8/24/20151 Sermons From Science -- June 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 6 月 Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and.

8/24/20151 Sermons From Science -- June 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 6 月 Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and also in PowerPoint slides in the website http://ChristCenterGospel.org. The contents of this presentation were taken from Dave Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. May God have all the glory. Let us pray for Dave Coppedge’s fast recovery from cancer surgery. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com

8/24/20152 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 How does a growing flower bud or feather follicle know where to put the intricate colors and patterns on a mature flower or feather? Scientists are beginning to get partial answers. Flower art: Imagine you’re a flower bud. You are blind, deaf, and dumb, but somehow you know how to create beautiful artwork. Through your efforts, a lovely rose, petunia or orchid will result. How would you do it? An article on Live Science suggests an amazing, though partial, answer: the bud has a map of the finished product. “The shape of a flower’s petals and leaves are dictated by a biological map hidden inside the flower’s growing bud,” according to a new study from the John Innes Centre and the University of East Anglia, both in the UK.Live Science

8/24/20153 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 “They discovered that concealed maps within the flower buds are made up of patterns of arrows that act as instructions for how each cell in the bud should grow. As such, the maps essentially influence a flower bud’s cell polarity, or the functions of the cells. The study’s findings not only shed light on why geranium petals are unlike rose petals, they also explain why an individual flower’s petals and leaves are different shapes.”

8/24/20154 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 The “arrows” are made up of proteins called PIN proteins that migrate to the tips of cells. When they concentrate, a pointed leaf results. When they fan out, a rounded shape, like a flower petal results. Other proteins follow the “arrows” to cause growth in those areas. PLoS Biology discussed the paper in a little more detail. The original paper in PLoS Biology described how the growth proteins follow the “polarity field” set up by the PIN proteins.PLoS BiologyPLoS Biology

8/24/20155 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 Feather art: Bird feathers are vastly different from flower petals, but another amazing “mapping” mechanism controls their development. Feathers can contain stripes, spots, and nano-patterns that play tricks with light; see examples in PhysOrg’s coverage of a paper in Science Magazine. What turns on the dark and light patterns? The new research paper by Lin et al., “Topology of Feather Melanocyte Progenitor Niche Allows Complex Pigment Patterns to Emerge,” offers the beginnings of an answer:PhysOrgScience Magazineresearch paper by Lin et al.

8/24/20156 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 “Melanocyte progenitors are distributed as a horizontal ring in the proximal follicle, sending melanocytes vertically up into the epithelial cylinder which gradually emerges as feathers grow. Different pigment patterns form by modulating the presence, arrangement, or differentiation of melanocytes. A layer of peripheral pulp further regulates pigmentation via patterned agouti expression. Lifetime feather cyclic regeneration resets pigment patterns for physiological needs. Thus, the evolution of stem cell niche topology allows complex pigment patterning via combinatorial co- option of simple regulatory mechanisms.”

8/24/20157 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 By “evolution,” the authors cannot assume that blind, undirected processes create the patterns any more than they create intricate feathers themselves. They merely mean that stem cells are regulated to generate the patterns. But what tells the stem cells to differentiate according to a predetermined pattern? What created the pattern in the first place that these mechanisms execute? The explanation begs even deeper questions.

8/24/20158 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 Speaking of feathers, how would you like to dive into a feather on the wing of a red-tailed hawk and see its microscopic structure? You can live this adventure, along with many others, in a new film just released in May from Illustra Media entitled, Flight: The Genius of Birds. (Click the link for trailer and ordering information.) With cutting-edge science, stunning photography, an original music score and a thoughtful narration aided by the insight of biologists, the film makes a convincing case for intelligent design. Along with the previous release Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies, this new entry forms the foundation to Illustra’s new series of high-quality nature documentaries, The Design of Life. Both were produced in High-Definition Blu-ray with 5.1 surround sound.Illustra Media entitled, Flight: The Genius of Birds.Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies

8/24/20159 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 We are very happy to co-sponsor Flight: The Genius of Birds and will be drawing attention to it all month. CEH Editor David Coppedge worked closely with the producer on scientific research and proofing, but it was the genius of the production team led by Lad Allen, with his editor Jerry Harned, working with the biologists, the animators, the composer Mark Lewis and the sound technicians, and others, who made this film a masterpiece. Flight: The Genius of Birds

8/24/201510 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 The DVD is great, but if you have a good home theater, this is a film to enjoy in an immersive environment, with a Blu-ray player, a large screen and a surround sound system. Flight is the equal of secular nature documentaries—but without the Darwinism that is merely assumed by the others. It includes several incredible true stories about particular bird species. After being amazed by what you learn, and how beautifully it is presented, we are sure you will want to order extra copies of Flight to pass around. Order today! DVD ships May 14, Blu-ray on June 11.Order today!

8/24/201511 How Intricate Patterns Grow in Flowers, Feathers 花和羽毛如何长复杂的图案 And by all means, if you haven’t yet watched Metamorphosis, order them both! Readers delighted with the exceptional work of Illustra Media should support them financially. They have plans to augment The Design of Life series with more superb documentaries on the wonders of the living world. Nobody does it better than Illustra! Their films are reaching around the world. Be part of a team that is dismantling Darwinist materialism with clear, powerful, convincing evidence for design.Metamorphosis

8/24/201512 Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝

8/24/201514 Intact Dinosaur Skin Found 找到完好的恐龙皮肤 Some material that flaked off a fossil in Alberta was not stone; it was dinosaur skin. Discoverers were excited and puzzled: how could it last so long? Here’s how Mauricio Barbi of the University of Regina described their discovery, according to PhysOrg: PhysOrg “As we excavated the fossil, I thought that we were looking at a skin impression. Then I noticed a piece came off and I realized this is not ordinary – this is real skin. Everyone involved with the excavation was incredibly excited and we started discussing research projects right away.”

8/24/201515 Intact Dinosaur Skin Found 找到完好的恐龙皮肤 The reports on PhysOrg and on Nature World News focused on figuring what color the skin was. Readers who go all the way to the end of the article, though, find out the really big question:PhysOrgNature World News “But perhaps the greatest question Barbi is trying to answer at the CLS is how the fossil remained intact for around 70-million years. “What’s not clear is what happened to this dinosaur and how it died,” he said. “There is something special about this fossil and the area where it was found, and I am going to find out what it is.”

8/24/201516 Intact Dinosaur Skin Found 找到完好的恐龙皮肤 The fossil was found in an area described as a “robust bone bed.” Barbi claimed it’s the only 3- dimensional dinosaur skin fossil in the world. According to the articles, the skin was preserved “almost intact,” with tissues that can be analyzed: “For the experiment, the sample is placed in the path of the infrared beam and light reflects off of it. During the experiment, chemical bonds of certain compounds will create different vibrations. For example, proteins, sugars and fats still found in the skin will create unique vibrational frequencies that scientists can measure.

8/24/201517 Intact Dinosaur Skin Found 找到完好的恐龙皮肤 “It is astonishing that we can get information like this from such an old sample,” said Tim May, CLS Mid-IR staff scientist. “Skin has fat and lots of dead cells along with many inorganic compounds. We can reflect the infrared beam off the sample and we can analyze the samples to give us very clear characteristics.” They will be studying melanosomes (pigment cells) in the skin to try to determine what color the hadrosaur was.

8/24/201518 Intact Dinosaur Skin Found 找到完好的恐龙皮肤 Barbi promised he is going to find out what is so special about his fossil and the area in which it was found. His only hope is to abandon the millions-of- years Darwinian story. The reason the skin is intact, and its tissues can still be studied, is that it is recent—not 70 million years old. If he were to propose that explanation, though, his career would be over. So strong is the bias against Darwin skeptics (even stronger against old-earth skeptics), truth no longer matters. The primary goal of evolutionary geologists and paleontologists is to defend Charlie’s quaint Victorian myth against all the evidence the world throws at it.

8/24/201521 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Incredible advancements in technology are coming from the imitation of nature, but engineers cannot yet attain animal performance. Look like a bug: “New Camera Inspired by Insect Eyes,” announced Science Now. If you thought insects with their compound eyes had inferior vision to ours, think that no more:Science Now “An insect’s compound eye is an engineering marvel: high resolution, wide field of view, and incredible sensitivity to motion, all in a compact package. Now, a new digital camera provides the best- ever imitation of a bug’s vision, using new optical materials and techniques. This technology could someday give patrolling surveillance drones the same exquisite vision as a dragonfly on the hunt.”

8/24/201522 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 In the Illustra film Metamorphosis, Dr. Thomas Emmel notes that butterflies have better color vision than humans. They can see from infrared to ultraviolet. And in the Illustra film Darwin’s Dilemma, we see that compound eyes existed in the Cambrian multicellular animals, including trilobites and anomalocaridids.Metamorphosis, Darwin’s Dilemma According to PhysOrg, the new camera has an “unmatched field of view.” Part of the challenge for engineers at the University of Illinois was to develop flexible electronics and optics that could accommodate curved surfaces. Even so, their “low-end insect eye” mimic does not reach the performance of the design that inspired it:PhysOrg

8/24/201523 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 “Eyes in arthropods use compound designs, in which arrays of smaller eyes act together to provide image perception. Each small eye, known as an ommatidium, consists of a corneal lens, a crystalline cone and a light- sensitive organ at the base. The entire system is configured to provide exceptional properties in imaging, many of which lie beyond the reach of existing man-made cameras.”

8/24/201524 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 It would appear difficult to rephrase that paragraph in Darwinian terms, since it depends on the use of concepts like design, configuration, and exceptional properties. The project caught the attention of Nature, and Science Daily twice. The engineer’s paper was published in Nature, which noted that arthropods differ in the number of facets or ommatidia. Some ants have about 100 facets; praying mantises have about 15,000, while some dragonflies have up to 28,000. They ended by saying, “Biologically inspired schemes for adapting to different light levels are also of interest.”NatureScience DailytwiceNature

8/24/201525 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Fly like a fly: A biomimetic robot that flies like a fly was reported in Science this week. It caught the attention of Nature and Science Daily. “RoboBee” doesn’t look anywhere near as sophisticated as an actual fly (and lacks digestive, neural, and reproductive systems), but Nature called it a “manufacturing marvel.” One of its designers said, “This is a major engineering breakthrough, 15 years in the making.” The little robot, weighing only 80 milligrams, has thin membranes for wings that it can flap 120 times a second, similar to a fly’s flapping rate (the engineers admitted it is only “modeled loosely on the morphology of flies”). Building a lightweight battery was one of the biggest challenges, so they had to tether it to a power source and computer with thin wire. Still, it’s “pretty fantastically cool,” an observer said for Science Now.ScienceNatureScience DailyNatureScience Now

8/24/201526 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 The engineering team faced many challenges. For instance, if the wings weren’t exactly symmetrical, it failed to fly. It “took many rounds of tweaking the design before it finally worked,” but when the team had their “Kitty Hawk moment,” they were really proud. RoboBee can only fly for 20 seconds, and wears out after 15 minutes of use. But it’s “the smallest flapping wing aircraft that has ever been built and made fully functional,” they said. The goal is to get the power supply, flight control computer and everything else on board.

8/24/201527 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 They envision making swarms of these robots for search and rescue. “When you scale things down, smaller is better,” they said. That speaks volumes about the actual living fly, which not only has everything on board, but also contains digestive, neural, and reproductive systems. A fly or bee is comparatively large for insects, too (consider gnats and mosquitoes, for instance). Recently, a microscopic fairyfly dubbed Tinkerbella nana was discovered with a body length of 155 micrometers (see Science Daily for picture). That’s packing a lot of systems into a very tiny space.Science Daily

8/24/201528 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Sea horse armor: In other biomimetics news, scientists at UC San Diego have their eyes on seahorses for ideas. According to Science Daily, “Sea horses get their exceptional flexibility from the structure of their bony plates, which form its armor.” The plates slide past each other. The plates can be compressed to half their size without damage. The principle behind the UCSD project is broader than one particular animal:Science Daily

8/24/201529 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 “The study of natural materials can lead to the creation of new and unique materials and structures inspired by nature that are stronger, tougher, lighter and more flexible,” said [Joanna] McKittrick, a professor of materials science at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. McKittrick and Meyers had sought bioinsipiration [sic] by examining the armor of many other animals, including armadillo, alligators and the scales of various fish. This time, they were specifically looking for an animal that was flexible enough to develop a design for a robotic arm.

8/24/201530 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Mr. Clean cicada: The 17-year locusts are emerging from hibernation in some parts of the south this year. Live Science reported on work to understand how the bugs can stay so clean. They don’t need to stand in the rain; the structure of their exoskeleton allows the bugs to be self-cleaning, researchers at Duke University have found. “Apparently, grime can simply leap right off them, given dew.” When dewdrops merge together, they literally leap off the bugs, carrying grime with them. This also happens on lotus leaves and other “super- hydrophobic” surfaces.Live Science

8/24/201531 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 “These findings not only can help explain the mystery of how cicada wings keep clean, but could also lead to improved artificial self- cleaning materials. Jumping droplets could also help remove heat from power plants, Chen said.”

8/24/201532 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Protein origami: Science Magazine published a paper about the use of proteins for self-assembling materials. A “Perspective” piece in the same issue about the project said that synthetic biology “aims to push natural biological systems in novel directions or to generate biomimetic systems with new properties.” The team from University of Bristol learned how to control the self-assembly of proteins to generate simple “cages” and patterns out of coiled-coil elements of proteins. “The assembly properties of the peptides are governed by how their folding results in the projection of chemical functional groups into space.”Science MagazinePerspective

8/24/201533 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Short bows: Nature mentioned the “worm- inspired adhesive” that came from following how a spiny-headed worm embeds itself in the tissues of its host. A bandage built on the principle is “more than three times as adhesive as surgical staples for affixing skin grafts.” Live Science posted “Seven Clever Technologies Inspired by Animals.” Entrants include butterflies, sharks, worms, cockleburs, beetles, geckos, and spiders.NatureLive Science

8/24/201534 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 As usual, evolution was useless in all these stories. It was only mentioned occasionally as an ideologically- driven afterthought, such as “Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution” (PhysOrg). Nature is not a developer! Nature is not a refiner. Nature knows nothing of concepts. Those are terms from intelligent design. The Nature paper on the compound eye begins, “In arthropods, evolution has created a remarkably sophisticated class of imaging systems, with a wide-angle field of view, low aberrations, high acuity to motion and an infinite depth of field,” but then says nothing further about evolution. PhysOrgNature

8/24/201535 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 Evolution is not a creator! Evolution does not design sophisticated imaging systems with desirable properties! Tanya Lewis at Live Science dreamed, “Over time, evolution has led to some incredible developments, from the photosynthetic machinery in plants to the human eye.” She needs to awake from her dogmatic Darwinian slumbers.Live Science

8/24/201536 Bug-Eye Camera, Fly Robot and other Bio-Inspired Tech 臭虫眼睛相机，飞仿生机器和其他技术 The lingo that predominates in biomimetics is design, inspiration, exceptional performance. Darwinians, pack up your snake oil wagons and get out of the way of this new, popular I.D. parade.

8/24/201539 Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 Some claims by evolutionists sound cool, calm and collected until you see them in context. An example appeared in Science Daily and Astrobiology Magazine – a claim that life may have originated in salty, icy stalactites under the sea ice. Need “clues to the origin of life”? The article says, “Life on Earth may have originated not in warm tropical seas, but with weird tubes of ice — sometimes called ‘sea stalactites’ — that grow downward into cold seawater near Earth’s poles, scientists are reporting.”Science DailyAstrobiology Magazine

8/24/201540 Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 That’s a major shift toward further implausibility. From Darwin’s own speculations about a “warm little pond,” origin-of-life researchers have long claimed that heat is necessary to drive the reactions for life. That’s why some have imagined life’s origin at a hydrothermal vent, or lakes near a volcano, or at least in the open ocean exposed to sunlight. But “sea stalactites” of ice in the coldest oceans on earth?

8/24/201541 Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 Even more desperate is the analogy the researchers of the American Chemical Society posed: these “brinicles,” as they have been dubbed, look like “chemical gardens” kids play with. They look like “children’s chemistry sets, in which tubes grow upward from metal salts dropped into silicate solution.” Being made of the wrong stuff, those structures have absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life. From there, the article descended into rank speculation:

8/24/201542 Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 “The analysis concluded that brinicles provide an environment that could well have fostered the emergence of life on Earth billions of years ago, and could have done so on other planets. “Beyond Earth, the brinicle formation mechanism may be important in the context of planets and moons with ice-covered oceans,” the report states, citing in particular two moons of Jupiter named Ganymede and Callisto.” It’s safe to assume that if origin-of-life researchers had something better than this to propose, they would have proposed it long ago.

8/24/201543 Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 NASA’s Astrobiology Institute is a worthless boondoggle that accomplishes nothing. Where is their evidence? They study planets, rocks, and possibly oceans, but there is still no evidence for life beyond Earth’s biosphere. It’s an enterprise built entirely on faith in a Darwinian ideology. Astrobiology Magazine publishes almost nothing original. Day after day they re-post press releases from other sources that say, “maybe this” and “maybe that.” Did you see the government seal of approval on the webpage?

8/24/201544 Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 When “astrobiology” was born as a “new science” back around 1990 because of a rush to celebrate possible fossils in a Martian meteorite (since debunked), then-NASA-chief Dan Goldin convinced Congress to fund research into life on other worlds. Since then, nothing has been accomplished to find life elsewhere, and now they are so desperate they propose cold icicles “could” be environments for the “emergence” of life on other planets. Good grief. One of our readers should research how many millions of tax dollars the government has spent on this Darwinian fantasy trip.

8/24/201545 Detecting Panic in Evolution Articles 检测到进化文章的恐慌 This is not to imply that many astrobiologists are not intelligent, highly-educated scientists. It’s just that their astronomy has nothing to do with biology. Detecting extrasolar planets, studying planetary atmospheres, and characterizing the nature of living creatures at deep-sea vents is all fine and good, but to imply that life “emerged” from non-living environments is supported by no evidence whatsoever. The legitimate studies of planets could have been funded without inventing a new word. Astro-biology is a fabrication, spliced out of two legitimate sciences, astronomy and biology. It is no more legit than geo-psychology or planetary sociology. Without evidence to justify its existence, it should be called astro-bio-mythology.

8/24/201548 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 In a mathematical tour de farce, two Oxford evolutionists have applied Darwinian natural selection to the multiverse to try to explain why it looks designed. A press release from the University of Oxford tells how evolutionary theorist Andy Gardner and theoretical physicist Joseph Conlon figured that universes give birth to other universes through black holes. The ones with the “fittest” parameters of physics get better at it and survive:University of Oxford

8/24/201549 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “Cosmological natural selection proposes that, if new universes are born inside black holes, a ‘multiverse’ of many possible universes could be shaped by a process similar to natural selection so that successive generations of universes evolve to become better at making black holes.… ‘This idea of cosmological natural selection is controversial, and physicists have pointed out all sorts of problems with it. But we were interested in seeing if its basic evolutionary logic actually works,’ said Dr Andy Gardner of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, lead author of the paper.

8/24/201550 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 ‘We found that a general equation from evolutionary genetics, Price’s theorem, can help us to model how selection can work not only at the scale of genes and organisms but also at that of something as unimaginably vast as multiple universes,’ said Dr Gardner. ‘Our model uses maths similar to the mathematical theory underlying Darwinian adaptation in biology, which explains how the dynamics of natural selection leads to organisms appearing designed to maximize their fitness.’

8/24/201551 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 The Price equation, however, is not universally accepted as a valid description of evolution, dependent as it is on controversial ideas of kin selection and group selection. Van Veelen and others criticized its use in the Journal of Theoretical Biology last year. Tutorials at Evolution and Games illustrate how Price’s theorem can produce misleading results.Price equationJournal of Theoretical BiologyEvolution and Games The Oxford team of two admitted that “the evolution of universes is very different from the evolution of animals,” but decided that “models of evolving universes are quite similar to models of bacterial evolution,” so they felt the similar logic made the exercise worthwhile. Their original paper, published in Complexity, is available online in PDF format.published in Complexity, is available online

8/24/201552 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 So if models of evolving universes resemble models of biological evolution, what does that say about the latter? Let’s use this paper with all its whiz-bang equations to show how to respond to pseudo- erudite atheists, without being intimidated by their jargon and flawed mathematics. The idea to master is that if your thesis is illogical, no amount of jargon or math will make it logical. You don’t have to be able to follow the math of these Oxford scholars to conclude that their ideas are laughably absurd.

8/24/201553 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 Suppose, for instance that you want to prove that gnomes are capable of painting birds’ eggs in the middle of the night. In your paper, you let G stand for the available gnome population, E stand for the egg density per acre, r the effective egg coloration rate and F the gnomic fitness increase derived from the Price equation, assuming the egg-painting activity allows gnomes to produce more offspring. It doesn’t matter if you can derive F = cov(G 1 — G 2 ) + cov(E 1 — E 2 ) r - ewT or anything else, even more impressive- looking. If the assumptions are wrong, the conclusions must also be wrong.

8/24/201554 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 Gardner and Conlon’s reasoning (and math) is a house of cards on sand in a whirlwind. They assumed Darwinism accounts for finely-tuned adaptations in biology, like avian flight, blinding their eyes, as did Francis Crick, who said that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” They leapt from that error to assume that evolution can account for fine- tuning in the fundamental constants of physics. avian flight

8/24/201555 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 They borrowed Lee Smolin’s controversial notion of “cosmic natural selection,” which they admitted “is only weakly analogous to Darwinian natural selection.” They further assumed that finely-tuned, life-giving universes can emerge from black holes rather than dissipate in a sea of random particles by Hawking radiation. They trusted the shaky math of Price’s theorem, which embeds evolutionary assumptions into the terms of its equation just like our example embedded gnomes into its terms. They know exactly what they are doing. Look at the intellectual hurdles they simply walked around instead of facing:

8/24/201556 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “This idea relies on several important assumptions, all of which are controversial. First, it is key to the ideas of Smolin that the endpoint of black-hole formation is actually a new universe, rather than simply a quantum mechanical state that will decay over time and ultimately disappear through Hawking radiation.…

8/24/201557 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “Second, Smolin suggests that the fundamental constants can change during the formation of new universes, but no physical mechanism is known to account for this. Third, Smolin assumes that the new universe inherits the constants of the previous universe, up to small variations. However, in the context of the multiverse, one should expect not just the constants of the Standard Model to be ambient, but also the gauge group (set of forces) and particle content of the Standard Model to be ambient properties as well. In this case, one would expect far more dramatic changes to the physical laws (e.g., the absence of electromagnetism as a long-range force) than simply a change in numerical constants. These are all substantial caveats (see [16] for an in-depth review). Here, we proceed on the assumption that they are surmountable.

8/24/201558 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 With a leap of faith like that, you can simply discount everything they say as foolishness. Isn’t that exactly what Paul said the wise of this world do when facing clear evidence for design? Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. These two fallible men know fully well how designed the universe is:

8/24/201559 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 “The precise numerical values of these constants determine much of the physics of our universe and pose a double conundrum for physicists and philosophers. First, the values have a high degree of arbitrariness: they are dimensionless parameters that range over eight orders of magnitude, for no known reason. Second, it is generally acknowledged that even rather small modifications to some of these values would lead to universes that are vastly less complex than our own.…”

8/24/201560 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 No known reason? Here you witnessed a willful escape from reason. Because they stubbornly refuse to consider actual design by a designing intelligence, they would rather leap into absurdity, using their God-given talents for abstract reasoning to manipulate numbers that exclude the obvious out of existence in a fantasy multiverse of their own imagination. It’s just what Paul said: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

8/24/201561 Cosmologists Use Natural Selection to Explain Fine-Tuning of the Universe 宇宙学家使用自然选择来解释宇宙的微调 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:19–21). Futile thinking implies the self-refuting fallacy. By thinking their own reason emerged from a mindless cosmos, Gardner and Conlon just undermined its validity. Such thinking deserves pity, not funding from the Royal Society, whose founders believed design came from the Designer about whom Paul wrote. Today’s members honor fools by publishing their folly.self-refuting fallacy

8/24/201564 Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Evidence disputes Mars water, let alone life. It’s looking like a toxic place. Besides, where would the water come from? The big mound in Gale Crater, site of the Mars Curiosity Rover, looked like a tantalizing place to look for habitability. Mt. Sharp, as it is called, appeared to be a mountain laid down by water. Now, however, it looks more likely it was built by wind. Astrobiology Magazine shared the bad news from Princeton: “If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars’ past habitability.” Astrobiology Magazine Princeton

8/24/201565 Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Where would the water have come from, anyway? Live Science proclaimed that Mars and the core of Jupiter formed from “large space crashes.” The energy of impacts would seem to obliterate volatile compounds (including water). That’s why cosmogonists try to find other sources for Earth’s oceans, assuming it crashed into existence similarly. The highly speculative theory proposed by U of Chicago scientists, given credence in the article, relies on numerous improbabilities, among them: (1) dust particles sticking together to make planetestimals, (2) sufficient numbers of planetesimals colliding and accreting together instead of breaking up into fine particles, and (3) sufficient time before all the planet- forming ingredients are expelled from the system.Live Science

8/24/201566 Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Michigan State scientists are divining the meaning of Martian meteorites again, but they admit the conclusions are unclear: “most meteorites that originated on Mars arrived on Earth so long ago that now they have characteristics that tell of their life on Earth, obscuring any clues it might offer about their time on Mars,” a researcher confessed. Given the confusion, they are only “laying the groundwork for future researchers to answer this age-old question.” In other words, they have nothing to say. Michigan State

8/24/201567 Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Mars must certainly not be a lively place now, given what landers have found. There are “pesky perchlorates all over Mars, ” Science Magazine said. The chlorine compounds not only erase carbon compounds by converting them to gas, they make living on Mars dangerous. The perchlorates and other chemicals like gympsum get into fine dust that blows all over the planet, making it a dangerous place to send humans. New Scientist described how “Toxic Mars could hamper planned human missions.” The fine dust could harm the lungs and thyroid glands of future astronauts. Even in the safety of spacesuits, the electrified dust would stick to everything, making its way unavoidably into astronaut living quarters.Science MagazineNew Scientist

8/24/201568 Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 The bad news is not stopping children of the Star Trek generation, though. Some 78,000 have applied to go on a proposed one-way trip to Mars, New Scientist reported elsewhere. Hopefully they won’t find out too late that it’s a suicide mission.New Scientist

8/24/201569 Trouble for Mars Lifers 相信火星有生命的麻烦 Mercury is a sterile hell, Venus is a sterile hell, Mars is a toxic wasteland, and so on out. In between Venus and Mars lies this blue jewel we call Earth, blessed with abundant water, greenery, and life in almost every nook and cranny. It has the right magnetic shield, the right solar energy, the right continental minerals, the right atmosphere, the right carbon/oxygen/water/nitrogen cycles — the right everything. Doesn’t that send a message we should heed? Maybe the Creator gave us all these other worlds to examine, so that we would appreciate all the more how well designed our Earth is. For those not drunk on Darwine, that has been the primary benefit of the planetary exploration program.

8/24/201572 Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The most information-rich medium known to man has been found in abundance under the sea, but man didn’t put it there. In “Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below Sea Floor,” Traci Watson described for Science Now what deep-sea explorers have found in the abyssal plains of the Atlantic, 3 miles below the ocean surface:Science Now

8/24/201573 Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 “In the middle of the South Atlantic, there’s a patch of sea almost devoid of life. There are no birds, few fish, not even much plankton. But researchers report that they’ve found buried treasure under the empty waters: ancient DNA hidden in the muck of the sea floor, which lies 5000 meters below the waves.”

8/24/201574 Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The DNA is contained in fossils of foraminifera, radiolarians and other planktonic creatures that have settled to the sea floor. Pedro Martinez Arbizu, a deep-sea biologist of the German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research, said, “We have been able to show that the deep sea is the largest long-time archive of DNA, and a major window to study past biodiversity.” It’s like finding a new fossil record. Some of the 169 forams and 21 radiolarian species were unknown. Even species without hard shelly parts yielded DNA. A British scientist said, “These records are telling you new information that wasn’t found in the fossil record.”

8/24/201575 Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 Another team found traces of DNA from 2700 species in the shallower bottom of the Black Sea, including DNA from algae, fungi, and dinoflagellates. Scientists expected that DNA could not survive exposure to oxygen, but apparently newer material cut off the oxygen from deeper sediments, preserving the genetic material. Watson said, “more recent Black Sea sediments weren’t exposed to oxygen at all.”

8/24/201576 Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The Black Sea team claims the sediments are 9,600 years old; the Atlantic team claims the DNA they collected is 32,500 years old. The article did not explain the dates, but suggested that they were estimated from “first appearance” of certain species according to evolutionary assumptions.

8/24/201577 Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 Two observations should jump out at this announcement. One is that even with evolutionary assumptions, they are only claiming a 32,500-year maximum date for what they found. That’s a tiny fraction of the millions and billions of years they assume plankton should have been settling onto the sea floor. If the DNA is protected from oxygen by what lies above it, why didn’t they find DNA hundreds of thousands or millions of years old? After all, evolutionists explain away dinosaur soft tissue by claiming it can last over 70 million years. More likely, the DNA is even younger than they think. It could not survive degradation, under ideal conditions, for more than a few thousand years.

8/24/201578 Buried Treasure Found Under the Ocean: DNA 海洋底面发现的宝藏：脱氧核糖核酸 The other observation is the remarkable difference between minerals and information. Non-living rocks and mud are composed of relatively simple mineral compounds that carry no message. DNA, by contrast, bears information — the wherewithal to build a complex organism like a radiolarian or foramina, with all its molecular motors, digestive, respiratory, and excretion systems. Some of the shells of these creatures look like cathedrals or spaceships. What a thought that information is still present in this dark, cold, otherwise sterile realm. It’s like finding books inside a cave, or hard drives on the moon. The best explanation (from our common experience) for information-rich systems is intelligent design.

8/24/201581 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Two mysteries from the moon are forcing revisions to textbooks. One concerns water in moon minerals. The other concerns the moon’s magnetic field. Mare Basalts Surprisingly Magnetic “New research sets back date of moon’s dynamo 160 million years,” reported PhysOrg based on a paper in PNAS. A team of geophysicists was surprised to find evidence from magnetic signals in moon rocks that the moon must have had a magnetosphere-generating dynamo that lasted much longer than they thought possible. Current theory must be inadequate, because “The lifetime of the ancient lunar core dynamo has implications for its power source and the mechanism of field generation,” the scientists wrote. They were driven to postulate unlikely mechanisms to keep the hypothetical dynamo going:PhysOrgPNAS

8/24/201582 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “These data extend the known lifetime of the lunar dynamo by ∼ 160 My and indicate that the field was likely continuously active until well after the final large basin- forming impact. This likely excludes impact-driven changes in rotation rate as the source of the dynamo at this time in lunar history. Rather, our results require a persistent power source like precession of the lunar mantle or a compositional convection dynamo.”

8/24/201583 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Space.com’s headline reads, “Mystery of Moon’s Magnetic Field Deepens.” Space.com Improbabilities that Are All Wet When a Mars-sized object hit the Earth to form the moon (according to a popular theory), it should have obliterated all volatile compounds, like water, requiring Earth’s oceans to form later from impacts from wet comets or asteroids. That theory has been impacted itself by studies of water-bearing minerals in moon rocks, prompting Science Daily to report, “Moon and Earth Have Common Water Source.” Another Science Daily article suggests the new theory, “Water on Moon, Earth Came from Same Primitive Meteorites.” A new analysis of Apollo moon rocks dispels ideas that comets brought the water. It must have come from carbonaceous chondrites, the study concludes.Science Daily Lisa Grossman at New Scientist believes “Moon water came from young wet Earth.”New Scientist

8/24/201584 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “The notion that all Earth’s water was delivered by comets or asteroids has just taken a hit. Chemical analysis of lunar rocks suggests that Earth was born wet, and it held on to its water long enough to donate some to the moon.” This is a flagrant reversal of the idea that a moon- forming impact left the moon bone dry. Measurements of water-bearing minerals on the moon show it’s not just a little water they’re talking about. “The minerals hold as much as those in Earth’s upper mantle,” Grossman says. Nature News portrays the head-scratching this finding causes for modelers:Nature News

8/24/201585 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “That still leaves a potential gap in the Moon- forming model. Some planetary scientists had reasoned that the heat generated by the collision would have boiled away any water that Earth might have transferred to the coalescing Moon. The findings “are screaming that there’s something about the Moon’s formation that we’re not quite grasping”, says study co-author Erik Hauri of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.”

8/24/201586 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 The findings beg for a new explanation. Meteorites could not have brought the water unless the moon were still molten, but the moon would have solidified too rapidly. All one of the researchers could figure out was that the water came from the only place they know had water: the Earth. So how did the Earth “donate” some water to the moon? This calls for a delicate scenario: the hypothetical impactor that hit Earth had to loft just enough material off our primordial planet to form a large moon without destroying all Earth’s primordial water. Then, some of that water lofted into orbit had to migrate to the moon:

8/24/201587 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 “It no longer looks likely that all the water in the material that formed the moon evaporated instantly in the giant initial impact. Instead, it now seems more probable that water migrated over a period of centuries out of the cloud of debris that coalesced into the moon.” Apparently, “likeliness” has evolved in the modeler’s minds. The new findings forced a reassessment of what scientists thought was “probable.”

8/24/201588 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 But the explanation begs a new question: where did the Earth get its water to donate? Current theory does not allow a body at Earth’s location to garner water from a spinning debris disk. Adding a little more ad hoc can get the job done: “[Alberto] Saal [of Brown University] thinks that Earth may have formed near where the asteroid belt is now, which is far enough from the sun for water to condense. The planet would then have migrated inward. It’ll be a tough theory to prove, because Earth’s geologic activity has been recycling rocks, and thus erasing the evidence, for billions of years.” The new model would claim that the early Earth was not habitable, but through a series of lucky breaks, migrated into the habitable zone, where everything worked out just right for microbes to emerge and become planetary scientists who figured it all out.

8/24/201589 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 These reports should anger anyone who watches science shows and reads textbooks that make the formation of the Earth and its large Moon look so easy. No theory can account for the observations. Instead, secular moyboys (believers in “millions of years, billions of years”) concoct fantastical models to preserve their fantasies from the evidence. Did you catch the howler in the quote above? Earth has been “erasing the evidence, for billions of years.” Quick! What does that imply? This is a fact-free story – even the part about erasing the evidence for billions of years.

8/24/201590 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Before, the priests of the planetary evolution cult needed just a delicate impact from a Mars-size object (itself a highly improbable event) to form the moon, followed by some hand-waving and chants, to bring in a series of unknown wet impactors to form Earth’s oceans. That was unlikely enough. Now, they need Earth to form out in the asteroid belt, where water can conceivably condense, followed by a lucky pitch from Jupiter or Saturn to careen our dead planet right into the batter’s box of the habitable zone. That all had to happen before the Mars-size impactor came in, this time even more delicately, to loft water into Earth orbit without losing it, so that it could transfer the water to a new moon (which happens to be just right to support life on Earth).

8/24/201591 Moon Water and Magnetism Mystifies Astronomers 月球的水和磁性迷惑天文学家 Nobody would believe this series of ad hoc events unless it were absolutely necessary to preserve secular materialism and long ages for Darwin. We won’t even go into the much more highly fantastical tales needed to get life, multicellularity, consciousness and intelligence to “emerge” from hot wet muck. Scientists speak of new data as “constraints” for their models. That’s why raw data from planetary missions is so valuable. The more constraints on storytellers, the better. As of now, they appear to have just one hand free to wave from the straitjacket the data have put them in. Maybe the next data will constrain the remaining hand-waving arm, and gag the mouth, too.

8/24/201594 Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 There was a time when talking plants was mythology. Now, it’s science. Hidden Messages in Plain Sight Plants don’t speak English, obviously. Somehow, though, they communicate through channels scientists are only beginning to understand. No less than Science Magazine, the most respected journal in America, said this: “Shhh, the Plants are Talking.” In the “Science Shot” article, reporter Andrew Porterfield described controlled experiments in Australia that showed chilis grow better when basil is nearby. Somehow, the basil coaxes the chili plants through a hidden mechanism:Science Magazine

8/24/201595 Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 Because light, touch, and chemical “smell” were ruled out, the team proposes that the finding points to a new type of communication between plants, possibly involving nanoscale sound waves, traveling through the dirt to bring encouraging “words” to the growing seeds. Understanding this novel communication could help growers boost crop yields and increase global food supplies. How neighborly.

8/24/201596 Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 Live Science put it this way: “Even in the plant world, babies fail to thrive without a friendly community chattering nearby, according to a new study.” We weren’t kidding about talking plants. Reporter Becky Olson headlined her article, “Plants Talk: Seedlings Thrive with Encouraging ‘Words’.” Live Science The Underground Fungal Railroad More evidence is arising that plants communicate throughout ecological communities through a network of fungal threads in the soil. The fungi reward the plants for sharing nutrients by passing messages along, in a symbiotic relationship. The BBC News featured more discoveries about the underground network, as did PhysOrg. The BBC article claims that work in the UK is the first to show plant communication via the fungal railroad.BBC NewsPhysOrg

8/24/201597 Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 The research appears to show that a bean plant under attack by aphids can send out a warning through the underground communication channels. Plants getting the message set up defenses, but plants without the fungal network do not. One of the researchers was delighted at this “abject surprise that it was just so powerful — just such a fantastic signalling system.” The BBC called this an “evolutionary role” for the fungus without explaining how a blind, purposeless process could discover any role in complex communications systems.

8/24/201598 Talking Plants and Secret Networks 说话植物和秘密网络 Some day soon we may decipher the language of plants. Here are some predictions. Favorite joke: that some humans think the underground railroad evolved. Favorite saint: Basil. Weather report: Chili today and hot tamale. Favorite pastime: sending intelligently designed signals. Favorite cowboy line: Where never is heard a discouraging word. Favorite hymn: Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

8/24/2015101 Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 Today’s entry features a mammal, a bird and an insect that have good reasons to show off. The insect: A little moth has hearing unsurpassed in the animal kingdom (but we already know, from the film Metamorphosis, that any lepidopteran undergoing transformation from caterpillar to flying insect has much to boast about already). Humans with optimum hearing can hear about 20 kHz. That’s nothing for the greater wax moth. Science Daily reported research at the University of Strathclyde that measured sensibility up to 300 kHz in this little, inconspicuous, gray insect. The lead researcher remarked, “We are extremely surprised to find that the moth is capable of hearing sound frequencies at this level and we hope to use the findings to better understand air-coupled ultrasound.” The moth’s hearing system appears overdesigned for detecting bat echolocation calls, so why would this extreme hearing evolve? Ultrasound tends to drop in intensity through air faster than lower frequencies do.MetamorphosisScience Daily

8/24/2015102 Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 The mammal: Speaking of bats, one flower-feeding bat species has a dynamic tongue that works like a nectar trap. Live Science and National Geographic have electron micrographs of the tongue tip from Pallas’s long-tongued bat. Researchers at Brown University showed that blood in the tongue instantly fills dozens of papillae, or protrosions, in the tongue, allowing the bat to lap up much more nectar than a flat tongue could. This all happens in less than the blink of an eye – 0.04 second. A slow-motion video on National Geographic reveals action too fast for the eye: the papillae straighten and the tongue tip grows by 50% when the tongue hits the nectar. The bat benefits from this mechanism because it has to expend a lot of energy hovering near the flower, so the more nectar retrieved from each sip, the better. The full paper can be found on PNAS.Live ScienceNational GeographicNational GeographicPNAS

8/24/2015103 Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 The bird: Those emperor penguins that starred in the documentary March of the Penguins looked mighty cold out there in the Antarctic wind. Surprisingly, their outside feathers are even colder! New Scientist told how their freezing exteriors prevent heat from leaking out of their bodies. Now for a bird bonus about the flying variety: PhysOrg told about how scientists are using tiny geolocators on migrating birds like the Manx shearwater to understand how they adapt their behaviors to changing environmental conditions.March of the PenguinsNew ScientistPhysOrg

8/24/2015104 Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 The movie: Illustra Media’s new documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds is being released on DVD today. It has another fascinating tongue story to tell, and a great migration story, too — just two glimpses into a film packed wonderful scientific discoveries about avian flight, told beautifully in this new documentary with great cinematography and outstanding animation. You can order a copy right now by clicking the link. Watch the trailer full-screen here. Join the Illustra Facebook page for news and updates.Flight: The Genius of Birdsclicking the linkhereIllustra Facebook page

8/24/2015105 Surprising Animals Go to Extremes 令人惊讶的动物走极端 Learning details of wonders in the animal world provides immunity against Darwinian indoctrination. That’s why we love sharing the latest discoveries here. We highly recommend the new Illustra film Flight: The Genius of Birds. You can order the DVD today, but if you have a good home theater, you might want to wait till June 11 to get the Blu-ray version with its outstanding detail and sound. Or, you can get the DVD now to watch and give away, ordering the Blu-ray version for your library to go with your HD copy of Metamorphosis: the Beauty and Design of Butterflies —a terrific pair you’ll want to watch again and again.Flight: The Genius of BirdsMetamorphosis: the Beauty and Design of Butterflies

8/24/2015108 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 When a fossil violates Darwinist expectations, it never falsifies the theory. It just creates a new round of imaginative gesticulations. Bad, monster, bad: National Geographic wrote a headline, “New Sea Monster Found, Rewrites Evolution?” The question mark implies, “Of course not,” even though the partial ichthyosaur fossil found in Kurdistan is “Out of time,” according to Live Science. Actually, it wasn’t lacking time. It had plenty of time to create problems for Darwinists:National GeographicLive Science

8/24/2015109 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 “Researchers had previously believed that ichthyosaurs declined throughout the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 199 million to 145 million years ago, with the only survivors rapidly evolving to keep ahead of repeated extinction events. The new fossil, however, dates from the Cretaceous Period, which lasted from 145 million to 66 million years ago. It looks remarkably like its Jurassic brethren, revealing a surprising evolutionary statis [sic, stasis]. The fossil “represents an animal that seems ‘out of time’ for its age,” study researcher Valentin Fischer of the University of Liège in Belgium said in a statement.”

8/24/2015110 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Now, the gesticulation: one evolutionist called it a “ghost lineage” (i.e., “changing very little over millions of years”). Another called it a “living fossil of its time.” One “never even imagined” it could survive so long. One said “it shouldn’t be there, but it is.” The new story will apparently read: “The resulting ichthyosaur family tree suggests these marine reptiles stayed diverse into the Cretaceous, only to go mysteriously extinct 95 million years ago.” National Geographic is holding out hope that a single specimen won’t “rewrite evolution”.National Geographic

8/24/2015111 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Go, ginkgo: Speaking of stasis, the unusual tree Ginkgo biloba is a classic “living fossil.” Because it is the now the “most abundant cityscape tree in the world,” one might be growing in a park near you. Evolutionists, though, consider it an exception to their rule, “evolve or perish.” J. C. McElwain wrote in Science Magazine about a new book about the ginkgo tree by Peter Crane:Science Magazine “Ginkgo is among Earth’s oldest-living organisms, reaching ages of around 1500 years. It is a “living fossil,” belonging to a family line extending back over 200 million years. It is a symbol of morphological stasis yet incredible persistence, having survived two of the five great mass extinction events in Earth history.”

8/24/2015112 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Now, the gesticulation: maybe it’s because it invented lignotubers, “among ginkgo’s adaptations that have ensured its persistence and resilience through hundreds of millions of years of global change.” Funny no other plant borrowed that idea. McElwain relishes in some tidbits of “subtle” evolutionary change, even though the tree is a “poster child for morphological stasis”. He puts a positive spin on how ginkgo fossils can “inform us about the tempo and nature of plant macroevolution.” Then he relishes how Crane makes the most of reverse evolution:

8/24/2015113 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 “He holds that Darwinian microevolutionary processes and contingency can account for most of the patterns observed in the plant fossil record, and he downplays (but does not entirely discount) the roles of evolutionary innovations and environmentally driven macroevolutionary processes. Crane also draws a nice parallel between the trajectories of horse and ginkgo evolution—both belonged to once highly diverse families and both were “winnowed” to a single extant species.”

8/24/2015114 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 The human network: Categories of early humans are falling like dominoes, now that Svante Pääbo’s team has found more evidence of interbreeding between Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern humans (see 9/01/12). Elizabeth Pennisi’s report in Science Magazine about a well- attended talk he gave in Germany last week seems devastating to evolutionary attempts to parse out human ancestors to various species and make a tree out of them:9/01/12Science Magazine

8/24/2015115 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 “With all the interbreeding, “it’s more a network than a tree,” points out Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. Pääbo hesitates to call Denisovans a distinct species, and the picture is getting more complicated with each new genome. Pääbo’s team also deciphered additional Denisovan DNA, both nuclear and mitochondrial, from two teeth found in different layers in Denisova Cave. The nuclear DNA confirmed that both teeth are Denisovan. But, surprisingly, one tooth showed more than 80 mitochondrial DNA differences from both the other tooth and the pinkie bone. These Denisovans, who lived in the same cave at different times, were as genetically diverse as two living humans from different continents and more diverse than Neandertals from throughout their range, says Susanna Sawyer from Pääbo’s lab. Such diversity implies that the Denisovans were a relatively large population “that at some point may have outnumbered Neandertals,” Pääbo said.”

8/24/2015116 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Now, the gesticulating: Pennisi reported that the evolutionists feel the new data will help clarify “genetic changes that underlie our own evolution.” They might be able to line up genes from these “archaic people” and find out which are unique to our species, compared to genes of apes and monkeys. See also the 9/05/11 and 8/12/11 entries.9/05/118/12/11

8/24/2015117 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 The observations show solid horizontal lines between interbreeding kinds, but dashed vertical lines where the evolution is supposed to have happened. Where is the tree? It’s all a tangled bramble bush. When the fossils don’t tell the Darwin tale, they have to invent terms like “morphological stasis” and wave their hands to keep you from seeing what the evidence implies. Ignore the waving hands. If they can’t get the tree right, what makes you think they got the dates right?tangled bramble bush.

8/24/2015118 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 Pääbo has basically undermined the Neanderthal myth. Evolutionists give arbitrary names to populations of Homo sapiens, giving them new species designations like Homo neanderthalensis. Since it fits Darwin’s expectations, it quickly becomes textbook orthodoxy. Artists go to work to make the new species look as different as possible from us. But what have we just heard? “These Denisovans, who lived in the same cave at different times, were as genetically diverse as two living humans from different continents and more diverse than Neandertals from throughout their range.” It’s all phony baloney categorizing among true humans, whose ability to interbreed proves they are one species.

8/24/2015119 Out-of-Order Fossils Make Darwinists Wave Hands 混乱化石使达尔文挥手 At first, Pääbo and other evolutionists tried that with the bones from Denisova cave, but now is reluctant to call those cave dwellers a distinct species. How could he? The DNA is all scrambled, showing they were all members of a single species: human beings. The people in that cave were smart. They were networking way back when they lived, just like we do today. None of them were stupid enough to try mating with apes, or to think that’s where they came from. If you respect evidence, help toss the Darwin Party out of power.

8/24/2015122 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 If lying evolved as a fitness strategy, can we believe anything an evolutionist says? In his blog entry “The Evolution of Lying” on The Conversation, Rob Brooks, a professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Director of the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at University of New South Wales, gave half-hearted credit to a new theory on deception as a by-product of the evolution of cooperation. The open-access paper by two Irish evolutionists, Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson, was published by the Royal Society this week. It posits lying as an evolutionary strategy:The ConversationRoyal Society

8/24/2015123 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 “Our results suggest that the evolution of conditional strategies may, in addition to promoting cooperation, select for astute cheating and associated psychological abilities. Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature.”

8/24/2015124 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Brooks agrees that lying evolved, but feels the model of McNally and Jackson is too simplistic. “I would like to see if it can help us understand the fine-scale tensions between cooperation and dishonesty in human affairs,” he said. “There is a lot more to lying than simply misrepresenting the world.” The liar can deceive himself as well, for instance, in order to make the lie more believable. From there, Brooks considered Sam Harris’s short e- book Lying, in which Harris advocates we all try to do better at overcoming our evolutionary tendencies, “arguing we can both simplify our own lives and build better societies by telling the truth in situations when we might be tempted to lie.” Here’s how Brooks concludes all this discussion about lies and truth (bold added, italics in original):

8/24/2015125 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 “Harris gets bottom-up processes and the conflict between individual benefits and group functioning. His book is worth a read for his impassioned argument that each of us, as individuals, would benefit from resisting the urge to lie. “I’m not convinced. What would help right now is some theoretic and empirical evidence that showed the conditions under which Harris’ prescriptions might work. And that’s the beauty of papers like today’s one from McNally and Jackson. “Irrespective, a better understanding of how lying evolves, no matter how simple, might do enormous social good. “For one thing it might help constrain the worst dishonesties in politics, public relations and propaganda.” The question none of them are considering is, if lying evolved, and if self-deception is possible, and if deception can be very convincing, how are the readers to know who is telling the truth?

8/24/2015126 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Imagine a liar so skilled, he convinces his listeners that he is 100% against the worst dishonesties in politics, public relations and propaganda. He tells you he wants to achieve enormous social good to provide a better understanding of how lying evolves. Now, add to it that he is self- deceived. Doesn’t his credibility implode? How could one possibly believe a word he says?

8/24/2015127 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Brooks has the Yoda complex. So do McNally and Jackson. They believe they can look down on the rest of humanity from some exalted plane free of the evolutionary forces that afflict the rest of humanity. No; they need to climb down and join the world their imaginations have created. In the evolutionary world, there is no essential difference between cooperation and deception. It’s only a matter of which side is in the majority at the moment.

8/24/2015128 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 To see this, consider a majority of humans in a population that are self-deceived and believe that by giving magic Kool-Aid to the defectors, laced with cyanide, they will help them become cooperators. The few defectors in that situation who try to stop them would be perceived by the majority as the real liars and non-cooperators. By what standard would anyone in this Darwinian world know the difference between truth and lies?

8/24/2015129 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 Having no eternal standard of truth, the evolutionary world collapses into power struggles. The appeals by Brooks and Sam Harris to try to “resist our temptations to lie” are meaningless. How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them? How can either of them know what is true? Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially confess to lying themselves. Their readers are therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and dismissing everything they say, including the notion that lying evolved.

8/24/2015130 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 An even stupider notion came out of the Association for Psychological Science. This is the evolutionary story that “political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength” (see also Science Daily with its photo of a guy flexing his bicep). A group of Darwine-drunk psychologists are trying to convince the world that “Men’s upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution.” According to them, “an evolutionary perspective may help to illuminate political motivations, at least those of men.” Strong men oppose redistribution of wealth, namby-pamby men and women support it, they claim. It’s not clear if they intended to impugn Obama’s masculinity this way, and those of all his staff, but it doesn’t really matter how many biceps they measured in their survey of political opinions. (Exercise: list exceptions to their “rule” from world history.) Association for Psychological ScienceScience Daily

8/24/2015131 Evolutionists Confess to Lying 进化论者承认说谎 You know their whole premise is false from their comment, “This is among the first studies to show that political views may be rational in another sense, in that they’re designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.” OK, their point is? If physical strength is a measure of fitness “designed” by natural selection, then anti-redistributionism is a measure of fitness, too. Get the wimps out of the way! They’re impeding evolutionary progress. Isn’t “self-interest” the highest good in Darwinism? We won’t belabor the misconception of conservatism they presented, because they already defeated their credibility by calling natural selection “rational.” Readers are justified in dismissing everything these quacks say, too, if they had any inclination left to trust the word of “evolutionary psychologists” about anything.

8/24/2015134 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 There are more wonders in your body than you can possibly imagine. Here are half a dozen new findings for conversation starters. Your inner bat: You have another sense you may not be aware of: you can learn the art of echolocation. It’s been known that blind people develop an ability to detect objects by their echoes, but Science Daily reported that even sighted people can train themselves to do it. Some people are better at it than others, for unknown reasons. Echolocation depends on very precise detection of timing differences between the two ears.Science Daily

8/24/2015135 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 Self-healing holes: Our blood vessels are made of a wonderful tissue, called epithelium. It’s stretchy, stable, and watertight. Science Daily says, “Measuring just a few hundred nanometers in thickness, this super-tenuous structure routinely withstands blood flow, hydrostatic pressure, stretch and tissue compression to create a unique and highly dynamic barrier that maintains the organization necessary to partition tissues from the body’s circulatory system.” Science Daily But there are immune cells, called leukocytes, that need to enter these passageways. How do they do it? The article presented findings by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where scientists studied how epithelial cells cooperate with leukocytes, creating holes for them to enter, then healing the holes behind them.

8/24/2015136 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 “By and large, these ensuing “micro –wounds” are short-lived; as soon as the cells have crossed the endothelium, these pores and gaps quickly heal, restoring the system’s efficient barrier function. In cases when these gaps fail to close — and leakage occurs — the results can be devastating, leading to dramatic pathologies including sepsis and acute lung injury.… “Described in The Journal of Cell Biology, the new findings suggest that rather than structural robustness per se, the barrier function of the endothelium relies on an enormous self-restorative capacity.… “The cell’s restorative capacity was just so striking,” says [Christopher V.] Carman. “But these early investigations were still inadequate to tell us how the breaches were being closed. We had to dig down to the sub-cellular level to understand the underlying activities and the molecular signaling mechanisms that were orchestrating these activities.””

8/24/2015137 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 Viruses, your friends: You have another immune system scientists did not realize till recently, and it involves partnership with viruses. Nature News reported that “Viruses in the gut protect from infection.” Bacteriophages, tiny viruses that can invade and kill bacteria, find a home among the linings in your airways, by forming bonds with sugars in the mucus. When bacteria invade, these killing machines, like a robotic army, take them out. Medical Xpress called this a “new immune system” that has been discovered. In more general terms, Science Magazine reviewed “our viral inheritance,” giving examples of good and bad ways that viruses interact with our bodies. Even some endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) that seemed at first to be parasitic on our genomes now appear to be useful or beneficial.Nature NewsMedical XpressScience Magazine

8/24/2015138 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 Nose knowledge: The sense of smell continues to be one of the most difficult to understand in humans and in fruit flies. The molecules that land on olfactory receptors encode messages that are in some ways similar to those in the retina, but there appear to be timing dependences, too, Medical Xpress reported. Science Magazine reviewed the growing science of “flavor,” trying to understand how we learn to associate smells and tastes with pleasure or displeasure. “It’s a vastly more complex topic than they once thought,” the article said.Medical XpressScience Magazine

8/24/2015139 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 Your inner clock: We share a sense with the little flies we swat on our arms: a biological clock. Because the human circadian clock is much more complex, scientists try to understand the clock in fruit flies. Medical Xpress reported that a new component of the fruit fly circadian clock has been identified.Medical Xpress

8/24/2015140 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 Six degrees of separation: Because the brain is so heavily interconnected, any synapse is only about six steps away from any other. This allows for an enormous amount of plasticity for “rewiring” circuits when one part is damaged. Science Daily discussed work at UCLA that shows the brain “rewires itself after damage or injury.” Understanding these processes could lead to therapies for stroke victims and Alzheimer’s patients. Last week, Science Magazine discussed “Why adults need new brain cells.” Contrary to beliefs decades ago, neuroscientists now know that brain cell regeneration takes place. Not only that, “a key function of adult neurogenesis is to shape neuronal connectivity in the brain according to individual needs,” the article said. Because of the brain’s plasticity and massively parallel architecture, Sandia Labs is looking to the human brain as “a model for supercomputers,” PhysOrg reported.Science DailyScience MagazinePhysOrg

8/24/2015141 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 To make a point without attempting to be morbid, these findings underscore why the death of a human being, whether in a tornado or an abortion lab, is such a traumatic thing. It’s like smashing a supercomputer, destroying a working factory, obliterating a work of art. A dead body returns to undifferentiated dust that fulfills none of these fantastically complex processes.

8/24/2015142 Amazing Body Facts 惊人的身体事实 The Bible describes death as an enemy, the result of sin that infected the planet with a curse and judgment. The only hope of a new body that can live forever is faith in Jesus Christ, who paved the way for salvation through His death and resurrection (I Corinthians 15). If you marvel at the body you have now, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him” (I Corinthians 2:9).I Corinthians 15(I Corinthians 2:9

8/24/2015145 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Evolution is one of the most carelessly-used words in science, as several recent articles show. Not all change is evolution the way Darwin meant it. Roaches check in, and they also check out: Those omnivorous pests have outsmarted engineers again. Even though they like sugar in the wild, they have learned to avoid sugary-tasting poison in roach traps. Sure enough, you can watch the smarter bugs in a video clip on Live Science. Stephanie Pappas headlined the story, “Yikes! Cockroaches Evolved to Avoid Sugary Baits.” The authors of the paper in Science claimed that the German cockroaches “rapidly evolved an adaptive behavioral aversion to glucose.” They spoke of glucose aversion as a “gain of function adaptation” that “emerged” in their study population.roach trapsLive Science German cockroachesadaptive

8/24/2015146 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” The scientists did not state, though, if the glucose- averse roaches represent a new species. Darwinian evolution is not just about changes of adaptive behavior within a species, but the arrival of new species. If the glucose-averse roaches are interfertile with the wild type, no evolution has occurred. In the Live Science article, furthermore, one of the paper’s authors admitted that glucose avoidance could have been an ancient trait that surfaced under the new environmental condition of encountering man-made bait traps. “Some plants produce toxic bittersweet compounds that roaches would have needed to avoid before humans came around.”Live Sciencebait traps

8/24/2015147 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Even worse, the glucose-avoiding roaches may be less healthy. In Science Daily, that same co-author admitted they grow more slowly in the lab without the environmental stress. “Cockroaches have to adapt to a varied and unreliable food supply, and glucose- aversion places an additional restriction on obtaining adequate nutrition.” In any case, this is certainly not a case supporting Darwinian evolution—universal common ancestry via natural selection.Science Daily

8/24/2015148 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Name it and claim it: Just claiming something evolved does not make it so. Asking why some flowers close at night, Elizabeth Palermo on Live Science credited evolution. Those plants are “highly evolved,” she said. That’s no better than ridiculing another human as being less evolved than you are. Then she admitted, “scientists are not quite sure why some plants, particularly flowers, evolved this way.” You can’t just say that the trait might be a “highly evolved defense mechanism against a plant’s nocturnal predators.” Without an explanation based on mutation and natural selection, this is mere speculation. For all Palermo knows, plants were designed that way.closeLive Science

8/24/2015149 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Negative selection: Some developmental processes involve killing of cells that are not needed in the finished adult form. It happens in the developing thymus, for instance; in PLoS Biology, Caitlin Sedgwick wrote, “To prevent autoimmunity, developing T cells undergo a process called negative selection, wherein strongly ‘self-reactive’ T cells are provoked to undergo apoptosis (cellular suicide) before they leave the thymus.” This is not evolution, either, even though she boasted of “Bringing You Negative Selection, Alive and In Color.” The word “selection” might cause one to think this is about Darwinian evolution. It’s not; the only evolution here is the “evolution [i.e., unfolding] of apoptotic events.”PLoS Biologyautoimmunity

8/24/2015150 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Not everything Darwin said is evolution: Charles Darwin wrote about a lot of things, not all of which support his idea of universal common ancestry via unguided natural processes. A story on PhysOrg is a case in point; “research proves Darwin prediction,” the headline reads, but the principle at issue is whether “productivity increases with species diversity.” Creationists would accept a substantial amount of variation within created kinds. Although the researcher mentioned “evolutionary distance,” the distance doesn’t have to be evolutionary. Creationists acknowledge a lot of morphological distance between a zebra and a zebrafish. Even critics of Darwin recognized he was right about some things. Nothing in the data of this story necessarily supports Darwin’s most famous notion, that zebras are descendants of microbes.PhysOrg

8/24/2015151 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Guided variation is not evolution: It’s like a pesky urban legend that won’t die: artificial selection is not evolution. It’s intelligent design, even if the engineers use random variation in the process. Another example appeared on Live Science, where Wynn Parry wrote, “Evolution May Help Build Better Robots.” Then he transferred the design from the engineers to the robots themselves, claiming, “In the real world, animals have evolved the ability to get from point A to B by galloping, crawling and jumping. Now, robots in the virtual world have accomplished something similar.”Live Science

8/24/2015152 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Turtle embryonic development is not evolution: On Science Daily, the word “evolution” was used in connection with observations of turtle development from the embryo. First, the article said that turtles are “not primitive reptiles as previously thought, but are related to the group comprising birds and crocodilians, which also includes extinct dinosaurs.” Whether that relationship illustrates common ancestry or not, the statement argues against a simple-to-complex process. Then the article confused embryonic development with evolution. Here again, though, was a conundrum: “The study also reveals that despite their unique anatomy, turtles follow the basic embryonic pattern during development.” Science Daily

8/24/2015153 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Even if the shell arrives late in the process, when limb development normally occurs, the highly complex process of development can hardly be used to support the notion that “turtle shell evolved by recruiting part of the genetic program used for the limbs.” Evolution is not a recruiter. That’s the personification fallacy. Yet based on this, one of the researchers stated, “The work not only provides insight into how turtles evolved, but also gives hints as to how the vertebrate developmental programs can be changed to produce major evolutionary novelties”—all that after admitting that these “evolutionary monsters” are unique in the animal kingdom. personification fallacy

8/24/2015154 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” Data points within natural variation of a species are not evolution: The Chinese found another “new hominin” in a cave based on its teeth. But then, the article on PhysOrg admits, “the size of these teeth all falls [sic] into the tooth size variation of Chinese modern humans.” How, then, are these teeth assumed to be from a different ancestral species? As usual, when the data are unconvincing, more research is needed: “Our excavation shows the cave has great potential perspectives,” the researcher said. “Further excavation and laboratory study of cave development, filling sequence, hominin teeth morphology, dating, and environmental change from the Fuyan Cave as well as some adjacent caves will help better understand the human evolution and adaptive behavior in Southwest Hunan, east Guangxi, and north Guangdong.”PhysOrg

8/24/2015155 Roach Bait Story Highlights Abuse of Word “Evolution” 蟑螂毒饵的故事滥用 “ 进化 ” This is how scientists get away with claims that evolution is essential to biology, and is supported by mountains of evidence. Why, look at all the scientific papers and articles about it! How can Darwin skeptics claim it is unscientific? Well, we can, and we just showed you why. Ask them for evidence supporting universal common ancestry of all life by unguided natural processes, and this is the kind of fluff you get. They accuse their critics of being people of faith, but Darwinians are people of fluff. Point that out to them, and they become people of froth. There’s nothing as pitiable as people of froth supporting their fluff by faith.

8/24/2015158 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Stem cells continue to show promise for dramatic healings, but reporters don’t always clarify what lived or died to produce the cells. Adult stem cells inhabit all living humans; embryonic or fetal stem cells require a human death.continue Adult Stem Cell News Cord blood awakens boy: Parents of a boy with pediatric cerebral palsy are glad they froze samples of his cord blood when he was born. At age 2–1/2, he had a cardiac arrest with severe brain damage that left him in a persistent vegetative state. Now, Science Daily reported, after the first successful treatment with stem cells from his autologous cord blood, the boy has awakened. He can move and speak simple sentences.cerebral palsyScience Daily

8/24/2015159 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Mesenchymal stem cells and ALS: It’s an odd reversal of ethics to put human stem cells in rats, but Medical Xpress reported progress against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by injecting engineered human mesenchymal stem cells into the furry rodents, causing them to produce growth factors that delay onset of the disease. The article pointed to a benefit of adult stem cells: “By using adult mesenchymal stem cells, the technique avoided the danger of tumor that can arise with the transplant of embryonic stem cells and related ‘do-anything’ cells.”Medical Xpressadult stem cells

8/24/2015160 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Blood stem cells and cancer: Science Daily reported on significant improvements in survival for cancer patients with lymphomas, leukemias and other blood cancers, thanks to adult blood stem cells from donors and the patients themselves. “The significant improvements we saw across all patient and disease populations should offer patients hope and, among physicians, reinforce the role of blood stem cell transplants as a curative option for life-threatening blood cancers and other diseases.”Science Dailyleukemias

8/24/2015161 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Embryonic and Fetal Stem Cell News hESC and blindness: New Scientist reported a rare success with human embryonic stem cells. Implanted into the retina, a man with a form of macular degeneration went from 20/400 (legally blind) to 20/40 (sighted) over time. Results have not yet been published.New Scientistmacular degeneration Fetal stem cells and stroke: New Scientist reported modest improvement in stroke victims injected with stem cells in a new clinical trial. The article only mentioned where the cells came from in passing. The researcher “thinks that the fetal neural stem cells injected into the volunteers’ brains may stifle inflammation and catalyse the formation of new blood supplies to stroke-damaged tissue.”New Scientist

8/24/2015162 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Cloner trouble: The embryonic stem cell success at University of Oregon (see 5/17/13) has come under fire for two things: a rush to publication, and sloppy errors. New Scientist and Nature reported the controversy. So far, it appears none of the errors affected the experimental results. Mitalipov admitted the mistakes but defends his work.5/17/13New ScientistNature How This Translates to Policy

8/24/2015163 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Protecting the right to kill: In the wake of the Mitalipov success, Nature’s editors urged the journal’s scientific members to take ownership of the stem cell debate, lest public fears stifle progress. The editors acknowledged, “It is true that the research faces ethical controversy on three fronts: egg donation, embryo destruction and cloning.” They also acknowledged that induced pluripotent stem cells appear so far to work just as well as hESC without the ethical problems: “crucially they do not require egg recruitment, embryo destruction or cloning.” Yet the editors seemed more concerned about preventing a public outcry against the destruction of human embryos. Without proof, they said, “Whatever the outcome of those investigations, there are some clinical applications for which cloned stem cells could be the best option.” The prior week, though, Nature editors urged scientists to accept more social responsibility for risky new technologies.Natureegg donationNature

8/24/2015164 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Why stop at embryos? In an article entitled “Alzheimer’s disease, the soft target of the euthanasia debate,” Medical Xpress aired the views of Megan-Jane Johnstone (Deakin University) about euthanasia. Johnstone sees a softening of public attitudes about euthanasia with so many elderly declining into dementia. “The proposal to allow euthanasia as a morally warranted option in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is neither simple nor straightforward,” she said. “Anything less than an honest, transparent and accountable debate, which has been lacking to date, would be an assault on the integrity of all—both those for and against the euthanasia proposal—who are trying in their own ways to care for those who are confronting the hard-nosed reality of their inevitable mortality.”Medical Xpress

8/24/2015165 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Why stop at euthanasia? New Scientist provoked controversy with this eye- catching headline: “Is extinction really such a bad thing?” Consultant Shaoni Bhattacharya was not proposing it for humans or anything like that; she was just commenting on a new exhibit on extinction at London’s Natural History Museum. “A thoughtful exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum explores the benefits of extinction, and the possibility of humanity eradicating itself.” The world view is both Darwinian and Malthusian:New Scientist

8/24/2015166 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 “Survival is tough, and in a masterful stroke, the exhibition drives this home with a retro video game. In the species extinction game, the player must manoeuvre a Pac-Man-like creature around a world beset with creeping ice ages, fiery volcanoes and relentless winds, all the while competing with other animated species to snaffle sparse food supplies. A genius touch is the availability of “adaptation” tokens, which allow your creature to evolve traits to help it survive longer in its hostile world.” The museum portrays extinction as a part of life. “Extinction isn’t necessarily the end of the world, it could be just the beginning…,” one sign reads. “In a thought- provoking section, the museum presents the concept of Homo extinctus — humans wiped out forever.” Sweet dreams.

8/24/2015167 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 The choice is clear. Evolution is pro-death, creation is pro-life. Evolution sees death as a good thing; creation sees it as a curse. Evolution says “what’s the big deal?”; creation says humans, made in the image of God, are more precious than animals. Evolution sees millions of years of senseless struggle against elements just for the reward of passing on one’s genes in an endless cycle of meaninglessness that ends in a charred, dead world. Creation sees death as an intruder, an enemy, that will be conquered in the new heavens and new earth, and has been conquered for those who accept Christ’s death and resurrection on their behalf. Choose you this day.

8/24/2015168 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 The sanctity of human life is the dividing issue for stem cell research, abortion and euthanasia. It’s easy to see why evolutionists are so dismissive of the ethical qualms “religious people” worry about. They only see cells and fetuses as clumps of matter, when in fact, a human embryo, even from the single-celled zygote, contains the entire genetic program for an adult human being.

8/24/2015169 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Evolutionists tend to be pragmatists. If people are having abortions anyway, why not grab some of the stem cells? (They fail to see how this legitimizes abortion and creates a market for it.) If women are producing eggs anyway, why not harvest them? (They fail to take seriously the potential abuses to women.) If human blastocysts can’t produce adult clones (yet), why not harvest their stem cells? If old people can’t communicate any more, why not help them die? If everything competes for resources, why not let humans go extinct? If humans are wrecking the planet, why not drastically cut their numbers? OK, evolutionist, set the example – you first.

8/24/2015170 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 The New Scientist article on extinction shows that some evolutionists still think Malthus had the right idea: competition for scarce resources guarantees lots of death. That notion that spurred Darwin to use the “struggle for existence” as a driver for natural selection has been debunked (7/02/09, 12/09/09 #3, 9/18/10) but it keeps returning. In actuality, freedom lets human society blossom, but tyranny destroys it. Need proof? The 20th century.New Scientist7/02/0912/09/099/18/10

8/24/2015171 Depending on Source, Stem Cells Can Kill or Heal 根据不同来源，干细胞可以杀人或治愈 Evolutionists would not want to live in the world their world view is leading toward. Those who love Christ need to keep the leaven of his teachings spreading through a lost world. Keep the salt in the decaying meat. Keep the light shining in the darkness. All that is required for a brave new world to embrace death is for godly people to do nothing. “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).Deuteronomy 30:19

8/24/2015174 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Here are some recent fossil finds that, whether they fit or not, are claimed to shed light on evolution. Goby a fish: Otoliths are rocks in the head of many vertebrates that aid with orientation and gravity sensing. An article on PhysOrg claims that fish otoliths provide “unprecedented insight” into the evolution of gobioid fishes, one of the most numerous groups of bony fish. But what can really be told from little rocks? What is the “eloquence of the otoliths,” as the headline teases? Does the body of the article live up to the hype? Actually, even though a team claims to have produced a detailed phylogeny, and claims it can read otoliths like a genetic code, the major finding from “perfectly preserved” otoliths in Italy just moves one fish family to another clade. Moreover, the lack of fossils that can be dated “has hampered understanding of the evolutionary history of this highly successful group of fishes.”PhysOrgthe article

8/24/2015175 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Turtle on the half shell: A fossil of a turtle-like animal with back ribs that are not fused together, as in modern turtles, is attracting interest. Both Science Now and Science Daily put their headlines just-so story form, like “How the Turtle Got Its Shell” (see 10/09/08). The comparison of the fossil to a turtle looks convincing that the fossil is an evolutionary ancestor, but that inference requires believing that the “beginnings of the turtle shell started 40 million years earlier than previously thought” according to another Science Daily article. It also requires believing that the turtle’s novel respiratory system evolved in concert with changes in the ribs. “If you incorporate your ribs into a protective shell, then you have to find a new way to breathe!” one researcher exclaimed. That being the case, they are only claiming that the South African fossil named Eunotosaurus may provide “clues” to turtle evolution.Science NowScience Daily10/09/08Science Dailyrespiratoryincorporate

8/24/2015176 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Scrambled dino eggs: Fossil dinosaur eggs are rare, especially ones that contain fossil embryos. National Geographic used the “missing link” meme in its announcement of theropod eggs found in Portugal. Lucky for evolutionists, they fit in a gap that “has frustrated scientists because many of the bird- like aspects of reproduction seem to have appeared during the gap.” Scientists inferred a few things about the eggs, such as that they must have been buried, but nothing definitive of increase in complexity or information except a single layer as opposed to two or three layers of assumed later dinosaurs and birds.National Geographic

8/24/2015177 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Triceratops cousin: Live Science announced a new ceratopsian dinosaur claimed to have lived “12 million years before the rise of its more famous younger relative.” It’s being called “a new kind of three-horned dinosaur” that “may be the oldest cousin of Triceratops yet.” Judging from the artist reconstruction, though, it’s hard to see much difference. Judiceratops (from the Judith River formation, Montana) has the frill and three horns and most other features Triceratops, yet the article asks readers to believe that these dinosaurs evolved rapidly, with “a lot of turnover” as older species were replaced by newer ones. Whatever differences might be apparent to paleontologists on the outside seem trivial compared to the complexity of the inside of both creatures.Live Science

8/24/2015178 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Wood you believe: PhysOrg posted a story of a buried forest in Switzerland that is being studied for dendrochronology. Claimed to be 13,000 years old in Zurich clay, the pine wood was discovered by accident. The data have not been formally published, but the article includes a picture of some cross sections being analyzed.PhysOrg

8/24/2015179 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 The early bird: No sooner had our entry on “Feathers before flight” gone to press (5/28/13) that a new “feathered dinosaur” announcement hit the wires (paper in Nature). All the secular sites went nuts, as expected: “New candidate for world’s first bird” (National Geographic); “New feathered dino may be world’s first bird” (Live Science); “New contender for first bird” (Nature News). The reconstruction makes this creature look something like a bantam chicken with teeth, but fully fledged with modern- looking feathers and wings. A consequence of calling Aurornis xui the first bird is that it puts Archaeopteryx back on the bird line (BBC News, New Scientist), after the controversial shake-up by Xing Xu in 2011 (see 7/28/2011). Science Now, though, is not sure this fossil, found by a Chinese farmer and sold to a museum, is authentic:5/28/13NatureNational GeographicLive ScienceNature NewsBBC NewsNew Scientist7/28/2011Science Now

8/24/2015180 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 “But Luis Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California, says that Aurornis must fly through at least one important hoop before it can claim to be the first bird: Its authenticity must be proved. That’s because the specimen was not found during excavations by Godefroit’s team, but—like most early birds and feathered dinosaurs from Liaoning province, including many studied by Xu—it was supposedly found by farmers and acquired from a Chinese fossil dealer, who sold it to the province’s Yizhou Fossil and Geology Park. China’s museums and research institutions have been plagued in recent years by the circulation of fake or altered fossils, including the infamous “Archaeoraptor” fake of the late 1990s, a claimed “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds published by National Geographic.”

8/24/2015181 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Many of the science news sites though, including National Geographic, let their imaginations take wings, asserting that it is truly a feathered dinosaur ancestral to birds. The original paper was more concerned about phylogenetic placement of this fossil than about explaining how powered flight could have evolved. The supplementary information file claims there was no evidence of forgery but concurred that most of the spectacular feathered dinosaur fossils have come from dealers.National Geographic supplementary information file

8/24/2015182 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Mammoth blood: A potentially gigantic, though controversial, finding came from Siberia this week: mammoth blood preserved in ice (see Siberian Times, “Exclusive: The first pictures of blood from a 10,000 year old Siberian mammoth”; Live Science, “Perfectly preserved mammoth blood unearthed in ice”). The photos show clear pictures of blood vessels, red meat and liquid blood collected in a vial. Nature urged caution in its announcement, “Can a mammoth carcass really preserve flowing blood and possibly live cells?” but could not rule out the authenticity of the claim:Siberian TimesLive ScienceNature

8/24/2015183 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 “The Siberian Times obtained striking photos of the specimen showing the reddish tissues and a vial of the dark brown liquid said to be blood that was found in ice cavities under the animal’s belly, as well as additional details of the discovery. The story quotes mammoth researcher Semyon Grigoriev of the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, who led the recovery of the mammoth, as speculating that the blood contains “a kind of natural anti-freeze” and declaring the specimen — a female that was between 50 and 60 years old when she died — to be “the best preserved mammoth in the history of paleontology.””striking photos of the specimen

8/24/2015184 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Moreover, the report says this specimen gives researchers “a really good chance of finding live cells” — no wonder the Nature reporter said, “Wow!” before mentioning a few caveats: “The upshot: it really does appear to be an incredible find, but some of the claims about it are incorrect as reported or have yet to be established as fact.” A few experts weighed in on the possibility that the claims are true. None of them claimed they were definitely false. One asked, “Another question is, how were these samples preserved in this state for so long? Nature

8/24/2015185 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 The discoverers postulated that some kind of natural antifreeze protected the blood and soft tissues. They said they are working with South Korean researchers who want to clone a mammoth, using an elephant for gestation. Speaking of mammoths, Science Daily presented a new theory for their extinction: a meteor impact changed the climate. Considering that mammoths and mastodons lived throughout much of the world, and some are buried in mass graves like those in Hot Springs, South Dakota, impact theories require auxiliary hypotheses to explain why a meteor would be selective in its effects.Science Daily

8/24/2015186 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 The last two stories are the most interesting (early bird and mammoth blood). The prior ones show evolutionists doing what they usually do, forcing obscure pieces of evidence into their worldview picture (see 5/01/08 commentary, “How not to work a puzzle”).5/01/08

8/24/2015187 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Regarding Aurornis, skeptical readers should watch these “feathered dinosaur” fossils like a hawk. Science made a very damaging admission by stating that most of the fossils come from dealers. Just think—very few, if any, were found intact in the strata, including those found by master dinobird storyteller Xing Xu (5/01/10). Forgers fooled the experts once with “Archaeoraptor” back in 1999. Is it possible that many of the most controversial “feathered dinosaurs” are fakes? Those that are not fakes (like Archaeopteryx, found across the world in Germany) are genuine, but it was a bird, capable of powered flight. Consider: the motivation for forgery is strong. 5/01/10

8/24/2015188 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Poor Chinese farmers can gain riches and fame for finding what evolutionists want. Maybe the forgers learned lessons from “Archaeoraptor” and have gotten better at their craft. Why can’t the paleontologists pull authentic fossils out of the strata themselves? Is it because the fossils are not there? Why are the same species never found anywhere else in the world in comparable strata? If forgery is proved for some or any of them, creationists will be all over it like white on paint. It would seem in the best interests of the evolutionists, therefore, to err on the side of caution, stop the hype, and go dig up some in situ specimens, documenting their provenance. Their reputations depend on it.

8/24/2015189 Felicitous Fossils Facilitate Phylogenetic Fabling 恰当的化石有利于进化寓言 Regarding the mammoth blood, this is an amazing story worth watching. More analysis is needed that can satisfy scientists, but the fact that many frozen mammoths are already known would seem to discount motivation to commit a forgery. In July or August the discoverers are bringing other researchers to the cold site where the specimen is preserved. Imagine if live cells and intact blood are actually proved. That would be a “Wow!” indeed—a finding that would cast serious doubt on the dating methods used to claim this beast died 10,000 years ago. Until we have more reliable information, though, creationists should include disclaimers in their coverage.

8/24/20151 Sermons From Science -- June 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 6 月 Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and.

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8/24/20151 Sermons From Science -- June 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 6 月 Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and.

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Presentation on theme: "8/24/20151 Sermons From Science -- June 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 6 月 Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and."— Presentation transcript:

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