January 25, 2025 | David F. Coppedge

Archive: Jellyfish, Stem Cells, Quran, Bats, Homo, Titan, Spiders, More

 

 

Here are some of the stories we were reporting in January 2002, restored from archives. Some of the items here were of fundamental importance at the time.

Note: some embedded links may no longer work.


How Did Jellyfish Fossilize in Wisconsin?   01/25/2002
The February issue of Geology, Vol 30. No. 2, has a paper attempting to explain a rare fossil deposit of Cambrian jellyfish. Commenting on the paper, EurekAlert asks, “What are those big jellyfish fossils doing in Wisconsin? It’s rare to find a jellyfish fossil–not having a skeleton, they easily decay. So why is an entire horde of them preserved in central Wisconsin?”

The theory of Whitey Hagadorn of Caltech and his research team is summarized: “They believe that the jellyfish were preserved because of a lack of erosion from sea water and wind, the lack of scavengers, and the lack of any significant sediment disturbance by other organisms after the jellyfish were stranded in the sand.” These Cambrian jellyfish are the largest known in the entire fossil record, about four inches in diameter, but some up to 20 inches. Apparently they were deposited when Wisconsin had a tropical environment. The summary in New Scientist has pictures of the fossil impressions. See also the Jan 30 entry in Nature Science Update which quotes another paleontologist saying, “They must have been buried extremely quickly.”

What stranded hundreds of jellyfish in the sand? We see stranded jellyfish on the beach occasionally today, but they are not being fossilized. It would seem any slow, gradual process would not explain the fossilization of such soft-bodied organisms, because they would decay quickly. The abstract begins, “Fossilized impressions of soft-bodied organisms are exceptionally rare in coarse-grained strata. Fossilized mass-stranding events of soft-bodied organisms are even rarer.” This is only one of two such deposits known. The authors have to postulate several improbable settings (lack of scavengers, no erosion for hundreds of millions of years) to account for the deposit. Is it possible these medusae were quickly buried by deep flood sediments? The fact is, no one was there to know. All one can do after the fact is postulate a scenario that is consistent with the present evidence.


Horsehead Nebula Unveiled in New Detail   01/25/2002
Images of the famous Horsehead Nebula in Orion photographed by the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope (VLT) have been released. They show impressive color and detail comparable to those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The caption says that the nebula’s “structures are only temporary as they are being constantly eroded by the expanding region of ionized gas and are destroyed on timescales of typically a few thousand years. The Horsehead as we see it today will therefore not last forever and minute changes will become observable as the time passes.”

Truly stunning photographs, not considered possible from a ground-based telescope just a few years ago. Notice that the Horsehead is an eroding feature, not an evolving one, and eroding quickly at that.


Scientists Get Seals-Eye View of the Ocean   01/24/2002
Researchers have obtained footage of ocean life the way seals see it. According to National Geographic, scientists have put video headgear onto Weddell seals and sent them as cameramen into the cold, dark waters of the Antarctic ocean. The footage is showing not only the surprising hunting skill of the seals, but details about the lives of fish they prey on. Scientists are amazed at the ability of the seals to find food. One remarked, “It’s cold and dark. The animals dive four to five hundred meters down while holding their breath, and are still efficient at finding food.” They like to eat six-inch silverfish, gulping them down like popcorn.

This story was also featured on Nature Science Update, which has a couple of sample video clips. The original paper was published this month in Marine Biology.

Neat idea! Think about what an amazing submarine a seal is. Its rapid and graceful turns are poetry in motion. How do seals dive so deep and rise so fast without getting the bends? How many dogs had to die evolving this amazing scuba gear? These are wonderfully designed creatures having fun in dark, freezing environments that would kill an exposed human in minutes. What a lark it must be to watch these new “seal cam” films (as long as you take Dramamine first).


Adult Stem Cells Found   01/24/2002
Adult stem cells have apparently been discovered in bone marrow that are just as potent as embryonic stem cells, claims New Scientist, which claims it might turn out to be the most important cell ever discovered. The finding may also render moot arguments for embryonic stem cell research.

This is good news and an important story to follow. It may obviate any push to continue research on human embryos, which is laden with moral and ethical concerns.


Muslims Use Scientists as Unwitting Defenders of Quran   01/23/2002
According to an article in MSNBC, Western scientists are sometimes being quoted out of context to support claims that the Quran must be from God because it is historically and scientifically accurate in every detail. For instance, Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a Presbyterian, made some comments in the 1980’s at a conference that he now says sound silly and embarrassing taken out of context about the Quran and embryology, but he is being quoted as a champion of the book.

Simpson is just one of several non-Muslim scientists who have found themselves caught up in the publicity machine of a fast-growing branch of Islamic fundamentalism.

Dubbed “Bucailleism,” after the French surgeon Maurice Bucaille, who articulated it in an influential 1976 book, the doctrine is in some ways the Muslim counterpart to Christian creationism. But while creationism rejects much of modern science, Bucailleism embraces it. It holds that the Quran prophesied the Big Bang theory, space travel and other contemporary scientific breakthroughs. By the same token, it argues, the Bible makes lots of scientific errors, and so is less reliable as the word of God.

The article discusses how one of the most ardent advocates of Bucailleism is Sheikh Abdul Majeed Zindani of Yemen, who happens to also be a “friend and mentor to another Bucailleism devotee of Yemeni descent: Osama bin Laden.”

Our Baloney Detector is flashing many colors on this story. Read the article and then see if any of these fallacies rear their heads, either from the Muslim apologists or the comments by MSNBC columnist Daniel Golden: half truth, guilt by association, card stacking, analogy, glittering generalities, post hoc, either-or, authority, and bluffing. The remark about creationism rejecting much of modern science is close to a Big Lie, and assumes the myth that evolutionary storytelling is science. Check out this Answering Islam site to see if the muslims are being fair in their use of science to support the Quran. And decide if any of the Quran quotes they claim are scientifically accurate are really that crystal clear, instead of being vague, far-fetched interpretations (“Allah made man as a leech” supports embryology?). Compare these with Biblical examples of scientific accuracy. See who wants you to think, compare, research and study, and who wants you to just take their word for it. True apologetics wants you to think and believe; propaganda wants you to believe without thinking.


Debate 01/23/2002: As promotion for his book Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells posted “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution”.  In November, the NCSE, an anti-creationist activist organization, posted their “Responses to Jonathan Wells’s Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher.” Now in January 2002, Dr. Wells has provided a detailed rebuttal on the Discovery Institute website with, “Inherit The Spin: Darwinists Answer ‘Ten Questions’ with Evasions and Falsehoods.”

This is a lively and interesting interchange. Who do you think is winning?

Note: Dr Wells passed away in September 2024 and is sorely missed by many for his wisdom and knowledge about Darwinism.


Bats Upset the Taxonomy Belfry   01/23/2002
A paper by six taxonomists in the Jan 22 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to untangle the confusing family tree of bats. Stating that “The recent history of bat systematics is rife with controversies,” the authors admit that “Morphological evidence does not agree with molecular evidence,” i.e., family trees based on looks do not agree with those based on DNA.

After discussing the pros and cons of conflicting schemes for grouping microbats (little bats) with megabats (large bats) from the new and old worlds into larger groups of mammals, these authors decide from their molecular evidence that some characteristics such as echolocation through the nose evolved independently by convergent evolution. They also acknowledge that the oldest known fossil bat is a microbat. Their proposed solution, they grant, is “in striking contrast to traditional taxonomy,” and that “features of the chiropteran skull associated with the nasal emission of echolocation have more complex evolutionary histories than previously believed.” See also this summary on Science Now posted the day after we reported this story. It states, “But evolutionary biologists are quick to note that the work will likely fuel an already fierce classification controversy in the bat world.”

The evidence is a welter of conflicting characteristics that do not fit naturally into an evolutionary tree. Notice that the oldest known bat is already fully developed as a bat. These authors debunk the hypothesis that bats evolved from flying lemurs, but lump them in with moles, anteaters and carnivores! Yet associating bats with any other mammal group is pure fiction. And again, as we have reported here repeatedly, the molecular and morphological phylogenies don’t match. And trying to explain complex features by “convergent evolution” is pure hand waving, expecting us to believe that unlikely events occurred more than once. It’s not just the mouth or nose that are adapted to the bat’s amazing ability to use sonar, but the ears, the brain, and the whole body.

Have you watched the Olympic-level aerobatics these animals perform as they pinpoint the location, size and direction of an insect that is darting about, and scoop it up in flight in total darkness? Now the evolutionists expect us to believe this incredible suite of interrelated hardware and software evolved twice, without a programmer. Let’s get real. The evidence shows, as is the rule, that complex abilities like bat sonar are already fully developed or have degenerated (if some bats lost this ability), but are not seen getting better. Nothing in living or fossil forms supports the notion that unique bat characteristics like this evolved through gradual steps. There are no transitional forms. That is the observational evidence; evolutionary ancestry theories are forced on uncooperative data, something like gathering pieces from a thousand unconnected puzzles (that’s how many species of bats there are) and trying to fit them into another imaginary picture none of them match. If the preconceived image is wrong, partial success is not progress.


How Similar Are Modern Humans to Archaic Humans?   01/22/2002
Three anthropologists have tried to figure out what skull characteristics distinguish modern humans from archaic forms like Homo neanderthalensis. Writing in the Jan 22 preprints of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have settled on the retraction of the face and the roundness of the skull (neurocranial globularity) as markers, after comparing 100 modern individuals with bones in the National Museum of Natural History. Their paper, however, contains a number of serious admissions of doubt (emphasis added):

  • Despite much data, there is no unanimity over how to define Homo sapiens in the fossil record.
  • Paradoxically, our own species, Homo sapiens, is one of the most poorly defined species of hominids. The recent human fossil record has a confusing pattern of variation, with numerous vaguely defined taxa (e.g., “archaic” H. sapiens, “modern” H. sapiens, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo helmei, Homo rhodesiensis), most of which are not widely accepted.
  • …an increasingly popular view is that AMHS [anatomically modern Homo sapiens] is a distinct species [based on genetic evidence]. … Testing this hypothesis by using cranial features, however, is a challenge because of the substantial integration that occurs among the various semi-independent units of the cranium.
  • further analyses are necessary to test whether and how growth differences explain these contrasting patterns, especially in terms of facial retraction and neurocranial globularity.
  • [on whether moderns and Neanderthals might have had different growth patterns.] However, the available sample of infant AH [archaic human] crania is too small and insufficiently complete, particularly in the basicranium, to test directly the effects of facial size, cranial base flexion, anterior cranial base length, and middle and anterior cranial fossae size on cranial ontogeny. In addition, there are no well-preserved fossil Neanderthal crania with undistorted or complete cranial bases, and none younger than 2.2 postnatal years, by which time most cranial base growth (e.g., flexion) is complete.
  • Although a universally acceptable definition of the species unit is a quixotic endeavor, both phylogenetic and evolutionary species concepts agree that species should be monophyletic lineages, evolving separately from other lineages… [thus modern humans appear to be a distinct species from Neanderthals].
  • We have much to learn about the complex processes of cranial growth and integration, but the above results highlight how efforts to tease apart these processes have the potential to yield better characters for testing systematic hypotheses, and to identify possible targets of selection during speciation.

In spite of the fragmentary data, the authors speculate on which features appear early in development and which are influenced by environment, such as heavier brow ridges due to heavier chewing. They conclude on an optimistic note: “It is exciting to consider that only a few small shifts in growth, probably in the brain and possibly in the cranial base, may be responsible for most aspects of the evolution of modern human cranial form. Viewed in this light, the origin of modern human cranial form is more likely a result of relatively minor morphogenetic ‘tinkering’ than a major shift in developmental processes.”

There’s that word tinkering again; who is the tinkerer, we ask? As usual, the admissions in this paper are more interesting than the details of bone measurements. The quotations above demonstrate how much is pure inference and speculation, how much disagreement there is between anthropologists, how little is actually known, and how fragmentary the evidence is. This is how it is written up in the scientific papers, but a very different tale is told on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic and your local museum, where artistic license trumps scientific integrity as you watch actors or mannequins dressed as hairy apemen hunched over in their caves. An image of positive proof is portrayed to the masses who will watch a TV show, but cannot afford a subscription to PNAS and would get lost in the jargon jungle wherein the most damaging admissions are communicated. That’s why we’re here. Scientific journal notwithstanding, we show that these evolutionists have presented nothing that would convince a skeptic who does not already believe man evolved from an ape-like ancestor, but instead admit numerous problems that undermine their case. All the nit-picking over what bone angle and density means to your past sounds no more convincing than what the folds in a goat liver mean to your future.


India Fossils Too Old for Evolution   01/22/2002
If the rocks in central India are as old as new uranium-lead dates indicate (1.6 billion years), evolutionists have a problem. The rocks contain apparent worm burrow markings, which would put complex life before the Cambrian explosion. These rocks had been claimed to be ~1 billion years old, and therefore the oldest fossil evidence for life, but others have contended the rocks are only 540 million years old. The new date is published in the Feb 2002 Geology, with “Possible implications for early evolution of animals” in the title. The abstract states, “given the doubts expressed about the origin of the bedding-plane structures, as well as the surprisingly ‘old’ age of the host rocks, further studies are urgently required to provide supportive evidence.” (Emphasis added.)
Update 02/15/2002: Richard Kerr in Science Magazine makes the claim they are not fossils, but just mud cracks.Another paper in the same issue of Geology arrives at similar range dates for these Vindhyan Supergroup rocks, which calls into question the identification of fossils found within them. The authors are not sure who is wrong; “These findings are in conflict with the report of Cambrian small shelly fossils and fossils of articulate brachiopods in the Rohtasgarh Limestone and argue for a Mesoproterozoic age for the formation that contains the alleged trace fossils. Reports of an Ediacaran fossil Spriggina(?) from the Lower Vindhyan Supergroup from the northern margin of the Vindhyan Basin suggest either incorrect stratigraphic correlation of units or misidentification of this fossil.”
Update 02/11/2002: Science news headlines talks about this report, sharing some of the consternation it is causing evolutionists.

Stick up for your right to doubt the dates alleged by geologists. Did you notice that the dates disputed by geologists differ by 1 billion years, the size of the average? That’s 100% error. Then why feel shy about asserting these formations as only a few thousand years old? With error bars this large, it would appear any date you want is on the table.


Impact Dust Didn’t Kill the Dinosaurs   01/22/2002
The Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan, considered by many to be the smoking gun of the impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, apparently wasn’t loaded with enough gunpowder to do the job. In a paper in the Feb 2002Geology, Kevin Pope examined impact ejecta at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary layer and estimates there was far too little fine dust lofted by the impact to affect the climate. In the abstract, he states: “These findings indicate that the original K-T impact extinction hypothesis–the shutdown of photosynthesis by submicrometer-size dust–is not valid, because it requires more than two orders of magnitude more fine dust than is estimated here. Furthermore, estimates of future impact hazards, which rely upon inaccurate impact-dust loadings, are greatly overstated.” See additional comments by Pope in the summary on EurekAlert posted the day after we reported this story.

Better go back and revise all the Discovery Channel documentaries, especially the last episode of Walking with Dinosaurs, unless you enjoyed it as pure science fiction.


Ohio School Board Fights Over Softening Darwinism, Teaching Design  01/18/2002
Another Kansas-style revolt against evolutionary dogmatism is heating up in Ohio, according to Phillip Johnson in his Weekly Wedge Update. Some board members want the science curriculum for K-12 to present evolution as “assumption, not fact” and allow freedom to teach the alternative intelligent design viewpoint, but other board members are afraid of lawsuits and criticism from science education organizations.

Johnson has promised an update on this developing story when he returns from a speaking engagement. Expect the usual rhetoric from the Darwinists about stealth creationism and separation of church and state. Will light emerge from the heat this time?


Small Wonder Dept.  01/18/2002: How fast does your intracellular railroad run?  A research paper in the Jan 18 Science analyzes the components that label, load, dock, and ship cargo from the cell into the nucleus via tunnels (the nuclear pore complex), and estimates the speed of the operation at 520 molecules per second.

That’s the equivalent of about 175 Lucille Balls packaging chocolates on a sped-up conveyor belt.


Army Spins Spider Web   01/18/2002
“Spider silk has long been admired by material scientists for its unique combination of high-performance properties including toughness, strength, lightness and biodegradability,” says a report on EurekAlert about a joint project by the US Army and Nexia, a biotechnology firm, that have just announced success in producing fibers of recombinant spider web silk. The report is published in the Jan 18 Science. The new fibers, named BioSteel, may show up some day in biodegradable fishing line, soft body armor, medical sutures and many other environmentally friendly products. To mass-produce BioSteel, Nexia is raising genetically modified goats that produce milk containing the protein for its patented process, ten years in the making during an “agonizingly slow” research program. (No one has been able to herd spiders – or find neighbors that would want to live next to a spider ranch.)

Spider silk is five times stronger, by weight, than steel, yet is flexible and non polluting, both in its manufacture and degradation. Spiders can create different weights of dragline with different amounts of stickiness. Nexia has finally achieved the “holy grail” of materials science by getting the proteins to form fibers without clumping; and while they are flexible and strong, they still are not the equal of the natural stuff. Dr. Jeffrey Turner, CEO of Nexia, praised the lowly spider:

It’s incredible that a tiny animal found literally in your backyard can create such an amazing material by using only amino acids, the same building blocks that are used to make skin and hair. Spider silk is a material science wonder – a self-assembling, biodegradable, high-performance, nanofiber structure one-tenth the width of a human hair that can stop a bee traveling at 20 miles per hour without breaking. Spider silk has dwarfed Man’s achievements in material science to date.

He described the spider’s method of producing this remarkable substance as “a process that has been perfected through 400 million years of evolution.”

That last line spoils the story. It’s like the punch line of a bad joke, or finding a fly in a delicious soup. How can these scientists wax eloquent in their praise of nature’s wonders, then ascribe it all to mindless, purposeless, undirected, unintelligent forces acting over millions of years? There is no intelligence or power in mutations or natural selection to organize thousands of left-handed amino acids in the precise order required to produce biological steel, let alone to create a tiny robot able to secrete it and arrange it into a geometrical web. Some day, some day these naive statements by evolutionists are going to be laughed at by incredulous readers as the bad jokes they are.

See also our July 26 and March 28 [currently offline; reproduced below] headlines on spider web silk.

Spiders Win in Bullet-Proof Textile Technology  03/28/2001
The lowly orb-web spider is leagues ahead of the manufacturers of Kevlar, the material in bullet-proof vests, according to a story on the Nature Science Update. The material in spider silk is more resilient, stronger than steel, non-polluting, quickly manufactured at ambient temperature, and biodegradable. How spiders keep the complex protein strands from kinking and lumping into amorphous blobs is a trick humans haven’t yet mastered. Genes that produce these fibers are being sequenced in hope of producing a new class of versatile, strong protein-based textiles. This story made Nature’s Feature of the Week, with links to the full paper and related articles, including an essay by Philip Ball on how human engineers can and do get inspiration from nature’s designs (note last sentence about the bacterial flagellum).

Sadly, the article again lays the praise at the feet of the usual false god: “It [spider silk] is nature’s undisputed high-performance polymer fibre, fine-tuned by several hundred million years of evolution.” If you can hold your stomach on that line, the rest of the article is instructive on the wonders of spider technology. But Jonathan Sarfati writing in the latest Creation Magazine beat Nature to the punch on this scoop.


Why Does Titan Still Have an Atmosphere?   01/17/2002
Exclusive  The world’s leading planetary scientists, gathered for a quarterly planning session at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Cassini Mission to Saturn and Titan, discuss many topics. This reporter was conversing over lunch with a leading atmospheric scientist about the nature of Titan, target of the Huygens Probe riding along Cassini, which (hopefully) will make a soft landing on the surface in January 2005. This individual, a key instigator and principal investigator of Galileo’s probe that parachuted into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 1995, explained that the evolution of Titan’s atmosphere is a problem; it should be long gone by now. Methane in Titan’s thick atmosphere provides enough greenhouse effect to sustain the nitrogen and other ingredients which rain down ethane, acetylene and other hydrocarbons onto the surface continually, forming a fluffy snow possibly a hundred meters thick or more. But unlike earth, Titan has no cycle to recirculate these ingredients, so why is the process continuing today?

Furthermore, solar radiation is eroding the methane space blanket. When enough methane has been depleted, the atmosphere will collapse, because the temperature will fall enough to condense out the nitrogen, carrying it and all the other ingredients down to the surface. Dr. Atreya put 100 million years as an upper limit on the sustainability of Titan’s atmosphere – only about one fiftieth of the assumed age of the solar system. He had no explanation for why Titan has such a dense atmosphere today, other than perhaps it formed recently by some unknown mechanism, and we are lucky to see it. When the reporter remarked that such an answer sounded like the same one the ring scientists give for why we see Saturn’s rings (which are also very short lived), he agreed, with a grin of chagrin.

100 million years is the upper limit; it could be far less. Whenever you are told the earth and universe are billions of years old, don’t just swallow it: ask questions. That “the earth is 4.5 billion years old” is one of those truisms that everybody knows because the Discovery Channel says so, but what is the evidence? Here is another case of a phenomenon that doesn’t fit. It’s not that scientists can’t find a way to fit anomalies into the timeline; the important lesson is that the timeline does not come from the data, but from the assumptions. Be bold and question the assumptions. Continue clicking the Dating Methods [category on the menu bar] for other examples of anomalies that cause difficulties for the evolutionary time scale.

Finding recent youthful phenomena contradicts the assumed lifetime of Saturn. Now, Mimas joins
Titan and Enceladus in the special-pleading accusation.


Darwinists Question Bateman’s Principle of Sexual Selection   01/17/2002
A news feature in the Jan 17 Nature, “Sexual Stereotypes,” discusses the rethinking of ideas about behavioral biology and sex. In 1948, Angus John Bateman formalized a hunch of Darwin’s that evolution progresses by producing males that are aggressive and profligate while producing females are coy and choosy. Bateman studied fruit flies and concluded that promiscuity is more advantageous for males than females. Bateman’s principle was extended to the entire animal kingdom, even humans, and became accepted as a truism. Since the 1970s, however, dissenting voices have arisen. Now, even if agreeing with the principle in part, scientists see the idea as simplistic: “Today, behavioural biologists are finding evidence that the world of sex is more complicated than Bateman thought. It’s not that his principle is invalid, they say, but rather that it has been used to extend dated preconceptions about human sexual behaviour to the entire animal kingdom, sometimes to the detriment of scientific knowledge. … another example, perhaps, of the truth being obscured by nineteenth-century sexual stereotypes.”

Our Baloney Detector is beeping on analogy, extrapolation, personification, and glittering generalities. How many other Darwinian ideas could be described as simplistic, projections of human stereotypes on the animal kingdom, and detrimental to scientific knowledge? Even today, Darwinian “truisms” have provided a pseudo-scientific rationalization for all kinds of immoral human sexual practices (see the PBS Evolution TV series episode five, Why Sex? for a recent example).

Science cannot provide justification for promiscuity. Which animal model should man follow, the birds that mate for life or the bonobos that have group sex? Any sexual fantasy can find a counterpart in nature that either supports it or argues against it. Science can only observe, not command; it has nothing to say to our human moral and ethical requirements. We are persons made in the image of God, not fruit flies. What God designs or allows for animals is His prerogative, but for humans, He commanded, Thou shalt not commit adultery. Consider whether that command is trustworthy before rationalizing your life choices on a Darwinian principle that tomorrow may be dismissed as a myth.

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Comments

  • EberPelegJoktan says:

    Just as it is futile to drink from or swim in a mirage, it’s equally absurd when people swallow the ideas of Darwinism and evolutionary thinking. “Things evolve”; “Over millions of years…”; Contrast their claims and ideas with observation and recorded history, for instance “Noah lived ten generations after Creation”; “In the days of Noah, a Worldwide Flood destroyed the earth” ; “Noah had three branches of his family”; “Abraham lived 2000 years after Creation”; etc.

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