Creationism News -- May 2012
创造论新闻 -- 2012年5月
Dedicated to David Coppedge who sacrificed his career
as the Head Systems Administrator for the Cassini
Spacecraft in JPL to honor the Creator of the
Universe. He also spent literally thousands of hours to
make his excellent websites.
The contents of this presentation were taken from
various sources. Thank God that David Coppedge
came back from the lawsuit after two months of
“vacation.” Pray for the results of the lawsuit. I now
resume using his website materials.
Pastor Chui
http://ChristCenterGospel.org
3/17/2016
ckchui1@yahoo.com
1
Creatures of Light
生物光
Discover (May 2012) announces that in the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City many
exhibits on creatures of light: New Zealand cave
where gnat larvae string glowing lines to ensnare the
insects they eat; the underwater world of a jellyfish
that absorbs blue light and radiates flashes of green.
Live light-emitting creatures include a tank of flashlight
fish, who lure the shrimp and plankton they eat with a
blue-green glow, produced by bacteria living in
translucent sacks under their eyes.
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2
Learning from the Octopus
从八达通学习
Discover (May 2012) reports that Rafe Sagarin observed
that top-down management and bureaucratic inertia
stymied government efforts to adapt to constantly
evolving security threats. He promotes an alternative
strategy he calls “natural security”: the idea that we
can model our own strategies on the survival
techniques of highly successful organisms. It’s a
humbling thought, but Homeland Security may have a
lot to gain from studying octopuses, whose skin cells
can adapt to threats without reporting to or taking
orders from a central brain.
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3
The Taste of Tomorrow
明天的味道
Discover (May 2012) reports that Josh Schonwald first
heard of cobia, a steaklike fish that some seafood
industry say will soon become a culinary staple. As his
investigations progress, Schonwald realizes that any
vision of the future food must balance ethical and
environmental concerns with culinary ones. While he
optimistically champions biotech’s potential to make
the future more sustainable, most of the possibilities
that he explores—such as lab-grown meat, a food pill,
and saltwater fish raised indoors—are still a long way
from reaching our plates.
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4
Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone
大棱镜春天，黄石国家公园
Discover (May 2012) reports the Yellowstone National
Park powers the 10,000 springs, geysers, and other
thermal features located where magma-heated water
and steam come simmering to the surface.
Yellowstone’s biggest hot spring, Grand Prismatic,
also hosts some of the planet’s strangest, hardiest life,
which thrives at temperatures up to 180 degrees F.
Water flows from the ground at 560 gallons per
minute. Brilliant green, yellow, brown, and orange
bacterial mates encircle the spring. Some bacteria use
arsenic instead of phosphorus in their DNA! This is still
controversial.
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5
Transit of Venus over the Sun (June 5)
金星在太阳上通过 （6月5日）
Discover (May 2012) reports on June 5, 2012, Venus will
pass over the sun. This can be seen all over US on a
cloudless day. Use a sheet of welder’s glass or project
an image with a telescope. The next chance won’t
come until 2117! You will see a black dot which will
move over the solar disk. The observations can be
used to calculate the distance between us and our
star. That was how the astronomer Edmond Halley did
it in 1716.
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6
Human Organ for Transplant
用于移植的人体器官
Discover (May 2012) has an interesting article on organ
transplant. In 2011, doctors in the US transplanted some
21,000 organs from deceased donors, obtained through
58 organ procurement organizations. Heart donations
must be transplanted within 4 to 6 hours; livers have 24
hours; kidneys can last 2 days before expiration. Kidneys
are the most common organ transplanted. In 2011 more
than 15,000 people received kidney transplants; 10,000
came from deceased donors. Liver, heart, lung, pancreas,
and intestine come next, in that order. Acceptable organ
donors range from newborn to over 65. Seniors can
donate corneas, skin, and bone. 113,000 people are still
waiting. 18 people die waiting for an organ each day.
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7
Things you didn’t know about allergies
你不知道的过敏反应
Discover (May 2012) has an interesting article on allergies.
According to NIH, more than 50% of Americans have
allergies. Most food allergies result from an immune
response to a protein. Parasites can distract the immune
system from food allergies. Allergies to shellfish, nuts, fish,
milk, eggs, and other foods cause an estimated 150 to 200
deaths a year in the US. A walk in the grass can turn you
into a vegan. Tick bites can cause the immune system to
produce antibodies to alpha-gal, a carbohydrate in beef,
pork, and lamb. These antibodies can induce allergic
reactions to meat. Human dander can cause allergic
rashes in dogs and cats, and in other humans. Jewelry
containing nickel can trigger a lifelong metal allergy.
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8
Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger
行星辐射的日期1/3年轻
http://crevo.info reports:
The half-lives of radioactive isotopes may not be as well-known as
thought. One decay rate frequently used to date solar system
objects had to be adjusted down to 66% of its former assumed
value, impacting theories of planet formation.
PhysOrg headlined, “‘Faster-Ticking Clock’ Indicates Early
Solar System May Have Evolved Faster Than We
Think.” The old decay rate for samarium-146 (146Sm) was reevaluated by a team from Argonne National Laboratory,
Hebrew University, two Japanese universities and the
University of Notre Dame. The old value of 103 million years
for its half-life was recalculated at 68 million years, two-thirds of
its previously measured value.
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9
Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger
行星辐射的日期1/3年轻
http://crevo.info reports:
 The smaller value, “previously adopted as 103
million years, to a much shorter value of 68
million years,” the article continued. It “has the
effect of shrinking the assessed chronology of
events in the early solar system and in
planetary differentiation into a shorter time
span,” the article said. The story was reported
a month ago by Science Daily.
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10
Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger
行星辐射的日期1/3年轻


http://crevo.info reports:
The article put a positive spin on this
adjustment, saying, “The new time scale,
interestingly, is now consistent with
a recent and precise dating made on a lunar
rock and is in better agreement with the dating
obtained with other chronometers.” It seems
they could just as well have said that the other
chronometers are now cast into doubt by the
adjustment of 146Sm, which was also
considered a precise chronometer till now. 11
3/17/2016
Planetary Radiometric Dates 1/3 Younger
行星辐射的日期1/3年轻
http://crevo.info reports:
 In any case, it is disturbing that a physical value that is “out
there in the world” could be found to be so far off by human
measurement. How many published papers are affected by
this change? Papers often quote radiometric dates to 4 or
more significant figures. Theorists rely on these values. If
values are not discovered but “adopted,” is it possible there
was motivation by theorists to “adopt” a different value to create
consistency with other chronometers? Does the new value
make the “assessed chronology of events in the early system”
more or less plausible? What will be the ripple effect from here
on for a chronometer that ticks 33% faster than previously
thought? Who will go back and correct theories based on the
previous value? These are questions the press releases never
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12
ask.
Earth Myths with a Sprinkling of Data
地球的神话与数据稀疏
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
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According to Live Science, Bill Hammond has been measuring
uplift of the Sierra Nevada range since 2000. Currently they
have measured about a millimeter or two of uplift a year for less
than 12 years. Launching from that, the article stated:
The amount might seem small, but the data indicate that longterm trends in crustal uplift suggest the modern
Sierra could be formed in less than 3 million years, which is
relatively quick when compared to estimates using some
geological techniques.
This represents an extrapolation of five orders of magnitude
(stretching 12 years of data to “suggest” what happened in 3
million years). Nevertheless, they are convinced they have
determined a “young” uplift for the California mountain
range. Despite the bold announcements, Hammond said, “The
Sierra Nevada uplift process is fairly unique on Earth and not
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13
Earth Myths with a Sprinkling of Data
地球的神话与数据稀疏



Even more hubris was displayed in another article, “Earth
history and evolution,” on PhysOrg. The opening paragraph
is the operative statement about mythology referred to in our
title:
In classical mythology, the cypress tree is associated with
death, the underworld and eternity. Indeed, the family to
which cypresses belong, is an ancient lineage of conifers, and a
new study of their evolution affords a unique insight into
a turbulent era in the Earth’s history.
This article claimed that genetic data between several genera
of cypress thought to have evolved independently after a
mythical supercontinent, Pangea, split apart, has
“revolutionized the field of biogeography” and given us
“understanding” of earth history.
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14
Earth Myths with a Sprinkling of Data
地球的神话与数据稀疏


The new study confirms that cypresses represent a very old
plant family. Their origins can be traced back to Pangea, and
the evolutionary divergence of the northern and southern
subfamilies of cypresses actually reflects the break-up of
Pangea about 153 million years ago.
This adds another couple of orders of magnitude to the
extrapolations from data evaluated in the present. The “insight”
generated comes with some caveats, however. “Some groups
have turned out to be surprisingly young in evolutionary
terms, others much older than people had assumed.” It
appears that using assumptions about a law of nature
concerning evolutionary rates requires sacrificing laws of nature
in other aspects of the story.
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15
Earth Myths with a Sprinkling of Data
地球的神话与数据稀疏


Let’s take stock of what we know (or think we
know) based on the data presented. (1) The
Sierras have risen 1 or 2 millimeters per year
since 2000, give or take the uncertainties that
always need to be factored into any
measurement. (2) Certain selected genes in
certain selected species of cypress have a
measurable percent difference, give or take the
uncertainties that always need to be factored
into any measurement.
That’s it. The rest is interpretation.
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16
Earth Myths with a Sprinkling of Data
地球的神话与数据稀疏

Are you better off with modern mythology than the
Greeks and Romans were? The fighting gods of
classical lore have been lumped into a new god
named Evolution that performs whatever miracles are
necessary to keep the myth going. We are told “new
lineages were established”. By whom? Evolution, the
god of death, the underworld and eternity. Evolution
weaves tales of “turbulent eras in earth history” when
he fought the Earth Giants, splitting continents and
sending the spirits of Life Force on separate
evolutionary trajectories. We don’t see Evolution, but
through his oracles, we gain “understanding”. We
envision “detailed pictures”. We achieve “unique 17
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insight”.
We Became Human by Mistake
我们错误地成为人类


Live Science headlined in bold print, “Did a
Copying Mistake Build Man’s Brain?” (We
assume this includes woman’s brain, but this
could arouse controversy, depending on
whether the mistake is deemed a good or bad
thing). Not to be outdone, New Scientist titled
their version in a less sexist way, “One gene
helped human brains become complex.”
The provocative headline stems from “new
research” from the Scripps Research Institute
that identified a gene that appears to result from
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18
a gene duplication:
We Became Human by Mistake
我们错误地成为人类



“There are approximately 30 genes that were selectively
duplicated in humans,” study researcher Franck Polleux, of
The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., said in a
statement. “These are some of our most recent genomic
innovations.”
An extra copy of a gene gives evolution something to work
with: Like modeling clay, this gene isn’t essential like the
original copy, so changes can be made to it without damaging
the resulting organism.
By “selectively duplicated,” Polleux was clearly referring to
natural selection, not selection by an intelligent designer
wanting to make humans smarter. The gene, SRGAP2,
appears to be involved in the efficient organization of the
cerebral cortex.
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19
We Became Human by Mistake
我们错误地成为人类



When the researchers added the partially duplicated gene
copy to the mouse genome (mice don’t normally have it)
it seemed to speed the migration of brain cells during
development, which makes brain organization more
efficient.
The mice, however, were not observed to start writing
music or philosophy.
Somehow, using evolutionary dating assumptions, the
Scripps team was able to surmise that this gene got
duplicated not once, but twice in human evolution: the first
time 3.5 million years ago, when it duplicated completely,
and again 2.5 million years ago, when only part of it got
duplicated.
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20
We Became Human by Mistake



我们错误地成为人类
These cells that expressed the incomplete duplication
of SRGAP2 also had more “spines” — knoblike extensions on the
cell surface that connect with other brain cells, which make them
look more like human brain cells.
Interestingly, the incomplete copy of the gene seems to have
showed up just as the extinct hominin Australopithecus made
room for the genus Homo, which led to modern humans. That’s
also when the brains of our ancestors began to expand and
when dramatic changes in cognitive abilities are likely to have
emerged.
Sarah Reardon in New Scientist expanded the story to imagine
different lineages of humans with different numbers of gene
duplications of SRGAP2. “When it comes to brain development, slow
and steady wins the race,” she began. “A single ancestral human
gene that made two copies of itself may have helped the evolution
of our large brains 2.5 million years ago, as our ancestors were
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21
diverging from australopithecines.”
We Became Human by Mistake



我们错误地成为人类
What’s interesting about the duplication, Eichler says, is that
it would have changed brain development immediately and
dramatically. Human ancestors with two, three, or even more
copies of SRGAP2 – and consequently stark differences in their
cognitive abilities – could have been running around together at
one point. “That’s fun to think about,” he says.
Live Science was even more dramatic about the scientific earthquake
generated by this fun thought. Eichler said, “These episodic and
large duplication events could have allowed for radical —
potentially Earth-shattering — changes in brain development and
brain function.”
Yet so little is understood about how the matter of the brain connects
to the mind, the self, cognition and intelligence, as an essay by Sumit
Paul-Choudhury explored on New Scientist. Along that line, perhaps
another PhysOrg article would be appropriate in connection with the
daring assertions above: “Has modern science become
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22
dysfunctional?”
We Became Human by Mistake
我们错误地成为人类


OK; if this is a new law of nature, let’s count all
the SRGAP2 genes in mammals and see how they
correlate with cognitive function. Are you smarter
because of knoblike spines on your brain cells? If
so, IQ should be a direct reflection of your knobs,
making some people Einsteins and others witless
knobs who are spineless.
Here’s the question you should ask when reading
stupid claims like this. How would they ever know? If
evolution made a mistake and duplicated a gene, then
our intelligence arrived by mistake. But evolution is
what evolution does; i.e., this was not a mistake at
all. Stuff happens.
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23
We Became Human by Mistake
我们错误地成为人类


Now, if an evolutionist wants to reach outside of evolution and
engage in philosophy, to determine whether something was
mistaken, or whether a mouse’s brain is less efficient than a
human brain, then he (or she) is making reference to Truth,
something that is outside of nature. Truth must be timeless,
universal, necessary, and certain. It is not made of particles,
and cannot evolve.
If, on the other hand, the scientist says that science is not about
Truth, but about exploration, then the game is over. Science is
not about finding the truth. It’s just something “fun to think
about” (whatever thinking refers to in a primate brain with more
or less knobs and spines). Maybe it’s the kind of fun a
chimpanzee gets from scratching its butt. So if scratching your
head or your butt is fun, have at it. Enjoy; both ends are
equally cognitive.
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Coelacanth: Survival of the Dullest
腔棘鱼：最乏味的生存


A new fossil species of coelacanth was discovered in
Canada. Scientists think from its tail fin shape that it
was a fast swimmer–perhaps a hunter. Sadly, it was a
“spectacular failure” in evolution. The luck of the
evolutionary draw went to today’s slow-moving, docile
species.
PhysOrg states that the new fossil “rewrites the history
of ancient fish.” The discoverers named it Rebellatrix,
calling it a “rebel” that “does everything a coelacanth
should not do.” Modern coelacanths have broad tails
and are fairly docile, but the discoverers think that the
forked tail in Rebellatrix indicates it was a fast
swimmer with a muscular tail fin.
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Coelacanth: Survival of the Dullest
腔棘鱼：最乏味的生存
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National Geographic pointed out what this means to
evolutionary theory:
In general, the discovery “shows how plastic and flexible
evolution can be,” said John Long, a coelacanth expert at the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California.
It really shakes things up “that coelacanths can suddenly
deviate what they’ve been doing for 200 million years and
occupy a lifestyle that’s radically different from other
coelacanths.”
Still, the fossil record shows that the slow-moving version of
the coelacanth ultimately won out, while the
speedy Rebellatrix was replaced by sharks and other cruising
predators, study leader Wendruff said.
“I like to say Rebellatrix was a spectacular failure.”
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Coelacanth: Survival of the Dullest
腔棘鱼：最乏味的生存

National Geographic also reminded readers
about the historic importance of the coelacanth
as a living fossil: “The coelacanth (pronounced
SEE-la-kanth) is a type of primitive, slowmoving fish that was thought extinct until its
rediscovery in 1938,” the article said. “The
modern fish is sometimes called a living fossil,
because it apparently existed largely
unchanged for 320 million years.” The new
find shows that only one species remains from
a past diversity – survival of the dullest.
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Coelacanth: Survival of the Dullest
腔棘鱼：最乏味的生存


Too bad for all the social Darwinists in the 1930s who glorified
strength, speed, warfare and might as the evolutionary law of
nature. If you’re a modern evolutionist, maybe you should take
a cue from the surviving coelacanths and pursue slothfulness
(one of the seven deadly sins).
Better yet, ditch Darwinism as a falsified Victorian
myth. Surviving “largely unchanged for 320 million years”
should be a colossal embarrassment. So is imagining these
creatures going extinct millions of years ago then finding them
doing just fine off the coast of India. Remember, too, that the
coelacanth had long been touted as a missing link, its bony fins
suggesting it was a transitional form between fish with fins and
feet. Now that coelacanths still have those bony fins but don’t
use them for anything resembling walking, that notion has been
soundly debunked. It’s a survivor; why call it “primitive”?
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Stem Cells Getting Healthier
干细胞越来越健康
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
How they work: Researchers in the Netherlands found a new way
to culture mouse embryonic stem cells in vitro. They found to their
surprise, according to Science Daily, that the stem cells seem to
be “on hold,” their gene expression inhibited, rather than actively
transcribing genes as previously believed. “From this state,
the ES cells can efficiently specialize,” the article said.
Embryonic self-sacrifice: Researchers at the North Carolina
School of Medicine found that embryonic stem cells will commit
suicide rather than risk DNA damage. A protein called Bax,
responsible for programmed cell death, is activated but kept in a
safe place in the Golgi apparatus for the crucial days of embryonic
development. If DNA damage occurs, Bax migrates to the
mitochondrion, where it initiates cell death. PhysOrg titled its
report, “Stem cells poised to self-destruct for the good of the
embryo,” as if they will fall on their swords for the good of the
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29
organism rather than let DNA damage propagate.
Stem Cells Getting Healthier
干细胞越来越健康


Safe adult cells: Techniques for inducing pluripotent stem
cells from tissues (iPS) continue to
improve. PhysOrg reported that researchers at Johns
Hopkins verified that iPS cells contain no more genetic
changes than normal cells. This adds confidence that
therapies developed from them will be safe, not adding
cancer risk.
Skipping a step: According to Science Daily, researchers
at Duke University were able to generate heart muscle
tissue from scar tissue without going through a stem cell
stage by programming microRNAs to turn scar cells back
into heart muscle cells. By eliminating the need for a stem
cell transplant, this promises to improve the hopes of
damage repair for heart attack patients.
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Stem Cells Getting Healthier
干细胞越来越健康

Dystrophy hope: It seems like forever that people
have raised money for muscular dystrophy
patients. Is any progress being made? Yes;
according to PhysOrg, researchers at the University of
Minnesota have demonstrated a therapy using iPS
cells that has “been shown to be effective in the
treatment of muscular dystrophy.” The mouse model
sets the stage for human clinical trials. Researchers
were able to deliver muscle progenitor cells from iPS
cells. “Upon transplantation into mice suffering from
muscular dystrophy, human skeletal myogenic
progenitor cells provided both extensive and long-term
muscle regeneration which resulted in improved
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muscle function,” the article said.
Stem Cells Getting Healthier
干细胞越来越健康
The good work continues to come from adult stem

cells and iPS cells which, unlike embryonic stem cells
(ES), are ethically sound (not involving the destruction
of a human embryo). The ES promoters offer hope
with hype. “Due to these unique properties,
expectations for the use of ES cells in the clinic are
high, but ES cells therapies have not yet been
developed to full potential,” the first Science Daily
article stated. If iPS cells do better with fewer
problems and no moral concerns, why is there a
dispute? Let human embryos develop into human
beings, but let adult tissue cells be reprogrammed to
heal.
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Follow the Leader: Plants and Animals
跟随领袖：植物和动物
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Need solutions to engineering problems? Look no
further than the plants and animals around
you. That’s what more and more scientists are doing.
How dry I am: Lotus leaves and gecko toes stay clean
and dry because they repel water very
effectively. They do this with structures that are
billionths of a meter in size. The BBC News reported
how an Australian team of chemists has created a
super-hydrophobic surface that is “impossible to wet”
by imitating the properties of the lotus leaf and gecko
foot. A short video clip shows how water just beads
off the surface. This technology could lead to better
raincoats and self-cleaning fabrics.
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Follow the Leader: Plants and Animals
跟随领袖：植物和动物

Got those butterfly blues: Nature News reported that
a Korean team has successfully imitated the
microstructure of a Morpho butterfly wing to create the
same shimmering blue color that can be seen from
many angles when the insect flies. The butterfly uses
a combination of regularly-spaced ridges and
randomness: “The tight, semi-random packing of the
ridges makes the wings appear bright across a wide
range of viewing angles.” The Korean team
“deposited silica microspheres onto a surface and
then sprayed layers of titanium dioxide and silicon
dioxide over them, Nature said. “The resulting film…
had just the right mix of regularity and disorder to 34
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create the even blue colouring.”
Follow the Leader: Plants and Animals
跟随领袖：植物和动物
The nose knows: An electronic nose is closer to

reality, thanks to work by a team from the American
Institute of Physics. They placed DNA molecules
specially designed to react to certain chemicals on
carbon nanotubes that conduct
electricity. PhysOrg said, “The researchers are next
interested in creating something akin to an actual
electronic nose consisting of many individual DNAbased sensors performing the same role as an
olfactory receptor.” In biological noses, though, a
huge variety of chemicals can be differentiated by a
signal chain that expands and compresses the input
signals through codes. It appears the electronic
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version uses a one-to-one type of signalling.
Follow the Leader: Plants and Animals

跟随领袖：植物和动物
Spider men: The dragline silk of garden spiders continues to baffle
materials scientists who would really like to imitate it. Part of the
problem is that about 10% of the spider’s silk is ordered, and 90% is
disordered. Researchers from Argonne National Lab looked at the
disordered portion for clues, PhysOrg reported, “untangling the
mysteries of spider silk.” The “amorphous regions are made up of all
these proteins that are incredibly complicated,” one researcher
said. Another remarked, “When it comes to silks, humans are just so
far behind nature in terms of the quality of the materials that we can
produce.” Solving the mysteries of spider silk may bring wonderful
new products possessing flexibility and strength to the
marketplace. Other teams are looking at silkworms for additional
“ideal” materials, reported PhysOrg. Think of the advantages: “As
produced by spiders and insects, natural silks are made under benign
conditions— ambient temperature, low pressure, and with water as
solvent.” It’s a cinch that “this is something we should aim to copy
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when designing and making fibers for the future.”
Follow the Leader: Plants and Animals
跟随领袖：植物和动物

Make like a squid: Wouldn’t it be cool to have clothes that
could flicker with color rapidly? Squid, octopi and cuttlefish
make this trick look easy. Engineers at the University of Bristol
are making it happen, reported Science Daily; they have
“created artificial muscles that can be transformed at the flick of
a switch to mimic the remarkable camouflaging abilities of
organisms such as squid and zebrafish.” Imitating the
chromatophores in squid and zebrafish, the team developed
artificial versions made of polymers connected to electrical
circuits. This might lead to “smart clothing” that can imitate
nature’s camouflage – something that might help a soldier
vanish into a changing environment some day. Lead author
Jonathan Rossiter said, “We have taken inspiration from
nature’s designs and exploited the same methods to turn our
artificial muscles into striking visual effects.”
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Follow the Leader: Plants and Animals
跟随领袖：植物和动物
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Workin’ on the railroad: Inspired by the molecular machines in
the cell that move cargo along microtubules, British researchers
have created a molecular track and a two-legged “walker”
molecule that can move along it. It’s as clumsy as a stick figure
compared to a real machine, PhysOrg noted, but it’s a start.
If scientists use intelligent design to create materials and
machines that imitate biological counterparts, how can anyone
think that the biological ones, that are almost always superior to
the artificial ones, are products of unguided processes? The
inference to intelligent design is clear.
There was no mention of evolution in any of these articles, once
again, showing that Darwinism is useless in the rapidlyexpanding field of biomimetics. Speaking of which, can
anybody think of anything useful Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law
has done for mankind?
3/17/2016
38
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变


Y chromosome? Because it is a unique structure, the Y
chromosome in human males seems more subject to
deleterious mutations. The Y is also unable to distribute
linked genes through recombination, a process that
“makes selection more effective,” the article claimed.
Earlier claims that the Y chromosome is evolving away to
extinction were premature. PhysOrg reassures males,
“Men can rest easy — sex chromosomes are here to
stay,” even though a study from University College
London was done on chickens (no epithets,
now). Humans have a unique Y chromosome in males,
but chickens have a unique W chromosome in females. A
research team examined how sex-linked genes on the W
chromosome are passed on.
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39
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变



The results confirm that although these chromosomes have
shrunk over millions of years, and have lost many of their
original genes, those that remain are extremely important in
predicting fertility and are, therefore, unlikely to become
extinct.
Professor Judith Mank, from the UCL Department of
Genetics, Evolution and Environment and senior author said:
“Y chromosomes are here to stay, and are not the genetic
wasteland that they were once thought to be.”
It was nice of her to rescue the opposite sex. Mank studied
sex-linked expression of genes in a variety of chicken breeds
and found that they adapt to selection pressures. She deduced
that “female-specific selection related to fertility acts to
shape the W chromosome, and that the chromosome is able
to respond to that selection despite all the problems with the
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40
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变



To her, this means evolvability is the key to their
success:
Professor Mank said: “We have shown that Y and
W chromosomes are very important in fertility – the
Y in males and the W in females. It is the ability of
the W-linked genes to evolve that is the key to
their survival, and which suggests that both the Y
and the W chromosomes are with us for the long
haul.”
Oddly, this implies that survival of the fittest applies
to both the XX and the XY combinations: selection
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has produced opposite strategies that both work.41
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变
Udder disaster: Female mammals lactate, but milk is loaded



with calcium. Why don’t breasts calcify into stiff, hard
structures, like bone? Just the thought is rather disconcerting
to both sexes. New Scientist came along to explain “Why
milk doesn’t turn breasts to bone.” First, the Darwin
commercial:
Charles Darwin suggested that lactation
evolved through natural selection, starting when the
ancestors of mammals gained a nutritional advantage from
lapping up sweat-like secretions from glands under their
mothers’ skin.
This idea had some grounding. Darwin would have studied
monotremes – egg-laying mammals such as the echidna.
Monotremes have nipple-less mammary patches, and these
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secrete a fluid that provides moisture to permeable eggs. 42
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变


Reporter Catherine de Lange introduced a
problem: milk has 100 times the calcium and 1000
times the protein of these glands. The glands (one
would think) would calcify over time, and the milk
would quickly build toxic fibrils around them.
A pair of researchers, Carl Holt (University of
Glasgow) and John Carver (University of Adelaide)
found what keeps breast tissue soft and
supple. Milk casein has the ability to “squirrel
away” the stiffening calcium phosphate into
micelles –naturally occurring “polar” molecular
aggregates akin to soap bubbles.
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43
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变


The Darwin commercial came back for the last line: “Holt
and Carver say that the concentration of these spherical
micelles in milk may have increased over evolutionary
time, producing a progressively more nutritious fluid.”
True to form, Charles Darwin “suggested” that
something evolved over millions of years. That’s
because Darwin liberated science from rigor and
introduced storytelling into science. Now, instead of
making scientists work the old-fashioned hard way, by
trying to tie laws of nature to their effects, he introduced
the power of suggestion – granting scientists the ability
to employ their imaginations and weave tall tales.
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44
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变


His method was to introduce a new law of nature with an
impressive name: “natural selection.” If it’s natural, it must be
good, right? What he meant was that random variations
occur. But “selection” has the feel of intelligent design about it – a
problem he aggravated in The Origin by comparing it to artificial
selection (intelligent design). What to do? Solution: personify
Nature as an invisible Selector, scrutinizing the slightest variations,
rejecting those that are bad, adding up all the ones that are good.
This introduced another problem: what is good and bad in a world
ruled by contingency? Evolution is what evolution does. It’s not
good or bad. Darwin pivoted by changing “natural selection” into
“survival of the fittest” at the suggestion of his buddy, Herbert
Spencer. But since the fitness of the fit is undefined, except for
whatever increases survival, this phrase collapsed into the survival
of the survivors. Whatever survives is fit by definition – even if it
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45
has traits that are opposite what another survivor has.
Evolution for Men and Women



男性和女性的演变
So, “natural selection” became indistinguishable from the Stuff
Happens Law. Why are flatworms flat and roundworms round? Stuff
happens. Why are sloths slow and cheetahs fast? Stuff
happens. Why do normal chromosomes survive with two copies,
evolving with the benefit of recombination, and sex chromosomes
survive with one copy, evolving without recombination? Stuff
happens.
To keep critics at bay, Darwin bequeathed to his disciples a magic
wand: “millions of years.” Improbable as a given evolutionary story
seems, given millions of years that no human ever observed or
experienced, any stuff can happen.
This wonderful new law with its magic wand suddenly explained
everything. Now, scientists can look fondly back to Father Charlie for
giving them powerful new explanatory tools to tell the peasants about
everything in the world. All one has to say is something “might have”
evolved this way, or “may have” evolved that way over millions of
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46
years. It sounds scientific. How can anybody dispute it?
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变

Like good Darwinians, “Holt and Carver say that
the concentration of these spherical micelles in
milk may have increased over evolutionary
time, producing a progressively more
nutritious fluid.” (Note: “Evolutionary time” is a
synonym for “millions of years.”) Similarly,
Judith Mank “suggests” that even though sex
chromosomes have “shrunk over millions of
years” they are “able to respond to selection”
(meaning, they are susceptible to stuff
happening).
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47
Evolution for Men and Women
男性和女性的演变


Without this powerful army of Darwin disciples shouting “Stuff
Happens” in unison and pounding their chests, ID advocates
might have gotten away with announcing that the
Junk DNA argument has taken another setback (e.g., Y
chromosomes are “not the genetic wasteland they were once
thought to be”). And nobody will be able to hear critical
questions : e.g., (1) Why has selection become effective with
opposite outcomes? (2) Where is an unbroken chain of slight
modifications between monotremes and lactating
mammals? (3) Why are monotremes still around without the
“progressively more nutritious fluid”? (4) Who is the engineer,
and where is the squirrel, that can “squirrel away” calcium
phosphate into micelles in breast tissue (but not in bone) so
that lactating breasts stay soft?
Whatever other questions come to mind don’t matter, because
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48
an unheard question is indistinguishable from an unasked one.
New Chirality Solution Proposed



新的手性解决方案
It’s long been a mystery why cells use one hand of two-handed
molecules, like left-handed amino acids and right-handed
sugars. A new proposal solves the mystery, explaining how this
phenomenon called homochirality arises naturally. Wait a
minute…
“Life scientists unlock mystery of how ‘handedness’
arises,” announced a headline on PhysOrg. Dr. Thomas G.
Mason, a professor of chemistry and physics at UCLA, was
fascinated by the long-standing mystery of how life chooses
one hand over the other when either “isoform” is equally
probable. “Why many of the important functional molecules in
our bodies almost always occur in just one chiral form when
they could potentially exist in either is a mystery that has
confounded researchers for years,” the article said.
So what is his solution? Surprisingly, it’s entropy – something49
3/17/2016
we usually associate with disorder and randomness.
New Chirality Solution Proposed
新的手性解决方案



“It’s quite bizarre,” Mason said. “You’re starting with achiral
components — triangles — which undergo Brownian motion and
you end up with the spontaneous formation of superstructures that have a handedness or chirality. I would never
have anticipated that in a million years.”
.…“We discovered that just two physical ingredients —
entropy and particle shape — are enough to cause chirality to
appear spontaneously in dense systems,” Mason said. “In my 25
years of doing research, I never thought that I would
see chirality occur in a system of achiral objects driven
by entropic forces.”
The body of the article explains, though, that he didn’t try his
experiment with actual amino acids or biological molecules. He
experimented with colored equilateral triangles, imprinting them on
a static surface using lithography. He perceived “superstructures”
3/17/2016
made up of parallelograms in the densely-packed arrangement.50
New Chirality Solution Proposed
新的手性解决方案



Does this have anything to do with life? Not yet. “We’re learning
some new physical rules, but the story in biology is far from
complete. We have added another chapter to the story, and I’m
amazed by these findings,” he said.
Good grief. Drop the self-serving hype about how amazed he
was. This is stupid. Entropy is not a force. OK, so triangles form
parallelograms when you artificially etch them onto an artificial
surface. Big deal. This has about as much to do with living cells
as a backgammon board has to do with a backgammon champion.
Amino acids are not triangles. They are 3-dimensional molecules
with complex side chains. Living cells employ homochiral amino
acids and sugars because they provide the optimum arrangement
for structure and function of proteins and nucleic acids. They are
100% one-handed. Any deviation from 100% pure chirality
destroys the protein or DNA molecule.
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51
New Chirality Solution Proposed
新的手性解决方案


Even more important, the sequence of the amino acid
building blocks is critical to function. Amino acids do not
link together at random. They are forced together by
molecular machines (ribosomes) that order them
according to a genetic template, complete with
proofreading.
That this silly attempt would get published in the
journal Nature Communications is a sign of desperation at
not having solved the mystery for over a century since
Pasteur first noticed it. You know what solves it
perfectly? Intelligent design. If Mason thinks he has
written “another chapter” to the story, it’s a chapter in the
wrong book – the storytelling book, not the science
textbook.
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52
Best Cave Art Is Still the Oldest
最好的洞穴艺术是最老的




A new research study confirms that the exquisite cave art at
Chauvet Cave is the oldest.
The study is documented in an open-access paper
on PNAS (May 7, 2012). The abstract begins,
Since its discovery, the Chauvet cave elaborate artwork called
into question our understanding of Palaeolithic art
evolution and challenged traditional chronological
benchmarks.
The artwork on the walls of Chauvet Cave is unequalled in
Paleolithic art, superior even to the better-known works of
Lascaux dated much later. Evolutionists had expected that
cave art would progress from simple to complex as man’s
cognitive abilities evolved, but Chauvet challenged that idea by
showing that the oldest was by far the best.
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53
Best Cave Art Is Still the Oldest
最好的洞穴艺术是最老的



The authors of the paper were astonished at its quality:
Chauvet cave, in Vallon Pont d’Arc, Ardèche, France, is a
site of exceptional scientific interest for a number of
reasons: (i) the variety of its majestic parietal; (ii) very
good conservation of the floor and wall ornamentations,
exhibiting human and animal imprints; (iii) revelations of
unknown techniques in Palaeolithic rock art (such as
stump drawing); (iv) predominance of rare themes such as
felines and rhinoceroses; and (v)unequalled aesthetic
delivery.
The new research tried to corroborate or refute carbon
dates using a different dating method, cosmic ray
exposure.
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54
Best Cave Art Is Still the Oldest
最好的洞穴艺术是最老的



Unfortunately for evolutionists, the results continue to “call
into question” their understanding of the artistic abilities of
early man:
Remarkably agreeing with the radiocarbon dates of the
human and animal occupancy, this study confirms that
the Chauvet cave paintings are the oldest and the
most elaborate ever discovered, challenging our
current knowledge of human cognitive evolution.
Their last sentence re-emphasized the challenge to
evolutionary understanding of human capabilities: “These
results have significant implications for archaeological,
human, and rock art sciences and seriously challenge
rock art dating based on stylistic criteria.”
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55
Best Cave Art Is Still the Oldest
最好的洞穴艺术是最老的

PhysOrg summarized the paper, stating that the scientists
determined that a rock fall closed the cave for good 21,500
years ago, ensuring that the paintings had to have been
made much earlier. Finding “the oldest and most
elaborate [cave art] ever discovered” at such an early time
implies that “the method of dating by style” (using
evolutionary assumptions) “is no longer valid.” Nearly
twice as old as the Lascaux paintings that are dated at
12,000 to 17,000 years, evolutionary scientists estimate
the Chauvet paintings date from 28,000 to 40,000 years
ago, “befuddling some who believed that early art took
on more primitive forms.” PhysOrg included a
photograph of modern-looking footprints that were also
found in the chamber.
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56
Best Cave Art Is Still the Oldest
最好的洞穴艺术是最老的


The point is not whether their calculated dates are correct or
not; all dating methods depend on assumptions that cannot be
independently verified. The point here is that evolutionary
assumptions about the mind of man are 100% off. Cave art
started out wonderful and degenerated. The first humans
capable of expressing themselves artistically on cave walls did
so with such expertise and “unexcelled aesthetic delivery” as to
make Picasso blush. Why do we listen to evolutionists? Over
and over their predictions are falsified. This story matches a
Biblical account of the creation of man, not a Darwinian
picture. Let the evidence speak for itself.
This story confirms what we have reported for over a
decade. Chauvet has been studied since 1994. That they can
still believe in evolution after 18 years of falsifying evidence is a
measure of intransigence, not progress in cognition.
3/17/2016
57
From Toxin to Medicine
从毒素改变药物


Botulinum toxin (botox) is now big business in
health and fashion, but few may remember it
derives from one of the deadliest substances
known in nature. Other examples show that
some forms of “natural evil” can be seen in a
different light.
New Scientist featured a series of articles called
“Drugs with bite: The healing powers of
venoms.”
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58
From Toxin to Medicine








从毒素改变药物
If you are scared of snakes, scorpions and other nasty things,
consider how they might save your life:
Have hypertension? A new remedy called captopril comes from the
bite of pit vipers.
Worried about cancer? A chlorotoxin from scorpions shows promise
for cancer treatment.
Suffering from severe pain? A substance called Xen2174 from
deadly cone snail venom offers hope.
For multiple sclerosis or HIV, the venom of the deadly cobra is being
looked at.
Autoimmune diseases may find treatment from the stinging cells of
sea anemones.
Diabetes patients can be prescribed Exenatide, a drug from the bites
of gila monsters.
These new drugs show that there’s more than one way to look at a
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59
scary creature.
From Toxin to Medicine
从毒素改变药物

A T. rex bite could also cure headache instantly. This
subject should not minimize the harm from creatures
to humans, but does point out two interesting
possibilities; (1) toxins are just molecules with delivery
methods that are not evil in themselves; (2) perhaps
some of these substances originally had beneficial
functions. Only Biblical creationists have an answer to
“natural evil” – the original creation contained no
suffering, and some day it will be redeemed. In the
meantime, let’s continue to look for good uses for
“bad” things out in nature.
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60
Lamarckism: Dead but Useful
拉马克：已经死亡，但有用


Lamarck’s theory of evolution was supposed to have died in
1859 when Darwin published his theory of natural
selection. Despite textbook depictions of Lamarckism as
obsolete, Lamarckian language still surfaces from time to time,
even in prestigious journals.
A recent example of speaking like a Lamarckian was detected
in Science this month (4 May 2012) in an article entitled, “How
the Modern Body Shaped Up.” Evolutionists are not supposed
to speak in terms of “use and disuse” and “inheritance of
acquired characteristics,” but reporting on a meeting of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists,
correspondent Ann Gibbons came pretty close: “A remarkably
comprehensive analysis of more than 2000 European skeletons
presented at the meeting reveals how cultural changes have
altered our physiques,” she said.
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61
Lamarckism: Dead but Useful


拉马克：已经死亡，但有用
In all fairness, she could have been speaking of how random
mutations that were naturally selected led to better adapted
physiques – and undoubtedly, if questioned, she would affirm
that. Yet for the anthropologists she quoted, it seemed too tempting
to speak of humans acquiring their physiques by Lamarckian
pressures:
Modern humans have gone through a lot of changes in the past
30,000 years. We switched from hunting and gathering to
farming and herding; from life as nomads to settling in urban
centers; from eating meat, nuts, and tubers to consuming grains,
sugars, and dairy products. Now, a remarkably comprehensive
analysis of more than 2000 European skeletons presented at the
meeting reveals how these cultural changes have altered our
physiques. “When you become a modern human, what happens
to your body?” asked paleoanthropologist Christopher Ruff of Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, co-chair of the session on
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62
skeletal adaptation in recent Europeans.
Lamarckism: Dead but Useful



拉马克：已经死亡，但有用
If “cultural changes” to anatomy are not Lamarckian, what are
they? According to neo-Darwinism sensu strictu, changes due to
habit have to find expression in the gametes through mutation and
natural selection. In the second paragraph, Gibbons seemed to mix
Darwinian and Lamarckian mechanisms:
While other studies have documented a decrease in height after the
transition to agriculture, this is the first systematic study of how the
skeleton changed from the time modern humans spread through
Europe 30,000 years ago until they were circling the globe in jets by
the 1960s. In 10 posters, Ruff and his colleagues focused on how
each part of the body, from the spine to leg and arm bones,
evolved over time through both genetic and cultural change.
One anthropologist attributed a drop in strength of leg bones to the
switch from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to the sedentary life of
the farmer. Another attributed changes in upper body strength to
agriculture.
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63
Lamarckism: Dead but Useful
拉马克：已经死亡，但有用


Recalling how Lamarck argued that men with strong arms from
work might pass that trait on to their sons, it’s hard to get more
Lamarckian than the description of how anatomical changes
occurred:
Over the same 30,000-year period, upper body strength
declined after the introduction of agriculture. In males, it
then increased in the Medieval period, possibly due to
intensive upper-body labor such as blacksmithing. One
trend through time is that the right arm lost much of its
asymmetric larger size compared to the left arm, perhaps
due to fewer strongly lateralized activities such as spear
throwing. Women show particularly symmetrical arms from
the beginning of agriculture 7000 years ago to Europe’s Bronze
Age, 3000 years ago. The researchers suspect that this
stems from using both arms to make flour with grinding 64
3/17/2016
stones.
Lamarckism: Dead but Useful
拉马克：已经死亡，但有用


Perhaps it’s too tedious or confusing to speak in strict
Darwinian terms, calling on random mutations to be
selected. For Gibbons and the anthropologists she interviewed,
Lamarckian terminology – the environment or culture leading to
adaptations directly – may be a tempting shortcut. Even so,
there were no disclaimers in the article, despite its subject of
how the human body “evolved over time.”
Another example was found on PhysOrg, where Dean Falk
(University of Florida) attributed the shape of the Taung baby (a
hominid fossil) as an environmental adaptation: “The persistent
metopic suture is an adaptation for giving birth to babies
with larger brains; is related to the shift to a rapidly growing
brain after birth; and may be related to expansion in the
frontal lobes.” Mutations in the birth canal should have
nothing to do with mutations in the brain.
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65
Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事


To a Darwinian evolutionist, the mind is the product of
unguided mutations and random environmental pressures
acting on material forces. This raises questions about the
mind and morals: do they have any validity? Evolutionists
need to “mind” their matter. The following examples show
how they try to justify these non-material entities arising
from matter in motion.
The smart thing: Intelligence is an immaterial property
that, to an evolutionist, must be an epiphenomenon or
illusion arising from particles in motion. New
Scientist asked whether intelligence – “what distinguishes
humans from the myriad other species with which we
share our planet” – can be explained in evolutionary
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66
terms.
Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事



The article is more a question than an answer about
intelligence:
It is a key factor in everything from our anatomy to our
technology. To ask why we are intelligent is to ask why we
are human; it admits no discrete answer. But let’s ask it
here anyway. Why are we, alone in nature, so smart?
One answer is that maybe we aren’t as smart as we think
we are. “Maybe our anthropocentric conceit prevents
us from fully appreciating the intelligence of other animals,
be they ants, cephalopods or cetaceans.” This approach
however, invokes one immaterial concept, conceit, to
dodge another, intelligence. It seems the article is
marching in place so far.
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67
Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事



Time for another tentative step:
So let’s rephrase the question. There is a cluster of
abilities that seems unique to humans: language, tool use,
culture and empathy. Other animals may have rudimentary
forms of these abilities, but they do not approach humans’
sophistication and flexibility. Why not?
Again, though, language, tool use, culture and empathy
are immaterial, so this approach suffers the same
shortcomings. Appeals to variations of intelligence within
species doesn’t solve the problem. At this point, the
anonymous author of this article leapt into storybook land
about why not all chimps became champs of intelligence:
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68
Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事


Some did, but a long time ago: our own
ancestors. Somewhere in our evolutionary history, there
were presumably similarly prodigious
protohumans, produced by some accident of genetics or
environment, whose greater intelligence gave them the edge
over their less gifted peers. Today’s chimp prodigies do not
seem to profit from their intelligence in the same way. Their
society and environment do not reward it as ours did.
So our ancestors may have been fortuitously placed
to embark on the runaway cycle of biological and cultural
development that led to modern, multitasking humans… and to
a level of adaptability that allows us to adjust readily to changes
in our environment, and even modify it to suit ourselves.
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Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事


To avoid belaboring the point that words like history, prodigy, gifted,
reward, and suit refer to immaterial concepts and values, this
answer reduces to “stuff happens” – we got smart “fortuitously,” by
“some accident of genetics or environment.” If intelligence is an
accident, though, philosophers will want to know what gives it
validity to be turned on itself to ask questions about its own origin.
The right thing: Kate Douglas tried to evolutionize morality with a
book review for New Scientist entitled, “When did our ancestors
learn to do the right thing?” but whether she did the right thing
evolutionarily is the question at issue. The book under review is
Christopher Boehm’s Moral Origins: The evolution of virtue,
altruism, and shame. A social anthropologist, Boehm studied the
!Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa for
answers. He believes the !Kung mimic “the original moralists —
late Pleistocene foraging societies living in Africa 45,000 years
ago.”
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Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事



Here’s his thesis in a nutshell:
So how did we evolve from amoral apes to moral
humans? It is a question that has perplexed many,
from Darwin onward, but what sets Boehm’s approach
apart is his effort “to make the natural history of moral
origins more historical”. In so doing he provides a new
and coherent map of the evolution of morality.
He argues that our ancestors were “preadapted” for
morality. Like today’s chimps and bonobos, they had
a sense of self and of fairness, a tendency for young to
learn appropriate behaviour from their mothers, and
the potential for collective action, giving subordinates
some power over dominant individuals.
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Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事

The first step was to develop a conscience, or what
Boehm describes as a “Machiavellian risk calculator”.
At first, this controlled selfish urges through fear of
punishment, but morality began to emerge when
our ancestors learned to internalise their society’s
social rules, connecting them with emotions such
as shame and honour. Finally, he says, altruistic
genes got a boost as societies came to value
generosity and punish selfishness. Our egotistic and
nepotistic tendencies still far outweigh the altruistic
ones, but by social selection we have
unwittingly made our own gene pool more virtuous.
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Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事

It’s hard to see how Boehm can justify using words like self,
fairness, rules, values, shame, honour, altruistic,
and virtuous in a materialistic context. Some of these things
he seems to think were just “there,” being somehow
“preadapted.” His law of “social selection” seems contrived
out of Darwin’s natural selection. Another problem is that
Boehm studied modern, living humans who already are
“egalitarian and share big game equitably,” begging the
question on how such immaterial traits got started. Kate
Douglas tried to be as nice as she could: “It is a complex
story and Moral Origins is a bit muddled at times, but
Boehm’s experience doing fieldwork with humans and wild
chimps makes him a wonderfully knowledgeable guide. And
some of his ideas are truly revolutionary.”
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Evolutionists Need to Mind Their Matters
进化论者需要考虑到他们的事

In short, somewhere, in an unobserved evolutionary
history, presumably, an accident of genetics or
environment did something, perhaps developing a
conscience, that internalized rules, generating
“altruistic genes” that in turn produced true altruism,
leading chimps down a path that led to us humans
with our intelligence, virtue and morality. To call
evolutionary answers “a bit muddled at times” is being
truly altruistic. That, in and of itself, is evidence that
altruism and intelligence are not products of material
processes of selection and “fortuitous” accident, but of
design. It follows logically that it is neither virtuous nor
sensible to think otherwise.
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Noah’s Ark Claim Not Trustworthy
诺亚方舟声称不值得信任


A creationist group in Hong Kong is releasing a dramatic
documentary filled with fantastic claims about the
discovery of Noah’s Ark on Mt. Ararat. Other prominent
creationists are warning of fraud and scientific malpractice.
The two whistleblowers have no antipathy to the
subject. They would love real evidence of Noah’s Ark,
knowing full well how powerful such evidence would be for
the historicity of the Genesis Flood
account. Nevertheless, they have found it necessary, at
personal risk, to call attention to fraudulent practices such
as selective reporting, doctoring evidence and reliance on
unscrupulous characters by the Hong Kong based
group NAMI (Noah’s Ark Ministries International).
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Noah’s Ark Claim Not Trustworthy
诺亚方舟声称不值得信任



1. Dr. Carl Wieland of Creation Ministries International has just
written a lengthy article, “The ‘Hong Kong Ark’ fiasco — an
overview to date (May 2012)” after personally visiting with
the NAMIteam.
2. Dr. Randall Price, a Biblical archaeologist, author, and ark
researcher, also wrote a lengthy PDF document at his
site, World of the Bible.
A wise old preacher of righteousness, Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., said,
“It is never right to do wrong to get a chance to do right.” Good
intentions can never atone for misconduct. Integrity is essential
for science and any scholarly enterprise. We urge NAMI to
come clean on their evidence, refrain from hype, and admit
wrongdoing, even though millions of dollars are at stake for
them after their fundraising and promotion. Meanwhile, help
those deceived by their claims to learn the facts.
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Rapid Undersea Geology Observed
观察快速海底地质



An undersea volcano near the Cook Islands was
observed to grow and shrink rapidly in a fortnight,
rivaling the rapid changes in Vesuvius and Mt. St.
Helens.
The BBC News reported that a research team from
Oxford “recorded huge changes in height in just
two weeks.” In fact, they were glad they weren’t there
during an explosive phase, or else “rocks could have
hit the hull of the ship — that could have been
potentially dangerous.”
Submarine geology is “little known,” the article
said. Sonar images of the undersea volcano before
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and after showed rapid changes had occurred:
Rapid Undersea Geology Observed
观察快速海底地质



Later the ship returned to the scene and the scientists
were surprised to see how much the volcano had
changed. In the space of a fortnight, one part of the
volcano’s summit had collapsed by as much as 18.8m
while new lava flows had raised another area by 79.1m.
Most striking was the creation of an entirely new
volcanic cone.
The researchers believe the changes are larger than at
most other volcanoes. Only Vesuvius and Mount St
Helens have recorded larger growth rates.
The paper says the speed of growth and change is “a
reminder of how rapidly geological processes such
as submarine landsliding and volcanism can occur.”
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Rapid Undersea Geology Observed
观察快速海底地质


The article stated that some 32,000 undersea mountains have
been identified, many believed to be volcanic in origin. Lead
author Tony Watts called this “a wake-up call that the seafloor may be more dynamic than we previously
thought.” He remarked, “I’ve spent my career studying the
seabed and have generally thought it pretty stable so
it’s stunning to see so much change in such a short space
of time.”
Live Science called the volcano the Monowai
Seamount. Based on sonar measurements from 2007, Tony
Watts’ team figures the volcano must have undergone 10 to 13
similar eruptions—perhaps 2 or 3 “large, quick eruptions each
year,” the article said. If submarine geology is indeed little
known, there could be many other examples of rapid undersea
volcanic changes that have so far been out of sight, out of 79
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mind.
Rapid Undersea Geology Observed
观察快速海底地质

Why was he stunned? Undoubtedly, it’s due to
the fact that he was indoctrinated as a student
into Lyell’s cult of uniformitarianism and
Darwin’s vision of millions of years of slow,
gradual changes. His own words show that
such doctrines put geologists into the bad habit
of thinking in their sleep. Let’s help amplify the
wake-up call so other Darwin zombies get out
of their dogmatic slumbers and face reality.
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Dark Matter as an Escape
暗物质作为一种逃避


Employing exotic unobservable entities such as dark
matter may be an escape from scientific rigor in more
ways than one.
Recently, the notion that most of the universe is
composed of dark matter took an evidential hit. Live
Science said, “A sprawling collection of galaxies and star
clusters surrounding our own Milky Way is challenging
long-standing theories on the existence of dark
matter, the mysterious substance thought to
pervade the universe.” According to a survey of
satellite galaxies of the Milky Way conducted at the
University of Bonn, dark matter theories fail to account
for the arrangement of matter in a region spanning 10
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times our galaxy’s diameter.
Dark Matter as an Escape
暗物质作为一种逃避



The astronomers extended the impact of their findings
to the entire universe:
“Our model appears to rule out the presence of
dark matter in the universe, threatening a central
pillar of current cosmological theory,” said study
team member Pavel Kroupa, a professor of astronomy
at the University of Bonn. “We see this as the
beginning of a paradigm shift, one that will
ultimately lead us to a new understanding of the
universe we inhabit.”
The statement also implies that previous
“understanding of the universe” was misguided or
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absent.
Dark Matter as an Escape
暗物质作为一种逃避

Last month Ker Than, reporting for National
Geographic News, quoted an astronomer who said the
finding of a huge structure of satellite galaxies
surrounding the Milky Way puts cosmology “basically
in a shambles.” He referred to his other National
Geographic article two weeks earlier that also
questioned the existence of dark matter because it
wasn’t detected where needed to explain the Milky
Way’s halo. That finding “could provide ammunition
for skeptics who argue that the invisible
substance is just an illusion,” he said. About the
same time, though, another National
Geographic reporter claimed that dark matter particles
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hit the average human once a minute.
Dark Matter as an Escape
暗物质作为一种逃避


Growing questions about dark matter’s existence may be giving
rise to a proverb called the “dark matter argument.” In another
context, Maggie McKee at New Scientist reported doubts that
the star Fomalhaut has a planet. A bright spot imaged in a dust
disk surrounding the star, imaged by the Hubble Telescope in
2004, had been hailed as a direct observation of an extrasolar
planet. Astronomers were encouraged at the time by the fact
that it appeared in a gap in the dust dusk, suggesting that the
planet had cleared a path for itself.
Now, however, a new study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center has shown that the bright spot might be a dust cloud,
not a planet. Furthermore, simulations shown in a computer
animation within the article indicate that gaps in dust disks –
even with sharp edges – can form without the presence of a
planet.
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Dark Matter as an Escape
暗物质作为一种逃避




A JPL scientist used the occasion to joke about the escape
hatch dark matter theories provide:
“I call it the dark matter argument,” says Wladimir Lyra
at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“There is something you are seeing that you cannot
explain, and you blame the gravity of something you
cannot see.”
Dark energy has also come under scrutiny. National
Geographic asked, is it a kind of “reverse gravity” as usually
described? Perhaps not. The pressure leading to accelerated
expansion of the universe might come from normal old
antimatter, well characterized in earth-based detectors.
These appear to be dark days for dark matter theories.
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Dark Matter as an Escape
暗物质作为一种逃避


Philosophers call appeals to unseen, unknown
entities “occult phenomena.” Like spiritually
occult things, they are placeholders for
ignorance. But given a name, these
placeholders take on a reality of their own, used
by scientific shamans to tell the peasants why
things are the way they are.
For too long, dark matter has been a rhetorical
flubber to impress laypeople while escaping
scientific rigor. It’s time to call astronomers to
account. Account for dark matter, or turn on the
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light.
Improbable Ape Speaks Randomly
不可能猿随机讲话



It’s not uncharitable to call someone an ape when he
calls himself that.
New Scientist entitled a short article, “We Are the
Improbable Ape.” It’s perhaps fortunate that the
author(s) did not identify himself, herself, itself or
themselves, because it claimed that 3 chance mutations
made us what we are, complete with thinking brains
(5/05/2012) and language. One excerpt wins Stupid
Evolution Quote of the Week:
But on another it brings home the sheer improbability
of our existence. The essence of humanity largely
boils down to a bunch of random mutations, every
one of them happening by chance.
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Improbable Ape Speaks Randomly
不可能猿随机讲话




Richard Dawkins once described evolution as
“climbing mount improbable”. It is always worth
remembering that humans have climbed the highest.
It’s not entirely clear that an improbable ape arriving by
the Stuff Happens Law would know which way is up.
Maybe the improbable ape who wrote for New
Scientist is highest on another level, the “under the
influence” level. The rest of us rational human beings
can be content we are on the level on purpose. Just
hope the improbable apes don’t throw their rocks with as
good aim as the Swedish chimp reported in PLoS
One does. Both are equally good at practicing deceit,
though.
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Butterfly Mimics Don’t Evolve; They Share
蝴蝶模仿不进化，它们分享


A non-evolutionary explanation has been found
for a classic evolutionary showpiece: mimicry in
butterflies.
Heliconius butterflies are well-known for having
nearly identical wing patterns between
species. Prior evolutionary explanations
involved developing these patterns
independently through mutation and natural
selection. Now, a new paper in Nature shows
that the butterflies share the genes for the
patterns through hybridization.
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
89
Butterfly Mimics Don’t Evolve; They Share
蝴蝶模仿不进化，它们分享




PhysOrg summarized the surprising findings:
The genetic sharing between species, researchers
believe, is the result of hybridization. Considered
extremely rare, particularly in animals, hybridization
occurs when insects of two different species
interbreed in the wild.
The resulting hybrid offspring share traits with both
mother and father. Though often considered
evolutionary dead-end, hybrids occasionally
interbreed with a parent species, in the process
introducing new genes that can help populations
adapt to new or changing environments.
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And what does this mean for Darwinian evolution? 90
Butterfly Mimics Don’t Evolve; They Share
蝴蝶模仿不进化，它们分享


“What we show is that one butterfly species can gain its
protective colour pattern genes ready-made from a different
species by hybridizing (or interbreeding) with it – a much faster
process than having to evolve one’s colour patterns from
scratch,” said Kanchon Dasmahapatra, a postdoctoral researcher
at the University College of London’s Department of Genetics,
Evolution, and Environment, and a co-author of the paper.
“This project really changes how we think about adaptation in
general,” said Marcus Kronforst, a Bauer Fellow at Harvard, who
participated in the sequencing. “Evolutionary biologists often
wonder whether different species use the same genes to generate
similar traits, like the mimetic wing patterns of Heliconius
butterflies. This study shows us that sometimes different species
not only use the same genes, but the exact same stretches
of DNA, which they pass around by hybridization.”
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Butterfly Mimics Don’t Evolve; They Share
蝴蝶模仿不进化，它们分享





The Nature paper had nothing to say about mutation and natural
selection. Instead, as these excerpts show, it described the
adaptation spreading by sharing genes (called introgression), not
neo-Darwinism:
These patterns would be very hard to explain in terms of
convergent functional-site evolution or random coalescent
fluctuations. Instead, our results imply that derived colour-pattern
elements have introgressed recently between both rayed and
postman forms of H. timareta and H. melpomene.…
We have demonstrated repeated exchange of large (~100-kb)
adaptive regions among multiple species in a recent radiation.…
Although it was long suspected that introgression might be
important in evolutionary radiations, our results from the most
diverse terrestrial biome on the planet suggest that adaptive
introgression is more pervasive than previously realized.
This leaves an obvious question: How did the first butterfly evolve the
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92
Butterfly Mimics Don’t Evolve; They Share
蝴蝶模仿不进化，它们分享


Sharing by hybridization is not neo-Darwinian
evolution. How many textbooks have used butterfly mimicry
as an example of Darwin in action? Now, scientists have to
consider that the genes for these color patterns were already
there, “ready made.” We learn that butterflies have the ability
to swap & share pre-existing genetic information. This begs
the question of where the information came from in the first
place.
Darwinists might counter that the process aids survival of the
fittest. OK, so what? That still doesn’t answer the question
of the origin of the information. That evidence fits just as
well, if not better, with the argument that intelligent design
permits adaptation by mechanisms that allow sharing of
beneficial genetic information. It’s a robust design feature,
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not an evolutionary innovation.
Butterfly Mimics Don’t Evolve; They Share
蝴蝶模仿不进化，它们分享



Notice that the scientists confessed that they long suspected
that introgression could be important in “evolutionary
radiations,” because it was hard to believe that “convergent
evolution” could generate these patterns “from scratch.” But if
it’s not evolution by neo-Darwinian means, it’s not an
evolutionary radiation, and it’s not convergent evolution
either. It’s design all the way around.
Notice also that they said these hybridization events occurred
recently. They didn’t say how recent, but obviously,
hybridization can occur in one generation. Presto: instant
information in the genome, “ready made” for better survival.
We can’t let a butterfly story pass without a reminder that you
can see Heliconius butterflies, and many other beautiful
species, in Illustra’s latest ID masterpiece, Metamorphosis,
available at metamorphosisthefilm.com.
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Earth’s Magnetic Field Less Sustainable than Thought
地球磁场比想象的不可持续


Geophysicists have found that their favored dynamo
theory for Earth’s magnetic field is less sustainable
than thought, leaving them wondering how our
planet retained its magnetic field for “geologic time.”
Nature wrote, “New calculations show that
the electrical resistance of Earth’s liquid-iron
core is lower than had been thought. The results
prompt a reassessment of how the planet’s
magnetic field has been generated and
maintained over time.” This is from Bruce
Buffett,1 reporting on a paper by Pozzo et al. in the
same issue.2
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Earth’s Magnetic Field Less Sustainable than Thought
地球磁场比想象的不可持续


They said their findings have significant implications:
Revised estimates of σ and k calculated directly at core
conditions have fundamental consequences for the
thermochemical evolution of the deep Earth. New estimates
of the power requirements for the geodynamo suggest
a CMB [core-mantle boundary] heat flux in the upper range of
what is considered reasonable for mantle convection
unless very marginal dynamo action can be sustained,
while a primordial inner core is only possible with a
significant concentration of radiogenic elements in the
core. There are objections to a high CMB heat flux and also
to radiogenic heating in the core, but one of the two seems
inevitable if we are to have a dynamo. If the inner core
is young, these high values of conductivity provide further
problems with maintaining a purely thermally driven
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dynamo.
Earth’s Magnetic Field Less Sustainable than Thought
地球磁场比想象的不可持续


A thermally stratified layer at the top of the
core also appears inevitable. Viable thermal history
models that produce thin stable layers and an inner
core of age ~1 Gyr are likely to require a fairly rapid
cooling rate and some radiogenic heating. The
presence of a stable layer, and the effects
associated with an increased electrical
conductivity, have significant implications for our
understanding of the geomagnetic secular
variation.
This makes it sound like the geodynamo is a “theory in
crisis” with two requirements, both of them undesirable
to maintain the dynamo for the assumed age of the
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Earth.
Earth’s Magnetic Field Less Sustainable than Thought
地球磁场比想象的不可持续



Buffett left the finding as a “remarkable” challenge to existing
theory and understanding, not only for our planet, but for all the
planets, even those around other stars:
It is remarkable that a modest change in thermal conductivity
can have such a dramatic affect on the dynamics of Earth’s
core. More broadly, the latest study reveals how the properties
of liquid iron make the operation of magnetic dynamos in
terrestrial planets even more precarious than was
previously believed. We are left with the challenge of
understanding how Earth has succeeded in maintaining its
magnetic field over most of geological time.
Where have they been? Creation geologists have been
pointing out these problems for decades. As usual, they get no
credit.
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Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小


Should you trust the diagnosis of a
psychiatrist? If it helps, individuals are free to
choose. Behind the scenes, however, there are
severe, deep-seated debates about whether
professional shrinks understand disorders, let
alone diagnose them properly.
In New Scientist, James Davies reported about
protests at the American Psychiatric
Association’s (APA) annual meeting. Some
protestors feel that psychiatry is “not even
wrong”; psychiatrists don’t know what they are
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doing, and sometimes end up abusing patients:
Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小


The demonstration aimed to highlight the harm the protesters
believe psychiatry is perpetrating in the name of
healing. One concern is that while psychiatric medications
are more widely prescribed than almost any drugs in
history, they often don’t work well and have debilitating
side effects. Psychiatry also professes to respect human
rights, while regularly treating people against their
will. Finally, psychiatry keeps expanding its list of disorders
without solid scientific justification.
That list includes major changes with each new edition of the
psychiatry “bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM). Edition V is coming out, loaded with
new maladies that were never diagnosed before, and altering
the description of other disorders – changes that can have
major effects on prescriptions, insurance policies and scientific
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“explanations” for various behaviors.
Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小



In another article on New Scientist, “Trials highlight worrying flaws in
psychiatry ‘bible’,” Peter Aldhous focused on flaws in tests that
psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness. “While for some diagnoses
reliability was good, others yielded scores little better than chance,”
he said. Some of the worst results concerned some of the most
common diagnoses:
The conditions with questionable reliability include subtly altered
descriptions of two of the most common diagnoses in psychiatry:
major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder. That
has opened a can of worms, leaving some mental health professionals
wondering about the reliability of even established psychiatric
diagnoses.
The final wording of DSM-5, scheduled for publication in May 2013, will
have profound effects on people’s lives. The manual not only helps
determine who is given psychoactive drugs, but in the US may determine
whether treatment is covered by health insurance. Some diagnoses are
even used to justify holding people indefinitely in secure mental101
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hospitals.
Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小

There are others that Aldhous worried about: diagnoses of
autism, and an alleged precursor of schizophrenia dubbed
“attenuated psychosis syndrome.” Psychiatrists use a
value called kappa that is supposed to measure the “the
consensus between different doctors assessing the
same patient, with 1 corresponding to perfect diagnostic
agreement, and 0 meaning concordance could just be due
to chance.” Unfortunately, chance could not be ruled out
as a hypothesis for some of the most common
disorders. For instance, regarding attenuated psychosis
syndrome, “While field trials gave a kappa of 0.46,
the variability was so large that Darrel
Regier, APA’s head of research, told the meeting that
the result was “uninterpretable”.
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Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小

One theory escape mechanism for the
questionable reliability of “major depressive
disorder” and “generalized anxiety disorder”
diagnoses was to suggest that depression and
anxiety are like the “fevers” of a deeper mental
disorder whose symptoms can mask a variety
of conditions. Aldhous did not seem impressed;
“if depression and anxiety can’t be reliably
diagnosed, many patients will wonder how
many more disorders stand on similarly
shaky ground.”
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Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小



Psychiatrist: “Our new textbook indicates that your
delusions of grandeur were misdiagnosed. In other
words, you’re cured.”
Patient: “Some cure! I used to be Napoleon. Now I’m
nobody!”
Psychiatry is a pseudoscience acting like a religion (i.e.,
telling people their problem and the solution), but
masquerading as a science with big words and lots of
money. Since it is a pseudoscience, we can have a little
fun with it by imagining a world in which the Darwin
skeptics have the money and the power. Like them, we
can use scientific jargon to diagnose our foes as
mentally ill. We could publish our manual in the
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DSM, Darwinian Symptoms of Madness.
Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小

Suppose, for instance, we were to diagnose Richard Dawkins with
“Design denial disorder” (DDD) with symptoms including (1)
obsessive acts of self-persuasion that what one is observing was
not designed, but evolved; (2) incessant repetition of
Dobzhansky’s proverb that nothing in biology makes sense except
in the light of evolution; (3) willingness to believe in intelligent
design when it comes to aliens seeding life on Earth, but only if the
aliens evolved by natural selection; (4) a compulsion to persuade
others that there is no God by making money selling books, and
(5) an illogical preference to live in a theistic country while
promoting atheism. With the right consensus, we could probably
obtain high kappa values to prove our etiology is valid and our
diagnosis reliable. We might even get insurance companies to
cover prescription drugs aimed at curing DDD. Anyone protesting
our actions we could diagnose with “DDD co-dependent
syndrome” (DDD-CDS), and drug them, too. Remember, we have
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the power and the self-serving science to back it up.
Shrink Validity Is Shrinking
收缩的有效性正在缩小


We would never do such a thing, of course, since we believe in
compassionate persuasion and intellectual integrity. We would
never wish to manipulate power by imitating psychiatry’s flawed
methods and Darwinian “survival of the fittest” ethics. We would
wish to be transparent and consistent about our belief that “mental
illness” is an oxymoron, believing instead that people’s behavioral
problems are caused by either sin or physical flaws such as brain
damage. But our imaginary power play is certainly a conceivable
thought experiment. It turns the tables on what some Darwinians
actually do: calling their critics insane.
The evolutionists’ bible is Darwin’s Origin of Species, with its
evolutionary tree of life, and the shrinks’ bible is the DSM-V, with
its man-made judgments of what constitutes normal and abnormal
behavior. These ‘bibles’ have their genesis in the flawed
assumption that human brains were not designed, but
evolved. The authentic trees of life and of knowledge of good and
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evil are known by their fruits.
What SETI Guru Wants to Know
搜索地球外师想知道



Seth Shostak, a SETI advocate, has two key
questions for aliens.
A frequent spokesperson for the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI), Shostak was recently
invited to be a science consultant for Hollywood’s
latest cosmic battle epic, Battleship. His interview
for Space.com ended with the following: what would
he ask the aliens?
First, Shostak clarified whether the question meant
getting an answer back or not. Assuming it could be a
two-way conversation, he did not care so much to
learn about alien science or technology. Instead,
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surprisingly, he would ask something very different. 107
What SETI Guru Wants to Know
搜索地球外师想知道




Seth Shostak said,
But if it ever got to a point where you could get into
a conversation and ask questions, my two have
always been: do you have music and do you
have religion?
I wouldn’t ask about physics because we could
eventually figure that out, but those two
questions are things only they would know.
As for whether aliens would be friendly or hostile,
Shostak shrugged and said it’s basically too late to
worry, because our messages are already out
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there.
What SETI Guru Wants to Know
搜索地球外师想知道



Yes, they have both music and religion. Angels
serve the living God and sing for joy in His
presence.
Next question?
Shostak would never ask such things if he did
not realize deep in his soul that music and
religion make no sense in a Darwinian
universe. Somebody send him
Handel’s Messiah for contemplation as he
ponders the conundrum of whether aliens
would send signals by intelligent design or not.
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Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文



Finch beaks loom large in classical Darwinian theory, but two
examples of mouth parts in very different animals show that
dramatic variations can be achieved quickly without the slow
and gradual accumulation of small changes Darwin envisaged.
A. Pufferfish: The pufferfish that can quickly inflate themselves
into spheres have a mouth that is unique among teleost fishes:
it looks like a parrot’s beak. A paper in PNAS1 claimed that
their unusual dentition most likely arose through a regulatory
modification during embryonic development:
Teleost fishes comprise approximately half of all living
vertebrates. The extreme range of diversity in teleosts is
remarkable, especially, extensive morphological variation in
their jaws and dentition. Some of the most unusual dentitions
are found among members of the highly derived teleost order
Tetraodontiformes, which includes triggerfishes, boxfishes, 110
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ocean sunfishes, and pufferfishes.
Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian

喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文
Adult pufferfishes (Tetraodontidae) exhibit a distinctive parrot-like
beaked jaw, forming a cutting edge, unlike in any other group of
teleosts. Here we show thatdespite novelty in the structure and
development of this “beak,” it is initiated by formation of
separate first-generation teeth that line the embryonic pufferfish
jaw, with timing of development and gene expression patterns
conserved from the last common ancestor of osteichthyans. Most of
these first-generation larval teeth are lost in development. Continuous
tooth replacement proceeds in only four parasymphy seal teeth, as
sequentially stacked, multigenerational, jaw-length dentine bands,
before development of the functional beak. These data suggest that
dental novelties, such as the pufferfish beak, can develop later
in ontogeny through modified continuous tooth addition and
replacement. We conclude that even highly derived
morphological structures like the pufferfish beak form via a
conserved developmental bauplan capable of modification
during ontogeny by subtle respecification of the developmental
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module.
Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian


喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文
Science Daily printed a summary of the paper with a picture of a
pufferfish. It said that pufferfish tooth development is “unchanged
through evolution” and uses a “highly conserved process” in its
beak development. The unique structure represents an adaptation of
pre-existing tools: “It is an example of re-specification of its genetic
tool-kit for tooth development toward a very alternative, and unique,
dentition.”
B. Madagascar birds: Move over, Darwin finches: the vangas of
Madagascar show more diversity than the Galapagos birds Darwin
made famous. The seed-eating vangas show wide variation in body
size, feeding habit, beak shape and size, and coloration. Science
Daily showed a vanga family tree of 22 species inhabiting the island
that “differ considerably in terms of morphology and resulting
foraging habits.” How did these differences arise? Not the way
Darwinians thought, the article surprised readers. “Until now,
Madagascan vangas were also viewed to be a textbook
example of this process” – the rapid filling of vacant ecological 112
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niches.
Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文

The new idea is that vangas underwent two bursts
of rapid diversification separated by long periods of
stasis: the first when the birds arrived, the second
when a “key morphological innovation” emerged
among some of them much later – a sickle-shaped
bill that “enabled the new species to retrieve
insects hidden under the bark of trees, and so
occupy a new dietary niche.” At first glance, this
sounds like two Darwin wins instead of one. The
last paragraph, however, casts doubt on what is
known in even textbook cases of Darwinian
evolution:
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Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文

The fundamental study by the international team indicates for
the first time that the amazing diversity of the vangas evolved
in a two-step process. The study also illustrates how much
of Madagascar and its unusual biodiversity is still not fully
understood, and what exciting scientific discoveries may
await there. Furthermore, the study shows that
a morphological key innovation and related new foraging
strategy may result in a burst of speciation, even after the
group has already reached its ecological limit. Previously,
researchers had thought this to be possible, but it had never
been demonstrated. However, the high specialization of the
vangas might now be their doom: the habitat to which the birds
have adapted over the past 25 million years is shrinking quickly
as a consequence of land use and climate change.
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Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文

The subtitle of that paragraph was, “First evidence for old
ideas.” Did they really mean to imply that there has been no
evidence for a Darwinian idea for 153 years? The new story,
being told by an international team that studied the vangas, is
that a founder population arrived 25 million years ago, quickly
diversified and reached an ecological limit, and stopped
evolving. Then, a key “innovation” just “emerged” 15 million
years later, and the birds – that had been living without evolving
all that time – underwent another rapid burst of diversification
with the new sickle-shaped beaks (until humans started
threatening them with “land use and climate change”). The
abstract of the original paper in PNAS chirped,2 “Morphological
space bears a close relationship to diet, substrate use, and
foraging movements, and thus our results demonstrate the
great extent of the evolutionary diversification of the
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Madagascan vangas.”
Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文


Science Daily did not explain how the sickle-shaped beak
“emerged,” how the male with the sickle beak found a female
with the same innovation to pass it on, how the birds learned to
use it and develop a taste for new food, why the prey did not
evolve counter-measures, how the beak shape correlated with
color changes, or why innovations were so rare as to keep
Darwin’s theory in check for millions of years at a time. The
original paper also stated, “Why some lineages undergo
adaptive radiation is not well-understood, but filling
unoccupied ecological space appears to be a common
feature.”
C. Hopelessness: PLoS Biology3 shared a paper that
underscored how difficult it is to confirm a case of adaptive
evolution in an ecological community:
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Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文

Understanding how natural selection drives
evolution is a key challenge in evolutionary
biology. Most studies of adaptation focus on how a single
environmental factor, such as increased temperature,
affects evolution within a single species. The biological
relevance of these experiments is
limited because nature is infinitely more complex. Most
species are embedded within communities containing
many species that interact with one another and the
physical environment. To understand the evolutionary
significance of such ecological complexity, experiments
must test the evolutionary impact of interactions among
multiple species during adaptation.
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Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文

The authors suggested a method for isolating evolutionary
effects from the tangle of infinite complexity in the real
world, but could only offer hope for the future. “If
evolutionary biology is to become a predictive
science,” they concluded (implying it is not yet a predictive
science), “future research needs to embrace
the complexity inherent to communities and
ecosystems.” They even stated that previous studies are
misleading: “In this regard it will be important to move
beyond studying static patterns of trait variation and
selection that are currently employed, which can provide
a misleading snap-shot of evolution.” Perhaps the
pufferfish and vanga beak studies come to mind, warning
evolutionists to be careful when speaking about freak 118
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beaks or diversification peaks.
Beak Careful: Variation May Be Non-Darwinian
喙小心：变异可能不是达尔文

Birds are real, pufferfish are real, but “evolutionary
understanding” (an oxymoron) is a flight of
fancy. Design biologists have explanations, too; they
put the capacity for adaptation in the design of the
organism, not in the ability of the environment to make
lucky adaptations emerge, or in the Stuff Happens Law
to create key innovations by chance. How did the
Darwin charlatans ever gain such power and control
over the journals and media? How can their hegemony
be hedged? Maybe the environment will take care of
it. Maybe land use and climate change will threaten the
Darwinists’ ecological niche, too. A niche in time saves
design.
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？


Some animals commit cruel or disgusting acts humans
would consider immoral. What does this mean?
Some pro-evolution scientists seem to take particular
pleasure in pointing out the sins committed by
animals. Examples abound: some commit
cannibalism and infanticide, engage in open
homosexual acts, cheat on their spouses, steal, and
deceive their neighbors – essentially breaking most if
not all of the Ten Commandments. Evolutionists are
usually quick with Darwinian explanations for how
these acts increase survival of the fittest, but generally
fall short of advising that humans should follow their
examples.
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？


Here are some recent instances in the news:
Lion cannibalism: The BBC News addressed the question
of cannibalism and infanticide among lions and other
animals. Anna-Louise Taylor offered several evolutionary
explanations for why killing or eating one’s own offspring,
or the offspring of a rival, “can benefit animals.” For
instance, males can beat their rivals by killing the young of
another. Females can allocate limited resources to the
best offspring. Both males and females might survive if
food is scarce by eating their young. “Although this act of
cannibalism is difficult to comprehend in a human context,
when meat is scarce, in the natural world it can make all
the difference to whether other members of a family
survive,” she said.
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？

Bird cheating: There have been Christians who have pointed to
certain birds that mate for life as lovey-dovey natural object
lessons of the virtues of marital faithfulness. Some
evolutionists have responded by chirping about other bird
species that are either promiscuous or cheat on their assumed
faithful partners. The fact is, some animals are monogamous,
but many others are not, so it’s not reasonable to pick and
choose any one as an example for humans. Nature News had
to backtrack recently, though, about an evolutionary
rationalization for bird promiscuity. A study by researchers in
the UK found there might be a selective
advantage against cheating, not for it. Since both phenomena
exist, though, it’s hard to attribute explanatory power to natural
selection.
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？

While observational facts about animal behavior are fair game
for study, philosophical and theological problems emerge when
reporters or scientists try to moralize about the implications for
human beings. What are the limits of our animal nature? How
should we behave in light of these observations of
animals? Occasionally, evolutionists imply that humans, being
mere animals, have no reason to behave differently than
animals. They teach that morality is a mere convention that
emerged by nature’s law of natural selection. Some argue that
human vices can be excused on the basis that “animals do
it.” It’s not clear that such casual philosophers would wish to
live in a society governed by the law of the jungle. Worse, if
human morality has only an evolutionary basis it destroys any
ground for assuming that cannibalism or infant torture could not
be justified by a society as morally good for them.
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？


Every society recognizes morality is necessary, but only Biblical
theology can account for (1) the reason human beings are set
apart from animals, and (2) the need for grounding morality in
absolute standards of right and wrong.
First, humans are not mere animals. This is not only clear
from Genesis 1:26 and many other Bible passages that state
humans were created in the image of God, endowed with the
mind, reason, a conscience, worship, creativity and other
attributes not found in animals, but in passages that distinguish
humans from “brute beasts” (e.g. Jude 10, “But these men
revile the things which they do not understand; and the things
which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by
these things they are destroyed.” Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4
was judged by being turned into a virtual animal: “Let his mind
be changed from that of a man, And let a beast’s mind be
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given to him.”
Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？


Until his mind was restored, he acted like an animal. In Biblical
theology, therefore, humans are a kind of hybrid — possessing the
attributes of mammals but also having the capacity to fellowship with
the Creator. As “souls cast into animal bodies,” as Wernher von
Braun once described human nature, we need to address our bodily
needs as well as our spiritual needs.
Second, the spiritual nature of mankind implies that we must live by
different standards than animals. These standards have been made
clear in natural revelation (e.g., conscience) and special revelation
(e.g., the Ten Commandments, all of Scripture, and the life of
Christ). It is a non-sequitur to conclude that if animals commit
infanticide, homosexual acts, or infidelity, that humans are permitted
to do so. Even societies oblivious to special revelation can reason
from creation and conscience that we are accountable to a Creator,
and have need of laws governing acceptable behavior. Those laws
are best informed by special revelation–thus the need for sharing the
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Word of God.
Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？

Third, humans know intuitively that individuals who have
lost their rational capacity are not responsible for their
actions. We do not condemn the actions of a victim of
microcephaly or severe brain damage, or of a loved one
suffering dementia from Alzheimer’s disease. That’s why
courts assess the mental capacity, thus the accountability,
of those accused of a crime. It’s also why the
circumstances of a crime can mitigate punishment: for
instance, if a person stole from hunger or desperation, or
murdered someone because of fear of immediate bodily
harm (even if misguided), as opposed to premeditated
anger. In such cases, a physical drive (hunger,
adrenaline) that influenced the rational choice provides
grounds for mitigating punishment.
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？

In short, human beings are expected to behave
differently than animals–to use their reason and
conscience–because we are not mere
animals. This is not unique to Christianity. The
Romans and Greeks taught this. If you come
across a pool of water surrounded by dead
animals, you are expected to reason that the water
is poisonous, rather than act like the dumb beasts
that responded to their instincts. If you see other
people jumping off a cliff (as Mom and Dad
perennially warn their teens), you should think
before following the herd.
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？

With this background, we can address a thorny question: why
would a morally perfect Creator permit animals to “sin” as in the
above examples? Did God create lions to eat their young or
murder the babies of a rival? First of all, the question presumes
that what is is what ought to be. On the contrary, Genesis
3 teaches that the creation, pronounced as “very good”
in Genesis 1, fell due to human sin. Plants and animals
suffered the consequences through a curse on nature. Like a
damaged machine, nature has to get by without its original
perfection, though still retaining enough design to exhibit the
Creator’s wisdom and love. Romans 8, thankfully, teaches that
the curse will be lifted and nature will be restored to its original
goodness. This is the only world view that explains natural evil
as the result of a “paradise lost” while simultaneously offering
the hope of a “paradise regained.”
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Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？

Remember that animals, as “brute beasts” without the human
capacity of rationality and morality included in the image of
God, are not morally responsible for what they do. They cannot
“sin.” They follow their imbedded physical drives. A hungry
lioness, with no conscience to get twinged, might eat its cubs if
hungry enough. A male lion that kills its rivals will be most likely
to pass on its genes. A pack of scavengers will push others
aside to get to the meat. This has nothing to do with evolution,
but can perpetuate behaviors that humans, with a conscience,
might find repulsive. The Creator endowed animals and plants
the ability to adapt to a cursed world without thereby endorsing
those behaviors as “very good.” The creation had to “ratchet
down” to a new level to adjust to damaged circumstances. In
fact, the Creator may have left natural object lessons as stimuli
to remind humans to live uprightly, so as not to be like the brute
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beasts.
Animal Sin: What Does It Imply?
动物罪恶：这是意味着什么？


In this regard, evolutionists who use animal examples as
justification for human morality are teaching the opposite
of what they should infer from the observations.
An evolutionist, to be sure, will not accept any of these
Biblical arguments for morality. Fine. Let them be
sentenced to live in a society for a year where might
makes right, where humans kills their infants, or
cannibalize the weak, that has unrestricted sex and
cheating, that endorses lies and theft and abides by the
law of the jungle, and they will come running and
screaming back to a Christian civilization long before the
time is up. Even Richard Dawkins knows better than to
take up residence in a country operating by natural
selection.
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Written in Ink: No Evolution
用墨水写下：没有进化

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An ink sac from a fossilized Jurassic cephalopod said to be 160
million years old looks identical to those from living cuttlefish.
Science Daily did not blink at the surprise that something would
not evolve for 160 million years. Indeed, the reporter seemed
to relish what this means for evolution. Quoting John Simon
(University of Virginia), the article even highlighted the fact that
this cephalopod had a complex machinery to operate its inky
escape:
“It’s close enough that I would argue that the pigmentation in
this class of animals has not evolved in 160 million years,”
Simon said. “The whole machinery apparently has been locked
in time and passed down through succeeding generations of
cuttlefish. It’s a very optimized system for this animal and has
been optimized for a long time.”
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Written in Ink: No Evolution
用墨水写下：没有进化




Live Science, similarly, did not consider this a problem for
evolution. Reporter Stephanie Pappas even dubbed the fossil a
“cuttlefish ancestor” even though its ink sac looks like that of an
identical twin.
All the popular reports based on the UVA Today press release,
including the echo on PhysOrg, pointed out that original melanin
protein was present in the fossil:
Generally animal tissue, made up mostly of protein, degrades
quickly. Over the course of millions of years all that is likely to be
found from an animal is skeletal remains or an impression of the
shape of the animal in surrounding rock. Scientists can learn much
about an animal by its bones and impressions, but without organic
matter they are left with many unanswered questions.
But melanin is an exception. Though organic, it is highly
resilient to degradation over the course of vast amounts of time.
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Written in Ink: No Evolution
用墨水写下：没有进化



National Geographic called this an example of “exceptional” soft
tissue preservation, adding that the ancient ink is
“indistinguishable from modern ink.”
In short, the articles all stated unequivocally (yet without doubting
evolution), that (1) protein degrades quickly, but melanin is an
exception that can last 160 million years, (2) no evolution occurred
over 160 million years because the ink sac system was “very
optimized” from the start, and (3) lack of evolution constitutes
evidence for evolution. This is clear from the final quote by Simon
in the last paragraph of Live Science:
“The ‘aha moment’ for me was when we looked at the techniques
for chemical bonding and we couldn’t find anything that
distinguished the pigment in the fossil from the pigment in a
modern-day cuttlefish, which suggests the pigment hasn’t
changed in 160 million years,” Simon said. “When I think
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about other evolutionary transitions that just amazes me.” 133
Written in Ink: No Evolution
用墨水写下：没有进化



Simon next hopes to look for original pigment samples in fossils
dating back (in evolutionary terms) from 500 million years ago.
Simple Simon needs another ‘aha moment,’ as in: “Aha!
Darwin was wrong!” Simon needs to be amazed further by
another Aha: “Lyell was wrong!” 160 million unobserved years
cannot, therefore, be assumed for purposes of keeping the two
Charlies (Lyell & Darwin) in the science race. Falsification is
the main thing Charlie & Charlie have in common.
Since Simon has apparently not thought very deeply about this
evolutionary transition (which is not a transition at all, but rather
evidence for stasis and exceptional soft tissue preservation in
the recent past), what should he “think about other evolutionary
transitions”? Be amazed yourself — at the gullibility and
complicity in what passes for science reporting these days.
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Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠



Worries about the crater count dating method, widely relied
upon to infer ages of planetary surfaces, began emerging in
2005. Those worries have not subsided; they have only grown
worse. Crater numbers may have nothing to do with age.
We’re kept track of the crater count crisis since 2005, when the
problem of secondary craters was brought to light . Secondary
craters are formed by fallback debris from large impacts
(primary craters). A single large impact can produce a million
secondary craters, blurring relationships between crater counts
and the age of a surface.
Astronomers had hoped that secondaries could be identified,
thereby alleviating the confusion. Not so; a new paper
in Icarus by Xiao and Strom1 indicates that many secondaries
are very difficult to distinguish from primaries, because debris
lofted up may go into orbit for years, falling down far away from
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135
the initial impact (distant secondaries).
Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠


The authors tested dating by counting small craters in a variety
of presumed “old” and “young” regions of the moon, and got
widely divergent results despite using standard methods and
software. They urged a high degree of caution, therefore, when
trying to infer the age of a planetary surface. The abstract
states:
The small crater populations (diameter smaller than 1 km)
are widely used to date planetary surfaces. The reliability of
small crater counts is tested by counting small craters at
several young and old lunar surfaces, including Mare Nubium
and craters Alphonsus, Tycho and Giordano Bruno. Based on
high-resolution images from both the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter Camera and Kaguya Terrain Camera, small craters in
two different diameter ranges are counted for each counting
area.
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Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠

Large discrepancies exist in both the cumulative
(absolute model ages) and relative plots for the
two different size ranges of the same counting
areas. The results indicate that dating planetary
surfaces using small crater populations is highly
unreliable because the contamination of
secondaries may invalidate the results of small
crater counts. A comparison of the size-frequency
distributions of the small crater populations and impact
ejected boulders around fresh lunar craters shows the
same upturn as typical Martian secondaries,
which supports the argument that secondaries
dominate the small crater populations on the 137
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Moon and Mars.
Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠

Also, the size-frequency distributions of small rayed lunar
and Martian craters of probable primary origin are similar
to that of the Population 2 craters on the inner solar
system bodies post-dating Late Heavy
Bombardment. Dating planetary surfaces using the
small crater populations requires the separation of
primaries from secondaries which is extremely
difficult. The results also show that other factors, such
as different target properties and the subjective
identification of impact craters by different crater
counters, may also affect crater counting results. We
suggest that dating planetary surfaces using small
crater populations should be with highly cautious.
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Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠

Some of those “other factors” include not knowing the
incoming rate (impact flux), saturation criteria,
differences in target properties, erosion rates, or what
complicated resurfacing histories have occurred. In
addition, human judgment can bias the counts based
on what individuals consider significant: “this problem
is severe in small crater counts,” the authors noted,
although it might be alleviated with automated
counting methods in the future. Even so, someone
would have to tell the computer the difference
between the small potatoes and the large
potatoes. Non-impact structures (like volcanic vents)
can sometimes look like craters.
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Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠


Crater count dating would be straightforward if impactors of
predictable size came in at a predictable rate within predictable
rates of speed, were made of predictable materials and
impacted a uniform surface material and left marks distinct from
those of any other source. Even correcting for known
complicating factors, astronomers thought they could calibrate
the “old” and “young” craters with radiometric measurements
from Apollo samples. Unfortunately, complications quickly arise
in all those assumptions. Absolute dating was not a help:
We counted the small crater populations on both young and
old lunar surfaces to determine the problems of using small
crater counts for age dating. Our counting areas are not smaller
than those used in other publications, and the absolute model
ages were determined from the widely employed
production and chronology functions. Great discrepancies
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are observed in the small crater counts.
Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠


The authors were so pessimistic, they could not even recommend
crater counting to assess relative ages. “Small crater counts are
highly unreliable for either relative or absolute age dating on
both old and young surfaces,” they said. In addition, the
uncertainties they learned from testing the method on the moon
and Mars extends to the whole solar system: “All crater counting
ages on other celestial bodies,” they warned, “are based on
certain assumptions about the origin and impact rate of the
impactors.” The take-home message from the paper was bleak:
In general, statistics of small craters are affected by numerous
factors, e.g., contamination of secondaries and different target
properties. Crater counting is a subjective process which
causes more uncertainties to the results. Simplistic attempts
to date planetary surfaces from small crater counts may be
invalidate if they do not take these factors into account.
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Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠

Update 5/24/2012: Mike Wall, seni0r editor for Space.com,
unwittingly illustrated the arbitrariness of crater count
dating in an article on Live Science: “One of the Red
Planet’s most mysterious landforms is probably 2 billion
years older than has been thought,” he began,
“suggesting it may have had a volcanic origin, a new
crater count finds.” While not questioning the validity of
the method, Wall wrote that different astronomers, all
using crater counts, arrived at ages for the Medusae
Fossae area on Mars of a few hundred million years (“very
young”), then 1.6 billion years, and now, up to 3.8 billion
years. This not only shows that the same method
produced results differing by over 250%, but also raises
doubts whether the newly-published date is any more 142
3/17/2016
reliable.
Crater Count Dating Still Unreliable
环形山计数年龄仍然不可靠



Some relative dating can be preserved. If a crater sits inside or
on top of another crater, all that can be said is that the inside or
top crater happened after the other one. But without knowing
when they formed or how much time had passed between
them, how useful is that? It’s a subjective process with too
many uncertainties.
So, toss another dating method into the dustbin, along with all
its secondary impacts – the Late Heavy Bombardment, the age
of the solar system (A.S.S.), relative events between solar
system bodies and all the other mythoids* the moyboys** use to
pretend they have gnosis about an unobserved history and can
tell us all about it.
*Mythoid: An easily understood, workable falsehood that can be
stated succinctly to sound like a fact. Not to be confused with
factoid.
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Doomed Worlds: Planets Seen Disrupting, Not Forming
注定的世界：没有行星形成
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Much as astrobiologists would like to see the birth of a
new planet, the ones we observe seem to be dying,
not being born.
“Newly found planet may turn into dust,” reads a
headline on NASA’s Astrobiology Net. This does not
bode well for any inhabitants the astrobiologists would
like to meet. Echoing a press release from MIT, the
article described how a planet around a star 1,500
light-years away appears to have a comet-like tail,
evidence of a cloud of dust following the planet as it
disintegrates. The press release includes a 40second animation of how the “doomed world” is
shedding its material, and ends with this statement: 144
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“This might be another way in which planets are eventually
doomed,” says Fabrycky, who was not involved in the
research. “A lot of research has come to the conclusion
that planets are not eternal objects, they can die
extraordinary deaths, and this might be a case where
the planet might evaporate entirely in the future.”
PhysOrg today described another place where planets are
doomed. Too remote to be observed directly, this system’s
dust disk appears to be tugged at by a black hole at the galactic
center. No need to worry about the inhabitants there; there
aren’t any. “Yet, even if planets do form, living near a
supermassive black hole is still not a hospitable place for
life,” the article said. “The extreme amounts
of UV radiation emitted as the black hole devours gas and
dust is likely to sterilize the region.”
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注定的世界：没有行星
形成
As referenced in the May 14 entry, New Scientist warned that dust disks
around stars can no longer be assumed as planet maternity
wards. “Dust rings not ‘smoking gun’ for planets after all,” wrote
Maggie McKee. (Sorry for the unfortunate mixed metaphors; the thought
of a smoking gun in a maternity ward may be disturbing – unless nothing
was being born there in the first place.) The dust surrounding a star can
form sharply-defined rings without congealing into a paradise for aliens.
Astrobiologists and planet hunters have a new worry announced
in Nature today:1 “Startling superflares.” Bradley Schaefer, referencing
a study done by the Kepler Spacecraft team published in the same issue
of Nature,2 said, “Stars that are just like our Sun have flares more
than a million times more energetic than the biggest flare ever seen
on the Sun.” A couple of minutes of exposure to one of these flares
would doom the Earth, but some of these flares from other sun-like stars
can last for half a day or several days. The astronomers found no
correlation of superflares with hot Jupiters or with rotation rates, leaving
them clueless about the causes of the flares.
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Statistically, superflares are not common on sun-like
stars. Nevertheless, our sun is special, as Schaefer explained:
The possibility that the Sun has superflares is not realized. Historical
and geophysical records show that the Sun has not had any
superflares in the past two millennia, and no superflares with
more than roughly 1036 erg for perhaps a billion years.
Maehara et al. show that only 0.2% of Sun-like stars have
superflares, so it is unlikely that the Sun has such events. With
their average rate of occurrence (once every 100 days for 1035–erg
flares) and their observed size distribution (with a power-law index of
roughly −2.0), the expected frequency of 1032–erg flares on all
superflare stars should be very high. In stark contrast to this,
the Sun has one 1032–erg event roughly every 450 years and so is
completely different from superflare stars.
While recognizing the deadly force of a superflare, Schaefer
exercised a vivid imagination by thinking of ways they might be good
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for evolution:
Doomed Worlds: Planets Seen Disrupting, Not Forming
注定的世界：没有行星形成

Superflares have implications far beyond being just a
challenge for stellar physics. If a superflare’s energy is
linked to the orbital energy of a hot Jupiter, then three
events a year on the star would make its planetary
companion spiral in towards it on a timescale of a
billion years. The huge energy output of superflares
could make any planets around the star uninhabitable
for far-future human colonization, and astrobiologists
will have to consider the effect of the superflares on
possible alien life. Superflares might provide the highenergy radiation required to create organic molecules,
so perhaps superflare systems are a good place to
look for alien life that has evolved to avoid the effects
of the huge flares.
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Doomed Worlds: Planets Seen Disrupting, Not Forming
注定的世界：没有行星形成
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Preach it, Bradley; Darwin comes to the rescue to
create aliens that evolve the ability to avoid being fried
to a crisp. Why not test your idea by looking for
imaginary friends on Venus or the Sun?
The findings do not support the bottom-up view that
everything emerges from nothing. Instead, they are
consistent with the top-down view of the universe: the
universe, stars and planets were created perfect and
are degenerating under entropy. Planets and stars
are not being formed now; they are disrupting and
getting fried. Were it not for providential design of our
star and planet, it could happen to us, too.
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The findings are also consistent with the Privileged
Planet hypothesis of Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez,
that our planet was designed for life and for scientific
discovery. The only place in the universe we know about
where sentient beings can observe distant stars and see that
they have superflares is Earth. Those same beings can notice
that our sun is remarkably stable and life-sustaining.
Intelligent design, of course, is not at all surprising to Biblical
creationists who read the words of Isaiah, revealing God’s
purpose in making the Earth:
For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself
that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he
created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the
Lord; and there is none else. (Isaiah 45:18)
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Doomed Worlds: Planets Seen Disrupting, Not Forming
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With great privilege comes great responsibility, as the Lord,
speaking through Isaiah, continued in the next verses (referring
back to Genesis 1 as His revelation):
Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel
together: who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath
told it from that time? have not I the Lord? and there is no God
else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside
me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth:
for I am God, and there is none else. I have sworn by myself,
the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall
not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue
shall swear. Surely, shall one say, in the Lord have I
righteousness and strength: even to him shall men come; and
all that are incensed against him shall be ashamed. (Isaiah
45:21–24)
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How to Liven Up Dead Geology
如何搞活死地质
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A new study shows some carbon compounds from Mars arose
from geological processes. What does life have to do with
it? Ask some science reporters.
The facts: According to a new study by the Carnegie
Institution, some carbon compounds in Martian meteorites
arose by chemical processes on the red planet, probably
volcanism. The compounds in the famous Martian ALH 84001
meteorite that sparked the birth of the new science of
Astrobiology in the 1990s were also found to be non-biological
in origin. This means the compounds have nothing whatsoever
to do with life.
One might suspect this would be tragic news for those who
have devoted their careers to finding life on Mars, but here’s
how popular news reports treated the story:
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How to Liven Up Dead Geology
如何搞活死地质

Live Science began by saying that organic compounds
(by definition, those containing carbon, including
cyanide and tailpipe soot) are “linked with life” and
used the popular phrase, “building blocks of life”
twice. It quoted a scientist saying, “We now find that
Mars has organic chemistry, and on Earth, organic
chemistry led to life.” The article was more “lively”
than the dead geology facts indicated. It even turned
the bad news (astrobiologically speaking) into good
news: “Now that scientists have a better picture of the
foundations of Martian chemistry, they can better
look for anomalies that might be signs of life,”
reporter Charles Q. Choi said.
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How to Liven Up Dead Geology
如何搞活死地质
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Science Daily also used the suggestive phrase “building
blocks of life” and accentuated how the new knowledge of
dead rock “will help aid future quests for evidence of
ancient or modern Martian life”.
New Scientist called the finding that “Tiny carbon nuggets in
meteorites from Mars were formed by cooling magma, not
left by ancient alien microbes” to be “good news and bad
news for astrobiologists.” MacGregor Campbell’s headline
read, quizzically, “Bottled carbon from Mars bodes well for
ancient aliens.” Campbell quoted a researcher who brought
the lava, like Lazarus, from the dead with a word: “The
presence of organic carbon at or near the Martian surface
provides a potential nutrient source for putative life.” The
ending paragraph, which mentions St. Paul, would probably
make the creationist saint roll over in his tomb:
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How to Liven Up Dead Geology
如何搞活死地质
“Perhaps the formation of prebiotic chemistry on Mars was as
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simple as cooling of Martian lavas,” says Marc Hirschmann, a
planetary scientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis
and St. Paul, who was not involved in the research. “It reinforces the
idea that early Mars may have been ripe for the development of
life.”
National Geographic topped off the lava-lamp theory of life (9/17/2003)
by suggesting that Earth life came from volcanoes, too. “Magma Rise
Sparked Life as We Know It?” Reporter Ken Croswell began. “Shift
in planet’s volcanoes flooded Earth with oxygen, study says.” He even
deduced the middle ages: “First, though, the rise of oxygen subjected
our planet to a mid-life crisis: Oxygen readily reacts with methane, a
greenhouse gas that had been warming the world before the oxidation
event,” he ended. “With a drop in atmospheric methane, Earth and its
inhabitants suffered the planet’s first major ice age.” Nevertheless, like
Campbell agreed, just having the potential molecules, whether carbon
or oxygen, makes a planet ripe for putative life.
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How to Liven Up Dead Geology
如何搞活死地质

While we’re at the Game of Life, why not just define
volcanoes as alive already? Charles Lineweaver, in an
interview for New Scientist, lamented the typical woes of
defining life, so he “moved the bar” a little with a
provocative definition of his own. Asked how he would
define life, he answered, “To the extent that the question
makes sense, as a ‘far-from-equilibrium dissipative
system’.” When confronted with the fact that this makes
hurricanes and stars (and presumably volcanoes) alive, he
responded, “I’m moving the bar in what I consider to be a
reasonable way. People should be disappointed, not at
my moving the bar, but in the unrealistic expectation
that there should be a bar where we have traditionally
placed it.”
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How to Liven Up Dead Geology
如何搞活死地质

Unexpectedly, Lineweaver scoffed at the idea that life
can be defined as something that undergoes
Darwinian evolution. “We pretend that makes
sense, but if you look it makes no sense at all,” he
remarked. “What is the unit of Darwinian
evolution? Is it the gene? Is it the cell? Is it a
multicellular organism? Is a city evolving? How about
Gaia? Is that a life form?” Perhaps allowing a star,
hurricane or volcano to qualify as life forms has the
advantage of legitimizing Astrobiology and making the
search for life on Mars a lot easier. Just don’t ask
Lineweaver what the unit of a far-from-equilibrium
dissipative system is.
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How to Liven Up Dead Geology
如何搞活死地质

This is more evidence that evolutionists are really animists and
pantheists. They turn lava lakes into gardens of Eden. Just
add water; just add lava; just add oxygen — all dead things –
and what happens? Emergence. “Some two billion years
later, Earth’s oxygen-rich air allowed animals—including
humans—to emerge and thrive,” Croswell wrote. The
universe is brimming with a life force, a potentiality that
permeates space and time, filling volcanoes and meteorites
with putative possibilities, accumulating building blocks of life so
that the Unseen Hand of Evolution, the Tinkerer, Gaia, or
whatever (doesn’t need to make any sense at all), can work
behind the scenes in some mysterious, unguided way. But the
Unseen Hand is not allowed to act until the Spirit of Charlie,
hovering over the surface of the lavas, shouts: “Come
forth! Emerge! Arise! Be fruitful and multiply!”
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Fine Art and Music Emerges Earlier Still
美术和音乐的崛起早些时候


With the “best came first” art of Chauvet cave fresh
on our minds (5/09/2012), another discovery
shows that exquisite art and music existed even
further back than evolutionists expected.
Hand-crafted flutes found in caves in southern
Germany, dated by radiocarbon at 43,000 years
old, show that humans were possibly singing and
playing musical instruments around their campfires
far earlier than previously supposed: “The bone
flutes push back the date researchers think
human creativity evolved,” Jennifer Walsh wrote
for Live Science. No pre-flutes were reported. 159
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Fine Art and Music Emerges Earlier Still
美术和音乐的崛起早些时候

Science Daily reported, “Oldest Art Even Older: New Dates from
Geißenklösterle Cave Show Early Arrival of Modern Humans,
Art and Music.” The evolutionists attempted to dress up the
surprise with a theory that the cultured elite of the period moved up
the Blue Danube to spread their culture, but they clearly were only
guessing: “Whether the many innovations best documented in
Swabia were stimulated by climatic stress, competition between
modern humans and Neanderthals or by other social-cultural
dynamics remains a central focus of research by the
archaeologists,” the article pointed out, continuing with the theme
that many questions remain: “High-resolution dating of the kind
reported here is essential for establishing a reliable the [sic]
chronology for testing hypothesis [sic] to explain the expansion
of modern humans into Europe.…” This implies no such reliable
chronology is established, and no hypotheses have passed the
test.
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Fine Art and Music Emerges Earlier Still
美术和音乐的崛起早些时候
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
Well, if this was published in the Journal of Human Evolution,
the journal editors are not going to let it undercut their reason
for existence, are they? They have to concoct an evolutionary
tale even when evidence appears that humans were artistic and
musical from the beginning (remember Jubal? Genesis
4:21). For reasons why radiocarbon dates beyond about 5,000
years are unreliable, see CMI’s list of articles.
Ignore the jargon words in the articles like Aurignacian culture,
Kulturpumpe Hypothesis, Danube Corridor hypothesis,
etc. These are modern placeholder names covering up
ignorance. How can you tell it’s ignorance? First of all, by the
composite explanations: “Whether the
many innovations … were
stimulated by climatic stress, competition between modern
humans and Neanderthals or by other social-cultural
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dynamics.”
Fine Art and Music Emerges Earlier Still
美术和音乐的崛起早些时候
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This splatter gun method of explaining is like your doctor
saying, “your pain is caused by your genes, your diet, the
weather, or other social-cultural dynamics.” Well, which is
it? Come back when you know. Until then, don’t call it
knowledge.
The other way you know it’s ignorance is that it requires
believing the preposterous corollary that humans who were
anatomically indistinguishable from us and were smart enough
to migrate around the world, make musical instruments, paint
art that rivals Picasso’s and wear jewelry sat around in caves
for another 25,000 years before figuring out how to ride a horse
or build a house. If that is considered knowledge, don’t ask the
Journal of Human Evolution what constitutes folly. (Their
answer would undoubtedly be, “intelligent design”–thus proving
our point.)
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Ready, Aim, Flower
准备，瞄准，花
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How does a plant know the time to flower? A new study
describes a process involving genes, sunlight sensors,
switches, clocks, feedback loops and messages.
The research, published in Science,1 focused on a
protein that is sensitive to day length. The longer the
day, the more the protein is produced. Its activity is
controlled by the circadian clock, a set of genes and
proteins that keep time in all plants and animals. In the
lab plant Arabidopsis, this protein, named FKF1, is
allowed (when the days become long enough) to
activate another protein that activates flowering. This
second protein, though, has to travel from the leaves
where it is made to the tips of the stem. There, it turns
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on the flowering system.
Ready, Aim, Flower
准备，瞄准，花


The paper described the complexity of the system:
The FKF1 photoperiod sensor uses multiple, partially
redundant switches to allow strong activation in long
days. As the Sun rises higher in the sky each day
when spring approaches, plants can sense the
increased intensity in the blue-light range of the
spectrum each afternoon through multiple
photoreceptors, including FKF1. The complexity of
this mechanism even in a temperate species such
as Arabidopsis suggests that it has the flexibility
to regulate successful reproduction in a wide
range of environments.
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Ready, Aim, Flower
准备，瞄准，花



In other words, their lab plant has probably one of the
simpler systems. Seasonal response is probably even
more complex in some plants and animals, but even
bacteria are known to have circadian clocks of Paleylike complexity. Neither the paper nor the summary
on PhysOrg mentioned evolution.
1. Song, Smith et al., “FKF1 Conveys Timing
Information for CONSTANS Stabilization in
Photoperiodic Flowering,” Science 25 May 2012:Vol.
336 no. 6084 pp. 1045–1049, DOI:
10.1126/science.1219644.
No comment, except: Darwin lovers, when are you
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going to face the reality that Paley was right?
Aliens: Evolutionists’ Imaginary Friends
外星人：进化论者的想像朋友
Some evolutionists have a lot to say about imaginary friends no
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

one has ever seen.
SETI prima donna Jill Tarter is sure “aliens don’t want to eat
us” (PhysOrg). Presumably this implies they won’t wish to
season their dishes with Tarter sauce, either. Perhaps, then,
their treatise on “How to Serve Man” really was a genuine offer
of help, rather than a cookbook.
Mark Thompson assures us that the Fermi Paradox means
Earthlings “don’t need the ‘Men in Black’” (Live
Science). Men in white, maybe… but don’t assume they are
scientists.
Mark Mardell (BBC News) is convinced that aliens use
Legos. “Life’s building blocks” have been found on Mars, he
said, even though NASA’s Astrobiology Magazine admitted the
carbon molecules detected are non-biological. Still,
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the NASA piece used the L-word “life” hopefully five times.
Aliens: Evolutionists’ Imaginary Friends
外星人：进化论者的想像朋友
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
New Scientist said that if the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, due
to land this fall) doesn’t find aliens, it’s “No problem, we will look
elsewhere.” The search will go on, even though “Astrobiology is
an odd science. It largely concerns itself with studying
something that may not exist,” the article said. Apparently,
existence is not a requirement for science these days. Something
else has taken the place of observing things that must exist: “Even
so, it [astrobiology] captures the imagination like nothing else.”
Live Science offered a quiz, “Mars Myths &
Misconceptions.” Partakers may be surprised to learn that
Guglielmo Marconi believed he contacted alien signals from Mars
in 1921, and that the U.S. Government was seriously listening for
radio messages from Mars as late as 1924. The quiz did admit
that there is no solid evidence for life on Mars, but neglected to
classify any of the current Mars astrobiology claims as myths or
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misconceptions.
Bacteria as a Vast Unexplored Medicine Chest
细菌作为一个巨大的未开发的药箱
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Most of our therapeutic agents have been derived
from bacteria. A new survey shows we have barely
tapped the surface of potential medicines beneath our
feet.
Science Daily reported on a study of three desert soils
from California, Arizona and Utah published in the
May issue of Applied and Environmental
Microbiology. A team from Howard Hughes Medical
Institute found “greater diversity of potentially
useful products than was previously supposed” in
the biosynthetic genes of soil bacteria, implying that
“environmental bacteria have the potential to
encode a large additional treasure trove of new 168
3/17/2016
Bacteria as a Vast Unexplored Medicine Chest
细菌作为一个巨大的未开发的药箱

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The article explained where most of our medicines come
from:
Natural compounds have been the sources of the
majority of new drugs approved by the US Food and
Drug Administration, and bacteria have been the
biggest single source of these therapeutically
relevant compounds. Most bacterially-derived antibiotic
and anticancer agents were discovered by culturing
bacteria from environmental samples, and then
examining the metabolites they produce in laboratory
fermentation studies. But the vast majority of bacterial
species cannot be cultured, which suggested that the
world might be awash in potentially useful, but
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unknown bacterial metabolites.
Bacteria as a Vast Unexplored Medicine Chest
细菌作为一个巨大的未开发的药箱
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
It seems that researchers will not soon run out of
material to investigate: “the genomes of environmental
bacteria could encode many additional drug-like
molecules, including compounds that might serve,
among other things, as new antibiotics and
anticancer agents.”
When you think of bacteria, do you think of
health? Maybe findings like this will help end a kind of
microbial racism. A few bad ones should not create bias
against the majority that work hard to create a better
world.
This survey also suggests that bacteria originally had a
useful function in the Creation paradigm.
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The Wonder and Blunder in Your Skull
在你的头骨的奇迹和大错
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Even when it goes awry, the brain wins an award of cosmic
proportions, according to a veteran psychiatrist.
In an article for the BBC News about Sir Robin Murray’s lifelong
research into the causes of schizophrenia, the interviewer put
the most significant quote in the first paragraph:
“We won’t be able to understand the brain. It is the most
complex thing in the universe,” says Professor Sir Robin
Murray, one of the UK’s leading psychiatrists.
Earlier this month, though, Chris Stringer entitled an article
in Nature (485, May 3, 2012, pp. 33–35, doi:10.1038/485033a ),
“Evolution: What makes a modern human.” He seemed
more interested in the skull – the container – than the cosmic
superlative inside it.
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The Wonder and Blunder in Your Skull
在你的头骨的奇迹和大错
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PhysOrg, likewise, put the human brain on an evolutionary
continuum with those of mice, even though the scientists
admitted mouse brains have not evolved since mice first
scurried about. “The brains of larger mammals, such as
humans, however, have a completely different structure to
those of mice,” the article said, leaving some readers to wonder
how evolution can produce opposites – stasis and radical
restructuring – within a single theory.
How does evolution get from brain to mind? Current
Biology (22:10, R392-R396, 22 May 2012,
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.033) recognized the philosophical
difficulty in trying to explain, in material terms, something as
simple as our conscious experience of qualia (singular, quale),
i.e., “the phenomenal aspect of consciousness or ‘what it is like’
character of subjective experience.”
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The Wonder and Blunder in Your Skull
在你的头骨的奇迹和大错

Perhaps the most difficult biological question of all might
be how and why electrochemical neuronal activity in the
brain generates subjective conscious experience such as
the redness of red or the painfulness of
pain. Neuroscientists track how light impinging on the retina is
transformed into electrical pulses (neuronal spikes), relayed
through the visual thalamus to reach the visual cortex, and
finally culminates in activity within speech-related areas causing
us to say ‘red’. But how such experience as the redness of
red emerges from the processing of sensory information is
utterly mysterious. It is also unclear why these experiences
possess phenomenal characteristics, which can be directly
accessed only from the subject having the experience. This is
called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness as coined by the
philosopher David Chalmers.
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The Wonder and Blunder in Your Skull
在你的头骨的奇迹和大错
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This was no problem at all for Dan Jones, though, who in New
Scientist argued that evolution wired our brains to argue. Indeed,
contra Sir Robin Murray, he believed he could understand the
brain. Darwin showed him how. In “The argumentative ape:
Why we’re wired to persuade,” Jones tried to persuade readers
that evolution wired us to engage in several logical fallacies,
including confirmation bias. “We’re all guilty of flawed thinking
because our brains evolved to win others round to our point
of view – whether or not our reasoning is logical,” he argued
persuasively, using game theory and other methods to show how
our brains “evolved to” do this or that deceptive thing.
Jones was sure he was not guilty himself, even if he didn’t take
time to explain how he himself got outside of evolution to look
back at the rest of humanity from an unguided process that
produced a “flawed instrument” geared to “dupe others” rather
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than to recognize logic, reason, and truth – let alone qualia.
The Wonder and Blunder in Your Skull
在你的头骨的奇迹和大错

Didn’t Robin Murray discuss paranoia and
schizophrenia as delusions? ““The amazing
thing about schizophrenia is these are people
who have to live their life without being able to
believe their senses,” he said. “When you or I
hear something we know that it is real.” Yet
Dan Jones can look at the most complex thing
in the universe and argue, as if he believes
what he is saying is true and real, that it is the
result of pointless mutations that resulted in our
brains evolving to manipulate others.
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Climate Change as a Philosophy of Science Case Study
气候变化为例哲学科学


Climate change (what used to be called Global
Warming) provides a test case on whether a scientific
consensus is reliable or authoritative.
A minority of scientists, most being strict Darwinians,
rule a majority of their fellow human beings who
believe in creation. A similar situation exists in
“climate change” theory, where the scientific elite are
frustrated that ordinary citizens and governments balk
at accepting their opinions. Though off topic
for Creation-Evolution Headlines, some comparisons
may be instructive on how to evaluate the consensus
about Darwinism.
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The more inclusive “climate change” term
evolved by punctuated equilibrium (or, as some
might have it, by intelligent design) after years
of warnings by scientists about “global
warming.” But global warming carries no
political baggage unless it is human caused –
the source of most of the conflict about
“anthropogenic global warming” and what
should be done about it.
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The scientific consensus is still adamant that humans are
guilty of setting our planet on a dangerous course via
industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. In recent years,
their force of presumptive authority led to global summits
and promises by governments to take draconian measures
as penance. Some still do. The wind seems to have gone
out of the scientific sails recently, though. Reasons
include lingering damage from embarrassing exposures of
fraud and flawed statistics, inconsistent claims, growing
doubt about the validity of the data, governments that are
figuring that cutting their own emissions puts them at an
economic disadvantage, and a public reluctant to accept
the “sky is falling” message.
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“Climate change” has become something of a catch-phrase that
stands for too much and thereby means too little. For instance,
just when the layman has learned to watch his carbon footprint,
New Scientist tells him to watch out for his nitrogen footprint,
water footprint and phosphorus footprint. How can John Q.
Public avoid stepping all over himself?
In addition, some of the warnings and advice appear downright
nutty. National Geographic, for instance, seriously reported a
proposal to put sunscreen in the sky. The environmental
impact of pumping many tons of titanium oxide into the
atmosphere has not been evaluated, for sure. What will
happen to the coral and endangered species, including
humans? Even if deemed safe, application could be decades
away (too little too late), whether or not the EPA decides
what SPF factor Mother Earth needs to put on.
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A number of reports about past climate change
undermines today’s doomsday prophets. “Climate
change led to collapse of ancient Indus
civilization” reported Science Daily this
week. Clearly, whatever climate catastrophe might be
correlated with their demise was not anthropogenic so
long before the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes the
response of scientists is to warn that today’s threat is
greater than any historical climate change. Many
onlookers find that unconvincing. If ice ages and
warming periods happened before, don’t blame us,
they think.
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Another sign of the changing political climate appeared on Science
Daily this week: “Public Apathy Over Climate Change Unrelated to
Science Literacy.” This implies that skeptics of anthropogenic warming
are not stupider than climate scientists who promote the consensus
view. The skeptics may have different cultural values, but are just as
able to comprehend the science, according to a study just published
in Nature Climate Change. The article tried to divert attention to matters
of public bias or the persuasive abilities of scientists, but the results must
have been discomfiting to the journal editors and to the National Science
Foundation that funded the survey.
Whether the consensus is correct regarding global warming or not, it’s an
issue with parallels to the evolution controversy: a scientific consensus
bucking heads with a recalcitrant public. It shows that science is not “out
there” as some ideal entity, but is necessarily a human
enterprise. Elitists or not, scientists have to get down and dirty in
rhetoric, politics, and reputation in messy relationships with their fellow
human beings who don’t always buy into their right to tell them what to
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do.
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It doesn’t help science’s reputation when commentators like Daniel
Sarewitz write in prestigious journals like Nature on May 9,
“Beware the creeping cracks of bias: Evidence is mounting
that research is riddled with systematic errors. Left unchecked,
this could erode public trust,” the article began. Though the
context was different (medical research), the principle is the
same. Arguably, a problem of bias in medical research,
something more accessible and short-term than climate change,
could erode public trust even more with talking about longer-term
theories like global warming or evolution.
Like the Darwinians, the climate-change people own the media,
the schools and the U.N. The Darwinians had better be shaking in
their boots about the possible collapse of global warming
theory. Even though a collapse by itself would not justify the
climate skeptics – it could be discounted as a rhetorical loss by the
“right” side – it would demonstrate that scientists cannot pretend
to
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be a global oligarchy.
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The real issue relates to philosophy of science: how do scientists
know what they know? If the consensus collapses from within, if a
new consensus emerges that discards the old one, say, and warns
that humans are causing a new ice age or whatever, it will
demonstrate Kuhn was right. By parallel evolution, Darwinism will be
relegated to a currently powerful paradigm that may some day give
way to a new paradigm based on intelligent design.
Darwinians are in a Catch-22 situation. They cannot simultaneously
preach scientism (“science is the path to Truth”) and argue that
evolution produced the human mind. If it’s Truth they want – a Truth
that can allow a minority to persuade and direct a majority – they
can’t posture themselves as argumentative apes . An embarrassment
about climate change will only illustrate their fallibility. What are the
Darwinians going to say if their critics mock them, saying, according
to their own assumptions, evolution caused their demise? It’s just
survival of the fittest. Q.E.D. Stuff happens. The climates, they are
a-changing. That’s what you get for founding a belief system on 183
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chance and contingency.
Spiders Can Cross Oceans
蜘蛛可以跨海洋
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Why did the spider cross the ocean? To colonize the
Old World after it “originated” in the New World.
It seems inconceivable for creatures as small as
spiders to play Columbus, but they did. Their ships
were rafts of vegetation, a short article in Nature said
this week (Nature 485, 31 May 2012, p. 550,
doi:10.1038/485550a). “A family of harvestmen that
inhabits tropical forests on both sides of the Pacific
Ocean originated in Mesoamerica roughly 82 million
years ago,” the journal claimed. “The arachnids’
migration is a rare example of a trans-Pacific
dispersal.”
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A genetic comparison of harvestmen from old and new
worlds led Harvard scientists to conclude that the spiders
got from Brazil to Indo-Pacific islands. “The creatures
probably did not disperse through the break-up of the
supercontinent Gondwana, so the authors speculate
that they made their way across the Pacific on floating
vegetation carried by ocean currents.”
Let’s see if the evolutionary explanation makes
sense. The spiders, we are told, “originated” in
Mesoamerica. That’s really helpful, isn’t it? How did the
world form? It originated. Why is there air? It
originated. Where did the philosophy of origins come
from? It originated. Try that at home; even your kids know
you’re dodging their question.
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Spiders Can Cross Oceans
蜘蛛可以跨海洋
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Next, we are told that the migration across the
ocean is “a rare example of a trans-Pacific
dispersal.” You don’t say. No kidding; once in
82 million years is pretty rare. What could have
gotten into those little spidey brains in that one
generation to make them want to colonize new
worlds? Is this a new law of nature? If so, we
should see them hopping on vegetation rafts all
the time, mixing their genomes up between
continents, not doing it once after originating.
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Evolutionists tell their tales this way because
they’ve anchored their thoughts to an imaginary
timeline Darwin needed, with its millions and
millions of years. In their tale, a supercontinent
(that “originated” who knows how) had to break
up at a certain time. The spiders, who
“originated” after MesoAmerica
“originated,” couldn’t have just ridden the
drifting continent, so they had to swim or take a
cruise ship. Whatever “the authors speculate”
to keep the story intact (with its millions of
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years) gets sanctified as science these days.
Spiders Can Cross Oceans
蜘蛛可以跨海洋
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These are the same people who will scoff at the
Biblical Flood story as nonsense, saying there
is no possible way for animals to get from the
Middle East to the rest of the world. When a
creation scientist offers the possibility that some
of them floated on mats of vegetation, the
laughter gets rip-roarin’ crazy.
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