Focus: news of interest about creation and evolution
Iguana surfing—same facts, different story.
Last issue we reported on the 15 iguanas that were seen surfing in to colonize a
new island, having traveled hundreds of kilometres across open ocean on a vegetation
raft. We were delighted at this demonstration of one of the ways creatures were
dispersed after the Flood. Surprisingly, the very same event was featured in the
world’s leading anti-creationist journal, NCSE Reports (July/Aug
1998, p. 6), as a demonstration of an ‘evolutionary mechanism’
(!).
Vulture vortex victory
Designers of aircraft wings have long tried to overcome the various problems of
‘drag’ associated with the lifting power of wings.
One of these is the drag loss associated with the tips of wings, where the flowing
air causes spiraling flows called vortices. This is why aircraft designed
to operate efficiently at high altitudes have to have very large wingspans.
Many different shapes for wingtips have been tried, with mixed success, in order
to alleviate this problem.
A group of Swiss researchers noticed that vultures, birds with relatively short
wingspans, seemed to be remarkably efficient soarers.
So they designed wingtips which imitate the special spreading tip-feathers of vultures.
The results are described as ‘startling,’ allowing them to halve the
span of the wing for the same lift/drag ratio.
Flying, p. 109, January 1999.
Even the lowly and despised vulture displays super-intelligent programming.
Making rapid rocks
We previously reported (Creation 17(2):8, 1995) that mud
was turning into solid rock in Norfolk salt marshes in a matter of months.
Now Max Coleman of the University of Reading has found out that this happens due
to the co-operative action of two types of bacteria that live in seawater. The resultant
stony deposits are of iron sulphide and iron carbonate.
Coleman believes that such deposits, because they happen so quickly, could easily
preserve fossils ‘before they can rot.’
New Scientist, p. 25, 19 September 1998.
At the time of the Genesis Flood, many of the creatures buried rapidly would have
been covered in (often salty) mud.
The action of such bacteria might help explain the rapid hardening needed for beautifully
preserved fossils, which are plentiful (and are impossible to reconcile with slow
hardening over long time-spans).
Speech unique
The capacity for rich and varied speech is unique to humans. We have our vocal chords
deep in the throat, forming a large cavity, which allows us to create the rich range
of sounds typical of human speech. No animal has such an arrangement.
Because of this efficient design for speech, adults cannot simultaneously breathe
and swallow food or drink without risk of choking.
However, infants do not have a problem with this because they are born with the
vocal chords higher in the throat, allowing breathing and suckling at the same time,
without choking. As a child grows, mainly in the first six years, the vocal chords
move down to the adult position.
New Scientist, pp. 46–47, 5 December 1998.
We are indeed beautifully designed.
Ancient organisms stay the same
A while ago, evolutionists would not have expected to find any fossils in rocks
that they thought were, say, three billion years old—life supposedly hadn’t
evolved yet. However, fossils of bacteria kept turning up in progressively ‘older’
rocks (no surprise to creationists), which allowed less and less ‘time’
for the first life to evolve in the hypothetical, oxygen-free ‘early atmosphere.’
Now an Austrian/Swiss team of scientists has looked at rock from Western Australia’s
Pilbara region, supposedly around 3.5 billion years old, and found fossilized cyanobacteria.
These appear to be indistinguishable from the same (oxygen-producing) creatures
making the mat structures called stromatolites in the shallows of Shark Bay, some
500 kilometres away on the coast.
BBC News (internet) 27 March 1999.
The West Australian, 26 March 1999.
Smart plants
Researchers have long known that some plants, like cotton, corn and tobacco, when
suffering insect attack, are able to send out chemical distress signals. These summon
wasp species which are natural predators of that caterpillar type.
The incredible sophistication of these signals has now come to light. For instance,
the same plant will send out one signal if being attacked by corn ear worms, and
another when attacked by tobacco bud worms.
The plants even ‘sweeten the deal by producing nectar to feed the wasps, giving
them an incentive to stay.’
CNN website, 4 February 1999.
The researcher concerned found it ‘amazing.’ But her expressed awe was
for ‘evolutionary forces,’ not the obvious creative intelligence on
display.
An eye-full of design
Have you ever taken a picture of someone with the sun behind them? The resulting
picture looks washed out, no matter how carefully you work out the exposure. This
washed-out effect or lack of contrast is caused by light bouncing around inside
the camera, between the lens and the film.
Physicist Edward Kelley says, ‘So I copied the design of the human eye, which
uses liquid to fill the gap between lens and retina [thus overcoming this problem].’
Of course you cannot fill your camera with fluid because it would ruin the film.
However, the new digital cameras do not have film.
So Kelley made a digital camera with silicone oil between the lens and the device
which senses the image. The modified camera is up to 70 times better than one filled
with air.
New Scientist, p. 17, 5 December 1998.
Egyptian chemistry lesson
Ancient Egyptians synthesized chemicals for cosmetics, forensic chemists in France
say. Egyptian cosmetic powders contained ingredients that were so rare that they
had to have been synthesized. And all this was going on up to 4,000 years ago.
New Scientist, p. 27, 13 February 1999.
Much technology would have been lost (to differing degrees in the various groups
of people) following the Babel dispersion. Clearly, the level of technology around
when Noah built the Ark was much greater than many imagine today, due to the prevailing
false belief in the upward progression of man from grunting animal to astronaut.
Siberian link for Amerindians
Languages naturally group into a small number of ‘families,’ which may
each represent one of the original ‘stem’ languages resulting from the
dispersion at Babel. Thus English, Italian, German, Russian and Sanskrit, along
with many more, can all be traced back to a common Indo-European source. In remote
Siberia, there are 500 people who speak a language called Ket. All other languages
belonging to that language family, called Yeniseian, became extinct last century.
Now Merrit Ruhlen of Stanford University tells of 36 words in Ket which correlate
with those in Na-Dene, a language family which includes Navajo and Apache. For instance,
the word for birch bark, ch’ee (hard to transliterate into English)
is identical in Ket and several Na-Dene languages. The word for breast is tuhguh
in Ket, and t’uga in a Na-Dene language.
Ruhen says he found many other similarities as well. All of this confirms that the
two groups are closely related, as people migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait
(then a land bridge) into North America.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95:13994–13996,
November 1998.
Languages change rapidly, especially in small, isolated populations with no writing.
This finding has two implications. First, the Yeniseian and Na-Dene families may
represent only one stem language.
Second, to have such close correlations still existing makes little sense if the
migrations were as much as 11,000 years ago, as is commonly believed. From the biblical
record, they would have been less (possibly much less) than some 4,000 years ago.
Starry surprise
Big bang proponents believe that as they look further out into space, they are looking
back many billions of years, to a time much closer to the alleged primordial event.
So as telescopes have looked further and further out, big bangers, who believe that
stars and galaxies evolved over millions of years, would expect to eventually see
all the very early stages of galaxies forming. There was some initial excitement
at finding some galaxies with bluer light, interpreted as younger galaxies.* Lately,
the Hubble telescope has been able to look out to a distance of 12 billion light-years.
To big bangers, this means they are looking at things as they were very close to
the beginning. However, instead of seeing any ‘protogalaxies,’ they
see proper ‘galaxies with huge families of stars.’
The Cincinnati Enquirer, p. A20, 9 October 1998.
*Note that the creationist cosmology of physicist Russell
Humphreys, in his book
Starlight and Time, would be able to deal with such a result also,
were it the case.
The big bang, an almost infinitely flexible concept, has been ‘salvaged’
a myriad of times (in the face of contrary results and failed predictions) by ‘twiddling
the knobs.’ This discovery will doubtless trigger off another round of ‘readjustment.’
Mind, man and monkey
New ways of mapping brain function have caused a researcher at Johns Hopkins University
to overturn a belief about the human brain.
Previously, scientists had only been able to work on the brains of non-human primates
like monkeys. They had assumed that, due to their ‘evolutionary closeness’
to humans, the place where monkeys stored their short-term ‘working memory’
would be the same in humans.
The breakthrough came with functional MRI* scanning in humans, which is able to
safely measure differences in blood flow in regions of the brain while tasks are
performed.
Humans turn out to have a unique location, significantly further back, for short-term
memory (stm) storage.
The areas in humans analogous to the monkey stm site appear to be used for uniquely
human functions, such as abstract reasoning and planning for the future.
ScienceDaily webzine, 27 January 1999.
*Magnetic Resonance Imaging—which was invented by the creationist Raymond
Damadian (Creation 16(3):35–37,
1994).
Aping human rights
Because the (Genesis) foundation upon which Western culture was built proclaimed
that only people were created in the image of God (Gen.
1:26–27), they have been assigned ‘rights’ and legal standing
quite distinct from the animals. The more our society is ‘evolutionized,’
the more we can expect this distinction to erode. New Zealand’s parliament
recently considered a bill to give great apes certain legal rights. Others are calling
for a U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Great Apes. People in the U.S. are considering
a lawsuit on behalf of a chosen chimpanzee to set a legal precedent.
Though thoroughly secular, the journal New Scientist fortunately took a
strong stand against this nonsense. They pointed out that humans and chimps have
a lot of DNA in common, but genes are not ‘cake recipes’—a few
genes can make a crucial difference. What’s more, on the basis of assumed
evolutionary continuity, one would ‘have to argue continuity between apes
and monkeys.’ And then between monkeys and ... .So there is no reason for
not giving ‘legal rights’ to lab rats. [Extending the argument further
along the evolutionary spectrum, why not rights for cockroaches?]
The journal also cited Ronald Nadler, a psychology professor at the Yerkes Primate
Centre, as saying that because the great apes look like us, researchers get ‘sucked
in’ to overemphasizing the similarities, and overlooking the differences,
which he says are ‘substantial.’ He agrees that chimps ‘should
not be sitting alone in small cages. But that’s because the animals are distressed,
not because they are obviously human.’
New Scientist, pp. 3, 20–21, 13 February 1999.
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