Thoughts from a scientist who is a Christian (not a Christian Scientist)
I just got back from a great fishing trip with one of my favorite people in the world. Here is a picture of the catch:
The fish look a lot prettier right after they have been caught. Here is an example of what a fresh mahi-mahi (Coryphaena hippurus) looks like:
Many evolutionists have claimed that the human eye (actually the vertebrate eye in general) is wired “backwards.” According to evolutionists, this is such a terrible way to make an eye that it clearly shows the eye has no Designer. What is so “terrible” about the way the eye is wired? Well, light that enters the eye is detected by specialized cells called rods and cones. Those rods and cones convert the light that they detect into signals that travel through association neurons and into nerve fibers that carry the signals to the brain. As shown in the illustration above, however, the neurons and nerves that carry those signals are in front of the rods and cones. Thus, light must travel through the nerves and association neurons before it can hit the rods and cones.
According to evolutionists, this is a terrible design. After all, if anyone with any sense were to design an eye, the rods and cones would be the first thing the light hits. That way, the rods and cones would get an unobstructed view of the light. Since the vertebrate eye is not designed the way these evolutionists think should be “obvious,” it is clear (to them) that the eye was not designed. Indeed, in his book The Blind Watchmaker (probably his best work), Richard Dawkins says:
Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas.1
Of course, like most evolutionary nonsense, the more science we learn, the more we see how wrong this argument is.
Continue reading “Science Has Demonstrated Evolutionists Wrong and Creationists Right…AGAIN”
Is morality something that is a part of our very being, or is it something that is learned from our culture? From a scientific point of view, that is a hard thing to answer. Data exist that could support either argument, so often the conclusion that is drawn from the scientific evidence tells us more about the interpreter than the data. A very interesting article in the New York Times illustrates this in very stark terms.
Before I start discussing this article, there are two things I want to make clear. First, I got this article from PZ Myers’s blog. As anyone who reads this blog probably knows, he is my favorite atheist. More than anyone else, he demonstrates how the atheistic worldview is based on irratonaility. As I have written before, there are serious scholars who are atheists, and their arguments need to be heeded. There are also hacks that are atheists, and their arguments make it very easy to be a theist. PZ Meyers is, indeed, one of the hacks. Nevertheless, I read his blog because it is fun to see the mental gymnastics through which a scientist must go in order to be an atheist.
The second thing I want to make clear is that I do not think that the argument from morality is a reasonable argument for the existence of God. While there is ovewhelming scientific evidence for the existence of God, the argument from morality simply isn’t one of them. Indeed, in my experience, some of the most immoral people I know call themselves Christians, and their “morality” is put to shame by many atheists.
So…while I don’t think the argument from morality holds much weight, I do think that the interpretation of any data related to morality (like the interpretation of many other kinds of data) is heavily influenced by whether or not you think God exists. This New York Times story demonstrates that in no uncertain terms.
source:http://darwin-online.org.uk/life10b.html
That molecular evidence typically squares with morphological patterns is a view held by many biologists, but interestingly, by relatively few systematists. Most of the latter know that the two lines of evidence may often be incongruent.2
Once scientists got to the point where they could sequence many, many genes and compare the genes in one organism directly to the genes in another organism, it was thought that a “definitive tree of life” would be produced. After all, since evolution is supposed to occur via mutations in the genome being acted on by natural selection, genetics should provide a clear map of how evolution progressed.
The problem is that DNA has simply muddied the waters even more when it comes to evolutionary relationships. Indeed, it has caused some biologists to say that evolution cannot even be represented by a tree.
Continue reading “Is DNA Providing a Coherent View of Evolution?”
Answers research journal has just published a very interesting study called Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin. If you are not familiar with the term “holobaramin,” it refers to a group of animals that are all related to one another through common descent.
Remember, in the creationist view, God created individual KINDS of organisms, and the genomes of those organisms were created so that they could adjust and adapt to changing conditions. As a result, the organisms that God created could change significantly, but not infinitely. Their amount of change is bound by the level of information in their genomes.
Wolves and dogs, for example, are a part of the same holobaramin. Even though a Chihuahua and a timber wolf might look and behave very differently, they both descended from the same kind of animal created by God. So when a creationist says that certain creatures belong to the same holobaramin, he or she means they both descended from the same created kind of creature.
The analysis presented in the peer-reviewed paper linked above says that Australopithecus sediba should be placed in the human holobaramin, which means it descended from people. If you recall, this is quite different from my analysis of A. sediba.
While the paper does do a solid baraminological analysis, I am not sure I agree with that conclusion. After all, this paper focused only on craniodental features. While I don’t have a problem with that in general, I do have a problem with including Australopithecus sediba in such an analysis. Remember that the majority of the cranial and dental bones recovered were from a juvenile, and it is difficult to compare juveniles with adults. Thus, I am afraid that making a definitive placement for Australopithecus sediba is a bit premature. Hopefully, more fossils will eventually be published so that a more thorough baraminological can take place.
The other conclusion of the paper was quite interesting:
Results indicate that hominins may be divided into as many as four different holobaramins: (1) the genus Homo (including Australopithecus sediba), (2) the genus Paranthropus, (3) Australopithecus africanus, and (4) Gorilla, Pan, Australopithecus afarensis, and Australopithecus garhi.
So Australopithecus africanus is not related to and A. afarensis or A. garhi. That surprises me. However, based on the craniodental data, it seems to be the correct conclusion.
In my previous post, I discussed the new journal BIO-Complexity. I briefly discussed the first two articles in the journal, but I want to go into one of them in more detail, because the results are fascinating.
To understand the importance of the paper’s result, remember one of the ways evolutionists think information can be added to a genome. They think that gene duplication occurs, resulting in two identical genes. The copy of the gene can mutate freely, since it doesn’t really have to produce anything. After all, the original gene is still producing the protein that the organism needs, so if the duplicate gene doesn’t produce anything useful, there is really no problem. Since the copy is free to mutate, it can presumably become a completely different gene, adding information to the genome. This is supposed to play a major role in evolution.
So imagine you have this gene copy that is free to mutate. Since it can mutate a lot, it presumably can “explore” all sorts of possibilities as far as the new proteins it might make. When it hits on a protein that is beneficial to the organism’s survival, it will be naturally selected, and presto, there is new information in the genome of that species.
This idea sounds reasonable (ignoring annoying things like information theory), but it hinges on the assumption that a duplicated gene is free to mutate and that the cell continues to “sample” that mutating gene so as to “try out” the new proteins for which the duplicate is coding. Well, that didn’t happen in the experiment presented in the BIO-Complexity paper.
Continue reading “Another Confirmation of the Creationist View of the Genome”
Sometimes I worry about the state of science today. The majority of students are woefully ignorant about even the most basic scientific concepts. More worrisome, however, ideology drives much of science. Evolution (in the ‘goo to you’ sense) is taught as fact, even though it is, at best, an unconfirmed hypothesis. In an attempt to promulgate this myth, many scientific journals refuse to publish anything that challenges the dogma of evolution.
And if any journal dares to publish a heretical paper, heads must role. For example, when Stephen Meyer sent a paper entitled “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” to the small journal called Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, the editor (Dr. Richard Sternberg), sent it out for peer review. It passed peer review, and it was published. Then, a firestorm occurred. As the Washington Post says
Within hours of publication, senior scientists at the Smithsonian Institution — which has helped fund and run the journal — lashed out at Sternberg as a shoddy scientist and a closet Bible thumper.
Why did the firestorm occur? Because the paper discussed intelligent design in a positive manner. It doesn’t matter that the paper passed peer review. It doesn’t matter that the reviewers who didn’t even agree with intelligent designed called it meritorious and worthy of publication. The fact that it dared to question the dogma of the day was enough. Sternberg faced retaliation, defamation, and harassment because he allowed heresy to creep into the biological literature.
If anyone is interested, opening night for Cabaret was last night (Thursday, 4/29). It really went well. The audience was really into it. They laughed at all the right spots and rewarded us with lots of enthusiastic applause.
The local newspaper came to review it a few days earlier, and the review was very positive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cameraria_ohridella_8419.jpg
This really intrigued me, so I spent some time looking into leaf-mining insects, and what I found was truly incredible. First, there are a lot of leaf miners. Some are moths, some are flies, some are beetles, and even some are wasps. The adult lays her eggs in within the tissue of a leaf, and when the eggs hatch, the larvae begin eating the insides of the leaf. This, of course, protects the larvae, because they are not exposed to predators. They stay inside the leaf until they are ready to pupate (start metamorphosis into their adult form).
Now, of course, if a larva is “unlucky” enough to hatch shortly before or after the leaf falls from the tree, this could be a problem. After all, the larva is eating the living tissue inside the leaf and therefore needs the leaf to stay alive while it is feeding. What happens if the leaf dies before the larva is ready to pupate? Well, that’s where the “green islands” come in. It seems that the larva can keep the portion of the leaf it is eating alive so that it can continue to eat and develop, and that’s why the area around the larva stays green!
You might have noticed that my blogging frequency has declined a bit. That’s because I am in a play, Cabaret, that is getting ready to open this weekend. It’s being performed at Anderson’s Mainstage Theater in Anderson, IN. Shows are at 7:30 PM on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (4/29-5/1) this week and then Friday and Saturday (5/7,8) next week.
In case you are interested, I play Ernst Ludwig, a Nazi. I befriend the leading man in the show, Clifford Bradshaw, and no one knows I am a Nazi at first. I have to be fun and likeable (a stretch for me) so that when you finally see that I am a Nazi and will ruin everyone’s life, you are kind of surprised.
I am working with a very talented group of people. The person who plays the Emcee (Lot Turner) is playing his character in a much more “gritty” way than most interpretations I have seen, and the person playing Clifford Bradshaw (Cameron Vale) has a great singing voice. To me, however, the real standout is the young lady playing Sally Bowles, the female lead. Her name is Tiffany Taylor, and her interpretation of the character is truly unique. Her Sally is carefree, daring, and talented (as she must be), but there is a sophistication in her Sally that I have never seen in any production of Cabaret. The two people playing the older romantic parts, Herr Schultz (Bill Malone) and Fraulein Schneider (Nita Arnold), are simply adorable on stage. They play “two old people in love” in the cutest way I have ever seen. The closest thing I have to a love interest is Fraulein Kost, who is a prostitute. The actress who portrays her, Connie Rich, has the best German accent of all of us, and she plays her part spot on. She has a WONDERFUL singing voice, but unfortunately she has only one short song, and it is partly spoiled by me singing along with her.
The set is minimalist, which I don’t like, and the show suffers from some of the typical problems associated with community theater productions. However, it has been a lot of fun. If you are in the area, it is worth the $10 price of admission.