A Sinosauropteryx fossil showing the 'fuzz' that has been interpreted as either proto-feathers or collagen, (Click for Credit)
In 1996, a farmer and part-time fossil hunter in the Liaoning Province of China found a fossil that he recognized was rather unique. It had all the hallmarks of a dinosaur, but it had some “fuzz” on the head, neck, back and tail that looked like hair or feathers. Over the years, two distinct interpretations of this “fuzz” have emerged. Some scientists, like world-renowned paleornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia, considers it to be nothing more than collagen fibers that remain from skin structures such as frills. Others, like paleontologist Dr. Mike Benton, think it is the remains of “protofeathers,” an evolutionary precusor to bird feathers. Given the current “birds evolved from dinosaurs” craze, you can guess which view is held by the majority of those who have studied the fossil.
Of course, science is not done by majority vote. It is done by examining the data. So what do the data say about this “fuzz?” Well, in 2007, Feduccia and some colleagues published a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In that study, they examined the detailed structure of the “fuzz.” They showed that its structure is exactly what you would expect for protein fibers that would be used to stiffen a system of frills. In addition, they say:1
The fibres show a striking similarity to the structure and levels of organization of dermal collagen. The proposal that these fibres are protofeathers is dismissed.
The Smithsonian Institutes's flyer advertising its IMAX theater. The dinosaur in the photo comes from the Creation Museum.As I have been surfing the blogosphere over the past few days, I have seen three stories that relate to atheists being upset. I’ll start with the first one, which is both ironic and hilarious at the same time. It seems that the Smithsonian Institute has produced a flyer (shown on the left) promoting its IMAX theater. To entice the reader, there is a prominent picture of a dinosaur on the front cover. I am sure the marketing department chose the picture because it is so realistic. Here’s the problem for the Smithsonian: the picture is of a model from the Creation Museum, which promotes young-earth creationism! I find this particularly funny, since the Smithsonian has attacked the museum on its blogs.
For example, Sarah Zielinski wrote a post discussing how a group of creationist students from Liberty University visits the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History every year. She then mentions the “other side,” where a secular group of students from Indiana University visited the Creation Museum. She posts a video that the students made, and not surprisingly, rather than trying to address the evidence set forth in the museum, the students simply try to mock it. After the visit, the students stop at a restaurant about 10 miles away, and one of them says:
If there is a nexus of all the misinformation and propaganda against science and progressive education it is about 10 miles…education in general…it’s about 10 miles down the road.
Well, when the Smithsonian’s marketing department wanted to depict a dinosaur, it chose one from this nexus of misinformation. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t gone over well with some in the atheist community. For example, “The Friendly Atheist” mentions the founder of the museum, Ken Ham, saying:
*Sigh*
You win this round, Ham…
Smithsonian people, I know it’s just a picture of a random dinosaur and you would never endorse Creationism garbage, but you’re getting the image from people who wrongly believe dinosaurs lived with people.
To me, it’s not surprising that the Smithsonian unwittingly used a picture from the Creation Museum. While there are things in the Creation Museum with which I strongly disagree, overall, I found it to be significantly more scientifically accurate than most museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Thus, it’s not surprising to me that they found one of the Creation Museum’s dinosaur models to be an accurate depiction of a dinosaur.
In one of his blog entries, Dr. Jerry Coyne asks the following question:
Sometimes I wonder why this small pack of loonies thinks that so many scientists—certainly at least 95% of biologists—are so deluded as to believe in Darwinism? Are we all simply victims of a 150-year hoax, a hoax involving fields as diverse as embryology, geology, morphology, genetics, biochemistry, and biogeography—all of which erroneously point to the same conclusions? Or do they think it’s a vast conspiracy in which scientists in their smoke-filled labs meet to push a theory that’s knowingly wrong—perhaps as a way to attain our real goal: universal atheism?
Not surprisingly, the correct answer isn’t given by Coyne. He is not the victim of a hoax, nor is he part of some wild conspiracy. Instead, he and those like him are simply stuck in a failed paradigm.
Someone who knows a lot about how people can be stuck in a failed paradigm is Dr. Patricia Adair Gowaty. She is the lead author of the study that demonstrated the flaws in the experiment used to construct the now-debunked Bateman’s Principle. Here’s how she sees the effect of paradigms:
Paradigms are like glue, they constrain what you can see…It’s like being stuck in sludge — it’s hard to lift your foot out and take a step in a new direction.
That’s why people like Jerry Coyne are so hopelessly devoted to evolution. They are stuck in its sludge, and they simply can’t take a step in a new direction, regardless of the fact that the data are clearing pointing that way.
A sperm about to fertilize an egg. Note the large difference in size
(Image in the public domain)
In 1948, English geneticist Angus John Bateman published what became an incredibly influential paper in the biological community. In that paper, he reported on his experiments with fruit flies. Using those experiments and referencing other scientists’ observations, he concluded that, in general, males are promiscuous in their mating habits, while females are more choosy about their mates. This rule, he said, should be applicable to both animals and plants.1
What’s the reason for this supposed trend? It’s because sperm are small and easy to produce, while eggs are large and more difficult to produce. Notice the picture at the top of this post. It shows a sperm about to fertilize an egg. Note how small the sperm is relative to the egg. Indeed, the egg is so large compared to the sperm that only a portion of the egg can be shown in the picture. A male, then, invests little in producing his sperm, so it is most advantageous for him to mate with as many females as possible. The female, however, invests a lot in the production of an egg cell, so she must be choosy as to the males with which she mates.
In the intervening 60 years, Bateman’s principle has been considered unquestionable truth in the evolutionary community. I was taught it as “scientific fact” when I was at university, and many scientists go so far as to call it a law. For example, in her book on behavioral mechanisms in evolution, Emory University’s Dr. Leslie Real writes:2
Behavioral ecology has few overriding general principles that have survived empirical investigation for very long. One of the more persistent claims is that females will generally be more choosy than males in their selection of mates. Male fitness will thus be limited by access to females (leading to increased competition among males), while female fitness will be limited by resources available for offspring production and development. This general claim has been elevated to the status of a law and often appears in the literature as “Bateman’s principle,” named after A. ]. Bateman (1948).
There’s only one problem. Bateman’s Principle is definitely not a general rule in nature, and more importantly, we now know that Bateman’s original study was fundamentally flawed.
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.
A human embryo after about 7 weeks of development
(public domain image)I have written a lot about the evolutionary myth of vestigial organs (here, here, here, here, and here), showing how several biological structures evolutionists once thought were vestigial are, in fact, quite necessary. The concept of vestigial organs is very popular among many evolutionists, but it usually boils down to ignorance. If evolutionists don’t know the use for a biological structure, they assume that it must be vestigial. As is often the case, however, further research generally shows that this evolutionary assumption is quite wrong, due to our ignorance of the structure being considered.
This concept is often employed when studying the development of embryos. Because of the fraudulent work of Ernst Haeckel, evolutionists have long promoted the myth that an embryo will produce vestiges of its evolutionary history as it develops. Once again, this is mostly the result of ignorance. Embryonic development is rather difficult to study, so we often observe things that we don’t understand. When these things superficially resemble something that supposedly developed in the evolutionary history of the organism that is being studied, it is often pointed to as some vestige of evolution.
For example, in Why Evolution is True, Dr. Jerry Coyne tries to make the case that the human embryo is covered in a fine coat of lanugo hair simply because it is a part of the evolutionary heritage of humans. He says that there is no reason for a human embryo to be covered with hair, but it happens because humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor that was covered in hair. The coat of hair is simply a leftover vestige from that part of the human evolutionary lineage. As I have already pointed out, this is utterly false. In fact, the fine coat of hair that human embryos have is incredibly important to their development, and the idea that it is a leftover vestige of evolution is just a result of ignorance when it comes to human embryonic development.
Well, in a Facebook group discussion I recently had, the conversation turned to the supposed “tail” that human embryos have early in their development. This is a popular myth, but it is utterly false, and I thought I would post this so that others would benefit from a modern scientific analysis of this important embryonic structure. As you can see in the photograph of a human embryo above, there is a structure (pointed out in the figure) that resembles a tail. The structure eventually goes away, but it is a rather striking part of the embryo while it is present. Evolutionists have long taught that this is a leftover vestige of when our ancestors had tails,1 but we now know that such an idea is simply 100% false.
Last week, I had the privilege of of speaking to the Bolling Area Home Educators (BAHE), a group of military homeschoolers who live on the Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling near Washington, DC. In other words, I got the opportunity to speak to heroes and their families. These brave men and women sacrifice so much in order to keep up safe, and those who choose to homeschool their children sacrifice even more. The nature of military life often means one spouse is gone for extended periods of time, which means that the spouse who stays at home must carry the burdens of parenting and educating alone. In addition, homeschooling is made significantly easier when you have a consistent network of other homeschoolers in your area. Because our military heroes rarely stay in one location for more than a few years, a military homeschooler rarely has the consistent support network enjoyed by most other homeschoolers in the U.S.
The trip got off to a very military start, because a good friend of mine has his private pilot’s license, and he agreed to fly me there in a Cessna Cutlass 172RG. Since we were flying into the DC area, there were all sorts of restrictions related to where we could fly, and he was actually given instructions on what to do if the fighter jets came to escort us out of a restricted area. Since there were so many restricted areas, I assumed we wouldn’t see any actual military traffic. It turns out that I was wrong.
We were flying towards the Manassas Regional Airport at an altitude of 5,000 feet. There was a solid layer of white clouds at around 2,000 feet, well below where we were. As we were flying, air traffic control told us to be aware that there were two F/A-18 jets doing some maneuvers in our area at about 3,000 feet. We scanned the sky below us and sure enough, we got to see them flying around! Of course, they were flying so quickly that they were hard to follow for any length of time, but it was amazing to watch from our point of view!
Once the bird’s-eye view of military maneuvers was over, we landed, and it was time to get a ground-level view of military life and homeschooling. Because the guest housing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling was full, we ended up staying in the guest quarters at Fort Belvoir, another military base in the D.C. area. It was very interesting to see life on the base from the inside.
Question: What is the significance of the freshwater fish groups represented by the individuals pictured below?
Saddled Bichir, a representative of the Polypteriformes. (Click for credit)Atlantic sturgeon, a representative of the Acipenseriformes (Click for credit)A bowfin, representative of the Amiiformes (Click for credit)
Believe it or not, the answer is as follows: The most recent evolutionary analysis says that nearly all saltwater fishes* evolved from fishes that were members of these freshwater groups!
Over the past weekend, I spoke at the Midsouth Homeschool Convention, which is a part of the Great Homeschool Conventions series. It was held in Memphis, TN, so pictures and tributes to Elvis were abundant everywhere except the convention itself. I didn’t give as many talks at this convention as is typical, so that left more time for my favorite part of a homeschool convention: talking with students and parents.
Since I am not selling anything at homeschool conventions these days, my booth in the exhibit hall looks rather odd. It consists of a plain black-and-white sign that just has my name on it, an empty table, two chairs, and me. In contrast to most of the other booths that try to attract people in with color banners, comfy couches, potted plants, and videos, mine looks pretty bare. The CEO of Home Educating Family thought it was just too bare, so he added one “decoration.” On my plain white sign, he wrote “The Doctor Is In” and gave me a sticky note that said “OUT.” When I left my booth, I could cover the word “In” with the sticky note. Perhaps it doesn’t sound funny to you, but I thought it was hilarious, and I used it the whole time I was there. I regret that I did not take a picture of it before I left.
Although the bulk of this post will deal with a question I got in one of my talks, I do want to mention one thing that really impressed me. It turns out that during the conference, some low-life broke into several of the vendors’ vans. While most vendors didn’t lose much, one vendor’s van was loaded with an iPad and some other important technology, so they were looking at a serious financial loss. In order to help them out, several other vendors took up a collection. Now these vendors are all competitors. If you buy a math course from one vendor, that probably means you won’t buy a math course from any other vendor. Nevertheless, the vendors all gave generously. That really impressed me. Even in business, Christians should put compassion first, and that’s what I saw happening in Memphis.
The information in DNA is stored in specific sequences of the nucleotide bases adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). (Click for credit)
We hear a lot about how similar the human genome is compared to the chimpanzee genome. As I have discussed previously, if we compare the genomes one way, they are 72% identical. If we compare them another way, they more than 95% identical. If we compare them yet another way, they are 88-89% identical. That’s a wide range of results! Why can’t we say definitively how similar the human genome is to the chimpanzee genome? There are probably several reasons for this, but I want to highlight a basic one. Even though the human and chimpanzee genomes have been sequenced, we still don’t know them as well as you might think.
To understand why we don’t know these sequenced genomes very well, you need to know a bit about how DNA stores information. As most people know, DNA is a double helix. Each strand of this double helix has a sequence of chemical units called nucleotide bases. There are four different nucleotide bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). Taken three at a time, these four nucleotide bases code for a specific kind of chemical called an amino acid. The two strands of the double helix hold together because the nucleotide bases on one strand link up with the nucleotide bases on the other strand.
As shown in the illustration above, the way the nucleotide bases link up is very specific. Adenine (A) links only to thymine (T), and cytosine (C) links only to guanine (G). Because of this, if you know the sequence on one strand of DNA, you automatically know the sequence on the other strand. After all, A can only link to T, so anywhere one strand has an A, the other strand must have a T. In the same way, C can only link to G, so anywhere one strand has a C, the other strand must have a G. So the two strands of the DNA double helix are held together by pairs of nucleotide bases.
As a result, we count the length of a genome in terms of how many base pairs there are. The illustration above, for example, has 14 base pairs (the black G is hiding a C behind it, and the black A is hiding a T behind it). Obviously, then, the larger the number of base pairs in the genome, the longer the genome is. Believe it or not, even though the human and chimpanzee genomes have been sequenced, we don’t know for sure how long either of them are!
