate things further, it turns out that where the "global warming" effect is concerned, Methane is 23 times as potent as Carbondioxide! What does that mean? Well, not only is man putting out 1% as much gas, but the gas he's putting out is 1/23 as potent for global warming. So the end result is that mankind contributes only four hundredths of a percent to the overall global warming picture (which to be clear, is not happenning).

See the article here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060906/ap_on_sc/warming_permafrost

Isomorphic Instantiation

2006-08-25T16:07:00.000-06:00

Isomorphic Instantiation is a term that describes what happens when a complex, man-made technology is subsequently found to exist in nature. One such example is echo-location. It's the means by which bats find their way in total darkness by sensing the echo resonance of their own high-pitched chirps bouncing off cave walls. It is different in no substantial way from advanced submarine sonar systems that can identify the class and displacement of ocean-going vessels miles away.

Another such example is what we know as Light Emitting Diodes or LED's. LED's are a form of electro-luminescence that occurs when narrow spectrum light is emitted from a semi-conductor which has been electromagnetically stimulated in the "forward direction". Among other uses, this technology has put nickel-sized lights on the key chains of many Americans. These lights can last ten years without a need for replacement batteries. Yet, this same technology was found to exist in a form of southern butterflies.

Additionally, bacterial flagellum that serve to propel bacteria through a liquid medium, are no different than outboard motors that have spelled death for so many large-mouth bass.

There is no shortage of examples of this observation of advanced design in nature. A wasp that build himself an echo chamber to attract a mate. Ants that farm other species of insect, or grow their own crops for food. There are hundreds of known examples, and many yet to be discovered.

All of these are evidence of our all-knowing God who designed machines of unimaginable, incomprehensible complexity. Scientists have only begun to understand the full inner-workings of single-cell creatures such as amoebas. What hope do they have of fully understanding our own human bodies?

If they were honest, scientists would make their lab verse:

Pss.139:14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

Truth Versus Fact

2006-07-20T23:25:00.001-06:00

Science is the pursuit of facts, not truth. A scientist leaves the ownership of truth to philosophers and theologians. The currency of science is the provable, not the believable.

This is the kind of mumbo-jumbo you'd hear if you were a pupil in thousands of biology, archaeology, and paleontology classrooms. But this kind of thinking is a rejection of the concepts of both truth and fact.

Truth is, by definition, the extent of all truisms. Everything that is true is part of truth. In every trial, the man is either guilty or innocent, never both, never neither. Despite what the fallible court may rule, a truth exists. Hidden from all human knowledge, perhaps, but true nonetheless. The thing that is true is also a fact. Fact, in scientific terms is something that is *observably* true, but not different in substance from truth.

The purpose of this rhetorical slight of hand is to disarm the still under-developed critical thinking abilities of young university students. What better way to supplant the truth that the students know than by convincing them that there is room for two truths in their world view: one under the banner of truth, the other flying the flag of fact.

As the impressionable students make space in their minds for the second truth, they never realize that they are doing so at the expense of the first. After several years of thinking this way, they come to realize that the notion of truth versus fact was nothing more than another way to say that whatever is not proven is false. Thus the conclusion: whatever is believed by faith is false!

Secular university can be a dangerous place for young people of faith. Like a minefield, knowing the devices of one's enemy can arm him with knowledge enough to neutralize that advantage.

Facts are always true, and all that is true is also factual. Everything that is not true is false or fiction. That there is a God is not only true, it is fact. Everything that suggests there is no God is false, untrue.

Critical mass is achieved in a compression type fissile reaction when two solid objects are forced together to occupy the same space at the same time, beyond natural mass. This redefines the composition of both in terms of each other. Neither survives in its original state. It's a messy process, I understand.

It is no less messy when two mutually exclusive truths attempt to occupy the same mind at the same time. The composition of both is decomposed, and the subject is left with the belief that there is no truth.

Genetics: Our Greatest Common Mother

2006-07-05T11:11:00.000-06:00

For those of you who are familiar with the raging battle between creationists and evolutionists, you have probably heard the argument put in terms of a young versus old earth. Well, an interesting discovery has been made, which I've discussed with some of you over the past few months. It seems that geneticists have found a long strand of DNA that allows them to determine relationships between people without having to delve into history, genealogy, etc. This strand of DNA proves that mankind is a young species!

The kind of relationships I'm talking about sound something like this: "These two boys shared a common mother back five generations, which would put their common mother in roughly 1850, assuming a 21 year generational cycle."

They've discovered a strand of DNA along the human genome that appears to serve no real purpose. It is simply copied from mother to son/daughter, over and over, throughout the generations. This strand is supposed to be an exact replica of the mother's DNA along the same place on the same chromosome. The problem is that almost like a scribe copying a book by hand, there are copy errors, slight deviations from the original. Well, it turns out that these copy errors happen at a fairly predictable rate. Therefore, you can use the actual differences, and number of differences between any two people on earth to conclude how many generations ago these two individuals shared a common mother. Sisters will have around the same number of differences from their mother, though different differences. The child of sister A will have her mother's variations from her grandmother, as well as a few variations from her own mother. The accumulated differences going backwards can be extrapolated to determine how many generations ago, they shared a common mother.

For you data people out there, this is a flat representation of a tree model.

Now the most interesting thing is that they have already taken this technique and applied it to a sampling of people from all the major races and people worldwide. The result: (drum-role) everyone on earth shared a common mother as little as 5,000 to 7,000 years ago.

Now where have I heard those numbers before? Oh, yes!! It's the approximate number of years since Adam and Eve lived as recorded in Genesis, if you take all genealogy data from the Bible, put it on a timeline and trace it back to the beginning, forward to known historical times (c.200 A.D.), and add the known number of years from then till now using historical sources!

It also corresponds to the date that evolutionists claim that two amino acids formed the first complex protein, and thus started the chain of life!!! Oh wait, no it doesn't.

The fact is this is a slam-dunk against evolution and for Biblical creationism.

No, you ready for a bold prediction? They're going to find the same generally corresponding dates (i.e. 5-7000 years) for elephants, horses, birds, fish, cats, dogs, and oh yes, monkeys! When they do, watch them spin it!

The fact is, God designed the genome, and He put this segment in there as an irrefutable proof against what God knew, would become one of the most powerful of Satan's illusions, employed to draw many away from God, and toward "science" (falsely so called - I Timothy 6:20-21), and that is Evolution.

Read the full release of this Associated Press story here:
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71298-0.html?tw=wn_index_9

Immutability: If it looks like a duck...

2006-06-25T20:56:00.000-06:00

You'd be surprised how often a piece of scientific evidence comes along that baffles Darwinists, though mundane in nature and totally expected by Biblical Creationists. Such is the topic of this post. Without paraphrasing, here is the startling, new discovery: "Fossil experts in China have unearthed a 110-million-year-old bird that is strikingly similar to today's birds"!

In this latest case of "if it looks like a duck", scientists have unearthed evidence that they almost admit they didn't expect because it goes counter to evolutionary thought. Once again, rather than coming to terms with their false assumptions, they fane amazement. The see profundity in what should only seem profound to the deeply stoned.

But before creationists rush out and pop the cork on their...uh...diet coke, you should know that the paper's author made compelling arguments that this species, though duck-like, was no duck. You (the name of the paeleontologist) argued in this paragraph:

It may have looked like a duck and acted like a duck, but Gansus was no duck.

So there you (as in the reader) have it! You (as in the reader) can't argue with that!! (Don't go too hard on him for his lack of reason in this paragraph, he was probably just trying to keep from being crucified by the Journal Science).

Now, since the dinosaurs supposedly evolved into birds (wink, wink), AND birds were fully-bird at the time of the dinosaurs, scientists are forced to conclude that physical traits attributed to birds, but not dinosaurs, must have evolved very quickly and then remained stable and relatively unchanged ever since. These traits would include flight feathers, webbed feet, and racing stripes.

What they've really uncovered here is called "proof". Just not the kind they wanted. Either they are forced to admit that the layers of strata in which this duck was found aren't nearly as old as they say, or they must conclude that the bird-like characteristics evolved quickly and early in contrast to popularly held evolutionary views. Since re-dating the strata would be far reaching to the point of catastrophic, triggering the revisitting of thousands of accepted "facts", scientists choose to accept the less destabilizing option, that bird features developed early and quickly.

But all this gives rise to a more interesting point. Evolution is an attempt to explain the creation of the species through random and accidental means. It despises the notion of design in all its forms, particularly a Divine Creator. If these random, accidental mutations and variations in the genome are responsible for the creation of the species as evolutionists claim, then there should be absolutely no mechanism to keep these changes from occurring. It is a claim of design that either the bird-like traits developed quickly, or that they stabilized for the ensuing eons. If chance created these creatures and their traits, then the same chance should continue to modify them at a predictable rate throughout eternity! Stability should be impossible in evolutionary terms. And that gives rise to a whole new category of blogs that I've had on the back burner during my couple of month sebatical: Immutability - the ability to remain the same. Normally only attributed to God.

"Evolution the science" is a front company for "evolution the faith".

Article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060615-dinosaurs.html

Evolution of Evolution: Who...er...What Killed the Mammoths?

2006-05-10T16:38:00.000-06:00

Perhaps one of the clearest evidences against evolution is the way they keep changing their story.

Have you ever worked with kids that, when caught, deliver up the most meritorious explanation as to why they were playing baseball in the living room (not my kids, of course), but when examined further, fall back to a more palpable explanation, but completely incompatible with their first story? Well, those kids grow up into Evolutionary Scientists!

You can always tell a person who has no firm opinion or at least no conviction in his opinion. He changes his tune over and over again based upon who his audience is at the time. A confident man holds and defends a position with boldness and conviction. Scientists can be sniffed out based upon their constantly changing story. Remember how Neanderthal used to drag his knuckles on the ground when we were kids? Now, of course, he walks upright because scientists feel that they've filled in more gaps between Neanderthal and chimpanzee. Thus, Neanderthal doesn't have to span so much space between chimpanzee and modern man. If you watch carefully, you'll notice that the newest interpretations always play into the political correctness of the day.

We're all too young to remember the days when evolutionary theories were used to justify slavery, or even the slaughter of the aboriginal peoples of Australia for museum props to further the cause of evolution the world over.

Then there was the decades-old theory about how Jacob Roggeveen wiped out the population of Easter Island by cutting down all their trees, introducing European diseases, and enslaving the native population. This interpretation played into the anti-imperialism mindset of the '60's and '70's, but as of late, has been supplanted by newer evidence. Now, it seems, the native peoples, themselves, cut down their trees shortly after their arrival, which was hundreds of years later than previously thought. Food supply, it seems, was the most likely cause of societal collapse into cannibalism and barbarism...not that the Europeans are forgiven or anything.

Or, do you remember all those paintings in school books showing a bunch of sparsely-clad, apeish men dancing around a well-skewered Woolly Mammoth as he stepped on some poor mother's son? Well, those pages are about to be ripped up, whited out, pasted over, in light of "new evidence". Who knows, that mother might even get her son back.

It seems the latest evolution of evolution is that of how the Mammoths died out. For the past 40 years or so, man has been slandered for having hunted this noble creature into extinction. Corporations and profit motive most likely. Well, that sermon has out-lived its usefulness and now we're on to better things.

According to Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska, climate change wiped out the Woolly Mammoth, not rabid hunters! So mankind is absolved at last...oh wait.

Whatever club evolutionary scientists are using to pound creationists over the head on a particular day seems also to be an irresistible tool to explain all of natural history.

Evolution evolves, but some things never change.

Evolutionists: Out of Sync with Probabilities

2006-05-10T14:36:00.000-06:00

The purpose of this too-lengthy discussion is to help the reader interpret scientific papers, articles, and periodicals and understand how much of what they are reading is actually proven fact versus speculation by the author.

Another field of study with which evolutionary scientists are out of step is called Probabilities. It is a sub-study of both Logic and Statistics.

If you've been keeping up with scientific periodicals or just the headlines, you've probably noticed the number of times that the concept of probability comes up. It's usually hidden in phrases like:

"...is likely a result of..."
"...may have influenced..."
"...is the most probable explanation for..."
"...which best explains..."
"...clear evidence of..."

Ok, that last one was mostly a shameless plug. Most of these are short hand for "the only thing I could think of is..." But you're not likely (see there's another probability) to read any lengthy article or publication without also seeing these kinds of phrases to shield the author from peer scrutiny and future discovery. Why is that?

Well, rules for proof have existed for a very long time. Some of these rules have been formalized in the last 500 years to give researchers and philosophers an idea of what will be expected of them if they come forward claiming to have proven some new thing. Some of these rules look like this: In order for a thing to be considered "proven", a thing must be...

reproducible
observable
invariable
the only remaining possibility
universally applicable
atomic (no external dependencies)
independently verifiable

Many mathematicians and philosophers (far smarter than me) have analyzed the concept of probability and proof and systematized their observations into useable formulas. One such fellow is named Andrey Kolmogorov. He formalized 3 rules of probability:

a probability is a number between 0 and 1;
the probability of an event or proposition and its complement must add up to 1; and
the joint probability of two events or propositions is the product of the probability of one of them and the probability of the second, conditional on the first.

To make it simpler,

Rule #1: if you are 90% sure of something, then that percentage is equal to 90 over 100 or .9 which is between 0 an 1 as he suggests.
Rule #2: if the probability is .9, then it's 'complement' (i.e. how unlikely it is) is equal to .1, since the sum of the probability and improbability must add up to 1.
Rule #3: if the probability of one event is 90%, and the probability of another event is 50%, then the probability of both of these events being true (or coming to pass) is the product of the two, or .9 times .5, or .45 (i.e. 45 percent).

Now, I'm sorry to have dragged you through all of this, but there is a point to it. When scientists say that they are 99% sure of something that depends upon the truthfulness of something else of which they are 95% sure. Then the combined probability of them being right on a whole is only 94%. If those two rely on something that is 98% sure, the total probability drops to 92%.

An example of scientific assertions depending upon one another might be something like: 1) Neanderthals were likely forced north and east out of Europe by more modern hominids. 2) Some of these exiles probably would have crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America before it's 3) [assumed] collapse 10-11,000 years ago.

There are at least 3 statements of probability here. Two are overt, the third, in square brackets, is implied. That Neanderthals crossed into North America over the Bering Land Bridge depends upon 1) their actually being forced out of Europe, 2) the Bering Land Bridge actually existing. To take it one step further, their crossing also depends upon the land bridge existing at the time that these atheistic scientists say Neanderthal existed. So there is a chain of dependencies, each with its own probability attached.

Evolutionary archaeology, paleontology, biology and zoology offer so many unproven theories, all of which are interdependent. Each tiny thing they claim to have proven is dependent upon hundreds of past unproven statements, and immediately becomes the basis for many future unproven assertions. When the likelihood of each new discovery is added to the formula the total probability, as a percentage, drops.

When evolutionary scientists claim a bunch of things that are "fairly likely", they want us to average all the relevant probabilities, and tack on a few merit points for good measure. 90% of 85% of 99% of 87% of 98% of 94% of 50% of 89% of 99% of 80% of 55% of 95% of 90% of 83% of 99% of 97% of 88% of 92% of 88% of 60% of 80% of 98% of 95% of 92% of 97% of 85% of 99% of 98% of 97% of 94% of 90% of 79 % of 99% = 100%, which is how certain THEY are that evolution is true.

When in reality, the likelihood that all they're asserting is true is the PRODUCT (multiplied, not averaged) of all relevant probabilities, (i.e. 1%); and that's probably too generous!

Evolutionists: Out of Sync with Astronomy

2006-05-09T15:28:00.000-06:00

Scientists are a disorganized bunch. From lab to lab, from country to country, from field to field, there is little consistency in what scientists ask us to believe.

Consider the differences in two particular fields of study: Evolutionary Biology, and Astronomy. Evolutionary Biologists ask us to believe that mankind evolved in an unbroken progression from primordial goo over the past 4.1 billion years (plus or minus 15 minutes). Ok, fine. Astronomists ask us to believe that the chances of all life on earth being wiped out by a giant, city-sized (10 kilometers or greater) meteorite are about every 100 million or so years (plus or minus the time it will take you to read this blog). How do these two ideas sync up?

Answer: they don't. In the 4.1 billion years that evolution is supposed to have taken place from goo into macro-creatures such as man, the earth is supposed to have been destroyed, um...lemme see...41 times. So we've just gotten lucky, right? Well, how lucky have we been?

If you want to approach it mathematically, then the odds are 1 in 2^40, or one in two to the fortieth power. To break it down for you, if we go 100 million years without being struck by a very big rock, then we've defied the odds by 1 out of 2. If we go another 100 million years and still haven't been impacted, then we've again beaten the odds 1 out of 2, but now twice. Therefore, we've beaten the odds at a 1 in 4, still not that impressive. For every 100 million years we go without being struck by Synthia McKinn...er... a large meteor (or NEO for Near Earth Object), we have defied the odds by twice the previous 100 million years. So, the 1st 100 million years: 1 in 2 (or 2^1). The 2nd 100 million years: 1 in 4 (or 2^2). The 3rd 100 million years: 1 in 8 (or 2^3), etc... By the time we go 4.1 billion years, the odds are 2^40!!! That's 1 in 1,099,511,627,776! If these were 2.25 inch wide playing cards, then they would span from here to Mars (in it’s closest approach to earth in August 2003), 35 million miles! So pick a card.

In the mind of Evolutionary Biologists, the likelihood of life springing from dead materials by means of unlikely events is benefited by more time. But the Astrologists (using far more empirical methods) show that the more time you throw at the problem (past 100 million years), the more problematic evolution becomes. Each time a massive meteor hits, it pushes the reset button of life, and evolution is forced to restart!

The numbers against the Evolutionary Biologists are so massive that they make the belief in evolution highly mathematically improbable and, well...simply unscientific! They must either accept Divine protection of earth during those 4.1 billion years, or they must accept that the earth is a good deal younger than their illustrious theories assert.

P.S. - Check out this map of NEO's in and around the orbit of earth. These are detected using a radio telescope.

Differences? What Differences?

2006-05-02T10:23:00.000-06:00

A global warming article published 23 minutes ago, according to Yahoo! news, claims that differences in data collected from two different sources has been resolved. While surface measurements have supposedly long shown rising temperatures, satellites and weather balloons have shown just the opposite. Really? Since when? Why didn't we hear about these differences before? Oooh, that would have made you look bad! Oh, well, by all means, please, keep us in the dark! After all, we unejukatid folk merely exist to fawn over you brainy scientists whilst you figure out how you're going to make yourself look good again tomorrow!

No, honestly, had you EVER heard the global warming crowd suggest that there was ANY discrepancy in their data? So now, they've once again, gone from absolutely positive to absolutely positive, without discrepancies! Well, how do we know there aren't any discrepancies. I guarantee you, if I live another month, I'll have the opportunity to again rant about another (previously unmentioned) weakness in their theories that has been resolved!

As long as I've been watching the science headlines (about a decade), I've seen this pattern of hide-till-resolved a hundred times. This closely parallels the missing link I've written about before. They won't tell you there's a missing link until they think they've found something to fill it.

They have a word for this in politics too. It's called a "cover up"!

The Fruit of Darwinism

2006-05-01T14:13:00.000-06:00

Evolution kills God. That's it's intent.

I know, I know, how can true science have "intent"? But it does. Maybe intent isn't the right word. Perhaps "destiny" is better. Somewhere in the middle I think. When Edison invented the light bulb, it had wide-spread application to humanity and has revolutionized modern life, decoupling industry and even the private citizen from the timing of our solar orbit. When Lenoir built the first practical internal combustion engine, industrialists, inventors, and entrepreneurs laid up nights dreaming up the many applications to which it has today been employed. But since Darwin forwarded his theories on evolution, not one useful splinter of application to daily life has come of it. Has Darwinism had a lesser impact on modern life than the light bulb?

Perhaps, but not less important. While each invention has had it's wide-spread impact on civilization, they've all been useful. Darwinism's most profound impact has been to assault the relevance, or even existence of God! No medicines have been attributed to Darwinism. No machines, no conveniences, no advances in food production, no elongation of anyone's life expectancy can be attributed to Darwinism. Now this isn't true of Biology, Genetics, Chemistry, Geology, or any of the other "raw sciences". But Darwinism isn't among them. How could it be that so much effort, attribution, funding, and lip service be paid to a scientific fixture yet mankind receives nothing in return?

Answer? Because mankind wasn't meant to receive anything from Darwinism. Darwinism has no goals or aspirations except to preach the denunciation of God! Therefore, the more adamantly a particular scientist preaches the doctrines of Darwin, the more you can assert that he hates God.

But scientists don't say evolution is a fact anyway, right? They simply hold it up as a working model, a theory, until something better comes along. No. For something that can kill God in the minds of the masses, scientists are willing to give evolution a bye, an honorary doctorate. Something that can kill God shouldn't be required to pass muster. It should be given axiom-status, sovereign among the sciences. Darwinism isn't required to be observable. It isn't required to be reproducible. No, Darwinism became scientific fact the same way that the king with no clothes became gorgeously appareled: consensus.

Consider these quotes out of a recently published article on Yahoo! News:

"We have proved that one (species) is transforming into the other, so this evidence is important to show that there is human evolution... that human evolution is a fact and not a hypothesis," Asfaw said.
...
"It is the only place in the world where the three phases of evolution could be documented and proved," Asfaw said.

"All (three species) were able to be found in one place, proving that evolution is a fact," Asfaw said. "Successive records that we see here prove that the Afar region is the origin of human kind."

So simply lining up three pins in a row passes for proof of Darwinism according to this learned scientist. Darwinism is grandfathered into the larger family of scientific facts that hold exemption status: 1) Flat Earth; 2) 4 basic elements: earth, air, fire, water; and 3) life on mars.

As I've been sitting here writing this blog, I've noticed several similarities between my paper-clip dispenser and my stapler. Both use metal to fasten pieces of paper. Both are made of black plastic. Both were made in China and are patent-pending!! I think we're on to something!! If I could find a missing link, I might be able to establish the progeny of my less-primitive paper-clip dispenser with my more modern stapler. Hm. Searching... There!! My tape dispenser! I've found the missing link! The missing link was all that was necessary to establish progeny, right? And all located within inches of each other! I've shown proof. Three pegs is all it takes these days. Now to choose a name...Hodgenism? No...

Variation and Natural Selection <> Origin of the Species

2006-05-01T11:28:00.000-06:00

I believe in variation and natural selection. There, I've said it.

If you were to listen to modern scientists talk about variations of modern species, you'd think they'd invented the notion of variation. Darwin is credited with discovering variation and natural selection, as though no one had ever noticed it before! The ignorant Biblical creationist dragged his knuckles around for thousands of years, never noticing that Billy didn't look much like Tommy. But that's absurd. While Darwin formalized it into a term, he wasn't anywhere near the first to observe it.

Up until the time that Darwin was attempting to rationalize a scientific system whereby he might obviate the need for Divine input, no one needed to come up for a term that observed that Tommy was measly 4' 5" and Billy was a 7' bruiser.

I would liken it to the way that clinical psychologists have "diagnosed" every kind of bad behavior. Hyper-tension, ADD (pronounced ADD), ADHD, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, chemical imbalance, separation anxiety disorder, oppositional disorder, clinical depression and (my personal favorite) conduct disorder. That's the short list, and it grows annually! Why all the terminology, and why now? I'm not one to dump on the pharmaceutical companies. If they hadn't invented Maxalt, I'd have a migraine a couple times a week. But, I do believe that they have a big hand in the tokenizing of many bad behaviors. When they invented drugs to "treat" certain "conditions", they created a market reason to formalize these "conditions". Once formalized, markets grow around these ideas: Experts, doctors, professors, schools, clinics, and the public school (Oops! Freudian slip there). But these "conditions" were described and formalized in answer to a world view that "needed" to remove personal responsibility and destroy guilt, not because formalizing these notions was any "next logical step" in a continuing march toward human scientific enlightenment.

To be sure, Darwin noticed no more than anyone else had ever noticed: That some dogs are brown and some are black; that some people have blue eyes and others, green; that some breeds of cat are more than twice the weight of other breeds. But where the genius of Darwin differed from you and I was in his ability to fabricate the remaining assertions from thin air! A trick not all can master.

Darwin noticed that 1) specimens vary in size, color, proportional distribution of various extremities such as bills, wings, feet, head, etc... 2) that in any particular environment, physical attributes of a specimen make it more suited or less suited toward survival: By differing metabolisms requiring less water or food; by coloration that seconds as camouflage; by having bigger ears for better or worse hearing.

None of these things were new (or even middle aged) to mankind. And, with these observations, I agree. But immediately after that, Darwin and I take a fork in the road because Variation and Natural Selection do not equal the Origin of the Species.

Through a series of "must haves", Darwin asserted that these slight differences from one generation to the next (not corrected for same-generational variations) must account for their gradual formation into today's manifestations of that species from a simpler form of life (full of baseless assertions). He and his intellectual progeny asserted that these variations, given countless generations and infinite time, must have accounted for all variations of life from a single and simplistic life form.

Once the need for God was removed from this perverted worldview, they needed to formulate a theory by which non-life could become life without a need for God; and they're still stuck right there! They had to explain how, without God, and despite entropy, all the matter in the universe got there and how it organized into the complex systems that make up today's cosmos; and they're still stuck right there. They had to explain how fundamental changes could be passed on to the next generation and still produce a viable and virile offspring; and they're still stuck right there. They needed to prove that the descendency of all species can be traced to a single source using their genetics; and they're still stuck right there.

Nothing beyond the antique observations of variation and natural selection has ever been proven. So don't be fooled by the slight of hand employed by Darwinists when they observe no more than anyone else ever observed, and then assert what no one had previously been foolish enough to assert.

Global Warming: Startling New...uh...Paragraph!

2006-04-27T15:37:00.000-06:00

It's always tickling to browse the internet in search of the raw hyperbole that makes up the headlines of the global warming movement. Here's an example I found on the ENN (Environmental News Network) website where a member of the National Academy of Sciences calls on critics of global warming to apologize to his children for the grief they've caused them:

Their [his children's] world is going to be hotter than our world, unbearably so in some places. The weather is going to be more violent and less predictable. Precipitation patterns will be different, leading to increased flooding in some areas and droughts in others. Snowpack in the mountains is going to shrink and glaciers are going to disappear. It will be harder to grow enough food or provide enough fresh water for all. Entire ecosystems will be threatened; with humans, animals, and plants struggling to adjust. Indeed, global climate change is already here and it looks worse than we anticipated.

So let's take this step by step, shall we?

"Their [his children's] world is going to be hotter than our world, unbearably so in some places."

It already is. Has this guy ever been out of his air conditioned lab? Perhaps the best thing the average environmentalist could do is go outside sometime!

"The weather is going to be more violent and less predictable. "

...And watch the nightly forecast!

"Precipitation patterns will be different..."

It'll come down in rings and argyles tomorrow. OK? And...

"leading to increased flooding in some areas and droughts in others."

So, more of the same. Hm.

"Snowpack in the mountains is going to shrink and glaciers are going to disappear."

Last remnants of Noah's flood gone. Got it.

"It will be harder to grow enough food..."

Genesis 3:19 "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Sure, I agree with that.

"...or provide enough fresh water for all."

What's it cost to send a guy on that Russian space flight? Cuz' I saw pictures once and there was alot of blue!

"Entire ecosystems will be threatened;"

And that's what kills things: threats. And you can't make threats post 9/11. It's stalking, or even eco-terrorism. No wait, that's PETA and ELF.

"with humans, animals, and plants struggling to adjust."

Moved to Utah. Man! Don't I know!! Butchyano, ya' gotta' evolve.

"Indeed, global climate change is already here and it looks worse than we anticipated."

Well, that wasn't so bad, now was it? Let's see, should I go skiing in the mountains tonight, or biking in the hot West Desert?

Variation: Sub-species

2006-04-18T09:56:00.000-06:00

So what do these have in common?

Alvord cutthroat trout
Bonneville cutthroat trout
Coastal cutthroat trout
Colorado River cutthroat trout
Greenback cutthroat trout
Lahontan cutthroat trout
Rio Grande cutthroat trout
Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat trout
Westslope cutthroat trout
Yellowfin cutthroat trout
Yellowstone cutthroat trout

If you have a keen eye, you might have noticed that they are all, yes that's right, cutthroat trout!! Well, since you're on a roll, see if you can figure out this next one:

What do all these have in common?

Adriatic trout
Marmorata trout
Flathead trout
Brown trout
Ohrid trout
Sevan trout
Apache trout
Cutthroat trout
Gila trout
Golden trout
Rainbow trout
Aurora trout
Brook trout
Bull trout
Dolly Varden trout
Lake trout
Silver trout

Wow! You're on your game today. They're all trout! So why all the various species and subspecies of trout? In the end, aren't they all just...trout?

Well first, you've got these guys called Ichthyologists who do nothing all day long except studying fish. Anytime a topic receives that kind of attention by Harvard brain-washed scientists, it's going to be a bit over analyzed. I'm not really against the study of these fish, or even their categorization and sub-categorization that has become commonplace in the world of Biology.

All my objections come along in the second reason biologists of differing flavors tend to sub-divide species into smaller and smaller groups. See, it isn't very compelling when someone busts in the room and shrieks, "There are only 450 million trout left in the entire world!!!! We must do something!!!!!". However, when they call a press conference to lament the reduction in the number of Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat trout to only a few hundred thousand due largely to human interference, that grabs the headlines!

I think that the trout anology closely parallels the global warming trend, er...menace, ...er...crisis! Above all, most scientists just want to be worshipped. I tried to find a better word, but that's what it comes down to. They want to be obeyed unquestioningly, thought to be all wise, imputed with only the purest motives, and as famous, quoted, and discussed as deity!

They said the earth was cooling, people bought sweaters. They said the earth was warming, people ate more ice cream. They said there was climate change, but that wasn't even actionable. So what is a poor scientist to do? In search for relevance, they did what many children do when discussing their fathers: they engaged in a tit-for-tat to see which scientist could grab and hold the headlines.

They all sought the title of "foremost expert on climate change". And as the drive-by media is prone to do, they continually shoved the microphone into the face of the most dramatic alarmist. Scientist #1 said that global warming was happening, possibly at a rate of 1/10 of a degree per century; and people yawned. Scientist #2 said it was happening at a rate of 3 degrees per century; and ratings went up a bit. Reports became more dramatic and more alarmist until someone said that in the next 50 years, half of all species on earth would become extinct; and every news agency on earth carried the story!!!

But even that wasn't enough. Some out-of-step, but trend-following moron went and declared that it was just too late, that the damage was done and we must all now sit and wait for our impending doom. The room went silent and everyone just stared at each other. Then they all declared with one voice that the guy who said it was just an extremist.

Why? Why was he an extremist, but not the guy that said we had 50 years? Now can people who deal in billions of years really quibble over a 50 year gaff? Oooooh! Because if it's too late, then there's no need for scientists, no point in signing the Kyoto Accord, no need to spend billions of dollars on more stringent emissions standards, no need to waste further news cycles covering the next one-upist. We might as well eat, drink and be merry with what little time, and few trees we have left! I mean, what headline could be more alarming than "too late"? I know, "Scientist: Global Warming May Cause World-Wide Flood!!" Nah.

If you sub-divide species into smaller and smaller classes (see "smaller class sizes are good" by the NEA), a slight fluxuation in numbers of any one sub-species has a much greater impact than if it were rolled up into the world population.

Imagine the headlines if these sorts of tactis were used on the human population: "harvardous enlightenus conneticus americanus makes the endangered species list; traditional culling curbed in light of new evidence!"

Missing Link: Or Missing Chain

2006-04-12T10:26:00.000-06:00

Darwinists always talk about finding the "missing link". This puts into the minds of readers and conversationalists these two or three long segments of chain that lack only a single link or so to become one harmonious, singular chain. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Image some company builds a mile-tall concrete pillar to the bottom of the ocean floor somewhere between Europe and the continental United States, and puts a 10-foot long segment of road on top of the pillar, complete with yellow lane stripes and a light signal. While conservationists would certainly decry the traffic signal as "light pollution", the company could hardly claim to have constructed the first intercontinental Pan-European highway!

Yet, evolutionists with a million "missing links" yet to fill, hold a cereal bowl full of disconnected chain links in their hand and celebrate profusely when someone walks in the room and drops another disconnected link into the bowl, marking the near completeness of the chain.

What's worse, genetics has further complicated their quest to build their chain. What if one of the links was bronze, another was copper, another was lead, another was steel, another was brass, and the last was tin? In that case, the links you have don't even belong to the same chain! So you're even further from completing some ethereal chain!

As tissue specimens are collected and gene-mapped, we are able to tear apart each link and discover what it's made of. If one link's genome is 600,000 "base pairs" long (the size of some bacteria), while another link's is 3 billion "base pairs" long (the size of a mouse or human's), then they can't be from the same "chain" of decendency (and this ignores the coding of the base pairs!).

To a member of the genomics or bioinformatics community, sorting out which link belongs to which chain is as simple as is sorting pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters for you and I.

Scientists know that they don't have anything like a singular, cohesive chain. But they are slaves to their masters in the scientific community. If they want to be published or promoted, they must tow the line and pretend to be as confident in evolution as all their peers pretend to be. It's too bad that a few more honest scientists won't step up and declare the weakness of or at least question the accepted dogma. In our age of communication, haven't we had enough demagoguery?

For my part, I'd sooner buy a "gold" chain from a guy named "glitz" on a Chicago street corner than what Darwinists are selling.

Altered Beast: Looks-like Doesn't Mean Is-like

2006-04-11T14:31:00.000-06:00

Genetics are a wonderful thing! We all have 'em!

In addition to giving humanity hundreds of new and effective medicines, genetics research has also debunked a number of old wives tales that have plagued history through the ages, such as the Cooks Arrow fable, claiming that a Hawaiian arrow head was carved out of the bone of British explorer, Captain James Cook.
Another mighty exploit of genetics research is to finally bring down another fable of slightly greater proportions: Evolution.

Genetics is the bane of Darwinists! Just when everything seemed to be going their way, Francis Crick had to come along and discover DNA, now known to be the building blocks of life on earth. When discovered, Genetics was the hope of Darwinists to finally stamp out the arcane beliefs of the superstitious population of earth (i.e. religious people). Through mathematical probabilities, it should be simple to show the phylogeny of "related" species down through time. Yet, the hopes of Darwinists shortly gave way to fatalism in face of the evidence (which is why evolutionary bilogoists don't dwell on it).

This quote appeared in the magazine Science, November 1980:

The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomeno of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.

How damaging has genetic research been to the evolutionary faith? First consider this Coelacanth and Lungfish are (still) considered to be close relatives, as well as link-species in the lineage of the recently discovered Tiktaalik roseae. But the 1997 mappings of their genomes has not bourn out this classification. In an article discussing the problems of Clelacanth-Lungfish progeny, the Lungfish genome is found to be at least 35 times larger than Coelacanths:

Noonan said that coelacanth’s close relative, the lungfish, could also fill in the genetic gap between land animals and fish, but the coelacanth has one practical advantage: “The lungfish genome is enormous,” said Noonan, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At 35 times the size of the human genome, sequencing the lungfish is an unlikely proposition. In contrast, the coelacanth genome is smaller than that of either humans or mice.

So by genetic (true scientific) ways of reconning, Coelacanth and Lungfish are about as related as Ecoli bacteria and elephants!! If you don't like my conclusions, listen to the observations of another scientist out of SanDiego, CA:

Upon reviewing the molecular phylogenetics it is quite clear that the relationship between teleosts, tetrapods, coelacanths and lungfish is not resolved. Different datasets tend to support different hypotheses, and generally none of the separate datasets, or even combined data, deliver really decisive support for a single tree. There are obviously many gene specific molecular evolutionary artefacts. The project could expect to resolve the phylogeny, and as this has been used as a test case, would contribute to improved models of gene evolution underlying phylogenetic analyses - possibly better algorithms.

So in spite of the evidence that their theories are completely wrong and disproved, they still hold on to the belief that there is an evolutionary model out there, yet to be discovered, that holds the key to consistency between evolutionary taxonomy and documented genetics.

Evolutionists use nice paintings and simplistic drawings to show what, to the casual observer, appears to be clear descendency of species from protozoa to modern man. But in the face of genetic evidence, their theories fall like Enron stock prices!

I would assert, I think reasonably, that related species must have related genomes. If the genomes are widely different, then the species cannot be related. I would further assert that no animal species is closely related to man. Man is the special creation of God, set apart, and in God's image. Any superficial resemblances with Chimpanzes are just that: superficial.

In all likelyhood, the dogs are related to each other. The cats are related to each other. The apes are related to each other. The ants are related to each other. But the ants are not related to the apes which aren't related to the cats which aren't related to the dogs (and would tell you so if they could talk).

Missing Link: Transitional Species Debunked

2006-04-11T13:49:00.000-06:00

Debunked is probably too strong a word, but those that broker in the truth shouldn't have a hard time picking out nonsense and propaganda when they see it! Below is my thoughts on the latest discovery by scientists of what they are calling a transitional species between water-bound fish and land-roaming (terra-ferma) amphibian. It was written in response to an email from a friend directing me to an article on slashdot.com that announced this discovery:

Hey Jason,

How are things?

I thought you would like this recent article from the athestic anarchists at slashdot....

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/06/0217250

Alan

My response:

Alan,

Things are pretty good. I do miss Unishippers sometimes. Things there were more practical than here working for the government. It sure is nice to drive 15 minutes to work though (on a clear day with no construction!).

I read this article a few days ago in 3 different forms. I had to laugh, though at their outlandish speculation. I like your description of them: “athestic anarchists”. If you read carefully, there is no real evidence that this is a missing-link species. Consider these telling observations:

In the 2nd paragraph, they say that this find is in the class of Archaeopteryx which, they assert, bridged the gap between birds and reptiles. Problem is, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Archaeopteryx was anything other than just a bird. The whole body of evidence for Archaeopteryx being a bridge species is that they found it in a NE Chinese rock formation (Yixian) that, they asserted, predated the evolution of birds. Since birds didn’t evolve yet, they assert, Archaeopteryx must have been at least partly dinosaur! Interesting logic. If you’d found precisely the same fossil in strata that was dated, they assert, at say 300,000 years, then they would have said it was a new species of bird. But because of the strata it was found it, it must have been part dinosaur. What Archaeopteryx actually was is bedrock proof that birds were around as contemporary with the dinosaurs that supposedly turned into birds (a very new theory, even as evolution goes).
They also called it a “crocodile-like” animal. Well, if it’s like a crocodile, then why liken it to a fish!
The people who classified the find said it “probably had both gills and lungs”. Well that would certainly support their claims! But they didn’t find gills or lungs. All soft tissue was decayed an absorbed by the surrounding rock. No soft tissue survived (or normally does)! It really was just mindless conjecture to plant a picture in reader’s minds that would tend to support their claims that this animal was a transitional form.
I love this paragraph: Tiktaalik - the name means "a large, shallow-water fish" in the Inuit language Inuktikuk - shows that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water.” So a name they gave the animal is evidence of evolution? Huh?!?
They say it had a “more primitive jaw”. Again, how do they know what a primitive jaw would look like. How do they know that a different jaw is a “more primitive jaw”. Imagine if they applied this logic to humans! Are blacks or aboriginal more primitive? Are Caucasian characteristics more modern? Pure racism. Darwinism is the basis for much of modern racism, as well as anti-Semitism. Again, baseless assertions.
Keep in mind that they didn’t discover through this find that fish crawled onto land. They “knew” that long before! The previous claim was the Coelacanth. They asserted that it’s fleshy fins would have allowed it to climb out of the water and go for short strolls. They had asserted dozens of things that they knew about the behavior and significance of the Coelacanth, and then they found some swimming around. Now there are 7 locations across 1000+ miles of the Indian Ocean that refute every claim they ever made about the behaviors of Coelacanth. Before, they were only 100% sure. But now, they’re 100% sure!!
Click here to read the description of the American Crocodile. It has webbed feet, scales, and (not in this article, 2 lines of rigid fins down it’s back and tail. How does this make it a fish?
Otters, seals, sea lions, manatees, beavers, alligators, crocodiles, caiman and many other species go between land and sea, this doesn’t make any of them “transitional forms”.
When they say: “Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land-living animal both in terms of its anatomy and its way of life”. This is raw assertion. They found this fossil less than a month ago, and they claim to already know it’s “way of life”??? This is preposterous! If their brand of science was employed by CSI, every criminal would get off and every prosecutor would be in jail for contempt. This is not even circumstantial evidence; it’s something worse.
What they didn’t find: They didn’t even find the back half of the animal (though that didn’t stop them from drawing/painting/modeling it). The back half could easily shatter their theories. They didn’t find, nor could they, any evidence that this fish actually lived in shallow water, ever left the water, ever went in the water, ever anything. It’s all a total fabrication, as is all their retelling of 300 million years ago.
If evolutionists want to prove their theories, they won’t do it by asserting that one species looks like a cross between species A and species B. They’d have to do it by showing that evolution beyond the borders of the “kind” can happen. Of this, there are NO examples! While men range in height from 21 inches to 9+ feet, they don’t turn into anything other than men! Darwinists the world over are dancing on what they think is the grave of “intelligent design” (they say), but they haven’t made one inch of headway!
When scientists have tried to assert relationships between variant species, it looks plausible on the surface. But when you look at anatomy (where available), and the genome (where available), their theories break down quickly. They have totally disprove most of what they used to believe about even the simplest species of bacteria. When examining the genomes, they found out that they were far more different than originally thought.
What the scientists found was not a “developing species” like they try to portray through slight of hand. What they found was a fully-functioning species in it’s own right. I would assert (with equal authority, i.e. pulled it out of my ear, that what they found was merely an extinct species of whatever. Keep in mind that the notion of taxonomy and “species” was made up by a man (Carl Linnaeus) in the 1700's based solely on superficial resemblances. By their ways of reckoning, a turtle is more closely related to a rock than a person! The “species” are not related the way evolutionists assert. They are very wrong and they prove it daily. They just don’t admit it. Note: Linnaeus beleived in creation.

Anyway, that’s just my thoughts off hand. I haven’t researched this deeply like I’d like to do some time. Unfortunately, the people who discovered this find are being very tight lipped about the find, and only supplying details and photos that would seem to support their assertion. They’ve learned by experience that if you can get the majority of the scientific community to buy into it before releasing the rest of the find, it’s highly unlikely than any amount of contrary evidence will change their minds later. No one likes to admit they’ve been duped!

Hope all is well at Unishippers!!

Altered Beast: So Much From So Little

2006-04-06T15:49:00.000-06:00

I love a good suspense story just as much as anyone. Y'know, the kind where the hero is entombed in an inescapable prison that is shortly to become his grave! But then, at the last remaining second he produces from a hidden compartment in his highly polished wingtip shoes the one weapon for which the sinister villain had composed no contingency: a paper clip! The hero somehow cracks open a circuit box, uses the paper clip to short circuit the building's electronic security system, and opens a way of escape that not even he knew was there!

There's something heroic about someone who can take nothing and nothing and make something of it. Such is the case with the latest dino-discovery in southern-Utah's Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, newest addition to America's menu of wilderness lands. When University of Utah graduate students went exploring for dinosaur bones, they came across unequivocal evidence of the truthfulness of evolution!! What was it? A new species of dinosaur (74-76 million years old) that was a clear transitional form between the raptor family of dinosaurs and modern birds. It was complete with blue feathers, a large tail-feather ploom reminiscent of Cleopatra, a large toothless beak, long arms that were destined to someday become wings, and several other distinguishing features designed to let heroic paleontologists of the future know that this dinosaur wanted to be a bird, but surgical options weren't available (or no health insurance).

So what must it have been like, there at the dig sight as these UofU graduate students hushed to silence as one young Darwinists brushed aside the red-brown dirt with a super-delicate paint brush-looking-thing to reveal the never-before-seen blue feathers? I can almost hear the gasps for air as a handful of dirt was swished aside to reveal the bright-yellow toothless beak, a huge, newly-evolved advantage in an age of huge meat-eating predators because...er...uh. Anyway, I wonder if anyone expected the array of colors or radial arrangement of the tail feathers that comprised the great animal's tail?

Er...what? They didn't find any blue feathers? Oh, not any feathers at all? Well what about the yellow beak? No??! Well, surely the long arms, then? No!!??!! Just hand and foot bones? Well how do they even know they were from the same animal? Oh, they don't?

Well, this story seems to have been a non-starter folks. Sorry for the alarm. It seems they only found a few hand bones and a few foot bones and decided to heroically conjecture (see "pulled out of shoe") the rest into existence. I too am embarrassed at this much-ado-about-nothing. It seems that our paleo-psychotic friends were again suffering from exposure, can easily happen down there with the highest UV index in the country. Seems they used the hand bones and a cross-reference to some bird uncovered in China to assert that they were, um...related. Apparently they weren’t any better at border enforcement 75 million years ago.

So I wonder what they intended to prove with all that conjecture and bone-reading? Ooooh. Evolution again. But I thought it was already proven? Why are they still trying to prop up that old theory? Why don't some of them fork off and try to prove something more useful, like gravity or entropy or something?

The lesson, kids is this. When scientists claim to have discovered some huge thing that finally shows the Bible to be wrong and God to be dead, read the fine print.

Altered Beast: Feathered Dinosaurs

2006-04-05T10:01:00.000-06:00

Feathered dinosaurs...now there's a concept. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it seems like every dinosaur uncovered suddenly has "evidence" of feathers. Until recently, dinosaurs were thought to have had rough, heavy skin since they were "reptiles, not lizards". But then the most amazing thing happened: they found a dinosaur with feathers (dramatic music here)! So, they uncovered a fossil of an ancient specimen of a dinosaur with skin, feathers and small teeth! Did you find it at the pond? Um...it might have been a Canadian Goose...just thinking out loud here.

No, really! Scientists put out material, including full-motion 3D animated films designed for children showing with complete certainty that dinosaurs evolved into birds. One documentary I saw showed 3D dinosaurs morphing into birds; something that's much easier to do on computers than in the real world. But among themselves, they still hotly debate the evidence that badly contradicts itself. In one frank statement, a North Carolina professor said:

Not everyone agrees. "Vegavis was originally described as belonging to an extinct group; now all of a sudden it's a duck," says Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina, who proposed the big bang idea.

Yixian's birds have scarcely helped. The 20 or so species have a bewildering mix of primitive and advanced features - the toothed jaws and long tails of dinosaurs, plus the short tails and horny beaks of modern birds. The controversy will only be solved when more fossils come to light.

Do you mean there's controversy within the scientific community? Then aren't the 3D movies kinda' jumping the gun a bit? Now I can at least understand this sort of journalistic infidelity from the New York Times. After all, they're trying to beat the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post to the punch. Minutes matter in their field. But I don't understand this sort of "jumping the gun" from scientists who are studying topics that they believe span billions of years of evolution! Shouldn't "getting it right" trump "getting it fast" where scientific discovery is concerned?

The similarities between "feathered dinosaurs" and modern birds are so striking that to call them anything else but birds is kind of a leap. Their only reasons for calling them feathered dinosaurs are that they were buried in rock that Darwinists claim is a hundred+ million years old, which is before birds evolved! Now isn't that scientific (rhetorical "no.")!

Imagine a forensic pathologist is studying a murder crime scene (I know, ...more symmetry than analogy!), and decides that the victim has been dead for approximately 48 hours based on certain physical hints. Then, a young lieutenant produces a surveillance video tape from the hallway camera that details the struggle and subsequent murder, as well as contains a time-date index in the upper right corner of the film showing the murder to be only 6 hours earlier. So the investigator asserts the only logical conclusion: the body must have fallen into a time-altering worm hole that caused the body to experience 48 hours decay in only 6 hours! No! The only logical conclusion is that the forensic pathologist was wrong. The indicators that he relied upon to form his conclusions were wrong!

This is precisely the kind of leaps that evolutionary biologists and paleontologists routinely rationalize. They see feathers in a fossil that they've always thought pre-dated the evolution of birds. So they conclude exactly the wrong thing: that dinosaurs turned into birds. From the evidence, birds obviously did exist along side the dinosaurs. Their rationalizations that dinosaurs turned into birds are nonsensical, nearly random unless you also take into account their unwavering belief in evolution itself. These sorts of illogical rationalizations permeate all of modern evolutionary sciences. The formula basically looks like this: Since evolution is definitely true, whatever conclusion satisfies the truthfulness of evolution, however unlikely, must, therefore be true (a twist on Sherlock Holmes).

The gradual development of feathers also violates evolutionists assertion that evolution happens through long series of beneficial changes, often imposed by environmental factors. Feathers served no purpose until they were at a point where they could be used to fly. Why would dinosaurs carry around non-beneficial feathers for millions of years while unable to make use of them? Perhaps they were anticipating flight? "I know they're hot sweetie, but someday your great, great, great grandchickens will be able to fly"...oh wait.

Perhaps God created them the way they are. Did dinosaurs have feathers? Perhaps, but not because they evolved that way. They'd have them for the same reason that chickens, turkeys, ostriches, emus still have them today: because God liked them that way.

Genesis 1:21 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.

Missing Link: My Gap Theory

2006-04-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

Ever notice how scientists always claim to fill some colossal gap in the fossil record and, thus, the human evolutionary chain? What's interesting is that they never really admit such a gap exists until they discover some "transitional form" that fills in the afore unmentioned gap! Scientists give the impression that the fossil record is pretty much complete, and speaks with one voice about the origins of man. But when you catch them in a frank moment (y' gotta' be pretty alert), they sometimes admit how sparsely the fossil record is populated.

Their theories about how fossils are made (casual, every-day circumsces) are just flat wrong. Creationists, on the other had, believe the majority of the fossils were created through cataclismic events. The Bible has a great explanation about how the fossils got here. It's called the flood of Noah. Of course, the last thing (and I mean, the very last thing) that scientists want to do is lend credibility to something so "unscientific" as the Bible. Yet, given what an evolutionist expects to find, the fossil record is terribly "incomplete".

To use an analogy that we can understand, let's imagine that we wanted to write a thesis on the topic of what people wore in the 1980's; and so we hire a research firm to give us all available photographic records of people walking down a populated street in down town New York City in the '80's. The evolutionists on the project believe that there were clear and constant video feeds that should render a very complete record of everyone who ever walked down that street. The creationists, on the other hand, believe that the only record was from occasional snapshots taken by tourists on the street and city survey teams that were working on a re-surfacing project for the city public works department. Well, after a few weeks, the research company comes back with around a hundred snapshots that represent only fractions of a second from about once every few months during the '80's. Only about 10 seconds of lens exposure was recorded in all the photos combined. The creationists on the project are delighted with the quality of the prints and the broad sampling available to them to write their thesis. The evolutionists on the team, however, are irate that only 100 snapshots could be salvaged from the many video cameras and millions of miles of film that they believe should be available from the '80's.

So the creationists believe that all the available photographic artifacts were recorded during only a tiny portion of time compared to the decade being studied. The evolutionists, on the other hand, believe that the available photographic artifacts are a full and complete record of everyone that passed by for a full ten years.

Well, that's the situation that we have with the fossil record. Creationists are delighted with the snapshots that make up the fossil record. They are fascinated by the variety and broad representative sampling available to them. They know that the fossil record only represents a few moments in time when the conditions were right for forming fossils. They don't believe in the transition from one kind of plant or animal into another, thus they don't see any "gaps".

Evolutionists, however, who fashion themselves the stewards of the fossil record, are puzzled. They hide their embarrassment at the incompleteness of the fossil record given what they expected to find based upon their theories. They contrive fancy theories as to why skin sometimes fossilizes just fine, but whole species groups, such as marine animals constructed mostly of cartilage, don't. They come up with far-fetched ideas to explain why the layers of strata as they believe them to be, aren't found anywhere in the world, and when found, are often found out of order! They have no explanations for some anomalies such as why many petrified trees are standing right through their precious layers of strata that are supposed to be composed of build up and sediment from millions of years per layer! They come up with complex systems of relationships between disparate species and try to classify every new find as a "gap filler". They entertain B-class contrivances to help explain why some things vanished and where other things came from (see dinosaurs to birds) given no previous fossil record of those species. They've learned that ridicule is a powerful tool, and that by speaking with a unified voice (see global cooli...er...warming), the majority of people will be intimidated into asking few questions.

Creationists are increasingly less intimidated by the poor logic and naked faith of the evolutionary, pseudo-scientific world. As science advances, many of scientists' original beliefs fall to new evidence. Yet their faith continues. Each generation of scientist thinks he's an authority and scoffs at Christians. Yet the next generation of scientist comes along and disproves the last generation of scientists, claims to "really know", and, again, scoffs at the Bible. When you consider this pattern throughout modern history, the Christian you see over there quaking in front of an ape-man display at the Field Museum in Chicago, is probably just chuckling.

See this article for an example of research and interpretation that counters what the lemmings of the scientific community suggest.

Archaeology: David's Palace

2006-03-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

This will be the first installment of my Archaeology series. The point of this series is to show that the Bible is a reliable source of information regarding actual people, places and events. These sorts of finds are, frankly, too numerous to blog on all of them, but I want to highlight the big ones.

Historical revisionists have long questioned and even dismissed out of hand substantial claims documented only in Holy Scripture. One such item is the recent (1997) discovery of King David's Palace. This article documents how a 49 year old archaeologist, Eilat Mazar, used the Bible to locate King David's Palace, lost since the 9th century B.C.E.! There are now many authenticating features that make it highly unlikely that this find is anything other than David's Palace, even if the Bible had not been used to find it.

The article, as well as other sources, point out how the Palestinians and some secular archaeologists have scoffed at the existence of the Biblical David, or at least of his significance in Hebrew history. After all, the existence of a man like David that whipped his contemporary neighbors into submission isn't too comfortable for Canaanite descendents.

Once again, the Bible proves its worth as a guide for actual people, places and events. Does it prove there is a God? No, but it is evidence that the Bible isn't the fictional collage of stories as purported by the atheistic, pseudo-scientific community of our day.

In future installments, I hope to blog about the re-discovery of the Hittite Empire, the destruction of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great, and many other significant archaeological evidences that bear out the historical accuracy of the Bible.

The Lazarus Effect: Coelacanth

2006-03-31T11:06:00.000-07:00

One of the most notable in my Lazarus series is the Coelacanth. The Coelacanth was a large fish with an average weight of 176 pounds (80 kg) and up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length with unique characteristics that lived (according to learned scientists) somewhere in the Late Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods (390 million years ago). What interested scientists the most was this fish's fleshy appendages at the base of certain of his fins. These appendages must surely have represented a "transitional form", they asserted. These stubby appendages were certainly the progenitors of arms and legs (which is why they had 6 of them, bottom and top)!

A "transitional form", by their definitions, is one that exhibits characteristics of two types of modern animals, and must, therefore, have been a middle species between one and the other. The keen observer will note that lately, every dinosaur "discovered" seems to have feathers! This is because scientists have altered their model (this word makes fantasy theory sound more like operable facts) to assert that the dinosaurs didn't die out at the beginning of the ice age, they merely turned into birds (Ah, I see)! On a side note, check out this article that refutes thier claims about feather evolution. So in the millions of years that it took to transition from dinosaur to bird, they merely wore arctic clothing by Canada Goose.

Anyway, the learned scientists boasted about how the discovery of the Coelacanth proved their belief that cross-species evolution did happen! Evolutionary artists even painted pictures of the Coelacanth using their fleshy fins to crawl out of the water to feed, possibly lay eggs, or just see who won the super bowl that year! Now we know that they never came anywhere close to the surface (300 - 700 feet deep).

Well, imagine their surprise (code for embarrassment) when in 1930, someone discovered a Coelacanth swimming around the Indian Ocean. Since that time, at least 6 sites have been found to host living Coelacanths spanning a thousand miles. The "startling" thing about this (and all) Lazarus species is the way that when found, they appear to be identical to their 390 million year old counter parts!

So how did this fella’ survive all this time? How come there aren't any Coelacanth fossils from those early layers of strata till the present? Shouldn't there be a consistent record of Coelacanths from then till now? Shouldn't all layers of strata from 390 million years ago till the present contain examples of the Coelacanth? And why didn't he change over the eons? Could it be that the earth is only 6-8,000 years old and he hasn't had time to change? Isn't is possible that the Bible's account of history is true, and that God's declaration in Genesis that each should produce after it's kind (which would eliminate the possibility that the Coelacanth is the progenitor of the Clydesdales [though I must admit, they do both start with a "C"])?

For scientists theories about the fossil records to be true, it is impossible for the species to have "gone silent" in the fossil records during all the years from then till now. As they do daily, they disprove evolution each time they find a Lazarus species.

The Lazarus Effect: Squirrel-like Rodent

2006-03-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

Click here to see another Lazarus species, this time a rodent thought extinct for 11 million years. But it's understandable this time that scientists didn't find it earlier. It must have been a very tiny squirrel-like rodent. They said they found it inside Laos. Do you know how tiny you'd have to be to get inside a laos?

Here's an alternate link if Yahoo decides to archive their story.

The Lazarus Effect: Pine Trees

2006-03-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

This is the first blog in "The Lazarus Effect" series.

According to "scientists", the Lazarus Effect happens when a species only known from the fossil record from eons gone by suddenly re-appears walking, breathing, floating, or just standing there, as is the case in this first blog. The name, of course, comes from the Biblical story of Lazarus (John 11) who was raised by Jesus after he was dead four days, buried and "stinketh" (11:39) until Christ resurrected him.

The phenomena is so astounding because, according to the learned scientists, the fossil record (read: atheists' bible) "goes silent" on some species some millions of years ago (usually round numbers of 5 or 10), and no such species is found in "newer" layers of strata. To see a 120 million year extinct fish or a 65 million year extinct dinosaur walking around does present some problem for these learned men (and women,...er...persons). For these species to have flourished many years ago and for many of such species to have been fossilized in the past, say the Jurassic period, yet for none to have been fossilized from then till now (65m years) is, well, against the odds, shall we say.

When presented with (oh, no!) another Lazarus species, instead of revisiting their shabby theories to something more palpable (I can think of one or so), they instead pretend to celebrate the discovery. If it's a problem anomaly, let it be THEIR problem anomaly!

Now just to be clear, the term "Lazarus Effect" isn't quite the right term. See, they named it that to pretend like they believe it really came back to life after tens of millions of years. But they don't really believe that and wouldn't say they did. What they really believe, and what really astounds them, is that this species ("kind" is a better word), has been around all along, but we didn't know it. With all the people walking around (billions at last count...or was that cheeseburgers?), the chances of no one seeing one of these in, say the last 45,000 years (when they say we started tooling ewes, or was it using tools? Can't remember!) are again, against the odds.

So I think it only appropriate to propose a new term; let Lazarus rest in peace. Maybe the "We were wrong effect!" Doesn't ring. Hm. Maybe the "Egged Face" effect. Better. Well, feel free to write in with your proposals. But try to keep it catchy.

If you've hung on this long, you're pretty determined, so here's the link to the first article that shows one of these Lazarus species ... to scientists' astoundment...something or other. It depicts a rare, but obviously not extinct, species of pine tree, the Wollemi Pine, that some tree guy came across in Australia. It was supposedly extinct for 200 million years.

Clear Evidence

2006-03-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

Some people require proof before they will believe. This bars them from ever understanding and thus believing the greatest truths. The greatest truths are those concerning God and eternity. This blog isn't for them.

My purpose isn't to convince an unbeliever of the existence of God. Nothing I'll post here, or could post here could possibly accomplish that. My purpose is simply to present evidence that God is real. The cynic still won't be convinced.

A coworker of mine and I were having a discussion that landed (inevitably) on the topic of evolution. When I told him that I didn't believe in evolution, he came back with his experience in horse breeding, suggesting that he'd observed evolution in action. After several more volleys, he finally stated his standard of proof: "If they'd show me human tracks superimposed upon dinosaur tracks in the same layers of strata, then I'd believe them." Right away, I told him that they (the ambiguous "they") had uncovered just such evidence in many places on earth. Within a few days I'd found the book and page that documented an example of this in southern Utah, about 43 miles southwest of Delta. Here, sandal-clad human footprints overlaid trilobite fossils from before the dinosaurs (in evolutionary thinking). These fossils were supposedly from the Paleozoic or even Cambrian period (around 250 million years ago), yet they were superimposed by indisputably human footprints, which, in evolutionists thinking, couldn't have been been made until just 45,000 years ago! Scientists immediately labeled them a hoax until they returned with the man to uncover many more that he'd not discovered. When I showed my coworker this evidence, he said, "Hmph, that's interesting." and stomped off angry, rather than convinced. Such is the mind of the unbelieving man.

But perhaps a Christian, teetering on the edge, caught between the teachings of his pastor and the Bible, and the ridicule so overwhelmingly flowing from the world's demagogues (i.e. the media, university professors, apostate religious organizations, etc...) will think again before abandoning the faith to follow a different faith, today known as "science".

It is my intention to post on a handful of recurring themes:

1) Scientific and historical evidence that the Bible is true.
2) Evidence that the Darwinists are greatly changing their theories daily.
3) An attempt at explaining how true science is consistent with the Bible (and not the other way around.)

So I hope some of these things are encouraging to you as they have been to me. Once you learn to be suspicious of the scientific community, it's startling how many other things start making sense.

I would hope that anyone who reads this would accept the axiom of Colossians 1:18b "...that in all things he [Christ] might have the preeminence."