Creationism Archives : Page 11 of 29 : Proslogion

Ken Ham and Bill Nye the Anti-Science Guy

On February 4th at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, Ken Ham and Bill Nye will debate the question, Is creation a viable model of origins?

More than a year ago, Bill Nye was in an anti-science video that tried to convince people the creationist view should be censored. As I pointed out then, this is an incredibly anti-science notion. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only example of Mr. Nye’s anti-science behavior.

Nevertheless, I now have to give Mr. Nye some credit for doing something very pro-science: He is going to debate Ken Ham on the question, “Is creation a viable model of origins?” The debate will take place on February 4th at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It is good to see that Nye is stepping away from his promotion of censorship and is interested in actually engaging the creationist view. I tried to order tickets online as soon as they were available, but the event seems to already be sold out!

Now even though this is a positive step towards a more pro-science attitude for Bill Nye, many evolutionists are trying to convince him to be more anti-science. As one Christian-turned-secular-humanist put it:

Will the Bill Nye-Ken Ham Debate Advance the Secular Cause? Of course not. Debates are all about the faithful on each side saying their side wiped the floor with the other side. I am not sure why Bill Nye decided to debate Ken Ham. Nothing good can come of it.

I obviously disagree. I think debate is usually a good thing, because it allows us to hear another point of view from someone who actually believes in that view. For the creationists who attend the debate (and I suspect they will be the large majority), they will hear from an evolutionist who actually believes in evolution. This will be good, because most likely, much of what they hear about evolution comes from creationists. For the evolutionists in attendance, they will hear about the creationist point of view from a creationist. This is also good, since most of them have probably never bothered to get the creationist view from someone who actually believes it.

In an effort to help Mr. Nye with his budding pro-science attitude, I will give him a piece of advice: Be Prepared!

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DNA Is Even More Sophisticated Than We Thought!

DNA_wide — The information in DNA is stored in sequences of four different nucleotide bases (A, T, C, and G). In a gene, three nucleotide bases code for a specific amino acid, and that three-nucleotide-base sequence is called a 'codon.' (click for credit)

Over the years, scientists have learned a lot about DNA. Nevertheless, the molecule continues to surprise us with its exquisite design. Not long ago, scientists demonstrated that a single gram of DNA can store about 500,000 CDs worth of information. It has also been shown that the code used by DNA to store this information has been specifically designed to allow living organisms to respond to their environment in many different ways. In addition, we know that DNA stores its information in “modules” that can be rearranged in many different ways. This allows a single stretch of DNA to contain many different meanings, depending on how the modules are put together.

In the December 13 issues of Science, researchers have demonstrated yet another incredible design feature of DNA, and according to the University of Washington, the scientists who made the discovery were “stunned.” To understand what was done and what the discovery means, however, you need a little bit of background information on DNA and how it is used by the cell.

DNA stores its information in sequences of nucleotide bases called adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C). As shown in the illustration above, those nucleotide bases link together to hold DNA in its familiar double helix shape. The meaning of each sequence depends on where it is in the molecule. In many organisms, a small fraction of the DNA is made up of genes, and in most of the organisms with which you and I are familiar, the genes consist of two regions: exons and introns. The exons of a gene contain the recipe that tells the cell exactly how to make a protein. This recipe is given in groups of three nucleotide bases, which are called codons. Each codon specifies a certain chemical called an amino acid. When the cell stitches amino acids together in the sequence given by the codons, it makes a useful protein.

Introns are “spacers” that exist between the codons in a gene. Once derided by evolutionists as “junk DNA,” we now know that introns are a powerful means by which the exons are split up into functional information modules. The cell can stitch the modules together in different ways, so that a single gene can instruct the cell on how to make many different proteins. This is called alternative splicing, and it is a incredibly powerful design feature that allows DNA to store its information with amazing efficiency. Indeed, thanks to alternative splicing, there is a single gene in fruit flies that can tell the cells to make 38,016 different proteins!¹

Now don’t get lost in all the terminology. Think of it this way: genes tell the cell how to make proteins. However, to increase the information storage capability of DNA, these genes are split into two regions: exons and introns. The introns separate the exons into modules of useful information, and the cell stitches those modules together in different ways so that a single gene can tell the cell how to make lots and lots of different proteins.

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An Odd View of an Old Debate

Carl Strock is a journalist-turned-columnist who recently retired from the Schenectady Gazette after 25 years of service. After he traveled to Israel and wrote some decidedly anti-Israel columns, the Gazette received numerous complaints. In response, his editor told him to stop writing about Israel for a while and submit all of his columns to her for editing. This bothered Strock, because he saw it as censorship. After continuing his columns with less frequency, he eventually retired. However, he has not stopped writing. He has a blog at the timesunion.com and has written a book, From D’burg to Jerusalem, The Unlikely Rise and Awful Fall of a Small-Town Newsman.

Why am I writing about Mr. Strock? Because in his book, he mentions a debate he had with me back in 2006. I had actually forgotten about the debate, but when a reader in Schenectady told me about being mentioned in his book, I recalled the event. I got his book and planned to read the entire thing, but it just isn’t my cup of tea. However, I did read some parts of the book, including the chapter that discusses the debate. I found his view of that event to be very odd.

Here’s what prompted the debate: Strock had written some columns in the Gazette regarding creationism and intelligent design. Since he obviously knew little about either subject, his columns provoked some rather heated responses, which he seemed to find surprising. Eventually, he tired of people pointing out his ignorance, so he said:

I will meet any of them in open forum, and we’ll see who’s ignorant of what. (p. 161)

A student who was using one of my textbooks at the time contacted me, and (of course) I agreed to meet Mr. Strock in open forum. Strock was surprised, but he agreed to the debate. I thought the debate was amatuerish but informative. Based on what he has written in his book, he obviously disagrees.

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The Bacterial Flagellum: More Sophisticated Than We Thought!

flagellum1 — This is a schematic of a bacterium's flagellum (image in the public domain).

The bacterial flagellum is a symbol of the Intelligent Design movement, and rightly so. After all, bacteria are commonly recognized as the “simplest” organisms on the planet. Nevertheless, their amazingly well-designed locomotive system has continued to amaze the scientists that study it. In 1996, Dr. Michael Behe highlighted the intricate design of the bacterial flagellum in his book, Darwin’s Black Box. While some have tried to explain it in terms of Neo-Darwian evolution, they have not come close to succeeding.
Not only is the bacterial flagellum amazingly well-designed, it is far more versatile than anyone imagined.

Some bacteria (like Escherichia coli) have multiple flagella, which makes it very easy for an individual to navigate in water. All the bacterium has to do is adjust which flagella are spinning and how they are spinning, and the single-celled creature can do acrobatics in the water. However, the vast majority of bacteria have only one flagellum. It was thought for a long time that because of this, it is difficult for them to make sharp turns in the water.

Two years ago, this thinking changed abruptly when a group of physicists from the University of Pittsburgh showed that the bacterium Vibrio alginolyticus, which has only one flagellum, can make sharp turns with ease. They showed that in order to execute such a turn, the bacterium backs up, lurches forwards, and swings its flagellum to one side.¹ The entire maneuver takes less than a tenth of a second and results in a 90-degree turn. So not only is the bacterial flagellum an exquisite “outboard motor” that propels the bacterium through the water, it is also a rudder that allows the bacterium to make sharp turns at will!

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Sofishsticated Swimming

This is a glass knifefish like the one used in the study (click for credit)

Many aspects of nature are a mystery to science, and at least part of the reason is that nature has been designed so incredibly well. There are systems running in nature that are simply too complex for us to understand and, as a result, their functions remain a mystery. Not all that long ago, for example, many biologists were silly enough to actually think the human genome was mostly junk, simply because they couldn’t understand what the vast majority of the human genome does. Of course, as we have learned more about DNA, we have learned that what was once considered “junk” is vitally important (see here, here, and here, for example). Since the Encode project published its first major results, most reasonable biologists have slowly started to realize what creationists have said all along – there really isn’t much (if any) junk DNA.

Even on a larger scale, there are many aspects of nature that are very hard to understand. A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America provides an example:¹

Animals often produce substantial forces in directions that do not directly contribute to movement. For example, running and flying insects produce side-to-side forces as they travel forward. These forces generally “cancel out,” and so their role remains a mystery.

Why would a moving animal expend energy to produce forces that are perpendicular to its motion? Those forces don’t contribute to the animal’s forward motion, and they tend to cancel each other out. As a result, they are often called “antagonistic forces.” Such forces seem like an utter waste of energy. Nevertheless, lots of animals do this. In addition, some animals exert antagonistic forces even when they are not moving in a given direction. Hummingbirds, for example, produce antagonistic forces when they are hovering over a flower.

To understand the purpose of antagonistic forces, the authors of the study examined the glass knifefish (Eigenmannia virescens). When this fish is “hovering” in the water, it uses its fins to produce antagonistic forces. It has been thought that these forces might improve the fish’s ability to control its position and orientation in the water, but no one understood how.²

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“Oil” in Weeks, Not Millions of Years

In 2008, plant pathologist Dr. Gary A. Strobel and his colleagues published a paper about an odd fungus (Gliocladium roseum) they found in a Patagonian rainforest. It is endophytic, which means it lives within a plant and takes nutrients from the plant, but it is not a parasite. Other endophytic fungi have been shown to produce all sorts of benefits to plants, including giving them much-needed chemicals and allowing them to communicate with one another, so this fungus probably gives some benefit to the plants in which it grows. However, that wasn’t the focus of Dr. Strobel’s paper. Instead, he and his colleagues noted that this fungus actually produced a wide variety of chemicals, including those found in diesel fuel! As the authors stated:¹

The hydrocarbon profile of G. roseum contains a number of compounds normally associated with diesel fuel and so the volatiles of this fungus have been dubbed ‘myco-diesel’.

The prefix “myco” means “fungus,” so the authors basically were calling some of the chemicals that G. roseum produces “fungus diesel.”

Well, it seems that Dr. Strobel and his colleagues have been busy trying to coax G. roseum to make more “fungus diesel,” and they have produced some rather dramatic results. They built a tabletop device they call “The Paleobiosphere”², which is supposed to mimic the conditions under which oil might form. It consists of two layers of shale, a type of rock that often contains oil. Sandwiched in between those two layers is a mixture of the fungus as well as leaves from maple, aspen, and sycamore trees. The container is flooded with water periodically, and in a mere three weeks, the shale layers contain a rich mixture of chemicals that is very similar to the oil found in the shales of Montana!

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The Great Debate, Take 2

The skulls of some primates. Based on genetics, most evolutionists believe the chimpanzee is our closest living relative, but physical characteristics indicate the orangutan is. (click for credit)

Last night I once again debated Dr. Robert A. Martin, a vertebrate paleontologist who is professor emeritus at Murray State University. The previous debate was on the broad subject of creation versus evolution. This time, the organizers of the event wanted us to narrow our discussion, so we chose to talk about dinosaurs and people. Before I discuss the debate, I want to thank Dr. Martin for participating in it. I personally think the best way to understand an issue is to hear from multiple sides, so I think debates can be extremely helpful to those interested in controversial topics. However, it is difficult to get evolutionists to participate in debates about the creation/evolution controversy. I thank Dr. Martin for being committed to education strongly enough to be an exception to that general rule!

Since Dr. Martin had the weaker position scientifically, I allowed him to choose whether to present his case first or second. He chose to go second, so I was up first. The initial activities (songs, introductions, and remarks from the organizers) made it clear that for some reason, the audience this year was overwhelmingly creationist. The previous year, creationists were in the majority, but there were many evolutionists present. That didn’t seem to be the case this year, so I started by thanking Dr. Martin for being willing to act as a lion in a den of Daniels.

In making my case, I concentrated on the evidence that indicates dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old. I stressed the soft tissue that is being found in fossils that are supposed to be millions of years old (see here, here, here, here, and here, for example). I also discussed the fact that several dinosaur bones from different locations around the world all have enough carbon-14 in them to indicate that their maximum age is less than 40,000 years old. I also discussed how living organisms like the coelacanth, Wollemi pine, and tuatara falsify the geological-column thinking that leads most scientists to conclude that humans and dinosaurs didn’t live at the same time.

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Relationships in Nature Go Deep – Really Deep!

It has long been known that the species of jewel wasp pictured above (Nasonia vitripennis) can mate with another species of jewel wasp (N. giraulti), but the male offspring die in their larval stage. This, of course, keeps the species separate. Scientists have always assumed that the death of the male larvae must have something to do with an incompatibility between the two species at the genetic level. However, a recent study indicates that’s not true. The real reason the males die off is because their bacteria are incompatible with them.

Each species has bacteria living in its gut, helping it digest food, fight off infection, etc. However, the actual mix of bacterial species is different in each wasp species. When male larvae that came from the interbreeding of the two species were given antibiotics to kill off those bacteria, the larvae were able to survive. They weren’t incredibly healthy, but they were as healthy as purebred wasps that also had no bacteria living inside them. However, when bacteria from either species were introduced back into the larvae that came from interbreeding, they died! In the end, then, the males don’t die because of genetic incompatibilities. They die because of bacterial incompatibilities. As ant taxonomist Dr. Corrie Moreau commented:¹

I would never have predicted that…We were blown away.

So in some way that we don’t currently understand, the bacteria that live in the gut of these two species of jewel wasps so fundamentally affect their development that the wasps cannot survive unless they are compatible with a specific mix of bacteria. Interestingly enough, this isn’t the only case of bacteria affecting the development of an animal.

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People Weren’t The First to Develop an Internet!

mycorrhizae1 — This microscope image shows an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus in a clover plant's roots.
(Click for credit.)

The microscope picture above shows you a clover root (the mostly transparent material in the picture) whose cells have been “infected” with a fungus (the thick, dark material in the picture). At first glance, you might think the fungus is a parasite that takes nutrients from the plant, but that’s not really true. While the fungus does take nutrients from the clover, it also supplies the plant with critical nitrogen- and phosphorus-based chemicals that the plant has a hard time extracting from the soil. This is a mutually-beneficial relationship, which is often called a mutualistic relationship.

As anyone who has read this blog for a while knows, I am fascinated by such relationships. I have blogged about them many, many times before (see here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example). In fact, I have blogged about this specific kind of mutualistic relastionship before. It is called a mycorrhiza, and it is very, very common in nature.

About 95% of all vascular plants develop mycorrhizae,¹ and these relationships come in many different forms. For example, in the relationship shown above, the fungus forms a highly-branched structure called an arbuscule, which comes from the Latin word arbusculum, which means for “little tree.” This arbuscule is formed inside the walls of the root’s cells, and the fungus is called an arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungus. Such fungi cannot exist by themselves. They can only exist as a part of a mycorrhizal relationship. There are other forms of mycorrhizae as well, but the study I want to discuss is specifically about AM fungi.

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The Blue Planet

Astronomers call earth “the blue planet,” because when you look at it from space, it often appears blue. That’s because most of the earth is covered with water, which reflects blue light better than the other colors of light. So when white light from the sun hits the earth, more blue light is reflected than any other color (as long as there isn’t an enormous amount of cloud cover).

The Cassini space probe that is currently in orbit around Saturn recently had a chance to photograph the earth. It appears as the tiny blue dot pointed out in the photo above. Please click on the photo to get the full-sized version. It really is magnificent. At the time the photo was taken, the earth was 898 million miles away from the Cassini space probe. Nevertheless, it appears as a vivid blue dot on a mostly dark background. In addition, if you “zoom” in close enough, you can actually see the moon orbiting the earth:

cassini1 — The earth (left) and moon as seen from 898 million miles away.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) Click for a full-sized version.

Notice the differences between the earth and the moon. The moon is smaller, but more strikingly, it appears a stark white next to earth’s blue.

The earth has been intricately designed as a haven for life. Its blue color is a beacon proclaiming that, and the beacon can be seen from nearly 900 million miles away!