Archive: Baby IQ, microRNA, Moon Rocks, Plant Muscle, Mars, Courts, Darwin Tree Mixup, More
Here are some of the stories we were reporting in late October 2001, restored from archives.
Note: some embedded links may no longer work.
Out of the Mouths of Babes 10/30/2001
A fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the amazing ability of infants to acquire language skills, identify words, and recognize syntax. The paper comes from a presentation the authors gave at a Frontiers of Science Symposium last year. A couple of quotes from the paper are sufficient to arouse awe:
Imagine that you are faced with the following challenge. You must discover the internal structure of a system that contains tens of thousands of units, all generated from a small set of materials. These units, in turn, can be assembled into an infinite number of combinations. Although only a subset of those combinations is correct, the subset itself is for all practical purposes infinite. Somehow you must converge on the structure of this system to use it to communicate. And you are a very young child.This system is human language. The units are words, the materials are the small set of sounds from which they are constructed, and the combinations are the sentences into which they can be assembled. Given the complexity of this system, it seems improbable that mere children could discover its underlying structure and use it to communicate. Yet most do so with eagerness and ease, all within the first few years of life.
The researchers ran experiments with infants presented with artificial languages interspersed with subtle elements of surprise to see how they adapted to novel elements. They also investigated a Nicaraguan school for deaf children who were learning sign language. A review of the literature revealed no commonly accepted evolutionary explanation for the remarkable ability of children to acquire language. The authors conclude:
These examples of language learning, processing, and creation represent just a few of the many developments between birth and linguistic maturity. During this period, children discover the raw materials in the sounds (or gestures) of their language, learn how they are assembled into longer strings, and map these combinations onto meaning. These processes unfold simultaneously, requiring children to integrate their capacities as they learn, to crack the code of communication that surrounds them. Despite layers of complexity, each currently beyond the reach of modern computers, young children readily solve the linguistic puzzles facing them, even surpassing their input when it lacks the expected structure.
No less determined, researchers are assembling a variety of methodologies to uncover the mechanisms underlying language acquisition . . . . As these techniques and others probing the child’s mind are developed and their findings integrated, they will reveal the child’s solution to the puzzle of learning a language.
The gap between humans and animals is more than just biological. We were endowed by our Creator with an eternal spirit, and bodies equipped to communicate. Unlike the animals, we have the ability to communicate meaning, not just signals, and to form relationships based on mutual love and understanding. Evolutionists strive to package humanness into a materialistic box that is too small for it. King David, in Psalm 8, said, “Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, because of Your enemies, that You may silence the enemy and the avenger.” The enemies today are the materialists who would rob God of His honor as Creator, and who would ascribe His wonders to chance. The strength He has ordained is the powerful evidence of nature. Look no farther than the feeble infant in a mother’s arms, focusing its little eyes and ears on her every gentle word.
Article: 10/28/01 Paul Giem, “Carbon-14 Content of Fossil Carbon”, Origins, Geoscience Research Institute (51:6-30, Oct 2001). Dr. Giem examines dozens of reported cases of anomalous carbon-14 residuals in Cambrian to Pliocene rock, which should have been long decayed if the world were as old as claimed.
Tiny RNAs: A Whole New World of Regulators Discovered 10/26/2001
Cell biologists have uncovered a whole new class of regulators that control development and gene expression: micro-RNAs, or miRNAs. These short sequences of genetic material (usually around 10-30 nucleotides, much smaller than genes) that had “almost escaped detection until now,” may number in the hundreds or thousands in the cells of all living things. They work not by coding for proteins, but by latching onto messenger RNAs, that are en route to the protein assembly plants, and inhibiting them until the right time, thus acting as switches or timing controls. But the range of possible functions is just now beginning to be explored. One geneticist comments, “Each miRNA is probably matched to one or more other genes whose expression it controls. Their potential importance to control development or physiology is really enormous. If there are hundreds of these in humans and each has two or three targets that it regulates, then there could be many hundreds of genes whose activity is being regulated this way.” Three reports on miRNAs are in the Oct 26 issue of Science. See also this summary in SciNews.
Switches, controllers, regulators– is this the language of purposelessness and chance? The microscopic world of the cell just keeps getting more amazing, and harder to explain by evolution. Now we have another category of tools to marvel at.
Note: The discoverers of microRNAs won the Nobel Prize in 2024.
Article 10/26/2001: Writing for the ICR Impact series, Gregory G. Brewer, medical microbiologist at Southern Illinois University, predicts the “Imminent Death of Darwinism and the Rise of Intelligent Design.” He bases his forecast on the collapse of evolutionary trees of life, the genome sequence data, and the existence of irreducibly complex features in living cells. “The death of Darwinism will be a hard pill to swallow because it requires replacement by intelligent design, a paradigm outside the box of naturalism that many scientists embrace,” Dr. Brewer concludes.
Did Cro-Magnon Outsmart Neandertals, Or Both Outsmart Scientists? 10/26/2001
An article in the Oct 25 Nature makes it clear that there are almost as many opinions about human evolution as there are paleoanthropologists. Neandertals used to be pictured as brutish transitional forms in the human ancestral tree, and smarter Cro-Magnons survived because of their superior brains. But the picture today is not so simple. Points of dispute include: did Neandertals go extinct, or just merge into modern man? Were they as smart as Cro-Magnon? Did the Cro-Magnon invade and destroy them, or intermarry with them? Why are carbon-14 measurements so inconsistent? Who made the artifacts and stone tools? Although there have been new archaeological finds recently, paleoanthropologists are still far from answers, the article explains.
One gets the impression the whole story is bunk. They’re not sure of anything about these fully-human beings: when they lived, when they died, how they lived, how they died. Notice this statement about the carbon-14 dating evidence: “Where both bone and charcoal from the same level have been dated, some bone dates statistically match those on charcoal, but others are much younger and often make little stratigraphic sense.” By translation, this means that some of the bones are way too young for evolutionists’ storytelling. The carbon-14 dates and the rocks in which they are found don’t fit the evolutionary scenario. But instead of seeing this as evidence something is wrong with the story, they disregard the evidence as making little sense!
It is irresponsible for the Discovery Channel and other popular science outlets to portray Neandertals and Cro-Magnons in the usual Darwinian way, when the evidence is so confused and contradictory. There is nothing in the raw data that invalidates a Biblical view that these were all fully human beings that lived in relatively recent times. Put a Neandertal in a business suit and you would hardly notice him walking down the street. Yet evolutionists expect us to believe these intelligent people eked out a subsistence living for 200,000 years – thirty times as long as known civilization – without the smarts to build cities, ride horses, plant farms and write books. Something is drastically wrong with this picture.
Curious Anecdote: Did you know that the first fossils of Neandertal Man were found in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Germany, where a large cave named Neander-höhle was named for Joachim Neander (1650-1680), a hymn writer? Believe it or not, this was the original “Neander-höhle man” who wrote the famous hymn, Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation.
Note: There has been an upheaval about Neanderthal Man since 2001, including the recovery of ancient DNA that shows they interbred with modern humans. Most paleoanthropologists now accept Homo neanderthalensis as part of the human race, although some continue to try to make them look “different” than us.
How Plants Stand Up 10/26/2001
Plants are able to stand erect because of their rigid cell walls. Scientists have known that cell walls contained a complex carbohydrate called RG-II, but didn’t know its function. Now, scientists at the University of Georgia have figured out that RG-II forms a fishnet-like arrangement held together by boron atoms that, along with cellulose, gives the cell wall rigidity something like reinforced concrete. This carbohydrate, one of the most complex in nature and used by all plants, requires a host of enzymes to manufacture:
“RG-II has been known as an obscure, structurally weird polysaccharide that plants make,” said Malcolm O’Neill, senior research associate at UGA’s CCRC. “But we had no idea why plants went to all the effort to make it. There are 50 to 60 enzymes involved, 12 different sugars and 22 different linkages. There’s even one sugar that’s actually not been found anywhere else.”
They observed that mutants lacking a crucial side chain on the carbohydrate, or lacking boron, end up as dwarfs. The plants returned to normal by the addition of the missing ingredients.
Did you catch the personification fallacy there? Plants don’t go to the effort to make something; they just respond to the engineering designed into their coded instructions. Think about a process that requires 60 enzymes to complete, when each enzyme is a complex, folded strand of dozens or hundreds of precisely-placed amino acids, coded for by genes in the DNA library. The functions of enzymes and carbohydrates are highly dependent on having a precise shape, which in turn is highly dependent on the precise sequence of amino acids. The article agrees, “The sugar substitution [in the mutant form] changes the shape of the molecule . . . . As in all molecules – and in all biology – it’s the shapes of molecules that control their function.” The chance of getting one enzyme right, let alone 50 or 60, is infinitesimally small; yet if any one of them is wrong, the entire manufacturing process comes to a halt. How could this and thousands of other complex functional systems arise without design? Think about the degree of complexity at work the next time you look at a blade of grass standing upright against the force of gravity.
Are Meteorites and Moon Rocks Young? 10/25/2001
Two news stories last week are making planetary scientists jump through hoops to explain apparently youthful features in the solar system.
- Duncan Steele writing in The Guardian Oct 18 says that “Most meteorites appear to be too young, in terms of the time spent on independent orbits after escaping their parent asteroids.” This conclusion comes from observing too few cosmic ray tracks as a measure of space exposure. Date calculations yield results orders of magnitude less than the 4.5 billion year assumed age of the solar system. Steele theorizes that the Yarkovsky force, a drag force caused by differential radiation from a spinning body, may have accelerated their journey to the earth.
- Oct 19 Sky and Telescope online news discusses analyses of Apollo 17 lunar soil samples by two Berkeley physicists. They found about 15% more beryllium-10 than expected if it were produced by cosmic rays. Moreover, “beryllium-10 has a half-life of 1.5 million years, far younger than the Moon, so there must be a source of continual replenishment.” They propose that the solar atmosphere creates the Be-10 and flings it out into the solar wind that bombards the lunar surface. This explanation, however, requires that little Be-10 mixing occurs in the sun; it must be created and transported quickly.
Any dating method is going to have problems and anomalies, whether you believe in an old or young solar system. These two examples show how evolutionists deal with their anomalies. Whether their explanations hold up or not is difficult to prove. It should be clear, however, that the evolutionary old age is the constant that must not be questioned; other mechanisms are invoked to prop up that fixed and holy parameter.
Scientists Should Write With More Feeling 10/24/2001
In an op-ed piece in the Oct. 25 Nature, “Wondrous Order”, Matthew Cobb tries to get his colleagues to express a little more awe at the workings of nature, rather than write in such dry, passive-voice dullness characteristic of scientific papers. He recounts a 17th century anatomist whose descriptions sparkled with colorful adjectives and praise to God:
“For Swammerdam, the source of this structure could only be divine, and the only appropriate response was rapture. As he put it when summarizing his findings on the anatomy and metamorphosis of butterflies: “How then can we avoid crying out, O God of miracles! How wonderful are all thy works! How beautiful are the ornaments! How well adapted the powers which thou has so profusely bestowed upon thy creatures!”
Although in Cobb’s opinion science has removed the Designer and explained all by randomness, natural selection and adaptation, scientists should still get a little excited in their prose. “The fragility of nature and the lack of any ultimate meaning or plan make the world an even more amazing place in which to live than if everything were pre-ordained.”
We caught this man red-handed trying to steal the word awe from the Christian vocabulary. As a human made in the image of God, he misses the old heart-stirring feelings that the early creation scientists had for their work (Antonio Damasio in the same issue probes the elusive nature of feelings vs. emotions). Cobb sets up a straw man with Swammerdam, and creates an either-or fallacy with purposelessness vs. predestination. But away he goes, trying to smuggle some awe into modern materialism and saying a world without any ultimate meaning is even more awesome! But like materialist Carl Sagan said shortly before his death, “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” There’s no experience of awe among particles in motion, nor blood in turnips. Hand over the word awe to its rightful owners. Evolutionists can use their own word: despair.
Entropy Leads to Self-Assembling Molecules 10/24/2001
A University of Pennsylvania news release says that entropy has its benefits. It can assemble “fuzzy” molecules into precisely distinct lattices. Physicist Randall D. Kamien’s work “adds new evidence that entropy is far richer than the gloomy drive toward universal disorder it was once thought to be and suggests it could become a player in the world of self-assembling molecules. Entropy’s knack for driving fuzzy molecules into distinct lattices offers scientists the promise of new materials designed rationally rather than through trial and error.”
Whenever evolutionists hear evidence for self-assembly and spontaneous ordering, they get excited. This announcement won’t provide much comfort, though; the order is built into the valences of the atoms and is not information. Any spontaneous ordering of the lattices is similar to snowflakes and crystals: pretty, but meaningless. DNA transcription, on the other hand, involves a true code and elaborate translation mechanism, including error-checking and proofreading, that has nothing to do with the valences of the molecules. It is the information content of the cell that baffles naturalistic origin of life, and though our understanding of entropy is growing richer, it is still a “gloomy” drive toward universal dis-information, without a Designer and Sustainer of the world.
Finger-Pointing Over Cause of Mammal Extinction: Man or Climate? 10/24/2001
Donald Grayson, a University of Washington anthropologist, thinks the theory that early man hunted mammals to extinction (the overkill hypothesis) is a “faith-based credo that bows to Green politics.” He says that the theory by Paul Martin in 1967 that Clovis people migrating into North America killed off all the large mammals 11,000 years ago “is glitzy, easy to understand and fits with our image of ourselves as all-powerful. It also fits well with the modern Green movement and the Judeo-Christian view of our place in the world. ut there is no reason to believe that the early peoples of North America did what Martin’s argument says they did.” Instead, Grayson believes climate changes could have caused the extinctions. “Overkill is bad science because it is immune to the empirical record.“ he says.
Now there’s a first, putting the Green movement and Judeo-Christian view in the same sentence. But give it up, guys; none of you were there. It’s all bad science; it’s all faith-based credo.
Mars 2001 Odyssey Enters Orbit 10/23/2001
Cheers went up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 10:56 p.m. EDT Tuesday, just twenty minutes ago at this writing, as a signal from the spacecraft was attained indicating that the orbit insertion burn had succeeded and the ship was now in orbit around Mars. One of the goals of Mars 2001 Odyssey is the search for life. A Mars Atmospheric Chemistry and Astrobiology Workshop has just been announced to take place at Caltech December 17-19.
Update 10/24/01: In a morning-after pep talk to JPL, retiring NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, who is largely responsible for the agency’s astrobiology emphasis, said that “if life is ubiquitous in the universe, you will be the ones to find out.”
Congratulations to the hard-working engineers who pulled off another deep space maneuvering success. But how would you place your bet on the astrobiologists finding life on this dusty, rocky, cold desert?
Note: As of Oct 2024, Mars 2001 Odyssey is still working and returning valuable data. It completed 100,000 orbits in March 2024. No life has been found, however.
Veteran Activist Takes On Evolution Dogmatism in California – Again 10/23/2001
Nell Segraves, who won a California court order in 1981 requiring schools to present evolution as theory instead of fact, is out to remind the school boards they are breaking the law, according to a report in Focus on the Family Citizen Link. A textbook she examined was filled with evolution as fact and history, without a hint of evolution being controversial. She called the Department of Justice. They replied that the textbooks could be recalled and money refunded if enough students called and complained that evolution offended their religious beliefs; so she is launching a letter-writing campaign to the Department of Justice and hoping thousands of students will respond. “No tax money can be used to offend religious beliefs,” Segraves says. “But you have to be offended, and call their attention to the misuse of funds.”
We hope this will be effective, and that evolutionists will back off from their dogmatic propaganda, but we have some reservations about this approach. It makes Christians and creationists look like whiners, when really it is the Darwinists who are on trial here, in two respects: (1) Evolution is bad science, not just an offense to someone’s religious beliefs. If you are a regular reader of these pages, no doubt you have been appalled at the shameful storytelling that evolutionists continually engage in, contrary to what the actual evidence shows–see yesterday’s story about evolutionary trees of life, for instance. (2) Evolution is also naturalistic philosophy masquerading as science. It rests on unproveable assumptions and often absurd appeals to chance. It is just as “religious” as any other philosophy or religion, and has no right being presented dogmatically in science classes when it is not only incapable of proof but contrary to the science we know.
So we advise Darwin-doubters not to just whimper about how evolution is hurting our religious feelings– that plays right into the pro-Darwinist claims that “evolution is science, creation is religion.” We also discourage demanding “equal time” for creation, because that approach also fails to address the real problem; they respond with the straw man fallacy that “if you allow the teaching of Genesis in the biology class, you also have to allow equal time for Polynesian creation myths and Eskimo creation myths.” Darwinists are so entrenched in their belief that evolution is an objective science that they just cannot see their own philosophical bias for what it is, or conceive of the possibility that Darwinism is an unscientific creation myth. Finally, this approach, noble as its intentions are, gives the appearance to some of using the power of the state to push the agenda of a special interest group. In actuality, the shoe is on the other foot! See our Aug. 19 story, for instance. Darwin’s bulldogs are not above telling outright lies, shutting off dissent, discriminating against creationists and redefining science itself to prevent challenges to their philosophy from getting heard.
Instead of complaining from a religious stance, we encourage students and parents to challenge the “scientific” claims of Darwinism. Teachers have no right to present bad science and bad religion as biological fact; isn’t it in the spirit of good scientific inquiry to challenge accepted beliefs, if you can make a better case with better evidence? Textbooks and teachers should present all the scientific data, including the voluminous evidence that contradicts Darwinism and the strident controversies that exist between evolutionists themselves (such as between the neo-Darwinists and the promoters of punctuated equilibria, and between believers in and opponents of “evolutionary psychology”). It is simply irresponsible for textbooks and school boards and teachers to pretend these issues don’t exist and to smilingly say, “Evolution is a fact.” or, “All scientists accept evolution.” That’s indoctrination, not education. Instead of removing Darwinism from the classroom, we want schools to teach all the facts about it and not let pro-evolution media get away with a one-sided, dogmatic, slick marketing pitch. O, for a generation of well-informed, logical-thinking students! Get informed and challenge the claims with scientific evidence; you’ll find plenty of ammunition right here on Creation-Evolution Headlines.
For an example of how one student made a difference, read our Scientist of the Month story, below.
Evolutionary Tree of Life More Confused Than in Darwin’s Day 10/22/2001
A surprising admission comes from the Oct 22 issue of the Biological Proceedings of the Royal Society. Michael J. Benton has researched 100 years of evolutionary phylogenies (family trees) and admitted that evolutionists are more confused than they were before; in most cases, the stratigraphic record, the molecular record, and the fossil record produce inconsistent results. Here’s the abstract:
Phylogenies, or evolutionary trees, are fundamental to biology. Systematists have laboured since the time of Darwin to discover the tree of life. Recent developments in systematics, such as cladistics and molecular sequencing, have led practitioners to believe that their phylogenies are more testable now than equivalent efforts from the 1960s or earlier. Whole trees, and nodes within trees, may be assessed for their robustness. However, these quantitative approaches cannot be used to demonstrate that one tree is more likely to be correct than another. Congruence assessments may help. Comparison of a sample of 1000 published trees with an essentially independent standard (dates of origin of groups in geological time) shows that the order of branching has improved slightly, but the disparity between estimated times of origination from phylogeny and stratigraphy has, if anything, become worse. Controlled comparisons of phylogenies of four major groups (Agnatha, Sarcopterygii, Sauria and Mammalia) do not show uniform improvement, or decline, of fit to stratigraphy through the twentieth century. Nor do morphological or molecular trees differ uniformly in their performance.
Benton says the most striking finding in the comprehensive study is the little change in congruence between stratigraphy and phylogeny (rocks vs Darwinian theory) throughout the 20th century, and especially the last 30 years, a time of major revolution in methods and data sources. Apparently the advent of molecular phylogeny (finding ancestry in the genes) and cladistics has had little effect on resolving the problems. He thinks it will be interesting to revisit the issue in 10-20 years time, but for the present, leaves the problems unresolved, admitting that “the ability of the fossil record to document the history of life requires further reassessment.”
Hear ye, hear ye! That’s the value of Creation-Evolution Headlines. If you watched the PBS Evolution TV series, you would have been propagandized into a belief system that is not supported by the evidence. It’s in scientific papers like this that few laymen read that the truth comes out. This is a surprising admission– it basically states that the whole Darwinian tree of life as presented in the textbooks and on TV is not supported by the evidence! (Of course, some of us already knew that.)
Note: As of Oct 2024, evolutionists are still arguing about phylogeny. Numerous anomalies exist, there is disagreement between molecular phylogenetic trees and fossils, and some have even described the evidence as fitting a bush or network instead of a tree.
Thermodynamics of Cellular “Steam Engines” Described 10/22/2001
Three Japanese scientists have analyzed the thermodynamics of molecular motors in living cells in a new paper in the Biological Proceedings of the Royal Society. They compare the thermodynamic properties of macroscopic steam engines vs. the microscopic motors like dynein and myosin-V involved in cellular transport and cell division. They describe how these “remarkable microscopic engines” are able to perform a biased random walk (like a ratchet), even though buffeted by Brownian (thermal) motion, and perform useful work. The same equations shown here for linear molecular motors should be applicable to rotary motors like ATP synthase.
The scientific literature on biochemistry is teeming with phrases like molecular motors and cellular machinery. How can any thinking person believe that machines evolved out of a primordial soup? One can conceive a day in the not too distant future when belief in chemical evolution will be abandoned by all knowledgeable biochemists, leaving the superstructure of Darwinian evolution built on it without a foundation, poised for a monumental collapse.
Fossil Lemur Teeth Found in Pakistan 10/22/2001
The origin of lemurs, small primates now found only in Madagascar, has long been a puzzle. Now, according to paper in the journal Science (see summary and picture in ScienceNow), fossil teeth “resembling” those of lemurs, estimated at 30 million years old, have been discovered in Pakistan. Fossils on Madagascar, by contrast, only date back 40,000 years. One team member believes this provides “unequivocal evidence” that lemurs had diversified in Asia long before arriving off the African coast. How did they get to to their current location? He believes that the lemurs “probably got to Madagascar–which had separated from Asia about 88 million years ago–by riding on a small island that could have drifted from Asia to Africa and bumped into Madagascar.” Another paleontologist would like to see more fossil evidence than a few teeth.
Too little data and too many assumptions plague this story, as usual. The perceptive reader will see more problems than solutions. How do they know these are lemur teeth? How do they know they are 30 million years old? Even if so, why the huge gap between the Asian teeth and the oldest known lemur fossil in Africa? Why do lemurs appear in the fossil record fully formed without ancestors? How could lemurs ride some island to Madagascar and not leave any fossil trace anywhere else in the world? What process would make an island with the last surviving lemurs drift across the sea and unload its cargo on Madagascar? Making this finding fit evolutionary ages and biogeography is a stretch; they should be scratching their heads and admitting that something is terribly wrong with their theories. As is common in pro-evolution research, data don’t tell evolutionary tales– people do.