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Scifi and Fantasy Forum: Off-Topic Conversations: Evolution. Is it just a theory.:
Archive through Apr 02, 2003
Archive through Apr 02, 2003
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Insects Evolved Six Legs Multiple Times 03/21/2003
Scientists have always believed the insects evolved from a single common ancestor, but now Francisco Nardi and an Italian team have thrown a “naked fowl” (plucked chicken) into the works, says Richard Thomas in the March 21 issue of Science. Nardi claims that hexapods (six-legged critters) are not monophyletic (one common ancestor) but paraphyletic (two or more common ancestors). He bases his team’s conclusion on mitochondrial DNA sequences from Collembola, a group of wingless arthropods including springtails, assumed to be ancestral to the insects. “This in turn suggests,” comments Thomas, “that today’s terrestrial hexapods are products of at least two independent invasions of land and that some of the features shared by all hexapods have arisen convergently.” He warns that many arthropod experts will not be convinced by these data. “Systematics is a very contentious field, so we can count on criticisms about the small number of species, the single data type, and the method of analysis,” he says.
Differences between molecular trees and morphological trees seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Molecular comparisons have thrown a monkey wrench into the assumed family trees of most groups (see the recent example with mammals). This all seems like such a waste of time. Evolutionists are just playing connect-the-dots games, based on evolutionary assumptions, with way too many dots and way too many assumptions. But this is what scientists like: a good wrestling match, where they can argue with each other endlessly without ever having to know the truth. Prehistory is unknowable by definition, because it is hidden in the unobservable past: unless, of course, a credible Eyewitness told us what really happened.
DK:I have posted the mammal one ( Dogma With Disclaimers: National Geographic Urges Calm )
You shold know what creationists mean by "credible Eyewitness"
From http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
DNA Repairmen Can Back Each Other Up 03/21/2003
The DNA Damage Response team has many specialized technicians, but now scientists have found some of them can fill in for a fallen comrade. Amundsen and Smith of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, writing in the March 21 issue of Cell first set the stage for the story:
Faithful repair of broken or damaged DNA occurs by homologous recombination. This process requires a series of enzymes, collectively forming a “recombination machine,” that act on broken DNA. At least three broad classes of activities—helicases, nucleases, and synapsis proteins—constitute parts of this machine and can be provided either by one complex protein or by several separate proteins.
They describe two team members, RecBCD and RecF, that act independently under normal conditions. “But recent analysis of an E. coli mutant that lacks RecBCD nuclease activity,“ they announce, “normally required for that pathway of recombination, provides a striking example of how functional parts from these two recombination machines can be interchanged.”
Their minireview entitled, “Interchangeable Parts of the Escherichia coli Recombination Machinery,” also describes how the machines work. They feel this is probably not an isolated example of interchangeable roles: “Perhaps in wild-type cells also, there are situations of altered DNA metabolism not yet recognized in which activities from the two recombination machines interchange to maintain chromosomal integrity.”
Why would natural selection maintain interchangeable parts, or keep a specialist trained on a job it normally doesn’t have to do? These little molecules are incredible. Theyre like firefighters trained on each other’s tasks, so that the ladder operator can operate the hose if the hose operator is out of commission at the moment, so that the cell doesn’t burn down for lack of technical skill. Imagine little robots able to find and repair DNA; it’s uncanny. They know just what to do, and they’re on call 24 x 7. Amazing.
In this paper, you can find the words machine or machinery 42 times, repair 17 times, but not one mention of evolution, nor any thought on how this complex redundant mechanical system emerged. Let’s draw the logical conclusion.
Article: Latin Lizards: Logos vs Lottery
by Carl Wieland
First published in:
Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10(2):170, 1996
Today, the various species of Anolis lizard on Puerto Rico include ones small enough to forage for insects at the ends of branches, also a greenish variety better able to hide in the leaves, and a brownish version well camouflaged on tree trunks and the ground. Just as for Darwin's finches, it can reasonably be inferred (and creationists could agree) that all the present-day species descended from an original species (possibly only one pair) invading the island.
It is not difficult to conceive how such specialization occurred, with the lizards adapting via selection acting only on the genetic information present in the original population. The originally less-specialized 'ancestor' Anolis lizard was most likely medium-sized and able to forage for insects both on the trees and on the ground, with the information for both green and brown colouring already present in varying degrees.
The splitting off of such daughter populations, each with less information (as a whole population, not necessarily as individuals), does not involve any 'evolution' in the sense of new genetic information arising. For a smaller number of kinds on the Ark to have given rise to the more numerous descendant species of today, processes like this would have had to be operative on a substantial scale.
It becomes very interesting when one discovers that exactly the same pattern as on Puerto Rico is found for lizards of the Anolis genus on the island of Jamaica. This presents a prima facie problem for current evolutionary theory; how can evolution, if it is a largely unguided lottery depending on chance mutations, take exactly the same paths independently? The two islands ' ... have important differences in their plants, predators and climate'. Even if the selection pressures were identical, it would still require the same mutations to arise by chance over large stretches of time. Could they have evolved in one place and then independently migrated as separate populations to the other? Work on mitochondrial DNA by Jonathan Loso of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, suggests that this was not so—the ancestor Anolis species was somewhat different for each island (perhaps the consequence of prior speciation in the creationist view).
However if, as the creationist assumes, the genetic potential for at least most of such adaptive change was already present by design, it is no surprise to find the same sorts of changes. For example, if the ancestral lizard species had the information enabling both green and brown colouration, then whatever the other ecological pressures might be (so long as there were trees), it would not be unlikely for both green and brown daughter species to arise. Similar arguments would obtain for all the other parameters.
The Anolis lizards of Puerto Rico and Jamaica therefore are more consistent with the creationist/pre-adaptationist viewpoint. Commenting on this situation, Oxford zoologist Paul Harvey is reported as telling the prestigious British Association recently that 'Lizards don't seem to respect evolutionary theory
from http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1364.asp
Lizards don't seem to respect evolutionary theory  ..  
How Plant Wood Evolve if It Could 03/25/2003
Lignin is the molecule that gives sturdiness to cell walls, and is a major component of wood. Its presence differentiates land plants from the slimy algae of the waters. Is lignin an invention of early plants evolving onto the land? An entry on EurekAlert announced today, “Scientists find evidence for crucial root in the history of plant evolution.” Apparently, new findings were announced at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society about Asteroxylon, an extinct plant found fossilized in chert, that is thought to be one of the earliest plants to invade the land. George Cody and his team at the Carnegie Institute of Washington used an advanced analytical technique to preserve the fragile biopolymers in the rock and apparently found that this species already had lignin. George Cody sets up the question and then explains the findings:
A critical question is whether Asteroxylon in fact had the capacity to biosynthesize lignin. If it did, it starts to beg an interesting question: If one of the earliest plants had this capacity, then is it that capacity that allowed plants to colonize the continents? And that, of course, could have enormous significance, because that was probably one of the many truly defining events in Earth history.
What we came up with is evidence that really can’t be explained any other way than the fact that this plant, when it lived, had two structural biopolymers in its cell wall. The differences that you see in the spectra are consistent with a greater amount of lignin being in one region of the cell wall than the other, which is consistent with what we see in modern plants.
The rest of the article talks about the technique they used but says nothing else about the evolution of lignin, other than the opening paragraph, which states: “If ancient plants had not migrated from the shallow seas of early Earth to the barren land of the continents, life as we know it might never have emerged. And now it appears this massive floral colonization may have been spurred by a single genetic mutation that allowed primitive plants to make lignin, a chemical process that leads to the formation of a cell wall”
We got all excited about this story because it sounded like a big breakthrough, finally, to explain the evolution of plants. But then we looked and looked and couldn’t find anything about evolution, anywhere, except a bunch of bluffing about what a big step this would be if plants could evolve lignin. After setting up the big question, they examine this primitive plant and find lignin already there! So the very earliest land plant already had it; where, O where, is the evolution? We feel cheated. The rest of the article just brags about what a wonderful new technique they have now for getting the biological molecules out of the rock. That’s fine, but we entered this store to buy some evolution and all they offered us was some lab hardware. We thought bait and switch was against the law. If you offer us some evolution, you’d better pay up.
“Because lignins are very complex natural polymers with many random couplings, the exact chemical structure is not known,” states The Lignin Institute. And yet the American Chemical Society wants us to believe that this molecule, and the world of land plants that followed, all derive from a single genetic mutation. Sanity alert! This requires some radical lignin therapy. We suggest taking a nice walk in the woods or curling up in the recliner with a copy of Wildflowers of California by Larry and Donna Ulrich. Ah, relief!
See also our Oct. 2001 headline about RG-II, a very complex carbohydrate that gives rigidity to cell walls. It also has no evolutionary precursors.
DK: Coming up: Oct. 2001 headline about RG-II
From http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
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. 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. 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.”
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.
DK: or the force of the lawn mower' 
from http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev1001.htm#plant21
Infinitesimally small: The artilc above link to a page covering this subject.
link: http://www.creationsafaris.com/epoi_c06.htm
Near the end it says this:
When refigured thus, these conclusions can be reached:
The probability of a protein molecule resulting from a chance arrangement of amino acids is 1 in 10287. A single protein molecule would not be expected to happen by chance more often than once in 10262 years on the average, and the probability that one protein might occur by random action during the entire history of the earth is less than 1 in 10252.
For a minimum set of the required 239 protein molecules for the smallest theoretical life, the probability is 1 in 10119879. It would take 10119841 years on the average to get a set of such proteins. That is 10119831 times the assumed age of the earth
DK: So when some says the earth is 4.5 billion yrs old, please correct them it is actually over 10119841 years old 
Biggest Cosmic Mysteries Listed 03/25/2003
Space.Com has listed the biggest mysteries, myths and hoaxes in astronomy. We’ll leave the last two categories for the reader’s inquiry, but take a look at the first. What cosmic mysteries does senior science writer Robert Roy Britt list that pertain to the debate on origins?
Life. “Life remains the greatest mystery of science. How did it start? Nobody knows.” Britt considers astrobiologists the most clueless scientists of all, more even than biologists.
Sex. “We don’t know why sex began. Scientists have long been mystified as to why early life forms switched from asexual reproduction – which avoids all the complications of monogamy, entirely sidesteps partnering, and enjoys the benefits of cloning – to sexual reproduction, with its inherent burden of getting hitched, at least for a time.”
Other universes. No way to know if they’re there.
Dark matter. Without this stuff, whatever it is, galaxies wouldn’t hold together.
Dark energy. “This one makes dark matter seem simple,” moans Britt. Cosmologists are clueless what dark energy is.
Remember this list when that teacher or educational TV program gives some glib answer about the evolution of life, sex, or the universe. Every once in awhile, it’s worthwhile to remind our readers that it is not just creationists who are calling naturalistic scientists clueless*. When investigating the unobservable past, clue requires a Cluegiver.
*This shouldn’t be taken in a derogatory way, because it simply means there are limits to what can be known. But to persist in going the wrong way when all the clues point the other way is to be willingly clueless.
from http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
space.com article here: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/myths_hoaxes_030325.html
Posted By:  Bmat Mar 26, 2003 - 06:35 pm |       | Sex: I thought that more than one being contributing to the offspring's genes encouraged evolution and species survival. With asexual reproduction the same genetic material is used repeatedly.
Neanderthals Had Manual Dexterity 03/27/2003
Neanderthals had hands and wrists with a full range of motion, claim the authors of a new digitial analysis published in Nature March 27:
As there is no significant difference between Neanderthals and modern humans in the locations of their muscle and ligamentous attachments, there remains no anatomical argument that precludes modern-human-like movement of the thumb and index finger in Neanderthals.
The demise of the Neanderthals cannot be attributed to any physical inability to use or manufacture Upper-Palaeolithic-like (Chbtelperronian) tools, as the anatomical evidence presented here and the archaeological evidence both indicate that they were capable of manufacturing and handling such implements.
“Digital analysis: Manual dexterity in Neanderthals,“ was written by a team from Cal State San Bernardino and North Dakota State University, who begin their article saying, “These primitive people may have been as handy with their tools as modern humans are.”
Nature Science Update reports on this finding, and surmises that their demise was due more to social factors than physiological limitations. Scientific American has illustrations of the hand and wrist bones, admitting that this study blurs the distinction between Neanderthals and moderns and making their demise harder to explain. Also, the BBC News, agreeing that Neanderthals were not butter-fingered, ham-fisted klutzes, and admitting “the popular image of Neanderthals as clumsy, backward creatures has been dealt another blow,” is not letting the news steal the show on premiere night. Walking With Cavemen is advertised on the same page, along with illustrations of brutish-looking Neanderthals, ostensibly from the series.
Imagine the anthropologists in Huxley’s day finding out that all the arguments for brutishness of Neanderthals have collapsed. These individuals were just as smart and handy as we are. Maybe they lived in hard times, or never developed sophisticated technology due to pagan superstition. But they were fully human, just as are living “stone-age” tribal peoples. There is just as much physiological difference between existing groups of Homo sapiens sapiens as between Neanderthal and non-Neanderthal human bones. It is only evolutionary bias that has classified these our brothers into a different race. Neanderthals are no longer of any value in evolutionary arguments. It’s time to drop the label, stop considering them as icons of evolving primates, and start calling them Bob, Sue, Bertha, and Albert – the neighbors.
DK: I have already stated that Neanderthals where human.
Fossil Salamanders Show No Evolution 03/27/2003
If the Chinese team that found 200 fossil salamanders in Mongolia have their dates right, there has been little or no evolution for over 160 million years. Writing in the March 27 issue of Nature, they say (emphasis added):
Despite its Bathonian [161 million year] age, the new cryptobranchid shows extraordinary morphological similarity to its living relatives. This similarity underscores the stasis within salamander anatomical evolution. Indeed, extant cryptobranchid salamanders can be regarded as living fossils whose structures have remained little changed for over 160 million years. Furthermore, the new material from China reveals that the early diversification of salamanders was well underway by the Middle Jurassic; several extant taxa including hynobiids and cryptobranchids had already appeared by that time. Notably, this ancient pattern of taxonomic diversification does not correlate to any great disparity in anatomical structure.
This discovery predates the earlier record for this type by 100 million years. The specimens about 7 inches long and are so well preserved even soft tissue impressions are clear and distinct. BBC News has a report and picture. (DK: link below)
These kinds of reports are becoming so common that predictions of abrupt appearance and stasis should be the norm, not the exception. The authors provide no evidence of an ancestral form; both types do not show “any great disparity in anatomical structure,” and were clearly fully operational as salamanders when they were buried. All they can say is that if evolution had split the two groups apart, it had to have happened before the Middle Jurassic. That’s like saying if Santa Claus really came, he must have done it before 8:00 p.m., because the presents were already under the tree, completely wrapped. Amazingly, National Geographic titles their article, “China Ash Yields Salamander Evolution Secrets.” Read their whole writeup with bewilderment that anyone could spin this story into evidence for evolution.
Evolution is supposed to be this all-encompassing, all-pervasive force of change, yet look ye here: salamanders, nearly indistinguishable from living ones, with no evolution for 160 million years. The same could be said for horseshoe crabs, coelacanth fish, ginkgo trees, Wollemi pines, tuatara lizards, and a host of other known living fossils. Either (1) evolution is a myth, or (2) their dating methods are wrong. Pick any two.
DK: BBC News has a report and picture here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2896407.stm
news from:
http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
I have posted about lizards....already...
Article: Spot The Difference
Fascinating Living Fossils
First published in:
Creation 19(3):52
June–August 1997
Each of the two pictures below (courtesy of Dr Joachim Scheven) shows two different species of the bivalve Anadara.
Can you spot the difference between the living and fossil species? According to evolutionists and other long-agers, the difference is about three million years—but they are identical!
DK: Two pics here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/251.asp
Now back to artiicle:
The right picture is of two species of fossil Anadara from rock labelled as Pliocene, in Italy. The one with slightly gaping valves is A. corbulides, the other A. natalensis. In the top picture are two absolutely identical living specimens, arranged in the same way. Imagine— one is asked to believe that there have been three million years in which there has been absolutely no change, no ‘evolution’ visible at all. Note that:
1 Shellfish such as this have a much shorter generation time than humans. The number of generations which would have been born, passed their DNA information to the next generation, and then died, would have been enormous.
2 Each time there is a generation, and the DNA is copied, there is a chance of mutations (copying errors, which evolutionists claim is the stuff of evolution) creeping in. Creationists also believe that mutations can cause change—but they degrade information, causing it to be lost or corrupted.
3 While these millions of bivalve generations are passing, with mutations happening all the time, there are all sorts of pressures from the environment—changing conditions, predators, competition for survival, and so on. According to evolutionists, natural selection from such causes will act upon the mutations, to bring about evolutionary changes. In fact, it boggles the mind to imagine, if there really were millions of years, how species could avoid changing a little, even if only to degenerate.
The reality is that examples like this are commonplace. Many are on display in the creationist museum LEBENDIGE VORWELT, in Hagen–Hohenlimburg, Germany, run by Dr Joachim Scheven. The museum’s collection of so–called ‘living fossils’ runs into the hundreds. Fossil experts have now begun to talk routinely of ‘stasis’ as a commonplace in the fossil record—this simply means ‘staying the same’, which sounds like the opposite of evolution.
What would we predict the fossils to show on the basis of a recent six-day creation and a worldwide Flood?
Some fossil creatures would be somewhat different from their living counterparts due to genetic variation within the kind since the Flood, but still basically the same kind.
Some fossil creatures would not be represented among living things today—extinction, a fact of life since the Curse of death entered the creation, is not evolution.
Some fossils would be exactly the same as present-day kinds, just as shown in this example, because in reality, only a few thousand years separates the two specimens shown, not millions of years.
Article here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/251.asp
creationist museum LEBENDIGE VORWELT:
http://www.lebendigevorwelt.de/
Early Man Claims: Distorted Bones, Natural Variation Can Mimic Diversity 03/28/2003
Tim White takes his fellow paleoanthropologists to task in the March 28 issue of Science. He tries to rein in the tendency of fossil-hunters to classify every new find as a new species. He reminds them to remember two important factors that can create a false impression of diversity (emphasis added):
There are two questions to be asked in considering whether the fossil constitutes evidence of early hominid species diversity. First, are the described morphological differences from the A. anamensis to A. afarensis lineage real, or are they merely artifacts of postmortem fossilization processes? Second, does the putatively new morphology lie outside the expected range of phenotypic variation of this lineage? Fortunately, the history of vertebrate paleontology provides a largely unappreciated but critically important perspective on the first question. Modern primate skeletal collections help to address the second.
To illustrate the first factor, he offers a sequence of pictures of pig skulls that any amateur would clearly consider to be separate types. Yet experts know the skulls are all the same species, but their skulls were distorted by geological processes after burial: they were crushed, extruded, and otherwise modified, sometimes in nonlinear and asymmetric ways. To illustrate the second factor, he shows two very different looking skulls of modern female chimpanzees. One is narrow, the other broad; one profile has a pronounced slant, and the other is compressed. The teeth, brow ridges, skull cap and eye sockets are remarkably different – yet they are both the same species and the same sex. White points out that “This variation is normal in a single sex of an extant species; even more variation is present in other extant ape species.” Yet an amateur would almost surely classify these skulls separately.
Tim White does not make any claim that paleoanthropology has provided a linear evolutionary path from apelike precursor to man. In this editorial, he just wants to bring some order to the tendency of fossil hunters to emphasize the diversity of every skull. He attributes to Wilford the observation that “the embrace of ethnic diversity among contemporary academics may be creating a peculiar form of politically correct paleoanthropology.”
White does not provide a credible family tree for man, or hint that there even is one. He just debunks the overblown claims of several recent discoveries, like Kenyanthropus and Toumai. But his photographs are very revealing. If there can be this much variation between individuals of a single species, how can any claims be made about any putative human ancestor? The brow ridges, teeth, skull shape or overall proportions could be the work of geological deformation after burial, or natural variation within the kind. Why not use the same data and conclude that each individual was either completely ape or completely human?
White points out that other genera of animals have dozens, or hundreds, of species living side by side:
Is there really a great diversity of hominid lineages waiting to be found and recognized in Africa? Was this diversity like that in extant Anopheles mosquitoes (about 500 species), Old World fruit bats (173 species), cercopithecid monkeys (94 species), or even African soft-furred rats (8 species)? Or did just a few demographically expansive and cosmopolitan hominid species expand their ranges and invade new habitats during the Pliocene (5.3 to 1.8 million years ago)?
He leaves these questions unanswered. Maybe the answer is, “none of the above.” With all these factors capable of producing false impressions, paleoanthropologists can have a field day storytelling about what puzzle pieces fit together into any imaginable picture. Some scientific restraint is needed.
Tim White sounds like a city councilman recommending extra cops be deployed to maintain order in the diversity parade. He concludes, “Confusing true biological species diversity with analytical mistakes, preservational artifacts, diachronic evolution, or normal biological variation grossly distorts our understanding of human evolution. Past hominid diversity should be established by the canons of modern biology, not by a populist zeal for diversity.” The city council can allow the zealots to hold their demonstration, but should not vote based on the noisy and outlandish street antics going on outside.
link: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
Deep Inside You, Machines Climb Monkey Bars 03/28/2003
”Within every neuron is a vast protein trail system traversed by a small protein engine called Myosin V,” begins a press release from University of Pennsylvania Health System. But these trails, made of actin, are more like monorails than country paths. For a long time, biophysicists have wondered how myosin V moves along the monorail. How does this little motorcar ride the rail without losing its grip? They know it has two heads that grip the rail, and a tail that holds the cargo. Do the heads (actually more like feet) slide along like an inchworm, or move hand-over hand? Now at long last, Yale E. Goldman’s team thinks they have solved it. The tiny molecular motors move hand over hand, much like kids in a playground (Click here for a picture: http://health.upenn.edu/News/News_Releases/myosinv1.jpg ). Goldman explains: “It turns out that myosin tilts as it steps along the actin track – one head attaches to the track and then the molecule rotates allowing the other head to attach – much like a child on a playground crosses the monkey-bars hand-over-hand.” How did they see it? “Using single-molecule fluorescence polarization, we could detect the three-dimensional orientation of myosin V tilting back and forth between two well-defined angles as it teetered along.”
Congratulations to this team, and to all the hard-working scientists, who are bringing such marvels into our view to enjoy and contemplate. No kid on monkey bars could outrun the myriads of speedy myosin motors climbing hand-over-hand inside him. This story should be a reminder that living processes are not chaotic collisions of atoms. Living things do not submit, like limp rag dolls, to the relentless laws of thermodynamics, as do the molecules in a star or ocean or landslide. Entropy ultimately wins when the organism dies, but in living cells, genetic instructions build machines that do real work against the flow of entropy, at the cost of enormous expenditures of energy – energy that is captured, channeled, and directed toward function. Whether a salmon swimming upstream, a gibbon leaping from tree to tree, a whale breaching the surface or a mother cuddling a baby, living things do what they do only because they have an astonishing number of interacting, programmed parts, of which myosin is just one particularly athletic example.
University of Pennsylvania Health System: http://health.upenn.edu/News/News_Releases/mar03/myosinv.html
link: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
DK: got this link thing sorted, you do the links first, then hit preview, making clickable links, then you add the colors, bold etc, in preview....
"At the request of Jean Piveteau, President of the Academy of Sciences, and Georges Millot President of the Geological Society of France, Guy Berthault is inviting the scientific community to a scientific recasting of sedimentology, stratigraphy and geological dating."
DK: Just reposted this here.
from http://www.geology.ref.ac/berthault/
Cosmologists Worried by Sharp Images 03/31/2003
Why are cosmologists worried by new measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope? Some quotes from an entry today in Nature Science Update:
- Physicists’ notions of the universe could be in trouble.
- “The theoreticians are very worried,“ says Richard Lieu of the University of Alabama in Huntsvilled, a member of one of the teams. “There could be quite a bit of missing physics to be found.”
- “You don’t see anything of the effect predicted,” agrees Roberto Ragazzoni of the Astrophysical Observatory of Arcetri, Italy.
- “We have to do an awful lot more work,” he [John Barrett of the University of Nottingham, UK] says, to know what we should be looking for.
OK, so what’s the problem? Pixels of images from distant galaxies in Hubble images are sharp, not smeared. “The new observations cast doubt on the existence of two physical quantities: the Planck length and the Planck time,” explains John Whitfield for Nature. In theory, these are the smallest measurable units of space and time, beyond which both become jerky.” He also says, “New measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope hint that space is smooth, not grainy. Without graininess, our current theories predict that the Big Bang was infinitely hot and dense – tough to explain, to say the least.”
Those who like to watch TV programs that glibly show the Big Bang, in elegant simplicity, setting everything neatly asail on the calm, cosmic sea ready to evolve into planets and people, need to see the real astronomers biting their fingernails off. As NSU quips, they’re “Walking the Planck.”
link: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
Molecular Motors: Plants Have a Sewing Machines 03/31/2003
In a discovery that “represents a previously unreported concept and will stimulate further research,” three German biologists have reported that plants have a molecular motor that acts like a sewing machine. Schleiff, Jeilic and Soll of Munich studied an unusually large GTP-binding protein named Toc159 that was previously thought to be just a passive receptor on the surface of the chloroplast. Their analysis shows that “Toc159 acts as a GTP-driven motor in a sweing-machine-like mechanism.“
They explain that “The translocation of proteins across cellular membranes is a key mechanistic problem for every cell.” Apparently, Toc159 threads its needle by grabbing a precursor protein (preprotein) of the protein needing to get through the membrane. Then, Toc159 empowered by GTP actually pushes the cargo through the Toc75 channel, which expands to accommodate the thread-like protein. Once the cargo is through, Toc159 resumes its position. “Through multiple rounds of preprotein binding and GTP hydrolysis,“ the authors explain, “Toc159 will push the polypeptide across the membrane.” Thus it acts in a rocking fashion, sending the threads of protein through pores in the cloth of the chloroplast membrane, with two conformational changes and two expenditures of GTP to GDP for each cycle. They suspect other examples of this motor mechanism will be found.
Source: “A GTP-driven motor moves proteins across the outer envelope of chloroplasts,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online preprints, 3/28/03.
So plants have the Singer Model Toc159. What model do you have? Stay tuned; scientists are continuing to find more molecular motors at work. You can expect even more to be discovered.
from http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
Hot Spots May Be Not Spots 04/01/2003
A “first-order paradigm shift” may be in the works among geologists. For a long time, the plume and hotspot hypothesis has been used to explain the Hawaiian island chain, the Yellowstone caldera, and other volcanic features of planet earth. According to the April issue of GSA Today, “it is becoming increasingly clear that the hypothesis that attributes them to hot plumes upwelling from great depth fits many observations poorly, and that apparent paradoxes abound.” Better data from assumed hotspots has led to a proliferation of “radically different, alternative models“ of volcanism that rely on tectonic processes at shallow depth rather than plumes arising from deep within earth’s mantle. The Geological Society of America has scheduled a conference in Iceland this August to discuss these new models. The first item on the agenda is, “What is a plume? What is a hotspot? What do scientists today understand by the terms plume and hotspot? Do our terminological limitations suppress the development of alternative concepts?” Among other topics to debate is, “Is the concept of a hotspot reference frame useful, sensible, both, or neither?”
This indicates that major paradigm shifts are still possible. The picture of magma ascending from deep within the earth and spilling out over the surface may be incorrect; perhaps the heat is shallow, in the crust. Notice how little is understood from the questions they are asking: “How much do we know about the temperature of the mantle and of volcanic regions? Are ‘hotspots’ hot? If not, where does all the melt come from?”
If such basic questions are being asked in 2003 about something long accepted as common knowledge, what other conventional ideas in geology might be fundamentally flawed? What other alternatives are being suppressed by “terminological limitations” – mental straitjackets imposed by the very words that geologists use? Just because a museum or national park has a story and a diagram doesn’t make it a fact.
DK: GSA = Geological Society of America
link to info on Conference
http://www.gsajournals.org/gsaonline/?request=get-document&issn=1052-5173&volume=013&issue=03&page=0026
News from: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
Is the Earth’s magnetic field about to flip?
by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., AiG–Australia
1 April 2003
A new science fiction movie is being released called The Core. In this movie, the Earth’s core stops rotating and our planet’s magnetic field collapses. Since the field shields us from dangerous charged particles from the sun, it must be restarted, so scientists are sent deep inside the Earth to jump-start the rotation.
Dr Larry Newitt, an expert on geomagnetism with the Canadian-Government–funded Geolab, says that The Core:
‘… is composed of a few scientifically plausible ideas mixed with a large dosage of sheer nonsense. It should be fun.’
However, Dr David Whitehouse, BBC News Online science editor, said in an article Is the Earth preparing to flip?:
‘It is not just the plot for a far-fetched science-fiction disaster movie. Something unexplained really is happening to the Earth’s magnetic field.’
So what are these unexplained phenomena?
Earth’s magnetic field is decaying
Dr Whitehouse says:
‘But something else is happening to the Earth's magnetic field: it is getting weaker.’
And Dr David Kerridge, of the British Geological Survey, said:
‘There is strong evidence that the field is decreasing by about 5% per century.’
This is not so well known to the public, but it has been known to creationists since the 1970s, when electromagnetism expert (and physics professor) Dr Thomas Barnes pointed this out. By using standard physics, he showed that this was most likely due to a decaying electric current. And this decay could not have been happening for more than about 10,000 years, otherwise the current would have melted the Earth. This has long been powerful support for the Biblical timescale.
One way of long-agers avoiding this conclusion is to suppose that the magnetic field is generated by a self-sustaining dynamo (electric generator). Here, the magnetic field is somehow generated by circulating molten metal, and this of course relies on the Earth’s rotation. The Core presupposes that this model is correct, because if the Earth’s core stopped rotating, the field would be extinguished under this model, but not under Barnes’ model. However, Barnes’ model is based on sound physics and is rejected only because of the ‘short’ age implications; while there is no satisfactory dynamo theory, which is accepted mainly because it allows ‘long’ ages.
Field reversals
Evolutionists have also claimed that magnetic field reversals are the answer to the problem Barnes raises, and claim that they occur over intervals of thousands of years. Whitehouse says, although not in the context of Barnes’ theory:
‘Looking back in the geological record it is clear that on average such events occur about every 250,000 years. However, it has been 750,000 years since the last reversal—so we are certainly overdue.’
However, evolutionists have no plausible mechanism. But creationist physicist Dr Russell Humphreys proposed that during the Genesis Flood, tectonic plates plunged down far enough to cool the outer core rapidly (see Catastrophic Plate Tectonics(DK: link below)). The change in convection patterns would cause rapid field reversals, and cause the field energy to decay even faster. Humphreys predicted that such rapid reversals would be recorded in lava flows that cooled, from outside to inside, over only a few days. This prediction was dramatically confirmed only three years later.
In fact, Dr Whitehouse’s comment is further support for this. As he says, under the uniformitarian theory, we are long overdue for a reversal. But if all reversals occurred during the Flood year, then there is a very good reason why we have not had any reversals since then.
Similarly, Whitehouse said:
‘Some researchers suggest that it could be the start of a geomagnetic reversal, when the strength of the Earth's magnetic field decreases and then returns a few thousand years later with the north and south magnetic poles reversed.’
However, once again, the declining field strength is best explained by an exponential decay of the field due to a decaying electric current. While this decay will weaken the shielding effect, there is no experimental reason to believe it heralds another reversal.
Conclusion
It seems that Dr Newitt was right about The Core, but for some different reasons from what creationists would think. The movie should be worthwhile if it inadvertently alerts the public to the decay of the field, and its implications for the age of the Earth. It should also be a good opportunity to explain the best scientific explanation for the magnetic field and correct the errant notions of the dynamo theory promoted in the film.
Further reading
The earth’s magnetic field: Evidence that the earth is young and Dr Humphreys’ papers referenced therein. http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3317.asp
Plate Tectonics Questions and Answers: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/tectonics.asp
News from here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2003/0401magnetic_flip.asp
Darwinist Philosopher Ponders the Evolution of Free Will
04/02/2003
In an atheistic, materialistic version of the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism, Daniel Dennett thinks he has an explanation of human free will based on Darwinian natural selection. His conclusion seems to lean toward the Arminian side, that free will is real, in spite of a predestination coming not from the mind of God, but of Darwin. Nigel Williams examines Dennett’s new book Freedom Evolves in a book review entitled, “A biologist’s thinking man” in the April 1 issue of Current Biology. Dennett first differentiates between determinism and inevitability, claiming that the former does not necessarily imply the latter. He also denies that determinism leads to fatalism. His theory is that the more degrees of freedom an organism has, the more apparent free will it has. “The freedom of the bird to fly wherever it wants is definitely a kind of freedom, a distinct improvement on the freedom of jellyfish to float wherever it floats, but a poor cousin of human freedom,” he says.
Williams explains why Dennett got into this subject. “As he [Dennett] points out, educated people today are often trapped in a strange kind of double-think on the topic. Officially, they believe physical science calls for determinism, which proves they have no control over their lives. But in actual living, most of the time they do assume they have this control. They ignore their supposedly scientific beliefs but these can still cause deep underlying anxiety, confusion, guilt and a sense of futility.” So how does Dennett, whose “unstinting materialism, which he now calls naturalism, has roused many critics of his approach,” calm these anxieties? Dennett explains, “It is because we can foresee the outcomes of various circumstances that we can take action to avoid them, and the reason we are so much more free than other organisms is because we can see farther into the future because we have more knowledge.” So our actions can make a difference, even though there’s nobody home at the console known as the soul: “So the task for the naturalist like me is to show how there can still be persons without being Cartesian persons [i.e., souls distinct from the body], without there being a little immaterial soul that animates and controls the body like a puppeteer,” Dennett says. “That is a hard thing to show, but I think I can.”
Other evolutionists like Richard Rorty, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Mary Midgely are enthusiastic about Dennett’s daring charge into the domain of the mind. Williams concludes, “Dennett’s attempt to draw ‘free will’ into the entirely materialist and scientific view of the world provides a boost and a challenge to those still seeking to understand the full evolutionary legacy of Darwin’s work.”
Daniel Dennett is the one who described Darwinian evolution as a “universal acid” that eats through all traditional beliefs. He looks like a philosopher (or like Santa Claus, one of the two), but does his attempt at explaining free will deliver the goods? Assuming Nigel Williams (an admirer) has accurately summarized Dennett’s thesis, there seems to be a fatal flaw in it. Having more degrees of freedom does not necessarily relate to having the ability to use them. A rock, for instance, may have more degrees of freedom in the air than it does in the ocean, and on a library desk it has many more, but without genetic instructions, it’s just going to sit there, or fall, or otherwise be the puppet of natural forces. Living organisms, by contrast, are characterized by information. If organisms like jellyfish and birds and people are the products of blind, naturalistic forces, where did the genetic instructions come from? Their ability to use the degrees of freedom available requires information and the functional structures that can respond to that information. Assuming freedom produces free will is a non-sequitur. As you cannot get blood out of a turnip, you cannot get information out of natural law, and you cannot get free will out of naturalism. Information makes all the difference. In the beginning was the Word – Information, intelligence, communication, design. Williams only quotes radical evolutionists, who gush on Dennett’s fatherly wisdom. We’d sure like to hear Stephen Meyer review the book.
Although Dennett’s version of free will seems Arminian, it also has a Calvinistic aspect. But we refer not to John Calvin, the reformer-theologian of Geneva, but the fictional character of cartoon fame (Calvin and Hobbes). Michael Behe explained the play on words in his book Darwin’s Black Box. In a chapter entitled “Calvinism,“ Behe reminds the reader of Calvin’s adventures with the transmogrifier, a cardboard box that becomes a time machine, cloning lab, or anything else he wants to imagine it is. Natural selection is the evolutionist’s transmogrifier. It performs any miracle the evolutionist needs: transforming a bacterium into a orchid, a reptile into a bird, or a shrew into a philosopher. By using natural selection to create free will out of hydrogen, Dennett has shown himself to be a hyper-Calvinist. His five points of TULIP could be denoted: (1) Total Depravity, (2) Unconditional Selection, (3) Limited Argument, (4) Irresistible Force, and (5) Perseverance of the Fittest. Of these, Limited Argument is the key to defending hyper-Calvinism; keep those pesky intelligent design philosophers out of the debate.
link: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm
Big-bang project sparks cosmic response
By Ian Fried
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
April 1, 2003, 9:00 PM PT
Scientists in Switzerland are building a machine to test the big-bang theory of how the universe began. But first they have to construct a computer network that can handle the volumes of data the device will produce.
The new, more powerful particle accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is being built at CERN, the same Swiss laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web. With such a tool, scientists say that they will either be able to produce the same particles thought to have existed when the universe was formed, or they will have proved that such particles just don't exist.
But before they can test their theory, the scientists will need a computer network capable of processing and storing the massive amounts of data that will begin spewing from the collider once it starts smashing particles together in 2007. As a result, researchers at CERN created Openlab, a grid computing network designed to test the type of equipment that is likely to be standard by the middle to end of this decade when the project really gets under way.
More here: http://news.com.com/2100-1006-995004.html?part=dht&tag=ntop
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