Archive: Spider Webs, Cave Art, Chili, Prayer, Cicadas, Mars

This collection of archived articles from July 2001 will stimulate a variety of emotions.

Note: some embedded links may no longer work.

Spiders and Cavemen Puzzle Evolutionists With Their Art  07/26/2001
The August 2001 issue of National Geographic is out, and contains two honest admissions of puzzlement for evolutionists. In an article on spider webs, biologist Bill Eberhard ponders how evolution could have endowed the lowly spider with these skills:

You have an essentially blind animal with a limited nervous system building a complicated structure in an unpredictable environment. The spider makes what for a human would be very complex calculations: ‘How big is the open space? How much silk do I have? What attachment points are available?’ Spiders are not little automatons making the same thing over and over.  hey’re flexible. And they’re not stupidly flexible; they’re smart flexible.

The article describes how most spiders have three pairs of spinnerets, each with with hundreds of silk-producing spigots controlled by muscles. Spider silk is more elastic than nylon and stronger than steel.

In an unrelated article, the magazine comments on the artistic skill of prehistoric art found recently in a cave in France, alleged to be 35,000 years old. “Art this old was supposed to be crude and stiff, but there is nothing primitive about Chauvet.” The published pictures reveal the “subtle shading, ingenious use of perspective, and elegant lines of Chauvet’s masterworks” that stunned its discoverers in 1994. “For decades scholars had theorized that art had advanced in slow stages from primitive scratchings to lively, naturalistic renderings . . . . Then carbon dates came in, and prehistorians reeled. Approximately twice as old as those in the more famous caves [such as Lascoux], Chauvet’s images represented not the culmination of prehistoric art but its earliest known beginnings. A few thousand years after anatomically modern humans appeared in Europe, cave painting was as sophisticated as it would ever be.”

Here you have two anomalies for evolution to explain: lowly spiders with skill unmatched by humans, building all sorts of clever insect nets that look like works of art, to say nothing of the problem of how they invented a substance more flexible and strong than Kevlar. Then on a totally different front, you find the earliest human art to be the best! Compare these Chauvet paintings with the crude petroglyphs and cowboy-glyphs of the southwest, and you do not find evolution, you find degeneration. If we just keep reporting stories like this, maybe some skeptical readers will just let the evidence itself gradually convince them that something is drastically wrong with the evolutionary view of the world.

Red Hot Peppers Are for the Birds  07/25/2001
According to the BBC News, Arizona scientists figured out why chilis are so hot. It’s an evolutionary ploy to repel mammals from eating the seeds. Birds, you see, who are not affected by the hot sauce (capsaicin), eat the chilis and pass the seeds, undigested, to a new location.

We need to be like good toddlers here and ask lots of Why, Mommy? questions when we are told this bedtime just-so story. Why didn’t the mammals evolve a tolerance for the hot sauce? (After all, Texans did). Why don’t the birds digest the seeds, too? How come there are sweet fruits attractive to mammals? Why are you telling me this – is it true, I mean really, really true (cross your heart), or did you just make it up?

Creator Becomes the New Politically Incorrect Word  07/25/2001
According to California state senator John Campbell, appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s syndicated radio talk show July 25, the California Legislature voted down a resolution that would have declared the week of July 4 as Freedom Week because it made the mistake of including the word “Creator.” Also, according to World Magazine for July 21, ABC Newscaster Diane Sawyer on a July 4 TV special was heard to edit out the C word while quoting the Declaration of Independence, saying, “All men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights.”

Taking by their Creator out of the phrase is like turning off the engine in a hot air balloon. The balloon may drift for a short time, but will crash into reality once people (or politicians) realize there is no ultimate basis for rights. If God our Creator is not the Author of Liberty, then who is? Darwin? Chance? Hydrogen? Let’s try that: All men are created equal – no, that doesn’t scan; start over – All men are evolved equal – no, equal implies value, which presupposes some kind of transcendent standard; – All men are evolved, and endowed by hydrogen with certain inalienable rights – Aw, skip it.

If the Declaration of Independence goes, the rest of our nation’s references to God as the giver of rights cannot be far behind. In hydrogen we trust. Hydrogen bless America. One nation, under hydrogen, indivisible, with whatever the courts and politicians decide for all.

Prayer Lowers Blood Pressure  07/24/2001
A research project by Psychosomatic Medicine funded by the National Institutes of Health appears to show that religious coping activities lower blood pressure. The study of 155 subjects showed that, at least among the African Americans, those who engaged in prayer, scripture study and seeking religious guidance had consistently lower blood pressure. The finding is summarized in EurekAlert. In contrast to previous studies that attempted to correlate blood pressure and religion by taking measurements in clinics, this study included measurements during sleep and normal workday activities. The white participants, interestingly, did not show the correlation, because, according to the report, “African-Americans were much more likely than whites to turn to prayer, religion and God to cope with daily life.”

While it’s to be expected that trusting in the Lord will be good for your health and overall well being, one cannot test the Holy Spirit with the scientific method. We need to pray whether or not prayer lowers blood pressure; in some cases, agonizing in prayer might even raise it.  We pray not for our own sakes but because there is a God who hears and answers prayer.

17-Year Locusts Evolved Prime Number Life Cycle  07/23/2001
Why do cicadas emerge from their sleep in 13 or 17 year cycles? Possibly because evolution drove them to pick prime numbers, says a report in Nature. By landing on prime numbers, which are only divisible by one, they evaded predators with life cycles divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 years, thus evading enemies that would be awaiting the emergence with watering mouths. The hypothesis was supported by computer modelling done by a Mario Markus, a physicist in Germany.

Cicadas were assigned a random fitness score on the basis of cycle length and the frequency with which they encountered competitors.Over time, cycle length evolved until the cicadas hit a prime number, they found. The model assumes that in the past there were cicada predators and parasites that became extinct though a lack of the insects. “It’s a bold assumption,” says Markus. Evidence of such a creature would give the model a boost. An ancient wasp is one hypothetical parasite . . . . But the idea is highly speculative, as fossil records of the wasp have never been found. Why cicadas evolved such long cycles is also unexplained, says Simon.

Notice how ad hoc their model is: “A long cycle seems to be a disadvantage,” they continue speculating, “as the population would grow more slowly than that of competitors who reproduce more often.”

So why don’t we have 3, 5, 7, 11 and 19 year locusts? And why are the prey smarter than the predators – is the goddess Evolution playing favorites when passing out skill at natural selection? Even the authors admit that this hypothesis is highly speculative, and it raises as many questions as it answers.

This hypothesis has enough loopholes to drive a truck through.

Scientists Rethink Possibility of Life on Mars  07/20/2001
Friday 7/20/01 was the 25th anniversary of the exciting day the Viking 1 lander touched down on the Martian surface on July 20, 1976 and began the first scientific search for life on another planet. Space.Com in its commemorative article describes the Viking missions and current thinking about life on Mars. After the results of two experiments were negative, and a third ambiguous, scientists became pretty convinced that Mars was a dead world. These days, however, some think the uncertain results of the labelled-release experiment could keep hope alive for Martian life.(These scientists also tend to be the ones that view the controversial ALH84001 Martian meteorite as containing evidence for fossilized single-celled lifeforms.) The European Space Agency’s Beagle 2 scheduled for June 2003 liftoff will pick up where the Vikings left off, analyzing the chemistry in greater detail.

Give up, you guys. If life is so improbable on a water-rich planet like earth that it would never evolve, how much more so for Mars, a dry, freezing desert, bombarded by deadly radiation? But let them go and get facts to end the speculation. Prediction: if life is found, it will be contamination from earth.

The article does contain interesting historical links to the Viking missions, with pictures and descriptions, for those who missed those adventurous days during the American Bicentennial.