Archive: Rafting, Oxygen, Indoctrination, Mars Flood, More
These articles from August 2001 can provoke insight, disgust, humor, or any combination of the three.
Note: Some embedded links may no longer work.
Marsupial Swam from Antarctic to Madagascar? 08/07/2001
A tiny marsupial fossil tooth found on Madagascar has evolutionists scratching their heads, according to Scientific American. Marsupials aren’t supposed to be on Madagascar: only placental mammals live there today:
A leading theory of mammal evolution holds that marsupials and placentals (the group to which we belong) arose in the Northern Hemisphere and later spread to the southern supercontinent of Gondwana via South America. If marsupials had already arrived in Madagascar by the end of the Cretaceous period, as the new specimen indicates, they most likely entered Madagascar through Antarctica. This suggests that South America, Antarctica and Madagascar were connected much later than most models of plate tectonics estimate. The tooth discovery also bolsters the argument that the ancestors of the mammals that inhabit Madagascar today, all of which are placental, were not on the island during the late Cretaceous. Rather, Krause concludes, these creatures most likely arrived after the Cretaceous, and that “probably involved crossing a significant marine barrier.”
The little tooth thus stirs up controversy in not only the theory of mammal biogeography, but also the theory of plate tectonics.
Amazing how much inference is pulled from one tiny little tooth. No matter how much a find shakes up current theories, however, evolution is always sacrosanct.
Early Earth Juggled Oxygen Balance 08/06/2001
A NASA Ames team has proposed a new theory for how the early earth achieved higher oxygen levels, allowing advanced life forms to evolve. According to the paper in Science summarized by Scientific American, a process called methane photolysis, in which oxygen combined with methane, liberated hydrogen which escaped to space instead of being buried in sediments. This might have also enriched the methane concentration in earth’s atmosphere 100 to 1000 times what it is today, increasing earth’s temperature under the dimmer early sun and thereby forestalling a planetary freeze.
This is ad hoc manipulation of multiple factors. Evolutionists are trying to untangle a Gordian knot of their own making, wherein the early sun (according to their theories) was only four fifths its current brightness and should have frozen the earth. By tweaking the hydrogen and methane concentrations they are trying to keep atmospheric evolution from smothering biological evolution. Christians believe God made the world to be inhabited, so He was wise enough to set the parameters to the optimum levels from the beginning.
Hawaii School Board Rejects Alternatives to Darwinism 08/03/2001
In a unanimous vote, the Hawaii school board rejected allowing “multiple theories of origins” to be taught to students, reports the Honolulu Star News. The word creationism was not specifically mentioned in the suggested language committee member Denise Matsumoto proposed for vote, after noting that the state science standards were presenting Darwin’s theory as fact rather than opinion. But board members and the press were quick to interpret this as a way to sneak Biblical creationism into the science classroom. “We do not teach alchemy alongside chemistry nor astrology alongside physics, neither should we teach creationism in the biology classroom,” said a University of Hawaii professor testifying to the board. Even some clergymen joined in the attack: “Creationism and the flat Earth is not good science, and it’s not very good theology,” the Rev. Sam Cox said.
The press always presents this as a fight against Biblical literalism and science. As Phillip Johnson says, posing the debate in these terms ensures the outcome just by asking the question. It perpetuates the Inherit the Wind stereotype of Bible-thumping obscurantists against progress, when actually the tables have turned completely and it is the Origin-thumping Darwinists who are the bigots. Readers of these pages know the real situation; take a look just through a few pages here to see how bankrupt the theory of evolution is these days, and how it gets away with teaching absurdities and just-so stories against the evidence. Why not teach all the science, including all the mountain of evidence that opposes Darwinism? Does science presuppose naturalistic philosophy? Why not teach students critical thinking skills, instead of indoctrinating them into one position? These are the issues.
School boards are force-feeding students a position only 10% of the public accepts, and which teaches absurdities, like nothing times nobody equals everything, and information arises by random chance. As Johnson states in The Wedge of Truth (which anyone swayed by media reports should read), “the intellectual bankruptcy of Darwinism cannot be concealed for very much longer. The Darwinists may delay the day of reckoning for a while by wielding the weapons of power, but more and more people are learning to press the right questions and to refuse to take bluff or evasion for an answer.” (The Wedge of Truth, InterVarsity Press 2000, p. 150). Get informed. Understand the real issues. Study our Baloney Detector – you’ll find plenty of examples in this news story.
Mars Had Nearly Global Flood 08/03/2001
Mars got flooded with 50,000 times the flow of the Amazon over a wide area; so says a team of researchers from Arizona, NASA, the Smithsonian and the U.S. Geological Survey, analyzing data from JPL’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. Their results are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, according to SciNews, which states:
At sustained peak discharge rates, floods through the valleys would have filled a large ocean (96 million cubic kilometers) hypothesized for northern Mars in about 8 weeks, and a smaller ocean (14 million cubic kilometers) in the same region in about 8 days, according to the scientists’ calculations. The large ocean is equivalent to about a third the volume of the Indian Ocean, or more than three times the volume of the Mediterranean Sea, Caribbean Sea, South China Sea and Arctic Ocean combined. The smaller ocean is equal in volume to the Arctic Ocean.
Remember that Mars is half the diameter of the Earth, so these floods involved a substantial portion of the planet.
Why are geologists willing to conjecture on such global catastrophes on Mars, a dry dusty desert where water today would vaporize, but not here at home – the water planet, where there is also evidence for flooding on massive scales? Consider the sediments on the Colorado Plateau alone. Were these thousands of feet of sediments deposited slowly and gradually, or are they relics of catastrophic events? At least they should approach the data with an open mind as much as they do for Mars (an unlikely place for floods), where they are here claiming to have found the largest flood channels in the Solar System.
Paleontologist Gives Dinosaurs a Nose Job 08/03/2001
The nose is wrong on dinosaurs, says Lawrence Witmer of the NSF DinoNose Project. The nostrils were bigger and farther forward. NSF program director Jack Hayes is pleased with the finding; he says figuring out where the bones go and what soft tissues look like, the paleontologist’s specialty, is notoriously difficult. “Make a mistake,” he says, “and you might end up with a fossil horse that walked on two legs or a Tyrannosaurus rex that walked on four.”
Better update the movies, from Cave Man to Jurassic Park III. Follow the chain links on fossils for other mistakes that have been discovered, some of which were displayed in museums for over a hundred years. Yet some paleontologists don’t hesitate to speculate about how dinosaurs behaved, what color markings decorated their skin and even what kind of B.O. they had. Even since have the 60’s and 70’s, dinosaur looks have changed substantially. What will be next?
Pity Steven Spielberg; he has to walk up to T. Rex and say, “I’m going to rearrange your face.”
Quotable Quote 08/02/01: “The simplest living cell is so complex that supercomputer models may never simulate its behavior perfectly. But even imperfect models could shake the foundations of biology.” – W. Wayt Gibbs, “Cybernetic Cells,” Scientific American (August 2001), p. 53.
Look-Alikes Can Be Genetically Different and Vice Versa 08/02/2001
According to the National Science Foundation Media Tipsheet for 8/1, the inventiveness of evolution continues to surprise biologists when they compare the outward looks of an animal to its genes. The closest relatives of long-legged flamingos, for instance, are squat little birds called grebes (see also 7/03/01 headline). And now, two species of salamanders in New Mexico that are so similar looking experts cannot tell them apart have been found to have very different genomes. The article states, “The finding demonstrates an evolutionary concept called parallelism, a situation where two organisms independently come up with the same adaptation to a particular environment. The discovery is one of many surprises that have emerged in recent years as biologists use DNA comparisons to distinguish species and chart family trees.”
Simplistic theories of Darwinism just don’t cut it anymore. The genotype and the phenotype are telling different stories. Evolutionists expect us to believe that tall birds evolved from short ones, and that two identical looking salamanders evolved in parallel from different ancestors. There is a big rift evolving between one camp of evolutionists who believe the genes tell the ancestry, and others who trust the morphology.
Evolutionists have often used the sarcastic argument that if creation is true, God tricked us by making a world that looks like it evolved. Apparently God is trickier than the evolutionists thought.
Frankenstein Bacteria Jumpstart Evolution With Lightning 08/01/2001
According to Nature Science Update, researchers in France simulated lightning in soil with spark discharges and observed bacteria incorporating plasmids (DNA rings) into their genomes. They conjecture that this method of horizontal gene transfer might be instrumental in evolution.
Shocking, but true? Let’s try an experiment. Stick your finger in an electrical outlet and see if you evolve upward or downward.
Caution! Do not try this at home!
Chad Man Shakes the Evolutionary Tree 08/01/2001
According to a breaking news story in Ananova, a complete primate skull alleged to be 6 million years old has been found in Chad, west of the Rift Valley, far removed from the location of most earlier finds. The skull and teeth are said to be well developed, and the discoverers are testing to see if it is human or ape-like. If the Chad skull is confirmed as human, the story says, “the theory that the savannah lands to the east acted as humanity’s cradle will have to be re-thought.”
Well, this just blows away the whole tree, doesn’t it? All the prior talk about Lucy and Orrorin and Kenyanthropus doesn’t matter any more if a human skull predates them all. But don’t count on it. There is so much political infighting between the rival teams of paleoanthropologists, someone is sure to quickly denounce this new claim as fraudulent, or wrongly dated, or irrelevant. The English and the Americans are not about to let the French and the Chads win this no-holds barred game of Calvinball.