Are dolphins almost human?

Some evolutionists would like to blur the border between humans and animals. Image of a bottlenose dolphin courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

Bottlenose dolphins have bigger brains than we do. They also know how to use them creatively. Some researchers think that dolphins are almost like people. For them, keeping such prodigious creatures captive amounts to a heinous crime.

One of the hot potatoes discussed at this week’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was the status of dolphins. First their skills were lauded to the skies. Then philosopher Thomas White characterised them as almost ”nonhuman persons."

Not all participants were willing to subscribe to White’s view, however. Jacopo Annese, a neuroanatomist at the University of California, San Diego, says of the purported superb intelligence of dolphins, "It's a pretty story, but it's very speculative."

Evolutionists have often attempted to blur the border between humans and animals. Two years ago they tried to get human rights for a chimpanzee in Austria and partial rights for great apes in Spain.

Darwinism seems to be lurking in the shadows. It will allow us to trample on human rights but will conspicuously defend the rights of animals.

Source:

Grimm, David. 2010. Is a Dolphin a Person? Science NOW (21 February)
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/02/is-a-dolphin-a-person.html

Are ETs Chelsea fans?

”I like Chelsea F.C.” Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Recently, the UK Ministry of Defence released files that were previously classified as top-secret. They include over 6,000 pages of reports that describe “hundreds of other-worldly experiences with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and apparent aliens across Britain.”

UFOs have changed considerably in half a century. According to The Telegraph, “Many reports in this latest file describe aircraft as big, black and triangular in shape with lights along the edges, whereas the predominant form in the 1940s to 1950s was saucer or disc-shaped.”

The documents suggest that an UFO was observed hovering over Stamford Bridge, the home stadium of Chelsea F.C., during a soccer match. It seems that the ETs have been showing a bad example by their refusal to buy tickets.

Chelsea is no doubt a good football team. It has won the English Premier League three times and the FA cup five times, including last year, but there are other top teams in Great Britain also, Manchester United and Liverpool, for instance.

So why would ETs choose to watch a Chelsea game?

The origin of UFOs also raises questions. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star outside our solar system, is 4.3 light years away. In other words, at the speed of light it would take four years and four months for a one-way trip from there to see the Chelsea game in London.

Furthermore, we have no evidence that Proxima Centauri or any other star in our “neighbourhood” has planets that could harbour life.

UFOs seem to have a strong evolution connection. If one believes that life originated and evolved randomly on earth,one would probably also suppose that it could have evolved randomly elsewhere.

Source:

UFO files: MoD documents record mystery illnesses and alien residue.Telegraph.co, 18 February 2010.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/7254648/UFO-files-MoD-documents-record-mystery-illnesses-and-alien-residue.html

Elephants can distinguish between three human languages

Elephants are surprisingly clever. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Elephants roaming the savannahs in the Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya may be able to distinguish between three languages. This is the take-home message of a recent British study. BBC reports on tests conducted by a research team from the University of Sussex, UK, who drove around the park on the outskirts of Mount Kilimanjaro in a Land Rover, observing elephant behaviour.

The British researchers discovered that old female elephants were able ”to learn the identity of at least 100 other individual elephants by voice”.

The researchers also played recordings in three different languages (Maa, Kamba and English) on a loudspeaker atop their Land Rover. They noticed clear differences in how the elephants reacted to these languages. When the elephants heard someone speaking Maa, the language of the Maasai, they became nervous probably because the Maasai occasionally kill elephants in order to protect their herds. Then, when they heard the Kampa language, they were less nervous. On hearing English, the elephants stayed calm.

The elephants obviously know that English-speaking tourists only take photos. They seem to realise that the era of Ernest Hemingway and other rifle-toting white hunters is past and gone.

BBC also mentioned experiments conducted in Japan that suggest that elephants are good at mathematics.

According to Darwinists, chimpanzees should be much more intelligent than other land animals or birds. However, several recent experiments suggest that both elephants and crows beat chimps in tasks needing innovation.

These and other observations do not support assumptions based on Darwinian evolution.

At least some elephants are clever painters as well. See a video clip of an Asian elephant painting the portrait of – yes, a fellow elephant:




Source:

Luck-Baker. Andrew. 2010. Inside the Elephant mind. BBC News (17 February) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8518831.stm

Spiders gather water with their webs

A new study looks at how spiders use their webs to collect moisture from the air. Image courtesy of PD photo.org.




Joel Kontinen

A bright autumn morning will make spiders’ webs glisten in the sunlight. This has to do with water droplets that cling to them. In other words, spiders do not have to trudge down to a stream to drink some water but they get it from the moisture in the air.

Recently, a team of Chinese researchers published a paper in the journal Nature on how spiders use their webs to collect moisture. Zheng Yongmei and colleagues examined the webs of Uloborus walckenaerius spiders with an electron microscope and reported on their observations.

The researchers noticed that the structure of the web makes water droplets cling to the silk. They hope to copy the technology spiders already make use of and have constructed a man-made web for collecting moisture from the air.

Time and again scientists notice signs of truly amazing design in nature (You can read more here and here ). Three millennia ago, King Solomon wrote: ”He [i.e. God] has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

The water-collecting function of a spider’s web also suggests that in the very good world of Genesis 1 and 2 before the Fall, they could have been used for solely non-predatory purposes.



Sources:

Helmer, Magdalena. 2010. Dew catchers. Nature 463: 7281, 681.

Zheng, Yongmei & al. 2010. Directional water collection on wetted spider silk. Nature 463: 7281, 640-643.

When old views are discarded

In 1910 Martian canals were not seen as being altogether fictive. They have not made any headlines recently, however. Image courtesy of NASA/ESA.



Joel Kontinen

Our views of reality tend to change with the times. Recently, the journal Nature reported on what Percival Lowell (1855-1916) thought about Mars a century ago.

In 1910 professor Lowell contemplated the melting of the Martian glaciers and the ”canals” on the red planet. According to Lowell, ”Mars is habitable by organisms not essentially different from those with which we are acquainted.” He thought that Martians had solved their water crisis: ”Water is artificially ’engineered’ in such a way that organic existence is rendered possible”.

For a long time, the denizens on the red planet were thought to be real. An imagined Martian invasion of Earth caused widespread panic before the outbreak of World War II.

But scientific (and even popular) views tend to change with the passing of time. We have not heard much about the Martian canals for quite some time.

In 1975 Francis Schaeffer, a well-known Christian philosopher, wrote: ”The history of science, including science in our own day, has often seen great dogmatism about theories which later have been discarded.”

Darwinian evolution and man-made global warming are perhaps two of the hottest potatoes of our time. Both concepts are being defended rather fanatically.

Might it be time to listen to Francis Schaeffer?

Sources:

100 Years Ago. Nature 463:7281, 617. (4 February 2010).

Schaeffer, Francis A. 1975. No Final Conflict: The Bible Without Error in All That It Affirms. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Jesus and the Old Testament

Carl Heinrich Bloch: The Sermon on the Mount. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen


Recently, I read John Wenham’s essay Our Lord’s View of the Old Testament. Wenham (1913-1996) was an Anglican clergyman whose theological views were mostly conservative.

According to Wenham, Jesus had a very high regard for the Old Testament. In his essay, he quoted several passages that speak of the authority of Scripture:

” I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Matt. 5:18)

” It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law.” (Luke 16:17)

” Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35).

(These verses are from the NIV. Wenham used an older translation, but that does not change the message.)

According to Wenham,” To Christ the Old Testament was true, authoritative, inspired. To Him the God of the Old Testament was the living God and the teaching of the Old Testament was the teaching of the living God. To Him, what Scripture said, God said.”

Could anyone say that more explicitly?

Source:

Wenham. John W. 1953. Our Lord’s View of the Old Testament. http://www.the-highway.com/Scripture_Wenham.html

New research: Birds did not descend from dinosaurs but dinosaurs might have descended from birds

This poster needs changes.




Joel Kontinen

New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences challenges the old Darwinian dogma about birds being the descendants of dinosaurs. The dino-to-bird link has evaded extinction although evidences against it have increased in the past few years. (Read more here, here, here and here.)

Recently, Sankar Chatterjee and R. Jack Templin analyzed how well the Microraptor gui, which was found in 2003, was able to glide, and published their findings in PNAS. Computer simulations indicated that it could not have been able to take to the air from the ground but it could probably have glided down from a tree.

Several studies conducted in the past few years challenge the view that birds are descended from dinosaurs, says John Ruben, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University, in a comment on the study in PNAS. ”There are just too many inconsistencies with the idea that birds had dinosaur ancestors, and this newest study adds to that”, he says. According to Ruben, ”the weight of the evidence is now suggesting that not only did birds not descend from dinosaurs, but that some species now believed to be dinosaurs may have descended from birds.”

Professor Ruben said that many small animals, for instance, velociraptors, which were thought to be dinosaurs, have been flightless birds.

In other words: dinosaurs were dinosaurs and birds are birds.

Sources:

Chatterjee, Sankar and R. Jack Templin. 2010. Biplane wing planform and flight performance of the feathered dinosaur Microraptor gui. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:5, 1576-1580 (30 January 9 http://www.pnas.org/content/104/5/1576.abstract

Study challenges bird-from-dinosaur theory of evolution - was it the other way around? Physorg 9 February 2010 http://www.physorg.com/news184959295.html