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).

God is – Good

Christ Pantocrator icon at Daphne, Greece. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen



The media often bring before us a world that is far from perfect or even good. Recently, British MPs used state coffers as their personal piggy banks. In Myanmar or Burma the military junta rules the country with an iron grip. Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe keeps on destroying what is left of the livelihood of his impoverished countrymen. In Iran, the regime mishandles opposition supporters and shoots to death a teen-aged girl watching a protest march.

In the midst of all this the Bible speaks about a God who is Good. The apostle Paul wrote a letter to Titus in which he said, “When the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” (Tit. 3:4-5).

We have made the world a mess. God did not command Mugabe to impoverish his country or the Burmese military junta to transform their state into a large concentration camp. He did not inspire Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitism, either.

Evil is a consequence of the Fall described in Genesis. Sin spoilt a world that originally was very good.

Sin does not mean that all people are as bad as they can be but that no one has ever succeeded in being completely good –except a carpenter from Nazareth who had to pay a high price for his goodness.

But this carpenter from Nazareth was no ordinary man. ”No one ever spoke the way this man does” (John 7:46), the Jewish temple police said of him.

Jesus of Nazareth was also the Jesus of eternity who entered history as the manifestation of God’s love. He still works through those who have accepted Him into their lives.