Download July 2013

Creationism News – July 2013
创造论新闻– 2013年7月
Dedicated to David Coppedge who sacrificed his career
as the Head Systems Administrator for the Cassini
Spacecraft in JPL to honor the Creator of the
Universe. He also spent literally thousands of hours to
make his excellent websites.
The contents of this presentation were taken from David
Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. Pray for his fast
recovery from cancer surgery.
Pastor Chui
http://ChristCenterGospel.org
[email protected]
5/8/2017
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Astrobiology: The Science of Could
天体生物学: 莫非科学
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Anything “could” happen. Shouldn’t science deal with
what does happen and what did happen? The “could”
word is rampant in astrobiology literature and originof-life studies.
“Antifreeze on Titan could affect its chances for life”
(Astrobiology Magazine): 14 uses of the word “could”
and 6 of “might.”
“Billion-Year-Old Water Could Hold Clues to Life On
Earth and Mars” (Astrobiology Magazine): 8 “could”
and 4 of “may” or “might.”
“Life On Earth Shockingly Comes from out of This
World” (Science Daily): 8 uses of could and may.
5/8/2017
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Astrobiology: The Science of Could
天体生物学: 莫非科学
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“A Stepping-Stone for Oxygen on Earth”
(Astrobiology Magazine): 6 uses of could and may.
“Martian Clay Contains Chemical Implicated in the
Origin of Life, Astrobiologists Find” (Science Daily):
5 instances of could, may, or might.
“More Evidence That Ancient Mars Could Support
Life Found by Old Rover” (Space.com): 3
instances of could, may, or might.
“60 Billion Alien Planets Could Support Life”
(Space.com): 8 instances of could, may, or might.
5/8/2017
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Astrobiology: The Science of Could
天体生物学: 莫非科学
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The hedging words are often key to the evolutionary
ideas in the articles: e.g., in the antifreeze article,
“These molecules could ultimately serve as the basis
for life”; in the billion-year-old water article, “This
water could be some of the oldest on the planet and
may even contain life; in the Mars rover article,
“NASA’s Curiosity rover found that the Red
Planet could have supported microbial life in the
ancient past”; in the out-of-this-world article, “icy
comets that crashed into Earth millions of years
ago could have produced life building organic
compounds”. No life, of course, has ever been found
beyond Earth’s biosphere.
5/8/2017
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Astrobiology: The Science of Could
天体生物学: 莫非科学
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We need a new word to describe the propensity of evolutionists
to speculate out of thin air with the power of suggestion to lend
a false air of scientific credibility to their confabulations. We’ll
coin the term perhapsimaybecouldness index to measure
that property and add it to our growing Darwin Dictionary (a
helpful guide to understanding our commentaries).
Whenever you hear an evolutionist using the could word, as in
“life could have emerged from methane clathrates in Titan’s
subsurface ocean,” remind him or her that could works both
ways. Since it’s an imprecise, rigorless, unmeasured,
hypothetical, speculative, imaginative, unscientific way to
describe nature, stop them immediately with the response, “But
then again, life might not have emerged from methane
clathrates in Titan’s subsurface ocean, if there is such an
ocean; life could have been designed. What do
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you know about it?”
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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5/8/2017
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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Since we all live in a body, we should all feel
intrigued with what goes in under our skin. There
are more wonders than science can ever fully
know. Here are a few recent examples.
Looking and recognizing: Why do secure websites
ask you to identify words with curvy, speckled
letters before letting you in? The reason
for CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public
Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is
that humans are far superior in recognizing
misshapen words than computers. No robot can
come close, Science Daily said:
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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It seems easy to us — the human brain just
does it. But the apparent simplicity of this
task is an illusion. The task is actually so
complex, no one has been able to write
computer code that translates these distorted
letters the same way that neural networks can.
That’s why this test, called a CAPTCHA, is
used to distinguish a human response from
computer bots that try to steal sensitive
information.
5/8/2017
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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The article tells how scientists at Salk Institute are taking wee
steps at understanding the eye-brain system’s skill. Some day,
robot engineers may master it, but for now, it sets us apart.
Nice fat: Fat gets a bad rap, but it wraps us in a layer that can
not only feel temperature, but do something about it. A new
paper in PNAS describes how fat cells “directly sense
temperature to activate thermogenesis” – the creation of
heat, even without shivering. To do this, fat cells must be smart
enough to do two things: respond to environmental cues, and
know how to activate signal pathways that turn up the
heat. The authors say, “These findings provide an unusual
insight into the role of adipose tissues in thermoregulation,
as well as an alternative way to target nonshivering
thermogenesis for treatment of obesity and metabolic
diseases.”
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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Shape shifters: Many organs in the body are
lined with epithelial cells, cells that line up form
protective walls. But they’re not just walls that
are built and forgotten. Like fat cells, they
respond, too, in a kind of fluid motion involving
death and regeneration of individual “bricks” in
the wall. Two French scientists wrote
in Science Magazine about “Mechanics of
Epithelial Tissue Homeostasis and
Morphogenesis,” describing how wall-building is
an ongoing, purpose-driven process:
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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Epithelia are robust tissues that support the
structure of embryos and organs and serve
as effective barriers against pathogens. Epithelia
also chemically separate different physiological
environments. These vital functions require tight
association between cells through the assembly of
junctions that mechanically stabilize the tissue.
Remarkably, epithelia are also dynamic and can
display a fluid behavior. Cells continuously die or
divide, thereby allowing functional tissue
homeostasis. Epithelial cells can change shape or
intercalate as tissues deform during
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morphogenesis.
More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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The authors did not mention evolution. Instead,
they stated that control involves multiple levels of
organization – in human experience, a hallmark of
intelligent design. Without using the ID phrase,
here’s how they described the outlook for science:
We are entering an exciting time when
interdisciplinary research enables us to
understand the fundamental properties of tissue
functional homeostasis and morphogenesis by
considering the interplay between biochemical
and mechanical signals across different scales
of organization.
5/8/2017
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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A ubiquitous code: The protein ubiquitin, so named
because it turns up in all life, is on a roll for earning
increasing respect. At first discovery, scientists didn’t
know what it did. Then they learned it tags proteins for
recycling by linking up into small chains on cellular
garbage. Now, they are learning that there are various
ways it forms chains on different attachment points, with
different responses for each one. Calling it a “potentially
life-saving protein,” Science Daily describes the first hints
that the structures of different poly-ubiquitin chains encode
different signals to the cell. For the latest variation
described by scientists at the University of Maryland, its
“function is something different and perhaps equally
vital to maintaining healthy cells.”
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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Switching off inflammation: Science Daily tells
about an important molecule called DHA, found
in fish oil, that is effective in switching off
inflammation. It appears to work by signaling
white blood cells to produce another substance
called maresin that acts as a molecular switch,
turning the inflammation response off and the
resolution process on. “We encounter
inflammation almost daily, but our body has
ways of turning it off,” the journal editor
commented. “This is an important step toward
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understanding exactly this happens.”
More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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Placental barrier: How does the unborn baby keep from getting
Mom’s cold? Science Daily reports that “Placental cells may
prevent viruses from passing from mother to baby.” In the
placenta, cells called trophoblasts seem particularly immune to
viruses. They work by secreting little packages of RNA, called
exosomes, that can turn on programmed cell death to
neighbors infected by viruses. Researchers attributed this
wonderful and necessary protection mechanism to evolution,
stating that “the complex and elegant mechanisms human
placental cells, called trophoblasts, have evolved to keep
viruses from infecting cells,” and “this pathway could be a
powerful evolutionary adaptation to protect the fetus and
mother from viral invaders.” It “could” be (7/01/13), but then
again, it could not be. The scientists gave no particulars about
how an unguided, aimless material process “accomplishes
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this feat.”
More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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Behind the placenta: How does a developing
embryo go from single cell to complex body,
with organs like intestines made of tubes lined
with epithelium that loop and curve in long
passageways? Some insights into this
wonderful process were described in an openaccess paper in PNAS, “Anisotropic growth
shapes intestinal tissues during
embryogenesis.” It begins with an instability set
up by patterning of cells having different
structural properties:
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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Embryogenesis offers a real laboratory for pattern
formation, buckling, and postbuckling induced by
growth of soft tissues. Each part of
our body is structured in multiple adjacent layers:
the skin, the brain, and the interior of organs. Each
layer has a complex biological
composition presenting different elasticity.
Generated during fetal life, these layers will
experience growth and remodeling in the early
postfertilization stages. Here, we focus on
a herringbone pattern occurring in fetal intestinal
tissues. Common to many mammalians,
this instability is a precursor of the villi, finger-like
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projections into the lumen.
More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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The herringbone (zig-zag) pattern appears to create a
physical instability that induces buckling of the tissues,
as different parts of the tissues possess different
elastic properties. “The growth anisotropy increasing
with time, the competition between folds and zigzags,
is proved to occur as a secondary instability,” they
said.
How all these processes, and many others, come
together in an adult human being who can read a
book, play a piano or dive into a swimming pool after
eating plants that captured sunlight must constitute
grounds for sheer wonder and admiration in designs
that transcend anything we know.
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More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
Three responses should be forthcoming at this point:
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(1) Appreciation for all we have been given in
life. How can we take for granted even the simplest
pleasure or accomplishment, when we see the levels
of organization that make it possible? One begins to
see the crime of failing to be thankful (Romans 1:21)
for God’s magnificent designs in nature and in our own
bodies in particular. (2) Responsibility to care for what
we have. How would you treat a treasure, or an
artistic masterpiece? Would you hang an outstanding
work of art on a chain-link fence in a junkyard? Take
care of what you have been given, flawed as it may be
by millennia under the curse due to sin, and use it for
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good as much as you can.
More Wonders Going On Inside You
您的内部更多奇迹
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(3) Anger at the evillusionists who
ascribe all this to chance. “…elegant
mechanisms… have evolved,” they
say. Ingrates. No explanation,
just BAD language (bald assertions of
Darwinism), exhibiting willful ignorance
masquerading as “science.” If that is
“science” (knowledge), then the KnowNothing Darwin Party is behind the
starting gate, facing the wrong way.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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5/8/2017
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
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Animals, whether living or fossil, often show surprising tricks of
sensation, adaptation, or ornamentation.
My, what big teeth you have: A marsupial saber-tooth cat with
fangs like steak knives had a “embarrassing” bite no worse than
that of a pussycat, Live Science claims. Mechanical analysis
shows that to use them without ripping them out of their
sockets, the beast would have had to insert them with “delicate
precision” – a hard thing to test, since scientists lack the ability
to watch the predators in action. The BBC News story included
an artist’s conception of what the marsupial might have looked
like (with artistic license for coat color and environment); other
reconstructions make it look much more like Smilodon, the
placental saber-tooth cat. What’s more surprising is the
evolutionary angle. The marsupial supposedly had nothing to
do with its placental look-alike:
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
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Named Thylacosmilus atrox (“pouch saber”),
the animal was about the size of a jaguar, but
“looked and behaved like nothing alive today,”
paleontologist Stephen Wroe said in a
statement.
Superficially, Thylacosmilus resembled the
saber-toothed cats of the Pleistocene, like
the North American icon, Smilodon fatalis. Both
have long canines designed to attack large
prey, but the animals were separated by at
least 125 million years of evolution,
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researchers say.
Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
Tough but sensitive: What could be tougher than crocodile
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scales? Yet the scary beasts have a “supersense” in a
“previously misunderstood” delicate organ, Science
Daily reports: the ability to sense touch, heat, cold, and the
environment in their skin. It wouldn’t seem that a skin so
hard it cracks when it grows would be so sensitive, but inside
those cracks are “integumentary sensory organs” (ISO’s) that
help the croc find food even in dark, murky water. Their skin
provides multiple types of information: temperature, touch,
and chemicals in the environment. There is “no equivalent
in any other vertebrates,” the article states. “It is this
transformation of a diffuse sensory system, such as we
have in our own skin, into ISO which has allowed
crocodilians to evolve a highly armored yet very
sensitive skin.”
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
Communal glow: A short post
on Science Now shows that the
glowworms that snare insects in New
Zealand caves coordinate their light to
maximize their catch.
 Whale of an oxygen tank: How do fin
whales hold their breath and keep from
imploding when they dive down 650
feet? That mystery was explored in a
brief “Science Shot” on Science Now:
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
Think you’re under pressure? Try diving 200 meters below
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the ocean. That’s where fin whales (Balaenoptera
physalus) spend their time feeding. That kind of
pressure would rupture our blood vessels, but whales do
just fine. To figure out why, researchers compared whale
arteries to those of pigs, chosen for their relation to
the whale’s land-loving ancestors. Then they ran saline or
water over and through the vessels. The arteries, which draw
blood away from the heart, stiffened in the fin whale, while
the pig arteries stretched out and collapsed under far less
stress, the team reports online this week in The Journal of
Experimental Biology. The finding suggests that the whales
benefit from naturally occurring collagen around their
arteries. Firming up to withstand the depths, this connective
tissue may be what keeps whales from feeling the squeeze.
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
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More than one way to evolve a breath: Speaking
of oxygen down deep, Nature News claims that
“Animals have evolved a variety of ways to get
oxygen under extreme conditions.” Featured
creatures are northern elephant seals that can
hold their breath two hours underwater, rayfinned fish that possess a unique form of
hemoglobin, and deer mice that live at high
elevations. The article appeared to care less
about the design of oxygen deliver to tissues in
these well-adapted animals as in their evolution,
saying without elaboration,
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
Rezende … says that whereas the studies show that
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animals have found several ways to increase the
amount of oxygen delivered to their muscles, all
follow one unifying theme: all the adaptations help
the animals to perform better under difficult
conditions. And this is so useful that it has evolved
multiple times through different pathways.
“Increased oxygen delivery is almost always
associated with high performance,” he says.
High performance has also evolved in several different
pathways in racing cars, but.… News flash! A
beetle’s iridescent colors have survived for 49 million
years! Extra, extra, read all about it in New Scientist.
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
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There they go again; misusing their own
evolutionary theory. The phrase
“allowed such-and-such an animal to
evolve such-and-such an adaptation” is
nonsense. We’ll allow you a trip to the moon
without a space suit. Go ahead when
ready. Evolutionists cannot use evolve as an
active verb, “to evolve a” whatever. Opportunity
is not fulfillment. An unguided process gives no
permission. Whatever happens, happens in
Darwin’s “Stuff Happens” Law, whether the
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environment allows it or not.
Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
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When they say, “animals have evolved a variety
of ways to” whatever, there’s another
fallacy. They’ve personified evolution as
something animals or Mother Nature does on
purpose for a goal. Stupidest mythoid is this one:
“this is so useful that it has evolved multiple
times through different pathways.” Evolutionists
wield their theory like a magic wand, saying,
“Abracadabra! It evolved!” to account for
everything, including high performance oxygen
delivery to muscles. How many mutations did that
take for natural selection to filter through?
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Bizarre Creatures With Incredible Design
令人难以置信的奇异生物设计
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Added to the mythoid mix is convergent
evolution again; animals “have evolved”
multiple ways to get oxygen to highperformance muscles; saber teeth evolved in
two completely unrelated mammals, separated
by 125 million years in their mythical timeline.
Those of us who love animals should be able to
enjoy the discoveries without the Darwin Party
sales pitch. The evolutionary hype is like those
annoying pop-up ads that distract attention from
the real story, which is intelligent design.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝
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5/8/2017
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Are Starfish Eyes Missing Links?
海星眼睛是缺失的环节？
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Starfish are found to have “primitive” image-forming
eyes on the tips of their arms. Do these represent links
between simple and complex eyes? Some reporters
seem to think so.
Deborah MacKenzie at New Scientist leapt at the
opportunity to score one for Darwin:
We have known about the sensors that starfish have at
the ends of their arms for 200 years, but no one
knew whether they are real eyes that form images or
simply structures that detect changes in light intensity.
We finally have an answer: they appear to act as real
eyes. The discovery is another blow to creationist
arguments that something as complex as a human
5/8/2017
eye could never evolve from simpler structures. 33
Are Starfish Eyes Missing Links?
海星眼睛是缺失的环节？
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In a similar vein, PhysOrg asked if it is a “missing link in
eye evolution.” Dr. Andrews Garm at the University of
Copenhagen experimented on blue sea stars. When
deprived of the photosensors, starfish wandered aimlessly,
but their fellow stars with intact sensors migrated toward
the coral, where the food source is. The article contains
photos of the starfish and its photoreceptors.
Surprisingly, after 200 years of knowing these
photoreceptors exist, nobody had checked to see if they
are capable of providing directional cues to the
animals. New Scientist said they are “good enough to
show the way home” but more primitive than the
compound eyes in arthropods. MacKenzie continued the
evolutionary angle:
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Are Starfish Eyes Missing Links?
海星眼睛是缺失的环节？
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In evolutionary terms, says Garm, it
is interesting because starfish eyes are structurally
close in form to the hypothesised first image-forming
eyes.
For instance, light receptors in more advanced eyes are
built either out of modified cytoplasmic projections called
microvilli, or out of filament-shaped cell organelles called
cilia. Starfish eyes contain both structures, so “have
features that look a bit ancestral”, says [Dan-Eric]
Nilsson [Lund University].
“This shows what visual task drove this important step
in eye evolution,” says Garm. “Navigation towards large
stationary objects – here the reef – that were preferred
habitats.” In other words, he thinks our eyes may have
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first evolved so we could find our way home.
Are Starfish Eyes Missing Links?
海星眼睛是缺失的环节？
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PhysOrg said that the structure on the blue sea star,
“except for the lack of true
optics, resembles arthropod compound eye.” Neither
article mentioned the whole-body lenses on brittle
stars, another echinoderm (8/23/01).
In other echinoderm news, PhysOrg reported that
some starfish are able to shed arms to prevent
overheating. Nature News reported a Cambrian fossil
that they claim is an early echinoderm. It lacked arms,
but had five-fold symmetry. It “resembled an egg with
its tapered end planted in the sea floor,” the article
said. “Its mouth opened upward and its body spiralled
down.”
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Are Starfish Eyes Missing Links?
海星眼睛是缺失的环节？
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Nice try, Darwin Party, but no score. Starfish
are not ancestral to arthropods or
vertebrates. Eyes appeared abruptly in
separate phyla during the Cambrian explosion,
as seen in molluscs, jellyfish, comb jellies, and
arthropods (trilobites and the Burgess Shale
animals), and in some extinct phyla. Trilobite
eyes were very complex but appeared abruptly
like all the others. If starfish represented a
transitional form, why do starfish still exist
hundreds of millions of years later with the
same “primitive” eyes? Where’s the evolution?
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Are Starfish Eyes Missing Links?
海星眼睛是缺失的环节？

The authors made another tactical blunder in their
evolutionary tale. “Visual tasks” do not “drive
evolution.” You can’t drive an aimless mechanism on a
random walk. Eyes don’t evolve “so we could find our
way home.” That makes no sense theoretically or
evidentially. All living things have some common “tasks”
including finding their habitat. Why don’t plants have
eyes? Why don’t seeds have eyes so they can find the
right soil? Many plants and animals could have
benefited from sight but didn’t “evolve eyes.” You can’t
use “evolve” as an active verb. Evolution is whatever
happens, without anyone guiding it or needing it. Once
again we see evolutionists misusing and
misunderstanding their own theory.
5/8/2017
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Are Starfish Eyes Missing Links?
海星眼睛是缺失的环节？

The fact is, each animal has the senses it
needs for its place in the ecology. Everything is
equipped for its role. The story should have
been that starfish are more amazing than
previously thought, not that they represent a
missing link. Maybe the evolutionists are
panicking at the release of Stephen Meyer’s
best-selling book, Darwin’s Doubt, laying out
the case for intelligent design as seen in the
Cambrian fossil record. For a shorter
explanation of the Cambrian explosion, see
Illustra’s film Darwin’s Dilemma.
5/8/2017
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
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Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚
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Even with generous dates of 10,000 years for the origin of
farming, what were modern humans doing for tens of
thousands of years or more?
Take the latest date for the arrival of “modern humans” in
Europe, some 43,000 years ago for Cro-Magnon Man. If
farming did not begin till 13,000 years ago (the most generous
date mentioned in an article on Science Now), what were
modern humans doing for 30,000 years? That’s well over three
times as long as “recorded history,” when humans of equal
body and mind went from mud huts to the moon.
Michael Balter, in his article on Science Now, “Farming was so
Nice, It was Invented at Least Twice,” ignores that looming
question. Instead, he focuses on archaeological sites along the
Fertile Crescent (Israel, Iraq and Iran) that have been
radiocarbon dated to 10,000 years, plus or minus a few
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thousand depending on the site. He begins,
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚
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
The invention of farming some 10,000 years ago set the
stage for the rise of civilizations in the Near East.
Yet archaeologists disagree about how it happened.
Some say it arose in a single spot near the Mediterranean,
and spread from there. Others argue it had multiple
independent origins, a view that is getting new credence,
thanks to findings from an early farming site in Iran.
The multiple origin theory, though, makes the problem
worse. It discounts the idea that farming was the dream of
a lucky individual at one location who decided they could
save a lot of work by planting and growing the plants they
like. It means the idea hit several towns in widely
separated areas independently. Why, then, didn’t fully
modern humans ever get that idea tens of thousands of
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years earlier?
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚
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The problem is exacerbated when including the
members of the Homo genus prior to CroMagnon. Most paleoanthropologists concede that
members of Homo (whether neanderthalensis,
erectus, habilis or the like) used fire and made
weapons, sailed boats, created art and musical
instruments, understood semantic communication,
and were for all practical purposes just like us
before the Cro-Magnon arrived. If they could do all
these other things, why didn’t any of them think of
planting a crop or riding a horse throughout 1.9
million years?
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Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚

Some tribes in South America, when discovered
before they had been influenced by Western
culture, were planting their favorite crops as well
as building villages. It seems to be a natural thing
for humans to do: organize a society, plan ahead,
and take control of the powers of nature. Yet
Balter says, “Whether farming arose once or a
hundred times, it happened first in the Fertile
Crescent, a broad region stretching from the
Mediterranean Sea to Iran.” Did a genetic
mutation turn hunter-gatherers into farmers? If
they “invented” farming, did they do it by intelligent
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44
design?
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚

Regular readers know we’ve been driving this
issue for a long time. The Science Now article
provides another occasion to remind readers of
the huge credibility gap in the evolutionary
timeline. Look at how quickly people spread
around the globe. Everywhere they went they
built monuments with inscriptions and built
cities. Some of their technology, whether of the
Mayans, Egyptians, Stonehenge builders,
Incas, still arouses awe.
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45
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚

It’s the most natural thing in the world for
humans to find ways to make life easier. If it
rains, build a hut. If foot travel is too far, find an
animal to ride (horse, elephant, camel). If a
plant tastes good, plant it and grow lots of
it. We shouldn’t presume that Neanderthals
and the other mythical pre-humans evolutionists
place in their mythical prehistory were any less
capable of doing these things, considering what
other technologies they employed.
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46
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚

Biblical creationists have a clear advantage on this
point. According to Genesis, humans were farming right
after Eden. They were making musical instruments,
forging metals, and raising livestock. They were using
their God-given mental abilities to eke out an existence in
a newly cursed world, finding ways to make it not so
hard. Within Adam’s lifetime they were building
cities. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 provides a
credible history of the spread of mankind after the Flood
and after the confusion of tongues at Babel. It matches
archaeological finds with remarkably accurate names,
genealogies, and dates that can be checked (note:
creationists question the accuracy of radiocarbon dates
before the Flood).
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47
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚

The creationary explanation is about real
historical people using intelligent design
with minds created in the image of God by
the ultimate intelligent Designer, YahwehElohim — the uncreated, eternal, all-wise
Creator God. He is the Eyewitness. He
has revealed what happened. Eyewitness
testimony from someone who cannot lie is
to be preferred over empty speculation by
those who imagine humans emerging
from bacteria by random processes.
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48
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚


Evolutionary dates are inflated to force key
observational data points into their
predetermined old-age timeline. If science is to
be directed by observations and logic, then let’s
use the Guidebook from the One who knows
everything and was there. It’s time to play
hardball with the evolutionists in their own
Fantasyland. Dunk an evolutionist into the
credibility tank today, so everyone can tell they
are all wet.
OLD MAN DARWIN HAD A YARN
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49
Farming Came Too Late in the Evolutionary Timetable
进化时间表: 农业来得太晚















1. Old Man Darwin had a yarn, D-O-D-O-Woe.
And in that yarn he had no farm, D-O-D-O-Woe.
With a spear tip here and a bone flute there,
Here a pot, there a fire, everywhere a thought but
In that yarn he had no farm, D-O-D-O-Woe.
2. Old Man Darwin had a yarn, D-O-D-O-Woe.
And in that yarn he had no horse, D-O-D-O-Woe.
With a nay nay here and a nay nay there,
Here a nay, there a nay, nobody could ride a mare,
In that yarn he had no horse, D-O-D-O-Woe.
3. Old Man Darwin had a school, D-O-D-O-Woe.
And in that school they had a rule, I-D, I-D, No!
With a D-D here and an O-O there,
Here a DO, there a DO, everywhere a DODO,
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In that school they had a rule, D-O-D–Or else!
50
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
51
New Biomimetics Projects
新仿生学工程


These recently-reported attempts to mimic
nature show that the biomimetics revolution
continues, with no end in sight.
Splitting hydrogen: Bacteria make it look so
easy, taking hydrogen molecules and dividing
them at room temperature. Nature published a
whole paper on attempts to imitate the
hydrogenase enzymes in hopes of improving
fuel cells. The only mention of “evolution” had
nothing to do with Darwinism. It was about the
“evolution” of hydrogen gas from the artificial
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52
metalloenzymes the team developed.
New Biomimetics Projects
新仿生学工程

Bird smartphones: A new generation of “radically
better” smartphones may some day employ magnetic
field sensors inspired by how birds navigate,
reported Science Daily. European researchers “are
the first to successfully create perfect one-dimensional
molecular wires of which the electrical conductivity can
almost entirely be suppressed by a weak magnetic
field at room temperature,” the article
said. “The underlying mechanism is possibly
closely related to the biological compass used by
some migratory birds to find their bearings in the
geomagnetic field.” Need we mention the new
documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds, with its story
5/8/2017
about the world record holder for global navigation? 53
New Biomimetics Projects
新仿生学工程


Ant-i-cancer: A new cancer antibiotic was reported
by PhysOrg to be “inspired by nature’s fungus
farmer, the leaf cutter ant.” The ants don’t get
the credit, though. The antibiotic is produced by a
bacterium that lives in symbiosis with the ants.
Bionic ear: Researchers at Princeton are
“combining electronics with biological material” to
produce a “bionic ear” that can both receive and
transmit sound, Medical Xpress reported. The
antenna, shaped like a human ear and printed with
a 3-D printer, can pick up radio signals and
transmit the signal to speakers.
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54
New Biomimetics Projects
新仿生学工程


Big Dog: A video clip on Live Science shows a
walking tank called “Big Dog” undergoing field tests as
a support machine for the Marines. Carrying 400
pounds for up to 20 miles, the four-footed robot can
follow soldiers over a variety of terrains. Just the sight
of it might frighten the enemy to submission.
Knuckle-walker: A German team has developed a
four-legged robot that imitates the knuckle-walking of
apes. PhysOrg said the team is thinking of developing
machines to serve on spacecraft or to support
astronauts. Video clips in the article show the robot
ape stabilizing itself on wobbly surfaces. In the future,
improvements to its “spinal column” may allow it to
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55
stand up and pick fruit.
New Biomimetics Projects
新仿生学工程


Biomimetic air conditioning: National Geographic listed no
less than five new cooling technologies inspired by
“Mother Nature’s craftiness.” Featured animals are
termites, birds, whales, and even ticks, that secrete a
substance to absorb moisture from the air. Humans were
in the list, too, for the “logarithmic spiral shape found in
such phenomena as tornadoes, whirlpools, and even
airflow in the human trachea.” A biologist who wrote a
book on biomimetics said,
“With biomimicry we’re able to apply fresh thinking to
traditional manufacturing, to undo the toxic and
energy-intensive mistakes of the past,” said [Janine]
Benyus, who is part of a group that hopes to lead a new
revolution in design by imitating nature. “I wish we had
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been at the design table at the Industrial Revolution.”56
New Biomimetics Projects
新仿生学工程
As usual, none of these articles mentioned Darwinian




evolution.
Mentions of evolution in biomimetics articles seem to be
waning. Maybe scientists are seeing it as superfluous in their
focus on design engineering and intelligent technology.
How would Darwinists try to rescue their myth from these
developments? Would they say that humans are evolved
animals just imitating other animals, like mockingbirds? Let
them try that angle (one of Charle’s Angles). It will backfire,
because it will mean their own logic is a product of unguided,
meaningless processes. We can reply, “You’re only saying that
because natural selection made you utter various sounds.”
Benyus decried the “energy-intensive mistakes of the past”
during the Industrial Revolution. Why didn’t Victorian scientists
realize the models of good technology all around them? Let’s
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57
make up for lost time.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
58
Evolutionists Two-Faced About Academic Freedom
两面派进化论者: 学术自由


Compare two countries: in one, when their hegemony is
threatened, evolutionists plead for academic freedom. In
another, they deny it to those who want a chance to debate
evolution.
Turkey, with its somewhat secular government but largely
Islamic population, has doubts about Darwin. Leaders there are
reluctant to promote evolution, which they consider controversial,
as the “glue of all biological sciences,” according to Science
Now. Moreover, the government has (at times) blocked certain
educational evolution websites, and thrown roadblocks in the
way of evolutionary conferences, on the grounds that “Since
evolution is still a debated issue, the degree to which the
organizers represent the community/country is very
questionable.” This has angered certain Darwinist academics
who were expecting the Turkish government to fund a recent
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59
pro-evolution conference for students.
Evolutionists Two-Faced About Academic Freedom
两面派进化论者: 学术自由


. They appealed to freedom of speech and
inquiry (similar to academic freedom) in their
protest:
“It sets a very dangerous precedent,” Akçay
says. “Today it might be a summer school that
is fairly cheap … but tomorrow it could be a
young researcher coming up for tenure. … And
this on top of the very worrying and worsening
trend in academia and the broader society
towards curtailing freedom of speech and
inquiry.”
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Evolutionists Two-Faced About Academic Freedom
两面派进化论者: 学术自由

But in America, Darwinists are delighted when academic
freedom is denied to critics of their theory (see
commentary on Evolution News &
Views). Nature breathed a “Whew!” along with the
National Center for Science Education when five states
adopted science standards that will teach climate
science and evolution dogmatically, prohibiting efforts to
grant academic freedom to skeptics of those
theories. New science guidelines supported by
evolutionists begin the one-sided indoctrination “well
before high school.” They “recommend teaching
evolution before students reach high-school biology
classes, the point at which many states tackle concepts
such as natural selection and adaptation.”
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61
Evolutionists Two-Faced About Academic Freedom
两面派进化论者:
学术自由
In the past two months, education officials in Rhode Island,


Kentucky, Kansas, Maryland and Vermont have all approved
the standards by overwhelming margins. At least five more
states — California, Florida, Maine, Michigan and Washington
— may take up the standards in the next few months.
“Whew,” says Minda Berbeco, programmes and policy
director at the National Center for Science Education in
Oakland, California. “So far, so good.” Swift adoption of the
guidelines has been surprising but welcome news for many
supporters. Evolution has been a controversial
topic in US education for decades, stretching back to the 1925
‘monkey trial’ in Tennessee, where the state prosecuted highschool teacher John Scopes for violating a statute that barred
the teaching of evolution. In the past decade, those who
oppose evolution have sought to enact ‘academic freedom’
laws that would allow creationism to be taught alongside62
5/8/2017
Evolutionists Two-Faced About Academic Freedom
两面派进化论者: 学术自由

The reference to creationism is a bald lie, since
none of the bills prescribe teaching
creationism. Instead, they ask for honest
teaching of evolutionary theory, including its
strengths and weaknesses, or they forbid
schools from punishing teachers who do so,
such as Eric Hedin, now in hot water at Ball
State (see Evolution News & Views). In any
case, evolution is the only theory allowed in the
curriculum. Not even the Discovery Institute
recommends bills requiring the teaching of
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63
intelligent design.
Evolutionists Two-Faced About Academic Freedom
两面派进化论者: 学术自由

Such hypocrites. Evolutionists are like Marxists who cry
out for freedom until they get power, then they deny it to
everyone else. They’re not even good Darwinists. They
ignore the words of their Prophet Charlie, who taught in his
scriptures, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully
stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both
sides of each
question” (See AcademicFreedomDay.com). Until and
unless we rid science of the Darwin bigots, and require
them to debate the evidence, they will continue to behave
like the People of Froth, foaming at the mouth against
anyone who wishes to break their filibuster and discuss
the issues honestly. What are they afraid of? Scientific
evidence?
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64
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
65
Underwater Forest Discovered: How Old?
发现水下森林：有多老 ？


Sixty feet down in Gulf waters off the coast of
Alabama, stumps of an old cypress forest have
appeared. How can they be 52,000 years old when
the wood still smells like cypress?
The discovery was reported by Live Science. It
includes a five-minute video tour of the area which the
discoverers are keeping secret till it can be thoroughly
documented. Hundreds of Bald Cypress stumps as
large as two meters in diameter are found over a halfsquare-mile area, several miles from the coast of
Mobile, Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico. Fish,
anemones and other marine creatures have taken up
residence in the forest, causing it to decay more
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66
rapidly.
Underwater Forest Discovered: How Old?
发现水下森林：有多老 ？
 The video clip claims the stumps are
12,000 years old, but the text says
they have been radiocarbon dated at
52,000 years old. The article claims
that they might have been uncovered
by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Before
that, they may have been covered in
sand, preventing oxygen from
accelerating decomposition.
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Underwater Forest Discovered: How Old?
发现水下森林：有多老 ？

Yet it appears incredible the trees could be that
old. For one thing, “The forest contains trees so
well-preserved that when they are cut, they still
smell like fresh Cypress sap,” one of the divers
said. For another, are scientists ready to claim
that no hurricane of Katrina’s proportions occurred
in the alleged 12,000 years since the trees sank
below the surface? Now, the trees are decaying
so rapidly, the discoverers fear scientists only have
two years to examine the site and perform more
radiocarbon or tree-ring date calculations. Divers
said they could break off chunks of the wood with68
5/8/2017
their hands.
Underwater Forest Discovered: How Old?
发现水下森林：有多老 ？

Learn to ask the questions the reporters don’t
ask. None of them ever questions the
evolutionary dates, even when they lead to
absurdities, like expecting fresh-smelling wood
to be 52,000 years old, or asking people to
believe thousands of years went by with no
hurricanes strong enough to expose the
forest. And how did the forest last as it
gradually sank, unless a catastrophe buried it
rapidly? The presence of this preserved forest
silently cries for a recent catastrophe.
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Underwater Forest Discovered: How Old?
发现水下森林：有多老 ？

Creationists argue that radiocarbon dates
are unreliable before the Flood, because the
atmosphere changed drastically. Putting
that together with the evolutionary
absurdities, we can reason that the forest
was probably buried around the time of the
Flood or after. It’s a stretch, though, to think
five thousand years went by without a
disturbance, so it may be younger than
that. The old date for such fresh wood,
though, is clearly incredible.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
71
Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧


There’s no end of amazing tricks in the living world –
adaptations that aid their success. Finding them is
one thing. Explaining them is another.
Electric webs: There’s electricity in the air around
spider webs, Science Now says in “Spider Silk Grabs
Electrically Charged Insects in Midair.” Flying
insects pick up static electricity as they fly (a
honeybee can pick up 200 volts). Spider silks get a
charge out of greeting the food service, flexing up to 2
mm at a fast rate of 7 m/s when the prey
approaches. More study is needed, Live
Science cautioned, to see if all flying insects, such as
the spiders’ preferred diet of flies, pick up static
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72
electricity.
Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧

Jumping fish: A swamp dweller called the
mangrove rivulus has a unique hopping
method, Live Science reports. Unlike the
largemouth bass that flexes into a Cshape and jumps but gets nowhere fast,
the rivulus does a unique tail flip that
sends it on the path to progress (see
video clip in the article). On land, the
mostly-hermaphroditic fish can live for up
to two months feeding on insects while
absorbing oxygen through its skin.
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Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧

Self-cleaning guillemot eggs: The eggs of
the guillemot, a seabird, are covered in
small conical pimples that shed water,
the BBC News reported. This helps them
avoid the saltwater and detritus in the
birds’ crowded colonies. The roughness
of the shell may also give the eggs a
better foothold on the rocky cliffs where
the females lay their eggs.
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74
Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧

Bat battery: Using elastic energy stored in their
wing tendons, fruit bats get better
mileage, Science Daily reports. When taking
off, this “recycled energy” stored from previous
wing flaps gives them an extra boost. This
ability is apparently unique among small
mammals. The article ends with a touch of
biomimetics: “This research will likely have
relevance for the development of autonomous
micro aircrafts and potentially also amphibious
search and rescue vehicles.”
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Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧

Jerboa jumps: Jerboas are little desert
rodents that look like a cross between a
mouse and a kangaroo (see picture
in Science Daily). The small bipedal jumpers
have not been studied much. Science
Daily says that their hops, skips and jumps
allow them to compete with four-footed
rodents in Old World deserts. The
unpredictability of their trajectories gives the
jerboas a way to coexist in the niche
occupied
by
quadrupedal
rodents.
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Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧

RNA regulates flowering time: There’s
new insight into how perennial plants
know they are old enough to flower, and
that the right season has arrived. An
article on Science Daily reports that
“Alpine Rock Cress Uses a Ribonucleic
Acid to Measure Its Age and Tell When
It’s the Right Time to Flower.” The
concentration of a small RNA “works like
an hourglass,” the article explains.
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Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧

One can hypothesize about the origins of these
adaptations by considering horizontal and
vertical axes of information. The horizontal axis
represents variations of existing genetic
information. The vertical axis would require gain
or loss of information. With that in mind, we
might suspect that the guillemot egg did not
require intelligent design, since it represents
accentuation of existing dimples in the
eggshell. The most-dimpled ones survived the
salty, steep environment to bring a new
generation of birds, whereas others were more
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78
susceptible to damage or falling.
Animal and Plant Tricks
动物和植物的技巧

The RNA hourglass in flowering plants, though,
appears to be a system that required
programming from the beginning. There’s
nothing about a particular small RNA molecule
that would signal a plant to flower unless other
systems exist to measure its concentration and
use that metric to signal downstream
processes. Try your skill with each organism to
see where on the axes the adaptations might lie,
realizing that scientific explanations are not
necessarily part of science, especially when
speculation exceeds testability. Avoid just-so
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79
stories.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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80
Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘
 Silently, fossils speak from the earth,
requiring translation and interpretation
by humans who didn’t see when they
were laid to rest.
 Beetle bling: The shiny blue scales of
a weevil are still visible in a fossil after
49 million years, New
Scientist claimed.
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Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘

Tar pit puzzle: “The La Brea Tar Pits have stirred the
imaginations of scientists and the public alike for over a
century,” Science Daily writes. “But the amount of time it took
for ancient animals to become buried in asphalt after
enduring their gruesome deaths has remained a
mystery.” Researchers found insect traces on the sesamoid
bones and phalanges of herbivores, leading them to conclude
the carcasses were exposed to the air for 17–20
weeks. Surprisingly, “Although carnivorans vastly
outnumber the amount of mammalian
herbivorans excavated from the tar pits, no insect damage
was found on their bones.” Science Now’s coverage included
this typo: “fossils like this 35,000-foot bone of a prehistoric
horse,” probably intending 35,000 years, not 35,000 feet; that
would be a pretty big horse otherwise. The original paper is
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82
in PLoS One.
Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘

Transitional fleas: “Fleas are a group of highly specialized
blood-feeding ectoparasites whose early evolutionary
history is poorly known,” begins a paper in Current
Biology by paleontologists from Russia, China and
London. They claim to have found Cretaceous fossils that
“greatly improves our understanding of the
morphological transition to the highly specialized body
plan of extant fleas.” The claim they are transitional
relates primarily to gonad size, body size, and patterns of
stiff body hairs. Since they have all the flea parts, though,
the fossils could represent greater diversity in the past:
“The new fossils, in conjunction with previous
discoveries, highlight a broad diversity of ectoparasitic
insects in the mid-Mesozoic.”
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Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘



Transitional limbs: According to Science Daily, Yale
scientists studied living mudskippers and salamanders
to infer the evolutionary transition to land-based
locomotion.
Why did animals with limbs win the race to invade
land over those with fins? A new study comparing
the forces acting on fins of mudskipper fish and on
the forelimbs of tiger salamanders can now be used
to analyze early fossils that spanned the water-toland transition in tetrapod evolution, and further
understand their capability to move on land.
They measured the forces on limbs and fins of the
living animals, thinking it would help explain the
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motions of the dead:
Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘

Sandy Kawano said: “The transition from fins to
limbs marks the most dramatic change in
orientation of the locomotor forces from contact with
the ground. Using these data we can now evaluate
the locomotor capabilities of numerous important
fossil taxa that spanned the water-to-land transition in
tetrapod evolution. We hypothesise that the medial
orientation of the forces on pectoral fins would result
in unreasonably high bone stresses in early
amphibious fish with fins, which would explain why
the evolutionary invasion of land by
vertebrates was accomplished instead by tetrapods
with limbs with digits.”
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Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘


Kawano never explained why mudskippers, still
pushing themselves around with fins, never got the
evolutionary message.
If one did not assume evolution from the get-go,
would the conclusions make sense? Who would
think that fresh, clean, iridescent scales on a fossil
beetle are 49 million years old? The fleas
represent greater diversity in the past; that’s
devolution. The mudskippers are still doing fine
without digits. Salamanders haven’t evolved,
either. Why did larvae attack herbivores but not
carnivores, if all the animals were sinking into the
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tar at the same time?
Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘

The silliest idea above is the notion that forces on a fin
will turn it into a limb with fingers. Why don’t they try that
as a controlled experiment in the lab? Put forces on a
fish’s fin and watch it grow hands. This is so stupid it
takes an evolutionist to believe it. Look how they hide
their faith in passive voice verbs: “… unreasonably high
bone stresses in early amphibious fish with fins,
which would explain why the evolutionary invasion of
land by vertebrates was accomplished instead by
tetrapods with limbs with digits.” Was accomplished
by. My, what an accomplishment! Where did the
tetrapods with limbs with digits “emerge” from? As we
all know from Darwin’s storybook fantasyland, stuff
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87
happens (9/22/09).
Fossil Follies and Mysteries
化石愚蠢和奥秘

None of the conclusions jump out of the
data. All of them require
interpretation. Unfortunately, due to
evolutionary indoctrination from kindergarten to
PhD, the only lens provided to these scientists
is the Darwinian blood-red monocle that fits
over the left eye. It turns everything in nature
into a left-leaning diorama red in tooth and
claw. Scientists should open the right eye, take
off the monocle, and see the world in living
color with binocular vision.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
89
Ancient Text Found in Jerusalem from David’s Time
在耶路撒冷从大卫的时代发现的古文
Inscriptions are rare but valuable artifacts in
archaeology. Though short and simple, a
fragmentary inscription on a jug sets a record
as the oldest ever found in Jerusalem, from
the era of David and Solomon or before.
 Announced by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, the inscription consists of about six
letters in Canaanite script. Its meaning is
unknown. PhysOrg and Live
Science reported it, too, mentioning other
recent finds from the era.
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
Ancient Text Found in Jerusalem from David’s Time
在耶路撒冷从大卫的时代发现的古文

The jar fragment with the letters inscribed on
it was found outside the southern end of the
Temple Mount wall by Eilat Mazar, excavator
of the old City of David, who dates it to the
10th or 11th century BC. Since it appears to
be written in Canaanite rather than Hebrew
script (although others are uncertain that is
the case), it could have been written by one
of the Jebusites conquered by David when
he made Jerusalem his capital. A lot
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depends on the date.
Ancient Text Found in Jerusalem from David’s Time
在耶路撒冷从大卫的时代发现的古文

Todd Bolen on BiblePlaces Blog cautions that
Mazar has been criticized in the past for
dating artifacts from the time of David. The
basis for her dating of this inscription has not
yet been published. Other archaeologists
besides Mazar are involved in the analysis of
the fragment, though, and various experts are
beginning to weigh in on the possible meaning
of the inscription. George Athos believes its
placement on a large storage jar suggests it
was a royal jar, not one used by commoners.92
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Ancient Text Found in Jerusalem from David’s Time
在耶路撒冷从大卫的时代发现的古文

Every inscription from the Holy Land is particularly valuable,
so this is certainly a welcome addition to the collection,
especially if it sets a record as the oldest found in
Jerusalem. The text appears to be too ambiguous to shed
much light on the time, being brief and difficult to decipher. It
will have to be considered in the context of other artifacts. Its
provenance also needs to be described in detail, and the
date narrowed down, before it can be relied upon. At the
very least, it shows that someone had the expertise and
reason to inscribe text on a large storage jar before firing it,
whether from the early monarchy of David and Solomon, or
prior to the conquest of Jerusalem by a Canaanite
official. That suggests advanced urban life existed, not just
scattered nomadic groups run by local chieftans, as some
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minimalist schools believe.
Ancient Text Found in Jerusalem from David’s Time
在耶路撒冷从大卫的时代发现的古文

Exciting as these discoveries are, we should not let
them diminish the importance of the most valuable
inscription of all, the Hebrew Old Testament. That
inscription is lavish in its information content. It was
not inscribed on pottery, but rather passed on from
generation to generation with the utmost of care by
specially trained scribes who believed it to be the word
of God. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
including the complete Isaiah scroll, we know that the
Messianic prophesies therein, written down well
before the time of Christ yet so accurately fulfilled by
Him, testify to its supernatural origin. No other
inscription comes close.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化


The wonder of muscle inspires both awe
at its design and opportunities for
evolutionary storytelling.
Fifty years of assumptions about how
muscle fibers work is being set aside,
reported PhysOrg, with the discovery that
its components don’t just slide in one axis,
but bulge out in 3-D. The article, titled
“Biceps bulge, calves curve, 50-year-old
assumptions muscled aside,” states:
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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化


The basics of how a muscle generates power
remain the same: Filaments of myosin tugging on
filaments of actin shorten, or contract, the muscle
– but the power doesn’t just come from what’s
happening straight up and down the length of
the muscle, as has been assumed for 50 years.
Instead, University of Washington-led research
shows that as muscles bulge, the filaments are
drawn apart from each other, the myosin tugs at
sharper angles over greater distances, and it’s
that action that deserves credit for half the
change in muscle force scientists have been
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measuring.
Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化
 It makes sense; if fibers stretched in
only one direction, why would biceps
bulge outward? The fact that muscle
fibers don’t simply slide past each
other but buckle, generating forces in
multiple dimensions, adds to the
wonder of its design.
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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化


Fish Muscle Evolution
Humans are not the only animals with muscle, of course;
fish use muscles, too. Muscle imprints from extinct fossil
fish provided a backdrop for evolutionists from Australia to
manufacture “A Muscular Perspective on Vertebrate
Evolution,” Shigeru Kuratani wrote in Science about their
paper in the same issue, “Fossil Musculature of the Most
Primitive Jawed Vertebrates.” The amazing design of
muscle was less important to these evolutionists than
whether or not certain fossils can be placed into an
ancestral sequence. The puzzle of how soft muscle
imprints could be preserved for 400 million years was less
important to them than divining phylogenetic trees from the
data.
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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化

Although they assumed the evolution of fish, the paper’s
authors actually had little to say about
evolution. “Their evolutionary importance hinges
on whether eubrachythoracid musculature is specialized
or primitive relative to that of sharks” is one example of a
reserved statement; another, “Hypothetical
reconstructions are not able to recover the full
complexity of this musculature, either on the basis of
biomechanical analysis or phylogenetic bracketing, and
are thus liable to give a false picture of muscular
evolution at the origin of gnathostomes.” In the end, they
could only hope that future studies of “exceptionally
preserved fossils will continue to provide essential data for
the reconstruction of vertebrate soft anatomy, particularly
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in groups with no close living relatives.”
Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化


Kuratani, though, couldn’t get enough evolution
into his Perspective article. In every case,
though, he merely assumed evolution, without
showing how the fossil actually helps establish
a sequential list of lucky mutations leading to
muscular fish:
On page 160 this issue, Trinajstic et
al. systematically describe the muscle anatomy
of three fossil animals from the earliest jawed
vertebrate group, the placoderms, which
evolved soon after the acquisition of the
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jaw.
Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化



Knowledge of the morphology of these earliest jawed
vertebrates, especially with respect to soft tissues
such as muscles, is necessary for understanding
how vertebrates evolved.
How vertebrates evolved: This hypothetical
scenario of neck and cucullaris muscle
evolution builds on the data presented by Trinajstic et
al. and uses a simplified vertebrate phylogeny.
The primitive shoulder girdle in placoderms, as
suggested by Trinajstic et al., may be an
intermediate state of neck evolution that
simultaneously reveals the beginnings of a jawed 102
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vertebrate novelty, the cucullaris.
Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化


At one point, though, Kuratani was stumped. A complex
feature was found in the primitive ancestor. His
response? He just swept aside the concern, and
proceeded on with his “hypothetical scenario” –
The presence of the transverse abdominal muscles in
placoderms is another mysterious finding of Trinajstic et
al., because this muscle has been thought to be
present only in tetrapods. Phylogenetic importance or
homology aside, this muscle is potentially similar to a
component of the trunk muscle in tetrapods, the abaxial
muscle, which also develops as the result of myoblast
migration and interactions between myoblasts and the
embryonic mesenchymal environment of the lateral body
wall.
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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化

If the muscle patterns reported by Trinajstic et
al. are found to reflect the general morphology of
the placoderms, it would suggest that the
developmental bases for the muscle anatomy
of modern jawed vertebrates were present, in
primitive form, around the time of the
appearance of the functional jaw. This would
stimulate even greater curiosity about the
anatomy of more ancient stem gnathostomes such
as ostracoderms, because the beginning of the
jawed vertebrate body plan is likely to be
buried in the anatomy of these animals.
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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化


Can “phylogenetic importance or homology” be cast aside
so whimsically by an evolutionist? Wouldn’t casting aside
those matters undermine evolution itself?
This exposè has been brought to you by CreationEvolution Headlines, just the latest in its 12-year arsenal of
similar examples of handwaving and pseudoscientific
fabling about evolution in major scientific journals. They
can’t hide their dumbfloundering confabulations any
more. We are showing them to the world. Flex your
muscle and take up the fight to restore the truth of design
to science, which these DODO dogmatists twist into
mythoids about evillusion. (For definitions of these terms,
see our Darwin Dictionary.)
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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary
肌肉力量是设计，而不是进化

Enjoy your muscles today. It’s uncanny how
we can order muscles to do things. Our
general orders, like orders from a general,
set the armies of actin and myosin molecules
in motion in ways we can’t begin to fathom
from our command perspective. Your
muscles deserve good treatment. Feed
them well and give them some good healthy
work to do every day, then enjoy how good
they can make you look. Finish it with
sincere
thanks
to
your
Creator
who
granted
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us these wonderful systems.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
107
Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争


The race continues between scientists desperately
seeking a rationale for harvesting human embryos and
those who say, having adult stem cells and iPS cells
available, they are unnecessary – and their use is
unethical.
Now ear this (ES): Using mouse embryonic stem cells
(ES), researchers at Indiana University have grown
inner ear hair cells complete with hair
bundles, Science Daily reported. The cells were
grown in a culture that allowed them to hang freely
instead of growing on a flat surface as in previous
attempts. It was not clear from the article whether
embryonic stem cells, as opposed to iPS or adult stem
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cells, were required for the success.
Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

Liver vs die-er (iPS): A different organ
was grown with induced pluripotent stem
cells (iPS) – a tiny liver grown in a mouse
embryo with iPS cells from a
human. Human livers are in high demand
for transplants; many die before they
become available. A way to regenerate
them would be a huge help. Nature
News described the process:
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

The researchers make the liver
buds from three types of human cells.
First, they coax induced pluripotent
stem cells into a cell type that expresses
liver genes. Then they add endothelial
cells (which line blood vessels) from
umbilical cord blood, and mesenchymal
stem cells, which can make bone,
cartilage and fat. These cell types also
come together as the liver begins to
form in the developing embryo.
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

The scientists got the cells to “talk to each
other and make the organ.” Live
Science added, “The human ‘liver buds’ grew
blood vessels and produced proteins such as
albumin that are specific to humans.” The
article also said that when transplanted into a
dying mouse, the new liver allowed it to live
longer. Treatments for humans with this
technique will probably take years, but in the
meantime, the researchers are getting good
results trying to grow a pancreas, too. The
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111
original paper is in Nature.
Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

Whoops; long-held assumption was wrong
(ES): Science Daily published a short
article about how a long-held assumption
about embryonic stem cell differentiation
was wrong. A certain transcription factor
Nanog is not expressed only in one allele,
as was previously believed, but in
both. Significance? “it raises the
question for other genes. For some
genes, there might be similar issues.”
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

Safer alternative (iPS): A better way to
reprogram adult cells into iPS cells was
reported on PhysOrg. By developing “designer
transcription factors,” researchers at the
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have found
ways to make the reprogramming process more
efficient, and safer, too. Science
Daily described another initiative at the
University of Toronto that likened their work to
reverse-engineering gourmet dinners by finding
out that all the chefs used a device called a
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measuring cup.
Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

Epigenetics of muscle stem cells
(AS): Keeping the pool of stem cells
quiescent in muscles is important, but little
is known about how they are maintained,
and how they change with
aging. In Current Biology, researchers at
Stanford found “direct evidence that, with
age, epigenetic changes
accumulate and may lead to a
functional decline in quiescent stem
cells” in mouse muscle.
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

Maintenance crew (ES): Also
in Current Biology, a team of
European and Japanese researchers
identified a couple of factors, an
inhibitor and a cytokine, that appear to
be involved in maintaining embryonic
stem cells in a totipotent state by
shielding them from other
differentiating factors. Their research
was done with mice.
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

The next step down the slippery
slope: The controversy over geneticallymodified (GM) foods pales in comparison
to what’s coming,
the BBC News reported. It’s synthetic
biology – the creation of new living
organisms, designer creatures with
invented genes, not just chimeras of
animals with mixtures of existing genes
from different organisms.
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争



For those pioneering this new field, the science offers a
whole realm of exhilarating possibilities — dreaming up
and building new organisms that will perform exactly
what’s ordered. It is a vision for taking control of
nature.…
Right from the start of each project, the ethical and
environmental implications are considered — the aim
being to head off the kind of reactions
that GM produced.
Visions of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” come to
mind. David Shukman, science editor for the BBC, said
that representatives from the UK, US and China are
meeting to develop “codes of conduct” for this type of
research. They’re worried about public reaction.
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

Does anyone see any need
for ES cells, now that iPS
and AS (adult stem cells) seem to
have all the capabilities without the
ethical problems? Let them learn
what they need with mouse
embryos. It’s hard to understand why
some researchers still want access to
human embryos.
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Stem Cell Wars Continue
继续干细胞战争

As for synthetic biology, the ethics of that will
depend on (1) whether human brain cells are being
planted in animals, and (2) whether
experimentation poses health risks, such as an
out-of-control organism that reproduces with no
predators to stop it. Creating a designer bacterium
that can detect cystic fibrosis or cancer is a good
goal almost no one would object to, but there are
boundaries that must be maintained. Good
intentions notwithstanding, scientists are on the
verge of letting Frankensteins loose on the
world. They need the oversight of an informed,
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moral, concerned public.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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120
Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化
 Evolution is slow and gradual,
except when it is very fast. It
changes everything, except when
it keeps them the same. Recent
reports treat evolution as a catchall idea that explains any
phenomenon, even opposite
things. Is such a notion really
informative?
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Glue can hold unrelated things together, things that
would normally not fit well or assimilate on their
own. The word “evolution” is often used to “glue”
disparate observations into a theoretical construct, but
if a nonsense word were substituted to explain the
diversity of life, would we consider it scientific
theory? Yet that is how evolution is treated in many
reports, as a magic word that explains
everything. Few scientists and reporters make the
effort to identify mutations and selection processes
that might specifically relate to the origin of a complex
trait. Instead, they often just say “it evolved” – even if
new observations contradict previous evolutionary
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assumptions. Here are some recent examples.
Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

“New Insight Into the Human Genome Through the
Lens of Evolution” – that’s a headline on Science
Daily, promising insight by looking through a lens
(perhaps a crystal ball). The first sentence, though,
should be surprising to Darwinists: “By comparing the
human genome to the genomes of 34 other mammals,
Australian scientists have described an unexpectedly
high proportion of functional elements conserved
through evolution.” This article also contributed
more to the demise of the “junk DNA” error by showing
more function for non-protein-coding regions. It’s
almost like the authors looked through the lens of
evolution and saw design.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Beetle sheen: In Science Magazine, Elizabeth Pennisi
wrote in an article categorized under “Evolution” about
photonic crystals on weevil exoskeletons that give the
little bugs exquisite, iridescent colors. She tried to
show a progression from simple to complex over time,
and adaptation to environment, but was unable to
describe the geometric patterns in the chitin as
products of natural selection acting on DNA. Instead,
she proposed the idea that the patterns selfassemble. Surprisingly, the article ended with a push
for biomimetics, a project requiring intelligent
design. It’s not clear what evolution had to do with
any of it.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

The evolution is quicker than the eye: Science
Daily reported that a novel disease in songbirds
“Demonstrates Evolution in the Blink of an Eye.” What
evolved was not the birds, but the extent and virulence of
a non-fatal, flu-like disease afflicting some
songbirds. Everything happened in a few years. Unlikely
for a law of nature, evolutionary theory produced opposite
outcomes: “In evolutionary terms, some strains of the
bacteria were better adapted to spreading across the
continent, while others were more suited to becoming
established in one spot.” The results were also
“contrary to expectations,” the article noted. Rapid
variation in diseases (like human flu) is well known, yet flu
is still flu.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Peppered Mice: In another “Evolution” article in the
same issue of Science Magazine, Pennisi wrote,
“Field Test Shows Selection Works in Mysterious
Ways.” She highlighted a study by Rowan Barrett,
winner of the Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for
the Study of Evolution, whom she described as a
daring, persistent field biologist willing to tackle largescale evolutionary questions. His latest success:
confirming that light color imparts protection on mice
living in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. It’s not a
straightforward confirmation, though; “there are other
things that played a role in adaptation,” complicating
a simple test of selection. Her last two paragraphs do
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not look particularly helpful for Darwinist chutzpah: 126
Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化


But many genes not related to pigment also
changed over the course of the experiment. The
analysis revealed “a potentially large number of
genetic regions responding to selection,” Barrett
reported. He doesn’t know what traits those
changes affect, but he’s investigating each one—
and suspects some have nothing to do with surviving
predation. They might make a mouse healthier
overall, or better able to find food, for example.
“A lot of what we know about selection is very
crude,” Schluter says. “When we start to do
experiments we are surprised to find stuff
happening that we didn’t anticipate.”
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化


Evolution’s Toolkit: Relying heavily on “could” and
“might” words, an article on Science Daily announced,
“Development of Hands and Feet May Help Unlock
Evolution’s Toolkit.” A cute picture of a human hand
holding a monkey’s fingers adorns the article. But
right off the bat, the article discussed enormous
complexity, with no evolutionary solutions to explain it:
Thousands of sequences that control genes are
active in the developing human limb and may have
driven the evolution of the human hand and foot, a
comparative genomics study led by Yale School of
Medicine researchers has found.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化


The research, published online July 3 in the
journal Cell, does not pinpoint the exact
genetic mechanisms that control
development of human limbs, but instead
provides scientists with the first genome-wide
view of candidates to investigate.
The article continued to talk about “changes in
genetic sequences that may have occurred
during human evolution.” The scientists are
assuming evolution occurred and fitting the data
to that assumption. It’s all hope, not fulfillment:
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

“It has been difficult to understand how
human traits evolved, because we didn’t
have any idea where the important genetic
changes might be,” Noonan said. “Now we do,
and we have the experimental tools to
determine what biological effects these
changes may have. Our study also provides a
roadmap for understanding other humanspecific traits that arise during development,
such as increased brain size and complexity.”
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Development, however, is not
evolution. Even creationists accept the
role of genes in development, calling it
evidence of intelligent design in a
programmed system executing specified
information encoded in DNA. The
taxpayer-supported NIH and NSF are
helping fund this effort to find how human
traits might have evolved.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化
Evolutionary speedsters: Science Daily announced triumphantly that

sturgeon fish are not “living fossils”, but rather “evolutionary
speedsters.” Contrary to claims sturgeon have remained the same
for millions of years, this article calls them “one of the fastestevolving fish on the planet.” On what basis? Well, body size,
primarily. Evolutionists at the University of Michigan based their
conclusion from a model that assumes sturgeon evolved, and then
calculates, based on their fossil appearance, how quickly they
evolved. No new innovative features or organs were described; just
body size. It’s no wonder that evolutionary assumptions support
evolutionary conclusions: “We’re basically validating a lot of ideas
that have been out there since Darwin, but which had never
been tested at this scale due to lack of data and the limits of existing
technologies.” Whether or not sturgeon are living fossils, there are
many others that show no evolution, sometimes since their first
appearance in the Cambrian explosion (see new book Darwin’s
Doubt or the Illustra documentary film Darwin’s Dilemma).
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Fast and furious evolution: Evolution is relentless, according to
a new book by John N. Thompson (UC Santa Cruz), Relentless
Evolution. Reviewer Jordi Bascompte in Science
Magazine calls it “fast and endless.” Reason: “adaptive
evolution often leads to complex networks of interacting
species that in turn spur additional selective
pressures.” But then Bascompte points to the work of Peter
and Rosemary Grant on Darwin’s finches that showed a
reversal of beak adaptations when the weather changed. To
him, this helps them understand evolution, because the idea
that “adaptive evolution is so pervasive and fast relies on
the fact that the direction of evolution may change markedly
through time and space” – indeed, forward then backward
again. No examples of true innovation involving gain of genetic
information were mentioned.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Dating game: A dispute arose in Nature about whether
scientists found imprints of ovarian follicles in three fossil
birds in China in a previous evolutionary paper. The
exquisite preservation of many fossils in the Jehol strata
allows for investigation of fine details, but two scientists,
who said it would represent an “extraordinary case of
soft tissue preservation” if true, found it hard to
believe. They also said the data disagreed with
evolutionary expectations, saying, “the morphology of
the fossil structures does not agree with the
ovulation mode of coelurosaurs.” Zheng et al. stood
by their claim, stating, “simply because something is
unlikely to preserve does not mean that it will not.”
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Friendly natural selection: “Monkeys’ winter death toll
shows true value of friendship in natural
selection,” PhysOrg said with an ironic headline for a
theory built on selfishness. Claiming to report the “first
known scientific study to establish a correlation
between sociality (i.e. the number of social relationships
an animal holds within its group) and survival of extreme
ecological conditions,” the article “supports the view that
factors which contribute to establishing and maintaining
social relationships are favoured by natural
selection.” But what evolved? The subjects remained the
same species before and after the study. Actually, the
evolutionists merely constructed a model of what monkeys
would be expected to survive the winter: the friendly ones.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Inclusive fitness again: In Current Biology, Stuart A. West
and Andy Gardner defended the concept of inclusive
fitness, a version of natural selection that tries to explain
how groups can benefit from the selection on
individuals. This idea is not accepted by all
Darwinists. “The critiques of inclusive fitness theory have
provided neither an equally valid answer to the question
of what organisms should appear designed to
maximise, nor an alternative process to unite the
interest of genes,” they said, describing in their paper the
different ways of carving up natural selection.
“Consequently, inclusive fitness remains the most
general theory for explaining adaptation.” The debate
over the target of selection will undoubtedly continue.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
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
Models vs reality: PNAS posted another evolutionary
theory promising to explain “macroevolutionary
dynamics.” A look at the abstract, though, shows them
assuming evolution in the model, a case of circular
reasoning. “The model’s predictions for the appearance
times (the time of the first existing species) of the
taxonomic groups also approximately match estimates
based on molecular inference and fossil records,” it
says, failing to point out that molecular inference and
dates in the fossil record also assume evolution. It
shouldn’t be surprising that a model that assumes
macroevolution comes out supporting
macroevolution. It’s not clear if they included the
Cambrian explosion in their model.
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Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

We could go on and on. Stories like this pile up and
sometimes we just have to clear the deck. Here you see
example after example of rhetorical tricks, assumptions
masquerading as evidence, pre-ordained conclusions,
anomalies squeezed into those pre-ordained conclusions,
and admissions that Darwinian theory has never been
adequately tested, or is all wrong and another version of
selection needs to be considered. They promise “insight”
but deliver darkness. Their insight is phantom figures on
the cave wall, composed of just-so stories, glittering
generalities and visions of the approving smile of the
Bearded Buddha. We hope the amount of detail we
present documents those allegations. Stop taking them so
seriously. Once you realize this is divination, storytelling,
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mythmaking, the gig is up.
Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Explaining things by Darwinian evolution is like trying
to play basketball with square balls, because round
balls have been ruled illegal. That’s the rule of
methodological naturalism: design explanations are
excluded. Even when things look designed, they can’t
say it is designed. Evolutionists play within the
bounds of an impossible game, trying to dribble a
square ball that bounces at random, and fit it through
a round hoop by shooting aimlessly. Actually, they
kind of like the challenge, as long as they get paid for
it. Novices to the game think nothing of it, because it’s
the only game they’ve ever learned. They’ve never
been allowed to see the beauty of a pro game using
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round balls.
Evolution As Stretchy Glue
作为伸缩胶的进化

Evolution is the biggest scam foisted on mankind. Evidence for
design fills the world and the universe, but modern day
shamans of evolution wearing white lab coats promote the
notion that it only looks designed for a purpose. The Stuff
Happens Law (equivalent to Sheer Dumb Luck) can explain it
all, the guiding assumption that there is no guide, the vision that
there is only blindness, the purpose to propose only
purposelessness, the aim to call every vector aimless. When
will people come to their senses? When will this cult of Darwin
collapse? How long before people shake their heads in
disbelief that so many otherwise intelligent humans fell for this
colossal concoction built out of vaporware, futureware and
ideology posing as science? Be one of the clear thinkers
outside the fogma bank, then help rescue others trapped in
it. (Definitions of unfamiliar terms available in our Darwin 140
5/8/2017
Dictionary.)
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制


What could identify intelligent design more than
the discovery of “quality control”? Your cells
employ QC every day.
In “How Quality Control Works in Our
Cells,” Science Daily described “A cellular
control mechanism [that] prevents the
production of defective proteins in our
cells.” Many genetic diseases are associated
with the breakdown of quality control
mechanisms, a vital and necessary function for
all life, as it is in artificial systems:
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You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制


A person has hundreds of thousands of different
proteins that are constantly being produced and
degraded. Like in any factory where raw
materials are processed, there are various
control mechanisms in the cell that check the
quality of the products, namely the proteins.
The system discussed in the article is just one of
these mechanisms. It’s called nonsense-mediated
mRNA decay, or NMD. “For the NMD quality
control mechanism to be triggered, a large number
of factors have to coincide with the defective
mRNA,” researchers at the University of Bern
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found.
You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制

The way it works is by tagging a newly-transcribed
messenger RNA (mRNA) with an “assume bad”
protein tag, called UPF1 (up-frameshift 1). This
tag is placed on all mRNAs as a default indicator it
needs to prove itself worthy before
proceeding. On viable mRNAs, it is removed by
the ribosome (the translating factory), but on
defective ones, it remains. It is recognized by the
mRNA degrading machinery, which cuts it up for
recycling. “The protein UPF1 bound to the
mRNA acts as an armed trap that only has to
be triggered when needed to degrade the
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defective mRNA.”
You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制


There’s more. “NMD also ensures that many
mutations in our genes do not cause any
disease symptoms — as long as the second
copy of the gene affected is still intact and
thus a correct version of the body plan is
available,” the article explained.
In multicellular organisms, NMD can miss its
time limit to act on defective mRNAs. This
could lead to accumulation of bad mRNAs in
the cell. Fortunately, there’s another safety
step:
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You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制


However, the doctoral student was able to demonstrate
that NMD also recognises older, defective mRNAs as well
as newly produced ones, which improves the efficiency
of the quality control. “This result also indicates that
the basic mechanism of NMD in single-cell and
multicellular organisms is preserved and already
developed early on in the course of evolution,” says
Rufener.
Speaking of evolution, the research team spoke of
evolution as the creator of this efficient quality control
system: “To prevent faulty proteins from being produced
due to these corrupted mRNAs our cells developed
the NMD control mechanism in the course of
evolution, which recognises defective mRNAs and
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146
degrades them efficiently.”
You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制
More QC Systems
 Transporter, Open Sesame: Another part of
the cell, the mitochondrion, uses electricity to
conduct proteins across the inner
membrane. A voltage-gated channel
called TIM23 apparently has voltage
sensors, reported Science Daily, and uses
its voltage gradient to move its inner parts
around, letting the protein cargo pass
through. The nature of the voltage sensors
is still unknown.
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
You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制

A turnstile for protons: protons (H+) and
calcium ions (Ca2+) are very small things, but
gates in the cell’s outer membrane, made
just for them, are able to let them in while
keeping other small ions out. A paper
in Science Magazine describes how
electrical contacts in the channel guide the
molecules through the passageway single
file, while blocking other small ions. An
article on PhysOrg described the importance
of ion channels to the cell:
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You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制

A team of researchers at Columbia Engineering has
used miniaturized electronics to measure the activity
of individual ion-channel proteins with temporal
resolution as fine as one microsecond, producing the
fastest recordings of single ion channels ever
performed. Ion channels are biomolecules that
allow charged atoms to flow in and out of cells,
and they are an important work-horse in cell
signaling, sensing, and energetics. They are also
being explored for nanopore sequencing
applications. As the “transistors” of living systems,
they are the target of many drugs, and the ability to
perform such fast measurements of these proteins will
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149
lead to new understanding of their functions.
You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制


Starvation survival: A process called autophagy allows a
cell to “eat” its own innards in order to survive starvation
conditions. Medical Xpress says there are no less than 18
proteins dedicated to this process.
Constant cleanup: Even garbage collection is part of the
cell’s quality control. Without automatic janitorial services,
cells could accumulate waste and even poisons. Live
Science described at least three mechanisms for keeping
the cell clean: the proteasome enzyme, which degrades
proteins tagged for trash, the lysosome organelle, a kind of
“cellular stomach” containing enzymes that can digest
unwanted material (including viruses), and exocytosis, a
system that boots junk outside through the cell
membrane. Many diseases are linked to failure of these
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systems.
You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制

Darwin knew nothing about these things. If such
information had been accessible to the scientists at
Oxford and Cambridge in the 1850s, it’s likely
Darwin’s theory would have been laughed out of
town. Darwin himself would probably have been
so ashamed to suggest it, he probably would have
shredded his manuscripts on his own to avoid a
legacy of embarrassment. Intelligent design would
have been the leading movement of Victorian
Britain, as well as on the Continent, and around
the world, for the last 155 years, with no sign of it
slowing down.
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You’ve Got Quality Control
你已经得到了质量控制

That’s why it’s so disgusting to see reporters saying stupid
things like, “our cells developed the NMD control
mechanism in the course of evolution.” Good grief; cells
don’t develop anything. They use the software that an
intelligent designer developed and put into them. And if
“basic mechanism of NMD in single-cell and multicellular
organisms is preserved and already developed early
on in the course of evolution,” that’s not the course of
evolution! That’s the abrupt appearance of design, without
which the cell wouldn’t even be there. We must cure
these people of their dumbfloundering confability, so that
they don’t churn out material with a ridiculously high
perhapsimaybecouldness index. (See Darwin
Dictionary for definitions of unfamiliar terms.) Let the light
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of design shine in.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
153
Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）


One would think astronomers would not be stumped in
2013 by common objects like the moon, meteors and
stars. But they are. It’s driving them mad.
Moon madness: The lunacy begins with Earth’s
moon. Here is a body man has walked on, and he still
doesn’t understand it. National Geographic discussed
“The moon’s mystery,” dispensing with all three of
the most popular origin theories that were demolished
by the Apollo program. It also dispensed with the
currently-leading theory of a glancing blow collision,
showing that Apollo samples discredit the idea of
another mass with different composition leaving no
trace. Variations of the model all have their
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weaknesses, so the answer must be in the futureware:
Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）



“The barn door is wide open, and now we have lots
of ideas,” Asphaug said. “There probably will be
another ‘aha’ moment in five years or so.”
But for now, the moon holds on to its mystery.
Natural History Magazine (5/13 issue, “Blue Moon” p.
7) corroborated the crisis, saying that the discovery
that Earth and Moon share a similar composition
works against the popular impact hypothesis: “Overall,
the findings throw some big wrinkles into widely
accepted theories of how wet the primordial Earth
might have been, as well as just how the Moon was
born.”
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Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）

Speaking of the
moon, Space.com posted a handy
guide to Earth’s moon, staying pretty
much out of origin theories, only
mentioning the impact model in one
sentence without listing the
problems. Most of the article focuses
on facts about the lunar orbit and the
moon’s composition.
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Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）


Chondrule madness: Chondrules are curious molten
inclusions inside some meteorites that have defied
explanation for decades. “Blobs called chondrules in
the fabric of rocks from space have long baffled
scientists,” Richard A. Kerr wrote in Science
Magazine. “A new idea may shed light on their
origins, but some experts have given up hope.” He
describes the pessimism at a recent conference:
How would you like your decades of research on a
field’s central problem to be summed up by the
statement that “these objects remain as enigmatic
as ever”? That was part of the title of a session on the
formation of chondrules at the 75th annual Meteoritical
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157
Society meeting last year.
Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）

For half a century, meteoriticists—scientists who
study meteorites—have been trying to understand the
origin of chondrules: once-molten, millimeter-size blobs
of rock that a 19th century scientist called “drops of fiery
rain.” Chondrules riddle 85% of the rocks that fall to
Earth from the asteroid belt, so meteoriticists are deeply
intrigued. And scientists have long presumed that the
recipe for making the four rocky planets, including Earth,
consisted largely or entirely of chondritic rock. They
would like to know how their main ingredient came to
be. Yet only two of last year’s 14 talks in that chondrule
formation session directly addressed the topic, and both
of them described a decades-old idea that has made
little headway: chondrules splashing off colliding
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planetesimals.
Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）


There is no “unifying paradigm,” and “the field of
possible formation mechanisms has hardly been
narrowed in decades.” John Wood gave it up years
ago and took up oil painting. His student lamented,
“However [chondrules] formed, they formed beyond
our experience. How do you ever prove it?” The
only new idea sounds like a hard sell:
But there may be reason for hope. A collaboration of
astrophysicists and a meteoriticist has just floated a
new mechanism: humongous “short circuits” in
the still-forming solar system. All it has to do is run
the gantlet of skeptical meteoriticists and
astrophysicists.
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Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）

Alan Boss puts this idea on “the
bottom of the list.” Others are
similarly skeptical. No model has
worked. Nobody was there to see
what happened. One optimist placed
his faith in futureware: “Sooner or
later, someone’s going to come up
with a mechanism that solves it
all.”
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Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）

Star madness: One would think that stars, the most
plentiful objects astronomers can see, would be
understood by now. In “How did the universe get its
stars? An astronomical puzzle,” Space.com shared
the dirty secret that most star formation theories rely
on previous generations of stars; they have no idea
how the first generation of stars formed. It’s a
controversial question, and it’s an important one, an
astronomer remarked. Without original stars, you
have no heavy elements, which theory says formed in
stellar interiors. Once again, the solution was
sloughed off to some hopeful day in the future.
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Mystery Moon (and Meteorites, and Stars)
月球之谜（陨石，和星星）


We just thought you should know that textbooks
bluff about these matters. People need to know
how real scientists feel. They’re frustrated,
some are worn out, some are ready to leave
and take up oil painting. At least that involves
intelligent design.
Say, if the “barn door is wide open,” why not let
the Biblical creationists in? They have an
answer: the universe was created on Day One,
and the stars and moon on Day Four. That’s
they ‘aha’ moment they need, if they just
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weren’t so closed minded to intelligent causes.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
163
Longevity of DNA Estimated
预计DNA的长寿


How long can DNA survive in a fossil? Claims
of ancient DNA can be compared with a new
estimate based on a crime scene.
A re-investigation of the 1960’s Boston
Strangler case has given researchers a chance
to study the condition of the perpetrator after 50
years in the grave, Rachael Rettner of Live
Science reported. Because DNA degrades
over time, it has a “half-life” even under ideal
conditions of keeping it frozen. From Slate
Magazine’s article about Richard III’s remains,
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Rettner writes,
Longevity of DNA Estimated
预计DNA的长寿


Last year, researchers estimated that the half-life
of DNA — the point at which half the bonds in
a DNA molecule backbone would be broken — is 521
years. That means that, under ideal
conditions, DNA would last about 6.8 million
years, after which all the bonds would be
broken. But DNA would not be readable after about
1.5 million years, the researchers said.
According to Slate, the DNA of Egyptian mummies
has degraded. Amber is also not a good preserver
of DNA. You can’t tell by outward appearance, the
article said. DNA’s “shelf life” is fairly low:
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Longevity of DNA Estimated
预计DNA的长寿

The decay rate of DNA depends on the conditions of
its storage and packaging. Above all, it depends on
whether the DNA is exposed to heat, water, sunlight,
and oxygen. If a body is left out in the sun and rain,
its DNA will be useful for testing for only a few weeks.
If it’s buried a few feet below the ground, the DNA will
last about 1,000 to 10,000 years. If it’s frozen in
Antarctic ice, it could last a few hundred thousand
years. For best results, samples should be dried,
vacuum-packed, and frozen at about –80 degrees
Celsius. Even then, ambient radiation is likely to
render DNA unrecognizable before it celebrates its
millionth birthday.
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Longevity of DNA Estimated
预计DNA的长寿

Both articles claimed the
oldest DNA found so far, in permafrost, is
450,000 to 800,000 years
old. Neanderthal DNA said to be 100,000
years old has been sequenced by
paleoanthropologists, but “When it comes
to modern humans, the
oldest DNA recovered so far has been
only about 5,000 to 7,000 years old,” the
Slate article said.
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Longevity of DNA Estimated
预计DNA的长寿


Back in 2004, the upper limit was stated to be 400,000 years
(1/6/04, see also 9/4/06), but then last month (6/17/13),
horse DNA in permafrost said to be 700,000 years old was found.
These claims should be remembered if ancient DNA older than
that is confirmed in future finds. Biblical creationists will deny the
ancient ages, of course, saying that they are based on
evolutionary assumptions. But if intact DNA is found in a dinosaur
or other fossil older than the upper limit they just stated, it could
have the effect of falsifying the evolutionary timescale. Since
evolutionists are such staunch believers, though, most likely the
reaction will be, “Well, what do you know; DNA can survive for 65
million years.” That’s what they have already done with certain
proteins and soft tissues that should have been long gone. The
rest of us should remember what they said beforehand
about DNA’s upper limit age, and not let them get away with it.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
169
Batty Illogic Published in Evolutionary Paper
发布不合逻辑进化文章


Scientific papers do not emerge from pure realms
of wisdom and knowledge. They are written by
people, who can be illogical sometimes.
One has to be pretty smart and well-educated to
get into the National Academy of Sciences
(NAS). The criteria for getting published in the
Proceedings of the NAS are stringent. Somehow,
though, the criteria for evidential rigor and sound
logic are relaxed when the subject is
evolution. Here’s what a recent paper by
evolutionists primarily from China said
in PNAS about “Adaptive evolution of energy
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metabolism genes and the origin of flight in bats”
Batty Illogic Published in Evolutionary Paper
发布不合逻辑进化文章

Bat flight poses intriguing questions about how
flight independently developed in mammals. Flight
is among the most energy-consuming activities.
Thus, we deduced that changes in energy
metabolism must be a primary factor in the origin
of flight in bats. The respiratory chain of the
mitochondrial produces 95% of the adenosine
triphosphate (ATP) needed for locomotion. Because
the respiratory chain has a dual genetic foundation,
with genes encoded by both the mitochondrial and
nuclear genomes, we examined both genomes to
gain insights into the evolution of flight within
mammals.
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Batty Illogic Published in Evolutionary Paper
发布不合逻辑进化文章

Evidence for positive selection was detected in 23.08% of the
mitochondrial-encoded and 4.90% of nuclear-encoded oxidative
phosphorylation (OXPHOS) genes, but in only 2.25% of the
nuclear-encoded nonrespiratory genes that function in mitochondria
or 1.005% of other nuclear genes in bats. To address the caveat that
the two available bat genomes are of only draft quality, we
resequenced 77 OXPHOS genes from four species of bats. The
analysis of the resequenced gene data are in agreement with our
conclusion that a significantly higher proportion of genes
involved in energy metabolism, compared with background
genes, show evidence of adaptive evolution specific on the
common ancestral bat lineage. Both mitochondrial and nuclearencoded OXPHOS genes display evidence of adaptive evolution
along the common ancestral branch of bats, supporting our
hypothesis that genes involved in energy metabolism were
targets of natural selection and allowed adaptation to the huge
change in energy demand that were required during the origin
of
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flight.
Batty Illogic Published in Evolutionary Paper
发布不合逻辑进化文章

These evolutionists must surely know that the earliest
fossil bat is already 100% bat
(2/16/08, 4/20/06, 1/28/05). That empirical problem
aside, the authors of this paper assume that the
presence of “genes involved in energy metabolism”
was sufficient to create flying mammals. The highperformance genes for ATP production (involving the
exquisite molecular machine, ATP synthase)
somehow made a ground-based rodent take off into
the air, with all the systems involved for powered
flight. Why? Because natural selection “allowed”
it. Since flight “required” a huge change in energy
demand, once the genes arrived (somehow), the
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“origin of flight” resulted.
Batty Illogic Published in Evolutionary Paper
发布不合逻辑进化文章
 We’re holding up this example of
patho-logical inebriation (i.e., drunken
stupor) for the world to see that
scientists can say really dumb things
when under the influence of
Darwine. Don’t let their jargon fool
you. This is blubbering foolishness
masquerading as scholarship.
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Batty Illogic Published in Evolutionary Paper
发布不合逻辑进化文章

Let’s apply this theory to flying
dogs. Some dogs are high-strung,
and some are calm. The highstrung dogs meet the stringent
requirements for flight, don’t
they? Tell your dog you “allow”
him or her to fly, and watch natural
selection bring “the origin of flight”
to pass.
5/8/2017
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Batty Illogic Published in Evolutionary Paper
发布不合逻辑进化文章
 Some horses are high-strung,
too. Maybe we could call this the
Pegasus Theory of Evolution. If
energy requirements being met is all
that’s necessary for horses to fly, then
evolutionists should expect to find
flying horses in the fossil
record. Maybe unicorns, too.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
177
Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？


The idea that honeycombs in beehives selfassemble is as old as Darwin. A new study
claims to reinforce the idea, yet honeybees are
not just bystanders in the process.
Honeycombs have long been admired as
examples of functional design in nature. The
hexagonal packing is the most efficient method
of maximizing storage area while minimizing
building materials. Is this an example of design
in nature, or natural laws at work? Maybe that’s
a false dichotomy.
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Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？

Nature News announced the self-assembly
theme in an article entitled, “How honeycombs
can build themselves.” Writer Philip Ball
recounts how Darwin thought of self-assembly:
“The idea that the bees might first make
circular cells, which become hexagonal
subsequently, was proposed by Charles
Darwin,” he writes, “But he was unable to find
convincing evidence of it.” That evidence has
supposedly been forthcoming in a new study by
an engineer in the UK:
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Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？

Engineer Bhushan Karihaloo at the University
of Cardiff, UK, and his co-workers say that bees
simply make cells that are circular in cross
section and are packed together like a layer of
bubbles. According to their research, which
appears in the Journal of the Royal Society
Interface, the wax, softened by the heat of
the bees’ bodies, then gets pulled into
hexagonal cells by surface tension at the
junctions where three walls meet.
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Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？
 This finding feeds into a longstanding debate about whether the
honeycomb is an example of
exquisite biological engineering or
blind physics.
 Further reading, however, shows that
the bees are not mere bystanders,
even if they employ the natural laws
of “blind physics” —
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Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？

It might seem like there is not much left for the
bees to do once they’ve made the circular
cells. But they do seem to be expert builders.
They can, for example, use their head as a
plumb-line to measure the vertical, tilt the axis of
the cells very slightly up from the horizontal
to prevent the honey from flowing out,
and measure cell wall thicknesses with extreme
precision. Might they not, then, continue to play
an active part in shaping the circular cells into
hexagons, rather than letting surface tension do
the job?
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Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？


Good question. Another physicist noted that if bees’
body heat were so important to the process, the whole
hive would melt down.
Live Science stated that the honeycomb, “once
thought to be an incredible feat of math-savvy insects”
has been “explained by simple mechanics.” Later in
that article, though, is the suggestion that bees focus
their body heat to shape the hexagonal cells after first
carving them out as cylinders. Another biologist spoke
of the “the mechanisms that honeybees manage to
build very precise cells,” suggesting there is more
going on than “simple mechanics.” That biologist also
hinted that humans could learn something from the
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bees’ techniques.
Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？

If honeycombs were the product of blind physics alone, why
are they so precise in beehives? Columnar basalt is an
example of natural law at work without design. When some
lava flows cool, they crack into polygonal shapes, usually
hexagons—but not always. Displays like Devil’s Postpile in
California, spectacular as they are, show the limits of natural
law; irregular polygons, falling into piles at the base. Nothing
forces them to assemble at precise angles or thicknesses for
any conceivable function. Similarly, bubbles on the surface
of water can sometimes assume hexagonal borders due to
surface tension, but are rarely free of defects. Honeycomb
hexagons, by contrast, are very orderly and regular,
maximizing space and minimizing wax, for a specified
purpose: creating space for honey storage and the raising of
young.
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Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？

Another example can be found with arches. Natural arches can be
very large and spectacular, but we can tell intuitively whether an arch
is natural or designed. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the arches in a
basement supporting a building, or the arches in a Roman aqueduct
spanning a canyon for miles, would never result from natural
law. Why do they differ from Delicate Arch in Utah? Delicate Arch
doesn’t do anything. It has no specification, no purpose. There, a
sandstone fin eroded, weakest part first, till the most stable structure
– an arch – formed and enlarged till it stands near to collapse, joining
other arches in the park where gravity took over. No mind was
involved. The man-made arches, though, required a mind. They
function for artistry (commemorating a military victory), for
architecture, or for carrying water. Because they function, the design
specs for them are more critical and precise. Some Roman
aqueducts, still standing today, maintained a very, very slight
declination to keep the water flowing for over 30 miles, despite hills
and canyons along the route.
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Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？

Just because bees know how to use surface
tension does not mean they are bystanders in a
blind process of physics. On the contrary,
knowing how to use natural law efficiently is
evidence of intelligent design. If a bee can start
with a round hole and use surface tension to help
mold it into a hexagon, the bee is working smart,
just as much as an engineer using gravity to
advantage. The bee doesn’t just let nature do
it. The bee supervises the result, ensuring that
the resulting honeycomb meets the requirements
for precise wall thicknesses and inclinations of
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the cells.
Do Honeycombs Just Happen, or Do Bees Design Them?
蜂窝只是碰巧，或蜜蜂设计它们？

The intelligent design in the case of honeycomb
construction resides not in the brains of the bees
themselves, but in the instinctive abilities programmed into
them. They carry out the programmed instincts like
miniature robots. That presupposes a robot-maker. Who
was it? That’s an interesting question, but it’s beyond the
scope of intelligent design theory. Just as one can tell an
aqueduct was designed without knowing the designer, one
can infer intelligent design in honeycombs from the
specified complexity observed, whether or not certain
natural laws come into play during its construction. The
observation of design does not require knowing the
designer, but makes belief in a personal, purposeful God,
such as the God of the Bible, the most reasonable step 187
of
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faith in the direction the evidence points.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Take Up Insect Watching
观赏昆虫


Insects are among the most diverse
animals on the planet, many possessing
extraordinary abilities. Here are some
kinds worth watching.
Dragonflies: It’s National Dragonfly Week
in the UK. The BBC News posted a
gallery of colorful winged dragons and
damsels to whet your appetite for getting
out into the wild to watch these superb
flyers that can hover, dart, and move in all
directions with precision.
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Take Up Insect Watching
观赏昆虫

Ants: As long as they don’t invade your
kitchen, you should learn to respect ants
for their pathfinding skills. Within their
navigational toolkit, PhysOrg says that
certain ants seem to have a photographic
memory. If displaced from their starting
point, they can use a series of “snapshots”
they took when leaving, a kind of “photo
library” to find their way back, experiments
show.
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Take Up Insect Watching
观赏昆虫

Butterflies: Everyone loves butterflies:
beautiful, graceful, harmless creatures
that they are – and superbly engineered,
as the Illustra
film Metamorphosis reveals. Want to see
how they reflect iridescent colors? Take a
look at the 60,000x micrograph
on Science Daily of a wing scale, with
intricate patterns (photonic crystals)
engineers would love to imitate.
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Take Up Insect Watching
观赏昆虫

Creationists should be among the best
observational naturalists, because they believe
creatures are designed by an all-wise,
omnipotent Creator. Sure, after the curse due
to sin, many species have become harmful,
spreading disease, ruining crops, or causing
pain to humans, but those are only a few out of
the many thousands of harmless and beneficial
varieties. The bad rap of a few does not
diminish the fact that all insects are superbly
designed.
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Take Up Insect Watching
观赏昆虫

Let’s teach children to appreciate and enjoy the
beautiful colors and amazing abilities of insects by
setting a good example: being observant and
appreciative ourselves. And who knows: the secrets
of these tiny creatures might improve our own lives
someday, thanks to the willingness of many scientists
to study their designs with an engineer’s
eye. Biomimetic entomology would be a very good
career path for many precocious youngsters. For
those with a good eye and patience, insect
photography can be a fun hobby. Look at the
exceptional work of Bob Jensen for incredible photos
of amazing insects (see this teaser).
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Parallel Universe of Microbial “Dark Matter” Revealed
揭示微生物平行宇宙的“暗物质”


As scientists continue to find incredible diversity in the
smallest of organisms, realizations of all we’ve been
missing are changing conceptions of life.
Microbes: they live in and on us, and all around us – in
the soil, in the air, and deep in the earth and
seas. “How many microbes are hiding among
us?” Science Magazine asks. It’s been hard to know,
because most cannot be cultured in the lab. New
sequencing technologies are starting to shed light on the
“dark matter” of the living world, as EurekAlert termed it
in a Department of Energy press release reprinted
by Astrobiology Magazine. Eddy Rubin, leading a
discovery initiative for the DOE, likens it to a new Lewis
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and Clark Expedition into unexplored territory.
Parallel Universe of Microbial “Dark Matter” Revealed
揭示微生物平行宇宙的“暗物质”

“Microbes are the most abundant and diverse forms of
life on Earth,” said Tanja Woyke, DOE JGI Microbial
Program Head and senior author on the Nature publication.
“They occupy every conceivable environmental niche
from the extreme depths of the oceans to the driest of
deserts. However, our knowledge about their habits and
potential benefits has been hindered by the fact that the vast
majority of these have not yet been cultivated in the
laboratory. So we have only recently become aware of
their roles in various ecosystems through cultivationindependent methods, such as metagenomics and single-cell
genomics. What we are now discovering are unexpected
metabolic features that extend our understanding of biology
and challenge established boundaries between the
domains of life.”
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Parallel Universe of Microbial “Dark Matter” Revealed
揭示微生物平行宇宙的“暗物质”


One of the boundaries being challenged is the distinction
between viruses and microbes. When you find a virus so
large it contains more genetic material than some
eukaryotes, how do you classify it? Elizabeth Pennisi writes
for Science Magazine,
“It’s like finding a sasquatch,” says Elodie Ghedin, a
virologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
That’s one of the amazed reactions to the discovery,
reported on page 281, of two new viruses with by far the
largest genomes ever seen in a virus, including one that’s
bigger than the genomes of some parasitic eukaryotes. The
virologists in France who unearthed the massive viruses—
the biggest one is 1 micron long, a hundred times the size
of many viruses—suggest that their finds challenge the
longstanding view that viruses don’t qualify as life. 197
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Parallel Universe of Microbial “Dark Matter” Revealed
揭示微生物平行宇宙的“暗物质”

“It is clear that the paradigm that viruses
have small genomes and are relatively
simple in comparison to cellular life has
been overturned,” says Curtis Suttle, a
virologist at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver. The genome of
one of the viruses is 1.91
million DNA bases long, while the other
runs 2.47 million bases. That dwarfs
some bacterial genomes and edges
into the eukaryotic realm.…
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Parallel Universe of Microbial “Dark Matter” Revealed
揭示微生物平行宇宙的“暗物质”


This means that the division of life into archaea,
bacteria and eukaryotes may be up for revision
again. Efforts to sequence genomes of unknown
microbes so far have only been a drop in the bucket,
there’s so much more out there to discover.
Another thing this means is that our planet is awash in
coded genetic information. From the bottom of the
sea to the edge of space, Planet Earth is the
information planet! No other place we know has
instructional code to build organisms that function with
respiration, digestion, reproduction and all the other
functional systems that separate life from nonlife, but
Earth has it in super-abundance.
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Parallel Universe of Microbial “Dark Matter” Revealed
揭示微生物平行宇宙的“暗物质”

Creationists and intelligent design advocates would
expect our Privileged Planet to be the Information
Planet – and so it is. Functional information,
possessing purpose, complexity, and integration, does
not emerge from rocks. It is the organization of the
raw materials into information that sets it apart from
everything else we know in the universe. Creationists
would also expect the information to be organized into
a system with hierarchical organization, networks and
functional interactions from the micro to the planetary
scale – and so that is, too. The information in viruses
is part of that system. Most viruses are beneficial; the
few that are “virulent” are products of the curse due to
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sin, Biblical creationists believe.
Parallel Universe of Microbial “Dark Matter” Revealed
揭示微生物平行宇宙的“暗物质”

Ariel Anbar might try to make “the case for alien life”
(Arizona State press release) but it is illogical to
extrapolate a position from one instance. “Is life a
universal phenomenon, a planetary process just
like plate tectonics?” Anbar asks. “Or is life some
weird statistical fluke?” That’s a false
dichotomy. From our universal experience with
intelligent causes, we can deduce – whether alien life
is discovered or not – that life is the product of an
intelligent cause. From other signposts we can narrow
down the nature and identity of that Cause. Hint: it is
not a blind, aimless process of natural
selection. Follow the evidence where it leads, instead
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of the imagination of Creator-deniers.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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202
Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？


Philosophical questions about “reality” are fun if
not practical. But we need a concept of reality
in order to function practically.
“Get real!” we challenge one another. Most of
us believe in external reality. The
“correspondence theory” of truth posits that our
sensations, however flawed, correspond with
what’s really out there in the external world,
even if the signals go through multiple layers of
processing and translation from source to brain.
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？

Consider what mathematics represents. Is it a
fictional, self-consistent system in the mind, or
does it correspond to the universe? That
question was asked by four neuroscientists
at UC San Diego’s Kavli Institute for the Brain
and Mind (see NewsWise press release). The
question of whether humans create
mathematics or discover it is debated in the
article. Max Tegmark takes the position that
the universe is inherently mathematical:
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？

“[N]ature is clearly giving us hints that the
universe is mathematical,” says Tegmark,
professor of physics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and member of MIT’s
Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space
Research. According to Tegmark, many
mathematicians even feel that they don’t
invent mathematical structures, “they just
discover them—that these mathematical
structures exist independently of humans.”
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？


Tegmark also points out this isn’t just interesting as an
academic idea; if correct, then mathematics has a
special role for advancing human knowledge.
“If math is inherent out in the universe, then
mathematics can give us hints for solving future
problems in physics,” Tegmark says. “If we
really believe that nature is fundamentally
mathematical, then we should look for
mathematical patterns and regularities when we
come across phenomena that we don’t understand.
This problem-solving approach has been at the heart
of physics’ success for the past 500 years.”
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？


Some philosophers will complain that Tegmark’s response
is question-begging, but then one could reply to the
philosophers, asking whether their own responses are
real.
Tanya Lewis, in an article on Live Science “Reality
Check: Is Our Universe Real?” scares readers into
questioning the obvious: “Perhaps our human senses
are deceiving us — maybe existence is an illusion,
and reality isn’t real.” The problem with that view is that
it is self-refuting. It leads to solipsism, the idea that only
oneself exists. But even that thought might be an
illusion. In any case, who is Lewis talking to if that is the
case, but herself? “What humans perceive as reality
may be no more than an illusion,” she concludes. “But in
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the end, maybe that doesn’t matter.”
Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？

It surely does matter, though, if
one wants to conduct
science. Belief in external reality
and the validity of the laws of logic
are preconditions of science,
without which a scientist is wasting
his or her time. One cannot
“understand” something that
doesn’t exist.
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？

The major science journals, however, continue to
promote materialist views that equate the mind with
the brain. In Nature, for instance, Chris Frith gave
good press to Patricia Churchland’s new book
promoting monism, Touching a Nerve: The Self as
Brain. Recently the National Academy of Sciences
held a Sackler Colloquium called “In the Light of
Evolution VII: The Human Mental Machinery.” It
included John Searle’s views on Theory of
Mind and other papers assuming the mind evolved by
Darwinian processes of selection. No one seemed to
ask, if Darwinism is true, how they could know natural
selection produced the mind, including its thoughts
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that the mind evolved.
Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？



Other questions pop up from the proposition that
the mind is essentially material.
What is consciousness? A recent paper
in PNAS assumes human consciousness evolved
and differs only in degree, not in kind, from that of
the animals. Materialists have a burden to prove
their consciousness accords with reality.
What is scientific evidence, and how can we trust
it? A PhysOrg article assumes scientists can be
objective and unbiased – loaded words for an
evolved monkey’s brain.
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？


What is reason, compared with madness, and who
decides who is mad? (see Science book review about
psychiatry’s controversial diagnostic manual DSM5). Materialists must convince skeptics that they are
the sane ones, yet it would be insane to consider
reason or logic as evolvable entities.
What
is justice and fairness? Another PNAS paper
considers those moral qualities nothing more than
game theory applied to animal behavior. Honesty,
though, is another precondition for science. The
authors must convince their readers they are
interested in the truth, not just playing games.
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？

Materialistic explanations undermine their own
assumptions by borrowing the correspondence
theory of truth without justifying it, and acting as if
dualism is true, even as they deny it. The brain is
so complex, as an article in Nature about a new
“mapping the brain” project attests, it seems the
height of brashness to assume it excretes “mind”
as a substance, a kind of truth serum. We use the
mind to approach the brain, but whether the brain
(as a physical object) can approach the mind – an
entity in the realm of concepts – is a deeper
conundrum the materialist cannot escape.
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Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover It?
心灵创建现实或发现它呢？

Only the Biblical worldview allows a consistent framework
for doing science. One must believe that God, who cannot
lie, created a logical, mathematically-structured reality, and
gave His creatures the capacity to explore and understand
it. Otherwise, if it is the result of a blind evolutionary
process, how can one trust the sensations of a physical
brain that emerged only for survival? This conundrum
troubled Darwin (5/09/13) and is amply discussed in the
Discovery Institute Book The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis
on Science, Scientism and Society, a good read. With
Bible in hand, the world becomes comprehensible. Math
works. Reality is approachable through our intelligentlydesigned senses that were given to us for the purpose of
knowing truth. Though we may not discover truth
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exhaustively, we can approach it authentically.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉


When completely unrelated animals or plants display the
same engineering solution, is it reasonable to assume a
blind, unguided process of selection achieved improbable
outcomes multiple times? Is calling it “convergent
evolution” meaningful? Here are three examples.
1. Lizard convergence: A paper in Science (see also Live
Science summary) claims that lizards on separate
Caribbean islands converged on remarkably similar body
traits. They found “morphologically and behaviorally similar
species that occupy similar microhabitats” on islands
where ancestral lizards did not possess the derived
convergent properties. The Live Science article includes
photos of lizards from different islands that match in color,
markings and habitats, even though they supposedly
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evolved separately over millions of years.
“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉

The authors consider this an example of
“extreme convergence.” They use their
findings to claim evolution can be
predictable, contrary to the late Stephen
Jay Gould’s famous view that if one ran
the tape of life a second time, the
outcomes would probably be very
different. The authors attribute
convergent patterns to the environment:
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“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉


Parallel radiations unfolding at large temporal
scales shed light on the process of adaptive
diversification, indicating that the adaptive
landscape may give rise to predictable
evolutionary patterns in nature, that adaptive peaks
may be stable over macroevolutionary time, and
that available geographic area influences the
ability of lineages to discover new adaptive peaks.
This explanation, however, merely shifts the design to
the environment without explaining why a blind habitat
would interact with a blind process of selection to
produce extreme convergence.
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“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉

2. Fish convergence: Surprise – tuna are more
closely related to seahorses than to marlins, even
though tunas and marlins share the same streamlined
shape. The new “life-changing” phylogeny, reported
by Live Science, shakes up a number of branches on
the fish family tree. By implication (although the article
doesn’t mention it), the streamlining of tunas, marlins
and sharks all arose by convergent evolution. Another
surprise from the new tree is that fish apparently were
unaffected by the catastrophe that wiped out the
dinosaurs; “We cannot say why,” an evolutionist
at UC Davis shrugged.
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“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉


3. Brain convergence: One of the most
extreme claims about convergent
evolution was reported by Science
Daily. Evolutionists at Imperial College
London are now claiming that “Birds and
Humans Have Similar Brain Wiring.”
You may have more in common with a
pigeon than you realise, according to
research. It shows that humans and
birds have brains that are wired in a
similar way.
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“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉

A researcher from Imperial College London and his
colleagues have developed for the first time a map
of a typical bird brain, showing how different
regions are connected together to process
information. By comparing it to brain diagrams for
different mammals such as humans, the team
discovered that areas important for highlevel cognition such as long-term memory and
problem solving are wired up to other regions
of the brain in a similar way. This is despite the
fact that both mammal and bird brains have
been evolving down separate paths over
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hundreds of millions of years.
“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉



The team suggest that evolution has
discovered a common blueprint for high-level
cognition in brain development.
Though not stated explicitly, convergent
evolution is implied as the explanation: e.g.,
“They discovered that despite both hub
nodes having evolved differently, the way they
are wired up within the brain looks similar.”
[Brief pause to laugh out loud that evolution
could discover anything, especially “a common
blueprint for high-level cognition in brain
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221
development.”]
“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉

Brett Miller, who draws the excellent cartoons
for this site, wrote up an essay called “The
Convergence Concoction” that handily exposes,
with cartoons and numerous examples, that this
Darwinian explanation is a myth cooked up to
avoid powerful evidence for design. (His
excellent cartoon “Parallelizards” in the article is
right on point for the Caribbean lizard
story.) What more could falsify evolution than
dozens of striking similarities in animals and
plants that have no ancestral relationship in the
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222
Darwinian myth?
“Extreme Convergence” Strains Credibility of Darwinism
“极端趋同”菌株达尔文主义信誉

Darwin wanted an aimless, unguided
process. The views of some evolutionists like
Simon Conway Morris that evolution predictably
converges on archetypal forms borders on
Platonic mysticism. No; to be Darwinian, it
must be random and unguided. The world is
not that way. There’s similarity across tree
branches everywhere. When evolutionists
invent a phrase, “convergent evolution,” to
dodge a falsification, they deserve no more
respect than politicians who speak out both
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sides of their mouths.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
224
New Archaelogical Findings at Judean
Fortress Khirbet Qeiyafa
新考古发现，在犹太城堡Khirbet Qeiyafa


A hilltop near where David fought Goliath has revealed buildings
and artifacts suggestive of royal organization during the time of
King David.
A press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA)
announced the discovery of “royal public buildings” at Khirbet
Qeiyafa, a fortress on a hilltop overlooking the Elah Valley. First
reported by archaeologists in Nov. 2008 (see 11/16/08), it yielded
an inscription (1/07/10) and other artifacts that warranted further
excavation. The 7-year dig has concluded with the press release
claiming that two buildings were “David’s palace” and “an
enormous royal storeroom.” Also found were numerous stone
jars, along with “evidence of a metal industry, special pottery
vessels and fragments of alabaster vessels that were imported
from Egypt.” With its exceptional view, the site would have been
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225
valuable as a lookout.
New Archaelogical Findings at Judean
Fortress Khirbet Qeiyafa
新考古发现，在犹太城堡Khirbet Qeiyafa

Science Daily and PhysOrg picked up on
the phrase “David’s Palace” in their
headlines for articles that republished
the IAA press release. Live
Science considered it “indicate that David,
who defeated Goliath in the Bible, ruled a
kingdom with a great political
organization.” The dig was managed by
Yossi Garfinkel (Hebrew University) and
Saar Ganor (IAA).
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New Archaelogical Findings at Judean
Fortress Khirbet Qeiyafa
新考古发现，在犹太城堡Khirbet Qeiyafa


Conservative Bible history professor Todd Bolen in
Israel, on Bible Places Blog, urged caution:
Whenever you see a sensational claim such as
the discovery of a specific item mentioned in the
Bible, you should be suspicious. In most cases,
the archaeologist seems to be driven more by a
desire for attention than by
the evidence (e.g., the Cave of John the
Baptist, the palace of David,
or anything announced by Yosef Garfinkel in the
last six years).
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New Archaelogical Findings at Judean
Fortress Khirbet Qeiyafa
新考古发现，在犹太城堡Khirbet Qeiyafa

This is a bit surprising, since Bolen was initially
enthusiastic about the site’s potential
(12/24/08). Apparently he has reasons for distrusting
the IAA and these particular excavators, one reason
being that the end of a dig season is a tempting time
to announce sensational discoveries for fund-raising
or other non-academic motivations. There is no
question from the photos released, though, that
significant buildings, walls and artifacts from a welldeveloped fortress have been found. How they relate
to the kingdom of David specifically awaits further
analysis.
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New Archaelogical Findings at Judean
Fortress Khirbet Qeiyafa
新考古发现，在犹太城堡Khirbet Qeiyafa

The site is very intriguing and seems to support the
Iron Age identification. But respecting Bolen’s
informed opinion, we will refrain from reading too
much into the press release. Bolen feels Garfinkel is
press-happy, hasty to interpret findings, and prone to
sensational announcements (11/19/08). Surprisingly,
he finds more credibility (but not a lot more) in the
announcement that a room of the prophet Elisha has
been found at Tel Rehov (7/23/13), on the grounds
that its excavator, Amahai Mazar, has impeccable
credentials. Even so, it’s nearly impossible to prove
the room had anything to do with Elisha, he quickly
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warns.
New Archaelogical Findings at Judean
Fortress Khirbet Qeiyafa
新考古发现，在犹太城堡Khirbet Qeiyafa

The potential harm from hyping
archaeological digs too early (see his
entry) is making Biblical archaeology a
laughing-stock, and giving occasion for
skeptics undermine Biblical history. As a
science, archaeology needs a heavy
measure of scholarly caution. With that in
mind, hoping for further analysis of Khirbet
Qeiyafa soon, we announce this latest
series of findings with a subdued wow.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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231
News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻


T. Rex, Triceratops and other stars of the age of
dinosaurs have made news lately. Here are some
recent dinosaur findings.
Predator or scavenger? Debates about T. Rex’s
eating habits have raged for years. Was it a
hunter, like the terror in Jurassic Park, or
scavenger, picking the meat off dead
prey? Evidence of a bite in a hadrosaur backbone
seems to indicate the prey was alive when the
king’s tooth bit into it, says a video clip on Live
Science. But that’s just one data point, “the least
you can have,” one skeptic cautions.
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News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻

Tooth conveyor belt: Some huge sauropods may
have replaced their teeth every month. Science
Now said that analysis of “well-preserved fossils”
of Camarasaurus and Diplodocus led scientists at
Stony Brook University to estimate the beasts
replaced their teeth every 62 days and 35 days,
respectively. The fossilized dentin shows rows of
material ready to replace teeth worn down by their
heavy diet of plant material. Science Daily added
some Darwin from a researcher: “At least twice
during their evolution, sauropods evolved small,
peg-like teeth that formed and replaced quickly,” said
Dr. Michael D’Emic. “This characteristic may have led
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to the evolutionary success of sauropods.”
News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻


The BBC News refrained from the e-word, merely stating
that analysis of teeth can reveal feeding habits.
Big new ceratopsian: The name Nasutoceratops probably
doesn’t roll out of a kid’s memory bank, but a large new
horned dinosaur with that label has been found in Utah. “It
belonged to the family of herbivore ceratops dinos, of
which the famous triple-horned triceratops was a
member,” PhysOrg reported, claiming the location of the
fossil “sheds light” on moving continents. One mystery
remains, however: how did two dozen large animals
coexist on a landmass? Africa, with four times the area of
the assumed continent of Laramidia, has only five large
mammals. Also unknown is the purpose of the four-meterlong dinosaur’s oversize snout.
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News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻

Battle of the boneheads: More evidence
that bone-headed dinosaurs like
pachycephalosaur butted heads like rams
was reported by Live Science. Analysis of
wounds in 100 skulls by researchers at
the University of Wisconsin makes headbutting the most likely explanation. It’s
possible they used them for display,
though, or perhaps for both functions.
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News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻

Tale of a tall tail: A huge well-preserved
dinosaur tail of unknown species, probably a
kind of hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur, is
being excavated in Mexico, Live
Science and PhysOrg reported. Found by
locals, it’s about 16 feet (5 meters)
long. The BBC News has a video
report. Excavators have also found part of the
animal’s hip, and hope to find more as the work
continues. The tail would have been nearly half
the length of the animal.
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News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻

Warm or cold blooded? The belief that
dinosaurs were cold-blooded has been “put on
ice” according to Live Science. Researchers at
University of Adelaide came to the conclusion
that dinosaurs must have been warmblooded. They did this not directly, but by
inferring the energy requirements for thrashing
in living crocodiles and large mammals. As
usual, not every expert agrees. Given the
number of decades this aspect of dinosaurs has
been debated, it’s hard to predict if a new
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finding will overturn the latest claim.
News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻

Big fish: The largest bony fish that ever lived, some 16
meters long, was a contemporary of
dinosaurs, PhysOrg says.
Surprisingly, Leedsichthys
(Leeds fish) was most likely a plankton eater. The gills,
though “Extremely delicate and rarely-preserved,” were
preserved well enough to show the mesh structure,
resembling the honeycomb pattern in a beehive. The
article claims that the same meteor that wiped out the
dinosaurs wiped the big fish out, too. Maybe that reporter
didn’t see the Live Science article that claims an “absence
of any sign of a fish extinction event at the end of the
Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, when a mass
extinction wiped out the dinosaurs.” But when the same
article puts seahorses in the same phylogeny with tuna but
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not with swordfish, who you gonna believe?
News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻

Someone had to ask: PhysOrg posed the question,
“How did dinosaurs have sex?” (and no, the big bang
theory does not apply here). Someone needs to
answer, “Very carefully.” Alongside the headline is an
artist’s rendition of a huge, bulky
triceratops. Comparing dinosaurs with tiny birds and
giraffes does not seem to shed light on the
question. Speculator of the day John Long concluded,
“I truly believe the day will surely come,
probably when we least expect it, when a
remarkable new dinosaur fossil pops up solving the
age old mystery of how dinosaurs really did do the
deed.”
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News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻


Some day, when you least expect it, John, someone
may pop up to you and say, “Smile! You’re on Candid
Camera!”
Does anybody remember the claims about dinosaurs
from ten years ago, or even five? Science news is
often like short-term thrills that wear off until the next
fix. Debates about warm-bloodedness, extinction and
feeding habits have raged on for decades – decades,
and no resolution is ever forthcoming by scientific
“experts” (people who used to be spurts, but are now
ex-spurts). The latest claim by Dr. Science gets good
press, till another claim comes along later and
dislodges it.
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News About Your Favorite Dinosaurs
你最喜欢的恐龙新闻


And where, anywhere, does anyone see the need for
evolutionary theory? Dinosaurs once lived and are
now gone, but that’s not evolution. Fossils of huge
animals that flourished in a rich world of life show
evidence of design with subsequent decline. Our
world, rich and diverse as it is, is impoverished
compared to the world filled with large, healthy
animals and plants that once lived on it. It seems as
if some catastrophe* happened.
*Implausible? Science Now just reported that a
megaflood appears to have carried house-sized
boulders hundreds of miles, from China to India, as
easily as modern rivers carry sand.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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242
Cassini Shoots “Blue Dot” of Earth
卡西尼号拍摄的“蓝点”地球



Another epic photo of Earth from space was taken
on July 19 of Earth from Saturn by Cassini, and
released on July 22. From Mercury,
the MESSENGER spacecraft also portrayed Earth
as a small dot.
Many articles reported the photo-op, such as this
one on Space.com, which reminded earthlings that
such photos provide perspective:
It’s not often that some event comes along
to really show humanity its true place in the
universe, but two NASA spacecraft have just
managed just that.
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Cassini Shoots “Blue Dot” of Earth
卡西尼号拍摄的“蓝点”地球


It may not be often, but many images of Earth from space
have been taken since the famous Christmas Eve
“Earthrise” photo by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968.
Galileo, Cassini, and some of the Mars missions have
turned toward Earth to snap photos on their journeys. The
earlier Earth-facing photo taken by Cassini from behind
Saturn has been a classic since 2006 (Astronomy Picture
of the Day, 10/16/06).
Another classic, the “pale blue dot” photo of Earth in a
beam of sunlight taken by Voyager in 1990 at the edge of
the solar system, inspired opposite conclusions: that we
are insignificant, according to Carl Sagan, and that we are
designed for a purpose, according to The Privileged
Planet. The new Cassini image shows Earth not as pale,
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but as a rather bright and brilliant blue dot.
Cassini Shoots “Blue Dot” of Earth
卡西尼号拍摄的“蓝点”地球


For more views of the new Cassini photo, see the Cassini website,
Astronomy Picture of the Day July 22 and July 23, and video clip
on Space.com.
How could God care about beings on such a tiny speck? That
question has been a huge stumbling block to many since modern
astronomy revealed the vastness of the universe. Remember a
couple of things. For one, human beings are about halfway on a
scale from the very small to the very large. For another, God’s
concern for us is not based on our physical size; He is omnipresent,
which means all of God is present at every point in space. For one
more, we almost have to be the size we are (given the laws of nature)
to be held gravitationally to a body the size of the Earth, so that we
can live and move and have fellowship with one another. Everything
about our world – its star, its moon, its diameter, its composition – is
exactly right for life. Watch the Privileged Planet documentary (watch
entire documentary on YouTube in 12 segments), and marvel at how
the world God made for us allows us to explore the farthest reaches
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of space, and to begin to grasp the mind of God.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Toddler Beats Artificial Intelligence Computers
幼儿击败人工智能电脑


Artificial intelligence, despite decades of work, still
cannot match some of the mental capabilities of a
3-year-old. Computers have no common sense.
“To create a robot with common sense, mimic a
toddler,” says a story on New Scientist. The
article is an interview with Ben Goertzel, who is
trying to get A.I. up to toddler level and
beyond. “Step one is to make an AI program that
understands the world, and itself, in a basic
common-sense manner,” he said. “I think the best
way to get there is to build a robot toddler.”
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Toddler Beats Artificial Intelligence Computers
幼儿击败人工智能电脑


Computers and robots are very good at fast searches
through vast amounts of data. They can also
outperform chess champs. But prudence and sound
judgment at even a 3-year old level are beyond
them. According to Live Science, “Machines can’t yet
be programed to form intuitions about the physical
world without doing extensive calculations, and they
seem to fail at answering open-ended questions.”
A.I. researchers in Zurich believe they have developed
a chip that will make the breakthrough: chips that
mimic the brain. Medical Xpress tells about the new
neuromorphic chips. We’ll have to wait and see if the
robots have sense enough to come out of the rain
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before they short out.
Toddler Beats Artificial Intelligence Computers
幼儿击败人工智能电脑


Human brains have some pretty sophisticated wiring,
including a new method of signaling described in
another article on Medical Xpress. Exosomes provide
a kind of “delivery on call” capability, the article says.
Another article on Science Daily said that cells have a
“zip code” capability that is linked to learning and
memory, including redundancy to ensure proper
delivery. In addition, PNAS published a paper that
says “Flexible frequency control of cortical oscillations
enables computations required for working
memory.” The brain also finds it easy to pick out
salient sounds from background noise, Science
Daily said, by tracking frequency and time.
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Toddler Beats Artificial Intelligence Computers
幼儿击败人工智能电脑

But it’s not just the squishy hardware in brains that
makes them excel over computers in so many
ways. Where is the seat of common sense? Can a
computer judge a piece of music? A robot can dance,
but can it “know” that it is dancing? Before A.I. gets
close to making humanoid robots, there will still be
ample time for philosophers and theologians to debate
the nature of consciousness, and even simple
questions about qualia (our sensations of attributes of
things) – the “hard problem of consciousness”
according to philosopher David Chalmers, who
believes science will never solve it (see Evolution
News & Views video clip).
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Toddler Beats Artificial Intelligence Computers
幼儿击败人工智能电脑

A.I. is a variety of biomimetics, the imitation of
nature. Trying to reproduce simple intellectual tasks
our brains take for granted should be a good way for
scientists to learn humility, and conclude intelligent
design. Unfortunately, too often, the opposite
occurs. That’s a sign of human stubbornness and
pride – more evidence that underscores the Biblical
view of man created in the image of God but fallen into
sin. That’s why Jesus, knowing the mind of a toddler
He created, said to the prideful adults of His day,
“Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and
become as little children, you will by no means enter
the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
252
Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物


Inspired by the wisdom inherent in living
organisms, inventors and engineers are
finding bright ideas.
3-D Printing: In an article “Improving 3-D
Printing by Copying Nature,” National
Geographic reported on the work of
Janine Benyus, a biomimetics expert, on
how the new 3-D printing craze can help
the environment by using biological
materials instead of toxic solvents:
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Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

“Nature uses life-friendly chemistry,
which is nontoxic and water-based, and
which does not require high heat,” said
Benyus. In contrast, most of the products
people use today have been forged in
industrial-size furnaces, with a plethora of
toxic solvents. A potato chip bag may
seem like a simple item, but it is actually
made up of several thin layers of different
materials, one to make it strong, one to
make it airtight, and so on.
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Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

But nature creates an enormous amount of
diversity from a relatively small palette of
materials. Most of the polymers in the natural
world fall into about five classes, said Benyus. One
is keratin, which makes up skin, hair, and feathers
across the animal kingdom. Another is chitin,
which makes up exoskeletons in arthropods. The
way such basic building blocks are arranged,
in terms of internal structure, results in
extraordinary differences in animals’ size, shape,
color, and function—and it can also result
in extraordinary strength.
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Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物


She used the example of abalone shells and
diatoms that make extraordinarily tough materials
that outperform high-tech ceramics by layering
ordinary proteins and minerals in creative
ways. One problem: “we don’t really understand
how to do that,” said an MIT engineer – not yet, at
least.
Mussel sutures: Mussels and barnacles hold fast
to things despite the constant battering of ocean
waves, but use different methods. Science
Daily reported that the methods of attachment by
mussels is now coming to light: they use thin
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threads called byssus threads.
Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

Byssus threads, they found, are
composed of a well-designed
combination of soft, stretchy
material on one end and much stiffer
material on the other. Both materials,
despite their different mechanical
properties, are made of a protein
closely related to collagen, a main
constituent of skin, bone, cartilage and
tendons.
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Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

The 80/20 ratio of stiff to flexible material
allows them to “withstand impact forces
that are nine times greater than the
forces exerted by stretching in only one
direction.” Imitating this construction
could lead to improved medical sutures in
the wet, moving parts of the body, or for
attaching sensors to buildings, underwater
vehicles or any item located in extreme
conditions.
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Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

Anti-shark wetsuit: By learning about
smells and patterns sharks avoid, Aussies
have developed anti-shark wetsuits and
materials for the bottoms of
surfboards. Live Science shows a video
clip of tests with real sharks. The “Elude”
product, “inspired by nature,” could save
lives, and “It’s safe, it’s natural and
gives the animals no harm at
all.” Everyone can live with that.
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Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

Skin computer: It’s bright, it’s flexible, and it folds
up: it’s the E-skin computer display, as shown
on Science Daily. Touching this new skin-like
screen makes it light up. Human skin is not only
flexible but filled with sensors. Try it; touch
someone’s skin and watch if they light up. “In
addition to giving robots a finer sense of touch,
the engineers believe the new e-skin
technology could also be used to create things
like wallpapers that double as touchscreen
displays and dashboard laminates that allow
drivers to adjust electronic controls with the wave
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of a hand.”
Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

Insect prosthetics: Some insects are able to move
parts of their bodies without muscles via “neuronal
control” and some “clever biomechanical
tricks.” Science Daily discussed how mimicking this
ability could improve prosthetics for human limbs and
robots. The biomechanical movements allow
grasshoppers and fleas to jump much higher than
muscles alone would allow. Scientists at the
University of Leicester are studying those insect legs
very closely for clues. “We hope that our work on
locusts and grasshoppers will spur a new
understanding of how limbs work and can
be controlled, by not just insects, but by other
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animals, people, and even by robots.”
Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物

Squid telecommunications: The ability of squid,
cuttlefish and octopi to change colors
instantaneously has long fascinated
biologists. Now, scientists at UC Santa Barbara
have made headway understanding how the
animals control proteins in their skin to create
dazzling patterns and colors in fractions of a
second, Science Daily reported. Possible
applications? Tunable filters and switchable
shutters for infrared cameras; perhaps even
synthetic camouflage. Daniel E. Morse thinks
evolution is marvelous:
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Engineers Chase Animals
工程师追逐动物



“We already use optical cables and photonic switches in
some of our telecommunications devices. The question
is — and it’s a question at this point — can we learn
from these novel biophotonic mechanisms that have
evolved over millions of years of natural
selection new approaches to making tunable and
switchable photonic materials to more efficiently
encode, transmit, and decode information via light?”
Evolution takes credit often (8/24/07) from the sidelines,
while watching engineers chase the animals for their
designs. The process of evolution is still unknown.
The wonders of animal design, and the audacity of
evolutionists, are common themes in these biomimetics
5/8/2017
articles. Evolutionists have robbed the glory of God. 263
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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264
Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着


Within the factories of molecular machines that run living
cells, including those in the human body, processes occur
non-stop that are designed to meet every
contingency. Here are just a few examples.
Parking garage: Most of us have driven round and round
in those multi-level parking garages looking for a spot. We
have something like that in our cells, too: helical ramps
within an organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum,
where proteins are given final assembly and checkups
before being put into operation. Science Daily has a
diagram of the structure. Nature News described how it
works the same way as a parking garage, allowing
“for dense, adjustable packing of material in the
cell, boosting the surface available for protein
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production within a small volume.”
Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着

Brain tune-up: To perform in concert, neurons in the
brain occasionally need to tune their signals, like
orchestra players tune their instruments. Science
Daily described how they do it: NIH findings show that
“brief bursts of chemical energy coming
from rapidly moving power plants, called
mitochondria, may tune brain cell
communication.” About a third of mitochondria move
along tracks in the axon. Their presence seems to
provide a reference tone, like a tuning fork, for signals:
“the presence of stationary power plants at
synapses controls the stability of the nerve signal
strength.”
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Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着

Cell division conductors: Speaking of orchestra players,
there wouldn’t be music without an
orchestrator. Centrioles are tiny bundles of microtubules
located at the foci of mitotic spindles, the structures that
pull chromosomes apart during cell division
(mitosis). They are always found in pairs perpendicular to
each other. PhysOrg discussed their “manifold functions
in the cell,” including “orchestrators of cell division,” a
“tightly regulated process.” European biochemists
investigated the mysterious “pericentriolar material” (PCM)
that binds them into the “centrosome” where, in a still
mysterious way, they winch the chromosomes into the
daughter cells. “Our results show that the PCM still
harbors many surprises,” one of the researchers said.
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Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着

Damage repair team spirit: A paper in PNAS describes
what happens when lesions form on DNA strands,
triggering “excision repair” processes. The title describes
what happens: “Homologous recombination rescues
ssDNA gaps generated by nucleotide excision repair and
reduced translesion DNA synthesis…” The study,
performed on yeast cells, describes cooperation between
translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), singlestranded DNA repair (ssDNA), and homologous
recombination, which rebuilds a damaged strand from the
intact strand. “These findings suggest that ssDNA that
might originate during the repair of closely opposed
lesions or of ssDNA-containing lesions or from uncoupled
replication may drive recombination directly in various
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species, including humans.”
Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着

Checkpoint charlies: A technical paper in Science
Magazine described the interactions of multiple
players that use checkpoints to ensure genomic
integrity. The teams include proteins, small interfering
RNAs, and multi-part enzymes. These players are all
involved in “DNA Replication Origin Firing in Human
Cells,” i.e., making sure that the all-important task of
replicating the genome begins at the right
spot. Here’s a taste of the technical details: “We
propose that MTBP acts with Treslin/TICRR to
integrate signals from cell cycle and DNA damage
response
pathways to control the initiation of DNA replication
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in human cells.”
Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着


Master regulator: A paper in Nature uncovers more findings
about mTOR kinase, which it calls “a master regulator of
cell growth.” The opening paragraph describes why this
enzyme is important:
Whether or not a cell grows is decided by a remarkable
protein kinase enzyme called mTOR. As part of two
complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2, mTOR integrates and
interprets all sorts of factors that influence cell
growth — including nutrients, stressors and the outputs of
signal-transduction networks — by targeting a multitude of
substrates that drive processes such as protein translation,
metabolism and cell division. Research into mTOR-mediated
signalling has taken on added urgency since it was
discovered that most cancers contain mutations that
inappropriately activate this protein.
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Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着


The newly-uncovered structure of mTOR, made up of 1,500
amino acids, shows that it has a “gatekeeper
mechanism that controls substrate access to the active
site.”
You’re the boss: As a functioning whole organism, you can
tell your cells what to do. An attention-getting paper in
Nature states that “Attention enhances synaptic efficacy
and the signal-to-noise ratio in neural circuits.” In other
words, when you focus your attention on a sight or sound,
your neurons obey, all the way to the level of synapses
between neurons. “The results demonstrate that attention
finely tunes neuronal communication at the synaptic
level by selectively altering synaptic weights, enabling
enhanced detection of salient events in the noisy
sensory environment.” Philosophers of free will, take note.
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Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着


Bricks that build: Certain structural building blocks in
the inner ear don’t just sit there. They actually have a
“starring role” to play, Science Daily reported in a
surprise announcement. “Researchers have found in
mice that supporting cells in the inner ear, once
thought to serve only a structural role, can actively
help repair damaged sensory hair cells, the
functional cells that turn vibrations into the electrical
signals that the brain recognizes as sound.”
Sex cooperation: Science Daily reported a “shocker,”
a “surprising finding” that the female X-chromosome
participates in sperm production. One would think
men and women are actually part of the same species
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after all.
Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着

Where do we stop? We could go on and
on. Every week in the science literature,
new findings are made about regulators,
teams, quality controls (see 7/16/13),
checkpoints, conductors, players with
starring roles – Michael Denton wasn’t
kidding when back in 1985 (Evolution: A
Theory in Crisis, p. 328) he compared a
cell to a large city, filled with “supreme
technology and bewildering complexity.”
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Remarkable Cell Processes That Keep You Alive
显着的细胞过程，让你活着

That was almost 30 years ago; more discoveries
have poured forth since then, many of them of
paramount importance to our understanding of
how life works. It’s almost as if God, in His shrewd
wisdom, has allowed biochemists to peer into the
machinery, bit by bit, just as they were concluding
their “evolution is a fact” speeches through their
megaphones in the press. It’s hard to see how
Darwinian evolution can survive this never-ending
onslaught of Design, design, design! emanating
from the living cell as, week after week, year after
year, improving technology brings its perfections
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into sharper focus.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
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

Here are some headlines concerning early man
and the ongoing struggle by humans to improve
life.
Throw the dog a bone: An extinct ape
named Oreopithecus did not walk upright as earlier
claimed, Science Daily admitted. Maybe they sat
as they made little black cookies with white cream
in the middle. “The study, published in a
forthcoming issue of the Journal of Human
Evolution, confirms that anatomical features
related to habitual upright, two-legged walking
remain exclusively associated with humans
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and their fossil ancestors.”
From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

Back in Liang Bua Cave: Whatever happened to
The Hobbit? News about those little fossil people
from Indonesia occasionally breaks above the din
into the headlines. Latest claim: they looked like
us but were not us. Science Daily reported, “3DComparative Analysis Confirms Status of Homo
Floresiensis as Fossil Human Species.” A team
from Stony Brook University claims that they were
not victims of microcephaly. That keeps them in
the genus Homo, but as a separate species – at
least, until the next analysis contradicts it.
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
Give peace a chance: Scientists are fighting over
whether early humans were aggressive and
warlike. Reviewing a paper in Science, Elizabeth
Culotta, in her perspective article, announced, “Latest
Skirmish Over Ancestral Violence Strikes Blow for
Peace.” Early people were peacemakers. That’s the
opinion of two Finns who published an article
in Science about whether “lethal aggression” was
dominant among mobile foraging bands. It has
“implications for the origins of war,” they
wrote. “But those on the other side of the debate”
are fighting back, Culotta wrote; they “say that the
paper lacks the numerical data to evaluate how
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common war and homicide actually are.”
From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

And how can there be a peace treaty if
both sides can’t even define what war
is? Darwin always wins, regardless. “If
war is a common feature of the foraging
way of life, then perhaps it was a driving
force in human evolution,” Culotta
said. Well, then, what “if” it wasn’t? Then,
presumably, peace and cooperation were
the driving forces in human evolution.
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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民
 Ancient mariners: Using traditional craft and no modern
navigation aids, a Polynesian team completed a voyage
from New Zealand to Easter Island and back,
the BBC News reported. The feat revitalized natives to
remember a skill that is rapidly being lost. For “over
3,000 years, John Pickford wrote, “the Polynesians had
been using their great canoes, combined with nearmiraculous navigation skills, to explore and settle a
vast stretch of the Pacific.” Today’s islanders, want
often to leave their paradise and get jobs on the
mainland, it was a big morale booster. “They are
a powerful reminder of a heroic age not so long ago
when those mythic islands of the south seas were more
connected and the ocean really was a highway rather
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than a barrier.”
From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

Crop rotation, good: Since the days the Jews were
ordered to give their land a Sabbath rest, allowing
native plants to grow back for a year, wise early
farmers have learned that crop rotation increases
productivity of the land. It’s a trick medieval farmers
had to re-learn the hard way. Now, Science
Daily claims to know why crop rotation works: it
causes a shift in soil microbes. The microbes affixed
to the roots of some plant species, like legumes, know
how to fix nitrogen and fertilize the soil. Not only that,
rotation has a “profound effect … on enriching soil
with bacteria, fungi and protozoa,” researchers at
the John Innes Centre found.
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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

Farm changer, world changer: Moving up to
modern times, now, here’s a story to
watch. Science Daily reported that a professor at
the University of Nottingham has found a way to
take nitrogen fertilizer from the air. No, he hasn’t
invented a way to do it; he’s just borrowing the
technology of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Nitrogen is
the most abundant molecule in the atmosphere,
but its triple bonds make it hard to crack. Man’s
methods of fixing nitrogen to produce fertilizer are
costly and require heat. The press release could
hardly contain the excitement:
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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

Professor Edward Cocking, Director of The University
of Nottingham’s Centre for Crop Nitrogen
Fixation, has developed a unique method of putting
nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the cells of plant
roots. His major breakthrough came when he found a
specific strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in sugar-cane
which he discovered could intracellularly colonise all
major crop plants. This ground-breaking
development potentially provides every cell in the
plant with the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen.
The implications for agriculture are enormous as
this new technology can provide much of the plant’s
nitrogen needs.
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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

Turbocharging farms: Current Biology has
another idea to increase farm productivity:
genetically engineer crops to use
C4 photosynthesis. 97% of plants use the
C3 method, but a few species, particularly
those in harsh environments like deserts,
use C4. Now that humans have learned
genetic engineering, could they use C4 to
get more mileage out of crops? Elizabeth
A. Kellogg thinks so:
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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

The number of humans on earth is increasing, generating
concerns about food security and spurring efforts
throughout the world to increase the productivity of
crops. If a way could be found to increase the yield of
crops by, say, 20%, it would have immense impact on
global food supplies. Fortunately, evolution has already
crafted such a mechanism, known as C4 photosynthesis.
The C4 pathway is in effect a turbocharger for the more
conventional C3 pathway. Just as a turbocharger improves
performance of an engine by forcing more air into the
manifold, C4 improves photosynthetic performance by
forcing CO2 into the standard C3 photosynthetic
apparatus. The added efficiency of this mechanism is
obvious at a global level.
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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

In a sense, humans continue to use ingenuity
(a.k.a., intelligent design) to improve their lot in
life, using natural resources more and more
efficiently. If modern humans have existed on
this globe for at least 40,000 years (some
evolutionists think Homo species were our
equals two million years ago), would they not
have invented seafaring and agriculture much
earlier? (See 7/06/13, “Farming Came Too
Late in the Evolutionary Timetable”.)
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From Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Farmer
从猎人采集到现代农民

Despite all the progress in agriculture, there are
worries that humans are devolving, not
evolving. Evidence was right here in the article:
a retreat into pagan mysticism, as evident in
Kellogg’s statement, “Fortunately, evolution
has already crafted such a mechanism,
known as C4 photosynthesis…in effect
a turbocharger.…” There’s not much hope for
mankind with that kind of personification
fallacy getting published in a major science
journal.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈


Regrowing organs and other miracle cures may be
coming to a hospital near you, thanks to progress with
adult stem cells.
Three blind mice see again: The BBC News reported
on advances in treating blindness with stem cells. In
studies described as a “significant breakthrough” and
“huge leap forward,” lab work with mouse embryo cells
showed that stem cells can repair retina damage,
actually regrowing the rods and cones (see beautiful
picture of them in the article). Even though the work
was done with mouse embryonic stem cells, coverage
on Medical Xpress made it clear that harvesting
embryos is not necessary:
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈


The goal is to test therapy for AMD using
so-called induced pluripotent stem
cells, or iPS.
These are adult cells that have been
reprogrammed to return to their infant,
versatile state. Provided that they are
proven safe, they can provide a noncontroversial alternative to stem cells
culled from early-stage embryos.
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈

Grow a liver from skin: A team in Japan (birthplace of the
induced pluripotent stem cell or iPSC technique) has
succeeded in growing functional liver tissue, blood vessels
and all, from iPSCs. Publishing in Nature, the team said,
“To our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating
the generation of a functional human organ from
pluripotent stem cells.” With organ donors perennially in
short supply, this could be revolutionary news for those in
need of transplants: the ability to grow another organ from
one’s own cells. “Although efforts must ensue to translate
these techniques to treatments for patients, this proof-ofconcept demonstration of organ-bud transplantation
provides a promising new approach to study regenerative
medicine.”
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈

Heart and lung: Scientists in Pennsylvania are
seeking to understand how cardiopulmonary
progenitor cells, a kind of stem cell lining the lungs
and blood vessels, are capable of regenerating
damaged tissues. These cells appear to guide the
development of both tissues in the embryo. “Future
studies will focus on whether CPPs exist in the adult
cardiopulmonary system and whether they play a role
in the response of the lung and heart to injury or
disease,” the article on Medical Xpress said. It’s not
clear, though, what these comments about evolution
had to do with the story, which was focused on human
health:
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈


The evolution of adaptations for life on land
have long puzzled biologists –
are feathers descendents of dinosaur scales, how
did arms and legs evolve from fins, and from what
ancient fish organ did the lung evolve?
Biologists have known that the co-development of the
cardiovascular and pulmonary systems is a recent
evolutionary adaption to life outside of water,
coupling the function of the heart with the gas
exchange function of the lung. And, the lung is one of
the most recent organs to have evolved in
mammals and is arguably the most vital for terrestrial
life.
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈

Stem cell liver injections: Another team mentioned
on PhysOrg has grown functional hepatocytes (liver
cells), injected them into mice, and watched them take
on function, extending the lives of mice afflicted with
liver disease. Not only that, they’ve developed a
bioreactor that can generate stem cells in quantities
that would be useful for clinical applications.
“This promising advance in the development of cellbased therapies to treat liver failure resulting from
injury or disease relied on the development of
scalable, reproducible methods to produce stem
cell-derived hepatocytes in bioreactors,” the article
states.
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈


Paradigm shift: Incidentally, science popularizers may
have to drop the assumption that every cell in your
body has a copy of “your” genome. Science
Magazine reported the following:
With recent advances in genome-wide assays, it is
becoming increasingly apparent that a human
individual is made up of a population of cells, each
with its own “personal”
genome. Thus, mosaicism is perhaps much more
common within multicellular organisms than our
limited genomic assays have detected thus far,
and may represent the rule rather than the
exception.
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈

These differences in genomes appear in
embryonic stem cells and iPS cells. Why would
this be? It’s not just about mutations leading to
sickness. The article surmised, “the extent of
somatic mosaicism that is now being
reported in a variety of healthy tissues and
cell types suggests that it also has
physiological functions,” including possible
roles in the immune system and in normal brain
function. This is a new area ripe for
investigation.
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈

Aside from the Darwinist reporter trying to
insert evolution where it doesn’t belong,
these are great news stories offering hope
to millions of people. (Darwinism has its
place, but its place is in the dustbin of
discarded myths.) Did you notice that the
Darwinist provided no evidence for any of
the claims, but instead listed three major
puzzles they still haven’t figured
out? How much more time do we give
these guys?
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Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈

Stem cell research is intelligent design
research. Scientists are using their intelligence to
understand the intelligence built into stem cells that
allow them to turn into any kind of
tissue. Evolution has nothing to do with it. The
whole process of development is so amazing, it
transcends anything we know. If we can get these
pluripotent cells from adult cells, why on earth
continue to pursue embryonic stem cells? Go
ahead and play with mouse embryos; mice are
intelligently designed, but not made in God’s image
like man is. When alternatives exist, go for the
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non-controversial alternative.
Amazing Cures from Adult Stem Cells
从成人干细胞惊人的治愈

Your Editor has liver damage from
cancer. He would love to get a new liver
grown from his own skin cells, without
having to take the life of an unborn human
being. Pray these treatments will advance
quickly and help all those who need it in
time. For those without current health
issues, thank God for the health you have
and use it for good while you can.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）


Several recent science papers try to find evolution in bird
brains, genes, and behaviors. Do they succeed?
Sexual selection conundrums: Sexual selection seems to work
except when it doesn’t. That’s the apparent observation from
two articles, one on Science Daily that claims shorebirds
choose looks over brains, and one on Live Science that shocks
readers with the news that peahens don’t pay much attention to
the elaborate tail feathers of peacocks. This seems to
contradict a classic case of sexual selection. Sure enough, tiny
video cameras on peahens followed their gaze and found that
they tended to focus below the neck, a Purdue biologist found:
“The males put on this huge display, and females seem to look
at only a small portion of it.” What’s a male to do? Neither
article mentioned whether sexual selection matters in species
like crows that show virtually no sexual dimorphism.
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Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）

Chicks vs mice: A study in PNAS tried to find how much
divergence and convergence there is in the expression of
brain genes between chickens and mice. The authors
claim that their study “potentially resolves the complex
relationship between
developmental homology and functional
characteristics on the molecular level and settles longstanding evolutionary debates,” but the actual results
were mixed. The authors found some surprising examples
of convergent evolution (homoplasy) – surprising given
“very different developmental trajectories” of birds and
mammals. They admitted their limited data set could have
led to different results. As a result, their conclusions were
tentative, requiring further study:
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Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）

Our results suggest that the pallium has undergone major
transcriptomic reorganization, with traces of both
molecular homoplasy and homology .… These results do
not imply that there is no homology among other pallial
sectors, only that homology is not a dominant factor in
their adult gene expression patterns. Homology might have
a greater impact on pallial gene expression if we had
studied a greater number of smaller regions or even
individual cells.… Considering these results, subsequent
investigations into the evolution of the neocortex should
complement studies of homology based on cell lineage with
multiple levels of information in various taxa toward a
holistic understanding of how its
molecular programs were repurposed, resulting in such
cognitive convergence.
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Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）


Cockatoo puzzle solving: Speaking of bird brains,
cockatoos can perform intelligence tests on spatial
and navigational skills as well as toddlers, and
sometimes better than great apes, according to new
experiments reported on Science Daily.
Darwin’s finches again: A new book is out about
Darwin’s finches – not so much about the birds, but
about David Lack, the “father of evolutionary ecology,”
who spent a lot of time trying to defend Darwin’s views
about them. Ben C. Sheldon liked Ted Anderson’s
book in his review for Nature. Some readers might be
surprised to find out that Lack did more work than
Darwin:
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Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）

Charles Darwin had remarkably little to
say about how the birds that bear his
name — Darwin’s finches — came to
have such a variety of beaks, despite
their iconic status in evolutionary
biology. It was left to an English
schoolmaster on sabbatical in the
late 1930s to carry out the first serious
work on this question.
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Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）

Sheldon did not mention the subsequent work by Peter and
Rosemary Grant who found that changes to the birds’ beaks
oscillated according to the weather. Lack only spent 4
months on a field trip studying the birds, compared to the
Grants’ three decades. It’s doubtful Lack’s work contributed
much to scientific understanding of the Galapagos finches as
much as the starting of a new movement: “The central
message of Anderson’s book is that Lack should be
understood as someone who bridged the
gap between traditional natural history and the
development of its modern academic
descendant, evolutionary ecology.” In short: the book is
short on science, and big on name-dropping of the evolution
giants Lack interacted with. Whether “evolutionary ecology”
is a productive use of biologists’ time is another subject. 306
5/8/2017
Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）

Homing pigeon navigation: A bird article
with no need for evolutionary theory, but
implications for design, concerned homing
pigeons’ uncanny ability to find
home. Science Daily reported that new
experiments show the birds are not simple
“flying robots,” but use cognitive ability when
deciding what cues to follow. They build a
spatial map of their surroundings and can
choose to head toward a feeder or home,
depending on how hungry they are:
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Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）

“As we expected, the satiated pigeons flew directly to the home
loft,” explains Prof. Hans-Peter Lipp, neuroanatomist
at UZH [University of Zurich] and [Nicole] Blaser’s supervisor
for her doctoral thesis. “They already started on course for their
loft and only deviated from that course for a short time to
make topography-induced detours.” The hungry
pigeons behaved quite differently, setting off on course for the
food loft from the very beginning and flying directly to that
target. They also flew around topographical obstacles and
then immediately adjusted again to their original course.
Based on this procedure, Blaser concludes that pigeons can
determine their location and their direction of flight relative
to the target and can choose between several targets. They
thus have a type of cognitive navigational map in their heads
and have cognitive capabilities. “Pigeons use their heads to
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fly,” jokes the young biologist.
Birds and Their Evolution (or Design)
鸟类及其进化（或设计）


There was no mention of evolution in the article.
Was there ever a more useless, time-wasting,
distracting theory than Darwinian evolution? It made
some people famous who were able to look like they
were doing science. It created camaraderie between
fellow Darwine drinkers. But did it ever produce
understanding of the natural world? After reading
these articles, you be the judge. We think an
intelligent design perspective would have brought the
coveted “insight” and “understanding” far earlier,
without all the obstacles forcing observations to fit the
hunches of a Bearded Buddha. If you really need
convincing, watch the new Illustra film Flight: The
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Genius of Birds.
Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

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More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据


Epigenetics has become a hot topic in biology. There are
players “above DNA”– some heritable – that may be more
important than the genetic code itself.
Unto the 3rd and 4th generation: A headline on Science
Daily sounds almost Biblical: “Gene Mutations Caused
by a Father’s Lifestyle Can Be Inherited by Multiple
Generations.” Moses had said that a father’s sins can
affect offspring; was he stating a fact of epigenetics
unknown in his day? He was undoubtedly referring to
spiritual effects, but it’s becoming apparent to scientists
that “a father’s lifestyle has the potential to affect the
DNA of multiple generations and not just his immediate
offspring,” because changes in the regulation of genes can
be passed on through the gametes of his children and
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their children.
More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据

Reversible damage: A paper in PLoS
Biology states that epigenetic changes are
reversible. Working with yeast, a team
said, “The results presented here suggest
that epigenetic control within an individual
cell is reversible and can be achieved via
regulation of histone acetyltransferase
activity.” With the previous entry, this
suggests that offspring are not doomed to
suffer their father’s lifestyle problems.
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More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据
 Work out and modify your
fat: Science Daily reported evidence
that workouts make epigenetic
changes to your fat cells. A
researcher at Lund University in
Sweden said, “Our study shows the
positive effects of exercise,
because the epigenetic pattern of
genes that affect fat storage in the
body changes.”
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More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据

Work out and fix your nerves: Damage to
neural stem cells from mutations can be
reversed by exercise. That’s a finding
announced in Medical Xpress: mutational
damage to CHD7 (a gene that codes for an
epigenetic regulator) that inhibits neurogenesis
in mice, and presumably in humans, can be
completely reversed by exercise: “After the
running exercise the CHD7 mutant neurons
were fully rescued: They were able to create
functioning networks.”
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More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据

The pursuit of happiness: Research reported
on Science Daily shows that your body
responds differently to “different kinds of
happiness.” The “hedonic” kind (pursuit of
pleasure, likened to “empty calories” in food)
produces more stress, whereas the
“eudaimonic kind” (the pursuit of purpose and
noble meaning in life, as meant in the
Declaration of Independence), produced less
stress and greater sense of satisfaction with
life. The effects can be measured in epigenetic
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markers on genes.
More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据


Extra layer of information: As you grow, epigenetics modifies the
genes in your brain. An article on Medical Xpress says that
epigenetic information adds to genetic information content:
Changes in the epigenome, including chemical modifications of
DNA, can act as an extra layer of information in the genome,
and are thought to play a role in learning and memory, as well as
in age-related cognitive decline. The results of a new study by
scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies show that the
landscape of DNA methylation, a particular type of epigenomic
modification, is highly dynamic in brain cells during the
transition from birth to adulthood, helping to understand how
information in the genomes of cells in the brain is controlled
from fetal development to adulthood. The brain is much more
complex than all other organs in the body and this discovery
opens the door to a deeper understanding of how the intricate
patterns of connectivity in the brain are formed.
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More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据

These and other recent stories represent
a major paradigm shift in genetics. Gone
is the old “Central Dogma” that considered
genes the master regulators. The path of
information flow is not simply DNA to RNA
to protein anymore; it’s a much more
dynamic, elaborate choreography, the
intricacies of which scientists are only
beginning to understand.
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More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据
 Needless to say, the discovery of “an
extra layer of information” above DNA
is worrisome to Darwinism but
confirming of intelligent design. It’s
also helpful to know that our actions
and choices can affect our genes and
those of our children.
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More Evidence for Epigenetic Controls on Genetics
更多表观遗传控制的证据
 We’ll take this opportunity to again
promote the recent book on the
subject by Woodward and Gills, The
Mysterious Epigenome: What Lies
Beyond DNA. Hear a podcast by Dr.
Woodward on ID the Future. Watch a
short presentation by Woodward and
Gills on YouTube.
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Gloria Deo
愿荣耀归上帝

5/8/2017
320