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You Cannot Promote Truth With Lies!

Not long ago, I wrote an article about how Dr. Richard Dawkins attributed a quote to St., Augustine, but the quote turned out to be 100% false. A while before that, I wrote an article about how an evolutionist and a young-earth creationist both mangled quotes by C.S. Lewis in order to make it sound like Lewis believed things that he didn’t believe. Well, here’s yet another example of someone using made-up quotes in an attempt to prove her point of view.

This article comes from World Net Daily, which is not exactly a paragon of responsible journalism. It was written by Marylou Barry, and it tries to make the case that scientists don’t believe in evolution because of the evidence. Instead, they believe it because they dogmatically reject the idea of a Creator. This, of course, is absurd, as there are many, many Christians who believe in evolution. If belief in evolution is based on the rejection of a Creator, no Christian would accept it. Nevertheless, Marylou Barry tries to make the case, and she does so by quoting famous scientists. Some of the quotes sounded a bit odd to me, so I did some checking. It turns out that many of them are either made up or taken completely out of context.

Let’s start with a simple one. Ms. Barry reports:

“Evolution is unproved and improvable, we believe it because the only alternative is special creation, which is unthinkable,” wrote the late Sir Arthur Keith, physical anthropologist and head of the Anatomy Department at London Hospital.

Since she doesn’t bother to source any of her quotes, I had to do a bit of research. The only source that has been given for this quote can be found in Comparative Views on Origins. The author (Brock Lee) claims that this quote comes from the forward to 100th anniversary edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, 1959.¹ The problem with this reference is that Sir Arthur Keith died on January 7, 1955. That’s a full four years before this book was supposed to have been published! Keith did write an introduction to an edition of The Origin of Species that was published by J. M. Dent. However, it was published in 1928, and Keith’s introduction does not contain anything even approaching the quote that Barry gives. In the end, then, this is simply a made-up quote, and it doesn’t belong in any legitimate discussion of evolution.

Now if this were just one example among many quotes, I might be able to overlook Barry’s irresponsible behavior. Unfortunately, several other quotes in the story are either made up, edited, or taken way out of context.

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The Northeast Homeschool Convention

This past weekend, I spoke at the Northeast Homeschool Convention, the last of the 2012 Great Homeschool Conventions. While it had the lowest attendance of all the Great Homeschool conventions, there was a lot of enthusiasm, and I had a great time talking to (and with) home educators and their children.

For example, I had a wonderful conversation with a young lady who had just finished her junior year of high school. She told me that she really liked physics, but she didn’t like the mathematics associated with it. As a result, she had a hard time deciding what she would major in when she went to university. After talking with her for a while, I told her that it sounds like she enjoys science in general, not specifically physics. I suggested that she should go for a “natural science” major, which is common at many universities. Then, as she pursued that major, she might find the specific area of science that has the right mix of characteristics for her. During the course of the conversation, I found out that she was attending the University of Washington on a full-ride scholarship in gymnastics!

Of course, in addition to speaking with home-educating parents and their children, I also spoke to them. I gave a total of six talks at the convention, and (as always) I had a question/answer time after each. One of the talks was called Life and Its Amazing Design. In that talk, I discuss how the design I saw in nature convinced me of the existence of God, even when I was an atheist. I also discuss how that same observation convinced noted atheist philosopher Dr. Antony Flew that God does, indeed, exist.

Those who try to shut their eyes to the design that clearly exists in nature often try to point out what they think are “bad designs,” and vestigial structures are often given as examples. The problem is that very few vestigial structures really exist. In the talk, I discuss how at one time, evolutionists thought there were as many a 83 vestigial organs in the human body.¹ However, over time, important functions have been found for all but one (the male nipple). In the course of making this point, I highlight the function of the appendix, as biologists still misinform the public that it is a vestigial organ.

During the question/answer time, a student said the common evolutionary response is that vestigial structures don’t have to be useless. Instead, they can evolve to perform some new function as the old function becomes unnecessary. I agreed with him that this is the common evolutionary response. However, I cautioned him that this is a very new response. It is certainly not what evolutionists thought throughout most of the history of the evolutionary hypothesis.

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Tragedy and Faith

nathan — My nephew, Nathan, who recently passed away.

Tragedy. There’s just no other word for it. My nephew, who was only 18 years old, died in an automobile accident. He and some friends were on their way to a fish camp to celebrate the end of school. They weren’t drinking. They weren’t doing drugs. The driver probably was speeding. They hit a rut in the road, and the truck they were in flipped over…into a swamp. Thankfully, there were people close by who were able to get the teens out safely…except for my nephew. He drowned before he could be rescued. His life ended after a mere 18 years.

Not too long ago, my aunt died. Her death was not a tragedy. She lived a full, happy life. She married, had a wonderful son, and truly enjoyed her life to the fullest. She had a strong faith, and she positively impacted a lot of other people. It was hard to say goodbye to her, and I miss her a lot, especially when I am playing cards at her favorite hangout, the American Legion Post in Lapel. But death is a part of life, and you expect it for people who are getting on in years.

Nathan was not getting on in years. He was in the prime of his life. He was taken from this earth before he could get married, have children, or even start a career. His parents will never know the joy of experiencing his college graduation, his wedding day, or the birth of his children. There will forever be a hole in their hearts, because a huge part of their lives was taken from them far, far, far too soon. Parents should never have to bury their children. It just isn’t right.

So what are Christians to do when faced with such a tragedy? Are they supposed to wonder why God took Nathan so young? Are they supposed to come up with some reason for why this had to happen? Are they supposed to make sense of it all? I don’t think so.

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Cells Might Actually Communicate with Each Other Using LIGHT!

This is a magnified image of a paramecium like those used in the experiment. (Click for credit)

I was reading an article on Dr. Cornelius Hunter’s blog the other day, and he mentioned a 2009 study of which I was not aware. I was surprised by what Dr. Hunter wrote, so I read the study myself and became even more surprised. Quite frankly, I nearly fell off my chair. I try to stay relatively informed on major advances in the sciences, but somehow, I missed this one entirely.

What am I talking about? It involves cellular communication. Biologists have been studying how cells communicate with one another for quite some time. In order for any multicellular organism to survive, the cells must cooperate with one another. As a result, they must communicate. Generally, this is done through chemical means: one cell releases a chemical into the environment, and other cells interact with that chemical, producing an effect. In the human body, for example, your insulin-producing cells (technically called the islets of Langerhans) release insulin into your bloodstream. When cells in your liver, muscle, and fat tissues detect the insulin, they respond by absorbing sugar from the blood. This regulates your blood sugar levels.¹

Even when not part of a multicellular creature, cells in groups often communicate with one another. When bacteria group together in a colony, for example, they communicate with one another so that they can do things like forage for food as a group and form coherent structures such as biofilms.² Once again, however, most of the research that has been done on how this communication takes place focuses on chemicals that the cells release into their environment.

The study to which Dr. Hunter referred looked at an entirely different means of cell-to-cell communication, and if its conclusions are correct, the method is nothing short of amazing.

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More Evidence Against Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

In September, a high-energy physics group released some results indicating that they saw neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. This is a violation of Einstein’s special relativity, so it was met with much skepticism. Earlier this year, the group announced that it had found a problem with its experimental setup, and it wasn’t clear whether or not their result was valid. Well, another group has performed a similar experiment at the same laboratory, and they found that the neutrinos were not moving faster than light. I think it’s now safe to say that the faster-than-light neutrino result was incorrect.

The 2012 Transit of Venus

I had the rare opportunity to watch Venus pass in front of the sun yesterday. This is called a transit, and it’s a rare event because the orbit of Venus around the sun is tilted relative to the earth’s orbit around the sun. As a result, Venus passes between the earth and the sun frequently, but it rarely passes directly between the two. However, every now and then Venus lines up directly between the earth and the sun twice in a period of eight years. When this happens, you can see Venus as a black dot passing across the face of the sun. It happened in 2004, but the weather in my area was too cloudy to see it. It happened again yesterday, and this time, the weather was a bit better. It wasn’t completely sunny, but there were enough patches in the clouds to actually see something. That’s good, since it won’t happen again until 2117, and I doubt that I will be alive then!

Since you can’t look directly at the sun in order to see the transit, I rigged up my own “transit viewer,” made from a pair of binoculars, a camera tripod, a threaded rod, two nuts, a metal ruler, a bungee cord, a sheet of cardboard, a sheet of white paper, a spool of soldering wire, and lots of tape:

As you can see, the binoculars were not made for the tripod, so I used the bungee cord to hold them in place. I used a threaded rod, two nuts, a metal ruler, and tape to hold a screen made from cardboard and white paper behind the binoculars. That way, the image of the sun would be projected through the eyepieces and onto the screen. Because the ruler and screen were heavy, I needed a counterweight to keep the threaded rod hanging straight along the angle at which the binoculars were pointed, and the spool of soldering wire worked great for that.

Below the fold, you will find some pictures of what I saw.

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Information Is A Real, Physical Quantity

bookburn — Getting rid of information requires a release of energy.

When you read these words, you are receiving information. Some would call the information “too sciency, too nerdy,” but it is information nonetheless. But what, exactly, is information? Is it a real, physical quantity, or is it some esoteric construct of the mind? Rolf William Landauer spent a lot of time thinking about this question. That’s not surprising, because he was a physicist who worked for IBM, a company that deals with lots of information. In 1961, he wrote a paper for the IBM Journal of Research and Development in which he argued that information is a real, physical quantity that is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As a result, in order to erase information (such as when a file is deleted from a hard drive), a certain amount of energy must be released.¹

It is important to understand what Landauer meant. He didn’t mean that it takes energy to erase information. For example, if you want to erase the writing on a whiteboard, you have to expend energy wiping the markings off the board. That makes perfect sense, but it’s not what Landauer was referring to. He said that in order for information to be erased, energy must be released into the environment. The very act information being destroyed, regardless of the method, requires a physical response: a minimum amount of energy must be released. This is because information is a real, physical quantity and is therefore governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Now the Second Law of Thermodynamics is misunderstood and misused frequently (you can read more about that here and here), so let’s start with what the Second Law actually says. It says that the entropy of the universe must always increase or at least stay the same. It can never decrease. What is entropy? It is a measure of the energy in a system that is not available to do work. However, a more useful definition is that it is a measure of the disorder in a system. The larger a system’s entropy, the “messier” it is. Using this concept of entropy, then, we can say that the disorder of the universe is always increasing or at least staying the same: the universe never gets more ordered.

Now let’s apply this concept to a computer disk. A computer disk has a bunch of bits, and each bit can have a value of either 0 or 1. On a blank disk, all the bits have the same value. Let’s say it’s 0. However, as you start putting information on the disk, the bits change. Some stay at their original value (0), but others change (they become equal to 1). So as more information gets put on the disk, there are more possibilities for the values of the bits. If you were to erase the disk again, you would set all those bits back to 0. When you do that, the disk gets more ordered. While there was information on the disk, it was possible for many of the bits to have a value of 1. When you erase the disk, that’s not possible anymore – all the bits have to have a value of 0. From the point of view of the disk, then, when you erase the information, the disk gets more ordered.

If the disk gets more ordered when information is erased and nothing else happens, the universe would become a bit more ordered, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids this. Thus, in order to follow the Second Law, the very act of erasing information must release energy. Furthermore, that energy must be large enough to disorder the universe as much as or more than the disk became ordered. That way, the decrease in entropy of the system (the disk) will be offset by the increase in entropy of the disk’s surroundings so that the total entropy of the universe remains the same or increases. Landauer even used the Second Law of Thermodynamics to predict the minimum amount of energy that must be released for each bit of information that is erased.

This idea remained theoretical for more than 40 years, but it was recently tested by experiment, and it seems that Landauer was correct.

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Rapid Change in Lizards: An Example of Post-Flood Diversification

Nearly a week ago, a student sent me a web article about a study that slipped by me in 2008. According to the student, the study has been used by Richard Dawkins to show that evolution can produce entirely new structures in animals. This bothered the student, and he asked me to take a look at the web article to see what I thought of the study. Of course, the first thing I had to do was find the actual scientific paper upon which the web article was based. Once I read through the scientific paper, I thought it provided a great example of what young-earth creationists think happened after the worldwide Flood.

As I have mentioned previously, young-earth creationists are in debt to Charles Darwin, because he allows us to understand how an ark filled with two of every kind of animal (and seven each of the clean kinds) could produce all the biological diversity we see today. In case you aren’t aware, God did not command Noah to put every species of animal on the ark. Instead, He instructed Noah to take every kind of animal that needed protection from the Flood onto the ark. We young-earth creationists think that “kind” is a much broader term than “species.” For example, there are many species of cat today (tigers, lions, jaguars, domestic cats, etc.). However, we think that God created only one kind of cat.¹ As a result, only two cats went on the ark, and all the cats we see today have descended from that one pair of cats.

This is why Charles Darwin is so critical to a young-earth understanding of biological history. We think that variation and natural selection are what produced all the species of cats we see today. As the one pair of cats went out from the ark, they reproduced, and their progeny spread out. As the progeny encountered new environments, they adapted to those new environments via variation and natural selection, just as Darwin envisioned.

Where we differ from modern evolutionists is that we think biological change is limited by genetics. There is a certain amount of information in a genome, and varying what kind of information is expressed in the organism will produce all sorts of diversity within a genome. However, it is not possible to add information to a genome, so it is not possible to fundamentally change a genome. Thus, while a specialized cat (like a tiger) can come from two unspecialized cats (such as those that were on the ark), there is no way that a horse can come from those cats. The genomes of horses and cats are too fundamentally different.

The study this student sent me provides a perfect example of how that works and how quickly it happens when the environment demands it!

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The Long Beach, California Homeschool Convention

sign — The convention center's suggestion to homeschoolers.

This past weekend, I spoke at the California Homeschool Convention, which is one of the Great Homeschool Conventions. Many home educators attend conventions like this one to get advice from various “experts” on homeschooling, and for this convention, it seems that even the convention center where the event was held wanted to put in its two cents. The facility put out the sign shown on the left, and it was the first thing most people saw as they drove into the convention center. Obviously, the advice is sound, and I hope that the attendees took it to heart!

I gave a total of six talks at the convention, and most of them were for the teens. However, there was one, entitled “What Are They Doing Now?”, that is specifically for the parents. The talk focuses on homeschool graduates and what they are doing with their excellent education. First, I share some statistics, such as the fact that homeschool graduates are more likely to have college degrees and more likely to be in college than their non-homeschooled peers.^1,2 I then turn to a discussion of some individual homeschool graduates who are, literally, making the world a better place.

The homeschool graduates I talk about are all doing amazing things. For example, one is a medical doctor and bioethicist, another is an undercover operative for an intelligence agency, and still another is part of a non-governmental organization that is making better nutrition available to those in third-world countries. Many of them have impressive degrees, and many of them skipped university and started making a positive difference in the world right out of homeschool.

I met one of those graduates who started changing the world right out of homeschool. At the ripe old age of 17, she felt the Lord leading her to an orphanage in Monrovia, Liberia. This was not part of some organized trip, and she didn’t know anyone there. She simply felt the leading of the Lord, convinced her parents, and ended up going to that terribly dangerous country because she wanted to help those who had no hope. The orphanage specialized in adopting these children out to parents in developed countries, giving them a chance for a safe, happy life. She thought the Lord wanted her to be a part of such a life-changing ministry.

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Colony Collapse Disorder: This Might Be the Cause

If you don’t follow the news as it relates to science, you might not be aware of a genuine threat to our food supply that was identified six years ago: Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Many beekeepers have experienced the disappointment of checking their hives to find one of them mostly empty. While this is to be expected, most beekeepers report it happening rarely – on the order of one hive in five each year. Starting in the winter of 2006, however, some beekeepers started reporting losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives. This unusual increase in beehive loss has continued, and the problem is called CCD.

Why should we worry about CCD? Doesn’t it just mean there may be a shortage of honey one day? Absolutely not. Bees are critically important in the reproduction of many flowering plants. They collect pollen from flowers and take it back to their hive, as shown in the picture above. The big yellow “globs” on their legs are pollen sacs that are full of pollen. However, while they are collecting pollen, they can’t help but transfer some of it from one flower to another. That transferred pollen fertilizes the egg cell that is held in the female part of the flower, producing a new plant that gets packaged into a seed. The seed is further packaged in a fruit, which provides food for animals and people.

So without bees, animals and people would have a much harder time finding food. Now as far as we know, wild bees are not affected by CCD. As a result, it is doubtful that CCD will destroy the food supply in nature. However, hives that are maintained by beekeepers are responsible for fertilizing all sorts of commercial crops. As a result, if beekeepers continue to lose hives, there will eventually be a shortage of bees available for crops, which will result in higher food prices. These higher prices will not be limited to fruits, because some fruit products (such as almond hulls) are used for feeding livestock. In the end, many foods will become more expensive if CCD continues at its current rates.

Scientists have been looking for the cause of CCD for quite some time, and many avenues have been investigated. However, there haven’t been any studies that have proved particularly promising…until now.

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