Saturday, 31 October 2015
At Least 10,000 Scientists Doubt Evolution, PhD Scientist Says
Monkey business? Many scientists doubt Darwinian evolution.
Joel Kontinen
Richard Dawkins and some other evolutionists tend to claim that no reputable scientist doubts evolution. However, Darwinists often define evolution in anything but a precise manner.
If one defines it as gradual development from a common ancestor (goo-to-you, via the zoo), then a very different picture appears:
“The theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost entirely useless, and the object of superstitious awe,” as mathematician David Berlinski famously put it.
There are several lists of scientists who doubt evolution. The best-known one is Discovey Institute’s Scientific Dissent from Darwinism with over 800 names. In addition, the Creation Research Society has over 600 members and Dr. Jerry Bergman has “compiled a list of 3,000 ‘Darwin Skeptics,’ including about a dozen Nobel Prize winners.”
Dr. Bergman has another list of 1,000 scientists who do not want to go public with their dissent. He says that he “could easily complete a list of over 10,000 names,” if he had the time and resources to do so.
Source:
Cloud, David. 2015. How Many Scientists Reject Darwinian Evolution? Way of Life Literature (25 March).
Thursday, 29 October 2015
Oxygen on Comet 67P Challenges Belief in Billions of Years
Image courtesy of: ESA.
Joel Kontinen
Belief in a billions-of-years-old solar system is becoming increasingly difficult due to some recent discoveries.
The latest scoop came from oxygen found in Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. According to New Scientist:
“Oxygen is a volatile chemical that shouldn’t stick around for long in space, and the team couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t coming from the spacecraft itself. But after seven months of observing, they were confident that the oxygen had been buried in the comet since its birth about 4.5 billion years ago.”
It is a huge problem for a worldview not based on Genesis. As yet, no one has figured out a plausible explanation.
And we should not forget that there are many other signs of youth on planets, moons, dwarf planets and even asteroids.
Source:
Sokol, Joshua. 2015. Rosetta’s comet has oxygen made before the solar system’s birth. New Scientist 3045 (31 October).
Joel Kontinen
Belief in a billions-of-years-old solar system is becoming increasingly difficult due to some recent discoveries.
The latest scoop came from oxygen found in Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. According to New Scientist:
“Oxygen is a volatile chemical that shouldn’t stick around for long in space, and the team couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t coming from the spacecraft itself. But after seven months of observing, they were confident that the oxygen had been buried in the comet since its birth about 4.5 billion years ago.”
It is a huge problem for a worldview not based on Genesis. As yet, no one has figured out a plausible explanation.
And we should not forget that there are many other signs of youth on planets, moons, dwarf planets and even asteroids.
Source:
Sokol, Joshua. 2015. Rosetta’s comet has oxygen made before the solar system’s birth. New Scientist 3045 (31 October).
Tunnisteet:
age of the solar system,
billions of years,
solar system
Wednesday, 28 October 2015
Daddy Long-Legs Has Hardly Changed in ”300 Million Years”
Image courtesy of Marcel Zurreck, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Joel Kontinen
In 2011 a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on two harvestmen fossils uses expressions like “surprisingly modern”, “remarkable similarities”, “extensive morphological stasis” and "fully modern body plans", suggesting that the long-legged creatures have hardly changed at all in “305 million years.”
The authors begin with some background information:
“Harvestmen, the third most-diverse arachnid order, are an ancient group found on all continental landmasses, except Antarctica. However, a terrestrial mode of life and leathery, poorly mineralized exoskeleton makes preservation unlikely, and their fossil record is limited. The few Palaeozoic species discovered to date appear surprisingly modern, but are too poorly preserved to allow unequivocal taxonomic placement.”
Then they highlight the importance of their discovery:
“Here, we use high-resolution X-ray micro-tomography to describe two new harvestmen from the Carboniferous (~305 Myr) of France. The resulting computer models allow the first phylogenetic analysis of any Palaeozoic Opiliones, explicitly resolving both specimens as members of different extant lineages, and providing corroboration for molecular estimates of an early Palaeozoic radiation within the order. Furthermore, remarkable similarities between these fossils and extant harvestmen implies extensive morphological stasis in the order. Compared with other arachnids—and terrestrial arthropods generally—harvestmen are amongst the first groups to evolve fully modern body plans.”
Charles Darwin could hardly have anticipated how rapidly the list of living fossils would evolve 150 years after The Origin of Species.
The fossil record is often characterised by stasis, or lack of change – the opposite of what evolutionists would expect.
Source:
Garwood, Russell J., Jason A. Dunlop, Gonzalo Giribet and Mark D Sutton. 2011. Anatomically modern Carboniferous harvestmen demonstrate early cladogenesis and stasis in Opiliones. Nature Communications 2: 444.
Tunnisteet:
evolution,
living fossils,
stasis
Monday, 26 October 2015
Draco volans: Intelligently Designed Flying Lizard
Flying Lizard Draco volans. Image courtesy of Alfeus Liman, public domain.
Joel Kontinen
It’s a tiny lizard, barely 20 centimetres (8 inches) long, but it can glide 8 metres (26 feet). This colourful creature looks like a dragon, so it is no surprise that it’s called Draco volans, or flying dragon.
A fact sheet on the creature explains how it glides:
“The flying dragon has 6 to 7 pairs of ribs which are much longer than others. The skin between the ribs forms a large membrane called the patagium. This membrane can be folded just like a fan. When the lizard glides, it spreads out its ribs foward, forming a gliding surface.”
It’s not the only amazing glider.
The lizard displays the hallmarks of design. Researchers have a hard time explaining why and how these tiny dragons or other creatures took to the air, but here’s one attempt from the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology:
“The evolution of gliding can be cast as a multistep process initiated with an aerial righting reflex, and then followed by behavioral adaptations such that the falling lizard assumes a characteristic splayed posture with the body and tail oriented in the horizontal plane while falling. This allows the lizard to maximize drag and thus to parachute to the ground at a reduced velocity relative to that of a tumbling lizard (Oliver 1951).”
Like all animals, the Draco volans is amazingly well designed to do what it does.
Sources:
McGuire, Jimmy A. and Robert Dudley. 2011. The Biology of Gliding in Flying Lizards (Genus Draco) and their Fossil and Extant Analogs. Integrative and Comparative Biology, July 2011, 1–8.
Wildlife Singapore
Tunnisteet:
creation,
evolution,
intelligent design
Sunday, 25 October 2015
Monito del Monte: Tiny Living Fossil Is a Marsupial That Hibernates
Monito del monte (Dromiciops gliroides) is a South American marsupial. Image courtesy of José Luis Bartheld, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Joel Kontinen
It’s known as a mountain monkey after its Spanish name monito del monte, but it is a marsupial. Evolutionists believe that it is a living fossil,
“the only surviving member of an otherwise extinct lineage dating back more than 40 million years [sic]. Only slightly larger than a mouse, this little marsupial is an excellent climber. The base of the prehensile – or grasping – tail is capable of storing fat, which enables the animals to hibernate during the winter when food is scarce.”
All living fossils are fully functional, highly specified creatures that defy Darwinian storytelling.
Source:
Zoological Society of London. 2006. EDGE of Existence programme.
Joel Kontinen
It’s known as a mountain monkey after its Spanish name monito del monte, but it is a marsupial. Evolutionists believe that it is a living fossil,
“the only surviving member of an otherwise extinct lineage dating back more than 40 million years [sic]. Only slightly larger than a mouse, this little marsupial is an excellent climber. The base of the prehensile – or grasping – tail is capable of storing fat, which enables the animals to hibernate during the winter when food is scarce.”
All living fossils are fully functional, highly specified creatures that defy Darwinian storytelling.
Source:
Zoological Society of London. 2006. EDGE of Existence programme.
Tunnisteet:
evolution,
living fossils,
millions of years
Friday, 23 October 2015
Elephant Shrew: Tiny Living Fossil Forgot to Evolve
Black and Rufous Elephant Shrew (Rhynchocyon petersi). Image courtesy of Joey Makalintal, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Joel Kontinen
They are not shrews, and they are not big. Elephant shrews are tiny (10 – 30 cm or 5 to 15 inches long) insect eaters living in Africa.
Evolutionists believe that they have remained more or less unchanged for “30 million years.”
With the list of living fossils growing almost weekly, it is becoming difficult to keep count of the number of species that haven’t changed for aeons, i.e. that have not evolved at all.
Source:
Natur Spot. n.d. Short-eared elephant-shrew (Macroscelides proboscideus) - A "living fossil" from the Namib-desert.
Tunnisteet:
evolution,
living fossils,
millions of years
Thursday, 22 October 2015
Chevrotain Has Hardly Changed in “34 Million Years”
A chevrotain or Lesser mouse-deer (Tragulus kanchil). Image courtesy of Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Joel Kontinen
Zoologists tend to describe the chevrotain as a very primitive creature as some of its features resemble those of a pig.
A paper published in the journal Zoologica Scripta suggests:
“Tragulids are traditionally considered as the most primitive living ruminants (e.g. Janis 1984), and they still survive as tropical relicts: the water chevrotains (Hyemoschus) of Africa and the mouse deer or Asiatic chevrotain (Tragulus) of south-east Asia. They are characterized by their skeletal and dental features which are primitive within ruminants, and their general shape, digestive system and ethology which are reminiscent to those of pigs (Dubost 1965).”
The chevrotain has hardly changed in “34 million years”. In this context, describing a feature as primitive is a way of saying that there’s been no evolution in this cute little animal.
The enormous number of living fossils should be an embarrassment to a theory (Darwinian evolution) that is often defined as change over time.
Other living fossils include the ant Martialis heureka, pangolin, okapi, tarsier, red panda, sponges, nautilus. koala and starfish, for instance.
I’ve listed some others here.
Source:
Métais, Grégoire, Yaowalak Chaimanee, Jean-Jacques Jaeger & Stéphane Ducroc. 2001. New remains of primitive ruminants from Thailand: evidence the early evolution of the Ruminantia in Asia. Zoologica Scripta 30 (4): 231–248 (October 2001).
Tunnisteet:
evolution,
living fossils,
millions of years
Tuesday, 20 October 2015
Earth’s Life Began Early, Zircon Study Shows, Challenging Current Views
Hot beginnings? Image courtesy of the National Park Service, public domain.
Joel Kontinen
Many evolutionists assume that our planet’s early days were so hot that they call the period the Hadean Era after a place known as Hades.
New research challenges this assumption. Reporting on a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), New Scientist says:
“But Elizabeth Bell and Mark Harrison at the University of California, Los Angeles, and their colleagues think life might have existed in the Hadean after all.
They analysed more than 10,000 zircon crystals smaller than a millimetre in length that date from the Archaean and Hadean. In one Hadean crystal they found tiny flecks, or inclusions, of graphite, which must have been incorporated into the zircon crystal when it formed some 4.1 billion years ago.”
This would leave very little time for a naturalistic origin of life, even though the date is accompanied by some naturalistic inflation that cannot be corroborated.
Previous studies suggested that Earth probably had water from the very beginning.
Naturalistic explanations fail to account for the source of the Earth’s water.
Fine-tuning is a much more plausible explanation than a lucky accident. Moreover, the naturalistic scenario includes other weird puzzles, such as snowball earth, that have never been solved.
The most plausible explanation for our origins is given in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created.”
Source:
Colin Barras, Colin Barras. 2015. Life may have begun 300 million years earlier than we thought. New Scientist. (19 October).
Tunnisteet:
Earth,
origin of life
Monday, 19 October 2015
Quitarfish Protects Its Eyes with an Amazingly Sophisticated Method
Common guitarfish (Rhinobatos rhinobatos). Image courtesy of Johan Fredriksson, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Joel Kontinen
We might think that guitarfish had a huge problem. A brief article in Science says:
“Like sharks, the giant guitarfish doesn’t have eyelids that close all the way, so it can’t blink. That might guarantee a win in a staring contest, but it does pose problems for eye protection in the sandy, tropical waters where the creature lives.”
But that is by no means the end of the story:
“So when thrashing prey kick sand or bits of coral its way, the guitarfish protects itself with an eye-catching method: retracting its eyes almost completely into its head, leaving a craterlike depression. Now, new research shows that guitarfish can thank a specialized eye muscle for that ability. Using high-speed video, researchers found a guitarfish could sink its eye nearly 40 mm. That’s almost as much as the diameter of the eyeball itself and likely more than any other vertebrate, the researchers reported online before print in Zoology.”
The animal kingdom abounds with sophisticated solutions, for instance in the moth’s eyes, cormorants, the seahorse’s tail, mantis shrimp and the octopus, to name just a few.
These wonders suggest they were designed. And design suggests an All-Wise Designer, whom we call God, and who speaks to us in the Bible.
Source:
DeMarco, Emily. 2015. Video: Giant guitarfish eye gymnastics. ScienceShot (16 October).
Tunnisteet:
creation,
intelligent design,
intelligent solutions
Sunday, 18 October 2015
Bizarre Ant Hasn’t Changed in over ”100 Million Years”
Martialis heureka. Image courtesy of Michael Branstetter, www.antweb.org. Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Joel Kontinen
When Edward O. Wilson saw the ant, he thought it looked so strange it could have been from Mars. The name, Martialis heureka (‘From Mars! Wow!’) started as a joke, but that is how museums and biology textbooks now know the pale ant that was found in Brazil in 2000.
It does not have compound eyes, and researchers tend to think that it hasn’t changed much in over “100 million years.”
Like other living fossils, this little ant reminds us that stasis or the lack of evolutionary change is very common in the animal kingdom.
In other words, it challenges evolutionary dogma.
Source:
Chang, Kenneth. 2008. Scientists Find One Specimen of Bizarre Primitive Ant. The New York Times (17 September).
Joel Kontinen
When Edward O. Wilson saw the ant, he thought it looked so strange it could have been from Mars. The name, Martialis heureka (‘From Mars! Wow!’) started as a joke, but that is how museums and biology textbooks now know the pale ant that was found in Brazil in 2000.
It does not have compound eyes, and researchers tend to think that it hasn’t changed much in over “100 million years.”
Like other living fossils, this little ant reminds us that stasis or the lack of evolutionary change is very common in the animal kingdom.
In other words, it challenges evolutionary dogma.
Source:
Chang, Kenneth. 2008. Scientists Find One Specimen of Bizarre Primitive Ant. The New York Times (17 September).
Tunnisteet:
evolution,
living fossils,
millions of years
Saturday, 17 October 2015
350 Years Ago: Creationist Robert Hooke Published First Book on Animals Seen through a Microscope
An illustration of a flea in Hooke’s book Micrographia. Image courtesy of the National Library of Wales, public domain.
Joel Kontinen
In 1655 Robert Hooke’s book Micrographia made history. For the first time people could see what parasites, plants and small insects looked like.
Robert Hooke (1635 –1703) was one of the most important pioneers of modern science. A member of the Royal Society, he was a polymath who has been likened to Leonardo da Vinci.
A ScienceShot article says,
“Robert Hooke was one of history’s most important scientists, coining the word ’cell’ and making profound contributions to timekeeping, astronomy, physics, and microscopy. He also argued, controversially in Micrographia, that fossils were the mineralized remains of ancient living organisms. We’ve learned a lot in the intervening centuries, but Hooke’s illustrations still inspire us to look closer.”
What the brief article in Science does not say is that Hooke gave glory to God. He was humble enough to acknowledge that seeing life through a microscope indicated that compared to us, the Maker of all living beings is really awesome:
““The more we magnify the object, the more excellencies and mysteries do appear; And the more we discover the imperfections of our senses, and the Omnipotency and Infinite perfections of the great Creator.”
Like many other pioneers of modern science, for instance, Sir Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur, Hooke believed in God, who is introduced to us in the Book of Genesis.
Sources:
Harrison, Peter. 2001. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rogers, Nala. 2015. Hooke opened up the world of the unseen 350 years ago. ScienceShot (16 October).
Tunnisteet:
Christianity,
religion,
science
Thursday, 15 October 2015
Pangolin – No Evolution for “45 Million Years”
A tree pangolin (Manis tricuspis). Image courtesy of Valerius Tygar, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Joel Kontinen
Pangolins are intriguing creatures that have hardly changed at all in “45 million years.” According to the University of Berkeley – California website:
“An essentially modern-looking fossil pangolin, Eomanis, has been found in the Eocene of Germany, and another fossil pangolin has been found in the lower Oligocene of North America.”
The ever growing list of living fossils should be an embarrassment for Darwinian evolution, a theory that is supposed to be characterised by change over time from humble beginnings to ever increasing sophistication.
In very many cases, the data do not support this view at all.
(You can read more about living fossils here, here, here, here, here and here.)
Source:
University of Berkeley – California. n.d. Pholidota.
Joel Kontinen
Pangolins are intriguing creatures that have hardly changed at all in “45 million years.” According to the University of Berkeley – California website:
“An essentially modern-looking fossil pangolin, Eomanis, has been found in the Eocene of Germany, and another fossil pangolin has been found in the lower Oligocene of North America.”
The ever growing list of living fossils should be an embarrassment for Darwinian evolution, a theory that is supposed to be characterised by change over time from humble beginnings to ever increasing sophistication.
In very many cases, the data do not support this view at all.
(You can read more about living fossils here, here, here, here, here and here.)
Source:
University of Berkeley – California. n.d. Pholidota.
Tunnisteet:
evolution,
living fossils,
millions of years
Wednesday, 14 October 2015
Okapi: Living Fossil That Defies Evolutionary Explanations
Okapi. Image courtesy of Raul654, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Joel Kontinen
Charles Darwin and other evolutionists have made up fact-free stories about the assumed evolution of the giraffe’s long neck. What they have failed to notice, however, is that some animals, such as zebras and gazelles, tend to cope well on the savannah with their much shorter necks.
While the okapi (Okapia johnstoni) prefers to live in the rainforest, it is related to the giraffe. 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) tall at the shoulder, it has remained much smaller than its cousin and mostly unchanged for some “18 million years” and is thus assumed to be a living fossil.
Evolution is often defined as change over time, especially when its advocates want to advertise it as a viable theory, but in practice stasis or lack of change in often the norm, for instance in the red panda, nautilus, koala, or Gingko tree, to name only a few of the tens of living fossils found all over the world.
Tunnisteet:
living fossils,
millions of years
Tuesday, 13 October 2015
Leopons Show Genesis Principle Is Valid
Leopons. Image courtesy of TRJN, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Joel Kontinen
A leopon is a cross between a male leopard and a lioness. The first documented case of this exotic feline saw daylight in India in 1910 and several other leopons have since then been born in zoos.
In contrast to some other hybrids (such as grolars), they are not known to occur in the wild.
The take-away message from leopons and other hybrids is that species distinctions are fuzzy but the After Its Kind principle, introduced in Genesis, is still valid.
Source:
HYBRIDS BETWEEN LEOPARDS AND LIONS.
Monday, 12 October 2015
Tarsier, Pint-Sized Living Fossil, Challenges Evolutionary Thinking
A Philippine Tarsier (Carlito syrichta). Image courtesy of Kok Leng Yeo, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Joel Kontinen
Evolution should be characterised by change over time. However, in numerous cases the very opposite – that is, nothing – happens. Animals stay more or less like their great-great-great-ancestors.
Like other living fossils, tarsiers have resisted change for aeons.
Evolutionists tend to believe that tarsiers “belong to a relict lineage of primates that gave rise to monkeys and apes about 60 million years ago.” However, they will admit that they are living fossils that have hardly changed in “45 million years.”
Tarsiers are anything but primitive; they communicate using ultrasound.
And the presence of tarsiers in Asia has prompted evolutionists to speculate that these tiny furry creatures were excellent mariners, crossing the ocean from Africa.
Source:
Dartmouth College. 2012. Tiny primate is ultrasonic communicator. ScienceDaily. (8 February).
Tunnisteet:
evolution,
living fossils,
millions of years,
stasis
Information, Mathematics and Beauty Characterise Our World
The Fibonacci series appears everywhere, even in pine cones.
Joel Kontinen
Contrary to the claims of Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, our world does not look like it was produced by a blind watchmaker. We see order and great beauty all around us.
Information, mathematics and beauty come together in the Fibonacci series. Discovered by a 13th century Italian mathematician, the series is not too complicated, as it involves adding together two integers, either beginning with 0 or 1, to produce a new number.
Each new number is the sum of the previous two numbers, for instance
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144., or
Fn = F n-1 + F n-2.
We can find this sequence practically everywhere in nature, from the very small to the huge. We tend to see beauty in tiny seeds, shells, the petals of a flower and compound eyes, and even in the arms of spiral galaxies. (See examples here, here and here.)
We tend to associate the Fibonacci series with beauty. Indeed, if we divide any number in the series by the previous number, we’ll get a result that is not far from 1.618, which happens to be the golden ratio that is used in the arts and in architecture.
This kind of beauty does not come about by chance. In requires design – and intelligence.
It seems that our Creator was and is the greatest mathematician and artist of all times.
Source:
Reich, Lee. 2013. Nature follows a number pattern called Fibonacci. Phys.org. (20 February).
Tunnisteet:
creation,
Fibonacci sequence,
intelligent design
Saturday, 10 October 2015
Savannah Cat: A Hybrid That Shows Genesis Principle Is Reliable
A savannah cat. Image courtesy of Jason Douglas, Public domain.
Joel Kontinen
Hybrids, or descendants of animals belonging to different species, are intriguing in the sense that they corroborate the Genesis After Its Kind principle.
Often they have to do with animals that are artificially categorised into different species but belong to the same Genesis kind.
A rather common example is the savannah cat, a cross between a domestic cat and a serval cat, a large eared wild African cat.
Noah did not thus have to take more than two animals of the cat kind into the ark.
A male and a female of this baramin (created kind) could produce all the varieties of cats that we see around us, from the tiniest domestic cat to Cecil the Lion.
Other hybrids include ligers, zonkeys, wholpins, geeps and grolars.
Tunnisteet:
after its kind,
creation,
Genesis
Wholphins and Other Hybrids – Evidence for the Genesis After Its Kind Principle
A baby wholphin. Image courtesy of Mark Interrante, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Joel Kontinen
A wholphin named Keikaimalu made headlines in 1985 when it was born in Sea Life Park in Hawaii. The sea creature’s parents were a false killer whale and a bottlenose dolphin. The wholphin later gave birth to a second-generation female wholphin called Kawili Kai.
These two wholphins show that the Genesis After Is Kind principle describes animal life reliably.
Species are man-made distinctions and they differ from the original kinds. Hybrids such as ligers, zonkeys, geeps and grolars also indicate that when it comes genetics, Moses is more up-to-date than Darwin.
Source:
MSNBC. 2005. Whale-dolphin hybrid has baby wholphin. (15 April 15).
Tunnisteet:
after its kind,
Genesis,
species,
wholphin
Thursday, 8 October 2015
Birds Flew over the Heads of Dinosaurs, New Fossil Suggests
Perhaps we’ll soon hear about dino-age flamingos.
Joel Kontinen
Several studies have shown that birds and dinosaurs lived at the same time. A recent headline in ScienceDaily included the phrase “birds flew over the heads of dinosaurs.”
And not just any kind of birds, but ones that flew like modern birds.
Reporting on research published in the journal Scientific Reports, ScienceDaily states:
“A new discovery documents the intricate arrangement of the muscles and ligaments that controlled the main feathers of the wing of an ancient bird, supporting the notion that at least some of the most ancient birds performed aerodynamic feats in a fashion similar to those of many living birds.”
The researchers assume that the ”exceptionally preserved wing” that they studied belonged to a bird that lived “125 million years ago” or roughly 25 million years after the “earliest” bird Archaeopteryx.
They were able to study the bird’s “complex network of muscles,” which indicates that it was still soft and partly unfossilised.
It seems that soft tissue is becoming a nightmare for believers in millions of years.
And it sounds like the dino-to-bird hypothesis is in big trouble.
Source:
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. 2015. Tiny ancient fossil from Spain shows birds flew over the heads of dinosaurs: Exceptional 125-million-year-old bird discovered. ScienceDaily. (6 October).
Tunnisteet:
dinosaurs,
evolution,
soft tissue
Wednesday, 7 October 2015
Mega-Tsunami and Giant Boulders – Evidence for Noah’s Flood
Looks like evidence for Noah’s Flood. Image courtesy of NASA.
Joel Kontinen
A new report published in Science Advances looks at a mega-tsunami that was supposedly caused by a volcano in Cape Verde that partly crumbled into the ocean “some 73,000 years ago”.
It probably “generated an enormous wave that rose to 170 metres [550 feet] of height before it crashed into a nearby island,” a Nature news article states.
The Fogo tsunami, as it is called after the volcano that started it, also threw giant boulders onto land, some of them 200 metres or 650 feet above sea level.
The date was obtained by “measuring the amount of helium-3 on the boulder surfaces that have been exposed since the wave hit.”
However, radiometric dating relies on assumptions that cannot be tested. No one knows the initial amount of helium in the rock, for instance, or whether its escape rate was constant.
A more plausible explanation for the disaster is the global flood of Noah’s day roughly 4,500 years ago.
Fossil graveyards and many geological features, such as The Twelve Apostles, Heavitree Gap and Three Sisters, are best explained by the flood.
Jesus and the New Testament writers taught that it was a true historical event.
Source:
Brown, Emma. 2015. Island boulders reveal ancient mega-tsunami. Nature news (2 October).
Tunnisteet:
Christianity,
Noah’s Flood,
radiometric dating
Tuesday, 6 October 2015
Mars Sloshed with Water?
Water? Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
Joel Kontinen
In July, scientists were saying that there’s probably no life on Mars. They were not sure whether the red planet was wet or dry.
But now the story has changed dramatically. A brief report in TIME’s newsletter suggests:
“Mars may be the solar system’s most tragic planet. It once had a dense atmosphere; it once fairly sloshed with water; just one of its oceans may have covered two-thirds of its northern hemisphere.”
Sloshed with water? That is an interpretation unsubstantiated by the evidence. This doesn’t seem to prevent speculations, however:
“With seasons very much like Earth’s, it could have been home to who knows what kinds of life. But Mars suffered an apocalypse that’s never quite been explained; perhaps meteorite bombardments blasted its atmosphere into space, and the planet’s weak gravity frittered away the rest. The result either way is the cold, dead, dry world we see today. Except now, it seems, it’s not so dry—and perhaps not so dead.”
One of the things these speculations often ignore is that in order to sustain life, a planet needs more than just water. Plate tectonics and a big moon are also needed. Venus is Earth’s sister planet, and yet no one would expect to find life there.
Unlike Mars or Venus, Earth seems to be unique, fine tuned for life.
In other words, God created this planet to be habitable.
Source:
Kluger, Jeffrey. 2015. What the Modern Presence of Water on Mars Means. TIME newsletter (28 September).
Tunnisteet:
creation,
habitable zone,
intelligent design,
Mars,
origin of life
Sunday, 4 October 2015
More “Cold-Loving” Dinosaurs Found
Cranial reconstruction of Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis. Image courtesy of Hirotsugu Mori, Patrick S. Druckenmiller, and Gregory M. Erickson, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Joel Kontinen
Some dinosaurs preferred to live in the cold Arctic, or at least some researchers think that they did. A recent press release posted on ScienceDaily states:
“Scientists have uncovered a new species of duck-billed dinosaur, a 30-footlong herbivore that endured months of winter darkness and probably experienced snow. The skeletal remains of the dinosaurs were found in a remote part of Alaska. These dinosaurs were the northernmost dinosaurs known to have ever lived.”
Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, as the dinosaur is now known, challenges much that researches thought they knew about dinos. While the climate within the Arctic Circle was probably much warmer than it is today, the winters were dark and the average temperature round 6 degrees Celsius (43 degrees Fahrenheit).
The fossils are assumed to be 69 million years old.
According to a much more logical scenario, the dinosaurs met their end in the global flood of Noah’s day some 4,500 years ago. Regardless of where they lived, the flood waters carried them to the Arctic.
This is not the first time dinosaur fossils were found in the Arctic. You can read about previous discoveries here and here.
Source:
Florida State University. 2015. ‘Lost world’ of cold weather dinosaurs discovered. ScienceDaily (22 September).
Tunnisteet:
dinosaurs,
millions of years,
Noah's flood
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