BBC: Climate is not changing but the discussion is getting hotter

According to new data, Earth’s temperature has not risen for 11 years. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Earth’s climate has not become any warmer in 11 years. Up to now, the warmest year was 1998. Although there is more man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, temperatures have not risen.

Surprisingly, this news item was not published on a blog that takes a skeptical approach to climate change but on the science pages of BBC news. According to climate correspondent Paul Hudson, our planet warmed rapidly in the 20th century but now this warming has stopped.

Hudson does not mention Ian Plimmer, the controversial Australian geologist who was known as a fierce critic of creation but is now a self-proclaimed climate skeptic. Instead, he quotes more moderate experts.

Atmospheric scientists do not agree on the reason for the cooling. Dr. Piers Forster of Leeds University, who is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says that the warming during the past few decades was not due to the sun.

However, solar scientist Piers Corbyn says that the sun’s effect has actually been underestimated.

Hudson also quotes Don Easterbrook, a professor at Western Washington University, who suggests that the oceans have a greater effect on climate than was supposed. The 1980s and 1990s were exceptionally warm. Now we have entered a cooler period that he expects to last 30 years.

Professor Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC, admits that we might indeed be on our way towards a cooler period. However, he does not expect it to last as long as Easterbrook suggests.

The forecast? According to Hudson, the discussion on the reasons behind climate change is expected to heat up.

Al Gore and the Nobel Committee might also get something to think about. Barack Obama probably got this year’s peace prize partly because of his believe in man-made global warming.


Source:

Hudson, Paul. 2009. What happened to global warming? BBC News (9 October) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

Obama’s Peace Prize: Once Again, a Bizarre Choice

In 2003 belief in a literal Adam and a literal Eve most probably cost Raymond Damadian the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Image from the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum.



Joel Kontinen

The Nobel Committee’s decision to grant this year’s Peace Prize to Barack Obama has given rise to much debate about the motives of the Nobel Committee and the political nature of the choice.

In addition, the names of some past Nobel laureates, such as Jasser Arafat and Al Gore, might suggest something about the speculative nature of the Peace Prize.

Obama got his prize by talking. Last year’s laureate, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, actually brought peace to several war-torn countries, for instance Namibia. In contrast, Obama has not brought peace anywhere.

While Obama’s nomination was bizarre, it was by no means the first outlandish decision the Nobel Committee has made. At times, its choices have been anything but noble. In 2003 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for their breakthroughs in Magnetic Resonance Imaging ( MRI). However, Raymond Damadian, the pioneer of the field who invented the MRI scanner, was overlooked.

Michael Ruse, a Canadian philosopher of science known for his agnosticism, thinks that the Nobel Committee did not want to bestow the prize on Dr. Damadian since he is a creationist who believes that God took six days to create the world and that the flood of Noah’s day was a real historical event.

It seems that the Nobel Committee did not want to award a scientist who takes a critical view of Darwinian evolution.


Source:

Wieland, Carl. 2004. The not-so-Nobel decision. Recognition denied for achievement of great scientist Raymond Damadian—who is also a creationist. Creation 26 (4): 40-42.

God Did Not Create the World in the Beginning?

Gustave Dorén: Creation of Light. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Ellen van Wolde, a Dutch professor of Old Testament studies, claims that the first verse of Genesis has been mistranslated. In her view, the Hebrew word bara (‘to create’) does not mean what we think that it means.

Professor Van Wolde, who used to work with novelist Umberto Eco, concedes that bara does technically mean ’to create’. However, she explains that the writers of the Bible did not mean that God would have created everything but that he only created people and animals.

According to her, Earth already existed in Genesis 1:1. She believes that bara refers to separating. She suggests that the verse should read, "In the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth." He also separated the dry land from the sea and the sea monsters from the birds and land animals.

Van Wolde says that her view stems from what the Bible as a whole and other ancient creation stories say about the beginning. She rejects the traditional Judeo-Christian creatio ex nihilo (‘creation from nothing’) view as erroneous.

In reality, the expression heaven and earth in Genesis 1:1 is a figure of speech called merism in which individual parts refer to the whole. Thus, by heaven and earth the writer of Genesis means the entire universe.

Van Wolde’s view differs diametrically from that of other Old Testament scholars.

James Barr (1924-2006), who was Oriel Professor of the interpretation of the Holy Scripture at Oxford University, wrote:

"Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that:
1. creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience
2. the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story
3. Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark."

According to professor Barr, bara in Genesis 1:1 means exactly what we believe it to mean, i.e. God created everything from nothing by His word.

In contrast, van Wolde reads into the Genesis text something that is not there. She says that according to other ancient creation writings, it was dark in the beginning and sea monsters dwelt in the big waters.

Bible scholars call this kind of interpretation eisegesis. Exegesis is an explanation that rises from the Bible text. In contrast, eisegesis (’bringing into’) means that the reader brings his or her own ideas into the Bible text.

Skeptics have occasionally brought naturalistic explanations into the Bible. During the past few years we have heard the following stories: ”Jesus walked on an ice floe , ”Moses suffered from hallucinations” and ”Jesus’ family tomb was discovered” that all made headlines.

Re-interpreting the first verses of Genesis belongs to the same category. While one might make headlines with wild hypotheses, they have little if anything to do with academic Bible research.


Sources:

Alleyne, Richard. 2009. God is not the Creator, claims academic. Telegraph.co (8 October)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6274502/God-is-not-the-Creator-claims-academic.html

Barr, James. 1984. Letter to David C. C. Watsonille, 23 April 1984.

Richard Dawkins Used Ernst Haeckel’s Fake Embryo Diagrams as Evidence for Evolution

Ernst Haeckel’s embryo diagrams were known to be fraudulent 135 years ago. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Richard Dawkins used Ernst Haeckel’s fake embryo diagrams as evidence for evolution in the TV series The Genius of Charles Darwin, which was filmed in 2008. At least some episodes are on You Tube.

In 1866 Ernst Haeckel published his notorious embryo diagrams in the book Generalle Morphologie der Organismen. He speculated that different species resemble each other during the early stages of their development. According to this hypothesis, humans go through a fish stage before birth.

During Haeckel’s lifetime, some scientists doubted his explanation. Already in 1874 professor Wilhelm His said that the drawings were fraudulent.

In 1997 Michael K. Richardson and colleagues published images of what the embryos really look like in the journal Anatomy and Embryology. They differed diametrically from Haeckel’s illustrations.

Both Science and New Scientist reported on Richardson’s findings. This should have been the death knell for Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings.

Unfortunately, high school and college biology text books continued to include embryo diagrams modelled after these fake drawings.

Now it seems that either Richard Dawkins does not read science journals or he does not bother to look at articles that pose hard questions for Darwinian evolution.

Or perhaps he thinks that it is permissible to use misleading evidence in a struggle between worldviews.

Recently, Richard Dawkins turned down an invitation to debate Stephen Meyer on evolution. Doctor Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell was published a few weeks ago.

This was not the first time when Dawkins refused to discuss Darwinism with its critics. For instance, a year ago he turned down the chance to debate the Turkish evolution skeptic Harun Yahya.

Dawkins would hardly have been successful in any debate had he used Haeckel’s embryo drawings as proof of Darwinian evolution.


Sources:

Grigg, Russell. 1998. Fraud rediscovered. Creation 20:2, 49–51.

West, John. 2009. No Joke: Richard Dawkins Still Peddling Haeckel’s Fraudulent Embryo Diagrams! Evolution News & Views (8 October) http://www.evolutionnews.org/

Stone age people wore colourful clothes

The stone age people of Gran Canaria were skilful pottery makers. New research reveals that our knowledge of stone age haute couture also needs to be updated.



Joel Kontinen

In the film One Million Years B.C. (1966) Raquel Welch wears leather bikinis. The clothes of Fred Flintstone were not exactly bright and glaring, either. Like film makers and cartoonists, many others have also assumed that stone age people wore drab animal skins.

However, Science recently suggested that this mistaken view deserves to be discarded since it stems from either a lack of knowledge or from persistent prejudice – or both.

Archaeologists found pink, black and turquoise fibres in the east European (or west Asian) republic of Georgia. They now believe that stone age people used them for making clothes. The finds were dated at 34, 000 years BP (before present). They are probably much younger since dating methods are notoriously unreliable.

The researchers found the flax fibers in a cave. They suggest that in addition to clothes, the people who lived there might also have used them to make ropes and baskets.

Living in caves does not necessarily mean that mankind’s history would stretch back hundreds of thousands or even a million years. The Bible tells us about Lot who lived in a cave with his daughters for a while after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah some 4,000 years ago.

For instance, caves are still used as houses in parts of the Canary Islands.

Our knowledge of stone age people has changed considerably during the past few years. We now know that they wore shoes, and made musical instruments , tools and weapons.

These discoveries do not support the Darwinian view of a gradual evolution from extremely primitive savages to sophisticated Facebook and Twitter users.

Ape-like cavemen who could barely utter a few monosyllables are figments of Darwinian imagination. The real early history of man can be read in the Book of Genesis.

Source:

Derbyshire, David. 2009. Our Stone Age ancestors wore bright and garish clothes. Daily Mail. (11 September)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1212692/Our-stone-Age-ancestors-wore-bright-garish-clothes.html

New Scientist: Charles Darwin erred on the time it takes to domesticate wild animals

The domestication of wild animals, such as otters, takes much less time than Charles Darwin assumed. Image courtesy of Bernard Landgraf, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

How long does it take to domesticate an animal species living in the wild? Charles Darwin assumed that domestication was an extremely slow process.

New Scientist reports on the experiments that the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belayev initiated 50 years ago. He obtained 130 silver foxes from a fur farm in Estonia and began conducting breeding experiments. While the foxes were wild, they were ”relatively friendly”. In just four generations, some of the foxes began to wag their tails. After 20 years Belayev and his colleagues had domesticated the foxes.

Belayev also experimented with rats, mink and river otters. Some rats became tame in 30 years. The mink were even faster: they began to show signs of domestication in four generations. In addition, over a third of the river otters that were completely wild in the beginning were tame after 13 years.

The long eras speculated by Charles Darwin are thus not necessary at least for the domestication of these animals.

New Scientist could not resist including a little just-so monkey tale into the article: According to the magazine, Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harward University, believes that humans were also domesticated. From a chimpanzee-like ancestor we became the ”relatively tame species” we are now.

Who, then, domesticated man? We did it ourselves, Wrangham says.

This is how it goes. When an article in an out-and-out evolutionary magazine ends with an ape-connection, the readers will no longer dwell on Darwin’s error.

Source:

Nicholls, Henry. 2009. My little zebra: The secrets of domestication. New Scientist 2728 (30 September) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427281.500

Much Ado About Ardi

The discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, recently published in Science, changes man’s pedigree –once again. Image courtesy of Science via Time.com © 2009, J.H. Matternes.




Joel Kontinen

In Ardipithecus ramidus we have the second fossil to be touted as the discovery of the century this year. The first was the case of Ida or Darwinius masillae that turned out to be a flop.

Before Ida, we had the Hobbits or H. floresiensis. And during the dark ages, i.e. the 1970s, we all became acquainted with our grandmother Lucy a.k.a. Australopithecus afarensis.

According to Science, Ardipithecus ramidus, found in Afar in Ethiopia, is 4.4 million years old or 1.2 million years older than Lucy. Ardi is touted as the oldest hominid discovery of all time.

Putting together the fossil bones has been like trying to fit the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, as for instance the skull was badly crushed and it had to be put together from over 60 broken pieces that had spread over a large area.

Ardi was found in 1994. It took 15 years to reconstruct Ardi’s extremely fragile bones and put them together, which might say something about the speculative nature of the outcome.

Time.com. describes the condition of Ardi’s earthy remains, quoting Penn State paleoanthropologist Alan Walker:

"One problem is that some portions of Ardi's skeleton were found crushed nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction. 'Tim [White] showed me pictures of the pelvis in the ground, and it looked like an Irish stew,' says Walker."

It seems that the researchers’ basic assumptions decided which pieces they put where. While the bones were extremely fragile to the point of breaking apart in their hands, they nevertheless succeeded in putting together the remains of a female hominid estimated to be 47 in or 120 cm tall and weigh 50 kg.

Andrew Hill of the University of Yale says in a video released by Science that only four or five hominid fossils have been found. Most of our assumed ancestors are only known from skull fragments like in the case of Sahelanthropus, or from a few teeth or a bone or two.

What is obvious, however, is that evolutionists have been teaching a history of our past that is not true and man’s genealogical tree will have to be re-drawn. The discovery of Tim White and colleagues has awakened the Darwinists to realise that the assumed ancestor of man and the chimpanzee does not primarily look like a chimpanzee.

Hill disclosed that since very few chimpanzee and gorilla fossils have been found, researchers had not expected them to have changed considerably.

There is much less glory to be had in discovering a chimpanzee or gorilla ancestor than in getting a human forefather on the cover of a prestigious science journal. Perhaps for this reason few would even want to look for them.

Ardi has a typical ape’s foot, i.e. its big toe is sticking out sideways. Many evolutionists believe that Lucy or Australopithecus afarensis left the Laetoli footprints that do not considerably differ from those left by modern man although Lucy’s big toe most probably also stuck out sideways like Ardi’s. Ardi was definitely not able to leave such marks.

Dating old fossils is a game that is anything but precise since scientists will not date the fossils but rather the age of the place where they are found and since the methods include many assumptions. Thus, we cannot be certain whether Ardi really is the oldest hominid.

In addition, there is something suspicious in keeping extremely fragile fossil pieces out of the public eye for fifteen long years.

Sources:

Dalton, Rex. 2009. Oldest hominid skeleton revealed. Nature News. (1 October) http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091001/full/news.2009.966.html?s=news_rss

Science. 2009. Before “Lucy,” There Was “Ardi”: First Major Analysis of One of Earliest Known Hominids Published in Science.
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1001sp_ardi.shtml

The Analysis of Ardipithecus ramidus--One of the Earliest Known Hominids. Science Video.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5949/60-b

Lemonick, Michael D. & Dorfman, Andrea. 2009. Ardi Is a New Piece for the Evolution Puzzle. Time.com. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1927200-2,00.html

Luskey, Casey. 2009. Bones of "Ardi," New Human Evolution Fossil, “Crushed Nearly to Smithereens”. Evolution news and views. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/10/key_bones_of_new_hominid_fossi.html#more

White, Tim D. 2009. Authors' Summary: Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids. Science 326: 5949, 64, 75-86. (2 October).