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News from science relating to origins, creation vs. evolution, and intelligent design.

  • Electricity Forms Your Heart
    July 31, 2010 — Did you know your heart is an electrical appliance? That’s right. Currents of electrical ions are vital to its function as a contractile organ. Now, researchers at the University of California have found another thing electricity does for your heart: it guides the developing heart into the proper shape. This is a key study showing how epigenetic factors – factors above and beyond the genetic code – are essential for the formation of body parts. The research team, publishing in PNAS,1 explained the purpose of their investigation (Note: morphogenesis refers to the origin of shape, and cardiomyocytes are the specialized muscle cells that make the heart beat): Cardiac morphogenesis is a complex process that is mediated by a coordinated set of cellular and molecular as well as environmental factors. Recent studies have shown that epigenetic...

  • Getting Animals from Here to There
    July 30, 2010 — The world is a big place, and most animals are small. Yet many animals are found far from where their presumed ancestors lived. Most birds, naturally, can fly long distances, and some sea creatures can cross the oceans with the help of currents. That cannot explain all the cases, however. Here are some attempts by evolutionists to explain how animals got from here to there: 1. Land-locked reptiles: In the evolutionary saga, the first tetrapods invaded the land close to shore. Scientists at the University of London found reptile tracks, though, according to Live Science, found “ancient reptile tracks” in the Bay of Fundy at a location said thought to be 500 kilometers inland. According to New Scientist, the first land colonizers, frogs and amphibians, had to stay near the water. Howard Falcon-Lang gave his speculation...

  • Things in Space that Shouldn’t Be
    July 29, 2010 — A history of astronomy and a history of surprise discoveries in space would track pretty well. Recent stories show that the trend continues even today (6 reports from solar system to stars). An article on PhysOrg about early results from the Herschel Space Observatory with its SPIRE camera quoted Ian Smail of Durham University, who analyzes results from the mission: “It is already clear that we live in a changing Universe and, thanks to Herschel and SPIRE, few things are changing faster than our perception of it.” Looking back over 400 years of astronomy since Galileo and Kepler, Joseph Burns of Cornell University surveyed the many surprising discoveries made in space, especially in the last 5 decades of the space program: the Van Allen belts; Venus’s young surface; old, cold moons that proved surprisingly active; old, cold comets that showed...

  • Evolution of Segmentation Leads to Playing God
    July 28, 2010 — Most animals come in segments – body plans that are divided into more-or-less similar parts. Arthropods, worms and vertebrates are examples (including humans, with their vertebral segments and rough division into head, thorax and abdomen). Where did the idea of segmentation come from? Some French evolutionists think it just appeared by chance and changed the face of the world. The article in Science Daily makes a number of amazing claims: # (1) Segmentation appeared by chance: “By chance, evolution may have played a winning card with segmentation, which profoundly marked the history of life on Earth.” # (2) Evolution came up with segmentation either once or multiple times by “convergent evolution,” but the French think it happened once, because they found similar retrotransposons in the genes of the different segmented groups: “These similarities led them to conclude that the genes had been...

  • Is Our World Natural?
    July 27, 2010 — At first glance, the headline sounds absurd: is our world natural? Of course the world is natural. Nature is natural, isn’t it? Often, though, we picture what humans do as unnatural – oil spills, landfills, pollution, nuclear waste, crime, war. But if humans are a part of nature, then whatever they do is natural. Some recent articles show that the definition of natural requires some reflection (4 examples). These and other examples show that defining natural is complex and problematic. Yet the word is important in origins debates. Evolutionists, whether atheistic or theistic, often demand that science restrict its explanations to natural phenomena subject to natural laws. Yet by using their human reason and intellect, they are, in a sense, acting “outside” nature by casting judgment on what nature entails and how it is to be understood. Explanation...

  • Recapitulation Theory Gets Recap
    July 26, 2010 — The long-discounted “recapitulation theory” of Ernst Haeckel, the idea that the development of an embryo replays its evolutionary history, pops up every once in awhile in evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists (most notably the late Stephen Jay Gould) have long since disparaged the idea that evolutionary history would be preserved in embryos. In addition, photos of real embryos have put the lie to Haeckel’s fudged drawings he made to support his idea. According to Darwinian theory, only those mutations that survive should be preserved in an organism. What need would an organism have for embryonic replays of its ancestors? If something is non-functional in the present, neo-Darwinian theory requires, natural selection will weed it out. Not all evolutionists seem to have gotten the news. The most recent example was presented without question by PhysOrg, which published a press...

  • Dating of Impacts and Impacts of Dating
    July 25, 2010 — Earth and Neptune were both on stage this week with stories of impacts. How do scientists know when they occurred? 1. Neptune: A comet struck Neptune 200 years ago. That’s what planetary scientists are claiming, according to National Geographic. The data only “suggests” this explanation, according to Space.com. Since nobody witnessed the impact in 1810 (Neptune had not even been discovered yet), how do they know? The data consists of elevated carbon monoxide levels in the outer atmospheric layers of Neptune compared with the lower layers, as measured by the Herschel spacecraft. According to one of the authors of a paper on the hypothesis, “The higher concentration of carbon monoxide in the stratosphere can only be explained by an external origin,” Another author added, “From the distribution of carbon monoxide we can therefore derive the approximate...

  • When Evolutionary Theory Gets It Wrong
    July 24, 2010 — Evolutionary theory tends to make certain predictions about cells, tissues and organs. A long history of evolutionary errors, twists, turns and dead ends would lead to a build-up of junk. Recent examples show instances where nothing could be further from the truth. Other reports show complexity being pushed farther down the tree of life. 1. Primary cilia are not evolutionary relics: An article at PhysOrg said, “It’s safe to say that cilia, the hairlike appendages jutting out from the smooth surfaces of most mammalian cells, have long been misunderstood – underestimated, even.” The article goes on to say that many believed they served no purpose, being “regarded as merely an evolutionary relic – the cellular equivalent to the human appendix.” The discovery that many debilitating or life-threatening diseases can be traced to defects in primary cilia were some...

  • The Evolution of Integrity
    July 23, 2010 — Scientists are having to deal with a crisis that overlaps with theology: integrity. What is integrity? Where did it come from? How could it evolve? How is it to be measured? Questions like these are usually not answered with ammeters and test tubes, but they must be faced. A crisis of integrity in scientific research is casting serious doubt on the future of science. In addition, the attempts by scientists to explain spiritual, moral and intellectual matters raises further questions about the limits of science. This week, Nature had a lot to say about the nature of integrity. 1. Culture of corruption: Did you know the Department of Health and Human Services has an Office of Research Integrity? Its health science administrator, Sandra Titus, along with Xavier Bosch of the University of Barcelona,...

  • Tiny Life in Extraordinary Motion
    July 22, 2010 — Don’t despise small things. Miniature plants and animals can pack some amazing punch and technology, as shown in two recent findings. 1. Plant explosion: Peat moss. That’s the filler in our indoor plant soil and the stuff of bogs where archaeologists find finely-preserved human remains. What you didn’t know is that it packs a wallop—spore guns that are so powerful, they produce a mushroom cloud. Live Science reported that its pots shoot its spores out at 89 miles per hour, producing accelerations of 36,000 G’s. Some spore clouds reach 80 times the height of the spore capsule before slowing down from air resistance. The tiny plant produces a vortex ring like a smoke ring, an “extremely efficient way for a material to move through space.” Because of its...