The Faith of Some Evolutionists is Mind-Boggling

I just came across an article in the journal Science called “Irremediable Complexity?” 1 In the article, the authors describe an evolutionary idea called “constructive neutral evolution,” which was first proposed in 1993. The paper starts out stating something that is quite obvious:

Many of the cell’s macromolecular machines appear gratuitously complex, comprising more components than their basic functions seem to demand.

Of course the cell seems “gratuitously complex” to an evolutionist, since an evolutionist is forced to believe that everything found in cells (as well as the cells themselves) developed as a result of random processes acted on by natural selection. You would not expect amazingly complex things to be produced that way. Nevertheless, when you look at cells, you see all sorts of amazing complexity. Of course, those of us who understand science know that the cell’s machinery is not gratuitously complex. It is simply very well designed by a Designer who built a lot of adaptability and diversity into His creation.

The paper goes on to ask how we can understand such “gratuitous complexity” in light of evolution. The real answer is that you cannot. However, that’s not the answer an evolutionist likes, so the authors have to come up with something else. They quickly reject the widely-held adaptationist belief that the complexity is just the result of natural selection preserving any random changes that improve basic function. While they admit that this view can explain some of the simpler aspects of the cell, it clearly fails when discussing some of the really complex parts of the cell.

Their reasoning is quite valid, but their proposed solution takes even more faith to believe than the adaptationist view!

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A Bacterium Walks Into a Restaurant…

We now know that some bacteria can walk
(Click Image for credit)
The hostess says, “Hold on there. We don’t allow bacteria in this fine establishment.” The bacterium says, “It’s okay…I’m staph!” It’s a stupid joke, I know, but at least the beginning isn’t scientifically inaccurate. It turns out that some bacteria can, indeed, walk!

Microbiologists have already shown that bacteria can swim through liquid using their amazingly well-designed flagella. They have also found that bacteria can crawl along a surface. However, no one had ever caught them in the act of walking until a team of UCLA researchers started studying the dynamics of bacterial biofilms.

The researchers were studying Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a species of bacterium found in soil, water, and many human-made environments. It can cause lung, skin, eye, and gastrointestinal infections. Like many bacteria, members of the species can exist as either free-swimming individuals or surface-clinging colonies. The surface-clinging colonies form biofilms.

Interestingly enough, a free-swimming bacterium can be genetically identical to a member of a biofilm. However, because the two different lifestyles have different requirements, some genes are active in the free-swimming bacteria but not in the biofilm bacteria, and vice-versa. This switching on and off of genes produces bacteria that look and behave quite different, even though they have the same genome.

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And I Thought Slime Couldn’t Get Any Better!

Velvet worms make amazing slime! (public domain image)
As a chemist, I have always loved slime. There are so many different kinds of slime and so many different ways to make it! For example, you can make slime at home using glue, water, and borax. You can also make it using water, cornstarch, and some heat. Both slimes are different, and they both bring out the kid in me. Chemistry really can produce great stuff! Of course, nature does a far better job at chemistry than even the best of today’s chemists. Indeed, the best chemists in the most sophisticated chemistry labs on earth cannot begin to make many of the sophisticated chemicals that a “simple” bacterium makes every day!

There is an obvious reason for this, of course. While chemistry has developed over thousands of years and was guided by some incredibly intelligent people, nature was made by God. As a result, you expect nature to be filled with things that put the most amazing achievements of chemistry (and science in general) to shame. Of course, that’s exactly what you find. From the best possible design for the vertebrate eye to the lightning-fast chameleon tongue, nature’s designs are significantly better than anything human science can produce. Indeed, world-renowned atheist Antony Flew had to give up his atheistic faith specifically because of the amazing design he saw in nature.

Well, it turns out that even some of nature’s slime is amazing!

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A Small Brain Does NOT Mean A Low Intelligence

A bumblebee has a small brain but can do complex calculations (click the image for its credit)
As I mentioned in a previous post, because they are not willing to understand that it has been designed by an incredibly intelligent and powerful Designer, evolutionists are forced to look at nature in a ridiculously simplistic way. Take the naive evolutionary idea that brain size correlates with intelligence. Because evolutionists can’t appreciate the incredible design that went into producing brains, they generally assume that the smaller the brain, the lower the intelligence of the organism. Nearly a year ago, I reviewed The Design of Life , which discusses some powerful evidence against this silly notion. Recent research1 on bumblebees has just added more evidence to the pile.

In the research, the investigators wanted to know how a bumblebee decides the order in which it visits flowers. It has been observed for quite a while that bees tend to visit the flowers they have identified as good food sources in a predictable order. In other words, they don’t fly “willy nilly” amongst the flowers they visit. Instead, the have a planned flight route. This has been called trapline foraging, because human trappers typically follow a preplanned route when checking the traps they have set.2

The question the authors wanted to address was how the bees arrive at their preplanned “trapline” route. Do they just visit the flowers in the same order in which the flowers were originally discovered, or is there more thought given to the process? In the end, the researchers were able to show that there is a lot of thought devoted to the process.

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Thank God for Whale Poop!

Sperm whales are amazing divers (Scarred Giant by artist Chris Harman, click picture for reference)
Whales are incredible creatures. They are perfectly designed for a life in the water, even though they breathe air. They can dive to depths that would kill human beings, because their ribcage and lungs are designed to change as they dive deeper. This allows the whales to adapt to water pressures that are simply incredible. Sperm whales, for example, can dive more than a mile underwater.1 At that depth, the pressure the whale experiences is well over 150 times atmospheric pressure!

Many whales have an intricate method of communication that allows them to be highly social. Most social mammals rely on visual cues for communication, but because the water they live in inhibits the effectiveness of visual cues, whales mostly communicate with vocalizations. Dolphins, for example communicate with clicks, whistles, and other sounds. A few years ago, researchers learned that dolphins use their whistles to identify other dolphins by name. Two dolphins that are “talking” might even refer to a third dolphin by name as a part of their “conversation”!2

Well, it seems there is another thing to add to the ever-growing list of what makes whales so amazing: they also have great poop!

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How Bacteria Talk

Evolutionists have always wanted a “simple” life form to exist. After all, to make the leap from nonliving chemicals to living systems, there must be something that is alive in every sense of the word, but at the same time, is reasonably simple. For a long time, evolutionists wanted bacteria to represent that “simple” life form.

As I make clear in my biology textbook, however, there is no such thing as a simple life form, and that holds true for bacteria as well. The more we learn about them, the more we learn how complex they really are. One of the surprises that has emerged in the past few decades is that bacteria actually talk to one another. They have an incredibly complex means of communication, but Dr. Bonnie Bassler (a professor at Princeton University) does an excellent job of describing it in the following video:

Even though it is 18 minutes long, it is worth watching. She not only tells you how important bacteria are to nature and to you, she explains bacterial communication in a very easy-to-understand manner.

What I find interesting about it is how she and I take such a different view of what the data really mean. She says that because we now know bacteria have one language to talk to other members of their own species and a second language to talk to the bacterial community as a whole, it is clear that bacteria really “set up the rules” for communication between cells. Thus, the communication that makes your cells able to work together so that you survive is simply a more advanced version of what bacteria were able to evolve billions of year ago. I look at the same data, however, and see incredible evidence for design. Just as a common genetic code tells us there is a common designer for creation, the fact that cellular communication is common amongst all the cells in creation tells us that cellular communication is the result of a preplanned design.

Regardless of how you look at what these data mean, the facts are amazing, and Dr. Bassler does an excellent job of communicating them!

Here’s What You Do When A Fossil Find Contradicts Evolution

A spider trapped in amber.
(Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Spider_in_amber_(1).jpg)
Many trees produce resin, a thick liquid that typically oozes from wounds in the tree. While some scientists view resin as a waste product of the tree, resins have been shown to protect certain trees from insects, fungi, and other pests.1 Thus, resin is probably something purposefully produced by the tree.

If resin hardens, it forms amber, which is considered valuable both as a component for jewelry as well as a means by which fossils can be preserved. The photo above, for example, shows a spider that has been remarkably well-preserved by amber. It is assumed that the spider was trapped in a tree’s resin, and then the resin hardened around the spider. Because this forms a nearly airtight container, decomposition is greatly reduced, allowing for the formation of an incredibly well-preserved fossil.

Not surprisingly, different kinds of trees will produce different kinds of resin, which leads to different kinds of amber. Currently, there are five known classes of amber, based upon the specific chemical compounds that make up the amber. It has been generally thought (quite reasonably) that the chemicals in the amber are reflective of the kind of tree that originally produced the resin. However, that thinking will have to change in order to preserve the hypothesis of evolution.

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Sex Really Complicates Things!

Drosophila melanogaster (Image by http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Aka)
Evolutionists have always looked at nature in an overly simplistic way. They are forced to do so by their preconceived notions. As I mentioned previously, evolutionists cannot begin to appreciate the complex nature of genetics. If they did, they would understand that mutations cannot possibly add information to the genome and, as a result, they would understand that evolution has strict limits. It can only “tinker” with the genetic information that already exists in a population in order to produce individuals that are more fit to survive certain conditions. We call that “microevolution.” It cannot produce fundamentally new and innovative biological structures, which is what is necessary for macroevolution to occur. Thus, while microevolution (which has been demonstrated in both nature and the lab) is consistent with what we know about genetics, macroevolution (which has never been demonstrated in nature or the lab) is not consistent with what we know about genetics.

Of course, evolutionists won’t give up their overly simplistic view of nature, because it is necessary in order for them to cling to their dogma. As a result, they make many predictions, which time and time again are falsified by the data. Not surprisingly, a detailed study of microevolution in the fruit fly known as Drosophila melanogaster has falsified yet another one of their predictions.

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Every Year, There is Less Junk DNA

Image from http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna.html

The evolutionary mindset produces all sorts of pathologies in modern science, but it has probably wreaked the most havoc in the field of genetics. Because DNA is so incredibly well designed, assuming that it is the result of random processes guided by natural selection has hampered our understanding of it significantly. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the concept of junk DNA. The term was coined by Susumu Ohno back in 1972.1 He applied it to all parts of an organism’s DNA that don’t code for proteins. Back then, it was thought that DNA’s only job was to tell a cell which proteins to make and how to make them. If a portion of DNA didn’t do that, to Ohno and most other geneticists at the time, it was simply junk – a leftover vestige of the evolutionary process. To give you an idea of how unreasonable this evolution-inspired idea is, at one time, it was thought that more than 98% of the human genome was composed of junk DNA!


Of course, creationists have always contended that there cannot be much junk DNA in any organism’s genome. Because DNA is so incredibly well designed, any significant amount of junk DNA would cause all sorts of problems. Imagine throwing a bunch of junk into a race car engine. Do you think the engine would work properly if it was filled with junk? Of course not. Since DNA is designed more elegantly than the fastest race car engine today, it is hard to believe it could function properly if it were filled with junk. The creationist view, then, has always been that while there might be a bit of junk DNA that has come from mutations which have degraded the genome over time, the vast majority of all organisms’ DNA serves important purposes, whether or not we understand them.

Not surprisingly, the more we learn about DNA, the more the creationist view is being confirmed. Time and time, again regions of DNA that have been positively identified as “junk” by evolutionists have been demonstrated to have a necessary function. A recent article in the journal Nature is yet another example of this confirmation process.

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More Evidence Supporting The Young-Earth Theory of Earth’s Magnetic Field

One of my “top five” reasons for thinking that the earth is only thousands of years old comes from studying its magnetic field. As I wrote in the post I just linked, the young-earth theory of earth’s magnetic field (often called the ‘rapid-decay theory’) not only properly reproduces the magnetic fields of the planets, it actually predicted two of those magnetic fields before they were measured. When a theory can make predictions regarding unmeasured quantities and the subsequent measurements agree with the theory, there is strong evidence that the theory is true.

The young-earth theory of earth’s magnetic field not only correctly predicted the magnetic fields of two planets before they were measured, it has made other predictions that were later confirmed by measurement. As discussed in the previous post, it predicted that rocks from Mars should show that Mars at one time had a planetary magnetic field, even though it does not have one today. That was later confirmed. In addition, it predicted that Mercury’s magnetic field has decreased since it was last measured in 1975. MESSENGER, the latest spacecraft to visit Mercury, did a “quick and dirty” measurement of Mercury’s magnetic field in 2008, and the measurement confirmed this prediction, albeit with very large error bars. I eagerly await MESSENGER’S more precise measurement to see exactly how close the young-earth theory’s prediction is to the precisely-measured value.

In the meantime, some geologists have come up with even more evidence for the validity of the young-earth theory of earth’s magnetic field.

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