Creation vs. Evolution

Whale of a Tale ~ Debating Evolution

Published by Papa Giorgio

This post is with thanks to Philip Cunningham.

(For a great introduction to the below video of which the following is a clip from, see Evolution News & Views)

More About the Male (Whale’s) Refrigeration System ~ The system actually works better when the whale swims hard. How can that be, when the testes are located right between the abdominal swimming muscles? It’s like trying to keep a refrigerator cold between two furnaces. 

It works because the blood pumps harder during exercise, allowing more heat to escape into the water through the dorsal fin and tail. The higher volume of cool venous blood then enters the “miraculous web” (Latin rete mirabile, read more here) between the abdominal muscles, where the heat from the arteries is transferred to the cooler veins before entering the testes. It’s a marvelous solution: a “counter-current heat exchanger” (CCHE) mechanism.

As Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson explain in the film, without both internal testes and the refrigeration mechanism existing simultaneously, natural selection would halt, and whales would have gone extinct. Females, too, have a CCHE to protect the young during pregnancy. Similar CCHE systems are found in other marine mammals such as manatees and seals, providing more unlikely examples of “convergent evolution.”

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1161131450566453/” width=”640″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”1″]

One of the key (most complete) missing link in this WILD scenario is Rodhocetus. Rodhocetus’ discoverer, Dr. Phil Gingerich, one of the leading experts on whale evolution, promoted the idea that Rodhocetus had a whale’s fluke (tail) and flippers. Later Dr. Gingerich admitted,

  • “Since then, we have found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn’t have the kind of arms that can be spread out like flippers on a whale.”

When asked about the missing fluke, Dr. Gingerich replied,

  • “I speculated that it might have had a fluke… I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluked tail.”

Without this fossil, there is no evolutionary story telling like we see in this WHALE OF A TALE:

Rodhocetus Clear X

Will museums and textbooks change their displays or portraits Rodhocetus as a transitional fossil? Don’t hold your breath.

rodhocetus-size

(Philip Cunningham Intro) In the following video, Philip Gingerich, the paleontologist who discovered and reconstructed Rhohocetus, which has been called by evolutionists, ‘the most spectacular intermediary fossil in whale evolution’, states this about that, “most spectacular intermediary fossil”….

  • “Well, I told you we don’t have the tail in Rodhocetus. We don’t know for sure whether it had a ball vertebrate indicating a (tail) fluke or not. So I speculated (that) it might have had a (tail) fluke…. Since then we found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms, the arms in other words of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn’t have the kind of arms that can be spread out like flippers are on a whale.,, If you don’t have flippers, I don’t think you can have a fluke tail and really powered swimming. And so I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluke tail.” 

Philip Gingerich paleontologist – Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Evidence – video – fraudulent fossils revealed (Starts at the 11:40 minute mark – see another clip of this here):

Here we get into the weeds with these fraudulent Plaster of Paris replicas for the myriad of students visiting natural history museum. The excerpt here comes from Uncommon Descent:

If you can’t find a missing link, just make one up with plaster and body parts and put it in museums. I don’t think the deception was deliberate in as much as it was self-deception and they just added plaster to conform a land fossil to look like a whale.

The two scientists who found the lion’s share of walking whale fossils essentially created the best fossil proof of evolution using plaster models and drawings and supplied these to museums and science magazines. In each case, they started with incomplete fossils of a land mammal. Whenever a fossil part was missing, they substituted a whale body part (blowholes, fins and flukes) on the skeletal model or skull that they distributed to museums. When these same scientists later found fossils negating their original interpretations, they did not recall the plaster models or drawings. Now museums are full of skulls and skeletons of ‘walking whales’ that are simply false.” Dr. Werner went on to say, “I suspect some curators are not aware of the significance of these substitutions nor are they aware of the updated fossils. Museums should now remove all of the altered skeletons, skulls and drawings since the most important parts of these ‘walking whales’ are admittedly made up. Museums will also have to delete these images from their websites as they are misleading the public.” –

The Grand Experiment

Vestigial Responses

(just that, old… useless [baseless] theories)

Here is an example of my child’s biology textbook from grade school (enlargeable by just clicking the image ~ for maximum enlargement, right click with the mouse and choose, “open link in new tab“):

George B. Johnson and Peter H. Raven,
Biology: Principles & Explorations, Annotated Teacher’s Edition
(Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2001), 284-285.

On page 288 of the same text we read:

  • The pelvic bones found in modern whales are homologous to the pelvises that are found in land vertebrates. Although the whale pelvis bones are located near their reproductive organs, these bones do not function like a pelvis in a land vertebrate. The whale pelvis is located far from the vertebrae and has no apparent function. Thus, the whale pelvis is a vestigial structure.

The “pelvic bones” in whales are said to be vestigial. Here is another example from my son’s public schooling:

Vestigial Structures

Many organisms have features that seem to serve no useful function. For example, humans have a tailbone at the end of the spine that is of no apparent use. The human appendix, a small, fingerlike projection from the intestine, also has no known function. Some snakes have tiny pelvic bones and limb bones. Whales also have pelvic bones, along with a four-chambered stomach like that of a cow.

These apparently useless features are said to be vestigial. Vestigial (ves-TIJ-ee-uhl) features were useful to an ancestor, but they are not use­ful to the modern organism that has them. The vestigial tailbone in humans is homologous to the functional tails of other vertebrate species. A vestigial feature in a modern organism is evidence that the structure was functional in some ancestor of the modern organism. Moreover, an organism with a vestigial feature probably shares com­mon ancestry with an organism that has a functional version of the same feature.

So what sort of evolutionary clues can vestigial features provide? Consider that normal sperm whales, like all whales, have small pelvic bones but no hind legs. A very small percentage of sperm whales, how­ever, have vestigial leg bones, and some sperm whales even have bone-supported bumps protruding from their body.

Whales probably are descended from an ancestor that lived on land. In the whales’ genome, many of the genes needed to make hind legs have been conserved, or have remained unchanged. In normal whales, the genes for hind legs are turned off. In rare cases, however. the genes are partially turned on, and vestigial hind legs form. Thus. whales and other living things may display their evolutionary history in the usually unexpressed genes they carry.

Susan Feldkamp and Maureen Kilpatrick, editors, Modern Biology (Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2002), 290.

Here, Philip Cunningham fills in what these “vestigial” bones are used for via a couple examples, the first being an Email Exchange regarding “vestigial legs” pelvic bones in whales:

The pelvic bones (supposed Vestigial Legs) of whales serve as attachments for the musculature associated with the penis in males and its homologue, the clitoris, in females. The muscle involved is known as the ischiocavernosus and is quite a powerful muscle in males. It serves as a retractor muscle for the penis in copulation and probably provides the base for lateral movements of the penis. The mechanisms of penile motion are not well understood in whales. The penis seems to be capable of a lot of independent motion, much like the trunk of an elephant. How much of this is mediated by the ischiocavernosus is not known.

In females the anatomical parts are smaller and more diffuse. I would imagine that there is something homologous to the perineal muscles in man and tetrapods, which affect the entire pelvic area – the clitoris, vagina and anus.

The pelvic rudiments also serve as origins for the ischiocaudalis muscle, which is a ventral muscle that inserts on the tips of the chevron bones of the spinal column and acts to flex the tail in normal locomotion.

James G. Mead, Ph.D. – Curator of Marine Mammals – National Museum of Natural History – Smithsonian Institution

(via Uncommon Descent)

This second example comes by way of PHYS.ORG and like all other vestigial organs, the “Darwinism-of-the-gaps” is proven to be vacuous:

Both whales and dolphins have pelvic (hip) bones, (supposed) evolutionary remnants from when their ancestors walked on land more than 40 million years ago. Common wisdom has long held that those bones are simply vestigial, slowly withering away…

New research from USC and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) flies directly in the face of that assumption, finding that,, pelvic bones serve a purpose…

“Everyone’s always assumed that if you gave whales and dolphins a few more million years of evolution, the pelvic bones would disappear. But it appears that’s not the case,”….

Dean collaborated with fellow co-corresponding author Jim Dines,,, on a painstaking four-year project to analyze cetacean (whale and dolphin) pelvic bones.

The muscles that control a cetacean’s penis – which has a high degree of mobility – attach directly to its pelvic bones….

The Smithsonian Institute has and article on this as well… the title is illuminating:

I thought this was a telling commentary in the article:

Testing any of this in the field is near impossible—for now, there’s no way to x-ray whales having sex underwater to reveal the inner workings of their anatomy. All the researchers can do at this point is speculate.

My only question would be…

…why this “speculation” wasn’t applied to the previously held position that these bones are vestigial.

Phillip Johnson’s Classic Presentation on Neo-Darwinian Metaphysics

Published by Papa Giorgio

In this public lecture at the University of California, Irvine, Professor Phillip E. Johnson explains how ambiguous terminology, faulty assumptions, and questionable rules of reasoning have transformed a theory which explains minor evolutionary change into a dogmatic naturalistic religion.

Major topics include:

  • Darwinism as a New Religion
  • Assumptions and Terminology
  • Darwinism and the Blind Watchmaker Hypothesis
  • Logical and Empirical Problems in Darwinian Theory
  • Rules of Reasoning in Modern Science

Some consider this to be one of Professor Johnson’s finest lectures based on his first book “Darwin on Trial.”

Lively audience Q&A session follows the lecture.

Liberty’s Secret ~ Excerpt

Published by Papa Giorgio

I have already been challenged on this topic, to wit, the challenge and my response will follow the excerpt.

This following excerpt from Liberty’s Secrets is one that squarely displaces the typical secular attack on Jefferson being a man of faith to some degree. In this excerpt Thomas Paine’s position on Christianity and God is dealt with as an extra bonus, as well as some of the Founders predictions of the then young French Revolution. This is a really good read, and I highly recommend the book.

Before the excerpt, I want to share a favorite sentence that I think best defines the Founders accomplishments in the Constitution. Here it is:

  • The Constitution is the integration of ideals with reality, the ideal being human liberty, the reality being human nature. (p. 69)

If that isn’t the best definition in one sentence of the Constitution, I don’t know what is!

GOD AND THE HUMAN SOUL: THE EXISTENCE OF THE UNIVERSE AND MORALITY

Belief in God and the immortality of the human soul was universal among the Founders, which is incontrovertibly evident from the most cursory review of their writings. While not all of them were orthodox Christians, their thoughts on atheism ranged from extreme caution to outright disdain. For them, belief in God was natural to man because it was in accordance with his nature, and they agreed with Tocqueville when he noted (while describing the virtual absence of atheism in America) that “men cannot detach themselves from religious beliefs except by some wrong-headed thinking, and by a sort of moral violence inflicted upon their true nature… Unbelief is an accident; faith is the only permanent state of mankind.”

They saw the fingerprints of God everywhere they looked, and their conclusion that He existed was not even necessarily dependent on the Bible or any specific set of religious dogma but on the very nature of the cosmos. Writing to his friend John Adams toward the end of his life, Jefferson explained his views:Josh Charles Liberty Secret Book 300

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consum­mate skill, and the indefinite power in every atom of its composition… We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order… So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed through all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable than that of a few in the other hypothesis Even Thomas Paine, who in the second half of his life was an ardent opponent of orthodox Christianity (mostly Catholicism) and the clergy and did not believe the Bible was divinely inspired, wrote at the same time, “All the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make or invent or contrive principles. He can only discover them, and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.”

Paine criticized any teaching of “natural philosophy” (i.e., science) that asserted that the universe was simply “an accomplishment” (i.e., self-existent). He also criticized those teachers who “labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter and jump over all the rest by saying that matter is eternal” and thereby encouraged the “evil” of atheism. “Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowl­edge they acquire to create doubts of His existence,” he lamented. “When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of architecture, a well-executed statue, or a highly-finished painting… our ideas are naturally led to think of the extensive genius and talent of the artist. When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How, then, is it that when we study the works of God in creation, we stop short and do not think of God?”

For these reasons, among others, Jefferson rejected being an atheist, “which,” as he put it, “I can never be.” His friend John Adams noted, “I never heard of an irreligious character in Greek or Roman history, nor in any other history, nor have I known one in life who was not a rascal. Name one if you can, living or dead.”” Nor did the Founders see sci­ence and religion as opposed to one another, as is all too common today. Rather, as President Adams asserted in a letter to university students, they were not only mutually compatible, but mutually necessary for one another: “When you look up to me with confidence as the patron of science, liberty, and religion, you melt my heart. These are the choicest blessings of humanity; they have an inseparable union. Without their joint influence no society can be great, flourishing, or happy.”

Just as much as the existence of God was essential to their under­standing of the physical constitution of the universe, its combination with their belief in the immortality of the soul was crucial to their understanding of the moral constitution of the world, as it was the means by which God judged the good and evil acts committed in this life, whether noticed by man or not. Tocqueville ascribed a great deal of the accomplishments of the Puritans/Pilgrims and their progeny (the Founders) to this belief, which he described as so “indispensable to man’s greatness that its effects are striking,” for it kept him morally anchored, never able to escape ultimate justice. It was for this reason that the Founders considered belief in God as the cornerstone of all morality, but not because man could do no good apart from God commanding him to do so. Quite the contrary: part of their conception of the “law of nature and nature’s God” was the idea that all men had at least portions of this law inscribed into their very being, and that most men knew the basics of right and wrong because God had given them a conscience. The problem was that, because of their fallen nature, they did not obey their consciences as they should. Adams elaborated:

The law of nature would be sufficient for the government of men if they would consult their reason and obey their consciences. It is not the fault of the law of nature, but of themselves, that it is not obeyed; it is not the fault of the law of nature that men are obliged to have recourse to civil government at all, but of themselves; it is not the fault of the ten commandments, but of themselves, that Jews or Christians are ever known to steal, murder, covet, or blaspheme. But the legislator who should say the law of nature is enough, if you do not obey it, it will be your own fault, therefore no other government is necessary, would be thought to trifle.

This brings us to a very important fact that we must remember when it comes to the Founders: they did not believe that religion made men good, but rather that it provided the best encouragement and incentive to be good, for it taught them that their choices had consequences in eternity, not just in the moment. Even if consequences could be avoided in the now, God would exact justice in the hereafter.

This had been a Judeo-Christian teaching from time immemorial and was well known to the Founders. The problem was not that man had no knowledge of good and evil and therefore needed a religious commandment to tell him, but rather that human nature commonly bowed to the dictates of the passions, rather than reason, and thereby abandoned conscience and committed evil anyway. The Founders realized that our human nature could, and often did, pervert the plain dictates of conscience, allowing us to convince ourselves that right is wrong and wrong is right if it suits our own desires. As Adams noted, “Human reason and human conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a match for human passions, human imaginations, and human enthusiasm.” Our passions would corrupt our minds, our minds would justify our passions, and in turn our passions would become even more corrupt, a deadly cycle with horrific consequences for indi­viduals and society. “Our passions, ambition, avarice, love, resentment, etc. possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party,” Adams wrote. “And I may be deceived as much as any of them when I say that power must never be trusted without a check.”

That “check,” at least as far as voluntary self-restraint was concerned, was religion. The Founders understood that mankind’s capacity for self-delusion was boundless; therefore, moral obligations must be placed on a divine rather than a humanistic footing if anyone could assert any truth or notion of right and wrong at all. It was for this reason that religious commandments such as “do not murder,” “do not steal,” and “do not commit adultery” were necessary, not because man was completely incapable of avoiding these sins without God commanding him to, but because, since He had commanded them, man had no intellectual excuse for ever allowing his passions or personal desires to blind his judg­ment and excuse him of his moral obligations. Religion thus anchored the definition of morality on God and asserted its obligations on man by acting as a powerful regulator of the inherently negative aspects of human nature. James Madison explained the importance of this truth: “The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities to be impressed with it.”

Adams asserted the same thing and specifically acknowledged that Judaism, through the Bible, had bequeathed to the world what he con­sidered the most essential ingredient of human civilization:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

For the Founders, the most effective catalyst of virtue was religion, for it reminded man that he is not God and he therefore cannot shape morality according to his own selfish desires. It was the subversion of this principle that they identified as the cause behind the American and French Revolutions taking such radically different courses: it was ultimately a difference of theology.

GOD AND THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS

The Founders believed in the existence of a God, which they deemed the most rational basis for the existence of the universe, morality, and reason itself. The French Revolution was predicated on almost the exact opposite idea.

While many today assume that the notion of blind chance being the operative force in the universe’s creation and development arrived on the scene with Charles Darwin, this is not the case. In fact, it was a notion quite popular among many of the continental European intellectuals of the time, most of whom were French, and most of whom tended to be atheists and/or materialists (which were practically the same). They contended that the universe had not been created but had either existed eternally or was the result of inherent properties in matter itself. But among the French intelligentsia, the one who had the most profound effect on the Founders, Montesquieu, directly contradicted this position in his famous work, The Spirit of the Laws: “Those who have said that a blind fate has produced all the effects that we see in the world have said a great absurdity,” he wrote, “for what greater absurdity is there than a blind fate that could have produced intelligent beings?”

For Montesquieu and the Founders, the universe was simply too full of information, order, and harmony to ascribe it to blind chance. “What is chance?” asked Adams. “It is motion; it is action; it is event; it is phenomenon without cause. Chance is no cause at all; it is nothing.”

In addition to their denial, or at least extreme doubt of the exis­tence of a Creator, many of the French intellectuals in like manner either doubted or denied the existence and immortality of the human soul. They therefore denied the two theological pillars upon which the Founders based their ideas of virtue, and as such, it was no surprise that the French Revolution, which claimed to be the heir of the American Revolution, devolved into a bloodbath of violence and oppression unrestrained by any religious principle.

While both revolutions were similar in their assertion of human rights, they offered fundamentally different explanations of the origin of such rights. The American Revolution was premised on men being “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” while the French Revolution asserted man’s rights were based purely on reason, apart from any notions of divinity or religion. A statue of a deified “Reason” was erected in the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and the revolution was predicated upon principles that were explicitly and directly opposed to religion, Christianity in particular. Adams noted the differences between the two revolutions when he wrote to his friend Richard Price that “Diderot and D’Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau,” all French atheists and materialists, “have contributed to this great event more than Sidney, Locke, or Hoadly,” English political philosophers who explicitly asserted that the “laws of nature and nature’s God” were the foundation of man’s rights and moral obligations, and who had a profound impact on the American Revolution. The French, on the other hand, based man’s rights on the consensus of “the nation.” The rights of man were what man, through the nation, had decided they would be. For this reason, Adams admitted to Price as early as 1790, “I own to you, I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists,” and he predicted there would be rampant violence and bloodshed.

But that was not all. Several of the Founders, Adams in particular, believed that the principles of the French Revolution not only directly undermined the basis of human rights and obligations but also destroyed the very idea of human liberty. If man was simply matter in motion, then his entire destiny had already been determined by physical laws and constants (today known as “determinism”), making liberty a mean­ingless idea. And yet, this was the view of many of the leading French intellectuals. “And what was their philosophy?” Adams inquired:

Atheism—pure, unadulterated atheism…. The universe was matter only, and eternal. Spirit was a word without a meaning. Liberty was a word without a meaning. There was no liberty in the universe; liberty was a word void of sense. Every thought, word, passion, sentiment, feeling, all motion and action was necessary [determinism]. All beings and attributes were of eternal necessity; conscience, morality, were all nothing but fate. This was their creed, and this was to perfect human nature, and convert the earth into a paradise of pleasure… Why, then, should we abhor the word “God,” and fall in love with the word “fate”? We know there exists energy and intellect enough to produce such a world as this, which is a sublime and beautiful one, and a very benevolent one, notwithstanding all our snarling; and a happy one, if it is not made otherwise by our own fault.

Alexander Hamilton, who described the French Revolution as “the most cruel, sanguinary, and violent that ever stained the annals of mankind,” also predicted its failure due to the fact that it was explicitly

opposed to Christianity, “a state of things which annihilates the foun­dations of social order and true liberty, confounds all moral distinc­tions and substitutes to the mild and beneficent religion of the Gospel a gloomy, persecuting, and desolating atheism:’

It was precisely because the French Revolution rejected the Judeo-Christian notion of the fallen nature of man in exchange for the idea that he could be perfected by reason that they engaged in the wanton violence and cruelty of the guillotine: it was all worth it because they were creating a new, ideal world that had to be purged of its impure elements.

The French Revolution was thereby founded on principles that fun­damentally contradicted the divine basis of the existence of the universe, man’s rights, his moral obligations, and his very liberty, upon which the Founders, partaking of both the classical and Judeo-Christian tradition, asserted them. With God removed, several of the Founders, Adams in particular, predicted the French Revolution would operate according to the bloody principles of “might makes right.” “A nation of atheists,” he had warned, would likely lead to “the destruction of a million of human beings.” Adams explained his prophecy of a forthcoming deluge of blood in biblical terms and ascribed it to the utter rejection of religion by the leaders of the French Revolution:

The temper and principles prevailing at present in that quarter of the world have a tendency to as general and total a destruction as ever befell Tyre and Sidon[,] Sodom and Gomorrah. If all religion and governments, all arts and sciences are destroyed, the trees will grow up, cities will molder into common earth, and a few human beings may be left naked to chase the wild beasts with bows and arrows…. I hope in all events that religion and learning will find an asylum in America.

In this, he disagreed (at the time) with Jefferson. But even Jefferson was forced to admit decades later, after the Reign of Terror, the Napoleonic Wars, and the other violent outbursts that came out of the French Revolution, that Adams had been completely right in his assessment, acknowledging, “Your prophecies… proved truer than mine.” When Jefferson asked Adams why he had predicted what he did, Adams explained that the power of God had been replaced by the arrogant, usurping power of man, and conscience was thereby discon­nected from its transcendent anchors. Thus, those in power believed whatever they did was moral: “Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon foi [“in very good faith”], believes itself right. Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God’s service, when it is violating all his laws.” It was for this reason that, as much as religion had been abused for centuries in European history, Adams argued it could not compare with the atrocities committed in the name of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” during the French Revolution: “It is a serious problem to resolve whether all the abuses of Christianity, even in the darkest ages when the Pope deposed princes and laid nations under his interdict, were ever so bloody and cruel, ever bore down the independence of the human mind with such terror and intolerance, or taught doctrines which required such implicit credulity to believe, as the present reign of pretended philosophy in France.”

As president, Adams had to deal directly with the revolutionary French government and easily noted the difference between an American society that assented to general religious principles and a French society that rejected them:

You may find the moral principles, sanctified and sanctioned by reli­gion, are the only bond of union, the only ground of confidence of the people in one another, of the people in the government, and the government in the people. Avarice, ambition, and pleasure, can never be the foundations of reformations or revolutions for the better. These passions have dictated the aim at universal domination, trampled on the rights of neutrality, despised the faith of solemn contracts, insulted ambassadors, and rejected offers of friendship.

For the Founders, the purpose of reason—which Adams referred to as “a revelation from its maker” and Jefferson as an “oracle given you by heaven”-was to better align human actions with the “law of nature and nature’s God” by the taming of human passions and the application of knowledge. The leaders of the French Revolution believed precisely the opposite, that God didn’t really exist (and if He did, He was largely irrelevant), and that reason was man’s alone, and thus his to utilize toward whatever ends he himself determined. Though the Founders knew perfection “falls not to the share of mortals,” the French believed that man could be perfected through reason, and therefore any bar­riers to creating the world of their dreams needed to be destroyed, for this was tantamount to obstructing man’s perfection. The differences between the two revolutions thus turned out to be theological at root, and for this reason, while on the surface they were superficially similar, they were in fact fundamentally different, as Adams prophesied, other Founders criticized, and the facts of history verified.

Joshua Charles, Liberty’s Secrets: The Lost Wisdom of America’s Founders (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2015), 82-91.

Dennis Prager interviews Ann Coulter in regards to her new book, Demonic.” Ann points out a fact I wasn’t aware of in regards to the mob mentality that set the standard for the French Revolution. Much like the misunderstanding in regards to the Crusades, the witch trials, and the like, numbers are not the forte of the left. Nor is putting into context meaning behind them.

Challenges

I posted a link to this at a friends “counter-atheist” page on FaceBook. I posted the following that included a link back to this page:

For those interested, before I head out to drink wine in Cambria, I posted an excerpt from a book I am reading… and it deals with both Jefferson’s, Madison’s, Hamilton’s, Paine’s, view of faith and/or atheists and creation vs. evolutionary thinking (the basis of which reaches back to Greece)

Almost immediately after this was posted this was posted.

  • Fascinating!! I never knew Jefferson died before The Origin of Species was written!!

I believe Tim, the author of the above challenge, meant to say “died after” Darwin’s seminal work, not before.

Per the modi operandi of the atheists on this site, they do not read and inculcate what was said. Forgive me as I take time with a though. After reading four books on marijuana addiction and the latest studies (one that followed over a thousand people for 25-years) showing the deleterious affects of this drug (a 8% decrease of the amygdala, and 12% reduction in size of the hippocampus). During this time of reading, a story came out about what amounts to brain damage in a controlled setting by “targeted magnetism” — making more people unable to “believe” in God… by about thirty-percent.

One commentator said it must be embarrassing to the atheist because “the specific part of the brain they frazzled was the posterior medial frontal cortex—the part associated with detecting and solving problems, i.e., reasoning and logic.”

I often wonder aloud to my wife if these guys smoke weed! But I digress… continuing.

I respond:

I am sorry Tim, evolutionary thinking pre-dates Darwin. Take Cicero countering his rivals of the day (as an example). If you read this… what is the opposing viewpoint? [Nothing?]

…suppose that after darkness had prevailed from the beginning of time, it similarly happened to ourselves suddenly to behold the light of day, what should we think of the splendour of the heavens? But daily recurrence and habit familiarize our minds with the sight, and we feel no surprise or curiosity as to the reasons for things that we see always; just as if it were the novelty and not rather the importance of phenomena that ought to arouse us to inquire into their causes.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero Nature of the Gods Academics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Translated by H. Rackam, 2005), 217.

OR,

But if the structure of the world in all its parts is such that it could not have been better whether in point of utility or beauty, let us consider whether this is the result of chance, or whether on the contrary the parts of the world are in such a condition that they could not possibly have cohered together if they were not controlled by intelligence and by divine providence. If then the products of nature are better than those of art, and if art produces nothing without reason, nature too cannot be deemed to be without reason. When you see a statue or a painting, you recognize the exercise of art; when you observe from a distance the course of a ship, you do not hesitate to assume that its motion is guided by reason and by art; when you look at a sun-dial or a water-clock, you infer that it tells the time by art and not by chance; how then can it be consistent to suppose that the world, which includes both the works of art in question, the craftsmen who made them, and everything else besides, can be devoid of purpose and of reason? Suppose a traveller to carry into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Posidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every twenty-four hours, would any single native doubt that this orrery was the work of a rational being? These thinkers however raise doubts about the world itself from which all things arise and have their being, and debate whether it is the product of chance or necessity of some sort, or of divine reason and intelligence;

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero Nature of the Gods Academics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Translated by H. Rackam, 2005), 207-209.

And the opening sentence to a Berkeley.EDU paper is this:

✦ Evolutionary theory begins with the Ionian philosopher Anaximander (ca. 611 – 546 B. C. E.). Very little is known about his life, but it is known that he wrote a long poem, On Nature, summarizing his researches. This poem is now lost, and has survived only in extracts quoted in other works. Enough survives, however, that Anaximander’s thought can be reconstructed with some confidence. For Anaximander, the world had arisen from an undifferentiated, indeterminate substance, the apeiron. The Earth, which had coalesced out of the apeiron, had been covered in water at one stage, with plants and animals arising from mud. Humans were not present at the earliest stages; they arose from fish. This poem was quite influential on later thinkers, including Aristotle. ~ Berkeley.edu

Tim responds:

  • What’s your point?

This is one of those “bang your head on the keyboard” moments. You see, Tim challenged my statement. I corrected his challenge. He then feigns like I just waded in, off topic. Like I started talking about MPG for city buses where I live. You will notice this is Paley’s watchmaker argument almost 1800-years before Paley lived! Paley pre-dated Darwin. Were there no naturalistic origins hypothesis of his day either? Paley was just “preaching to the quire”? Dumb. Here is my response:

OMG…. sigh….

➣ You said: “Fascinating!! I never knew Jefferson died [after] The Origin of Species was written!!”

I corrected your viewpoint that “evolution” is something Charles Darwin “founded.” He merely reformulated the general idea that “man has evolved,” into, the General Theory of Evolution (GTE).

For more context on defining “evolution,” see my debate with some atheists about the General Theory of Evolution.

Our Created Universe ~ Spike Psarris

Published by Papa Giorgio

Spike Psarris has a Bachelor’s of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, and has done graduate work in Physics. For a number of years, he was an engineer in the U.S. military space program. He went into the U.S. military space program as an atheist and committed evolutionist, and came out of it as a young-earth creationist and Christian.

Spike is launching a new website to track creation evidence in astronomy at www.CreationAstronomy.com.

Was Archaeopteryx Devolving? Thus Losing It’s Ability to Fly?

Published by Papa Giorgio

The below is a response to a conversation elsewhere on the WWW.

ARCHAEOPTERYX

I have a digital edition of Science Magazine and they allow me to read all the past articles (like this one, Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms). In the article a wild eyed creationist… er… I mean, a respected evolutionist discusses how Archaeopteryx is more bird like, not the missing link between dino and bird.

In the article we find this:

  • feathers are 100% bird feathers;
  • hollow bones like birds;
  • It’s claws were perching claws (similar to the Bowerbird)…
  • doubts connected with dico/bird progression

…even the father of the modern “bird/dino” theory, John Ostrom, says this of recent revelations about Archaeopteryx:

  • “I’m just having a ball,” he said with a chuckle. “It sounds to me as if Alan [Feduccia] has presented a very good argument; I’m not sure he’s absolutely right, but I’m sure he’s on solid ground.”

Since the writing of the linked article at Science, more evidence (I will repeat, e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e) has come to light supporting the articles authored (Alan Feduccia) and curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institute, Storrs Olson:

  • bumps in the bone where feathers were connected (just like birds);
  • the avian lung was present in Archaeopteryx [pneumatized vertebrae and pelvis];
  • Cat Scans of the skull shows that the brain was birdlike, not dino-like (“Axial and appendicular pneumaticity in Archaeopteryx,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B. 267:2501–2505, 2000);
  • similar inner ear findings (“The avian nature of the brain and inner ear of Archaeopteryx,” Nature 430(7000):666–669, 5 August 2004; Witmer, L.M, “Inside the oldest bird brain, perspective,” same issue, pp. 619–620);
  • In 2011, “the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, the researchers wrote that Archaeopteryx’s assignment to a dinosaur group earlier this year ‘was acknowledged to be weakly supported’, They constructed new cladograms that pictured Archaeopteryx with birds, and not with any dinosaurs, with a caption that reads, ‘Archaeopteryx robustly reinstated as the most basal bird’.” (“Likelihood reinstates Archaeopteryx as a primitive bird,” Biology Letters. Published online before print October 26, 2011).

Some more resources for the above bullet points:

  1. Archaeopteryx (unlike Archaeoraptor) is NOT a hoax—it is a true bird, not a “missing link”
  2. Archaeopteryx Is a Bird… Again
  3. Dinosaurs vs. Birds: The Fossils Don’t Lie

AND FINALLY

Since other feathered “birds” have been found around the same time or earlier than Archaeopteryx, causing Alan Feduccia to quip, “You can’t be older than your grandfather” (Creation.com)… Nature has published an article pointing out that Archaeopteryx is JUST LIKE modern flightless birds.

And so it could have been losing its ability for flight (like modern birds have).

“We know Archaeopteryx was living on an archipelago during the Jurassic. And with its feathers and bones looking so much like modern flightless island birds, it just makes me wonder,” says…. Michael Habib, a biologist at the University of Southern California….

[….]

“Just because Archaeopteryx was the first feathered dinosaur found, doesn’t mean it has to play a central role in the actual history of the origins of birds,” says palaeontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park. “We have to remember it appears 10 million years or so after the oldest known bird-like dinosaurs and so our famous ‘first bird’ may really be a secondarily flightless one.”…

(NATURE JOURNAL)

Recent events cast even further doubt on Archaeopteryx as a transitional form. If the claims of Sankar Chatterjee prove to be valid, then certainly Archaeopteryx could not be the ancestral bird, and dinosaurs could not be ancestral to birds. Chatterjee and his co-workers at Texas Tech University claim to have found two crow-sized fossils of a bird near Post, Texas, in rocks supposedly 225 million years old—thus allegedly 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx and as old as the first dinosaurs. Totally contrary to what evolutionists would expect for such a fossil bird, however, Chatterjee claims that his bird is even more bird-like than Archaeopteryx! In contrast to Archaeopteryx, this bird had a keel-like breastbone and hollow bones. In most other respects, it was similar to Archaeopteryx.14 If evolutionary assumptions are correct, this bird should have been much more reptile-like than Archaeopteryx. In fact, he shouldn’t even exist!

14. S. Weisburd, Science News, August 16, 1986, p. 103; Tim Beardsley, Nature 322:677 (1986).

(ICR)

But even if its classification waffles again, it is disqualified as an evolutionary ancestor for birds by the fact that scientists found a crow-size bird and extinct four-winged birds in rock layers designated to be below those containing Archaeopteryx.3,4

3. Thomas, B. Early Bird Gets the Boot: Researchers Reclassify Archaeopteryx. ICR News. Posted on icr.org August 5, 2011, accessed October 27, 2011.

4. Beardsley, T. 1986. Fossil bird shakes evolutionary hypotheses. Nature. 322 (6081): 677. (pictured at beginning of post)

There is just as much [at best] evidence for this proposition as the next. “Devolution” — a loss of specificity, may be a more reasonable position to take via observed evidence. We see this all the time (directly below is an example from Lee Spetner’s new book), and EVOLUTION NEWS says that “looks like Archaeopteryx may have to be reclassified as a different sort of icon — symbolizing evolution by loss of function.” Oops.

Antibiotic Resistance

The evolution of antibiotic resistance has been for some time the Dar­winists’ favorite example for “demonstrating” evolution (Common De­scent). Superficially their case looks good. Antibiotics date only from about 1930 with the discovery of penicillin (Fleming 1929), followed by the development of a method to produce it with high yield (Chain et al. 1940). Antibiotics were first introduced to the public in 1942 to cure bacterial infection (Levy 1992, 4), and by the mid 1940s the first strains appeared of Staphylococcus resistant to penicillin (Fisher 1994, 15). Just a few years after antibiotics were introduced, resistant strains of the pathogens were found to have already evolved. As each new an­tibiotic was discovered and put into use against pathogenic bacteria, resistant strains soon followed. The argument then goes, with a wave of the hand, like this: If a small but significant evolutionary change like antibiotic resistance can evolve in only a few years, then surely in a mil­lion years huge evolutionary changes must occur. Darwinists expect this argument to support Common Descent.

An examination of the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance, however, shows it lends no support at all to Common Descent (Spetner 1997, 138­143). Antibiotics are natural molecules produced by some microorgan­isms for the purpose of killing other hostile microorganisms. A microor­ganism that makes an antibiotic must, itself, be resistant to the antibiotic it makes. For this purpose it is typically endowed with a battery of genes that code for a resistance mechanism. Most useful antibiotics have come from soil bacteria (D’Costa et al. 2006). How bacteria have acquired this resistance initially is not known, nor can neo-Darwinian theory shed any light on it. Antibiotic resistance genes have been found to predate the use of antibiotics by at least many thousands of years (D’Costa et al. 2011). Moreover, bacteria are known to be able to transfer genetic ma­terial to other bacteria through HGT (see above). On occasion, copies of the genes for resistance can find their way from a type of bacterium that is normally resistant to a type that is not normally resistant. When that happens, the recipient bacterium becomes resistant. This is indeed evolution, but it is a limited evolution of the population-change type. It is not the Common-Descent type of evolution.

The resistance genes already exist in the biosphere. No new informa­tion has appeared in the biosphere through this type of evolution of an­tibiotic resistance. Common-Descent evolution cannot be achieved by this procedure even if it were repeated innumerable times in succession, because no new information would be built up. This method of evolving antibiotic resistance therefore lends no support for Common Descent.

Sometimes, however, antibiotic resistance can indeed appear through a random mutation — a DNA copying error, which would bring something new to the biosphere. This kind of change looks like it might satisfy the requirements for Common Descent, so I shall give a brief description of it here, although I have already dealt with it in my previous book.

As an example, let us look at how a bacterium acquires resistance to streptomycin through a random mutation. All cells, whether of bacteria or of plants or animals, contain organelles called ribosomes, whose function it is to make protein according to instructions from the DNA of a gene. Proteins are large molecules, consisting of long chains of small molecules called amino acids, and are essential to all living things. They function as enzymes, which catalyze all the chemical reactions in a cell — each chemical reaction catalyzed by a specific enzyme. Proteins can also serve as structural elements. Of­ten, and maybe even always, a structural protein functions also as an enzyme. For an enzyme to perform its function, it must have a specif­ic sequence of amino acids.

A ribosome is an organelle within a cell that manufactures protein. It makes a protein by putting together a chain of amino acids according to the instructions in the DNA. A segment of the DNA is transcribed into an RNA molecule that matches the DNA nucleotide by nucleo­tide. This RNA is called messenger RNA because it carries the DNA message to the ribosome. The ribosome translates the message in the DNA into amino acids according to the genetic code. Three nucleotides translate into one amino acid. Accordingly, the ribosome constructs a chain of amino acids to form a protein.

The antibiotic streptomycin, for example, acts on a bacterial cell by attaching to a ribosome at a site to which it matches, the way a key fits into a lock. When the streptomycin molecule attaches to this site, it in­terferes with the ribosome function and causes it to make mistakes lead­ing to incorrect, dysfunctional or nonfunctional, protein. The errors it causes prevent the cell from growing, reproducing, and eventually from living. The important feature of streptomycin, and indeed of all other antibiotics, is that it kills bacteria but does not harm the mammalian host. Streptomycin kills the bacterial cells that are infecting you without killing your own cells. It discriminates between the cells of the bacteria and the cells of the host by its specific attachment to a matching site on the bacterial ribosome, a site not found on the host’s ribosomes.

A bacterium will gain resistance to streptomycin if a point mutation occurs in the gene coding for the protein in the ribosome, ruining the matching site, destroying the specificity of the protein, and preventing a streptomycin molecule from attaching. If the streptomycin cannot at­tach to the matching site, the bacterium is resistant. Just one mutation in the portion of the DNA coding for the matching site can mess up the site so the streptomycin cannot attach. It turns out that any one of several mutations in that portion of the DNA will grant the bacterium resistance (Gartner and Orias 1966). Note that this type of resistance is caused by a single random point mutation, but it cannot serve as an example of mutations that can support Common Descent. One cannot expect mutations destroying specificity, no matter how many of them there are, to build information and lead to Common Descent. Destruc­tion of specificity does not add information — it destroys it. One can­not add information by destroying it, no matter how many times one repeats the process. I have previously (Spetner 1997) compared trying to build up information in this manner to the merchant who was losing a little money on each sale but thought he could make it up on volume. The acquisition of antibiotic resistance is indeed evolution, but only a limited form of it. It cannot lead to Common Descent.

No example of antibiotic resistance in bacteria adds information to the biosphere. To become resistant, the bacteria either pick up ready-made resistance genes from other bacteria or they undergo a mu­tation that destroys information. Antibiotic resistance cannot therefore be an evolutionary example that could support Common Descent be­cause a chain of such mutations, no matter how long, does not add in­formation and thus cannot lead to Common Descent. The Darwinists’ favorite example of evolution fails to pass muster.

End Notes

Chain, E. et al. (1940) Penicillin as a Chemotherapeutic Agent. Lancet 239: 226-228.

D’Costa, Vanessa M., Katherine M. McGrann, Donald W. Hughes, and Gerard D. Wright. (2006) Sampling the antibiotic resistome. Science 311: 374-377.

D’Costa, Vanessa M. et. al. (2011) Antibiotic Resistance is Ancient. Nature 477:457-461.

Fisher, Jeffrey A. (1994) The Plague Makers: How we are creating catastrophic new epidemics — and what we must do to avert them. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Fleming, A. (1929) On the antibacterial action of cultures of a Penicillium, with special reference to their use in the isolation of B. influenzae. British Journal of Experimental Pathology 10: 226-238.

Gartner, T. K. and E. Orias, (1966) Effects of mutations to streptomycin resistance on the rate of translation of mutant genetic information. Journal of Bacteriology 91: 1021-1028.

Levy, Stuart B. (1992) The Antibiotic paradox: How Miracle Drugs are Destroying the Miracle. New York: Plenum Press.

Spetner. L. M. (1997) Not by chance! Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution. Brooklyn: Judaica Press.

Lee Spetner, The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People Are Rethinking the Theory of Evolution (Brooklyn, NY: Judaica Press, 2014), 119-120.

A friend comments about the newer position on his Creation/Evolution Headlines saying one “paleontologist remarked, ‘We really need an improved understanding of how anatomy relates to these diverse behaviours, so we can better interpret the fossil record’.” Continuing he adds his thinking to the matter:

No one called Archaeopteryx a “feathered dinosaur” back then, because the phrase only came into vogue with the Chinese fossil discoveries.  From Darwin’s day till recently, it was argued to be a transitional form between reptiles and birds.  Evolutionists emphasized the reptilian traits (teeth, claws on the wings), and creationists emphasized the flight feathers and anatomy that seemed to show it capable of powered flight. They also pointed out that some living birds, like the hoatzin, have claws on their wings as juveniles.  People saw what their biases wanted to see.  Astronomer Fred Hoyle tried to prove it was a forgery.  Today’s evolutionists use the “feathered dinosaur” label, but there is no guarantee that today’s consensus will not shift again.  The new proposal it was secondarily flightless implies a win for creationists – it devolved from a fully-functional flying bird, just like some living birds with stunted wings have on the Galapagos Islands.  Loss of function is not what Darwin needs!

Let’s think about Nature’s comment that the suggestion Archaeopteryx was losing the ability to fly “might have been considered madness” back in 1861 (actually, all the way from 1861 to just a few years ago).  This tells us that if evolutionists consider something madness now, it might be considered sanity later.  It further means that the sane ones could be the skeptics of the consensus, and the mad ones in the majority.  Don’t be deterred, therefore, if you feel you have good evidence and arguments for your position when it runs counter to the consensus.  It’s entirely possible for the intellectual majority to be suffering from delusions.  “We really need an improved understanding … so we can better interpret the fossil record” – good advice, but it implies that understanding is lacking and interpretation is flawed.  If they haven’t gotten it down after 152 years, don’t expect major improvements any time soon.  They might just be secondarily clueless.

A Definition of “So-So” Stories of Evolution Defined ~ Spetner

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is a quote, and really, a definition of the general theory of evolution (GTE) that G.A. Kerkut defines in his older text, Implication of Evolution (second quote). Here Spetner calls it the neo-Darwinian theory (NDT), it more common name today. Here is Spetner’s relevant quote:

Neo-Darwinian Theory (NDT) is counterintuitive, and is acknowledged as such even by its supporters. All present-day life is assumed to have evolved from some primitive cell, and that cell was supposed to have formed itself from simple chemicals. Nobody seems to know how that cell came to be, but almost all biologists think they understand fairly well how evolution proceeded from that cell to all the life we see today.

There appears to be a vast amount of information contained in trees, fish, elephants, and people. Where did this information come from? It is said to have come from random mutations and natural selection. How can that work? Natural selection is supposed to be the magic that makes evolution happen, but all natural selection does is eliminate the less adaptive organisms and allow the more adaptive ones to survive and proliferate. Where do those more adaptive ones come from? Ap­parently, that’s what random mutations are supposed to accomplish.

So the information buildup required by Common Descent can come only from random mutations. That means that the buildup of informa­tion is a matter of chance. At each step of the evolutionary process, a mutation has to have occurred that grants the organism an advan­tage. The big question is: Is that reasonable? To see if it is, some people (including me) have made calculations of the probability of mutations building information.

We really don’t have all the data we need to make this calculation. But even if we make some conservative assumptions and give the ben­efit of all doubts to the Darwinian side, such calculations demonstrate that Common Descent is not reasonable. The Darwin­ists, however, do not accept these calculations as conclusive — they suggest alternative scenarios that might make the probabilities larger.

In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe addressed the un­reasonableness of Darwinian evolution. He described some biological systems as what he called “irreducibly complex.” By that he meant that these systems are composed of several critical components in such a way that the system cannot work unless all those components are in place. He then argued that the system could not evolve one small part at a time, because natural selection could not work on less than the whole system. Here, too, the Darwinians countered by suggesting scenarios in which natural selection might work, but again, the Dar­winian scenarios are purely hypothetical.

Because the Darwinians can invent scenarios to address any chal­lenge to their theory, they are not convinced by attempts to show that neo-Darwinian evolution cannot work. Therefore, I have concluded that it would be more productive to challenge them to show that it could work — challenge them to do more than just offer vague scenarios of how their theory might work, but to show by calculation that the prob­ability of it working is reasonably high. This is a challenge they must meet to establish their theory on a scientific basis. They have never met this challenge and they cannot. They cannot show that the events they claim to have produced Common Descent have a high enough prob­ability to justify their claim. Their inability to establish the theory of Common Descent means that Common Descent is not an established theory. This is one of the main points of this book.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of probability calculations. NDT is not like Newton’s theory of mechanics, whose equations de­scribe the motion of a physical body under a force. Nor is it like Max­well’s theory of electromagnetism, whose equations describe the effects of electric and magnetic fields on electric charges. These theories are checked against experiment by solving those equations. NDT describes evolution as the result of random mutations that may or may not yield an adaptive phenotype. These are chance events. The theory can be checked only by calculating the probabilities of the required events to see if they are reasonably large. The theory has not been shown to have passed this test and is therefore not a valid theory. Whatever evidence is given for Common Descent is circumstantial. Circumstantial evi­dence cannot stand alone. It needs to have a theory tying the evidence to the conclusion. But instead of a theory, imaginary scenarios are of­fered to suggest how evolution might work. No calculations of proba­bilities are made.

[….]

Common Descent is a key component of an agenda advocating a natural origin of life. The effort to demonstrate the possibility of such a natural origin is usually divided into two parts: (1) abiogenesis, the origin of a simple life form from naturally occurring chemicals, and (2) the evolution of all life from that single simple beginning. It turns out, however, there is no good evidence for either of these two parts.

Lee Spetner, The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People Are Rethinking the Theory of Evolution (Brooklyn, NY: Judaica Press, 2014), 7-9, 15.

An Extended Quote From Jonathan Sarfati’s Must Have Resource

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is an extended quote from a MUST HAVE resource, The Genesis Account ~  for the seminarian or creation enthusiast (maybe a graduated-seminary student continuing his or her studies? of which I am). Again, this is not an introduction to the topic of “creation,” but rather a serious in-depth review of history, science, language, culture, theology and the Scriptures. [Two videos added to deepen understanding of molecular machines.]:

DNA: INFORMATION STORAGE, RETRIEVAL, AND TRANSMISSION

Not only do living things constitute enormously complex machines, they also contain the ‘instruction manual’ to build them—a sort of ‘recipe book’ programmed on DNA, the famous ‘double helix’ molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid). The information is stored in four different chemical ‘letters’: A T, C, and G.33 Plants and microbes also use the same DNA coding system.

These ‘letters’, or bases, have remarkable chemical properties. They are flat molecules, which allows them to stack as ‘rungs’ on a spiral staircase. This provides some stability, although see below. The letters of DNA have another vital property due to their structure, which allows information to be transmitted: A pairs only with T, and C only with G, due to the chemical structures of the bases—the pair is like a rung or step on a spiral staircase. This means that the two strands of the double helix can be separated, and new strands can be formed that copy the information exactly. The new strand carries the same information as the old one, but instead of being like a photocopy, it is in a sense like a photographic negative.

The copying is far more precise than random or laboratory chemistry could manage, because there is editing (proof-reading and error-checking) machinery, again encoded in the DNA. This machinery keeps the error rate down to less than one error per l07-108 letters).34, But how would the information for editing machinery be transmitted accurately before the machinery was in place? Lest it be argued that the accuracy could be achieved stepwise through selection, note that a high degree of accuracy is needed to prevent ‘error catastrophe’—the accumulation of ‘noise’ in the form of junk proteins specified by the damaged DNA.

DNA is unstable

DNA is a very complicated molecule, and actually a very unstable one. DNA researchers often need to store it in liquid nitrogen, at about —200°C, and even that frigid temperature doesn’t entirely stop breakdown. A recent paper on DNA stability estimates that, even when preserved in bone, it would be completely disintegrated in 22,000 years at 25°C, 131,000 years at 15°C, 882,000 years at 5°C; and 6.83 million years at —5°C.35 One article reported:

There is a general belief that DNA is ‘rock solid’—extremely stable,” says Brandt Eichman, associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, who directed the project. “Actually DNA is highly reactive. On a good day about one million bases in the DNA in a human cell are damaged.36

Fortunately, in our cells, we have many elaborate repair machines to undo this chemical damage.37 But most skeptics believe that life evolved in a primordial soup,38 which would have lacked such machines (not to mention the lack of any evidence that it existed at all39). So even if DNA managed to form spontaneously somehow, it would not have survived long.40

Encyclopedic information store

But even more important than the chemistry is the enormous information content of the ‘recipe’ stored on this DNA. This is transmitted from one generation to the next, so that living things reproduce ‘after their kinds’ (cf. Genesis 1). Leading atheist Richard Dawkins himself admits:

[T]here is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.41

Nowadays we would say that each of our cells—and there are about a hundred trillion in the human body—contains about three gigabytes of information. Even the simplest living creature, the tiny germ Mycoplasma, has about 600 kilobytes.42 And even this seems incredibly highly compressed. Some bioengineers, led by Stanford University’s Markus Covert, succeeded in modelling this ‘simple’ germ with computers.43 One report on trying to model the processes involved in one cell division for this cell stated:

What’s fascinating is how much horsepower they needed to partially simulate this simple organism. It took a cluster of 128 computers running for 9 to 10 hours to actually generate the data on the 25 categories of molecules that are involved in the cell’s lifecycle processes.44

To return to the Britannica, the information is in the form of ink molecules on paper. But nothing in the ink molecules themselves made them form into the letters, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs of the Encyclopedia. It certainly wasn’t produced by an ink spill. Rather, the information was imposed on the ink by an outside intelligent source (or a program ultimately programmed by an intelligent mind).

But here is the connection with living things. There is likewise nothing in the chemistry of DNA’s letters themselves that would make them join up in predetermined ways, any more than forces between ink molecules make them join up into letters and words. Michael Polanyi (Hungarian: Polányi Mihaly, 1891-1976), a former chairman of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester (UK) who turned to philosophy, confirmed this:

As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule. It is this physical indeterminacy of the sequence that produces the improbability of any particular sequence and thereby enables it to have a meaning—a meaning that has a mathematically determinate information content.45

Just as the Britannica had intelligent writers to produce its information, so it is scientific to believe that the information in the living world likewise had an original Writer.46

CELL MACHINES

Alex Williams, who was Australian representative to a research program coordinated by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, explained this further in applying this to the cell machinery:

Polanyi pointed to the machine-like structures that exist in living organisms. … Just as the structure and function of these common machine components cannot be explained in terms of the metal they are made of, so the structure and function of the parallel components in life cannot be reduced to the properties of the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and trace elements that they are made of. There are endless examples of such irreducible structures in living systems, but they all work under a unifying principle called `autopoiesis’. Autopoiesis literally means ‘self-making’ (from the Greek auto for self, and the verb poieo meaning ‘I make’ or ‘I do’) and it refers to the unique ability of a living organism to continually repair and maintain itself—ultimately to the point of reproducing itself—using energy and raw materials from its environment.47

For example, for creatures to live at all, they need energy. This energy is supplied by a molecule called ATP.48 In fact, the human body generates—and consumes—about its own weight of ATP every day. Nowadays we know that ATP is produced by the world’s tiniest motor, ATP synthase.49 [First Video Below] This is only 10 nm across by 8 nm high—so tiny that 1017 would fill the volume of a pinhead. Even the journal Nature called these motors “Real engines of creation”.50 Recent work shows that it’s also the most efficient motor in the world—in fact as efficient as the laws of physics allow-100%.51

But for ATP synthase to work as a builder of ATP, it must be in a membrane that provides an electric potential that drives a proton current to power it. Without this membrane, ATP synthase would operate in reverse, as an ATP destroyer (all enzymes are reversible).

There are many more nano-machines in living things, for example, the kinesin linear motor [Second Video Below] that ‘walks’ along miniature highways in the cell, called microtubules. In 8-nm steps (125,000 per millimetre), at a rate of 100 steps per second, it delivers protein packages to the right place in the cell. It knows where to go because of address labels on the packages! Kinesin is powered by ATP: one molecule per step.52

Above Video

(Creation.com) This animated sequence shows the ATP Synthase enzyme in operation. The animation is based on an incredible series of scientific discoveries. Only the colours show artistic licence.

ATP, or Adenosine Tri-Phosphate, is the energy currency of the cell. ATP is produced by a tiny molecular rotary motor, rotating at up to 7,000 rpm. These are so small that 100,000 would fit side-by-side in a millimetre. A current of protons drives the motor, unlike man-made electric motors, which use electrons.

This portion of the enzyme is where Adenosine Di-Phosphate is combined with a phosphate ion, in the presence of a catalyst to produce ATP which is then released, making way for the next cycle. A top view of the enzyme shows the sequential operation. Almost every bio-chemical process in your body requires ATP.

Such a nano-machine exhibits all the characteristics of super-intelligent design. ATP is vital for life and many of these motors were needed before the first living cell could exist. An evolutionary impossibility!

Related Articles:

Design in living organisms (motors: ATP synthase);
ATP synthase: majestic molecular machine made by a mastermind;
Is ATP synthase found in all life?

Above Video

(Creation.com) Inside a living cell is an amazing transportation system. Proteins have to be delivered to the correct part of the cell to perform their intended functions. This animation, based on a lot of clever research over a number of years, shows how it happens.

Highways, made of microtubules, are assembled by interlocking proteins, each manufactured in accordance with the coded instructions on the cell’s DNA. Marching along a microtubule is the kinesin motor, the hero of our story, carrying a huge sack of proteins to be delivered to a pre-determined place in the cell. Here the proteins will be released to fulfil their functions.

A kinesin linear motor uses one ATP to provide the energy for each step and takes 125,000 steps to cover one millimetre!

This amazing machine shows all the hallmarks of design!

Related Articles:

Incredible Kinesin;
Fantastic voyage;
DNA repair enzyme;
15 questions for evolutionists.

DECODING DNA’S INFORMATION

Information is meaningless unless we understand its language. The Britannica is little use unless we know English. For example, ‘gift’ in English means a present, but in German it means poison. The wrong convention can mean the wrong message. One German immigrant to New Zealand told me that in his first year, he thought that New Zealanders had macabre customs—at Christmas, they tried to poison their relatives and best friends!

The DNA code is also a language: three DNA ‘letters’ code for one protein `letter’. This language requires many different decoding machines to read it, including the ribosome.53 However, the instructions to build this decoding machinery are themselves stored on the DNA, thus producing a vicious circle, or chicken-and-egg problem.

Also, most of these processes use energy, supplied by ATP, produced by the nano-motor ATP synthase. But the ATP synthase motor can’t be produced without instructions in the DNA, read by decoding machinery using ATP… a three-way circle, or perhaps an egg-nymph-grasshopper problem.

Furthermore, DNA needs many machines for copying itself, but it also codes the instructions to build its own copying machines. But these instructions to build copying machines can’t be passed on without the copying machines already present … .

Multiple languages in DNA

In fact, there is more than one language involved. Recently, another code was discovered: the ‘splicing code’ that controls how different parts of the DNA are chopped out and spliced together; an editing process.54 This enables a single gene to encode multiple proteins, and explains why humans have only about 21,000 genes yet make up to a million proteins, which surprised those who decoded the human genome. For example, thanks to studies of the splicing code, researchers found that “three neurexin genes can generate over 3,000 genetic messages that help control the wiring of the brain,” according to co-discoverer Brendan Frey.55,56 This also involves a complex machine called a spliceosome. One paper was tellingly entitled, “Mechanical devices of the spliceosome: motors, clocks, springs, and things.”57

Multiple codes are an even bigger problem for evolution, as geneticist John Sanford (b. 1950), the inventor of the gene gun, pointed out:

Most DNA sequences are poly-functional and so must also be poly-constrained. This means that DNA sequences have meaning on several different levels (poly-functional) and each level of meaning limits possible future change (poly-constrained). For example, imagine a sentence which has a very specific message in its normal form but with an equally coherent message when read backwards. Now let’s suppose that it also has a third message when reading every other letter, and a fourth message when a simple encryption program is used to translate it. Such a message would be poly-functional and poly-constrained. We know that misspellings in a normal sentence will not normally improve the message, but at least this would be possible. However, a poly-constrained message is fascinating, in that it cannot be improved. It can only degenerate. Any misspellings which might possibly improve the normal sentence will be disruptive to the other levels of information. Any change at all will diminish total information with absolute certainty….

The poly-constrained nature of DNA serves as strong evidence that higher genomes cannot have evolved via mutation/selection except on a trivial level.58

The multiple languages are consistent with the almighty Creator God revealed in the Bible.

ATHEIST CONUNDRUM

The origin of the cell’s information, and its decoding machinery, is thus a huge problem for atheists. Astrophysicist and evolutionist Paul Davies (b. 1946) says:

We now know that the secret of life lies not with the chemical ingredients as such, but with the logical structure and organisational arrangement of the molecules. … Like a supercomputer, life is an information processing system. … It is the software of the living cell that is the real mystery, not the hardware.59

But he does nothing to solve this mystery. Instead he asks, “How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software?”, and answers, “Nobody knows …” and admits: “There is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.”

However, this makes good sense if the information came from a Master Programmer, as revealed in the Bible.

Foot Notes

  1. Adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. They are part of building blocks called nucleotides, which comprise the sugar deoxyribose, a phosphate and a base. In RNA, uracil (U) substitutes for thymine and ribose substitutes for deoxyribose.
  2. Kunkel, T.A., DNA Replication Fidelity, J. Biological Chemistry 279:16895-16898, 23 April 2004
  3. Allentoft, M.E. et aL, The half-life of DNA in bone: measuring decay kinetics in 158 dated fossils, Royal Society B 279(1748):4724-4733,7 December 2012.
  4. Salisbury, D.F., Newly discovered DNA repair mechanism, Science News, com, 5 October 2010.
  5. Sarfati, J., New DNA repair enzyme discovered, com/DNA-repair-enzyme, 13 January 2010.
  6. For problems with materialistic ideas that life evolved from non-living chemicals, see com/origin and Sarfati, J., By Design, ch. 11, 2008.
  7. Brooks, J., and Shaw, G. point out, “If there ever was a primitive soup, then we would expect to find at least somewhere on this planet either massive sediments containing enormous amounts of the various nitrogenous organic compounds, acids, purines, pyrimidines, and the like; or in much metamorphosed sediments we should find vast amounts of nitrogenous cokes. In fact no such materials have been found anywhere on earth.” Origins and Development of Living Systems, 359, 1973.
  8. Many skeptics believe that life started with a similar molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid). But this is even less stable than DNA, and so are its building blocks such as the sugar ribose. John Horgan admits in ‘Scientists don’t have a clue how life began’ above, “But the ‘RNA-world’ hypothesis remains problematic. RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize under the best of circumstances, in a laboratory, let alone under plausible prebiotic conditions…. The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation.” For those interested in chemistry, more chemical problems with ‘RNA World’ ideas can be found at creation.com/rna.
  9. Dawkins, C.R., The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design, 115, 1986.
  10. Fraser, C.M., et al., The minimal gene complement of Mycoplasma genitalium, Science 270(5235):397-403, 1995; perspective by Goffeau, A., Life with 482 Genes, same issue, pp. 445­446. They reported 582,000 DNA bases or ‘letters’. Other reports have a different number, but all within the same ball park. For simplicity, I am treating each DNA ‘letter’ as a ‘byte’ of information, which is ‘in the right ball park’.
  11. Karr, J.R. et al., A whole-cell computational model predicts phenotype from genotype, Cell 150(2):389-410, 20 July 2012.
  12. Madrigal, A.C., To model the simplest microbe in the world, you need 128 computers, com, 23 July 2012.
  13. Polanyi, M., Life’s irreducible structure, Science 160:1308-1312, 1968.
  14. See also Sarfati, J., DNA: marvellous messages or mostly mess? Creation 25(2):26-31, 2003.
  15. Williams, A., Life’s irreducible structure—Part 1: autopoiesis, J Creation 21(2):109-115, 2007.
  16. J.. ATP: The perfect energy currency for she cell. CRSQ 36(1):2-10, 1999.
  17. Updated from J. Sarfati, Design in living organisms (motors), Creation 12(1):3-5, 1998, written not long after the original discovery of the motor was published, and the Nobel Prize was awarded to the discoverers. A more up-to-date layman’s article is Thomas, B., ATP synthase: Majestic molecular machine made by a Mastermind, Creation 31(4):21-23, 2009; creation.com/atp-synthase links to an animation made by CMI.
  18. Block, S., Real engines of creation, Nature 386(6622):217-219, 1997; Comment on Hiroyuki Noji et al., Direct observation of the rotation of F1-ATPase, same issue, pp. 299-302.
  19. Shoichi Toyabea a , Thermodynamic efficiency and mechanochemical coupling of F1-ATPase, PNAS 13 October 2011.
  20. A lucid lay explanation is Calvin Smith, Incredible kinesin! Biological ‘robots’ will blow your mind!, com/incredible-kinesin, 26 June 2012. This contains animations of both kinesin and ATP synthase motors.
  21. Sarfati, J., com/message, 2003, links to animations of a number of DNA decoding machines, including RNA polymerase, the ribosome, the t-RNA ‘adaptor’ and the chaperonin folding machine; as well as the ATP synthase motor
  22. Barash, Y. et al., Deciphering the splicing code, Nature 465:53-59, 2010.
  23. Cantin, P., Researchers crack ‘Splicing Code’, solve a mystery underlying biological complexity, com, 5 May 2010.
  24. Geneticist Dr Robert Carter explains this lucidly in, Splicing and dicing the human genome: Scientists begin to unravel the splicing code, com/splicing, 1 July 2010.
  25. Staley, J.P. and Guthrie, C., Cell 92(3):315-326, 1998
  26. Sanford, J.C., Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, FMS Publications, 3rd Ed., p. 131-133, 2008.
  27. Davies, P. Life force, New Scientist 163(2204):27-30, 18 September 1999.

Co-Founder of “Darwinism” Embraced Intelligent Design (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

One of the most renowned biologists of the nineteenth century, Alfred Russel Wallace shares credit with Charles Darwin for developing the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet one part of Wallace’s remarkable life and career has been completely ignored: His embrace of intelligent design. “Darwin’s Heretic” is a 21-minute documentary that explores Wallace’s fascinating intellectual journey and how it sheds light on current debates. The documentary features University of Alabama at Birmingham Professor Michael Flannery, author of the acclaimed biography, “Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life.” You can purchase a DVD of this video plus more than 30 minutes of bonus material at http://www.darwinsheretic.com.

Here is an excellent article by David Klinghoffer at Evolution News noting that in today’s vernacular, Wallace would be considered a creationist:

At the inception of the theory of evolution, Darwin and co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace represented two paths forward, one headed in the end to nihilism, atheism, and despair — basically, today’s ascendant culture — the other to a wondrous and hope-giving recognition that material stuff is not all there is in the universe. As Wallace argued, a source of intelligent agency lies behind the changing façade of nature:

Wallace expounded his views at length in two scientific books near the end of his life: Man’s Place in the Universe (1903) and The World of Life (1910). He saw evidence of purpose in the functional complexity of the cell, the exquisite design of biological structures, and the rare constellation of physical factors that allows life to exist on the earth in the first place. “Everywhere, not here and there, but everywhere, and in the very smallest operations of nature to which human observation has penetrated, there is Purpose and a continual Guidance and Control.”

In our own day, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe and geneticist Michael Denton are prime examples of scientists who, like Wallace, see evolution as a fundamentally purposeful process. That they are regarded as beyond the pale by most current evolutionary biologists reflects the triumph of the metaphysics of Darwinism enforced by academic pressures of conformity that oppress dissent rather than consider evidence. The Church of Darwin is so narrow today that even the cofounder of the theory would have to be declared a heretic.

Let that sink in. If the co-discoverer of evolutionary theory were alive today, he would be attacked by the National Center for Science Education as a “creationist.”

[….]

It’s a sign of the times, an indication of the intellectual impoverishment of journalism and academia, that Darwin advocates are currently triumphant in convincing so many thoughtful people that evolution means Darwin, period, that Darwin is the only alternative to that ill-defined scare word, “creationism.” First Things deserves applause and thanks for reminding its readers that there is another way.

(Read it all)

As an aside,

  • First Things ran an article that was God Awful… apparently trying to give the other side of the issue a chance. The other side showed it’s true colors for believing in evolution: straw-men, red herrings, and supposition.

See more resources at Evolution News & Views, as well as the books, “The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace” and “Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life,” ~ and especially the site, Alfred Russel Wallace.

I will end with this quote from a non-creationist/non-ID’er that deals with the history of the background of the suppositions involved in modern evolutionary theory that still cause “brooding” to this day:

The third reason why most naturalists around 1835 were slow to admit the fact of evolution was neither a religious nor a moral ob­jection. It was a purely intellectual one. By now it has been almost completely forgotten, no doubt because we labor under the hand­icap of hindsight. But it was a well-founded objection at the time.

If someone says a certain thing has happened, and it is of a kind which has never been actually witnessed by anyone, it is reasonable to doubt what he says, if no one can think of any ex­planation of what he says has happened. It is on this principle that you would doubt my word, if I were to tell you (for ex­ample) that electrical storms follow me wherever I go. Now this was exactly how matters stood with evolutionism around i835.

No naturalist claimed, of course, to have ever seen a new species evolve out of an older one. Yet the evolutionists said that, whenever new species do come into existence, that is the way they do it. But what could be the explanation of one species’ giving rise to another? What causes or forces are there, already known to exist in nature, which would make one kind of grass or fish or mammal evolve into a different kind? Where is the vera causa, as they used to say, or (as we would say), where is the mechanism, which could drive this alleged process of evolution?

It should go without saying that this was not only a purely in­tellectual objection, but a good objection, to evolutionism. The main evidence for evolution was the fossil record, which reveals in countless instances the arrival of a new species which is closely re­lated to an earlier one. In 1835 most naturalists regarded these new species as brought about by exercises of God’s creative power; whereas the evolutionists regarded them as developments or evolutions of the older species in question. No one had ever wit­nessed any of these exercises of Divine power, of course, but then exactly the same was true of evolutions of one species into another; no one had ever witnessed an instance of that, either. And then, to ascribe new species to God’s creative power is at least an explanation of a kind, though doubtless not of a very satisfactory kind. But the evolutionists, for their part, had no explanation of any kind to suggest for their alleged process of evolution.

Darwin, being a rational man, naturally felt the force of this objection, just as strongly as did his fellow naturalists who were not evolutionists. For several years around 1836, it weighed heavily on his mind. These were the very same years when the reality of evolution was being constantly impressed upon him, by the multitude of facts which would be explained if it were true. But the trouble, and a very big trouble, was that he could not think of anything which would explain evolution. That was the rub, and it seemed to Darwin that he was staring at a blank wall.

Given the intellectual circumstances of the time, it is not surprising that, just a few years later, another young naturalist found himself brought to a standstill by exactly the same blank wall. This was Alfred Wallace. Though neither of them knew it, his early intellectual career had been exactly the same as Dar­win’s. On the one hand, he had become convinced of the reality of evolution; but on the other, he was altogether at a loss as to how to explain it.

Why should there be any evolution at all? Why should not the species which exist at a given time exist forever, without any new ones ever being added, or old ones subtracted? But it is not the subtractions which are the problem: presumably climatic or topographical changes, and general wear and tear, will sometimes bring about the extinction of a species. The problem is the new additions. Why should any new species ever come into existence at all? That is the mystery of the origin of species, which both Darwin and Wallace long brooded over in vain.

To ordinary observation, of course, it does not look as though new species ever do come into existence. But it is clear from the fossil record that the reality is very different. In countless thousands of instances, new species of organisms have appeared on earth. Organic nature is in fact, whatever else it is, a gigantic species-generating engine. Now, why in the world would it be that? What force can it possibly be, which drives this gigantic engine? It might reasonably be thought to be some Divine force, in view of the irresistibility of its operations, and the length of time that those operations have been going on all over the earth. But if it is not a Divine force, what force is it?

David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 1995), 24-26. (Emphasis Added)

Taung Child: Another Evidence [Proof] of Evolution Falls

Published by Papa Giorgio

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Here is a quick description from the Smithsonian Institute’s site about Taung:

When this 3-year-old child’s skull was found in 1924, it was among the first early human fossils to be found in Africa — and the first early human fossil discovery to draw major attention to this region as a place of origin of the human family tree. Still, it took over 20 years after that before scientists accepted the importance of Africa as a major source of human evolution.

The Taung Child’s fossilized anatomy represented the first time researchers saw evidence of early human upright, two-legged  (bipedal) walking. The evidence was the position of the Taung Child’s foramen magnum, or the hole through which the spinal cord connects with the brain. This spinal cord hole is positioned toward the front of the Taung Child’s skull, a characteristic associated with bipedal locomotion. This bipedal adaptation allows the head to balance atop of the neck; while contrastingly, a four-legged ape has its foramen magnum positioned toward the rear of the head to keep its eyes facing forward (and not down) when it moves.

And here is more from Science Daily, the cites where Creation magazine references:

Summary: By subjecting the skull of the famous Taung Child to the latest CT scan technology, researchers are now casting doubt on theories that Australopithecus africanus shows the same cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers.

The Taung Child, South Africa’s premier hominin discovered 90 years ago by Wits University Professor Raymond Dart, continues to shed light on human origins. By subjecting the skull of the first australopith discovered to the latest technologies in the Wits University Microfocus X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) facility, researchers are now casting doubt on theories that Australopithecus africanus shows the same cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers — in effect disproving current support for the idea that this early hominin shows infant brain development in the prefrontal region similar to that of modern humans.

The results have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Aug. 25, in an article titled “New high resolution CT data of the Taung partial cranium and endocast and their bearing on metopism and hominin brain evolution.”

The Taung Child has historical and scientific importance in the fossil record as the first and best example of early hominin brain evolution, and theories have been put forward that it exhibits key cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers.

To test the ancientness of this evolutionary adaptation, Dr Kristian J. Carlson, Senior Researcher from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, and colleagues, Professor Ralph L. Holloway from Columbia University and Douglas C. Broadfield from Florida Atlantic University, performed an in silico dissection of the Taung fossil using high-resolution computed tomography.

“A recent study has described the roughly 3 million-year-old fossil, thought to have belonged to a 3 to 4-year-old, as having a persistent metopic suture and open anterior fontanelle, two features that facilitate post-natal brain growth in human infants when their disappearance is delayed,” said Carlson.

Comparisons with the existing hominin fossil record and chimpanzee variation do not support this evolutionary scenario.

Citing deficiencies in how the Taung fossil material has been recently assessed, the researchers suggest physical evidence does not incontrovertibly link features of the Taung skull, or its endocast, to early prefrontal lobe expansion, a brain region implicated in many human behaviors.

…read it all…