Category: Creationism

A Million Visitors in Just Under Three Years – Amazing!

As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I have some problems with the Answers in Genesis ministry. At the same time, however, Jesus tells us that we must judge a tree by its fruit (Luke 6:43-45), and the fruits of the Answers in Genesis ministry show that it is a very good tree.

One of those fruits is the wonderful Creation Museum, which just recently welcomed its one millionth guest. This is a remarkable achievement, given the fact that the museum has been around for less than three years.

What makes the museum so popular? Well, unlike many museums, it actually makes its visitors THINK. Rather than just mindlessly repeating the dogma of the day regarding origins, it actually shows how strongly a person’s preconceived notions can affect the conclusions that he or she draws from the scientific data. It also has a lot of world-class displays, including one of the famous fish eating another fish fossils and an amazing discussion of the construction processes that could have been used by Noah to build the ark.

There are some things I don’t like about the museum, but they pale in comparison to the things I like about it. I know most evolutionists are furious about the Creation Museum, and it’s easy to understand why. The more people think, the less they will believe in evolution!

Cameleon Tongues – Another Example of Amazing Design

A chameleon using its tongue
The design we see in nature is powerful evidence for the existence of God. Indeed, it is so powerful that it forced world-renowned atheist Antony Flew to admit his lifetime of scholarship was wrong and that God must exist. The more we learn about this planet and the life on it, the more we stand in awe of that amazing design. The chameleon is an excellent example of this trend. For a long time, scientists have known about the amazing design features of the chameleon. The more we learn, however, the more amazing chameleons become!

For quite some time, biologists have puzzled over why a chameleon’s tongue is not affected by the temperature. After all, chameleons are cold-blooded. In other words, they cannot regulate their internal body temperature. As a result, their internal body temperature changes with the temperature of their surroundings. The colder the surroundings get, the colder the internal temperature of a chameleon gets.

Well, the colder the temperature, the slower the chemical reactions that power an animal’s muscles. Because of this, cold-blooded animals show a significant reduction in muscle action the colder the surroundings become. However, a chameleon’s tongue shows no significant reduction in action, even when the temperature dips almost to the freezing point of water! This is strange, because the tongue is a muscle, and all the chameleon’s other muscles are affected by temperature. Why not the tongue? Biologists now know the answer to that question, and it is remarkable.

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Wasp Pharmacology

A beewolf wasp
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wasp_August_2007-12.jpg
Beewolves are solitary wasps that typically prey on bees. The females dig tunnels and then drag their bee prey into the tunnels, where they lay their eggs on the bee. That way, when the larvae hatch, they have a ready source of food. There are several species of beewolves, but one in particular, Philanthus triangulum, loves to prey on honeybees, which makes it a pest for beekeepers.

Scientists from both the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and the University of Regensburg studied the reproductive process of this species, and they found an amazing thing: the female uses a cocktail of antibiotics to protect her young.1 Where does the female get those antibiotics? From bacteria that she cultures in her antennae!

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I Get E-MAIL

It is always wonderful to hear from students who use my courses and then experience spectacular success in university-level science courses. As readers of my blog already know, this happens a lot, and it is a nice reminder of how effective a young-earth creationist education can be.

However, every now and again I get a report about how effective a young-earth creationist education can be for pursuits other than university. Here is an example:

I would like to take this opportunity to express my profound appreciation for your stellar science products. My wife and I homeschooled our daughter through high school and used your biology, chemistry, advanced chemistry, and physics courses. Our daughter graduated last May and is now in paramedic school. Though all of the other 22 students ranging in age from recent high school graduates, to adults/post high school and college, etc. are struggling with patho-physiology and pharmacology, our daughter is not….as a matter of fact, she is excelling and earning the highest grades the instructor has ever given! She is able to converse with the medical director on a very high level having never taken any college courses prior to beginning these classes. She is affectionately known as “the overachiever”, the “guru”, and the “brain” who tutors everyone else. Thankfully, the other students do not see her as a threat, but as an asset. She feels that [your books were] wonderful preparation for the intensity of these classes, and we feel the same way.

It’s great to know that this person’s daughter is going to be out there saving lives. In addition, because of her commitment to sharing her expertise with others, there will probably be a few other paramedics out there who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to pass their training. This is all thanks to a young-earth creationist education and a student who took it seriously. It turns out young-earth creationism is not only good for science, it is good for public health!

Bacterial Batteries?

A schematic of the bacterial flagellum.
Image in the public domain.
The bacterial flagellum has become a symbol of the intelligent design movement, and rightly so. After all, bacteria are commonly recognized as the “simplest” organisms on the planet. Nevertheless, these “simple” organisms can make an amazingly well-designed locomotive system. Well, it turns out that the flagellum isn’t the only example of the amazing things that bacteria can construct. It seems that they can construct batteries as well!

I saw a blurb about this in the March 1, 2010 issue of Chemical and Engineering News, so I went online to find more information. I found this article on Nature News. According to the article, Lars Peter Nielsen of Aarhus University (in Denmark) did some experiments to see how bacteria are able to consume organic compounds and hydrogen sulfide in sediments that have very little oxygen. You see, in order to use these compounds, the bacteria have to oxidize them, which means that have to remove electrons from them. In order to remove electrons from the chemicals they consume, however, the bacteria have to “put” those electrons somewhere else. In most organisms, the electrons go to oxygen molecules. This process, reasonably enough, is called oxidation, and it is the reason you and I breathe. We take in oxygen so that we can oxidize our food, which produces energy for us to live.

It is very easy to understand how most organisms oxidize their food, because most organisms are exposed to a reasonable amount of oxygen in the air they breathe or the water in which they swim. However, there are lots of sediments (on the sea floor, for example) that are low in oxygen underneath the surface of the sediments. Nevertheless, bacteria in those oxygen-poor sediments seem to oxidize organic compounds and hydrogen sulfide just fine. Nielsen wanted to know how they accomplish this feat.

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Still MORE Problems for Abiogenesis

A hydrothermal vent deep in the ocean. Some origin-of-life researchers hope that life could arise under such conditions.
Image from the NOAA.
I have blogged a lot about the myriad problems facing the idea that life arose naturally. Even those who want to believe in it admit that all origin-of-life experiments are miserable failures, producing only minute quantities of the simplest molecules of life, along with enormous amounts of “goo” that would be detrimental to life. Stephen Meyer’s seminal work, Signature in the Cell, points out the terrible informational problems that any origin-of-life scenario faces. Dembski and Wells point out that the very existence of so many different scenarios for the naturalistic origin of life indicate just how implausible it really is.

Now origin-of-life researchers face another huge problem – oxygen. You see, most evolutionists who accept scientifically irresponsible dating methods are confident of the fact that earth’s atmosphere didn’t have much oxygen in it until about 2.4 billion years ago. At that point, according to the evolutionary narrative, the evolution of photosynthesis allowed the carbon dioxide in earth’s ancient atmosphere to be converted into oxygen. This is called “The Great Oxidation Event,” and it is crucial to any evolutionary narrative.1

Why is this “Great Oxidation Event” crucial to evolution? Because all origin-of-life scenarios currently under consideration require earth’s atmosphere to be very low in or completely devoid of oxygen when life first evolved. A significant amount of oxygen would destroy any hopes of producing the molecules of life, as reactions with oxygen would convert them into chemicals that would not be useful in the chemistry of life.

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More on Slime Molds

About a month ago, I wrote about an interesting study on slime molds.

This organism is surprisingly intelligent!
(Image from KeresH at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dog_vomit_slime_mold.jpg)

Even though they have no brain or other kind of “central processing unit,” they can figure out what the most nutritious food is for them, and they can adjust their shape and eating habits to make sure they get as much nutrition as possible.

These results surprised many scientists, because slime molds are supposed to be primitive creatures.

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Young-Earth Creationism Is Good for Science

There is a great article on the Creation Ministries International website called “Why Young-Age Creationism Is Good for Science.” The author (Brent W. Smith) makes some excellent points, so I would like to summarize what he says and then add one thought. You can tell Mr. Smith is a philosopher by how he summarizes his argument:

The basic idea is that [young-age creationists] offer to the current origins science establishment a competing rational viewpoint that will augment fruitful scientific investigation through increased accountability for scientists, introduction of original hypotheses, and general epistemic improvement.

If you don’t know what “epistemic improvement” means, you just need to know that epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and limitations of knowledge. It attempts to understand how we know things, how knowledge is acquired, and what knowledge actually is. Thus, in this case, “epistemic improvement” means an improvement in our understanding of what we can know through scientific inquiry.

Obviously, young-earth creationism will improve the epistemology of science, because it continually argues with the establishment about what we can learn from scientific data. For example, the fact that soft tissue has been found in fossils that are supposedly millions of years old can lead us to make one of (at least) two different conclusions: (1) Soft tissue can be preserved over time periods previously not thought possible or (2) The fossils aren’t really millions of years old. Those who believe in a billions-of-years old earth tend to support option (1), and young-earth scientists tend to support option (2). Each side tends to look for data that support its position.

If it weren’t for young-earth creationists, option (2) would not be considered. Thus, scientists would assume that option (1) is what we can learn from the data, and they would go on their merry way, never wondering if the data could mean something else. Young-earth creationists, however, will collect data to try to support their position, which will at least allow for some evaluation of what we can learn from the fact that soft tissue has been found in these fossils. If option (1) ends up being correct, then at minimum, there has been an evaluation of what this fact tells us rather than just an assumption of what it means. If option (2) ends up being correct, then a long-running mistake in science will be fixed. Either way, science wins!

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Some Evolutionists Just Never Learn

You would think by now that even evolutionists would finally admit that there is very little (if any) DNA in a living organism that could be described as “junk DNA.” However, they are still out there doing it. For example, in a rather pathetic attempt to refute Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, evolutionary biologist Dr. Francisco Ayala made the following statement:

There are also lots and lots of DNA sequences that are nonsensical. For example, there are about one million virtually identical Alu sequences that are each three-hundred letters (nucleotides) long and are spread throughout the human genome. Think about it: there are in the human genome about twenty-five thousand genes, but one million interspersed Alu sequences; forty times more Alu sequences than genes. It is as if the editor of Signature of the Cell would have inserted between every two pages of Meyer’s book, forty additional pages, each containing the same three hundred letters. Likely, Meyer would not think of his editor as being “intelligent.” Would a function ever be found for these one million nearly identical Alu sequences? It seems most unlikely.

But the fact is that functions have been found for these Alu sequences and other sequences like them. It is amazing that an evolutionary biologist doesn’t seem to know this.

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99%? 95%? 87%? 70%? How Similar is the Human Genome to the Chimpanzee Genome?

I recently got an E-MAIL from a student who heard a “university professor” say that the human and chimpanzee DNA are 99% similar. She asked whether or not the professor was correct and, if not, how similar is human DNA to chimpanzee DNA?

Well, the answer to her first question is quite easy. The professor was horribly wrong. The nonsensical idea that human and chimp DNA are 99% similar comes from misinterpreting a 1975 paper by Mary-Claire King and A. C. Wilson. 1 This groundbreaking (for its time) article compared several proteins in chimpanzees to their equivalent proteins in humans.

In case you don’t know, proteins are complex molecules that are composed of many smaller molecules (called amino acids) linked together. The primary structure of a protein is simply the order in which its amino acids link up. King and Wilson showed that in many, many proteins, the difference in the primary structures of chimpanzee and human proteins was about 1%. Since DNA determines the order of amino acids in each protein an organism makes for itself, they made the reasonable inference that for the portions of DNA that code for those proteins humans and chimpanzees are 99% similar.

However, the genes that code for these proteins make up a tiny, tiny fraction of the human or chimp genome, and only SOME of those proteins were studied. Thus, the idea that one can extend that number to the entire genome and say that human and chimp DNA are 99% similar is just absurd.

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