Archive: Ancient DNA, Evolution, Panspermia, Nazis, Creation, Phillip Johnson

CEH was not yet a year old when these articles were published in late July 2001.

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DNA from 1.8 Million Year Old Apeman Alleged  07/31/2001
An anthropologist claims to have recovered DNA from a blood stains on 1.8 million year old stone tools, according to the BBC News. Bonnie Williamson of the University of South Africa claims “The DNA we have found is something between a chimpanzee and a human, which suggests a hominid.” Others are skeptical. Alan Cooper of the UK, for instance, regards the likelihood that DNA could survive the heat of Africa for more than 10,000 years as “highly improbable, in fact almost impossible.” Some put an upper limit of 100,000 years as the length of time DNA molecules could survive outside a cell, and view the DNA found as probably contamination.

Wait and see. We saw a similar claim in January. Either it is contamination, or the bones are not 1.8 million years old. There is not enough data to assert the DNA is transitional between apes and man. According to Cooper, “Sadly, it is part of continuing claims of ancient human DNA finds lacking experimental and intellectual rigor.”

Evolutionists Try to Explain Animal Looks and Lifestyles  07/31/2001
A paper in the July 31 Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists by three biologists from New Mexico, Texas and Oregon formulates a new model for optimum life history, relating the variables of reproductive potential, life span, maturity, and body size.

We include this paper for an exercise in how to detect bluffing. At first glance it looks very impressive: loaded with technical terms and differential equations, and printed (after peer review) in the prestigious journal of the NAS. But look through the text and you find example after example of questions, puzzles, anomalies and failures of the model. Some examples:

• • Many equations have been statistically fit to body-size growth data (8, 9) and most merely describe rather than explain.
  • Theory for life-history evolution presents a major puzzle with reference to Fig. 1; many formal evolutionary models (19) predict that growth should cease with the onset of reproduction….  Because such determinate growth is uncommon outside of birds, mammals, and insects, the models must be ignoring something very basic and widespread.
  • …a second puzzle: b is the metabolic maintenance cost per existing cell, which raises the question of why any species would have a high b– Why build a body of cells expensive to maintain? We hypothesize that expensive cells (high b) allow greater reproductive effort…
  • Thus, lizards weakly support the model, whereas snakes do not at all.
  • One wonders why birds are almost 10 times more productive by this measure (flight? endothermy? habitat productivity?).

If their model worked, why is the world filled with so much diversity? The paper is filled with assumptions. It tries to manipulate variables whose relationships are poorly known, makes a feeble model that might make predictions, but then finds whole groups of organisms that don’t fit it. This is characteristic of evolutionary theory. To the uninitiated, it looks very impressive and scientific. Look at it in detail, however, and you find more exceptions than rules (see the First Law of Scientific Progress, right). It is simply the art of storytelling advanced to a high level.

Astrobiologist Claims to Have Found Bacteria From Space  07/31/2001
Chandra Wickramasinghe at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology claims to have detected bacteria above earth’s atmosphere, which he assumes has an extraterrestrial origin. He says, “There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometres, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported.” Scientific American says that peers are skeptical. Max Bernstein of NASA-Ames, a member of the SETI institute, argued that “it would strain one’s credulity less to believe that terrestrial organisms had somehow been transported upwards than to assume that extraterrestrial organisms are falling inward.”

Wickramasinghe, a close collaborator with Sir Fred Hoyle, has long been cited by creationists for his trouncing of evolution, such as in their statement that the origin of life by chance being as improbable as the assembling of a Boeing 747 by tornado in a junkyard. Their alternative, however, is far from creation by a transcendent, personal God. They have long promoted panspermia, the theory that life was seeded on earth as bacteria from space, then evolved into all the higher organisms. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have a vested interest in finding evidence to support their theory, but it is going to be a hard sell to both creationists and evolutionists.

Bernstein also commented, “I think that since the claim comes from him, it is regarded with perhaps a little more skepticism than if it came from someone who was a little more critical of the theory.” Then why do evolutionists discount creation arguments out of hand, and only accept the claims of those already committed to evolution?

Nazi Memories Haunt Stem Cell Debate in Germany  07/30/2001
Like the U.S. and the rest of the world, Germany is embroiled in the ethical debate about embryonic stem cell research. But according to the Washington Times, “the battle is complicated by the ghost of Germany’s Nazi past.” Both liberals and conservatives want to avoid repeating the horrors of Nazi experimentation on humans. Germany’s president Johannes Rau has warned against moving ahead without a full debate.

In a related story, the LA Times has a Washington Post article by Rick Weiss on the new ethical dilemmas posed by genetic engineering of humans:  “..ethicists and scientists have no trouble identifying reasons to be concerned about embryo screening. The most obvious reason is the idea of the designer baby, with its echoes of the eugenics movement of early 20th century America and its later adoption by the Nazis.” He asks if we are ready to face ethics based on a market economy.

Why did Nazi Germany experiment on humans? Because the Social Darwinism of Haeckel and others promoted the ideas that that we are just evolved animals, that ethics is defined by pragmatism, and that personhood is granted by consensus or the state. Sound familiar in 2001?  

Christian Legal Expert Urges Christians to Think and Defend Creation  07/28/2001
Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, widely recognized as one of the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement, urged Christians to use their heads and not just their emotions, reports the Baptist Press. Frustrated at churches that seem indifferent to ideas (which have consequences), and by Christians who seem weak and unable to defend their faith intellectually, Johnson points to the doctrine of creation as the natural starting point for effective Christian witnessing to our current culture that embraces evolutionary naturalism and postmodernism. In the interview, Johnson said he believes it is essential to point out irrational beliefs within Darwinian evolution, such as the concept that man simply evolved from nothing. He said that starting with a sovereign Creator fits the world as we see it. There is no need, therefore, to be intimidated by those who, trusting that science has given mankind all the answers to ultimate reality, rail against believers. “The real data for science, the real knowledge that comes from science points to the need for a creator,” he said. “So we have to understand some science, but we have to understand our own doctrines as well.”

Creation-Evolution Headlines can help you do just that. Feed your head: bookmark this page and come back often. This site is unique in pulling together, on a nearly daily basis, current science news that illustrates the fallacies in evolutionary teaching, and the evidence for design that is consistent with belief in the God of nature and Scripture. The [Topic Bar] at the top can guide you by topic through the hundreds of headlines this service has reported in its first year of operation, and the Baloney Detector can train your mind in the art of discernment.