Flat-Earther Makes It to Space (Sort of) and Back

Logo of the Flat Earth Society. Image courtesy of Blanko, CC BY-SA 4.0.





Joel Kontinen

After two failed attempts, self-made rocket builder Mike Hughes finally managed to take to the skies in his space vehicle.

He reached an altitude of 572 metres (1,875 feet) above the Mojave Desert in California before parachuting to the earth.

Mr. Hughes believes the earth is flat, and his motive in blasting to the skies was to prove that he was right.

That was something he was unable to do this time, so he hopes to build a more powerful rocked that would carry him to an altitude of 110 kilometres (68 miles).

He hopes to prove his thesis by taking high-altitude photographs.

However, NASA beat him by 50 years. The pictures the Apollo 8 astronauts took while orbiting the Moon show that the Earth is round.

The earthrise photos tell the same story.

The modern flat earth myth probably hails from Washington Irving’s (1783–1859) fictional biography of Christopher Columbus. Obviously, some seamen were afraid of falling over the earth’s edge.

However, there never was a time in Medieval Europe when most people believed our planet was flat.

Coins and symbols made in the Holy Roman Empire depicted a round earth, and so did Medieval scholars.

Source:

Bryner, Jeanna. 2018. Flat-Earther Blasts Himself into the Sky on Homemade Rocket (and He Survives). Live Science (25 March).

Stonehenge, Pyramids and Sophisticated Devices Defy Darwinian Views of Ancient Man

Could there be a link between Stonehenge and ancient astronomy? Image courtesy of Andrew Dunn, CC BY-SA 2.0.





Joel Kontinen

Many people tend to think that ancient men could not have been as clever as we are. This is in keeping with the Darwinian idea that humans evolved very gradually from ape-like creatures and learning was a slow hit-or-miss affair. They were not expected to accomplish much intellectually.

However, the pyramids, Stonehenge and other ancient monuments and devices tell an entirely different kind of story.

In 2016 Science reported on the work of Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin, who examined Babylonian clay tablets hailing from 350 BC to 50 BC.

Babylonian astronomers “also employed sophisticated geometric methods that foreshadow the development of calculus. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, in 14th century Europe.”

Dr. Ossendrijver also published a report in Science entitled The Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph.

The 2000-year old Antikythera Mechanism likewise challenges our views of ancient man. It is a multi-purpose calendar and computer. It could, among other things, be used to predict astronomical events such as solar eclipses and the timing of the Ancient Olympic Games.

A recent article in The Conversation examines the correlation of stars and ancient monuments and concludes that there might indeed be a link, but we cannot be sure of this.

Anyhow, even entirely oral cultures could have prodigious knowledge about constellations and stars.

In 2016 New Scientist wrote about Bill Yidumduma Harney, an Aboriginal Australian who could identify 3,000 stars in the night sky. How many astronomy professors could beat him in that game?


Sources:

Brown, Daniel. 2018. From the pyramids to Stonehenge – were prehistoric people astronomers? The Conversation (12 March).

Cowen, Ron. 2016. Math whizzes of ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus. Science (28 January).

Clever (Talking?) Trees Defy Darwinian Expectations

Darwin was totally ignorant of the surprisingly elegant ways that trees communicate with each other.



Joel Kontinen

Do Trees Talk to Each Other? Peter Wohlleben is a German forester who believes that they do.

Recent years have brought about amazing discoveries about trees and other plants.

We now know that trees sleep at night.

They have their own wood wide web (www) through which they share information.

Flowering plants are almost as clever; they have their e-mail system through which they engage in shoot to root communication.

In his book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, originally published in German as Das geheime Leben der Bäume, Peter Wohlleben discusses the amazingly communal life of trees.

Entering his world of trees is like stepping into a fairy tale where trees are very much alive.

Smithsonian Magazine gives us a hint of what is going on:

“The trees have become vibrantly alive and charged with wonder. They’re communicating with one another, for starters. They’re involved in tremendous struggles and death-defying dramas. To reach enormousness, they depend on a complicated web of relationships, alliances and kinship networks.

Wise old mother trees feed their saplings with liquid sugar and warn the neighbors when danger approaches. Reckless youngsters take foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light-chasing and excessive drinking, and usually pay with their lives. Crown princes wait for the old monarchs to fall, so they can take their place in the full glory of sunlight. It’s all happening in the ultra-slow motion that is tree time, so that what we see is a freeze-frame of the action.”

This is as far as one could get from the Darwinian world in which trees are “striving, disconnected loners, competing for water, nutrients and sunlight, with the winners shading out the losers and sucking them dry.”

Instead of competing, trees form alliances, even with other species.

Smithsonian Magazine tries in vain to preserve at least a tweeny weeny bit of evolution, but the message emanating from the woods is clear: Darwin’s time has gone. Intelligent design explains tree sociology (if we can call it that) much better.

Source:

Grant, Richard. 2018. Do Trees Talk to Each Other? Smithsonian Magazine. (March).

Evolution Can Explain Cancer But Hardly Anything Else

Charles Darwin’s famous “I Think” sketch, 1837. Public domain. It might explain cancer but hardly anything else.




Joel Kontinen

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution is the title on an essay Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) wrote for the American Biology Teacher magazine in 1973.

Recently, Mel Greaves, who seems to be a firm believer in Darwinian medicine, wrote an article entitled Nothing in cancer makes sense except…

The name is no accident, as Greaves references Dobzhansky’s essay and tries to persuade his readers that evolution can explain cancer.

It is perhaps a very fitting meaning of evolution, as even in theory, Darwinism can only break things and never make them.

Our cells have several strategies for getting rid of rogue or unwanted growth that could cause cancer, for instance apoptosis or programmed cell death and phagocytosis or the process of self-eating, where cells called macrophages or ‘big eaters’ (μακρος, makros ‘large’ and φαγειν. phagein ‘eat’) devour damaged cells.

These mechanisms are the opposite of Darwinian evolution.

This is not the first time Darwinists invoke cancer as an explanation for evolution.

Source:

Greaves, Mel et al. 2018. Nothing in cancer makes sense except… BMC Biology201816:22 (21 February).

Ancient Deer Turned into a Whale in New Darwinian Tale

Some think Ambulocetus looked like this. Image courtesy of Nobu Tamura, CC BY-SA 4.0.





Joel Kontinen

Darwinian stories can be both fascinating and bizarre – at the very same time.

Marine creatures left the sea because they saw food on land. Now New Scientist is telling us that land creatures returned to the sea as the shallow waters were so full of food.

This time it was supposed to be a deer that metamorphosed into a whale.

Thus, in a typical Darwinian scenario, the poor creatures kept on going back and forth until they found their preferred element.

In the early 1980s, evolutionists announced the discovery of Pakicetus, the grandmother of all marine whales, with great fanfare.

They believe that it lived ”52 million years” ago.

A diving Pakicetus made it to the cover of Science.

Later, after they found more bones, they had to acknowledge that Pakicetus was a land animal.

Then in 2011, researchers found a whale jawbone in Antarctica. “Dated” at 49 million years, it almost as old as its assumed land-loving ancestor, leaving far too little time for evolution.

There are other difficulties as well.

Mathematician and philosopher Dr. David Berlinski calculated that a cow-like creature living on dry land would have needed at least 50, 000 morphological changes for a move to the sea.

From skin to the breathing apparatus, almost everything had to be changed if the cow wanted to stay alive in its new watery environment.

Like transforming a car into a submarine, it would have needed an enormous amount of changes, making the entire scenario impossible.

Source:

Barras, Colin. 2018. Why ancient deer returned to the sea and became whales. New Scientist (19 March).

Relicts of Noah’s Flood and the Ice Age in Saharaomo sapiens, the Neanderthals, Homo erectus

The Sahara was once wetter. Image courtesy of Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 2.5.




Joel Kontinen

The Sahara desert was once a lot wetter place than it is today (although some parts got a brief snow cover recently).

It is very likely that this wet epoch followed Noah’s Flood, which obviously left the ground wetter than it is now, and the ice age that followed would also have kept moisture in the ground.

A paper published in the journal Nature Plants written by researchers from the universities of Huddersfield, Rome and Modena & Reggio Emilia finds evidence for cultivating and storing cereals.

According to Science Daily, “a chemical analysis of pottery from the site demonstrates that cereal soup and cheese were being produced.”

They believe that this was at a time (ca. 8,000 BC) when humans were supposed to be hunter-gatherers. The timing is way off by 4,000 years or so.

The Sahara also holds – or has held – other relics from the Flood, such as an imposing natural archway and a catfish fossil.

Source:

University of Huddersfield. 2018. The absence of ants: Entomologist confirms first Saharan farming 10,000 years ago. Science Daily (16 March).

“Sea Monster” Fossil Shows Darwin-Defying Diversity in Cambrian Era Brains

Kerygmachela kierkegaardi might have looked like this. Image courtesy of Apokryltaros, CC BY 2.5.



Joel Kontinen

For Charles Darwin, the sudden appearance of complex animals in the Cambrian was a huge dilemma.

And since then, the situation has become even worse. In 2012 University of Bath evolutionary biologist Matthew Wills acknowledged that Cambrian fossils “can cause a real headache for evolutionary biologists.”

Cambrian creatures tend to be far too complex for evolution.

Some, like Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis, have a very complex brain. Science reported that a shrimp-like creature dubbed Fuxianhuia protensa “presumably did a fair amount of thinking.”

We can also see Darwin-defying diversity in Cambrian creatures.

Kerygmachela kierkegaardi is a 25 cm (10 in.) long “sea monster” found in Greenland.

Assumed to be “520 million years” old, it is “a bizarre, oval-shaped water beast that had two long appendages on its head, 11 swimming flaps on each side and a skinny tail,” Live Science quotes palaeontologist Jakob Vinther as saying.

The researchers also found 15 fossilized brains, which differed considerably from other Cambrian Era brains by being slightly less complex:

“An anatomical analysis showed that K. kierkegaardi's brain innervated the creature's large eyes and the frontal appendages it used to grasp its tasty victims, the researchers said.”

Darwinians could never have expected to see such diversity in Cambrian animals.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2018. Fossilized Brains of Ancient 'Sea Monster' Discovered in Greenland. Live Science. (15 March).