Ultrasound image of one fetal twin caressing the other's back (Image from PLoS One)Those who want to say that a child inside the womb is not a human life have to ignore some very basic science. For example, they have to ignore the plain genetic evidence, which is found in the “blueprint” that makes each person. Of course, I am talking about the person’s DNA. While not all of a person’s characteristics are based on his or her DNA, most of them are. In other words, DNA contains the overall framework that makes a person who he or she is. More importantly, there is no other organism on the planet that has a genome like a human being’s genome. Thus, as soon as a person’s DNA forms, a human life has begun. When does that happen? It happens at the very moment of conception. At that moment, when the person is composed of just one cell, a human life has begun. Probably the best statement regarding this fact comes from Dr. Jermoe L. LeJeune, the brilliant geneticist who was the first to demonstrate a link between certain diseases and chromosomal abnormalities. While testifying before a U.S. Senate Subcommittee, he said:1
To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence
If you want to believe that a baby in the womb is not a person, then, you have to ignore the plain experimental evidence. LeJeune’s quote comes from 1981, and since them, more and more experimental evidence has been stacking up to show that a baby in the womb is most definitely a human being. The latest evidence to be added to the pile comes from ultrasound investigations of twins in the womb.
Not too long ago, a commenter asked about a “Goldilocks Planet” that had recently been discovered by Steven Vogt and his colleagues. The term refers to a planet that is thought to be close enough to its star to be warm, but not so close that it is unbearably hot. In other words, it is supposed to have a temperature that is “just right” for the existence of life.
Steven Vogt and his colleagues thought they had found such a planet in Gliese 581g. It is supposed to orbit a red dwarf (Gliese 581) with a period of 37 days. While this puts it very close to its star, Vogt and his team think it is hospitable to life because the red dwarf is cool compared to the sun.
In response to the commenter, I expressed my skepticism, not because I have a problem with the idea of extraterrestrial life, but because astronomers have been wrong in their assignment of “Goldilocks” status before. In addition, even if the planet is at the right distance from its star, there are a host of other conditions necessary for a planet to be hospitable to life.
Well, now there is another reason to be skeptical. The planet may not exist!
Suppose you wanted to get video from outer space, but you didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money. What would you do? For the cost of an iPhone (which was recovered), an HD video camera (also recovered), a parachute, some Styrofoam, tape, handwarmers, weights, and a balloon, these guys did it!
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.
Image licensed from www.clipart.comWhen people ask me why I am such a staunch advocate of homeschooling, I tell them it’s because I have seen the products of home education, and they are very impressive. While I was on the faculty at Ball State University, for example, I had students who graduated from public schools, students who graduated from private schools, and students who graduated from homeschools. In my experience, the homeschool graduates were truly head and shoulders above the others. This led me to look at academic studies that evaluated the efficacy of home education, and those studies echoed my experiences – When it comes to academics, homeschooled students are simply a cut above the rest. That’s why I am such an advocate of homeschooling.
Of course, a lot of universities recognize this fact. IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana makes it very clear on their website. They say:
Over 150 students have enrolled at IUPUI with home school backgrounds and as a group these students have academically excelled and out-performed the general student population.
Stanford University (like most serious universities) actively recruits homeschoolers, and they accept a higher percentage of their homeschooled applicants than the rest of their applicant pool. Jonathan Reider, an admissions officer at Stanford university explains why:
The distinguishing factor is intellectual vitality. [Homeschooled] kids have it, and everything they do is responding to it.”
Boston University agrees. They followed their homeschool graduates for several years and found their average GPA was 3.3 out of 4.1 That’s a sold “B.”
It’s not surprising, then, that when other universities examine their homeschooled population, they find real success.
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.
It is sad that parents are misinformed by those who are against vaccination. It is sadder still that children are not as healthy as a result. The saddest thing of all, however, is how innocent children suffer because of anti-vaccination misinformation. This year, we are witnessing the fruits of this misinformation: the suffering and death of innocent children.
According to the California Department of Public Health, there have been 4,461 cases of whooping cough (pertussis) reported throughout the state so far this year. The majority of those are confirmed cases, but 19% are considered probable cases, while 18% are merely suspected cases. This is the largest number of reported cases since 1955. At least 217 of these cases resulted in hospitalization, and 9 resulted in death!
What is causing this sudden surge of whooping cough? Well, there are actually two effects. First, like most contagious diseases, whooping cough goes through cycles of years when it is not very prevalent and years when it is very prevalent. This year is in the “very prevalent” part of the cycle. Second, over the past few years, there has been a significant reduction in the vaccination rate, due to misinformation promulgated by those who are against vaccinations.
The use of peer review is standard in most scientific journals. (Image Licensed from www.clipart.com)Peer review is one of the most important concepts in scientific publishing. When I submit a scientific article to a serious scientific journal, it is generally reviewed by people who are experts in the relevant subject in order to determine whether or not the article is worthy of publication. These people are called “peer reviewers,” and it’s their job to determine whether or not there are any errors in the paper, whether or not the paper’s conclusions are reasonable based on the bulk of the data, whether or not the conclusions and/or data are novel or interesting enough to merit publication, etc. In short, the peer-review process is supposed to ensure that only “quality” scientific articles get published in the scientific literature.
I used the concept of peer review heavily when I wrote my award-winning science textbooks. Even though I have a PhD in nuclear chemistry, I don’t know everything there is to know about chemistry. Thus, in order to ensure that my chemistry text was accurate, I had other PhD chemists (and one high school teacher) review the book to catch errors so that I could correct them. As I started writing textbooks that were further and further from my field of expertise, I had to rely on peer review more heavily.
While the concept of peer review is an excellent one, the execution of it in modern science has been questioned in many different ways. Some scientists think that peer review tends to enforce orthodoxy, making it very difficult for new and revolutionary ideas to be published. Others see peer review as a way for the reviewers to keep people they don’t like from getting published. Others say that is a way for reviewers to punish their rivals.
Over the years, several studies have tried to address the validity of the peer-review process, and unfortunately, the results have not been very good.
Over the course of my scientific career, I have been drug, kicking and screaming all the way, to the conclusion that radioactive half-lives have probably not been constant over the course of earth’s history. Because of this, I have written about observations that indicate the half-lives of certain isotopes seem to depend on the distance between the earth and the sun. The essence of the story is that investigators have been measuring the activity of certain isotopes over several years, and there seems to be a periodic variation in their half-lives. The half-lives increase and decreased based on the season. In addition, when a solar flare was observed, a marked decrease in the half-life of one isotope was observed. As I stated in my previous post on this subject, I think the researchers have done a good job eliminating the possibility that the observed variations are due to some artifact of the experimental procedure.
So if the observed variations in half-lives are real, what is causing them? Well, the sun emits tiny particles called neutrinos as a result of the nuclear fusion that is powering it. The distance between the earth and sun would affect how many of those neutrinos hit the earth. The closer the earth is to the sun, the more neutrinos would hit the earth. In addition, the number of neutrinos hitting the earth increases during a solar flare. The observations indicate that in both cases (during solar flares and when the earth is closest to the sun), radioactive half-lives increasedecrease. In other words, radioactive decay slows downspeeds up when the sun is hitting the earth with more neutrinos. Based on this reasoning, some nuclear scientists have proposed that neutrinos coming from the sun are somehow inhibitingaccelerating radioactive decay. [ADDITION (5/10/17): A colleague informed me that I had the proposed neutrino effect backwards, so I corrected the wording, as indicated by the deletion marks and boldfaced type.]
The viability of that explanation was recently tested by a rather clever experiment, and the results of the test indicate that neutrinos are probably not responsible for the observed variation in half-lives.
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.
