Iran Caused Superstorm Sandy, Syria Claims

Image courtesy of The Birkes, Flickr /Wikipedia Commons.





Joel Kontinen


Major catastrophes often give rise to outlandish explanations. According to CNN, a Syrian pro-government group claimed:

“Sources confirmed to us that Hurricane Sandy that is slamming the U.S. was set off by highly advanced technologies developed by the heroic Iranian regime that supports the resistance, with coordination of our resistive Syrian regime,” pro-government group News Network of the Syrian Armed Forces said in a Facebook posting.

This is the punishment for whoever dares to attack Syria’s (Bashar) al-Assad and threaten peace and stability.”

It is a common tendency to blame Israel or global warming for all kinds of calamities, so the Syrian claim is definitely a new kind of development.


Source:

Saad Abedine, Saad. 2012. 'Heroic' Iran, 'resistive' Syria behind Sandy, pro-Assad group claims.. CNN (31 October).

The Worst Holocaust Ever – It’s Still Occurring

Joel Kontinen


The worst holocaust of all time is occurring in our days. A new documentary produced by Shadowline Films opens our eyes to see what is happening in many countries.

The name of the documentary is It’s a Girl.

According to the Film’s website,

“In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called ‘gendercide’.”

Bogus Paper Accepted by a Peer-Reviewed Journal

Advances in Pure Mathematics (APM) is an openly accessible peer-reviewed journal.




Joel Kontinen

Proponents of Darwinian evolution often claim that those who are sceptical of evolution never publish papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The claim is false. However, one might be justified in questioning the validity of peer review, especially after a recent case in which a computer-generated mathematics paper was actually accepted for publication.

“Professor Marcie Rathke” submitted a paper entitled Independent, negative, canonically Turing arrows of equations and problems in applied formal PDE to the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics.

Advances in Pure Mathematics (APM) states that it “is an international journal dedicated to the latest advancement of ordered algebraic structures”.

The journal accepted Prof. Rathke’s paper but required some slight modifications to it.

What makes this interesting is that the entire paper was randomly generated.



Source:


Eldredge, Nate. 2012. Mathgen paper accepted! That’s Mathematics! (14 September).

The Whale That Almost Spoke

A beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas). Image courtesy of Steve Snodgrass, Flickr.




Joel Kontinen

A beluga whale known as NOC has recently become a celebrity, five years after its death, for its ability to mimic human speech.

NOC lived most of its life in captivity. A paper published in the journal Current Biology acknowledges that the whale was not as clever in imitating humans as parrots are.

However, NOC’s articulation differed somewhat from that of the average beluga whale, prompting evolutionists to write a research paper on it.

It seems that the motive behind the whale tale was the desire of evolutionists to show that the gulf separating humans and animals is not as unbridgeable as was assumed. But in the real world, only humans can speak like humans. Even a linguist has difficulty in deciphering NOC’s ”speech”.


Source:

Callaway, Ewen. 2012. The whale that talked: Captive beluga was able to mimic speech (sort of). Nature News (22 October). The article has an accompanying recording of how NOC “spoke”.

“Grandmother, Why Do You Have Such a Big Brain?”

Cambrian animals were by no means simple. A fossil of Marrella splendens (Marrellomorpha). Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.





Joel Kontinen

Early animals should not be as complex as modern ones, at least not according to Darwinian evolution. But sometimes they are.

Gregory Edgecombe, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, and colleagues recently published a paper in Nature. Among other animals, they examined the fossil of a well-preserved small invertebrate called Fuxianhuia assumed to be 520 million years old.

Edgecombe acknowledges that the brain of Fuxianhuia is "fairly sophisticated” and strikingly similar to today’s insects and some crustaceans.

If a brain does not change in “520 million years”, then evolution is in big trouble. After all, the Cambrian Explosion was a huge dilemma for Darwin. It still seems to be – at least for his modern successors.


Source:

Switek, Brian. 2012. Picking an ancient brain: Traces of an early arthropod’s neural tissue might be evidence of a long-running evolutionary arms race. Nature News (10 October).

Teeth Evolution - A Huge Darwinian Dilemma

This ancient fish was not supposed to have teeth, but its fossil says otherwise. Image courtesy of Dmitry Bogdanov, via Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

Fossil discoveries tend to bring more problems for evolutionists than they solve. Darwinists have assumed that early vertebrates such as fish did not have teeth. They believe that teeth evolved later.

New research published online in Nature shows that they were wrong. A research team lead by Martin Rucklin of Bristol University looked into the mouth of the early fish Compagopiscis with powerful x-rays and found teeth.

In other words, teeth did not evolve from non-teeth but have belonged in the mouth of these fishes from the beginning.

Sources:

Evolutionary Origins of Our Pretty Smile. Phys.org (17 October).

Rucklin, Martin et. al. 2012. Development of teeth and jaws in the earliest jawed vertebrates. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature11555. Published online on 17 October.

Latest Exoplanet Is Scorching Hot

An artist’s impression of the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. Image courtesy of ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org).




Joel Kontinen

This week Nature reported on the discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B 4.37 light years from us. Its proximity prompted at least one evolutionist to speculate that Earth’s twin would be discovered soon.

Astronomers at the University of Geneva made the discovery that Nature published online.

Dubbed Alpha Centauri Bb, the Earth-sized rocky planet orbits closer to its sun than Mercury ours so it is no paradise. Little green men would soon loose all their greenness and be turned into little scorched men.

A. Centauri is a triple-star system. Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Proxima Centauri are just fractions of a light year from each other. With three suns in the sky, nights on Alpha Centauri Bb will probably be short.

Exoplanet hunters have not found a single genuinely Earth-like planet. Nature News reported that although NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has found 3,000 potential exoplanets, not even one of the Earth-sized planets orbits its sun in its habitable zone.

Earth seems to be a very special planet.

Source:

Hand, Eric. 2012. The exoplanet next door: Earth-sized world discovered in nearby α Centauri star system. Nature News. (16 October).

The New Testament on the Creator

Joel Kontinen

The New Testament is not silent about the identity of the Creator. In Colossians, the apostle Paul writes about Jesus Christ:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.” (Col. 1:15-16, NKJV)

The Gospel of John (1:1-3, NKJV) says:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”

It would be impossible to see evolution in either of these passages:

New Research Buries “Arsenic Loving” Bacterium

NASA researchers found the bizarre microbe in Lake Mono, California. Image courtesy of Michael Gäbler, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

In December 2010 NASA announced that it was about to disclose an important discovery that had to do with extraterrestrial life.

It did not have anything to do with little green men, however. Published in the journal Science, the discovery was about a bacterium that was believed to be able to use arsenic instead of phosphorus.

Within a few days, scientists began expressing their scepticism of the discovery.

Recently, a paper published in Nature found that the “arsenic loving” bacterium was not so weird after all.

According to Nature News, “A bacterium that some scientists thought could use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA actually goes to extreme lengths to grab any traces of phosphorus it can find.”

The article went on to say,

“Dan Tawfik, who studies protein function at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues have now teased out the mechanism by which some of the bacterial proteins bind to phosphate and not arsenate. The study … suggests that just one chemical bond holds the key, and shows that the ‘arsenic-life’ bacteria have a strong preference for phosphorus over arsenic.”

It seems that a belief in weird life forms produced by evolution motivated the original arsenic paper, which, of course, says something about the naturalistic faith of some researchers.


Source:

Cressey, Daniel. 2012. Transport proteins show 4,000-fold preference for phosphate over arsenate. Nature News (3 October).

Cambrian Explosion - a Real Headache for Evolutionary Biologists

The Cambrian animals were by no means simple. A fossil of Marrella splendens (Marrellomorpha). Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.





Joel Kontinen

Hardly a day goes by without news of great difficulties for Darwinian evolution. Science Daily reports that the Cambrian Explosion, which used to be a dilemma for Charles Darwin, is still a real headache for evolutionists.

Matthew Wills, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bath, acknowledges:

“The fossils from the Cambrian period can cause a real headache for evolutionary biologists. Instinct tells us to expect simple organisms evolving over time to become increasingly more complex. However during the Cambrian period there was an apparent explosion of different major groups of animals, all appearing simultaneously.”

This is definitely not that what we would expect of evolution.

Source:

Marine Worms Reveal the Deepest Evolutionary Patterns. Science Daily Oct. 9, 2012.

Cavemen in the Bible?

Joel Kontinen

This might come as a surprise to many people, but the Bible does speak about people living in caves.

They were not dim-witted brutes, however. One of them was Lot, who after escaping from Sodom, sought refuge in a cave. Later David and his men also lived in caves.

Biblical history shows that there never was a time called pre-history. Man was intelligent from the beginning of his sojourn on earth.

CMI has produced a brief video on cavemen:

Freud, Marx, the Berlin Wall and Darwin

The Berlin Wall was supposed to last forever. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen


Some things were never supposed to tumble down. There was a time when Freudian psychotherapy was science. Not so long ago, when the Berlin Wall was still standing, some people adamantly promoted the Marxist view of history. They regarded it as fact.

Then the Wall came down.

Darwin might well be the next icon to follow the path of Humpty Dumpty, who, as we might remember, had a great fall.

Soft Tissue Found in Mammoth Bone

Charles R. Knight: Woolly mammoths near the Somme River, AMNH mural (1916). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

The recent discovery of a well-preserved mammoth in northern Siberia has brought an earlier discovery into the news.

According to The Guardian, “Russia's North-Eastern Federal University said in early September that an international team of researchers had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow some 100 metres underground during a summer expedition in Yakutia.”

While finding soft tissue in mammoth fossils assumed to be some tens of thousands of years old is not as spectacular as finding it in a T. rex bone, it is nonetheless interesting.

Recent years have brought to light other intriguing details about mammoths. In 2007 the journal Science published a paper on DNA extracted from mammoth hair shafts. Some of the mammoths were assumed to be over 50,000 years old. This should cause us to use critical thinking skills: Does DNA really last that long, even in Siberia? If not, then there obviously is something amiss in the dates assigned to these fossils.

According to the creation model, woolly mammoths lived during the ice age following the Genesis Flood. We would not be surprised by the discovery of soft tissue and DNA in their fossils.


Sources:


Gilbert, M. Thomas P. & al. 2007. Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequencing of Mitochondria from Ancient Hair Shafts Science 317: 5846, 1927 – 1930.

Well-preserved mammoth found in northern Siberia The Guardian. 5 October 2012.

Ex-Atheist: Secularists Bend the Facts into Their Worldview

Secularists are bowing down to Darwin and see everything in the light of Darwinism. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Ex-atheists are often more honest than practicing atheists. Recently, an American ex-atheist named Gary stated:

“Doesn't it strike you as odd that secularists are extremely creative in their interpretations and imaginations to bend the evidence into their worldview and paradigm, and then oddly enough insist that their conclusions are facts and everyone else is silly. It always amazes me.”

Gary was writing about the age of the earth on the Creation Ministries International website. He concluded:

“Sadly many Christians but [sic] into this madness [i.e., they accept evolution and millions of years of earth history] and are unable to see the folly and somehow think they are being scholarly and sophisticated.”

Source:

Creation Ministries International

G. K. Chesterton: “Why Are We Not Grateful to God for Filling our Stockings with Legs?”

G. K. Chesterton. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen


Many sceptics assume that eyeglasses are the result of intelligent design but the eyes behind the glasses came about through blind Darwinian processes.

It might perhaps be good to remember what English author G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who is known as a great defender of Christianity, said:

“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

Source:

Brainy Quote.com.

Miracles Without God: The Naturalistic Origin of Life

Joel Kontinen

Even if man rejects the supernatural, he still has to believe in the miraculous. While he does not have a miracle-maker, he still needs miracles.

One of the biggest naturalistic dilemmas is the origin of life. Life simply does not come from non-life, so the evolutionist has to resort to a naturalistic miracle or blind luck, as some would say.

This brief video from CMI illustrates the problem: