This article is from
Creation 30(1):7–11, December 2007

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Focus: creation news and views

Coral complex, not simple

Discoveries about the genetic complexity of coral could rewrite theories about evolution, say researchers.

Analysis has already identified about 10,000 genes in coral, and the researchers think they could ultimately find that coral has more genes than humans (who possess about 20,000). Coral has long been considered by evolutionists to be ‘a simple animal’. But the researchers say its genetic complexity ‘challenges the notion that life started out simple then evolved to become more sophisticated.’

One surprising finding has been that coral shares many genes with humans, including those related to the development of immune systems.

Of course, from the Creation account in the Bible it’s not surprising that evolutionary notions of progression from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ just don’t stack up, or that corals and humans have genetic similarities, because both were created by the same Creator not that long ago.

ABC News Online, www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200704/s1906743.htm, 26 April 2007.

Bye-bye big bang

A big problem for standard evolutionary ‘big bang’ cosmology is known as the ‘horizon problem’. Throughout the universe the background temperature is about the same, but, as New Scientist recently explained (according to evolutionists’ own reckoning), ‘not enough time has elapsed since the big bang for radiation to travel across the universe and back, exchanging temperature information.’ (See ‘Light travel: a problem for the big bang’ by a Ph.D. astrophysicist in Creation 25(4):48–49, 2003; creation.com/lighttravel.)

So in the 1980s, the idea that the early universe underwent rapid expansion was proposed, which has since become widely accepted. However cosmologist Cristiano Germani, of the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, now says it’s time to dump the idea. ‘We don’t have any fundamental physical explanation for how or why it occurred,’ says Germani. ‘Yet cosmologists today accept it as though it is a religion.’

Indeed, just as we have long pointed out (see, e.g. creation.com/Refutingch1), belief in a long-age evolutionary cosmology is a belief, i.e. a ‘faith’ position. Germani’s alternative proposal, dubbed the ‘slingshot’ model, says there was no big bang, and so no horizon problem.

‘We have no beginning of time, so the universe is easily old enough for regions on both sides of the sky to have been in contact in the past’, claims Germani. ‘In the slingshot scenario we could have an ever-existing universe.’

Of course, Germani is wrong about that. Time itself, along with the entire universe, is a created entity and therefore has a beginning (2 Timothy 1:9, Titus 1:2), just as the Bible says (Genesis 1:1, Exodus 20:11). Only God is eternal (1 Timothy 1:17).

New Scientist 195(2620):12–13, 8 September 2007.

Krauss criticises Dawkins

Leading US evolutionist Lawrence Krauss has written a stinging critique in New Scientist of his fellow evolutionist Richard Dawkins’ latest efforts to raise the profile of atheists.

Dawkins, well-known author of The God Delusion, has issued a new call for atheists ‘to come out of their closets’ and organize atheist events and organizations. Krauss describes this latest Dawkins campaign as ‘ill-advised’, although he acknowledges Dawkins has ‘a great record’ of trying to convince people to abandon their belief in God. ‘But’, writes Krauss, ‘before embarking on this new effort to appeal to people’s emotions, he might have been well-advised to consult a public relations firm.’

Krauss is particularly dismayed that the Dawkins website is selling T-shirts emblazoned with a large scarlet A (for ‘atheist’, presumably). Laments Krauss: ‘The scarlet A is strongly reminiscent of the A for “adulterer” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter. I don’t know who thought that this, combined with the phrase “coming out” with its gay connotations … would win hearts and minds in middle America, but I can’t imagine that it will.’

Incidentally, Krauss’s article was acerbically entitled: ‘A is for addle-brained’.

New Scientist 195(2618):21, 25 August 2007.

‘Alex’ parrot dies

‘Alex’, the famous African grey parrot used in research for over three decades, has died.

We had earlier reported (creation.com/alex; creation.com/petulant) how the language skills of smart ‘Alex’ parrot and other documented examples of high intelligence in birds highlight a problem for ideas about evolution. If chimpanzees are ‘our close evolutionary cousins’, then how is it that birds (which are not supposed to be our evolutionary cousins, and which have much smaller brains), can surpass chimps in various measures of intelligence?

Brandeis University researcher Dr Irene Pepperberg recalls her last conversation with Alex on the evening before he died. When she told him it was time to go in the cage, the bird said: ‘You be good. I love you.’ Pepperberg answered, ‘I love you, too.’ Alex then said, ‘You’ll be in tomorrow,’ and she replied, ‘Yes, I’ll be in tomorrow.’

CNN.com, www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/09/12/parrot.obit.ap/index.html, 17 September 2007.

Aborigine theory debunked

A DNA study by geneticists at the University of Cambridge has provided the ‘strongest indicator yet’ that the Australian Aborigines have the same human ancestors as the rest of mankind.

The study ‘debunks the theory that the Aborigines evolved simultaneously but separately to the rest of the human species that evolved from Africa’.

Instead the study found that the Aborigines and Melanesians from New Guinea had genetic features linking them ‘and other Eurasians’ to ‘the African exodus’.

Actually, the DNA evidence, when viewed free from any evolutionary presuppositions, fits with what you’d expect, given the biblical account of our ancestors Adam, then Noah, and then the dispersion from Babel.

The Advertiser, (Adelaide, Aust.), 9 May 2007, p. 27.

Microbes revived from ‘ancient’ ice

Microbes said to have been locked in Antarctic ice for eight million years have been ‘resuscitated’ in a laboratory, according to researchers.

However, other scientists are urging caution, saying that ‘as with most claims of ancient microbes being revived’, they would consider that contamination of samples with modern microbes was a distinct possibility.

One can certainly understand their caution. For bacteria and other microbes to have been sitting dormant in ice for eight million years defies reason, given that the organisms should have long ago ‘fallen apart’. After all, experts have said that there shouldn’t be any DNA remaining after 100,000 years, let alone the complete, intact ‘machinery’ of a living cell. Yet this revival of ‘ancient’ microbes is the latest in a string of similar findings—see, e.g., ‘“Sleeping Beauty” bacteria’ and ‘Salty saga’ (Creation 28(1):23, 2005; 23(4):15, 2001) and in each case, the researchers were meticulous in their efforts to prevent contamination.

So what’s the answer? The solution is to understand the problem. The problem is with the millions-of-years dating, which is based upon evolutionary and uniformitarian assumptions. Thus the revival of bacteria from ice, frozen sediments, and salt crystals all ‘dated’ as being millions of years old is instead powerful evidence of the truth of the Bible’s timeframe—i.e. the samples are much younger than evolutionists have claimed. So the resuscitation of microbes is not that surprising, as the ice is no older than about 4,500 years (when the entire earth was flooded for many months, as described in Genesis 6–9).

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(33):13455–13460, 2007.
BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6935146.stm, 7 August 2007.

Evolutionary storytelling in abundance

The evolutionary yarn-spinners seem to have been busier than usual, telling us, for example:

Girls prefer pink because of evolution—back in ‘hunter-gatherer days’, women would have benefited from being able to ‘home in on ripe, red fruits’.
Women are ‘born to shop’ because of evolution—‘women mastered the art of gathering food such as fruits and berries’.
People’s ability to digest starchy underground plant parts (potatoes, carrots, cassava) was the ‘fuel of human evolution’.
A collision between asteroids 160 million years ago precipitated the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago—as if to emphasize the point, one researcher said: ‘Dinosaurs were around for a very long time. So the likelihood is they would still be around if that event had never taken place.’

Pity the people who might believe such things, who don’t know that the Bible’s eyewitness account of history can be trusted from the very first verse. ‘The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple’ (Psalm 19:7).

The Courier Mail (Brisbane, Aust.), 23 August 2007, p. 11.
ABC News, www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2007/2025781.htm, 10 September 2007.
The Courier Mail (Brisbane, Aust.), 21 August 2007, p. 11.
BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6983330.stm, 13 September 2007.

Bible transforms marriages in China

A pastor in Communist China, where ‘there is no practice or culture of exchanging marriage vows’, has reported on a recent Marriage Enrichment Seminar he conducted for 60 couples. Many of them said they thought the church only talked about heaven, hell and earth, but when they saw how loving the couples in his church had become, they too wanted to learn the secret of a happy marriage.

The pastor said, ‘I told them there was no secret, just teachings from the Bible. They were amazed.’

Marriage of one man to one woman is God’s creation and gift (Genesis 2:18–24; Matthew 19:4–6). When you follow the ‘manufacturer’s instructions’, things work a whole lot better.

ASSIST News Service news release, www.assistnews.net/Stories/2007/s07090029.htm, 21 September 2007.

Goodbye ‘handy man’

The discovery of new fossils, including a partial jawbone assigned to Homo habilis, has ‘completely changed the story’ of human origins according to evolutionary theory. Many evolutionists had argued that H. habilis, sometimes dubbed ‘handy man’, had evolved from australopithecines (such as ‘Lucy’) and in turn evolved into Homo erectus—man’s supposed evolutionary predecessor. Thus ‘handy man’ was a convenient intermediate, although some paleontologists had argued that H. habilis was not a valid taxon, being a waste bin of mixed ape and human fossil bits and pieces.

But now paleontologists are in general agreement that ‘Homo habilis never gave rise to Homo erectus’. That effectively leaves a gaping hole in the story of human evolution, with nothing left to link humans with apes.

(Incidentally, H. erectus is actually fully human. For more on this see creation.com/habilis.)

Nature 448(7154):688–691, 9 August 2007.

Good design in miniature

When Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute researcher William Eberhard put miniaturized orb-weaving spiders to the test, he got a big surprise. Eberhard had expected that the bigger spiders (weighing 50–100 mg) in his study would substantially outperform the tiniest ones (weighing less than 0.005 mg).

His expectation that ‘the brains of very small species should be functionally inferior’ had a reasonable basis, as he explained:

‘Neuron size appears to reach a minimum (approx. 2 µm in diameter) near the lower end of the range of insects body sizes (approx. 0.9 mm) and then does not decrease further in smaller species; so very small species probably have reduced numbers of neurons.’

It was also known that ‘the internal substructures of the brains of very small insects may also be simpler or fewer in number, and smaller insects tend to have reduced numbers of sensory organs, such as chemosensory and tactile setae, and ommatidia in their compound eyes.’ Thus, given the apparently reduced nervous system capabilities in very tiny species, Eberhard had expected to see ‘increased imprecision’ in the spacing of successive loops of sticky spiral in orb webs, and that the smaller spiders would move more slowly.

As it turned out, he saw no evidence of any ‘handicaps of miniaturization’ whatsoever, with the tiniest spiders not only matching the web-building precision of their large counterparts, but also the speed of construction. In fact, the smallest spiders ‘were thus moving much more rapidly in terms of their body size than were the largest species’.

While this evidence of good design in miniature might have surprised William Eberhard, it ought not be surprising to anyone who understands (as per Romans 1:20) that:

‘All creatures great and small,
… the Lord God made them all.’

Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274(1622):2203–2210, 7 September 2007.

‘Dragon bones’ eaten in China

Researchers excavating dinosaur fossils from a site in central China recently reported that local villagers have long been digging up the bones and boiling them in soup, using them in traditional medicine. ‘They had believed that the “dragon bones” were from the dragons flying in the sky’, explained Dong Zhiming, a professor with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. When the villagers found out the bones were from dinosaurs, they donated 200 kg (440 lb) of bones to him and his colleagues for research.

Associated Press reported that the ‘dragon bones’ had been sold in Henan province for about 4 yuan ($US0.50) per kilogram, adding ‘The calcium-rich bones were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps.’

We have earlier reported the discovery of red blood cells and ‘still-soft-and-squishy’ material in T. rex bones, and even that some dinosaur bones still ‘smell’. (See Creation 28(4):8–9, 2006; creation.com/schweit.)

Such makes no sense if dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago as evolutionists claim, yet is readily understandable if the Bible’s historical timeline (spanning only thousands of years) is true.

PHYSORG.COM, www.physorg.com/news102762937.html, 4 July 2007.

Planet TrES-4 ‘should not exist’

At 1.7 times the size of Jupiter, astrophysicists say that the largest extrasolar planet discovered so far, dubbed TrES-4, is ‘bigger than it should be’ and theoretically ‘should not even exist’.

The planet was detected as it passed in front of its parent star, called GSC 02620-00648, and it leaves cosmologists with ‘something of a theoretical problem’. That’s because ‘its existence cannot be explained by current models.’

Actually, it’s hardly surprising that theories based on the idea of a self-creating universe can’t explain what astronomers observe as they look skyward, for the Bible says: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ (Psalm 19:1).

SPACE.com, www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070806_largest_exoplanet.html, 24 Sept. 2007.

Faster than the speed of light?

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, there is nothing, under any circumstance, that can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum.

Recently, however, physicists at the University of Koblenz, Germany, say they have observed microwave photons (tiny particles of light) travelling ‘much faster than the speed of light’, using quantum mechanical tunnelling.

This is fascinating operational science, but it has no bearing on the creation/age issue. The tunnelling efficiency drops off exponentially, so the effect could not be observed past one metre away, let alone light years distant.

New Scientist 195(2617):8, 18 August 2007.

Good advice

A recent news item reported that Charles Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, was urged by an adviser not to publish Darwin’s Origin of Species manuscript. Murray had approached the adviser, Reverend Whitwell Elwin, for his opinion on Darwin’s theory of evolution.

‘At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs,’ Elwin wrote in a letter to Murray dated 3 May 1859.

However, Murray chose to ignore the advice.

The Courier Mail (Brisbane, Aust.), 26 April 2007, p. 36.

Sparrows sing a new song

When Elizabeth Derryberry of Duke University, North Carolina, compared recordings of the singing of male white-crowned sparrows from 1979 with more recent recordings, she noticed that a number of differences in song styles had arisen. What’s more, the females that were tested were more responsive to contemporary recordings than to the older ones.

Thus mating barriers can be erected quickly, says Derryberry.

This provides something of an insight into how new ‘species’ of birds could have arisen from the same original biblical ‘kinds’—see also Creation 27(4):14–17, 2005 (creation.com/tarb).

New Scientist 195(2611):17, 7 July 2007.

Bee, orchid pollen, trapped in amber

A bee trapped in amber, together with orchid pollen grains adhering to it, has been dated as being 15–20 million years old. But could a still-intact bee and pollen grains really have lasted that long?

From the Bible’s eyewitness account of the actual history of the earth, we understand that this fossil cannot be older than 6,000 years at most, and more likely dates from the Flood, about 4,500 years ago.

See Creation 25(2):53, creation.com/amber.

Nature 448(7157):1042–1045, 30 August 2007.

Dino story rewrite (again)

With three whole chapters of Genesis devoted to the global Flood of Noah’s day, it’s hardly surprising that geologists before the 1700s saw the fossil-bearing layers of sedimentary rock worldwide as being a legacy of the Flood. (See Terry Mortenson’s book The Great Turning Point, available addresses p. 2.)

But the gradual acceptance of the idea that the layers represent long periods of time (driven by Charles Lyell and others whose stated aim was to ‘free science of Moses’), and the subsequent publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, changed all that.

Consequently, today it’s widely assumed that the ‘appearance’ (and ‘disappearance’) of particular fossils in the rock layers, when ‘read’ from bottom-to-top, is a ‘record’ of the evolution (and extinction) of life forms over billions of years, rather than simply the order of burial during the Genesis Flood, only around 4,500 years ago.

But that wrong view keeps evolutionists very busy, because the facts just don’t fit the evolutionary storyline—hence, so often when a new fossil is found, they have to change their story. (E.g. the discovery of grass remnants in fossilized dino dung overturned the previous dogma that grass didn’t evolve until after dinosaurs became extinct—Creation 29(2):22–23, 2007, creation.com/grass-eating-dinos; 29(4):35, 2007, creation.com/dino-dung-overturns-objection.)

The latest enforced change was necessitated by the ‘surprise’ discovery of dinosaurs and non-dinosaurian archosaurs buried in the same rock strata. The find ‘overturns decades of palaeontological assumptions’, namely that dinosaurs had suddenly displaced, and replaced, non-dinosaurian archosaurs. Instead, the new evolutionary storyline posits that non-dinosaurian archosaurs and dinosaurs ‘coexisted for at least 15 to 20 million years’.

They coexisted for sure, but not over the evolutionary timescale claimed—see creation.com/slowrise. In stark contrast to perpetually-revised evolution textbooks, the Word of God is unchanging and reliable (Luke 21:33, Hebrews 13:8).

New Scientist 195(2614):19, 28 July 2007.
Science 317(5836):358–361, 20 July 2007.

Why no evolution?

Fossil pycnogonids (‘sea spiders’) from Jurassic strata are described by researchers as being ‘exceptionally well preserved’ and reveal ‘very close morphological and functional (locomotion, feeding) similarities with present-day pycnogonids’. In other words, they’re just the same. By evolutionary reckoning, there’s been no change in ‘at least 160 million years’—why no evolution in all that (supposed) time?

By contrast, applying a biblical perspective makes much more sense—the fossils most probably date from the global Flood about 4,500 years ago. And the likely sudden burial in that event would explain the ‘exceptional’ preservation.