Posted by jlwile on August 25, 2010
One of the fundamental ideas behind the evolutionary hypothesis is that organisms fall in a range from “simple” to “complex.” The organisms that are supposed to be simple, like bacteria, are assumed to be more reflective of the kinds of organisms that existed on earth a few billion years ago. As the evolutionist waves the magic wand of time, it is assumed that those “simple” organisms slowly evolved into “complex” organisms. What we see on earth today, then, is a range of complexity in nature. “Simple” organisms (like bacteria) are reminiscent of the first kinds of organisms that existed on earth, and “complex” organisms (like mammals) are the products of the long, slow process of macroevolution.
Of course, this goes counter to the creationist view. In the creationist view, organisms do not fall in a range from “simple” to “complex.” Instead, as my coauthor and I stress throughout our biology book, there is no such thing as a simple organism. Even organisms like bacteria are marvelously complex. Thus, if there is a range of complexity in creation, it is from “really complex” to “ridiculously complex.”
The more we learn about science, the more it confirms the creationist view of complexity. Organisms that evolutionists call “simple” are actually amazingly complex.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on August 1, 2010
Tom Siegfried holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University, where he majored in chemistry, history, and journalism. He earned a master of arts from the University of Texas at Austin with a major in journalism and a minor in physics. I know of him because he is currently the Editor in Chief of Science News. I read that journal regularly, and since he often writes an editorial that appears on the second page of each issue, I have read a lot of his work. He is a talented writer, and he has a good grasp of a broad range of scientific issues. He also seems to have a lot more faith than I could ever muster.
In a recent editorial on origin-of-life research1, Mr. Siegfried made some statements that illustrate what a paragon of faith he really is. After remarking that humans have been trying to puzzle out how to create a simple form of life, he says:
It doesn’t sound like it should be that hard. After all, sometime not quite 4 billion years ago, lifeless molecules gathered somewhere on Earth and self-assembled into an entity that spawned the planet’s full repertoire of ancestral life-forms–without help from any fancy laboratory equipment.
Mr. Siegfried is quite confident that once upon a time, lifeless chemicals randomly interacted to produce something that eventually evolved into all the amazing living organisms we see today. He believes this despite the fact that every origin-of-life experiment has been a miserable failure, which makes him a true paragon of faith.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on July 27, 2010
Which Came First? (image in the public domain)
An article in Science Daily reports on a study that supposedly answers the question, “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?” Unfortunately, while one of the authors gives the correct answer (the chicken), he doesn’t use the correct reasoning. Also, spending time on that question actually distracts from the amazing results of the study, which demonstrate the incredible design ingenuity of the Creator.
The study focuses on chicken eggs. Specifically, it focuses on the shells of chicken eggs. While you and I (and a baby chick) see the shell as something annoying that needs to be broken, it is actually a marvelously-constructed shield that protects the contents of the egg while allowing them to interact safely with the environment. After all, the contents of the egg need protection, but the embryo needs oxygen, which it must get from the outside world. The egg shell is strong enough to protect the egg’s contents, but it is also porous enough for oxygen (which the embryo needs to take in) to diffuse into the egg and carbon dioxide (which the embryo must expel) to diffuse out.
This marvelous shell is made of a combination of proteins and calcium carbonate crystals. The proteins provide a bit of flexibility, while the calcium carbonate crystals provide strength. Without the proteins, the shell would be too brittle, and without the calcium carbonate, the shell would be too weak. The mother chicken makes both the proteins and the calcium carbonate, but until the study mentioned above was published, there was a big question mark regarding exactly how the calcium carbonate portion of the egg shell was formed.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on July 11, 2010
An interesting article has appeared in the journal Nature, and believe it or not, it uses the concept of Intelligent Design. Now don’t get excited. It doesn’t apply Intelligent Design to biology. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? Instead, the article applies Intelligent Design to the field of anthropology, where the high priests of science still allow the use of such concepts, at least for now.
Simon Parfitt and his colleagues have been looking for clues regarding the earliest presence of humans in Northern Europe. In 2005, they published a study that indicated humans were in Northern Europe long before it was originally thought. Indeed, using scientifically irresponsible dating techniques, that study found evidence of humans in Northern Europe nearly 700,000 years ago,1 which is roughly 200,000 years earlier than had been previously thought.
Now Parfitt has pushed that date back even further. Using data from both magnetic and climate indicators, they say that their newest discovery indicates people were in Northern Europe between 850,000 and 950,000 years ago.2 While their 2005 paper presented anthropology with a bit of a surprise, this one is even more surprising.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on July 6, 2010
Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Sustermans
Image in the Public Domain
Currently, my favorite book on Galielo is Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible by Dr. Richard Blackwell. Published by The University of Notre Dame Press, it gives an unvarnished account of how poorly Galileo was treated by the Roman Catholic Church. In the end, however, this new book might end up becoming my favorite resource regarding this great man of science and faith. Of course, once I am completely finished, I will give it a thorough review.
The purpose of this post is to discuss an amazingly insightful thing written by Galileo way back in 1623. In a work that was meant to refute an interpretation of comets by Orazio Grassi, Galileo wanted to make it clear how little he cared about the opinion of the majority of scientists. He said:
The testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing and not like hauling, and a single Arabian steed can outrun a hundred plowhorses. (p. 93)
Interestingly enough, Galileo was wrong about comets. He thought they were an atmospheric phenomenon, but we now know they are “dirty snowballs” that orbit the sun.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on June 25, 2010
I expect nearly every creationist and Intelligent Design blog will eventually discuss this, but I thought I would throw in my “two cents” about a study that has serious implications for the creation/evolution controversy. Laura Poliseno and her colleagues have published a study in Nature that has demonstrated a function for a class of pseudogenes.1 The study will result in a radical change in biology’s understanding of what has been disparagingly called “junk DNA.”
Let’s start from the beginning. A pseudogene is a section of DNA that looks a lot like a gene that exists in another section of an organism’s genome. However, despite this similarity, the pseudogene does not produce a protein. In other words, suppose a researcher finds a gene that produces a given protein. Let’s call it “gene A.” If the researcher finds another part of the organism’s genome that looks incredibly similar to “gene A” but with a few modifications that make it impossible for the organism to turn it into a protein, that part of the organism’s genome is called a pseudogene.
Since pseudogenes cannot be turned into proteins, it has long been thought that they are the result of a gene being duplicated at some point in history and then being mutated to the point where the gene cannot be used anymore. Indeed, as a commentary in the same issue of Nature says:
Pseudogenes are considered to be defunct relatives of known genes. 2
What Poliseno and her colleagues have conclusively demonstrated is that at least some pseudogenes are anything but defunct, and they might not even be relatives of known genes.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on June 24, 2010
Are some monkeys more valuable than some babies?
Clipart licensed from www.clipart.com
On the front page of that newsletter, there was an article about Wesley J.
Smith, senior fellow at the Institute’s Center for Human Rights and Bioethics. He is a champion of human exceptionalism, the seemingly obvious concept that people are more valuable than other forms of life on this planet. At first, it seemed a bit odd to me that this concept needs a champion, since it is, as one of my chemistry professors used to say, “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.” As I learned from the article, however, there are people who actually attempt to argue against this self-evident idea.
One such person is Peter Singer, professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. In 1979, he published a textbook called Practical Ethics. In 1993, a second edition was published, and that’s the one I found at the library. After skimming parts of the book and reading other parts, I can definitely say that this is one guy who has taken the hypothesis of evolution and twisted it into lunacy.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on June 18, 2010
Bioluminescent single-celled organisms make this wave glow.
Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bioluminescent_dinoflagellates.jpg
Bioluminescence is an amazing thing. Many living creatures use it to “light up” so they can communicate with others, more easily find food, or defend themselves against predators. In the picture above, for example, there are millions of single-celled organisms (called “dinoflagellates”) in the water. When they are disturbed, they use bioluminescence to glow. They are glowing in the picture because the wave is disturbing them. This is actually a defense mechanism. If the water is disturbed by an animal that eats them (such as a manta ray), the dinoflagellates glow, and the light might attract a predator that will eat (or scare away) the manta ray.
E. A. Widder wrote a review1 of bioluminescence in the May 7th issue of the Journal Science, and it is fascinating. As Widder points out, there are over 700 genera (the classification level above species) of organisms that use bioluminescence, and most of them (about 80%) live in the ocean. The mechanisms by which this process works are elegant and amazing, and they certainly defy any coherent evolutionary explanation.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on June 11, 2010
Before the human genome was sequenced, it was thought that humans had well over 100,000 genes. This reasonable conclusion was based on the fact that that the human body is estimated to produce 120,000 – 140,000 different proteins. Since biology had determined that a gene tells a cell how to make a protein, it was assumed that 120,000 – 140,000 proteins would require 120,000 – 140,000 different genes.
As is often the case with science, however, the data turned out to be very surprising. When the human genome was initially sequenced, it was estimated to contain about 30,000 genes. Today, it is thought that the human genome contains 20,000–25,000 genes.1
So if a human cell requires a gene in order to make a protein, and if the human body produces as many as 140,000 different proteins, how can it do so with “only” 20,000–25,000 genes? A large part of the answer to that question has to do with an amazing process called alternative splicing.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
Posted by jlwile on May 31, 2010
A student recently sent me a question based on a statement made in Dr. Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True. Since there doesn’t seem to be much written about it for a general audience, I thought I would summarize the issue. Here is Dr. Coyne’s statement:
One of my favorite cases of embryological evidence for evolution is the furry human fetus. We are famously known as “naked apes” because, unlike other primates, we don’t have a thick coat of hair. But in fact for one brief period we do – as embryos. Around sixth months after conception, we become completely covered with a fine, downy coat of hair called lanugo. Lanugo is usually shed about a month before birth, when it’s replaced by the more sparsely distributed hair with which we’re born. (Premature infants, however, are sometimes born with lanugo, which soon falls off.) Now, there’s NO NEED for a human embryo to have a transitory coat of hair. After all, it’s a cozy 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the womb. Lanugo can be explained ONLY as a remnant of our primate ancestry: fetal monkeys also develop a coat of hair at about the same stage of development. Their hair, however, doesn’t fall out, but hangs on to become the adult coat. And, like humans, fetal whales also have lanugo, a remnant of when their ancestors lived on land.1 (emphasis mine)
Note the strong words by Dr. Coyne. Embryos have “no need” for such hair, and thus its presence can “only” be explained as a remnant of our primate ancestry. Not surprisingly, Dr. Coyne is wrong on both counts.
BUT WAIT…THERE IS MORE! Read on »
