Impossible Planets: Some Exoplanets Shouldn’t Exist, If Naturalistic Theories Were Right

HR 8799b is an “impossible planet.” Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/G. Bacon (STSCI).





Joel Kontinen

“Nature is smarter than our theories.”

This is how Roman Rafikov, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, commented on exoplanets that according to naturalistic planet formation theories are in the wrong place.

We can thank HR 8799b for this admission. It is a distant giant or a huge planet that orbits very far from its star.

Science has a longish article on how exoplanets don’t fit in with traditional naturalistic thinking:

“When astronomers discovered the first exoplanet around a normal star 2 decades ago, there was joy—and bewilderment. The planet, 51 Pegasi b, was half as massive as Jupiter, but its 4-day orbit was impossibly close to the star, far smaller than the 88-day orbit of Mercury. Theorists who study planet formation could see no way for a planet that big to grow in such tight confines around a newborn star. It could have been a freak, but soon, more ‘hot Jupiters’ turned up in planet searches, and they were joined by other oddities: planets in elongated and highly tilted orbits, even planets orbiting their stars ‘backward’—counter to the star’s rotation.”

And this is hardly the end of the matter. The article introduces distant giants:

“Ground-based telescopes … have found giant planets several times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting their star at more than twice the distance Neptune is from the sun—another region where theorists thought it was impossible to grow large planets. Other planetary systems looked nothing like our orderly solar system, challenging the well-worn theories that had been developed to explain it.”

Astronomers used to believe that giant planets migrated to the orbits they now follow, but some are not convinced by this explanation.

Science publications often describe exoplanets as ‘weird’, ‘anomalies’ or even ‘impossible.’ Some are so weird that no theory can explain their formation.

Recently, astronomers found a planet with three suns.

The diversity we are beginning to see in exoplanets is staggering. It’s a far cry from the one-size- fits-all model.

What is obvious is that Earth is a unique planet. Some astronomers are willing to admit that there’s no place like home in the entire universe.

So, if nature looks smart, there most probably is a reason for it. I would suggest that the answer is not blowing in the wind, but should be sought in the Supreme Designer, who is the Father of all Ingenuity.

Source:

Clery, Daniel. 2016. Forbidden planets: Understanding alien worlds once thought impossible. Science (28 July).

Speaking Orangutan Is a Darwinian Illusion

This ape cannot speak.




Joel Kontinen

A captive orangutan has learnt to utter something that sounds a bit like hoo or huu, and this has inspired Darwinists to speculate about the evolution of language.

New Scientist gives us a summary of what occurred:

“An orangutan has shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the communications of ancestral great apes.”

This account is heavily biased towards Darwinism. The ape did not utter a single human word, but only a few sounds – or perhaps ‘grunts’ is a more befitting description.

Evolutionists were nonetheless impressed, as they tend to be when something like this happens:

“ ‘Rocky’ the ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a ‘conversational context’.”

Then the storytelling attempts to reach the stratosphere:

“ ‘This opens up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans,’ says lead researcher Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, UK.

His team conducted a game in which the ape mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made vowel-like calls.”

The orangutan’s calls are a far cry from language. Parrots and some other birds can do a lot better, yet evolutionists don’t get carried away by their prowess.

When it comes to speech, apes and monkeys just don’t have the necessary organs. No amount of wishful thinking can be of any help.

For Darwinists, the origin and evolution of language is an enigma. Some refer to it as Darwin’s problem (but it’s not his only one). It cannot be solved by storytelling.

However, they have tried a variety of approaches, for instance apes gesticulating with their arms, taming ourselves, gorilla song, ape laughter, and marmoset communication featuring listening.

But none of them are convincing. Apes differ too much from us.

Whereas some would say that the monkeys’ loss of voice control kept them from evolving language, a more plausible view is that only humans are programmed to learn language.

And that sets us apart from all other creatures. Only humans were created in the image of God.

Source:

New Scientist staff and Press Association. 2016. Orangutan learns to mimic human conversation for the first time. (27 July).

Egyptian Statue Confirms the Bible Was Right About Hazor

Hazor is a treasure trove of ancient buildings and artefacts. Image courtesy of האיל הניאוליתי, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0.).





Joel Kontinen

An Egyptian limestone statue measuring 45 X 40 centimetres sheds light on the time of Joshua. It was excavated at Tel-Hazor, north of the Sea of Galilee.

Tel-Hazor is the largest excavation site in Israel. Archaeologists have made many important discoveries at Hazor, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, during the past 30 years.

Earlier this year (2016) they found part of an Egyptian statue. Science Daily reports:

“Only the lower part of the statue survived, depicting the crouching feet of a male figure, seated on a square base on which a few lines in the Egyptian hieroglyphic script are inscribed.

...

This is not surprising considering the special status of the king of Hazor who was the most important king in Southern Canaan at the time. The extraordinary importance of Hazor in the 15th-13th centuries B.C.E. is indicated also by the Biblical reference to Hazor as 'the head of all those kingdoms' (Joshua 11:10).”

Secular researchers often use B.C.E. instead of B.C. to count the years before Christ’s birth, but that does not change the fact that the statue hails from the time of Joshua:

“The population of Hazor in the second millennium BCE is estimated to have been about 20,000, making it the largest and most important city in the entire region. Its size and strategic location on the route connecting Egypt and Babylon made it 'the head of all those kingdoms' according to the biblical book of Joshua (Joshua 11:10). Hazor’s conquest by the Israelites opened the way to the conquest and settlement of the Israelites in Canaan.”

Archaeology is a friend of the Bible. It confirms biblical history, people, buildings, places and even catastrophes such as earthquakes.

Statues, coins, ossuaries (bone boxes) and seal impressions show names mentioned in the Bible.

This should not be a surprise for us. After all, the Bible describes the true history of mankind accurately and reliably.


Source:

Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 2016. Historic find: A statue of an egyptian official at tel-hazor in israel. Science Daily (25 July).

Evolutionists Acknowledge They’re Proposing a Just So Story about Apoptosis

Apoptosis is anything but simple. Image courtesy of Pierre Fauquenot and Margaux Belhassen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).



Joel Kontinen


What would evolution be without its just so stories?

It might probably sound a bit more boring. Stories make good headlines, even if their credibility might be questionable.

Recently, the journal Current Biology published a paper entitled Just So Stories about the Evolution of Apoptosis.

Apoptosis means programmed cell death. Without it, cells would keep on living past their due dates, causing cancer and other unpleasant diseases.

The paper’s abstract says:

“Apoptosis is a form of active cell death engaged by developmental cues as well as many different cellular stresses in which the dying cell essentially ‘packages’ itself for removal. The process of apoptotic cell death, as defined at the molecular level, is unique to the Metazoa (animals).”

What it does not say is that like some molecular machines, apoptosis is irreducibly complex.

It could not have evolved through a stepwise Darwinian process. All parts had to be present at the start, or the mechanism would not work.

However, the paper attempts to explain why apoptosis can be seen in many different life forms:

“Yet active cell death exists in non-animal organisms, and in some cases molecules involved in such death show some sequence similarities to those involved in apoptosis, leading to extensive speculation regarding the evolution of apoptosis.”

Their use of the word 'speculation' seems to be an honest definition of what they are trying to do:

“Here, we examine such speculation from the perspective of the functional properties of molecules of the mitochondrial apoptotic cell death pathway. We suggest scenarios for the evolution of one pathway of apoptosis, the mitochondrial pathway, and consider how they might be tested. We conclude with a ‘Just So Story’ of how the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis might have evolved during eukaryotic evolution.”

'Just so story' might also be a befitting description of what they’re trying to do. It is often used in an attempt to keep the Divine Foot outside, as professor Richard Lewontin famously suggested.

Controlled cell death is a very complicated process. In 2002 Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for identifying genes that control apoptosis.

For more details, I would suggest you read Philip Bell’s excellent article on apoptosis in the Journal of Creation.

It shows how such a process could not have evolved.

Sources:

Bell, Philip. 2004. The non-evolution of apoptosis. Journal of Creation 18(1): 86–96.

Green, Douglas R. and Patrick Fitzgerald. 2016. Just So Stories about the Evolution of Apoptosis. Current Biology 26 (13): R620–R627 (11 July).

Is Dark Matter Dead? Two-Year Experiment Didn’t Find A Whiff

Some would see dark matter in this picture. Image courtesy of NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (Racah Institute of Physics/The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI),G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA.





Joel Kontinen

This summer has not been good for dark energy, one of the several unknown factors used to prop up the Big Bang. Some astronomers want to get rid of it.

And now it seems that dark matter is faring even worse. A two-year search for this elusive stuff found absolutely nothing.

Astronomers believe that this stuff should “be made up of particles that have some mass and interact weakly with other matter,” as New Scientist puts it; hence the name weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

But a fancy name does not mean that it really exists. In the standard model, i.e. the Big Bang, dark matter is needed to keep galaxies together, otherwise they might fly apart and the universe would be a mess.

Writing in New Scientist, Jacob Aron says: “What’s unknown is how often these particles bounce off each other – their scattering cross section – and their mass. They should also occasionally bump into normal matter. These rare collisions are what experiments like the Large Underground Xenon detector (LUX) are designed to pick up, in order to determine WIMPs’ properties.”

But they didn’t find “a single whiff”.

Basically, the Big Bang model says that in the beginning there was a quantum fluctuation that occurred for no reason at all, and then the universe suddenly accelerated for no reason, breaking all cosmic speed limits during a brief epoch called inflation.

The BB model should have produced as much antimatter as there is matter and thus blown everything up.

Obviously, it didn’t. Instead, we see a finely tuned universe in which early galaxies grew too fast for the Big Bang.

Everything in our cosmic neighbourhood points to Divine foresight.

God by His sovereign wisdom created a habitable place for us.

Source:

Aron, Jacob. 2016. Dark matter no-show puts favoured particles on death row. New Scientist (21 July).

Did Noah’s Flood Leave Rivers Beneath Greenland’s Glaciers?

Nuuk. Nowadays Greenland looks like this. Image courtesy of Oliver Schauf, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Many geological discoveries suggest that our planet was once much warmer than it is now. We have read of Arctic dinosaur fossils, camel fossils in Canada, pollen from tropical trees in Antarctica
and a fossilised tropical forest in Norway, to name just a few examples.

We can probably add another interesting discovery to this list. An article posted on Live Science gives the gist:

“A network of ancient rivers lies frozen in time beneath one of Greenland's largest glaciers, new research reveals.”

The article then mixes data and assumptions, featuring belief in millions of years:

“The subglacial river network, which threads through much of Greenland's landmass and looks, from above, like the tiny nerve fibers radiating from a brain cell, may have influenced the fast-moving Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier over the past few million years.”

We shouldn’t forget that that no one has actually dated the rivers and radiometric dating has serious defects.

It almost always is in conflict with dates obtained through the molecular clock approach.

Michael Cooper, a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Bristol, UK, who with his colleagues wrote a paper on the rivers, thinks that the

“Shape of the valleys and canyons beneath the ice [suggest that they were] likely formed by rivers cutting the rock away over time, rather than by the glacier.”

He points out that the valleys were V-shaped instead of being U-shaped. He proposes that they were formed before the ice age.

That might well have been during or just after the great Flood.

Huge aquifers in arid Northern Kenya, a semi-desert known for its Born Free books and TV series featuring the lioness Elsa and her cubs, might likewise be remnants of Noah’s Flood.

Mountain gaps and massive fossil graveyards also speak of a universal watery catastrophe.

We can’t be absolutely sure whether the hidden rivers are relics of Noah’s Flood but that seems to be a valid interpretation. What we know is that they are a glimpse into a world that differs a lot from ours.

Source:

Ghose, Tia. 2016. Secret World of Primeval Rivers Lies Beneath Greenland Glacier. Live Science (5 July).

Thank Evolution for Bad Science

Is Charles Darwin culpable for bad science?



Joel Kontinen

The scientific community is facing a huge crisis.

Increasingly, researchers are publishing results that others can’t replicate. Scientific misconduct is on the rise. Many papers have been retracted, as scientists were less than rigorous in their research.

Unfortunately, at least one good paper was also retracted for no other reason than its use of two non-Darwinian keywords.

Now two scientists are proposing an interesting reason for increasing scientific misconduct: evolutionary forces.

Writing in New Scientist, Simon Oxenham says:

“Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath at the University of California Davis used an evolutionary theory-based computational model to analyse the problem of bad science. They found that ‘the most powerful incentives in contemporary science actively encourage, reward and propagate poor research methods and abuse of statistical procedures’. In short, it’s natural selection for shoddy science.”

Well, if that is what evolution-believing researchers think, how can we trust anything they say?

While scientists are fond of using words like ‘innovative’, ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘novel’ in the abstracts of their papers, they tend to exaggerate the importance of their findings:

“Smaldino and McElreath found that their model pushed researchers to do less rigorous science, and publish more false positives. They suggest that their model shows that bad science can be explained as a result of the evolutionary selective pressures that are acting on scientists.”

Putting it in slightly different words, it seems that scientific misconduct thrives in the Darwinian community.

For instance, evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser, a champion of Darwinian morality, was accused of scientific misconduct.

So perhaps we should thank evolution for bad science.

Source:

Oxenham, Simon. 2016. Evolutionary forces are causing a boom in bad science. New Scientist (8 July).