Quikfacts

If you're interested, the reference given for each item contains further information and explanation. Readers are encouraged to follow up.

4/29/97: FOCUS Articles from Creation Ex Nihilo 18(4)

Similar format to Quikfacts, with graphics.

4/14/97: New Mexico Legislature Defeats Evolutionary Dogmatism

A recently sponsored bill by evolutionists in New Mexico (Senate Bill 155) was designed to prevent anything from being taught in government (public) schools except dogmatic evolution; no creation science, no evidence contradicting or challenging evolution, all evidence must be presented according to doctrinaire evolutionism. The arrogance of the evolutionists, who even called in Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Man, "burned so many bridges that they will have a much more difficulty in the future" (to quote Dr. D. Russell Humphries). Humphreys noted:

"In testimony, it became clear that what the evolutionists feared the most was evidence being taught *against* their sacred cow. It wasn't the competition from creation models, it was the internal weakness of their own theory. I think they know that once the public finds out how tenuous their theory is, it's all over for them!"

Humphreys also noted that one good creationist was worth a dozen evolutionists. After being told about how horrible and stupid and unscientific, blah, blah, blah the creationists are, the factual existence of being confronted with creationists and finding them to be nothing of the sort instantly destroys the credibility of the evolutionists in the eyes of the public, legislators, etc.

In the meantime, the state board of education will go ahead with plans to teach evidence against evolutionism, and to teach more than one origins model (i.e., creation science). (I believe the vote was 13-1 in favor of this pro-creation movement on the part of the school board.)

Source:
Humphreys, D. Russell, CRSnet report "RE: Creation/Evolution Legislation in NM" 4/1/97.

4/1/97: Death in the Blink of an Eye at Green River

Evolutionists have claimed that the Green River formation in the western United States took millions of years to form, each small layer appearing over the course of a year. Eventually I'll write a FAQ explaining why this position is hopeless, but one of the best examples I've seen yet appeared on the back of the latest Creation Ex Nihilo.

It shows a picture from the Green River formation of a finely preserved fish fossilized in the act of swallowing another fish. Did this happen over the course of many years, as the larger fish died with it's meal in it's mouth, quietly lying undecayed on a quiescent lake floor? Dead fish float the last time I checked, particularly the perch and carp such as are found superbly preserved in the Green River formation. Ironically, I have both creationary and evolutionary books which use photos of fish fossils from the Green River formation as examples of how well preserved fossils can be - yet the evolutionary book acknowledged on another page that fossilization must occur rapidly to prevent decay! Nowhere do we observe carpets of dead fish on lake bottoms, refusing to decay as they are slowly covered by annual sedimentary deposits. Yet this is just what the "slow and gradual" advocates would have us believe for the Green River formation.

Source:
Wieland, Carl, "Frozen Feeding," Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):52.

4/1/97: Dratted Radiocarbon Dating!

In the early 1970's a creationist scientist named Whitelaw pointed out that everything with organic matter in it invariably gives a date of only a few thousand years using radiocarbon dating. Since C-14 dating only works out to 40,000-70,000 equilibrium years (depending on the precision of the instruments), the evolutionary belief that plants and animals have been around for hundreds of millions of years should result in most organic material in the geologic record being undatable. The latest Creation Ex Nihilo provides another example of how this is not the case.

Hansreudi Stutz collected coalified wood from a Tertiary deposit held by evolutionists to be 20 million years old. He had the wood dated at the University of Bern, which returned a date of 36,440 +/- 330 years before present. Note that this is an "equilibrium" date. To understand corrected radiocarbon dating and how it fits with (and demands) the young-earth model, see a Radiocarbon FAQ. When will evolutionists begin accepting the implications of radiocarbon dating?

Source:
Stutz, Hansreudi, "Dating in Conflict," Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):42-43.

4/1/97: Convergent Evolution Up the Wazoo - Placental/Marsupial Convergences

One cop-out that frequently occurs in evolutionary literature refers to "convergent evolution." This is the idea that similar or identical complex characteristics, such as the eye of a human and a squid, have evolved by chance more than once, since they could not be descended from one another in evolutionary phylogenies.

Calling the multiple appearances of the same characteristic in widely disparate creatures "convergent evolution" is of course merely sticking a label on a mystery, not an explanation. And this notion that similar features can appear by chance on widely different animals is stretched far past the breaking point by the marsupial/placental "twins" phenomenom. That is, many species of marsupials and placental mammals are "twins," very similar to one another except that one is a placental creature (like us humans), while the other is a marsupial, bearing young in pouches like a kangaroo. Because of the fundamental difference in reproduction no evolutionist would say the two are closely related to one another, instead choosing to believe that somehow nature has guided the marsupials into producing species that share all kinds of features with a "twin" placental mammal.

The following are some "twin" species:

Source:
Batten, Don, "Are Look-alikes Related?," Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):39-41.

4/1/97: Human Evolution is a Mess

The official story used to be so simple. An unknown primate evolved into the Australopithecines, like the famous Lucy fossil. These in turn evolved into Homo habilis, which used primitive tools. These in turn evolved into Homo erectus, who then gave rise to Homo neanderthal and Homo sapiens like Cro-magnon man.

These days everything is a mess, and the cracks are even beginning to show in the secular media outlets that usually do their darndest to hide any problems from the public. As Marvin Lubenow pointed out in his book Bones of Contention several years ago, even if you accept everything the evolutionists say at face value you simply cannot see human evolution in the fossil record. What you see instead is a potpourri of human and ape fossils with overlapping dating ranges that make a mess of any attempted evolutionary chart.

Several new evolutionary reports highlight the confusion. Impact #286 by professor Lubenow details the conclusion of an evolutionary dating laboratory. It concludes that Homo erectus lived in Java, Indonesia just 27,000 evolutionary years ago. It was once thought these were ancestors to humans who died out far earlier than that, 100,000 years ago or more. This should not really be surprising since a similar Homo erectus site in Australia has a date of 10,000 evolutionary years, but that was swept under the rug by redefining the bones found as Homo sapiens. (This arbitrary redefinition of fossils to fit evolutionary theory rather than empirical evidence is a common problem scientists face.) At 10,000 years, or even 27,000 years, Homo erectus would have been coexisting with Homo sapiens for many millenia.

As if to highlight the difficulty, a Reuters news item on 3/26/97 hits evolutionism from the other end, by claiming that "modern" humans (Homo sapiens) emerged at least 270,000 to 300,000 years ago, which would mean Homo erectus is now overlapping over 90% of Homo sapiens age range! Stuck in their evolutionary mindset, they can only say: "Their findings add to a growing body of evidence that man's ancestors started looking and acting modern much sooner than standard anthropology teaches, and that several species of pre-humans lived together at the same time." How can anyone be sure who evolved from what (if anything) in such conditions? And what happens when evolutionists start admitting that the multi-million year (in evolutionary dating) Laetoli footprints are obviously not made by Australopithecines but are instead identical to human footprints? Can you hear that shattering sound? That's the sound of evolutionism breaking up...

See related stories below, on 2/28/97, 2/27/97, and 1/15/97, for more information and comments on this evidence within a creationary framework.

Sources:
Anonymous, "Scientists: Mankind May Be Older Than We Think," Pointcast News Network, 3/26/97.
Lubenow, Marvin, "Alleged Evolutionary Ancestors Coexisted With Modern Humans," Impact #286, Institute for Creation Research, April 1997.

4/1/97: Evolution as Blind Faith

"We don't need evidence. We know it to be true."
-Famous atheist and defender of old-guard Neo-Darwinian evolution, Dr. Richard Dawkins, "explaining his intellectual commitment to Darwinian evolution as the explanation of human origins."

Source:
CRSnet post by Dr. L. Lester, 3/19/97, on quote as it appeared in the last issue of World, the weekly news magazine. The quote is from a speech at Washington University in St. Louis.

3/27/97: Blood and Sea-Water Not Related
One of the older myths of evolutionism has been that blood and sea-water have minerals at the same concentrations. This claim seems to have fallen into disuse, but it bears documenting as myths have a way of reappearing. Here is a comparison:

Source:
Batten, Don, "Red-blooded Evidence," Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):24-25.

3/27/97: Native Americans, Mammoths - and Dinosaurs - Lived Together
An richly illustrated article in Creation Ex Nihilo documents this amazing evidence. It includes:
1. Color photo of a Moab, Utah, pictograph of a four-toed mammoth (which is accurate, modern elephants have five toes). The cave art comes from the Anasazi, who lived in the area from 150 B.C. to 1200 A.D. An authority on this art stated that the mammoth drawings are from the latter part of this period, within the last thousand years. Formerly, it was believed the mammoths died out at least 10,000 years ago.
2. Color photo of two carved slabs from New Mexico showing elephantine figures among other symbols, dating to around 1200 A.D. Since mammoth skeletons or fossils would not retain a trunk, it is concluded these must have been based on live mammoth sitings.
3. Color photos and negative image from Kachina Bridge National Park of a sauropod dinosaur glyph (i.e., such as an apatosaurus). "The leading regional expert on rock art concedes this glyph, which shows signs of weathering (pitting and fading) is of a sauropod and is authentically old, but proffers no explanation. Antagonistic to creationists, he has refused to reveal its location."
4. Color photos of two stones from the Nazca desert in South America. Done in an intricate Inca style, they clearly depict a Triceratops and an upright dinosaur, vaguely suggested to be a T. Rex or Spinosaurus (I suggest it looks like an Iguanadon standing up).
5. Fran Barnes, an American rock art authority "who despises creationists" is quoted: "In the San Rafael Swell, there is a pictograph that looks very much like a pterosaur, a Cretaceous flying reptile." Barnes accepts the apparent authenticity of this and other finds, and proffers no 'orthodox' explanation. It was also pointed out that the Sioux depict their legendary Thunder Bird as a pterosaur or something similar.
6. At Havasupai Canyon a well-weather glyph appears to show another upright dinosaur, standing on two legs and balancing on a long tail. This image is considerably less precise, perhaps due to the weathering, than the others.
Could they be frauds? The appearance of desert varnish (which builds up over time and makes recent carving easy to identify), weathering, accuracy of details (such as the mammoth toes), oxidation layers and acceptance by hostile witnesses mitigates against this possibility.

Although definitely presented from a young-earth creationist standpoint, this site and the video it advertises appears to be related to the South American finds and to more reputed discoveries in Central America that would demonstrate human-dinosaur coexistence.

Source:
Swift, Dennis, "Messages on Stone," Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):20-23.

Mysterious Origins of Man #3 video and website

3/2/797: Fresh "165 Million Year Old" Corpses?
A "mud spring" in England is upwelling Jurassic molluscs and other marine creatures from clays beneath the surface. The remains are not fossilized. The molluscs frequently retain their mother-of-pearl shells and even have their intact original organic ligaments, which is frankly incredible. The shells retain their iridescent quality and original aragonite composition. It is incredible they have been maintained for even a few thousand years, but 165 million? Even in a perfectly closed environment intrinsic thermodynamic instabilities would set in upon anything not kept at absolute zero.
Source:
Snelling, Andrew A., "A '165 million year' surprise," Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):14-15.

3/27/97: Koalas Our Closest Ancestor?
Evolutionists commonly select or invent evidence supporting the idea that humans evolved from primates (for example, see 1/7/97 note below). Other evidence, such as cytochrome c sequence comparisons that indicate chickens are most similar to us, or speech ability, which would make parrots our close cousins, are ignored. Now there is another example.
A forensic biologist in Australia has reported that koalas have fingerprints very similar to human prints, and much more so than monkey fingerprints are to human prints. Australian police beware: the next time you dust a crime scene for fingerprints, be sure you are not identifying a cuddly koala who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as Public Enemy #1!
Source:
Anon., "Cuddly Criminals," Creation Ex Nihilo 19(2):7.

3/5/97: Did Stars Have a Watery Birth?
The Bible speaks of the earth as being formed out of water and some current creationist speculation, such as Humphries' White Hole model for the formation of the universe, implies the formation of stars from the watery medium of the firmament. That stars had a "watery" birth strikes us as odd, but now secular researchers at the Weizmann Institute are suggesting something similar. An article describing their theory begins thus:
"Logically, stars should not exist. They are born when clouds of interstellar gas collapse inwardly under their own weight, growing denser and hotter until nuclear fusion causes them to emit energy in the form of light. However, since heat forces matter to expand, this hot contracting gas could be expected to immediately move outward again, preventing star formation from ever reaching completion.
To resolve this paradox, scientists have postulated the existence of a water-based "cooling system" that regulates the temperature of interstellar clouds, enabling the contraction to continue. Now a Weizmann Institute study reported in Physical Review Letters provides experimental evidence that the billions of stars that populate our firmament indeed had a watery birth."
Source:
CRSnet post from Lambert Dolphin of an unreferenced article from the web, and the Weizmann Institute.

2/28/97: Early Human Weren't Primitive "Ape-Men" II
It never rains but it pours. Today yet another report was made, describing the discovery of stone tools at Diring Yuriakh, 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Siberia. The report in Pointcast stated the discovery "is another of in [sic] a line of recent discoveries showing that early humans were more intelligent and resourceful than previously thought.... The news could greatly affect how scientists view human development."
Cautionary Notes & the Creation Model
In the evolutionary model the stone tools were estimated at 260,000-370,000 years old. This would be during the ice age epoch of earth history. Ironically, some extremely common misconceptions about the nature of the "ice age" may be causing evolutionists to be even more astounded by the discovery than the facts warrant.
The story stated that this part of Siberia reaches temperatures of -70 degrees (no mention of the scale, argh), explaining that such a discovery proved the humans who made the tools must have been far more advanced than previously thought, to even survive under such extreme conditions in that area. "...it shows even early humans would live in completely inhospitable places." The article implicitly assumes today's weather conditions are relevant to the discovery. One might naturally assume it was even worse during the ice age, right?
Wrong.
The standard evolutionary stories about the ice age and hypothesized causes are too simplistic and don' account for what is actually found. The most popular class of theories for the ice age, for example, involves "astronomical" causes, in which the earth receives less sunlight and cools down as a result. This has a variety of problems, one of which I will mention here: it doesn't explain why many northern areas were warmer during the ice age - including Siberia.
Fossil vegetation and animals found in glacial deposits prove that coastal regions and very cold areas today, such as Alaska and Siberia, were never glaciated and were in fact much warmer, even sub-tropical, at the same time as great ice sheets covered much of Europe and North America. The remains of forests can still be seen on Axel Heiberg island in the frozen Canadian tundra, and breadfruit and other vegetation is found in the stomachs of the mammoths. A simple cooldown doesn't explain this climate pattern, nor does shifting the polar axis a thousand miles or so account for what we see. However, Mike Oard does have a convincing explanation for the ice age weather patterns, as a result of the Cataclysm.
After the global flood, the waters had been warmed by massive geologic activity while the skies where cooled by massive amounts of volcanic dust. The warm water caused heavy evaporation and warm coastlines, while the cold skies above led to heavy precipitation over the continental interiors. Alaska and Siberia, and even Antarctica, were warmed by ocean currents. This continued for several centuries, until the skies cleared, the oceans cooled down and the ice sheets began to melt. Apparently the climate shifted rather suddenly and the warmer regions of Alaska and Siberia were swiftly frozen, trapping many animals, such as the mammoths, in icy tombs. (Yes folks, I know Walt Brown has other ideas but I disagree with him on this one.)
Think about it. Mammoths were not adapted to extreme cold as so often assumed, rather for a more temperate climate. And what do you suppose the huge mammoth herds did, wander around on glaciers and lick lichens and moss during short summers for food?? No, they and the many other mammals found in the region had ample vegetation to feed on, and they were not adapted to extreme cold because it wasn't that bad during the ice age, ironically.
So should we be surprised that early humans were able to live in the same areas as mammoths and other ice age mammals? Not at all, especially if we recognize they were perfectly intelligent, if materially poor, to begin with (see story below). The only people scratching their heads are evolutionists who persist with surprisingly simple-minded ideas about the ice age epoch to begin with.
Sources:
Anonymous, "Surviving the Frozen Tundra," Pointcast Network, 2/27/97
Oard, Michael, An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1990), 243 pp.

2/27/97: Early Humans Weren't Primitive "Ape-Men"
In a stunning new report in Nature (2/27/97?), scientists reported finding perfectly preserved wooden spears in a coal mine in Germany, along with the remains of at least ten butchered horses. As a Pointcast Network story admits: "The spears... add to a growing body of data indicating that our now-extinct ancestors were not primitive, grunting cave-men but rather had an advanced culture." The three spears showed "meticulous" workmanship and it is believed they were designed and balanced for throwing. Some dispute this, but others strongly advocate that they were throwing spears, even to the edge of ridicule; "to regard them as snow probes or digging sticks is like claiming that power drills are paperweights." (British archeologist Robin Dennell in the Detroit News.)
Evolutionists believe the spears are 400,000 years old, and that they were made by Homo erectus during the ice age that partly glaciated Europe. How do creationists understand this find?
In terms of real history, the spears probably date from around 300-600 years after the Cataclysm, during the height of the Flood-induced ice age. They may have been individuals born before the confusion at Babel who emigrated to Europe, or European natives, descendants of the civilation at Babel. Since there are no reports of human fossil remains at the site we can't be certain which they were, but this is how we could know where they originated, if any fossils are found:
Homo erectus: These humans remains are those of individuals born at Babel before the dispersion, or born in the centuries thereafter in warmer climates (i.e., not near the glacial fields of Eurasia) during the ice age. Their distinctive skeletal features are not "ape-like" but rather are the result of living to great age, while growing to maturity under relatively healthy conditions. Socially, they were typically civilized but materially impoverished, capable of good craftsmanship if they had the opportunity (as these spears suggested to the scholars). As time passed and lifespans declined to near modern spans, we see the gradual disappearance of erectus type skeletal features, though at Kow Swamp in Australia erectus specimens are dated to be even more recent than any Neanderthal sites, despite the fact that evolutionists believed Neaderthals evolved from erectus!
Neanderthal: These were humans living under rough conditions in Eurasia during the post-Cataclysmic ice age. They were natives to Eurasia, being born and raised in conditions of vitamin deficiency (Vitamin K production crippled by lack of sunlight from sheltering in caves and the lousy ice age weather), nutritional and environmental hardships and material poverty. These problems are now recognized to have caused many of the distinctive Neanderthal features once attributed to ape ancestors. Like the erectus they bear features suggestive of living to great age, such as tooth wear patterns that indicate slower growth to maturity. In warmer climes we do not find Neanderthal fossils because people were not suffering skeletal deformity due to the harsher conditions, appearing instead as erectus-grading-into-modern type fossils. Keep in mind the stupid looks and subtly ape-like features (hair, the way they are posed, etc.) put on museum reconstructions and artwork of erectus and Neanderthal by evolutionists is not found in the fossil record and has no basis in scientific fact.
Cro-magnon: As the end of the ice age approached and conditions alleviated, and lifespans declined towards the modern values, humans fossils of the modern type appear, most famously the Cro-magnon of Europe. Evolutionists generally believe erectus evolved into Neanderthal, and then get confused but generally indicate that Cro-magnon evolved from somewhere.
Now finds putting both Cro-magnon and Neanderthals together are indicating a different story. The Kow Swamp finds mentioned above also show that the evolutionary scenario is too simplistic. Instead we see fossils with a mixture of characteristics, and heavily overlapping time scales. Not every human born during the ice age was stunted, nor did Neanderthal variants simply vanish at the end of the ice age. erectus variants persisted where long lifespans presumably persisted. The Pointcast article acknowledges, "several findings now indicate that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals lived closely together for thousands [sic] of years," mentioning the discovery of art and ornaments associated with Cro-magnons at a Neanderthal site, for example.
Sources:
Anonymous, "Spears Show Hunting Started 400,000 Years Ago," Detroit News, p. ??, 2/28/97.
Anonymous, "Ancient Spears Shed New Light on Early Humans," Pointcast Network 2/27/97.
Lubenow, Marvin, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Hominid Fossils (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992).

[Add references to Cuozzo's work, ICR's most recent newsletter, Cooper, Mehlert, etc.]

2/12/97: Long-Period Comets Don't Decay Into Short-Period Comets
Creationists and astronomers in general have long pointed out that observed comets decay at a rapid rate. Placing reasonable limits on estimates of their original size (say, smaller than Jupiter!), we find that short-period comets can not have been orbiting the sun as they do today for more than a few hundred thousand years, and probably quite a bit less . Creationists point out this is straightforward evidence for a young solar system.
Several ad hoc responses have been offered by old-earthers. One popular proposal is that out far beyond the solar system, where we can't see, are swarms of millions of comets in the cold of interstellar space. This cloud was named the Oort Cloud after the man who proposed it. The idea was that occasionally for some reason comets from the Oort Cloud would fall toward the sun and go into orbit, becoming the comets we see today. Despite the way many textbooks and media articles refer to it as if it were a factual object, there is simply no observed evidence for it's existence, even after many decades. It is deplorable to see certain evolutionists, once again, creating "evidence" in people's minds from thin air.
More recently a group of comets called the Kuiper Belt was discovered. I am told there is still some controversy about the validity of the observations. I'll assume the Belt is real. (Update 3/27/97: "Second Look Finds No Comet Reservoir," Science News, 149(25):395 - indicates initial "sighting" of Kuiper Belt based on statistical analysis was mistaken.) Some comets orbit within the solar system, and some known comets have very eccentric orbits that take them in and out of the solar system. The Kuiper Belt completes the picture, being composed of comets in orbits outside the solar system.
The Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud are two very different things. That's why they give them separate names, and why the Belt has not been claimed as evidence for the Cloud. As the names imply, the Belt orbits the sun, while the Cloud is presumed to float freely in space, much farther out. The relevant question for us is whether the Kuiper Belt could be a source of supply for the inner comets, explaining how the solar system could be billions of years old if comets have a lifespan of only thousands of years. (Leaving aside, of course, the question of where the Kuiper Belt came from, or just how many comets it could supply for billions of years.)
It had been hypothesized that gravitational perturbations (from planets or other masses) could have caused long-period comets (those that orbit far out from the sun or in very eccentric orbits) to become short-period comets. This is now known to not be the case, as demonstrated in the Astrophysical Journal article below. As such the young-solar system model is the only one consistent with the evidence of comet-decay.
Sources:
Dunca, Quinn & Tremaine, "The Origin of Short-Period Comets," in Astrophysical Journal Letters 328: L69-L73.
For info on the Kuiper Belt, see the May 1996 Scientific American, pp. 46-52.

1/15/97: Fraudulent "Lucy" Reconstruction in St. Louis Zoo
A statue of the famous fossil discovery named "Lucy" (whose presumed gender was recently challenged in a scientific journal, I'll have to dig up the reference) in the St. Louis Zoo includes feet that are amazingly similar to human feet. Hairy feet, but flat, human-like feet nontheless. (No word yet on how they can tell how hairy the feet were from fossilized bones. :-)
The problem is that we have fossil evidence that tells us what australopithecine feet were like and the "reconstruction" is simply wrong. Their feet, like modern apes, have long curved toes, "even more so than apes today that live mostly in trees." The curved foot and toes allow the ape to grasp tree branches but making walking upright very clumsy. The exhibit gives Lucy feet that are at least as flat and short-toed as mine or yours.
Since evolutionary propaganda (at least, from the "Johanson camp") is fairly dogmatic that "Lucy" walked upright, it seems required that the public be deceived. Despite admissions by evolutionists when pressed, they have no plans to fix the exhibit and admit australopithecines are merely a branch of extinct ape. "Professor Betsy Schumann, evolutionist expert at [Dr. Dave] Menton's university, admits that the statue's feet 'probably are not accurate,' but when asked whether the statue should be changed, she says, 'absolutely not'." (Anatomy professor Dr. Menton is the creationist who broke the story to the mildy sympathetic press.)
Isn't it great knowing what people are doing with millions (in this case, $17.9 million) of your tax dollars?
Source: Anonymous "'Ape-woman' Statue Misleads Public: Anatomy Professor," Creation Ex Nihilo 19:1, pp. 52 (back cover).

1/8/97: Distant Mature Galaxies Threatening the Big Bang Model
When I took a class on creation science a few years ago, my instructor expressed the opinion that the soon to be fixed Hubble Telescope would reveal fully formed galaxies out to infinity, with no sign of a trend towards younger galaxies farther out as the big bang model demands. I thought he was wrong at the time, though I agreed about the falsity of the BB model. Now it looks like he may have known something I didn't.
Astronomers have now located what appear to be spiral galaxies with a redshift of 4.4, which is quite large. The larger the redshift, the farther away an object is thought to be. The farther away it is the longer it takes light to reach us from it, and therefore galaxies this far away are thought (in big bang models) to be close to the beginning of time. The problem is that spiral galaxies are mature and would presumably take a great deal of time to form. Thus, we are told by the scientists:
...stars must have formed in the newly discovered galaxy sooner after the big bang than anyone thought - so soon taht theorists are likely to have a few headaches trying to explain how... Cosmologists must now explain how stars formed, blew up, and reformed again in a mere [!] 1 to 2 billion years after the big bang. (Chown, p. 19)
Sources:
Chown, M. "Trouble at the Edge of Time," New Scientist 148(2000):19.
Oard, M.J., "Galaxies Near the Edge of the Universe may be Mature," Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10(3):291-292.

1/7/97: Apes & Humans 99% Similar?
Many people have heard that apes and humans have genes that are "99%" similar (or "98%", or whatever). I've been told this on several occasions. First, this percent "similarity" is not a direct comparison of genes. (What it actually is measuring would take too long to explain.) Besides, it turns out the actual reported value was 97%. This value is itself based on a simple mathematical error. Creationist plant physiologist Don Batten comments:
Interestingly, the original papers did not contain the basic data...
Sarich and co-workers obtained the original data... Sarich discovered considerable sloppiness in Sibley and Ahlquist's generation of their data as well as their statistical analysis. Upon inspecting the data, I discovered that, even if everything else was above criticism, the 97 per cent figure came from making a very basic statistical error - averaging two figures without taking into account differences in the number of observations contributing to each figure. When a proper mean is calculated it is 96.2 per cent, not 97 per cent. However, there is no true replication in the data, so no real meaning can be attached to the figures published by Sibley and Ahlquist.
As an aside, the alleged 99% similarity of humans to apes was never anything more than an emotional appeal, there was no predictive argument involved. No one said that if the value was really (ahem) 96%, then that would mean evolution is wrong, for example. As it stands, humans should be expected to have a high level of correlation with animals because low correlations would probably make us extremely toxic (or at least biochemically incompatible, as a food source, for example) to other life, and vice versa. As for apes being more similar to us genetically than anything else measured, that could be predicted simply by eyeballing humans and primates and other animals - origins has nothing to do with it.
Source: Batten, Don, "Human/Chimp DNA Similarity," Creation Ex Nihilo 19:1, pp. 21-22.

1/7/97: Hump-Headed Elephants
Paleolithic (stone-age) cave drawings in Europe show mammoths with a large, distinctive hump on their heads. Evolutionists claim these drawings are at least 10,000 to 30,000 years old. Now, explorer Colonel John Blashford-Snell has found two elephants in a remote valley of Nepal that share the distinctive hump and body shape of the mammoths. Additionally, the larger specimen is 3.7 meters tall, taller than the largest Asian elephant known until he was found.
Source: Carl Wieland, "'Lost World' Animals - Found!," Creation Ex Nihilo 19:1, pp. 10-13.

1/7/97: Riwoche Horse
In addition to the humped mammoth/elephant discovery above, the article also describes the recently discovered Riwoche horse, found in a remote region of Tibet. It shares the same distinctive features as are found on a horse previously known only from cave drawings, such as a beige coat with black stripe on the back, bristly mane, black lines on the lower legs and a wedge-shaped head like that of the zebra.
Source: 'Lost World' Animals - Found!, p. 13, see above.

1/7/97: Sticking People in a Zoo Proves Evolution?
In another attempt at evolutionary propaganda, a zoo in Copenhagen has been displaying a pair of human beings, complete with a standard zoo display label and signs. One zoo official commented that the purpose was to force people to believe they had an animal ancestry. Too bad no one told the lemurs. The couple complained they were keeping them awake at night with their "uninhibited screaming."
Source: Anon., "Zoo Displays Humans," Creation Ex Nihilo 19:1, p. 6 (citing New York Daily News, 8/29/96, p. 48).

1/7/97: Please God, Where'd You Hide the Deuterium?
The "big bang" model, proponents claim, can predict the abundance of certain elements found in the universe. Now, according to "careful measurements" made by a team of scientists, only about 10% of the expected amount of deuterium exists. Since the amount of deuterium is used to also predict the amounts of helium and lithium present in the universe, those estimates are also believed to be far off the predicted values. Gary Steigman of Ohio State Univ. was quoted, saying "It's a potential crisis for cosmology."
Source: Anon., "Heavy Problem for 'Big-Bang'," Creation Ex Nihilo 19:1, p. 7 (citing New Scientist, 5/18/96, p. 18).

1/7/97: They Weren't So Dumb After All
Archaeologists have discovered that natives of Britain, Spain and France were using a written script by 1500 B.C. Such findings are dispelling myths about the presumed primitive nature of these cultures before Roman hegemony.
Source: Anon., "Early European Writing Overturns Theories," Creation Ex Nihilo 19:1, p. 8 (citing The Sunday Times, 6/16/96, p. 17).
An aside: wasn't it advocates of the JEPD heresy who said Moses couldn't have written the Pentateuch because writing was unknown in his time (1500-1400 BC)? Now we have entire libraries being unearthed that pre-date Moses...

1/7/97: OK, OK, Maybe They Could Swim After All
One argument that has been made by evolutionists is some animals cannot have reached their present geographic distribution since they were released from the Ark on or near Mt. Ararat. The ground sloth of South America, in particular, has been cited as an example (cf., Ham et al, p. 205) of an animal that could not have made the journey from Ararat to South America in the time span alotted and across the intervening terrain. Now it appears there may be some egg on the critics face.
According to new evolutionary reconstructions, the land bridge between North and South America only formed 2.5-3.5 million years ago. Problem: based on their interpretation of the fossil evidence, mammals such as tapirs, camels, and gomphotheres (a type of elephant) were all here millions of years earlier. And the ground sloth is believed to have emigrated from South America four million years before the isthmus was formed.
Evolutionary solution? The creatures must have alternately walked and swum their way to and from the land mass, the theorists said. What's good for the goose is good the for gander: if swimming is adequate as an evolutionary explanation for biogeographic dispersion, then creationists should be able to appeal to it as a potential means (along with floating on vegetation mats, transport by explorers and colonists, etc.) by which sloths traveled from the Ark as well.
Sources: Anon., "Swimming Elephants," Creation Ex Nihilo 19:1, p. 7 (citing New Scientist, 6/29/96, p. 15).
Ham, Ken, Andrew Snelling, Carl Wieland, The Answers Book (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1991).

1/6/97: Pre-Adamite Man?
What is the origin of the concept of "Pre-Adamites," (humans or soulless man-like creatures who supposedly lived before Adam)? The notion began in the modern age with Isaac de la Peyreres (1596-1676), a Dutch geographer who declared that only Jews were descended from Adam, gentiles from a preadamite race.
Various derivatives of this teaching, which was declared heretical by the Roman Church, became the foundation for arguments that native Americans, Africans, and other non-white native peoples were inferior races unrelated to Europeans. It also gave rise to the belief that the Flood of Genesis must have been local, since otherwise they would have to be descended from Noah, and thus Adam. Racist Europeans who were unwilling to accept kinship with these "lesser races" thus found comfort in the notion that the Flood was local and did not cover the regions where these other races resided.
Source: Ian Taylor, "Preadamite Man," Bible-Science News, 34:8, p. 21-24.

See also: Quikfacts: Days of Creation

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(Created: 6 January 1997 - Last Update: 29 April 1997)