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:
Marsupial | Placental |
Tasmanian Thylacine (extinct, died out in 19th century) | Wolf |
Feathertail Glider (Sugar Glider) | Flying Squirrel |
Dunnart (Marsupial Mouse) | Mouse, Shrew |
Cuscus | Monkey |
Marsupial Mole | Golden Mole of Africa |
Quoll | Cat |
Bilby | Hare |
Rat Kangaroo | Rat |
Wombat | Marmot |
Numbat | Anteater |
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:
Element | Blood Plasma/Serum, Human | Seawater |
Sodium | 3220 | 10800 |
Chlorine | 3650 | 19400 |
Potassium | 200 | 392 |
Calcium | 50 | 411 |
Magnesium | 27 | 1290 |
Phosphorus | 36 | .09 |
Iron | 1 | .004 |
Copper | 1 | .001 |
Zinc | 1.1 | .005 |
Chromium | 1.1 | .0002 |
Bromine | 4 | 67 |
Fluorine | .1 | 1.3 |
Boron | 1 | 5 |
Selenium | .9 | .0001 |
mg./liter | mg./liter |
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