David Attenborough Thinks That We Have Reached the 'Age of Humans'

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Image courtesy of John Cairns, CC BY 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

The evolutionist’s view of man is not very lofty. If he (or she) believes that humans evolved from pond scum via the fish and amphibian stage into an ape-like creature before beginning to invent a family tree for themselves, the result is bound to be hopeless.

Sir David Attenborough, famous for his documentaries, put this into words: ”Humans are a plague.”

He has also thought that Genesis is to blame for the exploitation of nature and he has joined ranks with Richard Darwkins against all who want to question evolution .

Attenborough has turned his face from evolution to climate science, stating that Earth has begun a time era. the 'Age of Humans'”, that begun around the year 1950.

However, skeptics think that the time begun in the 1800.

Source:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2019. David Attenborough warns that Warns That Earth Has Entered 'Age of Humans', Live Science (January 23).

Mutations Reveal How Dinos Remain Dinos

A view of Anchiornis by Nobu Tamura, CC BY 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

A new discovery is creating expectations in the Darwinian community, They have known that dinosaurs took to the air during the Jurassic period, when flight weathers appeared.

However, “But no one knows exactly when—and how—these feathered dinos took flight.”

A new study by Pan Yanhong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, looked at the feathers of five species that lived between 160 million and 75 million years ago.

Of these, the Anchiornis is ten years older than Archaeopteryx, which means that these dinosaurs or birds are suggest that “the transition of feathers to flight required both the mutations that eliminated most α-keratins and the truncated flexible β-keratins.”

Today, bird use β-keratins, which control their flight. It might happen that some dinos could have been feathered, That, however, does not mean that they changed into birds.

Source;

Service, Robert F . 2019. Fossil feathers reveal how dinosaurs took flight. Science (28 January).

Can Plants Become Humans?

Image courtesy of Ryan Hagerty, Public domain.




Joel Kontinen

In January 2008 a chimpanzee named Matthew Hiasl Pan made headlines throughout the world as activists attempted to get the Austrian High Court to grant it the status of a person. The court refused to do so, however.

In 2014, Professor Peter Singer wanted to re-define chimpanzees as people.
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In a world seeped with Darwinian thinking, it is difficult for some people to see that humans are special, made in the image of God.

Animal rights activists, who tend to embrace evolutionary thinking, have for years tried to blur the differences between humans and animals.

The BBC reported in 2017, that “A court in northern Indian has given the Ganges and Yamuna rivers the status of ‘living human entities’.

While the motive behind the decision might be excellent, only humans can be “living human entities.”

Rivers will remain rivers, regardless of whether they are deemed to be sacred by adherents of a religion or not.

Pollution is a serious issue and so is pretending that inanimate things can be persons.

Now, however, “Ojibwe tribe granted wild rice the right to exist This would be the first law to recognize legal rights of plant species."

Source:

Smith, Wesley J.. 2019. A Right to Life — For Wild Rice Evolution News And Views (25, January).

Hagfish Are Intelligent Species Created This Way

The New International Encyclopædia, v. 9, 1905, p. 441., Public Domain.



Joel Kontinen

Hagfish have their skills enumerated in two science publications. First, PNAS published the study by Tetsuto Miyashita and colleagues. This study brings to mind living fossils of the Hagfish. He thinks that it might be 500 million years old.

“Scientists recently discovered a rare and important hagfish fossil that includes traces of preserved slime dating to 100 million years ago,” Mindy Weisberger writes on Live Science.
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A view days before that Royal Society Interface published also a study on the hagfish’ intelligent design:

“When the hagfish create this slime, they do so in an incredibly efficient way in that the amount of material they put into the water grows in a volume by a factor of up to 10,000 to make the final slimy gel,” Randy Ewoldt, associate professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois Ewoldt explained. ‘The volumetric increase is astounding and as far as I know untouched by anything else in nature or anything we’ve done as engineers’.

“What the team discovered was that the hagfish threads, 100 times thinner than a human hair and initially wound up like a skein of yarn, can unravel in the blink of an eye due to fluid flow. In doing so, it can go from a size of about 0.1 millimeter to 10 centimeters in length, or a water incorporation in a magnitude of 10,000:1. ”

This is what the us navy wants to do.


Sources:

Koon, Mike. 2019. Illinois team helping to unravel the mysteries of the hagfish's slimy defense. Illinois College of Engineering (22 January).

Weisberger, Mindy. 100-Million-Year-Old Hagfish Complete with Slime Kit Discovered Live Science (21 January).

Saturn’s Rings Are Very Young.

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

One of NASA's Cassini spacecraft’s last acts before it plunged into Saturn was to measure its rings, “to coast between the planet and its rings and let them tug it around, essentially acting as a gravity probe.”

"That estimate -- about 40 percent of the mass of Saturn's moon Mimas, which itself is 2,000 times smaller than Earth's moon -- tells them that the rings are relatively recent, having originated less than 100 million years ago and perhaps as recently as 10 million years ago."

Compare this to the age of the solar system: “4,5 million years” .This is a fraction of its age.

BBC News tells us that Saturn’s rings were formed as the dinosaurs roamed the world- They are very young.

Source:

University of California - Berkeley. 2019. Saturn hasn't always had rings: 2017 Cassini flyby allows first accurate estimate of weight and age of Saturn's rings. Science Daily. (17 January).

New Living Fossils Are Just Like Their Present Cousins

A present day beetle, Image courtesy of Udo Schmidt, CC By-Sa 2.0.




Joel Kontinen

“It is well-known that living fossils exhibit stasis over geologically long time scales. Examples are the panda and ginkgo. Now, two tiny beetles trapped in 99-million-year-old amber may join this group.”

“An international team led by Dr. Cai Chenyang, from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported two new and rare species of the extant family Clambidae from Burmese amber: Acalyptomerus thayerae and Sphaerothorax uenoi.“

“Both species are extremely morphologically close to their living counterparts, and can be placed in extant genera.”

Fossils trapped in amber tend to be problematic for Darwinians, as – regardless of their assumed age – they almost always show a profound lack of change.

Practically all insects trapped in amber look the same as today’s animals. Creatures like ticks, beetles, spiders, wasps or ants defy Darwinian expectations by their stasis or lack of evolution.

While the dates are inflated, the discovery shows that life in the fallen world had its disadvantages.

Source:

Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2019. Two tiny beetle fossils offer evolution and biogeography clues. Phys.org (18 January).

Beauty – a Creation Concept that Darwin Cannot Imagine

A flame bowerbird. Image courtesy of Richard Bowdler Sharpe, public domain.


In a Darwin only view of birds, Ferrish Jahr speaks about a thing that has surpassed evolutionists since Darwin.

A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut.”

He takes this trip with Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University and to a lesser extend with Michael Ryan:

"Ryan is particularly interested in the innate sensitivities and biases of our neural architecture: He describes how our visual system, for example, may be wired to notice symmetry. Prum stresses his conviction that in humans, as in birds, many types of physical beauty and sexual desire have arbitrarily co-evolved without reference to health or fertility.”

Them he makes this concession:

“Why are flowers beautiful? Or, more precisely: Why are flowers beautiful to us? The more I thought about this question, the more it seemed to speak to the nature of beauty itself.”


Source:

Jabr, Ferris, 2019. How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution. The New York Times (9 January).

Survey of College Students’ Religious Beliefs

The survey did not talk about Jesus.



Joel Kontinen

A new survey to college students’ religious beliefs has been published.

“Adults of various religious affiliations (n = 275) completed a questionnaire that probed their beliefs about God, angels, Satan, Heaven, Hell, cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, human suffering, and human misdeeds, as well as their experiences regarding prayer, worship, and religious development.”

“The participants were 275 undergraduates at Occidental College recruited from introductory psychology courses and compensated with extra credit in those courses. Participants were directed to an online questionnaire that took approximately 45 minutes to complete. Participants reported a wide range of religious affiliations: 26% Protestant, 19% Catholic, 11% Jewish, 3% Buddhist, 2%, Hindu, 2% Unitarian, 1% Muslim, 1% something else (Wiccan, Taoist, Navajo), and 36% unaffiliated.”

“Fifty-eight percent of participants (n = 160) claimed that God exists, and 42% claimed that God does not exist (n = 115). The former are referred to as “theists,” and the latter “atheists.” We report mean differences between theists and atheists on key measures, but we include all participants in analyses of the relation between God concepts and God-related beliefs and practices.”

The study also included a part on cosmogenesis and on anthropogenesis:

“With respect to cosmogenesis, 13% of participants claimed that the universe was created by God alone, 49% by the"Big Bang alone, and 38% by both God and the Big Bang. Among those who endorsed both God and the Big Bang, 67% justified their claim by appealing to a dual process (e.g., ‘God created the Big Bang,’ ‘God initiated the Big Bang and then perfected and sculpted the world,’ ‘creating the universe from a singularity is still creating the universe.’). With respect to anthropogenesis, 10% of participants claimed that human beings were created by God alone, 60% by evolution alone, and 30% by both God and evolution. Among those who endorsed both God and evolution, 78% appealed to a dual process (e.g., ‘God created the infrastructure of life within which evolution occurs,’ ‘evolution is the means by which God created humans’).”

The study cannot be relied one, as the subjects came from a single American institute and moreover, they only had to rely on themselves to get their views head. And another factor: the students had taken a course in psychology, which could disturb some answers.

Source:

Shtulman, Andrew and Max Rattner, 2018. Theories of God: Explanatory coherence in religious cognition. PLOS. one. (26 December).

Earth's Magnetic Pole Is Wandering

Image Courtesy of NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio.



Joel Kontinen

Earth's north magnetic pole is on the move, unpredictably lurching away from the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia. It's wandered so much, that the current representation of the entire globe's magnetic field, just updated in 2015, is now out of date.

This updated model, called the World Magnetic Model, was will be published om January 30.

Secular scientist have this story to tell: “the giant, central bar magnet loses its intensity, this other magnetic field gains more influence over Earth's magnetic field.” This may say that the switch to Siberia means, Ronald Merrill explains.

Earth’s magnetic field has been decreasing at 5 per cent annually. Extrapolating backward, a stronger field would have made the earth uninhabitable some tens of thousands of years ago.

However, believers in millions of years have this the trust that Earth is losing its magnetic field occasionally.


Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2019. Earth's Magnetic Pole Is Wandering, Lurching Toward Siberia. Live Science (14 January).

James Watson Loses Titles after Claims over Race

James_D_Watson_Genome image, public domain.





Joel Kontinen

Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles at Cold Spring Harbor after repeating comments about race and intelligence.

In a TV programme, James Watson, a pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests.

In 2007 he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".

He has repeated the error, after which Cold Spring Harbor.

They think his views are reprehensible, unsupported by science. this shows how far science has advanced from the days of Charles Darwin, who had some nasty things about Africans;

In his book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) Darwin predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.” (vol. 1, p. 201).

Source:

James Watson: Scientist loses titles after claims over race BBC NEWS (13 January)

Citizen Scientists Spot an Exoplanet

Image courtesy of Francis Reddy/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, public domain.


Joel Kontinen


“The exoplanet, named K2-288Bb, could either be a rocky world like Earth or a gas-rich planet like Neptune.

The new world lies in a stellar system called K2-288, which includes two dim, cool M-type stars that are roughly 8.2 billion kilometers apart — about six times the distance between Saturn and the our Sun.

The brighter star of the pair is estimated to be half as large and massive as Earth's sun, while its dimmer companion is about one-third the sun's mass and size. This world lies 226 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Taurus K2-288Bb orbits this smaller and dimmer star every 31.3 days.

It resides within its host star's habitable zone, which means the planet may have liquid water on its surface. “

However, liquid water is not the only way way to look for life in the universe. One of the things that we should look for is Phosphorus, that is a chemical element with the symbol P.

Source:

Mathewson, Samantha. 2019. Distant, Possibly Habitable Planet Spotted by Citizen Scientist. Space. com (9 January).

New Epigenetics Study: Male Guinea Pigs Pass on Adoptive Responses to Environmental Changes

Guinea pig. Image courtesy of Laniik, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

In wild guinea pigs, “epigenetic modifications specific to individual environmental factors are passed on to the next generation. The study is published in the scientific journal Genes.”

They taught that natural selection and mutation would do the trick. As Ann Gauger tells us, “DNA is copied into RNA, then RNA is translated into protein. Consequently, proteins cannot exist without DNA. However, DNA cannot exist without proteins either.”

However, epigenetics did the job much easier:

Alexandra Weyrich and her colleagues studied “two groups of male wild guinea pigs. One group was fed a protein-reduced diet for two months, the other group was exposed to an increase in ambient temperature of ten degrees (Celsius) for the same period.”

“Epigenetic modifications can translate environmental changes much faster provided the genome already contains the necessary flexibility for an adequate response. During epigenetic modifications, the genetic code is not altered but specific genes are activated and strengthened or shut down through several chemical processes.”

Mutations cannot cause Darwinian evolution – they arise too slowly. And, as Gauger tells us, natural selection cannot make make us humans from a chimpanzee like forefather.

Source:

Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V (FVB) 2018. New epigenetic study: Guinea pig fathers pass on adaptive responses to environmental changes Phys. org (28 December).

Ultima Thule Looks Young

Image courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.





Joel Kontinen

NASA’s spacecraft New Horizons reached an objective in the Kuiper belt known as Ultima Thule. As it passed within 3500 kilometres of the small rock’s surface at a speed of 14 kilometres per second, it took a few photographs.

The object, officially known as 2014 MU69, is 6.6 billion kilometres away from and it is based on too rocks. "Ultima" (the larger lobe) and "Thule" are red.

New Horizons investigator Jeff Moore said that because the two lobes show no obvious signs of damage from a collision, they probably hit one another slowly, at about a walking pace. “If you had a collision with another car at those speeds, you might not even bother to fill out the insurance forms,” he said.

How could these rocks cling on others for 4.5 billion years ago, since the beginning of time for our solar system? It takes great faith to explain this.

We recently heard that Jupiter’s m.oon Juno might be young too
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We also heard that Saturn was not so old as scientists told us.

This is not the first time researchers think that Saturn’s rings are young or that Saturn looks young.

Source:

Crane, Leah. 2019 Ultima Thule is a snowman-shaped rock covered in weird ice. New Scientist (2 January).

Juno Might Be Young, Too

Image courtesy of NASA/SwRI/MSSS.



Joel Kontinen

NASA scientist were willing to view Io's polar region, but then they were to witness “an active volcanic plume shooting material off the moon's surface.”

“Scientists have known Io is volcanically active since 1979. The activity is spurred by Jupiter's massive gravity tugging at the moon.”

This, however, does not say that Juno has been behaving in this way for 4.5 billion years.

We heard, recently that Saturn was not so old as scientists told us.

This is not the first time researchers think that Saturn’s rings are young or that Saturn looks young.

Now, who says the rings have existed for only “100 million years.” Even exoplanets such as HL Tau are young, and they might say that the whole universe is young.

Source:

Bartels, Meghan. 2019. Volcanic Plume on Jupiter's Moon Io Spied by Juno Spacecraft, Space.com (2 January).

Millions Of Years Without Any Proof

Marine Iguana, Image courtesy of RAF-YYC, CC BY-SA 2.0.




Joel Kontinen

“MILLIONS of years before the Galapagos Islands existed, there was another archipelago in the same stretch of water off the west coast of South America. And it seems those long-vanished lands probably shaped the evolution of some of the unusual Galapagos wildlife that later inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

How does he know this? For instance, the marine iguana, seems to be have come about earlier than the Galapagos Islands. And for a reporter who is well-versed in millions of years, that might should just right, but Darwin missed a lot, for example the finches gow by epigenetics, and he did not know that natural selection eliminates but it doesn’t create.


Source:

Barras, Colin, 2018..Lost ‘Darwinia’ islands could be origin of species in the Galapagos. New Scientistt (25 December).

Democratic Senator in Washington Wants People to Turn Into Trees

A Finnish forest with lignin.




Joel Kontinen

“There are the environmentalists … And they don’t just want to hug trees anymore. No, they want to become one.

Yes, in Washington, one legislator wants you to be able to become human compost when you die.

Democratic state Senator Jamie Pedersen is sponsoring a bill in Washington’s legislature that would let you become nutrient-dense soil, which could mean you could help a tree or a cabbage reach its full potential after you depart this vale of tears.”

“The new approach, known as ‘recomposition, “involves placing bodies in a vessel and hastening their decomposition into a nutrient-dense soil that can then be returned to families, NBC News reported on Saturday.

Recompose aims to charge $5,500 for its services, while a traditional burial generally cost more than $7,000 in 2017, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. (Cremation can cost less than $1,000, though that doesn’t include a service or an urn.)”

So turning people to trees is becoming a save way to fight other costs and even cremation.

Source:

Golden, C. Douglas,2018. Washington Democrat Pushes for Citizens to Become Trees After They Die… Seriously? Western Journal (31 December).