Harambe the Gorilla: Animal Rights vs. Human Wrongs

A gorilla. Image courtesy of Brocken Inaglory, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

A three-year old boy fell into a moat in the gorilla enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio, USA. A huge male gorilla named Harambe caught him by the hand and was about to drag him away.

With people shouting, the gorilla was agitated and could easily have hurt the toddler. Harambe weighted around 200 kilos (450 pounds) and, as male gorillas tend to have six to eight times the strength of an adult man, the boy was in real danger.

The zoo staff reacted quickly and shot the gorilla. The boy was unharmed, but activists were not pleased with the death of the animal. 295,854 people have signed the petition Justice for Harambe, and some would have wanted to imprison the boy’s parents for not watching after him more closely.

Thane Maynard, the zoo director, said shooting the gorilla was the right decision.

The BBC describes what happened:

“Video footage of Saturday's incident shows the gorilla dragging the child through the moat in its enclosure.

Mr Maynard described how Harambe ‘swished him around in the water by the ankle’ then carried him on to land.

The gorilla ‘wasn't trying to eat the child,’ he said, ‘but he was disorientated and wanted to get the child to stay there’.

The screams from the crowd were adding to Harambe's agitation, the zoo director said.”

The BBC also interviewed US wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin, who said that tranquillising the animal could have taken many minutes and required multiple darts.

Harambe would most probably have killed the toddler, if the sharpshooter hadn’t finished him off first.

People brought flowers to a gorilla statue at the zoo. In a world where evolutionary thinking colours the thoughts of many people, it often seems that activists have more concern for animal rights than human wrongs.

For instance, many individuals became more agitated on hearing about the killing of a single lion with a name than of the slaughter of many nameless human babies.

And then there’s the perpetual struggle to get legal rights for chimpanzees and other apes.

Source:

BBC news. 2016. Harambe gorilla killing: Zoo defends shooting. (30 May).

Zion Canyon: Massive Landslide Challenges Millions of Years Dogma

Zion Canyon. Image courtesy of Diliff, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Geological features can be formed – and destroyed – in almost an instant.

Recently, the BBC reported on a massive landslide in the Zion Canyon that brought down “some 286 million cubic metres of debris - enough to cover New York's Central Park to a depth of about 80m.”

It reshaped the canyon.

Dr. Jeff Moore, who wrote a paper on the events with his colleagues at the University of Utah, thinks the catastrophe occurred some 4,800 years ago, which would be the approximate time of Noah’s global Flood.

However, since radiometric dating methods tend to give inflated dates, this massive landslide could well have taken place during the post-Flood ice age.

What is important is that we don’t have to wait for millions of years for landscapes to change. Just think of Surtsey and Mount Saint Helens, for instance.

We see many other challenges for the millions of years dogma in mega tsunamis, precariously balanced rocks and the imposing Natural Archway in the Sahara Desert.

Source:

Amos, Jonathan. 2016. Geologists revisit giant Zion landslide. BBC news (27 May).

Evolution: The Best Designer Of All Time?

Evolution did not produce this dog, but humans did change it a bit – through artificial selection, also known as animal breeding.





Joel Kontinen

"Evolution, to me, is the best designer of all time,” says Frances Arnold, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who was recently awarded the Millennium Technology Prize for pioneering an approach Darwinians call directed evolution.

The name of this approach is an oxymoron. Darwin’s watchmaker is supposed to be blind, as Richard Dawkins would say.

The BBC explains what this is all about:

“With her engineering background, Prof Arnold wanted to make new, useful, problem-solving proteins. So she took her cue from the way nature does the same thing.”

It’s a long way from nature to evolution. They’re definitely not the same thing. The amazing features we see in the animal kingdom look as if they are intelligently designed.

The obvious conclusion: they are.

But the BBC article goes on to quote professor Arnold:

"I looked at it and said, well, nature didn't actually design enzymes... How does this happen? You make mutations randomly, you look through a large number of things for the ones that have the properties you're interested in, then you repeat the process.”

This is a bit problematic, as mutations are hardly ever beneficial. And they might not even be random.

Prof. Arnold continues:

“And you iterate, accumulating beneficial changes over multiple generations - pretty much like we've done for cats, dogs, cows, chickens, you name it."

There is a name for this: it’s called artificial selection, also known as animal breeding.

It is neither random nor Darwinian.

What Prof. Arnold does might be very beneficial, but it is definitely not directed evolution.

Evolutionists have tried to squirm away from what is obvious by proposing more or less bizarre solutions, for instance, that natural selection is akin to predestination, evolution is smart, complexity just happens or evolution was experimenting.

None of them address the serious drawbacks of neo-Darwinism.

Source:

Webb, Jonathan. 2016. Evolutionary engineer Frances Arnold wins €1m tech prize. BBC News (24 May).

“Sun Kickstarted Life on Earth”: New Attempt to Solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox

A new hypothesis tries to get past Earth’s magnetic field. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Popular science journalism tends to produce eye-catching headlines. Reporting on a recent attempt by Vladimir Airapetian at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to solve the faint young Sun paradox is no exception.

Cranky young sun could have kickstarted life on Earth, New Scientist informs us.

Belief in a billions of years old solar system is fraught with problems that don’t easily go away.

A major puzzle is the faint young Sun paradox. Let us listen to New Scientist:

“About 4 billion years ago, the sun was only 70 per cent as bright as it is today, which should have made the Earth a frozen snowball. But geological evidence shows that ancient Earth was warm enough for liquid water.”

Some have proposed that a habitable Earth is the result of many lucky turns, but that hardly counts as a scientific view.

Now, Airapetian proposes that giant solar flares might somehow have got passed Earth's magnetic field. Having reached the atmosphere, they could destroy molecular nitrogen:

“Nitrogen is an essential component for life on Earth, but the young Earth probably only had its molecular form, N2, which is useless for life. Solar particles from flares could split these molecules apart, allowing nitrogen to take more biologically useful configurations. Nitrous oxide, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, could have kept the climate cosy, for example.”

Here the worldview of the researcher (and the reporter) runs the show. And more is to come:

“As a bonus, similar reactions would have also made hydrogen cyanide, which can further react to form organic molecules like amino acids.”

However, chemicals don’t turn into life. Every attempt to solve the naturalistic origin of life dilemma has been an utter failure, as life only comes from life.


Source:

Sokol, Joshua. 2016. Cranky young sun could have kickstarted life on Earth. New Scientist (23 May).

Humans Are “Evolving” in Britain – But It’s Not the Darwinian Variety of Change

Modern Brits in old battle gear. Image courtesy of David Friel, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).




Joel Kontinen


Evolution in action is a catchphrase that Darwinists use when they think that they can see small changes within one and the same species. It often has to do with finches turning into finches or bacteria turning into bacteria.

But when that species happens to be us (H. sapiens), it is bound to make bold and misleading headlines.

According to an article in Science:

“ ’Being able to look at selection in action is exciting,’ says Molly Przeworski, an evolutionary biologist at Columbia University. The studies show how the human genome quickly responds to new conditions in subtle but meaningful ways, she says. ‘It’s a game-changer in terms of understanding evolution.’ ”

So what happened?

Genomic studies show that there are more blond and blue-eyed Brits now than in Roman times and they tend to be taller than what their ancestors were some 2,000 years ago.

But is this evolution in the orthodox Darwinian sense of the word? While the Brits might have been slightly shorter and more dark-haired in the beginning, they were humans, just as they were at the end of the story.

Most evolution headlines have amounted to mere speculations. Here are some examples:

· Human evolution is over.
· Eating meat made us human.
· The human hand is primitive.

And it is quite a stretch to claim that humans are evolving, when the research merely looked at Anglo-Saxons. I don’t see such changes in me, for instance. While I’m probably a bit taller than the average legionary (ok, maybe some change here), my hair (brown) and eyes (greyish-green with a touch of brown) have obviously forgotten to evolve with the times.

But, then, I’m not British, even though I like my 5 o’clock tea (milk but no sugar, just like the Queen). Or am I digressing?

Source:

Pennisi, Elizabeth. 2016. Humans are still evolving—and we can watch it happen. Science. (17 May).

Complex Beauty in Sunflowers: Fibonacci Numbers and Even More Complicated Patterns Defy Darwinian Explanations

More complex beauty in sunflowers than we assumed. Image courtesy of Jon Sullivan, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

The more we get to know about nature, the more complex it appears to be. Think about sunflowers, for instance. Commenting on a recent paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, an article in Science says:

“Mathematical biologists love sunflowers. The giant flowers are one of the most obvious—as well as the prettiest—demonstrations of a hidden mathematical rule shaping the patterns of life: the Fibonacci sequence, a set in which each number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, ...), found in everything from pineapples to pine cones.”

This kind of beauty is also seen in us.

The Royal Society paper reports on a citizen science experiment, with data on 657 sunflowers.

The researchers also “found more complex Fibonacci structures not previously reported in sunflowers,” which means that they could not use mechanistic models to explain this beauty.

This suggests that the beauty in the flowers is much more complex than we thought. Darwinists will have a hard time in trying to explain how such fine-tuning could have evolved.

Source:

Bohannon, John. 2016. Sunflowers show complex Fibonacci sequences. Science (17 May).

New Mystery: “Sleeping” Trees Don’t Fit In Well With Darwin’s World

The tree sleeps tonight?




Joel Kontinen

We knew trees and other plants display signs of intelligence, but we obviously never expected them to sleep.

Now, however, New Scientist has an intriguing article on “sleeping” trees:

“They don’t snore, but might creak during their slumbers. For the first time, trees have been shown to undergo physical changes at night that can be likened to sleep, or at least to day-night cycles that have been observed experimentally in smaller plants.”

While it might be too early to say that trees actually sleep, they obviously do seem to lessen their activity, at least a little:

“Branches of birch trees have now been seen drooping by as much as 10 centimetres at the tips towards the end of the night.”

There might be an obvious explanation for this:

“Photosynthesis stops in the dark, so this in itself may explain why the branches droop,” says András Zlinszky (Centre for Ecological Research in Tihany, Hungary), who recently wrote a paper on the nocturnal life of birches with Eetu Puttonen (Finnish Geospatial Research Institute) and other colleagues.

However, we do know that trees and other plants are not dumb. Smart plants use clever tricks to avoid being eaten, and the Venus Flytrap seems to be able to count.

Professor Richard Karban (University of California, Davis) has said, “‘Plants communicate, signaling within [themselves], eavesdropping on neighboring individuals, and exchanging information with other organisms’. They have adaptive responses that, if they happened at speeds humans understand, would reveal them to be ‘brilliant at solving problems related to their existence.’ ”

This does not sound like a Darwinian world at all. The real world is full of intelligent features. So perhaps trees do sleep. Who knows?

Source:

Coghlan, Andy. 2016. Trees seen resting branches while ‘asleep’ for the first time New Scientist (18 May).