Evolution – Slippery As An Octopus

Image courtesy of Albert Kok, Creative Commons, (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Darwinists are more than willing to embrace views that in effect contradict each other.

This prompted Eric Metaxas to say: “What’s the difference between evolutionary theory and an octopus? Well, one is a slippery, color-changing escape artist that can get out of any tough situation and the other is an aquatic invertebrate.”

He is not the only one to see contradictions in evolutionary theory. The late Philip Skell thought that thought Darwinian explanations were redundant as they often were self-contradictory.

Source:

Metaxas, Eric. 2015. Darwinism Versus the Octopus: An Evolutionary Dilemma. Break Point (8 September).

Darwinian Theory of Mind: Making Apes Out of Humans – And Humans Out of Apes

I spy with my little eye something beginning with R. Image courtesy of Eleifert, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists are averse to seeing humans as special. They want to see us as just another species of great ape, although the gap separating us and animals is so wide that no monkey can jump over it regardless of its attempts.

The latest Darwinian attempt is an experiment in which chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans watch a video clip featuring a human being dressed as King Kong steals a rock from another human being and hides it in a box. Then King Kong drives the man away and puts the rock in another box. Then he changes his mind and takes the rock away.

The researchers used an infrared eye-tracker to see where the apes would look. Most of them fixed their eyes on the boxes and many looked at the one where the man assumed the rock was – although it wasn’t.

The Darwinian explanation for this is that apes have a theory of mind.

We could obviously do the experiment with dogs and get a similar result, as in many ways they are cleverer than chimps or other apes. But in the Darwinian world, dogs aren’t our close relatives, so such a result wouldn’t make headlines.

In a created world we would expect animals to be intelligent.

But we would not expect them to use language or worship their Maker or build theories, as they most probably are not capable of abstract thinking.

Only humans are created in the image of God and as such we are special:

“What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet.” (Psalm 8: 4–6, ESV).

Source:

Morell, Virginia. 2016. Humans aren’t the only great apes that can ‘read minds’ Science (6 October).

Extraterrestrial Life Hopefuls Put Their Trust in Cosmic Rays

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI.





Joel Kontinen

Cosmic radiation might not sound like a good source of preserving life. But that is exactly what a paper recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface attempts to explain.

Researchers looked at an enigmatic microbe called Desulforudis audaxviator that lives 2.8 kilometres (1.7 miles) below the surface in a gold mine in South Africa.

It manages to live though there’s no oxygen, no carbon and no light.

The researchers believe that this rod-shaped bacterium gets its energy from radioactive uranium. An article in Science gives the details:

“It draws its energy from the radioactivity of uranium in the rock in the mine. The radiation from decaying uranium nuclei breaks apart sulfur and water molecules in the stone, producing molecular fragments such as sulfate and hydrogen peroxide that are excited with internal energy. The microbe then takes in these molecules, siphons off their energy, and spits them back out. Most of the energy produced from this process powers the bacterium’s reproduction and internal processes, but a portion of it also goes to repairing damage from the radiation.”

The discovery spurred researchers to speculate that there might be life elsewhere in the universe that likewise thrives in harsh environments, not getting their energy directly from photosynthesis or living on plants that do so, but directly from radioactive uranium or cosmic rays.

Usually, being exposed to radioactivity causes mutations that almost always are harmful.

Desulforudis audaxviator inspired a new paper and some wild speculations. Image courtesy of NASA.

This weird bacterium has prompted some astrobiologists to set their hopes on finding life on Mars, Pluto, the Moon, Jupiter’s moon Europa, Saturn’s moon Enceladus and on countless star systems.

But there’s a huge problem they have not solved: life does not just happen, it has to be created.

While naturalistic searchers for the origin of life might have made spectacular headlines, the entire field is a mess.

Chemicals don’t just turn into life and the evolutionists’ best attempt, i.e. the RNA world theory, does not work.

Even the tiniest bacterium is by no means simple. It is full of tiny machines that are so intricate that their inventor should receive a Nobel Prize, as the best humans can do pales in comparison to what they do.

Nanomachines do not just fall from the sky.

Source:

Boddy, Jessica. 2016. Alien life could feed on cosmic rays. Science (7 October).

Superfast Spinning Stars Show Our Sun Is Special – And So Is Earth

Weird stars show how special our sun is. Image courtesy of Fred the Oyster, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).





Joel Kontinen

Bill Nye might call himself the Science Guy, but his science is often badly outdated.

Recent research suggests his view of our sun is simply wrong. This is what he said:

“I'm insignificant. ... I am just another speck of sand. And the earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun an unremarkable star. ... And the galaxy is a speck. I'm a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.”

New Scientist summarises the findings of a recent study that shows just how wrong Bill Nye is:

“Our star is a particularly calm one. Hot, massive ‘early-type’ stars can spin almost 100 times faster than the sun, causing them to bulge in the middle. The gas around the star’s equator is then farther away from its centre, so it cools more than other parts of the star’s surface, in a phenomenon called gravity-darkening. The poles, meanwhile, remain hot and dense.”

John Ahlers, a researcher at the University of Idaho in Moscow, has examined what effect this would have on a planet orbiting such a star.

“Early-type stars emit mostly UV light, so this corresponds to yearly shifts of up to 80 per cent in the UV radiation hitting the planet. And because these planets would be directly over the star’s chilled equator twice in each orbit, it would go through two summers and two winters each year.

In extreme situations, the planet’s surface could rapidly oscillate between a boiling hellscape and a frozen tundra.”

The research is based on observations of the cause of seasons on the good Earth:

”Earth’s seasons come from the planet’s tilt: as we orbit the sun, one hemisphere leans towards it, receiving more direct sunlight, while the other leans away.”

In contrast to what Bill Nye thinks, our sun is anything but unremarkable. Almost everything in our solar system, from Earth’s magnetic field, the Moon and the giant gas planets, appears to be fine-tuned to keep Earth habitable.

That is exactly what we would expect, as Genesis is reliable history.


Source:

Crane, Leah. 2016. Superfast spinning stars cause strangest weather in the universe New Scientist (3 October).

Medicine Nobel for Intelligent Recycling in Our Cells

Autophagy. Image courtesy of eb billard, Public Domain.




Joel Kontinen

Humans did not invent recycling. We see it in the life cycle of a butterfly. An intelligent process uses the moth’s cells to build an entirely different creature – a butterfly.

And our cells do something similar. They break down content that is no longer useful and instead of throwing it away, use it to repair existing cells or build new ones.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, for his work on the mechanisms of autophagy.

Autophagy refers to self-eating. It is a combination of two Greek words, auto, ‘self’ and phagein, ‘to eat’. New Scientist gives us some background facts:

”Autophagy was first proposed as a concept in the 1960s, when it was observed that a cell can destroy its own contents by packaging it up into membranes called vesicles that are transported to a recycling part of the cell where it is degraded. This process rapidly provides fuel for energy and building blocks for the renewal of cell components.”

Professor Ohsumi discovered that authophagy does more than this. In an interview conducted in 2012, he said:

“As research into autophagy has expanded, it has become clear that it is not simply a response to starvation. It also contributes to a range of physiological functions, such as inhibiting cancer cells and aging, eliminating pathogens and cleaning the insides of cells.”

Autophagy is not the only intelligent process we have for getting rid of cells that are no longer useful but can cause harm by their longevity. There’s another one that’s called apoptosis or programmed cell death.

In 2002 the researchers who identified genes that control it were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery.

In recent years, several Nobel prizes have been awarded to researchers who have shown how wonderfully our cells are designed. In 2009, for instance three ribosome researchers shared the Nobel prize in Chemistry.

Source:

Thomson, Helen. 2016. Medicine Nobel Prize goes to discovery of how our cells recycle. New Scientist (3 October).

More Evidence of Intelligent Design in Our Brains: Cells Repair Damaged Axons

Axons. Image courtesy of Quasar Jarosz, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

The more researchers look at the brain, the more complex – and amazing – it looks. Gone are the days when they spoke about things like humans having a lizard brain, and so on.

It seems that epigenetics and gene switches run the show. A recent report on axon repair states:

“After the human genome was deciphered, epigenetics — the study of gene regulation — has moved to the forefront with the realization that genes don't matter much until they are switched on, and that genetic switches are the fundamental reason why a skin cell doesn't look like a nerve cell, and a nerve cells functions differently than a white blood cell.”

The article discusses the function of Schwann cells that play a major role in repairing damaged axons. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison “have found a switch that redirects helper cells in the peripheral nervous system into ‘repair’ mode, a form that restores damaged axons.”

The cells seem to know when repairs are needed and how to carry them out:

“In the repair mode, but not in the normal one, Schwann cells start cleaning house, helping to dissolve myelin, which is essential for proper functioning but ironically deters regeneration after injury. ‘If you invite Schwann cells to a party,’ says [Prof. John] Svaren, ‘they will clean up the bottles and wash your dishes before they leave the house.’

John Svaren, a professor of comparative biosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the lead author of a paper the research group published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

The research reminds us that the information programmed into our cells does things that Darwinian mechanisms never could.

Source:

University of Wisconsin-Madison. 2016. Researchers find switch that helps restore damaged axons. News Medical.net (16 September).

Intelligent Anti-Crash System Prevents Birds From Colliding

No collisions. Image courtesy of Walter Baxter, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).





Joel Kontinen

It almost takes a miracle to keep starlings from colliding. When hundreds of thousands of birds fly very close together and none fall to the ground, it well-nigh looks like magic.

But it isn’t. They follow a very precise strategy.

And now it seems that other birds have a somewhat similar trick that prevents collisions.

University of Queensland researchers filmed budgerigars flying towards each other in a narrow tunnel. They repeated the test 100 times, just to be sure, and noticed that almost always the birds veered right to prevent collisions.

Occasionally, the birds used a different approach. According to New Scientist,

“The budgerigars also tended to fly past each other at different heights, which prevented mid-air collisions on the rare occasions that one of the birds veered left.”

They did not observe a single crash.

Researchers hope to use these findings to design more efficient anti-crash systems in drones.

Unfortunately, the researchers decided to give credit to evolution. They believe that birds have evolved these strategies for “150 million years”.

But Darwinian explanations tend to be implausible.

They are hardly more credible than Rudyard Kipling’s just-so stories of How the Leopard got His Spots or How the Camel got His Hump.

Since evolution is a bumbling trial-and-error method, thousands of birds must have collided and potentially died before the strategy eliminated all crashes.

Where are all the fossils?

Source:

Klein, Alice. 2016. Budgies reveal the rule that means birds never collide in flight New Scientist (28 September).