Atheist Richard Leakey whines to media about resistance to "Evolution"

What do agnostic Richard Dawkins, atheist Richard Leakey, and dictator Barack Hussein Obama have in common? They're all from Kenya of course! Can anything good come out of that country?

MSNBC is reporting Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.

"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges".

Ok - we're good with that, and it's all quite sufficiently explained using the biblical model of a common created being fashioned by God only a few thousand years ago. Evolution theory gets no victory here. Leakey goes on in the article to blame humanity for what drives evolution - climate change - man made climate change no less.

"If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you've got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena," Leakey says. "Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one."

Wait - what? Evolution theory dictates (and depends entirely on) that all currently living organisms are the off spring of extinct predecessors. Even Darwin wrote this in "On The Origins of Species". Leakey would have us to believe that extinction is "always" driven by environmental change and that man created it?

It figures. Man-made climate change (anthropogenic global warming) is a known hoax. So it stands to reason that a theory (deep-time evolution) based on falsified evidence and circular reasoning should also get his stamp of approval. All of the actual evidence is easily explained using the biblical creation model.

"Leakey began his work searching for fossils in the mid-1960s. His team unearthed a nearly complete 1.6-million-year-old skeleton in 1984 that became known as "Turkana Boy," the first known early human with long legs, short arms and a tall stature". - article

Creationists have nothing to fear from the Turkana Boy. Turkana Boy is our distant relative. But this is not because we evolved from the apes, but because Adam is the common ancestor of both Turkana Boy and ourselves. We should welcome the opportunity to discuss the scientific evidence through a biblical lens. Although museums and the popular media trumpet this human Turkana boy skeleton as an icon of evolution, a careful investigation reveals that the scientific evidence fully supports the biblical account. See here.

Leakey has no problem with people having faith saying...

"I see no reason why you shouldn't go through your life thinking if you're a good citizen, you'll get a better future in the afterlife ...."

Wait - I wonder if Leakey has ever actually read the Bible. Being a a good citizen to get a better future in the afterlife is the exact opposite of the general message given in the Bible which teaches that humanity is entirely incapable of being a good enough citizen to gain any favor at all in the afterlife.This is important because in the articles online about this Leakey mentions the book of Genesis directly.

 "If you don't like the word evolution, I don't care what you call it, but life has changed. You can lay out all the fossils that have been collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up. So the question is why, how does this happen? It's not covered by Genesis. There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God."

There it is - the hero of evolution teaching - millions of years. It's a circular presupposition which has been shown many times to have weak support. Yet it remains the number one pillar of evolution theory. Take it away and the whole atheist creation myth falls apart.

There are many scientists doing real science without ever invoking the atheist creation story. There are many scientists who could very happily debate Leakey and bring his theoretical house of cards crumbling into a heap of embarrassment on the floor. There are many scientists who could easily show Richard has wasted the vast majority of his life chasing proof that he will never find.

He mentioned some numbers in his interview. Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it." That's an interesting timeline for Richard considering his age. Leakey is 67 years old. He only has 15 to 30 years to figure it all out before his own biological clock counts down to zero. Here's hoping he finds the real identity of his maker. Here's hoping he finds Jesus.

Is PPSIMMONS Gone? - Carl Gallups Explains

Hey folks this is Carl Gallups - one of the main spokespeople and video producers for the world famous and viral youtube site - PPSIMMONS. Many of you have noticed that the PPSIMMONS channel does not currently exist on YOUTUBE. Youtube exercised its right to pull the channel. Apparently the channel was the victim of a massive flagging campaign. The decision to pull the channel is under appeal. Perhaps it will reappear - perhaps not. In the final analysis it doesn't matter. It is in God's hand.

But never fear! Long before the PPSIMMONS channel was pulled I had opened my own personal ministry channel - The CARL GALLUPS youtube channel. 

This channel contains hundreds of videos - many of them featured on the old PPSIMMONS channel dealing with the issues of evolution, atheism, biblical prophecy, amazing Bible revelations, Bible teaching and ask the preacher videos. Its all there for you to enjoy, share, and pass around the internet community. 

Come check us out today! If you liked the PPSIMMONS channel - you will LOVE the Carl Gallups channel!

I will keep the very best in biblical teaching videos pouring into this channel on a daily basis. Come SUBSCRIBE TODAY and tell others! Together we can make a difference for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ - God bless you.

Carl Gallups

EVOLUTION DEFEATED! By Its Own DESIGN! (Real Science) Carl Gallups Explains

EVOLUTION DEFEATED! By Its Own DESIGN! (Real Science) Carl Gallups Explains
Hear Carl Gallups (narrator) every Friday - 1330 WEBY AM - Gulf Coast Talk Radio
Freedom Friday With Carl Gallups
http://www.carlgallups.com

EXPOSED! FRAUD AND DECEPTION! Darwinian Evolution Theory Falling Apart in Academia

Two HUGE Stories out of Baylor University this week have exposed a disturbing trend in the academic world.

Associated Press is reporting that colleges have spent billions on financial aid for high-scoring students who don't actually need the money, motivated at least partly by the quest for rankings glory.

It was a college, Baylor University, that paid students it had already accepted to retake the SAT exam in a transparent ploy to boost the average scores it could report. It's colleges that have awarded bonuses to presidents who lift their school a few slots.

And it's colleges that occasionally get caught in the kind of cheating you might expect in sports or on Wall Street, but which seems especially ignominious coming from professional educators.

The latest example came last week at Claremont McKenna, a highly regarded California liberal arts college where a senior administrator resigned after acknowledging he falsified college entrance exam scores for years to rankings publications such as US News.

Even though Baylor has been caught up in this there are glimmers of truth coming out of that particular University, perhaps not coincidentally. This week The Institute for Creation Research is reporting that in a recent paper titled "Dissecting Darwinism," Baylor University Medical Center surgeon Joseph Kuhn described serious problems with Darwinian evolution. He first described how life could not possibly have come from chemicals alone, since the information residing in DNA required an input from outside of nature.

He then addressed Darwinism's inability to account for the all-or-nothing structure of cellular systems, including the human body. As a medical doctor, Kuhn not only knows the general arrangement of the human body's visible parts, he also understands the interrelated biochemical systems that sustain and regulate all of those parts. He recognized that the human body contains an all-or-nothing system in which its core parts and biochemicals must exist all at once for the body to function.

Biochemist Michael Behe named these all-or-nothing systems "irreducibly complex." Removing a single core part from one of these systems keeps the entire system from working, and this implies that the system was initially built with all of its parts intact.

This is exactly what researchers expect to see if God purposely created living systems, rather than if natural processes accidentally built living systems bit-by-bit—as Darwinian philosophy maintains.

Kuhn cited the work of another medical doctor, Geoffrey Simmons, who described 17 "all or nothing" human body systems. These combine with many others to form the entire human body—a system of systems—that is irreducible at many levels, from gross anatomy to biochemistry. For example, just as a woman would die without her heart, she would also die without the vital blood biochemical hemoglobin.

But even an intact heart and hemoglobin need regulation. A heart that beats too fast or too slow can be just as lethal as having no heart, and a body that produces too much or too little hemoglobin can be equally unhealthy. Thus, the systems that regulate heartbeats and hemoglobin must also have been present from the beginning.

Kuhn wrote that "virtually every aspect of human physiology has regulatory elements, feedback loops, and developmental components that require thousands of interacting genes leading to specified protein expression." Thus, "the human body represents an irreducibly complex system on a cellular and an organ/system basis."

Evolution has no proven explanations for the origin of just one irreducibly complex system, let alone the interdependent web of irreducible systems that comprise the human body.

Could the human body have evolved? According to Kuhn, to change another creature into a human "would require far more than could be expected from random mutation and natural selection." However, a wonderfully constructed human body is exactly what an all-wise Creator would make, and He promised that those who trust in Him will one day inherit new bodies "that fadeth not away." See here for full article with references.

The Nylonase Fallacy - Addressing the Myth

(photo - islandcrisis.net)

Nylonase is one of the heroes of modern evolution theorists. According to the claims, bacteria have developed the ability to digest nylon; a material which has not been available until relatively recent times. But is nylonase worthy of the exaggerated claims made to promote it as "evolution observed"?

Bacteria are asexual microorganisms that can rapidly reproduce. While it would appear that bacterial offspring are effectively a clone of the parent, this genetic homogeneity would reduce a bacterial population’s ability to quickly respond to changing environments. Instead, bacteria have numerous mechanisms for introducing genetic variation into a growing population. These mechanisms, combined with their rapid reproduction and large population sizes, enable bacteria to quickly and effectively adapt to a variety of environmental changes.

Believe it or not, these rapid changes have also been observed in people though not exactly the same. In a mere matter of a few weeks, climbers of Mt Everest experience rapid adaptations in their body’s ability to carry oxygen. At 20,000 feet there is half the available oxygen in the air as there is at sea level. So through the act of acclimatizing the person’s red blood cell count doubles. This allows for double the load of oxygen to go through the body and compensates for the lack of oxygen in the air. Without taking the proper measures and waiting the required length of time to allow the body to go through the adaptation process at 20,000 feet the climbers’ lungs would fill with fluid and the person would die further up the mountain.

Even with the adaptation Everest climbers still need assistance from oxygen tanks they carry with them. However there are some people, through repeated Everest climbs, who don’t require any oxygen tanks at all to reach the summit of the tallest mountain on earth. Their bodies have made more lasting refinements to anticipate future attempts. On 8 May 1978, Reinhold Messner (Italy) and Peter Habeler (Austria) made the first ascent without supplemental oxygen, using the southeast ridge route. On 20 August 1980, Messner reached the summit of the mountain solo for the first time, without supplementary oxygen or support, on the more difficult Northwest route via the North Col to the North Face and the Great Couloir. He climbed for three days entirely alone from his base camp at 6,500 metres (21,300 ft).

Like bacteria, which also make rapid adaptations because of rapid reproduction in environmental condition changes, these humans never exhibit any reason to believe that they ever have been, or ever will be, anything but human. Whether we’re talking about nylonase or E. coli, or any other bacteria we’re always talking about bacteria. They may adapt, change, mutate, or whatever other label one may wish to give it, but whatever the outcome they will always be bacteria.

The Bible predicts this ability to adapt within the created kind. Noah didn’t bring two of every animal onto the ark. He brought two of every “kind” – a broad sampling of animals represented on the earth. These kinds have been mutating and adapting within their created barriers ever since; giving us the wide variety of species we observe today.

Gametic isolation prevents the microbe-to-man evolution myth taught under the guise of science designed to promote the Star Trek fairy tale atheism some believe will someday do away with belief in supernatural realities like heaven and hell, judgment and eternal punishment. There’s the motivation – the narrative for it all.

The new religion sounds very intellectual, very nuanced and out of most people’s reach. So society has given the thinking elite carte blanch – the public trust – the keys to the hope of humanity’s future. They’ve been permitted to hoodwink the masses into believing they are no more than animals that ruin the planet with their parasitic lusts and destructive use of force. They commit fraud in the text books and decry any public inquiry. They take public money to promote lies and deceit.

Evolution theory, with bacteria as its hero and science-fiction as its narrative, is long overdue for its own gate. Like Watergate and Climategate, evolutiongate could be just around the corner.

Did Humans Cause Dinosaur Extinctions? - plus video - Dinosaurs - Man - Evolution and The Bible

ICR

Like elephants and a few other animals, rhinoceroses are among the last of the large animals called "megafauna." Rhinos exist in African, Indonesian, Javan, Indian, and Sumatran varieties.¹ They are also among the rarest animals in the wild.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the Western Black Rhino officially extinct this year. The Northern White Rhino, also from Africa, may be on its way out as well, and the last Javan Rhino in Vietnam may be gone for good.²

Poachers are notorious for killing the large animals in order to harvest their highly valued horns, which some believe have medicinal properties, including use as an aphrodisiac. The horn is made of the protein keratin, the primary component of fingernails and hair.

This confirms what researchers generally observe about the extinction of species: The primary cause is interaction with humans. When mankind moves into an area, some of the first animals to face destruction are those that are the most threatening, such as the megafauna. Thus, recent centuries have seen the demise of such giants as Haast's eagle³ and the moa, a giant flightless bird.⁴

"The current extinction crisis is caused primarily by human impacts upon wild populations," according to UK biologist Rosie Woodroffe, who wrote on the declining populations of large carnivores.⁵

Rhinos are not carnivores, but in addition to being valued for their horns, they are large and can be dangerous if they are frightened or challenged. Thus, it stands to reason that if humans primarily cause the current extinctions of megafauna, then they may have caused past extinctions as well.⁶ That could help explain the plethora of legends, found in all cultures, of heroes killing dragons, which were probably dinosaurs in many cases.⁷

Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? One very likely factor—among others, such as climate changes after the Flood—is the same reason the black rhinoceros and so many other megafauna have died out: People moved in and eliminated them.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE WITH REFERENCES

The Ingenious Way That Bacteria Resist Aging - plus video -EVOLUTION - Settled Science - or - A Magic Man In The Mud?

ICR

Bacterial cells are singularly long-lived. They keep dividing for what seems like forever. But because they are made of biochemicals, their DNA and proteins should suffer damage similar to what any other cell endures, including animal cells. What keeps bacterial cell components from wearing down?

Microbiologists have been trying to find out how these single-cell organisms handle chemical damage, which relentlessly accumulates due to friction and uncontrolled chemical reactions. So far, the results have been confusing, but a new analysis appears to have confirmed that bacteria have a remarkably well-engineered damage-reduction program.

University of California, San Diego biologist Lin Chao led a computer analysis of prior experiments.¹ His team's work, published in Current Biology, cited a 2005 study showing that bacteria do age and that the cells do accumulate damage. But a subsequent study clearly showed no evidence of aging in the same bacteria species. Chao's analysis asserts that both are true.

His team proposed that when one bacterium divides into two cells, more of the damaged biochemicals end up in one than the other of the daughter cells. After many generations, a single population of bacteria ends up as a mixture in which cells filled with accumulated damage live side-by-side with "rejuvenated" cells.²

Chao said in a university press release:

So for a single celled organism that has acquired damage that cannot be repaired, which of the two alternatives is better—to split the cellular damage in equal amounts between the two daughters or to give one daughter all of the damage and the other none?²

"We think evolution drove this asymmetry," he said. But he did not explain how. He also said, "Because you have this asymmetry, one daughter by having more damage has aged, while the other daughter gets a rejuvenated start with less damage."²

Of course, the species as a whole will survive longer if each generation could redistribute damaged parts. But allocating so many tiny parts is a horrendous logistical problem.

Since no problem ever solves itself, either an intelligent person continually selects and removes the damaged biochemicals, or an intelligent engineer encoded an internal apparatus that identifies and transports the tiny offending chemicals into one daughter cell and not the other. There is no evidence that engineers live inside bacteria, so the latter option fits best.

While it makes sense that a dividing bacterium would give more damaged biochemicals to one cell than another, it makes no sense that "evolution"—which by definition excludes intelligent causes—could "drive" such a strategy. Strategies always come from strategists and never from nature.

Such an ingenious design could only have come from an ingenious Designer.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

New Study Shows Enzymes Couldn't Evolve - plus video - 3. THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN and Evolution - An Embarrassing Conundrum (VID 3 in a 7 part series)

ICR

According to evolutionary theory, chemicals must have somehow organized themselves into cellular life, presumably long ago. And that means that enzymes must have formed themselves, too.

But enzymes are highly engineered miniaturized machines. Even intelligent human scientists armed with the most sophisticated technology cannot reproduce their design and manufacture—so, logically, neither can unintelligent chemicals or the laws that govern them. The title of a recent scientific report asserted that a particular enzyme evolved. The study results, however, clearly demonstrate that this enzyme was purposefully created.

The investigators compared the three-dimensional structures of similarly shaped enzymes that are found in different species of bacteria. One enzyme splits water and combines the resulting hydrogen atoms with sulfur in a process that captures chemical energy. The researchers compared it with another class of enzymes that also splits individual water molecules, but then combines the hydrogen with a carbon-based molecule.

The enzyme that manipulates sulfur—called a CS2 (carbon disulfide) hydrolase—is required because its bacteria inhabit sulfurous volcanic waters in Italy. The studies confirmed that the core structure of the CS2 hydrolase, like that of similar enzymes, is critical. The scientists wrote in Nature, "Any change in this area of the protein [enzyme] adversely affected protein activity."1

On one hand, evolution's story requires that, at some point in time, something altered what would become the enzyme core again and again, as each structural piece evolved into place over eons. On the other hand, science shows that altering the enzyme core in the slightest is impossible without making the whole structure useless.

The researchers also found that CS2 hydrolase is distinct from enzymes with an otherwise identical core because it has an additional long, narrow tunnel through which only CS2 can pass. The tunnel "functions as a specificity filter," ensuring that no similar molecule such as carbon dioxide enters.1

The researchers found a clue in the DNA that suggested to them an idea of how the enzyme could have evolved. The DNA that codes for the tunnel portion of the CS2 hydrolase gene is surrounded by unique sequences, indicating that this DNA portion may have been added to the main enzyme's DNA. Perhaps some unknown cellular mechanism "stitched in" this extra bit at just the right place among the bacteria's 1.8 million DNA bases, adding the tunnel portion to a CO2-converting enzyme through "lateral gene transfer" and thereby forming CS2 hydrolase.2,1 If so, could this process properly be called "evolution"?

No—if the gene jumped from another bacterium to this one, it did not evolve because it already existed elsewhere. But in order for a lateral gene transfer to even work, in addition to the enzymes themselves, another mechanism had to already exist that could recognize, accept, and insert the foreign DNA in just the right place. Only then could it retrofit an enzyme in just the right way to enable the bacterium to live on sulfur.

Where's the evidence here for evolutionary innovation? Pre-existing DNA and pre-existing DNA transfer and splicing programs appear to have existed from the beginning.

The authors asserted that CS2 hydrolase "emerged owing to the evolution of a new quaternary [final protein] structure."1 But this ignores the facts that no new DNA actually "emerged," and the proper placement of transferred DNA required just the opposite of evolution—purposeful design.

CS2 hydrolase did not evolve. In fact, experimental science shows that this enzyme functions today only because of its precise and specific arrangement of parts. And like any machine with multiple, interconnected parts, whether biological or man-made, all the correct parts assembled in the correct configuration were needed from the very beginning.3

Original Article with references.

Dam Detonation Illustrates Noah's Flood - plus video -PPSIMMONS ANSWERS THE "THINKING ATHEIST" (Noah's Ark)

ICR

On October 26, strategically placed explosives breached the Condit Dam in Washington state in order to reopen the White Salmon River to salmon and other aquatic animals.

Upon detonation, the lake immediately began draining, but a video posted on a National Geographic website clearly showed that instead of clear water, fast-moving mud emerged from the torrent below the damaged dam.1 The time-lapse video also showed loads of silt sinking, settling, and flowing away with the dark fluid.

Given the small-scale nature of this event, what effects might a much larger torrent have?

The muddy water from this controlled dam breach resembled, though to a lesser degree, the more catastrophic mudflow that resulted from the uncontrolled 1982 breach of the Lawn Lake dam, which spilled debris and transported truck-size boulders into Colorado's Fall River.2 It deposited layers of mud and sorted sediment in flatter downstream areas. Eyewitnesses said that the front of the flood resembled a lumbering wall of mud that produced a terrible, thunderous roar.

If these local flood events, both controlled and uncontrolled, did this much damage, imagine what the earth's surface endured when the Flood of Noah's day completely covered it. Enormous sheets of mud and sediment would have scoured the surface. When the momentum decreased, the sediment load would have dropped out. Multiple massive, transgressive, and regressive mud-transporting phases would have formed layered deposits over the course of a year—the time specified by the Genesis record.

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens showed that the earth itself can produce muddy catastrophes greater than man-made floods. Fast-moving mudflows caused more damage than any other aspect of the volcanic explosion.3

How could Noah's Flood have buried countless creatures in sediments that later dried and hardened into fossiliferous sandstone and mudstone? First, as the Condit Dam breach showed, fast-moving water becomes fast-moving mud. Second, a worldwide flood would leave behind worldwide sediments. Today, continent-size and trans-continent-extensive sedimentary layers stand as monuments to the mud transported and deposited by the Genesis Flood.

Original Article with references.

White House Confirms PPSIMMONS Alien Video - we really ARE alone

In January 2010 PPSIMMONS produced a video called "The Anthropic Principle" wherein we detailed the anthropic constants which make our planet uniquely suitable for human life. This week the White House confimed our video in an official statement - according to them we really are alone.

So rare are the conditions which make life possible - earth appears to be completely alone in the entire universe. So special is our planet in the universe because there are far more reasons to see a dead planet than a live one - thus giving evidence of a divine creator who intervened in the gigantic odds against such a planet as ours existing at all.

Here is the official government statement on the existence of alien life from Nov 7/2011:

"The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our
planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member
of the human race," Phil Larson from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy reported on the WhiteHouse.gov
website."In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any
evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye."

So in spite of the voluminous works of fiction and billions of dollars spent looking for alien life not only have they never found any but, according to the WH, they have never found any trace of evidence to support the existence of life other than our own, special, unique planet. Here is our video. Enjoy.

Dinosaurs Ate Rice

ICR

Just what did dinosaurs eat?

One way researchers are finding out is by studying coprolites, or fossilized dinosaur dung. And as it turns out, some dinosaurs ate rice plants. But if flowering plants like rice did not evolve until millions of years after dinosaurs lived—as evolution maintains—how could dinosaurs have eaten them?

Some coprolites contain phytoliths, which are uniquely shaped microscopic crystals manufactured by various plant tissues. Most phytoliths are made of silicon dioxide, the same chemical that comprises sand. Scientists examining these tiny grains can often discern from which plant they came.

For example, in 2005, researchers found phytoliths from grass, palm trees, conifers, and other flowering plants in (probably sauropod) dinosaur coprolites from India.1 "It was very unexpected….We will have to rewrite our understanding of its evolution….We may have to add grass to the dioramas of dinosaurs we see in museums," palaeobotanist Caroline Strömberg told Nature News at the time.2

Recently, Strömberg and two of her co-authors from the 2005 study described coprolite-encased phytoliths that are so similar to those made by certain modern rice plants that those found in dinosaur rocks "can be assigned to the rice tribe, Oryzeae, of grass subfamily Ehrhartoideae."3 They collected these samples from the same Indian rock layers, the Lameta Formation, that contained their 2005 finds.

This find joins others that have shown that rice, grass, palm trees, and conifers from dinosaur rocks were essentially the same as their living counterparts. It's as though millions of years of plant evolution never occurred.

The Lameta formation includes sedimentary layers interbedded with volcanic rock layers. It is huge, covering a large area of India.4 The Flood described in the book of Genesis is the best explanation for this scale of upheaval, showing that the fossils found there resulted from the Flood.

Thus, these coprolites show that rice plants existed before the Flood. Either rice had diversified from an originally created grass that was common to many other grasses, like wheat and bamboo, or God created rice grasses separately from other grass kinds. Studies show that rice grasses do not hybridize with other grasses.5 These dinosaur-eaten phytoliths add weight to the idea that rice was a distinct creation from the beginning.

According to Scripture, God created all the grasses, plants, and grazing mammals, along with any grazing dinosaurs like sauropods, by the sixth day of the creation week. As far as what the fossils have shown, Scripture is right.

Original article with references.

Did Astronomers Find an Evolving Planet?

ICR

A Hawaii-based astronomer announced at an October 19, 2011, NASA meeting the discovery of a young-looking planet forming near the star LkCa 15. "You can actually see the planet forming, as the process is happening right now," Adam Kraus, of the University of Hawaii's Institute of Astronomy, told the Associated Press.1 But how does he know that it is forming?

Though a related university press release didn't show original photographs,2 in the AP report Kraus described what he and colleague Michael Ireland saw through their uniquely equipped telescope: "We see this young star, it has a disc around it that planets are probably forming out of and we see something right in the middle of a gap in the disc."1 Kraus and Ireland's research is scheduled to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.3

According to AP, the planet-like object "is estimated to have started taking shape about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago." But even if that object is a planet, what observations support the theory that it evolved from particles found in the dust disc? The answer is none, because the supposed evolution of planets has not been observed, but assumed. These assumptions were then used as the basis of "scientific models of how planets form."1

Not only was its evolutionary history assumed, but the physics of dust clouds prohibits planet formation. The problem is that such small particles bounce off each other when they collide, instead of sticking together.4 A few years ago, University of California Santa Cruz planetary scientist Erik Asphaug described difficulties modeling the critical early period of dust accumulation that supposedly leads to pre-planets called "planetesimals." He asserted that "dust grains coagulate," then wrote:

However, too great a turbulence disrupts agglomerates faster than they form….Not only must turbulence be low, but the gas must go away before the growing planetesimals spiral in.... Decoupled [separate] solids spiral towards the Sun at an estimated 1 AU [astronomical unit] per 10–1000 years, so there is not much time!5

Thus, even the models of planet development are packed with problems. So why did the AP's report of "scientific models of how planets form" fail to say so? In truth, "the problem of accreting meter-scale planetesimals is far from solved."5 But this is only a problem for planetary evolution—not planetary creation.

These astronomers may not have observed a planet at all. If it is a planet, what is the evidence that it is forming today, or that it formed by natural processes in the past? It might instead simply be in the process of falling apart or breaking down like everything else in the universe. Whichever is the case, these astronomers did not watch any planet forming!

And since a natural formation of planets defies physics, the creation of planets remains the best hypothesis to explain their existence.

Original Article with references.

New Study Can't Explain Blue Stragglers' Youth

ICR

Blue stragglers, according to NASA, "are older stars that acquire a new lease on life when they collide and merge with other stars."¹ But a new study calls into question whether stellar collisions can account for these remarkable stars. And blue stars burn their fuel so quickly that they actually look young.

Since their discovery, evolutionary astronomers have sought a way to explain how these stars can even exist. They burn fuel so fast that they should have burned out billions of years ago. American astronomers Aaron Geller and Robert Mathieu published in Nature a description of their model for how older stars could have acquired a "new lease on life" by siphoning matter from nearby gas giant stars through "mass transfer."²

They investigated stars within a cluster called NGC 188, found in the constellation Cepheus. It contains 21 blue stragglers, 16 of which are binary stars that closely interact with nearby stars. The researchers suspected that the blue stragglers' partners were white dwarfs, which would be small, leftover remnants of larger red stars that the blue ones had drained of fuel. Such dwarfs are too faint for direct observation, but they have sufficient mass to cause their partner stars to wobble.

Of the 16 binaries, 12 had rotational periods right at 1,000 days and were thus called "long-period" blue stragglers. The study authors ran a statistical analysis that showed "the theoretical and observed [mass] distributions are indistinguishable."² In other words, their theory that other stars "fed" these 12 blue stragglers matched well with what they observed.

But did this reconcile the relative youthfulness of these binary blue stars with their assumed billions of years of history? The answer is no. The authors wrote, "Blue straggler stars…should already have evolved into giant stars and stellar remnants,"² and their new observations do not solve this deep-time problem.

Blue stragglers should burn through all their fuel in "a few million years at best."³ But these NGC 188 stars are supposed to be seven billion years old. So, to make them fit that age, these authors maintain that they were not initially blue stars, but instead burned fuel at a normal rate for billions of years. Then suddenly, within the last one million years, all 12 of them began siphoning extra fuel from their binary partners so that they only look young right now.

However, nothing explains the many blue stragglers that are not binary stars and yet exist near and far throughout the universe. Could they have received recent "youthfulness" through collisions with other stars?

In an article summarizing the Geller and Mathieu paper, University of Cambridge astronomer Christopher Tout wrote, "Thus, in this cluster [NGC 188], a collisional origin for blue stragglers is much rarer than expected, and the authors' study casts doubt on whether it occurs at all."⁴ The modeled scenario in which blue stars form by collision did not match observations.

So, isolated blue stars could not have received their young looks from a binary system, since by definition they have no binary from which to siphon fuel. They probably didn't receive their youthful appearance from collisions, either, according to these results. And though the binary blue stragglers may have siphoned fuel from nearby partners, the idea that 12 of 16 only did so recently—after an imagined 7-billion-year wait—defies reasonable odds.

Thus, the best explanation is still the most straightforward one—blue straggler stars look young because they are young.

Original Article with references.

The Miracle of Water

ICR

The earth is the only known planet with huge bodies of water. Seventy percent of its surface area consists of oceans, lakes, and seas surrounding huge bodies of land. The few other planets that have water contain only moisture floating as vapor on their surface or small amounts of ice or liquid water on the planet itself, not large bodies of liquid water as on earth.

Water is unique in that it can absorb enormous amounts of heat without a large alteration in its temperature. Its heat absorption level is about ten times as great as steel. During the day, the earth's bodies of water rapidly soak up enormous amounts of heat; thus, the earth stays fairly cool. At night, they release the vast amounts of heat that they absorbed during the day, which, combined with atmospheric effects, keeps most of the surface from freezing solid at night. If it were not for the tremendous amounts of water on the earth, far greater day and night temperature variations would exist. Many parts of the surface would be hot enough to boil water during the day, and the same parts would be cold enough to freeze water at night. Because water is an excellent temperature stabilizer, the large oceans on earth are vital for life to exist on earth.

In contrast to virtually all other materials (the rare exceptions include rubber and antimony), water contracts when cooled only until it reaches 4 degrees Celsius. Then it amazingly expands until it freezes. Thus, because of this anomaly, the ice that forms in seas, oceans, and lakes stays near the surface, where the sun heats it during the day and the warm water below melts it in the summer. This and the Coriolis effect, which produces ocean currents, ensure that most of the ocean stays in a liquid form, allowing the myriads of water creatures to live.

This is one more "stunning" demonstration that the "Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens" (Proverbs 3:19).

Original Article with references.

Earth Hit the 7-Billion Mark Too Late

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The world's population will reach seven billion on October 31, 2011, according to the United Nations, and media outlets are heralding the issue of overcrowding on the planet. How long did it take for this many humans to be born?

The evolutionary version of human population growth presents a fantastic scenario to answer that question. In this imaginary long-ages history, the population did not grow at all for millions of years before suddenly taking off only a few thousand years ago. In the July 29, 2011, issue of Science, demographic anthropology expert Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel wrote:

After the members of the genus Homo had been living as foragers for at least 2.4 million years, agriculture began to emerge in seven or eight regions across the world, almost simultaneously at the beginning of the Holocene.1

Supposedly, the advent of agriculture enabled population growth at that time. But according to the Bible and historical records, there was never a time when humans weren't engaged in agriculture.

The problem is that in this projected timeline, people ("genus Homo") must have had virtually no population growth "for at least 2.4 million years." Bocquet-Appel wrote, "The world's population on the eve of the emergence of agriculture is estimated to have been 6 million individuals."1 Thus, the first human couple that supposedly evolved from ape-like ancestors would have had only 6 million descendants after 2.4 million years. This requires a population growth rate of about 0.000000009—essentially zero. Virtually no growth for 2.4 million years?

In contrast, the average historically observed growth rate has been at least 0.4 percent, at times spiking to above two percent. Even a "pre-industrial farming population" growth rate of 0.1 percent per year—Bocquet-Appel's number—would have yielded today's seven billion people in only 7,062 years.1 As the late Dr. Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research, asked, "How could it be that the planet only now is experiencing a population crisis—why not several hundred thousand years ago, soon after man first appeared on earth?"2

To try and explain this slow growth, Bocquet-Appel stated, "An increase in the birth rate was closely followed in time by an increase in mortality." And the cause of all this death was "infectious diseases" such as "Rotavirus and Coronavirus."1

But this only invokes more unlikely events. How could such diseases maintain a near zero balance of birth and death rates for so long without randomly killing the whole population at some point? And why would these diseases suddenly lose their population-reducing effect after so many supposed eons? Plainly, the infectious disease idea, along with unrealistically slow growth rates, are ad hoc add-ons that prop up long-age thinking.

But the current world population aligns completely with biblical history, with no added stories. Using census records from the last 400 years and a bit of algebra, and assuming a natural logarithmic growth, eight Flood survivors 4,500 years ago produce 7 billion people almost exactly.3 This is powerful evidence that biblical history is accurate, and man-made evolutionary history is not.

Original Article with references.

Ancient Paint Workshop Challenges Human Evolutionary Story

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In 2008, excavations in a South African cave uncovered two red-stained abalone shell bowls along with various tools in what was evidently a workshop where ochre and other ingredients were mixed, most likely for use as paint. Researchers examined the artifacts and have published a study in which they say the artifacts are 100,000 years old. Could they really be that ancient?

According to standard evolutionary dogma, mankind did not start evolving advanced cognitive abilities until about 70,000 years ago. Christopher Henshilwood, lead author of the study that appeared in Science, told Nature News that these artifacts "push back by 20,000 or 30,000 years" the imagined advent of "complex cognition,"1 or the time when humans finally had the brainpower to prepare and use paint.

In 2001, Donald Johanson, the famed discoverer of the fossil primate "Lucy," wrote, "The archaeological picture changed dramatically around 40-50,000 years ago with the appearance of behaviorally modern humans."2 But Henshilwood said that his date for these paint-processing materials "suggests conceptual and probably cognitive abilities which are the equivalent of modern humans" (emphasis added).1

So, did man evolve modern thought capacities 40-50,000, 70,000, or 100,000 years ago? Are any of these numbers trustworthy? Not only does the 100,000-year date assignment conflict with prior evolutionary notions, but also with the straightforward 6,000 or so years of world history recorded in the Bible.

The study authors performed three different dating techniques on the remains.3 Curiously, however, they did not carbon-date any artifacts. Some of the tools included cow, seal, and dog bones, and the abalone shells must still contain protein. All of this material should have datable carbon. Why were they not carbon-dated?

The answer probably has to do with the fact that carbon dating is unreliable for artifacts older than 60,000 or so carbon-years. If any carbon-14 was detected in these remains, then the carbon age would be no more than 60,000 years, and probably far fewer—thousands of years younger than these scientists' target date.

In their Science report, the archaeologists showed dates on a photograph of several vertical feet of cave floor layers. However, one dating method showed an age of 100,000 years for a layer that was dated at only 75,000 years by another method. And there were other inconsistencies, raising suspicion over the reliability of the age assignments.4

And there is more. They labeled the very top eight-or-so-inch-thick layer "hiatus," instead of assigning it an age like the other layers. Then they labeled the next lower layer at about 68,000 years. Why would nine feet of cave sediments accumulate over 32,000 years, then almost no sediment accumulate for 68,000 years?

The idea that man evolved his cognitive abilities has no scientific support, either. Cognitive thoughts are not traits encoded by particular genes, but immaterial traits. Thoughts interact with the material world through the sophisticated architecture of the brain, which requires thousands of precisely interacting genes. Tinkering with brains or brain-developing genes brings disaster, not improvement. Thus, brain biology shows that modern human cognition must have been purposeful and present at the beginning.

The ideas that human cognition evolved and that these cave sediments are 100,000 years old are both underpinned by evolutionary dogma, not historical or scientific research. However, these paint-making tools do show that the earliest human inhabitants of what is today South Africa possessed modern human abilities—which makes sense if they had recently descended from Noah.

Original Article with references.

Mercury's Surface Looks Young - evidence AGAINST deep time evolution

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NASA's Messenger spacecraft mission to Mercury has given scientists the opportunity to learn more about the properties of the solar system's innermost planet. After supposedly billions of years since its formation, the planet should be dead, or geologically inactive. New data from Messenger, however, show that Mercury remains active and is still generating surface features.

Before the Messenger data acquisition, astronomers observed that the sunny side of Mercury is hot enough to melt lead, and like other rocky objects in the solar system, many craters pockmark the planet's surface. In early 2011, Messenger carefully maneuvered into orbit and took photographs with unprecedented detail.

Images of the planet's surface revealed unusual, irregularly shaped hollows or depressions with rounded edges that were comprised of material so bright that many showed "high reflectance halos." Researchers hadn't expected to find such highly reflective features, which "appear fresh and lack superposed impact craters, implying that they are relatively young," according to the report published in Science.1

The study authors evaluated several possible causes for these fresh-looking features and ultimately described the most likely explanation as outgassing of volatile material from below the planet surface.

Of course, this conclusion only prompted new questions. How did Mercury obtain volatile chemicals in the first place, especially since its proximity to the sun should have burned them all off when the planet was supposedly forming? And, assuming they somehow did form, why would any such materials stay put for billions of years? After all, they're volatile. And how, after billions of years, does the planet still have the energy to expel the volatile-containing material through the planet's crust?

But if Mercury was created, then its volatile and non-volatile constituents would have been formed on purpose. And if Mercury was created only thousands of years ago, as the Bible clearly indicates, then it could easily have plenty of residual energy.

The study authors wrote, "Mercury is a small rocky-metal world whose internal geological activity was generally thought to have ended long ago. The presence of potentially recent surface modification implies that Mercury's nonimpact geological evolution may still be ongoing."1

Mercury's active geology is the exact opposite of long-age predictions—but it is just what one would expect if Mercury is only thousands of years old.

Full article with references.

Could a Virus Jump-Start the First Cell?

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Evolutionists have had a hard time imagining how mitochondria evolved. One theory is that these cellular powerhouses originated when bacteria invaded a primitive cell. A recent study deciphered the structure of a key mitochondrial enzyme, some features of which were described as providing "new insights" into this theory. The insights it actually provided, though, make an evolutionary origin even less likely.

A press release highlighting the enzyme discovery stated, "It is now generally accepted that mitochondria evolved from free-living bacteria that were engulfed by the progenitor of today's animal cells at an early stage in evolution."1

However, evolving mitochondria are not possible. These tiny cellular machines produce energy for the cell through clockwork-like machinery and interdependent networking. The cells would have died while waiting for just the right changes to retrofit a bacterium into an effective mitochondrion.2 Plus, retrofitting would have required an engineer, which naturalists are dogmatically unwilling to consider.

The newly described mitochondrial enzyme, an RNA polymerase, forms RNA molecules by reading and matching corresponding DNA sequences. This enzyme shared some features with the RNA polymerase found in certain viruses.

Because of these shared features, some scientists now suggest that right at the time when the cell supposedly engulfed its would-be mitochondrion bacterium, a virus attacked the cells. However, instead of causing any damage, the virus supposedly donated the DNA code for its RNA polymerase enzyme!

It was difficult enough to believe, without any observational precedent, that one bacterium could engulf another without killing it, that the engulfed bacterium would then immediately become an integral part of the host cell, and that nature somehow retrofitted the bacterium into a mitochondrion. But now readers are asked to believe—again with no observational support—that a virus donated the gene for an enzyme that was also immediately adopted by the imaginary cell-within-a-cell.

But that's not all. The gene was precisely and rapidly modified, all at the same time. What are the odds of that?

The researchers, publishing in Nature, explored the structural differences between the viral RNA polymerase and the human mitochondrial RNA polymerase enzymes. They found that the mitochondrial RNA polymerase required at least two additional proteins to "melt" DNA so that it could read the sequence. Apparently, the presence or absence of these partner proteins enables "mitochondrial gene regulation and the adaptation of mitochondrial function to changes in the environment."3

Though the study authors mentioned these concepts in their paper's abstract, they didn't explore them in the rest of their report. However, it is apparent that the mitochondrial RNA polymerase's methods of interacting with DNA are fine-tuned to the microscopic world of the cell's mitochondria, not to that of viruses. Insisting that such a fine-tuned machine arose by a chance viral infection and that the viral machine just happened to modify and integrate so perfectly as to activate mitochondrial machinery is too much to ask of nature.

But of course, fine-tuning molecules that enable life is not too much to ask a super-intelligent Being to accomplish. Indications are clearer than ever that God purposefully engineered the machinery of life.

Original article with references.

Did Dragonflies Really Predate Dinosaurs?

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No flying machine or other creature has the aerial dexterity of dragonflies. They can fly upside-down and backward as easily as straight ahead. And they move so fast that researchers have to use high-speed cameras to study them.

A recent report asserted that dragonflies achieved their flying skills because they have had millions of years to perfect and hone them. But is this scientifically grounded, or just a flight of fancy?

Harvard University biomechanist Stacey Combes and her team studied the way dragonfly flight operates. In a video posted by Science Nation, an online magazine funded by the National Science Foundation, one dragonfly with half of its right wing removed successfully caught a fruit fly in flight. No man-made aircraft of any kind can fly with the same kind of extensive wing damage.

However, when it came to explaining dragonfly origins, the report said:

Dragonflies have had a long time to evolve their skills as predators. They have been on the planet for about 300 hundred [sic] million years and predate dinosaurs. They can fly straight up, straight down, hover like helicopters and disappear in a blur.1

But does any scientific observation show that these kinds of predatory skills evolve? Does any experiment demonstrate that the addition of more evolutionary time yields better flying (or other equally challenging) structures in animals? And does credible evidence substantiate the "300 million years" claim?

It is true that dragonfly fossils are found in sedimentary rock layers below those containing dinosaurs. However, if most fossils were deposited in just one year by the worldwide Flood of Noah, then the geologic "periods" are not separated by millions of years. Instead, they represent different biomes.2 In other words, some swamp-dwelling dragonfly habitats were inundated prior to the more terrestrial habitats that contained the dinosaurs, conifers, birds, and mammals that are found together as fossils. But since they show catastrophe and are broad in extent, both the rock layers containing dragonfly fossils and those with dinosaurs appear to have been deposited as phases within the overall Flood year.

In addition, researchers can test the idea that dragonflies evolved their flying skills. Dragonflies were catastrophically buried in mud—which evidently flowed faster than the insects could fly—that later turned to stone. If the dragonfly fossils show partially evolved features, then that would support the claim that they might have evolved. But their fossils don't. Instead, ancient dragonflies are identical in core construction to modern ones. That, of course, supports the idea that they were created perfectly equipped for flight from the beginning.

In fact, the biggest difference between modern and fossil dragonflies is that many of the fossilized ones were several times larger, some having wingspans of over three feet! If anything, dragonflies have "devolved," not evolved.

So, there is no fossil evidence whatsoever that dragonfly flight evolved. In fact, since fossilized and living dragonflies share the same structure, they show no sign either of millions of years or of evolution. This is because, like man-made flying machines, dragonflies were also recently and purposely designed.

See original article for references.

"Terra Nova" Overtly Slams Christianity

There's a new show on television called "Terra Nova" which seems to be attempting to capitalize on the enormous popularity of "Lost". A group of people in a jungle atmosphere with a central cast consisting of a doctor, a cop, a leader, and, yes, their own version of the "others". Terra Nova looks rather amateurish and, well, silly.

But it also, quite openly, appears to be attacking Christian beliefs and especially creationism. The opening scene indicates that science is humanity's "only hope". The show's script constantly vomits up all the evolution talking points with the entire premise being an attack on YEC (young earth creationism). So then the plot is based entirely on the presupposition of atheism's creation story - evolution.

To make matters even more obvious, the "others" (perceived bad guys) are called... wait for it... "The Sixers". And what do creationists believe?

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Exodus 20:11

Terra Nova will probably not last long. It reminds one of the original Star Trek show where, if you looked hard enough, you could actually see the wires holding up the space ships. And even if they improve on the quality, they still have to contend with the impossible task of turning deep time evolutionary mythology into a believable plot while openly attacking the truth of Christianity with less than stellar acting. Since this will fail in the US market, well, so long Terra Nova.