Modern Science Archives : Page 44 of 53 : Proslogion

The Earliest Eyes Look Like Modern Ones

krilleye — A krill, with a magnified view of its eye. (Click for krill picture credit. Eye credit is at commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Krilleyekils.jpg)

A recent article ¹ in the journal Nature reports on fossil eyes that were discovered in early Cambrian rock. Before I discuss the fossils themselves, I have to make it clear that these eyes are not like the eyes you and I have. You and I have simple eyes. This doesn’t mean they aren’t complex. It just means that each of our eyes has only one lens. In addition to people, many animals have simple eyes.

The fossils discussed in the article were of compound eyes, like the one shown in the picture above. Unlike simple eyes, compound eyes have many, many lenses. Each little “section” you see in the magnified view of the eye is a separate lens. Each lens focuses the light onto its own, separate light-sensitive tissue. For this reason, a compound eye can be thought of as a lot of tiny individual eyes, each of which is called an ommatidium (plural is ommatidia).

Now why would an animal want a compound eye? Well, it allows the animal to have a much wider view. Some insect compounds eyes, for example, allow the insect to see nearly everything around it – not only what is in front of it, but also what is above, below, and behind it.² In addition, since the visual information is being processed by lots of little units rather than one big unit, a compound eye is much more efficient at developing images, making it sensitive to very fast motion.³ This allows the insect to travel at high speeds without running into things, and it allows the insect to see even the slightest motion from both predators and prey. These advantages do come at a cost, however. The visual acuity and resolution of a compound eye is not as good as that of a simple eye.⁴

The article reports on seven compound eye fossils that were found in Cambrian rock. According to scientifically-irresponsible dating techniques, these rocks are supposedly 515 million years old. Nevertheless, the fossil eyes are incredibly advanced.

Continue reading “The Earliest Eyes Look Like Modern Ones”

Strike Another “Vestigial” Organ

(Public Domain Image)

Evolutionists think there is a lot of junk in nature. Of course, that’s what you expect if you think a process that depends on random mutations acted on by natural selection is what produced all the life we see today. If you think that the world and life on it were created by God, however, you wouldn’t expect to see much junk. If you believe in the Christian God, you do expect some junk, because the Bible tells us that creation is in “slavery to corruption” as a result of the Fall of man (Romans 8:21). Thus, there has been some corruption from the supremely-designed state in which nature started. As a result, there should be some junk in nature, just not much.

One specific kind of junk that has been predicted by evolutionists over and over again is vestigial organs. These are organs that supposedly had a function in an evolutionary ancestor but have no important function in a current organism. For example, it was long thought that the primary cilium that appears on nearly every cell in the human body was vestigial. It was supposed to be a remnant of the evolutionary stage when our ancestors were free-swimming, single-celled creatures. Of course, we now know that the primary cilium serves several incredibly important functions.

More famously, it was long taught that the human appendix was vestigial. Supposedly it was a remnant of the evolutionary stage when our ancestors ate a much more vegetarian diet. Of course, we now know that this is false as well. Instead, the appendix has been shown to have an incredibly important function in people. Evolutionist Jerry Coyne made a huge blunder in his book, Why Evolution is True, because he claimed that the fine hair a human fetus grows all over its body (called “lanugo”) is vestigial. However, it has been long known that lanugo serves an incredibly important function.

As you would expect, modern science has just struck down another vestigial organ. This time, it is found in salmon, trout, and many other fishes ^*.

Continue reading “Strike Another “Vestigial” Organ”

The Genesis of Science

During the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, P.Z. Myers (my favorite atheist) said:

Science and religion are incompatible in the same sense that the serious pursuit of knowledge about reality is incompatible with [expletive]…. Religion makes smart people do stupid things, and scientists do not like stupid.

Obviously, Dr. Myers hasn’t studied much of the history of science, since it shows quite the opposite. Indeed, history shows that modern science is a product of Christianity.

Dr. James Hannam recently wrote a book entitled, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, and he makes a very strong case that modern science is specifically a product of medieval Christian thought. As I mentioned in a previous post, Dr. James Hannam is a graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge. He earned his physics degree from Oxford, and then he went to Cambridge to earn a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science. Thus, he is very qualified to write on this subject. He states his thesis in his introduction:

This book will show how much of the science and technology that we now take for granted has medieval origins. (p. xiii)

The book then goes on to give a wealth of evidence to support that thesis.

Continue reading “The Genesis of Science”

I Thought This Was Cool

I am working on an elementary science series right now, and I am up the point where I am looking for images to use in the first book of the series. While looking for images that were constructed using infrared light, I came across this one and thought it was really cool (click for credit):

The image is what an infrared camera sees when it looks at a snake wrapped around a person’s arm.

Remember, human eyes are not sensitive to infrared light. However, you can make cameras that see only infrared light. Generally, these cameras show you the amount of infrared light they are seeing by using a color scheme. In the picture above, for example, blue colors mean the camera is receiving a small amount of infrared light, red colors indicate a medium amount of infrared light, and yellow colors indicate a lot of infrared light.

The person’s arm “lights up” in yellow, because he or she is warm-blooded and is therefore warmer than the surroundings. Because of this, energy must flow from the person to the surroundings, and it does so mostly in the form of infrared light. As a result, the person’s arm emits a lot of infrared light. The snake, however, is not much warmer than its surroundings, because it is not warm-blooded. So it doesn’t lose much energy to the surroundings. As a result, it doesn’t emit much infrared light.

Using an infrared-sensitive camera to make such images is called thermography, and it can be used for various purposes, including seeing people in the dark.

Continue reading “I Thought This Was Cool”

More on Cane Toads in Australia

In my previous post, I discussed the cane toad invasion of Australia. While studies of the invasion have shown a new mechanism of selection that is distinct from classic natural selection, they have also shown how limited the range of evolutionary change in cane toads really is. This is consistent with the creationist view and quite contrary to the evolutionist view.

In this post, I want to discuss the changes that the cane toads have produced in other Australian animals. As you might expect, as a foreign species spreads across an ecosystem, it is going to have an effect on the already-established species there. In general, one expects the effects to be negative, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case. Indeed, a large study designed to assess the damage that the cane toad invasion has done to the already-established animals in Australia says:¹

Overall, some Australian native species (mostly large predators) have declined due to cane toads; others (especially species formerly consumed by those predators) have benefited; and for yet others, effects are minor or are mediated indirectly rather than through direct interactions with the invasive toads.

So in the end, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. However, what I find interesting are some of the details of how these animals have changed in response to the cane toad invasion.

Continue reading “More on Cane Toads in Australia”

Cane Toads in Australia

A reader E-MAILed me asking about an article she had read regarding cane toads in Australia. The article seemed to have some implications regarding evolution, so she asked if I would look into it. Since I will be speaking to homeschoolers in Australia near the end of June, I wanted to learn more about this issue. As a result, I looked into it, and it is all quite fascinating.

Cane toads are not native to Australia. Indeed, there are no toads that are native to Australia. They were brought there from Hawaii in 1935 in order to control sugar cane pests in northeastern Queensland.¹ Now you would have thought that those in charge would have learned from the famous rabbit fiasco that was recognized as a serious problem in Australia by the turn of the century, but apparently they did not. Instead, they brought the cane toad in to control the pests and, not surprisingly, it started to spread far beyond where it was originally brought. The map below shows you how incredibly far it has spread in only about 75 years.

ctspread — A map of the original introduction of the cane toad (black), the current extent (brown line), and the expected range (green). Click for credit.

Continue reading “Cane Toads in Australia”

Mass Does, Indeed, Warp Spacetime

geodetic — An artist's representation of how the mass of earth warps spacetime, which is represented by the blue grid. (Public Domain Image)

There are lots of experimental results that seem to confirm Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. For example, general relativity predicts that time passes slowly in the presence of strong gravitational fields and quickly in the presence of weak gravitational fields. The Global Positioning System confirms this prediction every second of every day.¹ However, there are some fundamental assumptions of general relativity that are significantly more difficult to confirm.

One of those fundamental assumptions has to do with the very nature of gravity itself. General relativity says that what we perceive as the force of gravity isn’t really a force at all. It is merely a consequence of the way that mass warps spacetime, which is a four-dimensional construct that combines the three typical dimensions of space (length, width, and height) with time. While this assumption produces all sorts of testable predictions that have been confirmed experimentally, the assumption itself has never been directly confirmed…until now.

In April of 2004, Gravity Probe B started circling the earth from pole to pole. It did so for 15 months, and all the while, precise observations were made of four gyroscopes that were roughly the size of ping-pong balls. The gyroscopes were covered with a superconducting surface. Once they started spinning, they each produced a nice magnetic pointer. Those pointers were actually able to measure two effects that the earth’s mass has on the surrounding spacetime.

Continue reading “Mass Does, Indeed, Warp Spacetime”

Ultrafast Underwater Traps

This video shows how the incredible traps used by bladderworts work. The narrator is hard to understand, but the video is worth watching.

When you study the living world, you can see how the Creator designed organisms to meet the needs of every ecosystem on the planet. Consider, for example, carnivorous plants. Plants form the foundation of many food webs. Using carbon dioxide and water, they convert the energy of sunlight into food for themselves, but they produce much more food than they need. As a result, they are used as a food source by many animals, which in turn are used as a food source by many other animals. Plants, therefore, are crucial to many ecosystems.

The food they make for themselves supplies plants with energy, but like all other organisms, plants need more than energy to live healthy and reproduce properly. They also need specific chemicals to build the molecules they need for survival. Most plants use their roots to absorb those chemicals from the soil. But what about places where the soil isn’t nutritious or it isn’t practical to absorb nutrients from it? Those ecosystems need plants as well, so there need to be plants that can survive in such places.

Enter the carnivorous plants. They capture and digest living organisms, but they don’t use those organisms for energy. Instead, the they use the organisms’ constituent chemicals as building blocks for all the elegant chemistry that they need to do. That way, they don’t have to absorb nutrients from the soil. Even the most barren soil can host carnivorous plants.

While all carnivorous plants are amazing in their own way, a recent study in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B has highlighted the amazing design of one type of carnivorous plant: the bladderwort (genus Utricularia).

Continue reading “Ultrafast Underwater Traps”

Modern Science Is a Product of Christianity

I received an E-MAIL from a student a few days ago. He had just finished Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Grand Design, in which the authors claim that God is not necessary in order to explain the universe. While I have not read the book yet, reviews (even from non-Christian sources) are far from flattering.

The student informed me that Hawking and Mlodinow credit the Ionian Greeks with the discovery of natural laws. This confused him, because in my book, Exploring Creation with General Science, I make it very clear that modern science was born out of Christianity. This is because the concept that nature operates according to strict laws is a natural consequence of the fact that it was created by a Supreme Lawgiver. Without the concept of a law-giving Creator, there would have been no reason to search for natural laws. Indeed, as Dr. Stanley Jaki tells us:¹

…the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a breakthrough in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws

The search for the laws that govern nature was inspired by Christianity, and as a result, modern science is a product of Christianity.

So what of the Ionian Greeks? Did they do something related to natural laws? Not really. They did do something related to science, however, and their contribution should not be downplayed. Nevertheless, it needs to be put in the proper context.

Continue reading “Modern Science Is a Product of Christianity”

What Do Evolutionists Do When One of Their Own Is Honest about the Data?

Dr. Lynn Margulis is a very interesting person. When she was a young scientist, she wrote a paper entitled “On the origin of mitosing cells.” It was rejected by several scientific journals, but it was eventually published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology more than 40 years ago. In that paper, she proposed an endosymbiotic theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells.¹ If you don’t recognize that term, there are two basic kinds of cells in creation: prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Just as the human body has distinct, smaller organs that each perform specific functions, eukaryotic cells have distinct, smaller organelles that each perform specific functions. Prokaryotic cells are smaller than eukaryotic cells and do not have distinct organelles. While humans, animals, plants, and many microscopic organisms are made of eukaryotic cells, bacteria are made of a single prokaryotic cell.

In her paper, which is now considered a landmark publication, she put forth the idea that the organelles in eukaryotic cells formed because one prokaryotic cell engulfed another, and they both somehow survived to work together. The engulfed cell became the organelle, while the cell that did the engulfing became the first rudimentary eukaryotic cell. While this idea did not originate with Dr. Margulis, her landmark paper was the first to provide biochemical data that supported the view. As a result, she has gotten the lion’s share of the credit for the endosymbiotic theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells.

Now there are serious problems with her theory. For example, she makes much of the fact that mitochondria (eukaryotic organelles that power the cell) are similar to bacteria. As a result, it should make sense that mitochondria were actual bacteria at one time. However, the similarities are rather trivial. There are significant structural and biochemical differences between the two, which makes the idea that mitochondria came from bacteria quite untenable. Nevertheless, endosymbiotic theory is currently the consensus view among evolutionists for how eukaryotic cells arose. Thus, it is not surprising that Dr. Margulis was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983.

While the problems associated with endosymbiotic theory are interesting, what really fascinates me is how two well-known evolutionists have reacted to her recent interview, published in Discover Magazine.

Continue reading “What Do Evolutionists Do When One of Their Own Is Honest about the Data?”