Chimp And Bonobo Interbreeding Shows Genesis Was Right

Bonobos. Image courtesy of W. H. Calvin, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).




Joel Kontinen

New research has shown that bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (P. troglodytes) share one per cent of their genes. This, actually, is no news, as before the 1930s bonobos were categorised as a chimpanzee subspecies. They used to be called pygmy chimps.

Christina Hvilsom, a conservation geneticist at the Copenhagen Zoo, and colleagues compared the genomes of 75 chimps and bonobos and discovered traces of interbreeding.

An article in Science suggests that this prompted them to think that the interbreeding occurred at two different stages: First, “1.5 million years” ago “bonobo ancestors mixed with the ancestor of the eastern and central chimps.” Then, “200,000 years ago, central chimps got another boost of bonobo genes.”

The researchers make much of gene flow between species. The article mentions that humans have a sizable amount of Neanderthal DNA and that coyotes, dogs and wolves also share genes.

From a Genesis perspective, this was expected. Neanderthals were fully human, and the dog kind has much more variety than early evolutionists could have imagined.

The fixity of species is a Darwinian myth.

The Biblical term 'kind' does not equal the biological concept 'species'. Living beings reproduce after their kinds, not species.

While we might see speciation happening (i.e. new species appearing), no one has ever witnessed a new kind being born.

We see all kinds of hybrids, such as ligers, zonkeys, geeps, wholpins, grolars and savannah cats, for instance.

This shows that animals reproduce after their kinds, not after their species. In other words, Moses was right and Darwin wrong – very much so.

Source:

Pennisi, Elizabeth. 2016. Chimps and bonobos had flings—and swapped genes—in the past. Science (27 October).

Tetrapodophis amplectus: Four-Legged Snake Was a Marine Lizard, New Research Suggests

Image courtesy of Dave Jones, Creative commons (CC BY-NC 4.0).



Joel Kontinen


Interpreting and dating fossils is an intriguing game. In 1990 J. Shreeve wrote in Discover magazine: ”Everybody knows fossils are fickle; bones will sing any song you want to hear.”

This, of course, pertains to hominins, i.e. us and our assumed more or less ape-like ancestors, as well as to all fossils.

In 2015, David Martill at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues published a paper in Science on an assumed transitional form.

The four-footed snake Tetrapodophis amplectus was found by a private collector in Brazil and brought to Germany. It was tiny: its skull measured a centimetre and its overall length was 20 centimetres (8 inches).

Assumed to be 108 million years old, it had four little legs and looked liked the transitional form evolutionists were hoping to find.

Last week, at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) another research team came up with a very different kind of interpretation of the fossil. They proposed that it was a marine lizard.

An article in Science states:

“Vertebrate paleontologist Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and colleagues presented their own observations of the specimen, rebutting Martill’s paper point by point to a standing-room-only crowd.”

It seems that the 2015 paper had overlooked some very pertinent details:

“The new analysis hinges on the ‘counterpart’ to the original fossil, which was also housed in the Bürgermeister-Müller Museum in Solnhofen, Germany. When the slab of rock containing the fossil was cracked open, the body of the organism stayed mostly in one half of the slab, whereas the skull was mostly in the other half, paired with a mold or impression of the body. This counterpart slab, Caldwell says, preserved clearer details of the skull in particular. In his group’s analysis of the counterpart, he says, ‘every single character that was identified in the original manuscript as being diagnostic of a snake was either not the case or not observable.’ ”

Caldwell and colleagues made a convincing case that Tetrapodophis was not a snake at all:

“For example, in snake skulls, a bone called the quadrate is elongated, which allows snakes to open their jaws very wide. This fossil’s quadrate bone is more C-shaped, and it surrounds the animal’s hearing apparatus—a ‘characteristic feature’ of a group of lizards called squamates, says co-author Robert Reisz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Canada. He and Caldwell add that although the fossil has more vertebrae in its body than in its tail, the tail isn’t short, but longer than that of many living lizards. They are working on a paper arguing that the fossil is probably a dolichosaur, an extinct genus of marine lizard.”

This is not the first time a supposed transitional form turns out to not conform to Darwinian expectations.

Recent years have witnessed increasing doubts about Ardi or Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus sediba, H. naledi and Nutcracker Man or Paranthropus boisei.

And we also had an infamous episode featuring Ida or Darwinius massillae.


Source:

Gramling, Carolyn. 2016. Controversial ‘four-legged snake’ may be ancient lizard instead. Science (1 November).

More Trouble for the Dino-to-Bird Hypothesis: Modern Traits in Mesozoic Bird

Hongshanornis longicresta supposedly lived 124 million years ago, yet looks like a modern bird. Image courtesy of Chiappe et al. 2014. A new specimen of the Early Cretaceous bird Hongshanornis longicresta: insights into the aerodynamics and diet of a basal ornithuromorph. PeerJ 2:e234, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Dino-era birds were real birds much earlier than evolutionists once thought. A fossil and other remains of a “120 million year old” bird found in China included a pellet that was full of fish bones.

Here’s the gist of the story, courtesy of Science Daily:

“About 120 million years ago, a bird dunked its beak into the water, caught a fish and, after digesting the meal, coughed up a pellet full of fish bones. The bird died moments later, but now its fossils are the oldest evidence of a bird pellet on record, a new study reported.”

The discovery suggests that at least some birds have had very modern bird-like traits and habits for far longer than researchers previously thought:

“The pellet — the first that is unambiguously from a bird that lived during the Mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs — indicates that the ancient bird had a two-chambered stomach, much like birds do today, the researchers said.

Modern-day birds, including many birds of prey, produce pellets made up of indigestible material, such as bones, hair and feathers.”

Several other studies likewise corroborate the non-evolution of birds. For instance, a “130-million-year-old” wading bird looks very modern. Bird feathers haven’t evolved in ”100 million years,” wings trapped in amber suggest.

At least some ancient birds “performed aerodynamic feats in a fashion similar to those of many living birds,” Science Daily suggested in 2015.

It seems that the dino-to-bird hypothesis is in big trouble. (Read more here and here.)

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2016. Ancient Bird Coughed Up 'Fishy' Pellet 120 Million Years Ago. Live Science (28 October).

The Moon’s Surface Might Be 100 Times Younger Than Previously Thought, Recent Impact Craters Suggest

Here’s one of the recent impact craters. Image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.





Joel Kontinen

The Moon’s origin is a naturalistic mystery. Now it seems that its age is also a dilemma for those who subscribe to billions of years.

In the past 7 years, meteorites have bombarded the Moon far more frequently than scientists previously thought. Recently, Nature published a paper by Emerson Speyerer, at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues.

They compared older and more recent pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and found at least 222 new impact craters.

This has far-reaching consequences. A Nature News article explains:

“Planetary geologists will also need to rethink their understanding of the age of the lunar surface, which depends on counting craters and estimating how long the terrain has been pummelled by impacts.”

On Space.com, Charles Choi brings up more surprises:

“The scientists also found broad zones around these new craters that they interpreted as the remains of jets of debris following impacts. They estimated this secondary cratering process is churning the top 0.8 inches (2 centimeters) of lunar dirt, or regolith, across the entire lunar surface more than 100 times faster than thought.”

" ‘I'm excited by the fact that we can see the regolith evolve and churn — a process that was believed to take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to occur — in images acquired over the past several years,’ Speyerer told Space.com.”

While believers in millions of years still think that only the Moon’s surface is young, they might well be mistaken. Time and again, planetary scientists are surprised at what they see: almost all planets, moons, and comets – and even Saturn’s rings – look a lot younger than they should in a solar system that they believe is “4.6 billion years” old.

Sources:

Choi, Charles Q. 2016. Impact! New Moon Craters Are Appearing Faster Than Thought. Space.com (12 October).

Witze, Alexandra. 2016. Meteorites pummel the Moon far more than expected. Nature News (12 October).

Brain And Blood Vessels from ”133-Million-Year-Old” Dinosaur

Iguanodon. Image courtesy of Nobu Tamura, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen

Brains are soft. They are not supposed to last over 130 million years.

But that is exactly what some researchers now believe.

Found in 2004 on a beach near Bexhill in Sussex, England, the fossilised brain of an iguanodon has in the past few days made headlines all over the globe.

Researchers examined the brain with a scanning electron microscope. Writing in The Conversation, Alex Liu of the University of Cambridge discloses what they found:

“This revealed evidence of the dinosaur’s meninges, the tough, collagenous outer membranes that protect the main brain. It also showed up tiny blood vessels preserved as tubes running across the surface of the specimen. There are even hints of deeper tissues that may have formed part of the brain cortex, the functional part of the brain that contains neurons.”

This kind of preservation is a big mystery for believers in millions of years. However, he proposes a scenario that he assumes is plausible:

“We think this level of preservation was possible because the brain tissue was effectively pickled before it was mineralised, probably after the dinosaur died in a highly acidic and low-oxygen body of water. The soft tissues were preserved by phosphate and iron minerals, and CT (computed tomography) scans show the fossil also contains sediment, as well as fragments of leaves, twigs and bone.

Taken together, these observations create a picture of the dinosaur dying in a well-vegetated, swampy environment. Its head probably became buried in the sediment on a river- or lake-bed, and the lack of oxygen allowed the brain tissues to mineralise before they had a chance to decay.”

With more water it might sound a bit like Noah’s Flood.

The past two decades have seen the discovery of more and more soft tissue – and even radiocarbon (C-14) – in fossils assumed to be tens if not hundreds of millions of years old.

The current record holder is a complex Cambrian brain assumed to be 520 million years old.

The most logical explanation is that the animals can’t be that old. That obviously is something evolution-believing researchers are not prepared to admit, at least not yet.

Source:

Liu, Alex. 2016. First dinosaur brain fossil suggests they may have been smarter than we thought. The Conversation (27 October).

Amazing Swifts Fly 10 Months Without Landing

Fly me to the Moon – and back, seven times. Image courtesy of Paweł Kuźnia, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Swifts spend a lot of time in the air, perhaps more than any other birds.

Each year, the common swift (Apus apus) roosts two months in Europe and then flies off to Africa.

Researchers at the University of Lund in Sweden fitted seven common swifts with lightweight data loggers and monitored their travels for two years.

Three of the birds stayed in the air for 10 months, and the others landed occasionally but very briefly, “never for more than half a per cent of the total time of their migratory periods,” says Anders Hedenström, who with his colleagues published their research in the journal Current Biology.

Hedenström thinks that the swifts might take power naps in the air. As they can live for 20 years, during their lifetime they probably travel a distance that equals 7 times to the moon and back.

So, what is the Darwinian explanation for such behaviour? There probably isn’t one.

Birds are a big problem for evolutionists. While they have made much of Darwin’s finches, the birds themselves do not conform to Darwinian expectations.

Many other species and traits cause additional problems, for instance starling murmurations, anti-crash systems, cooling beaks and anti-freeze.

What is more, birds such as robins, hummingbirds, cockatoos and bowerbirds display many signs of very intelligent design that cannot be explained away by evolutionary storytelling.

And bird migration refutes the local flood hypothesis.




Source:

Coghlan, Andy. 2016. Swifts break record by staying aloft for 10 months at a time. New Scientist (27 October).

Poor Fossil Record Has Led to Fatally Flawed Analysis of Fossils, Scientists Say

Dinosaur research might be fatally flawed, new research suggests.




Joel Kontinen

” Almost a decade's worth of work aimed at providing an insight into evolution may be misleading as it was based on … [a] fundamental error,” say researchers at the universities of Reading and Bristol, UK.

Old fossils cannot speak for themselves but they have to be interpreted. Hence, mistakes might easily creep in.

A press release issue by the University of Bristol calls this a “fatal flaw in the way fossil data is analysed.”

It might well have far reaching consequences:

“Years of research on the evolution of ancient life, including the dinosaurs, have been questioned.

…

Studies based on the apparently flawed method have suggested Earth’s biodiversity remained relatively stable – close to maximum carrying capacity - and hinted many signs of species becoming rapidly extinct are merely reflections on the poor quality of the fossil record at that time.”

New research calls into question the conclusions of over 150 research papers published in recent years.

It “suggests the history of the planet’s biodiversity may have been more dynamic than recently suggested, with bursts of new species appearing, along with crashes and more stable periods.

The new study published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution by Dr Manabu Sakamoto and Dr Chris Venditti, from Reading, and Professor Michael Benton, from Bristol, says a technique used to 'correct' records of diversity in fossils is actually giving misleading results.

It means almost a decade's worth of work aimed at providing an insight into evolution may be misleading as it was based on this fundamental error.”

So, what do evolutionists really know about evolution if even that what they assume they know is fatally flawed?

Too little to confidentially claim that evolution is a fact.


Source:

University of Bristol. 2016. Flawed analysis casts doubt on years of evolution research. (24 October).