The secret of how Greenland sharks can live cancer-free for 400 years

 

Image courtesy of dotted zebra/Alamy.

 Joel Kontinen

Can sharks live for over 400 years?

According to a study, some sharks do that - they are the Greenland sharks.  They can live for years without tumours. This is a case of intelligent design that keeps them alive.

Death came to the world following Adam and Eves strategy in the Garden of Eden, from which they were exiled and were subject to death, and also animals died.  

A genomic study may have revealed how Greenland sharks live for centuries and yet rarely get cancer.

These sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) are slow-moving dwellers of the deep that can reach more than 6 metres long and weigh over a tonne. We know little about their lives because they roam in dark, cold waters, but it is thought they don’t reach sexual maturity until they are 150 years old and their lifespan has been estimated at about 400 years, making them the longest-living vertebrates that we know of.

Source:

 Chris Simms 2025 The secret of how Greenland sharks can live cancer-free for 400 years | New Scientist 4 March 

 

Africans carry surprising amount of Neanderthal DNA

Image courtesy of Christopher P.E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich.




Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists have scratched their heads, Now, it seems that the Neandertals have all the DNA that put them in the human category. This means that Africans can fully declare that their forefather was Adam, just like us. Evolutionists taught that the Neandertals lost their apelike traits.

This was brought home in researched published in Cell, that anthropologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Calls a “novel and elegant finding.”

Evolutionists think that mankind originated in Africa, and then spread towards Europe and Asia and then conquers the world. as they lived in Europe, that is what the inheritance says.

We already know that Neanderthals were fully human they built their culture in the same way we do, we belief that they lived in Europe after the flood of Noah’s days .

Source;
Price, Michael, 2020. Africans carry surprising amount of Neanderthal DNA. Science (30 January)

Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?

James Jacques Joseph Tissot: Adam and Eve Driven from Paradise, public domain.





Joel Kontinen

Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, writes about human extinction. Would it be necessary for furthering life on the planet?

“It is humanity that is committing a wrong, a wrong whose elimination would likely require the elimination of the species, but with whom we might be sympathetic nonetheless.”

“Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it,”

“First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways.

How many human lives would it be worth sacrificing to preserve the existence of Shakespeare’s works?”

This tragedy is caused by the Fall, Adam's sin, that has enticed us.


Source:

May, Todd, 2018 Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy? The New York Times (17 December).

Hairy Panic in Australia Reminds of Genesis 3 Prediction

Panicum effusum. Image courtesy of Bidgee, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

A tumbleweed known as hairy panic has invaded the town of Wangaratta, Victoria, turning it into a surreal scene that could be from a horror film.

In some places, the grass stalks of Panicum effusum reach up to the roofs of houses.

Residents have laboured for hours, trying to clear their gardens of the stuff, only to see it return with a vengeance.

The weed grows very fast and can turn into a nightmare, as seen in Wangaratta.

Thorns and thistles are consequences of the Fall described in Genesis 3. Adam’s disobedience brought suffering and death into the world.

But even in a fallen world, there is an abundance of beauty.

Even Panicum effusum is quite beautiful. Only after it dies and dries up, it becomes a nuisance. It might be fatal for sheep if they eat too much of the weed, but otherwise the panic is not that serious.

Source:

BBC news. 2016. Australia town consumed by 'hairy panic' (18 February).

Humans May Be Programmed to Learn Language, New Research Suggests

This fellow will not learn proper grammar.



Joel Kontinen

During the dark ages of Darwinism, researchers assumed that language evolved from the grunts of ape-like creatures. Thia view has, however, evolved quite a bit since then.

In the 1960s Noam Chomsky initially suggested that humans may have a universal grammar and be predisposed to learn languages. In this sense – and many others as well – humans are unique.

An article in New Scientist reports on two recent studies on language learning that seem to support this view:

“People instinctively organise a new language according to a logical hierarchy, not simply by learning which words go together, as computer translation programs do. The finding may add further support to the notion that humans possess a ‘universal grammar’, or innate capacity for language.”

To test this theory, “Jennifer Culbertson, a linguist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and her colleague David Adger of Queen Mary University of London, constructed an artificial ‘nanolanguage’ ".

Culbertson and Adger tested it on adults, who seemed to know instinctively how sentences are build in a certain language.

In the other study, “David Gomez, a neuroscientist at the University of Chile in Santiago, and his colleagues measured blood flow in the brains of 24 newborn infants as they listened to recordings of spoken nonsense syllables. The syllables differed in a linguistic property called ‘sonority’, which describes the consonants that most easily precede and follow one another.”

They seemed to know instinctively how words are constructed. Both studies support the view that we have an innate capacity for learning language.

This should be no surprise to those of us who take the Bible, including its opening chapters, as history. After all, Adam was able to communicate with God and with Eve from the very beginning. And he was intelligent enough to name all the land animals that God brought to him at the dawn of history.

Source:

Holmes, Bob. 2014. Born to chat: Humans may have innate language instinct. New Scientist (31 March).

Scientific American: ”We’re All Made from Interstellar Dust”

A Hubble Space Telescope image of Supernova 1987A. Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, K. France (University of Colorado, Boulder), P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics).




Joel Kontinen

Recently, Scientific American published an article on the consequences of the 1987 supernova explosion that obviously produced "copious amounts of dust grains made of carbon, silicates and possibly iron" into interstellar space.

At the end of the article, Haley Gomez, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University in Wales, says that even humans are made from interstellar dust.

This is not far from what Genesis says about the creation of man. God created Adam from the dust of the earth (but not from interstellar dust).

According to the evolution-based worldview, the entire universe was formed from nothing without any kind of plan or design.

The view is full of problems as every natural system we know of - from the smallest (parts of the cell) to the largest (the universe)- bear signs of design.

Source:


Matson, John. 2011. Supernovae Seed Galaxies with Massive Amounts of Dust. Scientific American (7 July).

Jesus, The Last Adam

Joel Kontinen

The Bible knows of two Adams. The first of them was the earliest human in the entire history of our planet. He was a perfect human being when he was created, but his sin plunged the earth into disaster.

The apostle Paul speaks about the Last Adam in 1 Corinthians 15:45: “The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit”.

Where the first Adam failed, the Second Adam succeeded. He redeemed fallen mankind. He was none other than Jesus Christ, God ‘in the flesh’ or human form.

This brief video clip from Answers in Genesis shows us what the Last Adam did:




Scripture verse from the NIV.

When Neanderthals Were Depicted As Apemen

Recent discoveries have shown that Neanderthals were not ape-like. Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Image courtesy of Christopher P.E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich, via Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

In the 19th century, anthropologists had not yet discovered any fossils of our assumed forefathers in Africa so they used Neanderthal men as their poster boys for Darwinism, depicting them as grunting, stooped cavemen. Evolution needed spectacular evidence and ape-men were well-suited for the task.

Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the London Natural History Museum, acknowledges that Neanderthal men were not ape-men although they differed from us in some respects. For instance, they had larger brains than H. sapiens.

Dr. Stringer has not become a creationist but he nevertheless pointed out some misconceptions in a recent Scientific American podcast.

Neanderthal men were cleverer than we thought. (You can read more here , here and here.)

Neanderthals have made headlines recently. Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute, and his research team are sequencing the Neanderthal genome and hope to publish some preliminary results in the near future.

Pääbo believes that H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis lived near each other for long ages in Europe and the Middle East and they probably came into contact with each other. However, he does not think that there was any genetic mixing between them and us.

According to the creation model, Neanderthal men were the descendants of Adam. They most probably lived after the global flood of Noah’s day so we would not be surprised to see Neanderthal traits in some of our fellow-travellers.

Sources:

Callaway, Ewen. 2009. Genetic evidence for human-Neanderthal hanky panky? New Scientist blog (27 October.) http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/10/genetic-evidence-for-human-nea.html

Scientific American podcast, 23 October 2009
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=human-evolution-lucy-and-neandertha-09-10-23&sc=WR_20091027

The Last Adam

Jesus carries His cross. El Greco (1580). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

The Apostle Paul discusses the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in 1 Corinthians 15. He uses an interesting expression when referring to the Lord - The Last Adam:

So it is written: "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:46).

The first Adam is the man mentioned in the early chapters of Genesis. His fall brought death and suffering to the world. The Last Adam is the incarnated Son of God who came to take away the sins of the world.

We would not be able to understand the good news of Easter if we did not believe that the bad news in Genesis caused the Creator of the entire universe to be born as a human being and to suffer a horrible death on a cross in Jerusalem.

Genesis helps us to understand why we celebrate Good Friday and why the Easter morning changed history.

Have a blessed Easter time.