Creationism and Baraminology Research News

This blog has been officially superceded

2008-06-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished transitioning all of my blogs onto my new website. Here is the superceded version of this blog. Also see all of my other blogs.

God, Nature, and Design Conference at Oxford

2008-05-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

This sure looks interesting. Sadly, I am already booked solid for the moment :(

Why Scriptural Geology Failed in the 1800's

2008-04-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

GRISDA has a paper by Warren Johns explaining why he thinks that scriptural geology failed in the 1800s. It has some good ideas. Here are his suggestions:

Restricting flood layers to higher and higher portions of the geologic record

Lack of human fossils in geologic strata

The shift away from the hard facts of geology by the scriptural geologists

The major journals and educational institutions were hostile to traditional religious beliefs

The professionalization of geology made it difficult for part-time geologists (such as the scriptural geologists) to have a voice

Liberal theology was replacing orthodox theology as the dominant view

Art Chadwick's Dino Dig Site

2008-04-28T20:31:00.001-07:00

I found an abstract from a poster session (pg. 49A) given by Art Chadwick on his dino dig site that I thought might be interesting. Not only were they using really cool GPS tech to come up with their maps, they also found the following, which I thought was interesting:

The mass mortality event is preserved within a normally graded bed in a poorly consolidated claystone or mudstone with large limb bones at the base, grading upward to vertebrae and toe bones at all query sites. The bones universally exhibit little evidence of weathering; abrasion and other transport degredation are also conspicuously absent. The claystone is conformably overlain by fine-grained, well-sorted immature sandstone showing evidence of rapid accumulation. We propose that a large population of ornithopods...was catastrophically decimated and initially accumulated in a nearshore freshwater environment. Subsequently, the disarticulating remains were remobilized and transported basinward to a deeper water setting as a graded bone bed.

I had listened to his talk at the BSG conference a while back, but did not remember hearing that the bones were sorted by bone size. Anyway, there's lots of interesting information in there.

Probability

2008-04-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in probability, I think you'll find this blog post very interesting. The comments are also good.

For Intelligent Design purposes, _both_ the frequentist and bayesian outlooks on probability are important. The bayesian outlook is important in examining search strategies of cells for new genome configurations. When searching for a solution, you use probabilities as a way of separating out what you do and don't know.

However, I think that the frequentist outlook is also important. The generation of numbers which form probability curves is important, and I believe it belongs to a general feature of nature which can supply randomized numbers according to probabilities in order to maintain balance within nature.

Being in God's Creation

2008-03-27T20:27:00.000-07:00

Some of the things that have been coming out lately in science news is that, *gasp*, God's Creation is good for us! Things like being out in the sun actually help our bodies fight cancer. And now we are learning that playing outside can lower the risk of allergies. This is also interesting when we consider some of the ideas about symbioses which have been previously considered. Might it be that there are symbionts available in the environment that we are not getting when we are in an environment that is too clean?

Noah's Ark Studies: From Origen to the Present Day

2008-03-20T18:40:00.001-07:00

Bryan's CORE center just put out a short informational essay called How to Build an Ark, which details the studies into the Ark's possible construction from the time of Origen to the present day. It's an interesting read. Some recent ark studies include:

WorldWideFlood.com - a lot of interesting articles on Noah's Ark

Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study

After posting this, I just noticed that AIG is just now coming out with Noah’s Ark: Thinking Outside the Box Pack - might be interesting

Bookstore Improvements and the Future of this Blog

2008-03-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

UPDATE - I put an incorrect link to the bookstore, but it is now fixed!

First of all, I've revamped the bookstore so that it includes a lot more material, but is also better organized. Please let me know if you have additional suggestions. I've tried to weed out the useless stuff, but let me know if I may have missed something or been overly-critical.

Second, for the future of this blog, I'm going to be merging this with a lot of my other activities under the unified banner of Bartlett Publishing. This will probably not happen for a few weeks or months, but I thought you might want to know that it is coming, and the URL for this blog will likely be changing to match.

Eggs and Tracks in the Flood

2008-03-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

Ian Juby has been kind enough to let me repost this from a listserv that we are on together. It's more-or-less an FAQ about flood models, and what they do with eggs and tracks in the flood. I've slightly edited portions of it which were referencing other listserv emails.

I had received some queries and skepticism regarding the dino egg nests, flood deposits, etc.. - and have even heard about people abandoning the faith with one of the main reasons being that land animal tracks werenin the rock record.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I thought I would try to tie this all together (pictureless, unfortunately) into a flood model, to hopefully clear things up. It'll be long, so I've broken it into sections:

Dinosaur egg nests and trackways: are they in flood layers?

Egg nests in more detail

Tracks in more detail

What the bible says about the flood

Flood model

The context of eggs and tracks within the flood model

In conclusion

Dinosaur Egg Nests and Trackways: Are They in Flood Layers?

In short, yes. One must remember that it is not just dinosaur tracks that are in question - there are fossil footprints all throughout the rock record: dinosaur, human, scorpion, amphibian/lizard, spider, bird, etc...

At any rate, there are tracks of land animals and birds found in very deep layers.

All of these layers are clearly flood layers, and are all clearly associated with each other, via ONE flood. For example, these layers are all parallel to each other, often thousands of feet thick - yet the layers will bend (in unison) over mountains and uplifts. I can't really go into a lot of detail here, other than to say that the big picture screams "global flood."

The layers are parrallel to each other, sometimes found all over the world, and bending over mountains which also would have been formed during the later part of the flood.

The dinosaur eggs are no exception - in fact, even the evolutionists say that the eggs are laid on tidal flats!

So yes, the trackways and egg "nests" are in flood layers. The tracks and eggs often have hundreds (thousands?) of feet of sedimentary layers on top of them - layers that are parallel to all the rest of the rock record, and often found around the world.

Egg Nests in More Detail

I will mostly defer to the CRSQ article "Dinosaur egg nests reinterpreted," available on the CRSQ website.

I will merely refer to that article, citing major points from it, as well as my own two cents on a number of things, having had the opportunity now to see dozens of dinosaur egg clutches and remains (either in person, by photograph, or by scientific literature).

eggs are rarely in nests, and often found in fragments and caved-in.

what is commonly referred to as a "nest" is not at all nest-like, merely a clutch of eggs

as for the nests that are genuine nests, so what? How long would it take to make an egg nest? A few hours?

embryos are exceedingly rare in dino eggs; there was no incubation time before they were destroyed, presumably by the overburden that rapidly accumulated on them

the egg clutches, when studied closely, actually show that they were laid in stressful conditions - not ideal conditions.

there has now been _several_ oviraptors found buried with/on their nests - wikipedia has a nice photo of citipati, an oviraptor found buried alive on its nest. This is hardly evidence against the flood! Much ado was made by the dino-to-bird enthusiasts who simply assumed that its position reflected its brooding pattern (like a chicken), apparently ignoring the more likely explanation that it was trying to protect its eggs, even while being buried alive with them. Even the evolutionists know that these oviraptors were buried by a flash flood while sitting on their nests! They are found in layers that even the evolutionists claim were river beds or tidal flats!

embryos that are found in eggs can be explained by stressful conditions, where the mother simply carried the eggs so long that incubation took place, before discharging the eggs

while eggs, like tracks, are usually found very near the surface, there is often hundreds to thousands of vertical feet of sediments on top of them.

One can see how someone's faith can be shaken - the layers are claimed to be made by Noah's flood, so how on earth were dinosaurs laying their eggs in the bottom of a raging ocean during a global flood?

Tracks in More Detail

I've also now gotten to study tracks (including some megatrack sites) all over North America.

Contrary to what is commonly portrayed, tracks are an excellent evidence for rapid, catastrophic geological processes. The sediments they are found in must be deposited rapidly, in large quantities over vast areas, and must lithify (harden) rapidly.

There have been numerous dinosaur tracks found which mimic the coconino amphibian tracks in the Grand Canyon: The tracks go from very deep impressions, to lighter, to claws only, to completely vanishing. Even the evolutionists have acknowledged that these are from dinosaurs who went swimming! However, using the bighorn basin tracks in Wyoming as an example, you'll notice the evo's have painted a pretty picture of the nice dinosaur stepping off a shoreline into deeper and deeper water, eventually swimming. Ahhh, what a nice picture of dinosaur going for a cool, refreshing swim. However, this nice picture is not even remotely close to reality. The layers the swimming tracks are found on are FLAT. They are TIDAL FLATS. The dinosaur did NOT go down into the water, the water came UP, and the dinosaur had no choice but to start swimming!

Such trackways are common.

I also have photos of dinosaur tracks that have clearly been made in fast-moving water, as the trackways "crabtracked", or walked sideways, with the position of the feet being twisted by the current the dinosaur was walking in.

Tracks are always found on these "tidal flats", or layers that usually extend flat over large portions of the country/continent.

Using the Red Fleet track site in Utah as another example, the dinosaur tracks are under about 1,000 feet of sedimentary layers. That's how much overburden is within eyesight - I don't know how much may have been removed or may still be found on top of that 1,000 feet or so, beyond eyesight.

The Price, Utah coal mine tracks are very famous indeed, and very important to the discussion. The tracks were made in the incredibly thick layers of plant matter that now make up the coal - evidence of a watery catastrophe. The tracks are found on MULTIPLE levels, stratigraphically. In other words, they are found in rock layers tens to hundreds of feet higher in the rock sequence. There are polystrate trees in association with the tracks, and this is also apparently true for the Grande Cache tracks in Alberta; in fact, this is most likely the same coal seam and rock layers, thousands of kilometers to the North. These coal seams can be hundreds of feet underground.

Incidentally, the polystrate stumps and the dinosaur tracks themselves can KILL! The lycopod stumps are cone-shaped, and thus can fall out of the roof of the coal mine, once the coal is removed. These can weigh hundreds of kilograms and are nicknamed "kettles." The same goes for the dinosaur tracks - they too can be hundreds of kilograms, and once the coal is removed underneath them, people walking underneath them can get a dino track to the head, killing or injuring.

With the Paluxy river tracks, this is in the Cretaceous chalks, which we discussed previously - a layer which is found on every continent. It was obviously laid down by a global flood, and in the immediate vicinty of here (I'm in Glen Rose right now, writing from the banks of the Paluxy), one can see hundreds of feet of sedimentary layers on top of the tracks. Take a short drive, you can see hundreds of feet more. I don't know what the maximum thickness of overburden would be.

These are just the dinosaur tracks I'm discussing here, which are obviously in the middle of "flood layers." Once can see how someone's faith can be shaken by the "evidence." After all, how on earth can dinosaurs wander around the bottom of a raging ocean, in the middle of a global flood?

What the Bible Says About the Flood

This is key to understanding the whole scenario. Anti-creationists betray their ignorance about the global flood (and its overwhelming evidence) and what the bible claims.

The flood did NOT happen overnight!

it was 40 DAYS (almost a month and a half!) before the ark was lifted

it was 150 DAYS (FIVE MONTHS!!!) before the highest mountains were covered

the mountains rose out of the flood waters

obviously we're not underwater now, so the floodwaters LEFT the continents

Flood Model

It does not matter which flood model you favour - the points remain the same:

Now let's logicaly follow this through: What would happen during a global flood?

Today, we have TIDES. Do not underestimate the power of these tides. Obviously the tides would still be present during the flood - in fact, if anything, they would be enhanced.

Even going by today's tides, which average 3 to 5 feet, a five foot tide is a pretty serious tide!

So, every twelve hours we have a tide that comes in, and goes out. During the flood, each tide would be HIGHER than the last, because the flood waters are RISING. I would suggest a ten foot high tide is not at all out of line.

By comparison, the Inodesian Tsunamis were less than 30 feet.

During the Indonesian tsunami, we learned many things about sedimentary deposition; for example, one wave can lay down 3 to 5 sedimentary layers.

Thus, every twelve hours, during a global flood, we can lay down multiple layers with each incoming tidal wave (higher than the last), as well as "who knows how many" layers being deposited by waves superimposed upon the tidal wave.

We also saw excellent examples of organism sorting during the Indonesian tsunami:

People dead: > 280,000
Animals dead: 0?

It's like the animals KNEW it was coming and headed for high ground.

I've also been continuously amazed at what we've learned here at Glen Rose with our flume research.

One of the thing that's amazed me here as how we can dump ENORMOUS amounts of dirt with just a little bit of surprisingly slow-moving water! In our original, linear-flume experiments, our water speed was a pretty constant five feet per second - not a lot of velocity at all! We usually deposited sediments nearly the same thickness of the water! During our second runs, we were not depositing anywhere near as many sediments, though the water was faster, and thus more capable of carrying more sediments. The reason had nothing to do with the speed - it had to do with our sediment/water ratio - we had lots of water and very few sediments. Lots of sediments can be moved even with slow-moving water.

The Context of Eggs and Tracks Within the Flood Model

So, within my flood model (which I think is quite reasonable), every twelve hours you have a fresh wave of water and sediments washing higher on land. The water goes out during low tide, leaving behind the nice, freshly laid sediments. This goes on for MONTHS.

During this time, dinosaurs gestating eggs want to either a) make a nest (instinct would drive them to do this) or b) ditch the eggs to save energy as they flee the oncoming flood waters (again, instinct would also drive them to do this).

During low tide, dinosaurs, people, birds, etc..., would go out onto the tidal flats either foraging for food, or trying to get to other high ground.

High tide would come in, burying the tracks. Whether the tracks were preserved by rapid lithification of the sediments, or rapid burial, in either case, the preservation had to be rapid. Some dinosaurs would be forced to swim as the rising waters came in. Perhaps people, dinosaurs, and other animals, simply swam for a few hours until the tide went out. Some are swept out to sea, others deposited on the newly deposited flats.

As a side note, it is remarkable how far one can walk - especially if in a hurry. I often go for a ten mile hike "just for fun" and can keep a four mile per hour pace quite easily while walking railroad tracks. I don't know how far a human or dinosaur could walk/run between tides, but it could potentially be an incredible distance. Let us also keep in mind that conditions were obviously radically different at the time of the flood - one look at giants in the fossil record settles that issue. Under these better environmental conditions, people can walk farther without fatigue. Thus, it is quite possible that even humans could cover incredible distances during the few hours of low tide.

Some dinosaurs would ditch their eggs as the next tide came in; this is why most eggs are found in disorganized piles, or in rows. They are not "nests" but rather discarded eggs.

Some dinosaurs would attempt to make an egg nest. This can be done very quickly in between tides - why not? Oviraptor citipati (and others) can be buried by surprisingly slow-moving water which is merely heavily laden with sediments. The tidal waters of the Bay of Fundy are very slow moving, but rise and fall up to 50 feet! These tides can KILL if you get stuck out in the mud during low tide. It does not take water of incredible velocity to carry sediments, nor to bury organisms, it just takes lots of dirt and water.

Scorpion and spider tracks within the coconino sandstones are often cited as evidence that they were "deserts" and not laid by the flood. Hogwash. Spiders are too light to make tracks in sand - especially the depth of the tracks we find (I have some of these in my museum collection).

However, SEA spiders are negatively bouyant (very dense and heavy for their size) and are the more likely candidate for the "octopod" tracks within the coconino. As for the "Scorpion" tracks, they could have been from a sea scorpion, but let's assume they are from a scorpion. Scorpions can live for DAYS underwater. Furthermore, fossil "scorpion" tracks have been found on ellesmere island in the Canadian high arctic. While at Joggins last summer, we stumbled upon a young man, a rock hound who'd been collecting there for years, who'd found a FOSSIL SCORPION at Joggins - nobody is claiming that Joggins was a desert! They're claiming it was the shore of an ocean!

In conclusion

Tracks and eggs are definitely made in "flood deposits" from Noah's flood. However, they are easily explained, and in fact, BEST explained, within the context of a global flood.

International Conference on Creationism 2008

2008-02-10T18:27:00.000-08:00

Just got word that ICC 2008 is going to be in Pittsburgh, PA, August 3-7. It and the BSG conference are back-to-back and in the same hotel!!! Very exciting! I am going to try to be at both. They have some of the abstracts posted already:

Biological Creation and Relationship - The Prevalence of Symbiosis in Nature - Oooohh, one of my favorite subjects!

The Origin of the Elements - I think this is going to be Setterfield's paper on how the elements can originate from water in a plasma form - very cool!

Catastrophic Geology of the Northern Rocky Mountains - Catastrophic geology is always a fun subject :)

Anyway, it looks like a great time for everyone. And remember, if you didn't get a chance to get your papers into ICC, I'm guessing the BSG will have a pretty big turnout this year as well, since it is right afterwards in the same hotel!

Combined BSG/Creation Geology Group Conference

2008-02-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

The 2008 BSG conference is going to be held combined with the Creation Geology Group conference. The conference, titled "Frontiers in Creation Research", will be held August 7-8 in Pittsburgh. See more information at the BSG conference website. Abstracts are due March 28.

Stuff that's just cool

2008-01-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

It turns out, some DNA encodes things on both its strands.

New Creation Journal! Online and Free!

2008-01-16T22:06:00.000-08:00

AIG has a new research journal out with Andrew Snelling as the editor. The most exciting part -- the journal is online, free, and freely sharable!

Finally, someone gets it, and understands what will take Creation research to the next level.

Here's the link: The Answers Research Journal

RATE Diamond Results Duplicated and Reported

2008-01-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

A recent paper by Taylor and Southon, Use of natural diamonds to monitor ¹⁴C AMS instrument backgrounds, confirms the results that the RATE group discovered in testing diamonds for C14.

According to the paper, AMS systems should in theory be capable of detecting apparent ages of up to 100,000 years. In order to minimize sample contamination, Taylor and Southon used diamonds which are impervious to most types of contamination which had been removed from paleozoic strata.

This is related to the ability of diamonds to repel and exclude water from adhering to its surface, a very unusual property for a mineral. It was this unique physical characteristic of diamond that was the basis of our hypothesis that this surface would eliminate or significantly reduce the adhesion of carbon or carbon-containing molecules from the ion source of an AMS spectrometer that would contribute to a trace memory or sample cross talk effect.

The really interesting part is when you compare the results from multiple cuts of a single diamond compared with other diamonds. The cuts from the single diamond shows a range of 14C content between 0.00015-0.00018 fm (fm=fraction of modern - 69,000-70,000 yrs apparent age). The range from different diamonds is 0.00005-0.00021fm (68,000 - 80,000 yrs apparent age). This indicates that the differences are due to real C14 differences in the diamonds, not in instrumentation. If the problem was instrumentation, then both the split sample and the individual samples should have about the same variance, especially since (by long-age assumptions) both should be C14-dead. Instead, the carbon seems to be intrinsic to the diamonds themselves.

According to the paper:

Our measurements have confirmed our hypothesis that diamonds represent a much "cleaner" surface with respect to adhesion of carbon-containing molecules from the ion source that contribute to trace memory or sample "cross talk" effect. At this time, it is not clear to us what factors might be involved in the greater variability in the apparent ¹⁴C concentrations exhibited in individual diamonds as opposed to splits from a single natural diamond. Possible factors suggested to us are greater variability in the orientation of the crystal facies and microfractures in individual diamonds.

They also mention at the end that they plan on carrying out future experiments on artificial diamonds (in order to control introduction of C14) to see the differences in the machine output.

Anyway, it's a very interesting paper, especially since it essentially duplicates the RATE results, but done using a different laboratory and even for a different purpose (the authors did not give any indication that they doubted the long presumed age of the diamonds).

Highlights from CMI and AIG

2007-12-22T07:46:00.001-08:00

Sorry I haven't been around. The combination of huge projects at work and seminary have taken me away. Seminary is done for the semester, but the huge projects still have a few weeks on them. Anyway, in the interim, here are some highlights from CMI's blog:

Tas Walker gives us some reasons why empirical observations should shorten our view of how long certain things take to happen

Another living fossil

The Destructive Power of Cavitation and Noah's Flood

An Article on Paleokarsts which I have not had time to read

Several examples of rapid petrification and stalactite formation.

AIG's blog also has an interesting postings:

A (very short but interesting) discussion of Creation and Astronomy

Moralizing Non-Believers

2007-12-02T04:18:00.000-08:00

This post is a little off-topic, but the site I was hosting this at may go offline soon, and I need a place to stick it. In any case, here it is:

The Problem of Moralizing Non-believers
Jonathan Bartlett
6/20/2002

Why moralizing non-believers doesn't advance the Kingdom of God even one inch.

Many Christians today are really missing the boat when it comes to doing Christ's work. It seems that the ministry that God has called us to, the Great Commission, has been degraded to the Great Moralization. What I mean is that Christians have essentially given up trying to bring lost people to Jesus, and instead have focused on simply berating them for the way they live their lives.

This seems to me, well, backwards. Isn't living in sin what nonbelievers do? I'm not saying that believers don't sin, just that it's no longer something were bound into doing, it's just something we do because we're idiots. With believers they don't have a choice. Sure, they can stop one sin, but only to replace it with another. The best one can hope for in trying to moralize a non-believer is that the person in question will give up one life of sin for another - and what good is that?

It seems that we are fighting battles which need not be fought. One of my favorite examples of this is the assertion from non-believers that people are born homosexual. Now, I don't really believe it myself, but I hardly see the harm in it. What you have is non-believers coming out in agreement with the Christian doctrine that we are all born with a sinful nature. The fact that they are being specific about their sinful nature isn't that important. Why Christians are so combative about this argument is beyond me.

I've also heard many people, especially creationists, getting all up in arms because people who don't believe in God aren't believing in God being the creator. Well, what do you expect them to believe? It's not a conspiracy, people. People who are
aren't Christians don't act like Christians, and they shouldn't be expected to do so. In fact, I'm rather glad they don't, because it makes it more obvious who needs Jesus. When you see someone who is a murderer, a prostitute, a rapist, a homosexual,
a cheater, or whatever, God's instructions are to simply view them as people who need Jesus. After all, if we fix those things first, what have we really gained? We have someone who is still just as lost as they were before, just lost in a different jungle.

The people who are trying to change the world to Christian principles without first having them know Jesus is to both mock Christ and deny His power. You are mocking Him because you are belittling the importance of a relationship with Him. You are denying His power because your actions imply that you can lead a godly life without God. How dare you.

New Video: Thinking About Creation - Irreducible Complexity pt 1

2007-11-04T06:44:00.000-08:00

I just finished producing my next video in the Thinking About Creation series. This one is the first of several (probably 2 or 3) on Irreducible Complexity. This one covers the basics of what irreducible complexity is and how it relates to design thinking:

Complete Creation pt 3

2007-11-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

Ian Juby has a new edition of Complete Creation out. This is his best one yet, as it covers some of his own personal study of Joggins.

Shots of the Moon

2007-10-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't been updating the blog -- seminary + work is killing me. However, in a moment of spare time, my 5-year-old son and I looked at the moon tonight, and after he went to bed I took some shots. These are actually pretty good pictures considering it was a $70 telescope and a fairly cheap camera, and I don't know what I'm doing :)

Anyway, here are the pictures:

A Call for a New Kind of Seminary

2007-09-20T19:46:00.001-07:00

The current method of seminary just doesn't work. Perhaps in years past it was a great idea, but the present local Church has suffered greatly because of the seminaries. The local Church has suffered in the following ways:

The divide between lay and clergy is too wide. Lay people need access to more in-depth Biblical training, and pastors need more real-life experience.

The divide between the Church and the seminary is too wide. Seminaries often no longer reflect who Christ is, but instead try to be secular institutions which happen to teach theological ideas, rather than being an extension of the Church.

The seminaries which are gospel-focused have often lost their academic footings, and place the Church in jeopardy for lack of reasoned ideas.

Seminaries require potential clergy to take on huge debt loads, while debt is not something that Christians should be encouraging.

What I propose is that the local Churches take back seminary, literally. I'm not saying we should reform our institutions, but rather that we should move the physical location of learning back to the Churches themselves. Look, knowing the deep truths of the Bible is not something that should be reserved for clergy. We are all responsible for our faith, and in fact, any of us may be called to act in clergy-like roles. After all, we are God's priesthood. Why should the local Church not provide full theological training to anyone who wants it? Should knowing God and His word not be the right of every child of God?

Now, to make this happen will require quite a lot of work. First of all, those who have been gifted academically need to stop being greedy. Now, everyone knows that authors usually don't make much money, but that doesn't mean they aren't greedy. Many of them view their work as "theirs", and guard it jealously. They don't want any unauthorized reproductions - least of all unauthorized mass reproductions. And heaven for bid such information be freely available on the Internet!

The truth is, those who are gifted academically need to acknowledge that their gift is from God and that it is their responsibility to share that gift with the whole Church. Anything else is boasting in yourself of what God has freely given. This isn't to say that such people should not be paid. There are many avenues of payment that don't require that knowledge be withheld from those who thirst for it. Pastor's frequently make tape recordings of their sermons and hand them out to anyone who asks, and they still get paid. The fact is, the secular world is already understanding this, and us Christians just can't seem to understand this "sharing" concept.

It will also take dedication from the lay people. They aren't used to having anything either required of them, or even to attain such heights. They will have to be coached, and let them know that yes they CAN learn about God. Yes, it isn't just people in dark robes who can analyze scripture. It is every Christian's right to know God's word. In fact, it is a responsibility to know it, and know how to use it. But when was the last time a Church taught the basics of Biblical Interpretation? When have they taught the ancient languages?

In addition, we need to stop viewing pastorship as a lifelong notion. Certainly there will be some, if not many lifelong pastors. However, we should not perceive this as a foregone conclusion. In Paul's churches, the people who took the reigns of the Church after him were those who labored with him. He did not need to send out a search committee for pastors. They were already in the midst of the Church. God can raise up leaders from within. We don't have to look high and low for them. They are already here. If we bothered to teach our lay members, they would have the capacity to take the lead when needed.

Paul taught. In Ephesus he taught for hours each day for many years. Ephesus became a mighty Church. When it was persecuted, it caused many Churches to spring up in the surrounding areas. You see, the lay members had been well-taught, so when it was time, they were easily ready to take the leadership role. They didn't have to wait and find a pastor, or wait for some new kid to pass through seminary. The people were already educated.

So am I just complaining, or do I have a plan? Well, I have the beginnings of a plan. With your prayers and your help, you might be able to help me make this a reality. I estimate it will take 10 to 15 years to make this happen, but I think it can be done. Here's what I'm thinking of:

Find a teacher

The teacher teaches one course at a time. The courses are videotaped.

To start out with, the courses will utilize standard, copyrighted textbooks. Hopefully these can be replaced with open ones over time.

When future students take the course, they simply download the videos.

The teacher is available to answer questions and comment on homework (yes, there would still be homework).

The students can do the course and homework at ANY pace. When they finish a homework item, they pass it on to the teacher.

The teacher examines and comments on the homework, and tells the student whether the student should spend more time studying the subject or should continue on further. The teacher also provides additional insight to aide the student's thinking.

By going through this process, one course at a time, we can develop a full seminary education that's available to any person who wants to love God with all of their mind. It will bring academia back to the Church, and remove the current separation.

Sorry for the lack of posting

2007-08-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

School has started again, and I'm busy learning Hebrew, reading Greek, and learning the history of Christianity. I'll hopefully get some chance to post, but currently I am just too busy.

Beijing Anomaly - What is it Evidence for?

2007-08-11T19:29:00.000-07:00

A recent article from CMI discusses a recent discovery of a vast underground reservoir of water called the Beijing anomaly. The article says that the anomaly is evidence for Baumgardner's catastrophic plate techtonics, in which rapidly subducting tectonic plates would have pulled massive amounts of sediments and water into the earth's mantle. He says that not only that, but he goes on to say:

Runaway subduction may well be responsible for the water in the Beijing anomaly. But even larger volumes of mineral-laden fluids (hydrothermal fluids) could have reached the upper mantle and the crust. Wherever they would have filtered through unbound sediments (and Noah’s Flood surely produced tremendous amounts of them) the dissolved minerals would precipitate, cementing the unbound sediments into hard rock. About 90% of all sedimentary rocks are considered to be ‘terrigenous’ i.e. made of fragments of previous rocks eroded away from the continents and bound together by chemical cements.

Anyway, very interesting. But I also wonder if this could be evidence for the hydroplate theory. Might this large chamber of water be part of the "fountains of the great deep" that broke open? Anyway, lots of interesting things to think about.

Global Geological Outcrops and Other Implications of the Flood

2007-08-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

Ian Juby has another video out, which covers some fascinating data concerning flood deposition including the burial of polystrate trees as well as the existence of global strata. Anyway, it's a very fascinating video. One of the more interesting facts is that the upright polystrate plants are almost always hollow reeds, while the ones on their sides are hardwood, and they are all buried together. This indicates catastrophic burial in water (as I understand the reeds will fload upright while the hardwood will float on its side). Anyway, here's the video:

Journal of Creation Back-Issues Now Free Online!!!

2007-08-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

The Journal of Creation is beginning a massive effort to bring its back-issues online -- for free!

This is exciting news, as there have been many instances where I've wanted to look up past information referenced in current sources and have been unable to do so because I cannot get access to them. So this is fantastic! Thanks CMI!

Also, I think that ICR is working on putting together an online journal that can include multimedia content, which I believe would be the first technical journal to do so. Wouldn't it be cool, rather than just reading about flume experiments with sedimentation, to actually watch one? That's what ICR is planning on doing. Exciting stuff! I must say, I am thankful to be a Creationist today with all of these wonderful resources starting to bloom.

The Sumerian King List

2007-08-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting ancient documents is the Sumerian King List, which includes a section on kings who lived before the flood. A summary of the king list is presented:

King	Length of Reign	Location of Reign
Alulim	28,800	Eridu
Alalgar	36,000	Eridu
Enmenluanna	43,200	Bad-Tibira
Enmengalanna	28,800	Bad-Tibira
Damuzi	36,000	Bad-Tibira
Ensipazianna	28,800	Larag
Enmenduranna	21,000	Zimbir
Uburtutu	18,600	Shurupag
Total Years	241,200

Interestingly, there are the same number of kings in this list as there are generations in the Genesis 5 list (the Sumerian list doesn't include the "first man" nor the flood hero, so we aren't including Adam or Noah in the count). Now, I don't know if the king list represents the same people as the Genesis list, but I do think it at least represents a real historical account of pre-flood history that has been misinterpreted. My main point of argument comes from this paper by Raul Lopez. I am not sure about his equating the king list and the Genesis lineages, but I think makes a lot of sense.

So why are the numbers so high? The way to understand this is to understand the way that Sumerians used numbers.

First, rather than using a positional numbering system, they used a tallying number system. That means that, for example, if we want to write one humdred and two, we would use three digits in a particular order: 102. If we used a tallying system, we would have type of tally mark for the hundreds place, a different type of tally mark for the tens place, and a different type of tally mark for the ones place. Let's pretend that we used "x" for hundreds, "y" for tens, and "z" for ones - then we would write the number as "xzz".

Second, their system was a sexagesimal system. This means it was a base 60. So, rather than having a tens and hundreds place, they had a sixties place and a three thousand six-hundreds place. But they also used an intermediate base of ten. Therefore, they had a mark for the ones place (60⁰), a mark for the tens place (10*60⁰), a mark for the sixties place (60¹), a mark for the six-hundreds place (10*60¹), a mark for the three-thousand six-hundreds place (60²), and a mark for the thirty-six thousandths place (10*60²).

So what does this have to do with how long the ages are? Well, it is Lopez's contention that the original lists were written in base ten, and the Sumerians who first translated the list misunderstood the bases. Let's look at the digits in the list, and compare it to numbers in the Genesis 5 list rounded to the tens place (the Sumerian list is obviously rounded).

King	Reign	10*60²	60²	10*60	Genesis Patriarch	10³	10²	10¹
Alulim	28,800	0	8	0	Seth	0	9	1
Alalgar	36,000	1	0	0	Enosh	0	9	0
Enmenluanna	43,200	1	2	0	Kenan	0	9	1
Enmengalanna	28,800	0	8	0	Mehalel	0	8	9
Damuzi	36,000	1	0	0	Jared	0	9	6
Ensipazianna	28,800	0	8	0	Enoch	0	3	6
Enmenduranna	21,000	0	5	5	Methusaleh	0	9	6
Uburtutu	18,600	0	5	1	Lamech	0	7	7
Symbol Total		6	6	6	Symbol Total	6	6	6
Numeric Total	241,200	6	7	0	Numeric Total	6	7	0

The "total" for the Genesis column is the total of the lifespans, not the total of the length of time that the list spans. The "symbol total" is the total of the symbols as they are presented. The "numeric total" for the Sumerian list is the total that the Sumerian list has, and the "numeric total" for the Genesis list is a rounded total of the exact (not rounded) ages of the kings.

Here are some notable things about the lists:

The same (adjusted) number of patriarchs

The same general magnitude of the symbols used

The exact same symbols could be used for the total ages

Lopez thinks that the ages in the Sumerian king list were adjusted after-the-fact to make the total line up in the sexagesimal system. In fact, with the number of textual differences among the king lists and Genesis copies, it is difficult to know if the numbers could be closer in other texts. Whether or not they are the same people, it does seem interesting that the numbers do have a rough correspondence with each other if interpreted according to a decimal tally system instead of a sexagesimal counting system.

Anyway, this may all be special pleading, but I think it is an interesting paper that probably needs some follow-up work to see if there is more or less there than Lopez indicates. A starting point for research would probably be to evaluate textual variants of both Genesis and the King list to see if other variants have closer or less close correspondences.

Why Were Ancient Bugs So Big and Why Did the Patriarchs Live So Long?

2007-08-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

One of the notable artifacts in the fossil record are the giant bugs that can be found. "300 million years ago" (according to the evolutionists - Creationists generally think these are flood sediments) in the fossil record we find dragonflies the size of hawks! In Biblical history, we also have the curious notion that people lived to very long ages. Could, perhaps, a similar cause be behind people having shorter lives and various organisms not growing to the size they used to?

The Creationist hypothesis has been that before the flood, the earth was very different. And so was the atmosphere. There have been many speculations about exactly how it was different, and what atmospheric/geologic structures made it this way. One of them is that pre-flood, the earth had a high concentration of oxygen and a much higher air pressure. Many creationists think that the reason hyperbaric oxygen therapy can be effective is because it simulates pre-flood conditions (Baby Jessica was treated in this manner, and this can be used as a treatment for diabetic ulcers). I have heard that it was specifically the oxygen therapy that saved her foot from being amputated, but cannot find a reliable source for it. One creationist, for instance, invented a small hyperbaric biosphere chamber. You can see a summary of research results here and here, though I don't know of anyplace where these have been published. Basically, things grew bigger and lived longer.

This idea is now receiving confirmation from this recent study (lay overview here). The basics is that:

The x-ray scans revealed that as beetles become larger, tracheae take up proportionally more room in their bodies because they need to be longer and wider to deliver enough oxygen. This, in turn, inhibits growth by crowding other organs.

The tracheae in the larger beetles took up 20 percent more room than in smaller beetles.

The area where the body and legs meet is particularly limiting, because that opening can only get so big, Harrison noted.

In the smallest beetle, tracheae take up 2 percent of the region, compared with 18 percent in the largest.

Using that information, Harrison estimated that the maximum beetle size under current oxygen levels would be about six inches (15 centimeters).

That coincides roughly with the largest known living beetle, the Titanic longhorn.

So, could the change in oxygen levels, pressure, and other factors account for both the size of insects and increased life span of humans? This is definitely an area open to further Creation research.

Hat Tip to GlobeLens for alerting me to the research.

Twisted Polystrate Plants

2007-07-31T21:21:00.000-07:00

In the Geology conference mentioned earlier, Ian gave his presentation on polystrate plants at Joggins. Anyway, he gave me permission to summarize it for you. I was not there, so this is based on my recollections of what he told me about a year ago when he was researching this. So the errors here are mine, not his.

At Joggins, Ian was taking photographs of the numerous polystrate fossil plants there (a polystrate plant is one that cuts through multiple geological strata). He then noticed something he hadn't before -- they were almost always twisted. So he decides to start examining the twists more closely. Not only are they all twisted, they are all twisted in a clockwise ascending spiral (80% of those studying were spiraled in this fashion; 17% showed no spiralling, and the remaining showed counterclockwise spiralling).

So what causes the spiralling? Do they grow like this? No. And the plants were all bent the same way on the same bedding plane. Underwater tornadoes? No, they would have had to stay centered on the plant while burying it at the same time. Changing flow directions? No.

What is really unusual is that many are bent past the failure point (i.e. they should have broken), but are not broken, indicating that they were being supported while being twisted and buried.

Ian's solution was Coriolis forces due to rapidly shifting continents. He cited an interesting paper which may be showing similar forces in play in the mid-Oceanic ridge.

I don't know a lot about physics, so I can't really comment on Ian's proposed mechanism, but the pattern of twisted polystrate fossils is certainly an interesting one!

Geology Conference Wrap-Up

2007-07-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

Ian gave me what I think is the last of the technical part of the Creation Geology conference. Here is his take on it:

Timothy Clary started off the day with a fascinating overview of the cold blooded/hot blooded dinosaur debate and how it pertains to the potential of higher Oxygen levels in the past.

John Baumgardner then presented some more computer modeling relating to potential rolling of the planet resulting from pangea causing instability in the planet.

Peter Holyland presented for himself and Robert Frohn on DEM (digital elevation maps) for studying post-flood runoff and glaciation studies. This is an area I've had some experience in, so it was especially interesting for me. We talked quite a bit later on as Peter will probably be heading up a Creation research project; a collaboration of a number of fragmented creationists and creation groups around the world who were all attempting to do the same thing: Make global maps of stratigraphy. This was one thing that Peter's company was involved in, and a number of creationists, including myself, are heavily involved in studies of persistent facies and stratigraphic relationships on continental and global scales.
This project will be done on line, and thus we can all contribute and have access to the overall data.

Michael Oard presented his case for the post-flood boundary being in the Mesazoic layers. It was the usual excellent Mike Oard stuff, like drinking from a fire hose.

Aaron Hutchison presented his data from an excellent study in response to Glen Morton's claims that mercury poisoning during the flood would kill off all life on earth, including those after the flood. It was humurous, well thought out, and will be a chapter in the upcoming "Rock Solid Answers" book that John Reed and Mike Oard are editing, of which I also contributed a chapter.

John Doughty presented some fascinating data of anomolous gases (including carbon 14) in various gas wells in the southwest; all points to a very young earth and refutes the old ages assigned to it all.

Lee Spencer presented his case for a flood model attempting to explain the distribution of dinosaurs and stratigraphy. Very interesting tidbits of information strewn all throughout the talk.

Lastly, I got thrown to the lions. I showed evidence that the polystrate plants of Joggins, separated by hundreds to thousands of meters both stratigraphically and geographically, were spiraled, predominantly in a clockwise ascending spiral. It was good because I had already answered all of the objections, but simultaneously it showed me loud and clear that I was not presenting my case and communicating well.

Update from the Creation Geology Conference

2007-07-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

Ian Juby just wrote in concerning the Creation Geology Conference. He has been unable to video blog, so he provided me with a nice update:

There was roughly 50 people who showed up for this event; the first ever of it's kind, and a long time coming. It is being hosted at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.

The purpose of the conference is for Creation Geologists to bounce ideas off of other professionals; this is intended to be the place for model proposal and building where experts can critique your work and ideas.

Andrew Snelling drew the long straw and got to go first, giving us an update on his work cataloging and tabulating Radiohalo populations in various rock types, including various metamorphic rocks. This is a continuation of research from multiple researchers being carried out for literally decades, starting with Dr. Robert Gentry

Lee Spencer then presented a model for fossil distribution during a global flood related to biomes; that is, biological zonation and its possible relationship to why we find fossils where we do in the fossil record.

John Whitmore then attempted to address some of the claims made by old-earthers regarding reef formation and the possibility (as well as the methods) for rapid reef formation in a post-flood world.

I then gave my first paper which basically showed the research that was carried out in Glen Rose on two flumes at the Creation Evidence museum. This was encouraging, as John Whitmore and Ray Strom (a fellow Canadian who was also present) had been carrying out research on the coconino sandstones and sand dunes as I had been, and we were able to share our findings. Ray had some fantastic hi-definition video of sand dunes in California growing right before the camera on a very windy day. It was very enlightening and put more nails in the coffin of the "sand dune" interpretation for the coconino crossbeds.

After an awesome lunch here at the University, Peter Macleod, all the way from Ireland, presented a paper on a flood model he calls Tectonic wedge resonance. Kudos to him as I wouldn't be brave enough to attempt to put together a flood model, and his had many intriguing aspects to it.

John Woodmorappe then gave a paper examining formations called "hard grounds" which are sometimes cited as a supposed evidence for time gaps in the geolog record. It was a fascinating talk and Kurt Wise had some input from a separate study he was carrying out in California which may be related. Discussion on "burrows" and "bore holes" from organisms was interesting.

Ian Taylor gave a paper on the historicity of the old earth; which is a fascinating and important subject, as most people simply assume that the old earth theory was founded in good science. It was not; it was birthed out of religious motivation, and Ian showed some of the intriguing history behind all of this.

John Whitmore then introduced a new geology program Cedarville university to help fill the demand for Creation Geology researchers; this has been a growing need for decades and we look forward to the program being implimented.

Marcus Ross delivered a paper co-authored with David DeWitt and Steve Deckard on educational studies they had carried out on the effectiveness on biblical education in changing world views. This prompted considerable discussion.

After a break for supper, about 30 or so people joined John Whitmore and John Woodmorappe at a limestone ledge to examine hardgrounds and for people to collect the fantastic fossils found in abundance here. This particular limestone layers is an excellent testament to the global flood of Noah, spreading over multiple states as well as multiple provinces in Canada. In fact, this is the same layer that outcrops near my home where I fossil collect all the time.

The conference will continue for another two days.

Forcing a Crisis of Faith on Youth

2007-07-26T21:06:00.000-07:00

I have a rather unusual suggestion for the Church. It is this -- we need to force our young people into a crisis of faith early on -- like Junior High or High School. What I mean is that we need to present, or get someone else to present, during these years, the best evidences against Christianity, against Creation, and against the Bible.

Why? The reason is that our young people, when they leave for college or work, aren't coming back. There are many reasons, but there are two that concern this blog. First of all, when they get to the outside world, they meet people who aren't Christians, and who think that Christianity is stupid. They then get told all of the problems with Christianity. That person is not likely to have heard any of these things before. This brings a few responses:

1) I've been lied to - they think that since their parents never brought this stuff up, and made Christianity sound like it was bullet proof and only stupid or bad people disagreed, that since they've found someone smart, ethical, and with significant doubts about Christianity, this means their parents and Church were lying to them. Depending on what was being taught and how, sometimes this is in fact true.

2) I don't know what to do about my faith - they then have a crisis of faith -- what if this Christianity stuff isn't true? Now, since they were sheltered from this while they were in church with their family, not only are they having a crisis of faith, they are having a crisis of faith with NO ONE around who can help them through!!!

3) I never want to be in that position again - this isn't quite as common, but it happens quite a bit. The person feels stupid and embarrassed and exposed, and they never want to suffer from that again. So they swing the other way. They'll NEVER let themselves be fooled again.

All this happens because they were over-insulated while at Church with their family. What we should be doing is exposing everyone to the strongest arguments against Christianity while they are still young, and force them into a crisis of faith while they are around people who care for them and want to help them work through it. Almost EVERYONE has a crisis of faith. The only question is, would you rather your child's crisis of faith happen when they have no help at all, or when the Church is there to help them through it.

The Church has to wake up and be honest with the difficulties of all its positions if it wants to remain relevant. While we should be "ready to give an answer" that is not the same as pretending to have answers when you don't. If we give our young people the room and freedom to doubt, and care for them and help them through that process rather than keeping them from that process, we will have a better, stronger church.

Creation Geology Conference Proceedings

2007-07-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

The proceedings of Cedarville's first geology conference is now available. A lot of interesting ideas. I'm going to wait to comment until after the conference is over, or at least until we get some video back from Ian. Anyway, it's worth the read.

Your Mind is Not Your Brain

2007-07-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

Denyse O'Leary has a fantastic post about materialism and neuroscience. The part I found most interesting was this, from a neuroscientist who started out as a materialist, but became a dualist because of what he observed during brain surgeries (emphases are mine):

He found that he could elicit all kinds of things from electrically stimulating the brain- memories, emotions, movements of the body, etc. The mental processes elicited were remarkably vivid.Yet in all instances, patients knew that the evoked response was not caused by their own will. Penfield called it 'double consciousness'. Patients always saw the response from a third person perspective, as well as experiencing the response in the first person. Patients always knew that the response was done to them, not by them. Penfield noted that patients always experienced their own responses as observers, as well as participants, and they could always distinguish their own coincident experience from the simultaneous induced response. There always remained a first-person subjectivity that was untouched by electrical stimulation of the brain.

Penfield recognized that there was an irreducible component of human experience that was itself independent of neurophysiology. He noted "Something else finds its dwelling place between the sensory complex and the motor mechanism. . . . There is a switchboard operator as well as a switchboard."

Also fun is the article showing that people can live normal lives with almost no brain at all (there was a similar article in Nature not too long ago -- it has a nice picture of a cranial space almost entirely filled with water).

On a similar but slightly different note, here is an excellent talk by Plantinga on why dualism is much better than materialism.

Creation Geology Conference Next Week

2007-07-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

The Creation Geology conference in Cedarville, Ohio is next week. They have posted the schedule, and it looks fantastic! Hopefully Ian will get time to video blog for us. Ian's Friday talk, "Helical spiral exhibited in polystrate fossils" should be awesome - he has shared with me the contents before. Hopefully he'll get a full video of the talk. The conference is covering a wide range of topics and looks like fun. I wish I could be there!

On another note, YoungCosmos has just opened up a new Creation/ID forum.

Information Systems as Evidence of Design

2007-07-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

I've just put out a new video as part of my "Thinking About Creation" series. You can see all of them (there are only 2 so far, but I have numerous planned) on my YouTube channel. Below is my new video on information systems as evidence for a designer.

I forgot to put in the reference list at the end, so here are my references:

Abel and Trevors, Journal of BioSemiotics -- "More than a Metaphor: Genomes are Objective Sign Systems"

Gitt, W. In the Beginning was Information (condensed form here)

Shannon, C. The Bell System Technical Journal -- "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"

Trevors and Abel, Cell Biology International -- "Chance and Necessity Do Not Explain the Origin of Life"

Yockey, H.P. Computers and Chemistry -- "Origin of Life on Earth and Shannon's Theory of Communication"

Patriarchal Lifespans Follow a Sigmoid Curve

2007-07-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

In a TJ article from 2000 (but just published online today) Raul Lopez points out that the decreasing lifespans after the flood follows a sigmoid curve.

Figure 1 is a plot of the 35 lifespans as a function of date of birth in years BC. It is immediately apparent that the lifespans are not a random or incoherent set of values but that they form a well-defined and regular series with time. Notice how the ages of the prediluvian patriarchs are fairly uniform and run between 895 and 969 with the exception of Lamech (777 years). Following the Flood (F), however, the lifespans drop rapidly and consistently with time. It is interesting to notice that although Shem was born before the Flood he lived most of his life of 600 years after it. The values of the age at death in the period after the Flood from Shem to Terah are between 600 and 148 years. The lifespans from Abraham on continue dropping but at a much slower rate. They run between 180 and 110 years before the Exodus (E). During the Monarchy, longevity continues to slowly drop. The maximum age is 70 years for David, while it is only 36 for Ahaz.

It includes a lot of discussion on possible causes of ageing, but really nothing new. Now, Lopez calculated his curve by plotting the ages based on the date of birth of the individual. I have heard (I will not name the source since I do not have a perfect memory and may be misrepresenting it) that the most regular data points are retrieved if you base it on generations after Noah (though I'm not sure what curve this follows). The person who related this to me also mentioned that the Bristlecone pines (i.e. the oldest tree - thought to be started growing almost immediately after the flood) also follow this same distribution, with the children dying younger, and the children's children dying even younger, following the same basic series as the human lineage. Anyway, I wish I had a source for this information, but I don't, so treat it as speculation, but it would be an interesting research project. Lopez concluded:

The Old Testament life-spans were interpreted in the light of the ageing process in modern populations. Ageing can be characterized by an increase in mortality rate with age. The increase has been found to be exponential and can be expressed by the Gompertz formula.

The Gompertz formula relates the average age to the mortality rate, and Lopez noted that the sample size pre-flood is too small to be certain, but that in general terms if follows the characteristics of what we know about ageing, just at a very low mortality rate.

For more info about sigmoid curves, see here and here.

For more info about the Gompertz formula, see here.

More about the "Death Pose"

2007-07-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

Last year, Ian Juby gave us the low-down on the "death pose" (for more info on Ian and his travelling Creation museum, see ianjuby.org) - the position that dinosaurs are often found in. Here are some of Ian's comments about it:

The first thing you are met with is an in-situ dinosaur cast showing the "death pose" that I have been studying for the past year or so...For those not familiar with this, long necked, articulated animals in the fossil record commonly have their heads arched back as far as they can possibly go...the conventional thinking is that they laid out and dried up, the tendons on the back of the neck shriveled as it dried up, thus pulling the head back.

I have claimed that the heads are arched back due to suffocation: The last thing to go underwater when drowning is the head. Furthermore, while some of the animals exhibiting this death pose have their mouths open, others do not. In either case, even humans that are suffocating arch their heads back. I used to have asthma, that's how I know.

What I'm suggesting is that they were buried alive, and the stress of this event is exhibited in their taphonomy in burial. [NOTE - Ian is indicating that the burial event is the flood and their posture testifies to it]

At the Tyrell they had Archaeopteryx, compsagnathus, and at least EIGHT dinosaurs all exhibiting the death pose. Of those, NONE had tensed legs or arms. Some have the tails arched back as well, which could also be a reaction to being buried alive, or Joe Taylor also suggested defication.

Well, in the most recent issue of Paleobiology, we have additional support for Ian's interpretation of the "Death Pose" in a paper titled The opisthotonic posture of vertebrate skeletons: postmortem contraction or death throws? [NOTE - the "opisthotonic posture" is the "death pose"]

The paper argues:

Conventional post-mortem paleontological explanations for this position has no experimental evidence.

We have a lot of evidence in the clinical literature of why this happens before death

Taphonomic evidence argues against any long-period interpretation of this position because carcasses quickly become stuck to the beach in dry conditions and cannot be moved even by severe flooding.

Opisthotonic postures must have been buried quickly after drowning and then been left undisturbed.

Rigor mortis creates muscle stiffness, not contraction, so it cannot be an explanation of the position, though it can preserve the position after death for a short period if the animal was in that position at the time of death.

A carcass carried in water flow can sometimes cause a similar position to appear, though these are often disarticulated, and they are with the current flow.

The authors described numerous taphonomic experiments (i.e. watching what happens when/after animals die in various conditions) of animals that had been euthanized at a local humane society that validated that none of the post-mortem hypotheses for the posture stands up to experimental scrutiny.

The conclusion:

The available evidence shows that, instead of being a postmortem artifact, the true opisthotonic posture is a consequence of the spasmodic response of the animal's CNS [central nervous system] and musculoskeletal systems to hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and other CNS diseases experienced in the final moments of life. The subsequent onset of rigor mortis would (temporarily) fix the carcass in this position, if it is not previously disturbed, and burial would provide ultimate preservation. So it could be concluded that, in general, vertebrate skeletons preserved in the opisthotonic position were buried soon after death, generally without substantial transport, and did not suffer extensive deterioration from currents or scavengers.

They also point out that the opisthotonic position is correlated with "high basal metabolic rates" (i.e. warm-bloodedness), which I assume they are saying indirectly that dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded, though they hold that more tentatively.

And, for your pleasure, here are most of Ian Juby's "death pose" pictures (he's working on descriptions for these and we will post the page when he has it done):

New Video Series - Part 1: Intelligent Design and Choice

2007-07-04T22:36:00.000-07:00

I'm starting up a new series of videos. This one is much more apologetic than the blog is, because I think a lot of people don't understand what the evidences are for design and creation. Anyway, the goal of the video series is to have numerous short videos covering various evidences.

It takes a surprising amount of time to create a video. Mine are obviously low-budget, and still it took an hour to film and 2 hours to edit a 9-minute video! This may wind up taking up more time than I can manage, but it was fun to at least get started in this endeavor.

Anyway, let me know if you have any comments.

Creation Cosmologies and the Pioneer Anomaly

2007-07-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

I was just told that Russ Humphreys has written on how Creation cosmologies explain the surprising acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft. I'm too tired to make much of this (been working on my next post), but from the overview:

If a large volume of empty space surrounds the matter of the cosmos, so that the cosmos can have a centre of mass, then the matter is in a deep gravitational potential ‘well’. If space is expanding and spreading the matter outward, then the depth of the well is decreasing. According to general relativity, especially a new solution of Einstein’s equations derived in the Appendix (which also deals with Birkhoff’s theorem), the decreasing depth continuously shortens ‘radar’ distances within the well, causing the observed apparent acceleration. The magnitude of the anomalous acceleration implies the bottom of the potential well has not yet risen very far above the critical depth for gravitational time dilation. Thus the Pioneer effect supports the essentials of several creationist cosmologies: a centre of mass, expansion of space and recent time dilation.

The paper itself is here.

Huxley Memorial Debate Now Free Online

2007-07-04T05:10:00.000-07:00

I just found out that the 1986 Huxley Memorial Debate is now free online. I remember it was an enjoyable listen, and many have asked for copies of it, but now it is available free! In fact anything by Wilder-Smith is worth listening to.

New ARN YouTube Videos

2007-07-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

Access Research Network just dropped a whole load of 62 Videos onto YouTube. I'm at a coffee shop right now, so I can't really look at them very much, but this one looked interesting from the title:

Hat tip to UncommonDescent.

Biblical History and Geology

2007-06-28T17:56:00.001-07:00

This video by Ian shows the linkage between Biblical History and geology. I don't necessarily agree with all of the statements in the first part of the video, but starting at time 10:40 in the video, he has a great discussion of the relationship between geology and biblical belief.

Living Fossils

2007-06-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

I've got a lot of stuff I'd like to post, but not enough time to post it. Anyway, Mark Stewart has been collecting a list and recently forwarded it to me with permission to post it. It's very interesting.

Many Creationists use living fossils to ask questions of evolution, such as "why have these things not evolved for so many million years", or, in the case where forms are absent from the intervening periods, "if the fossil record completely missed these, what confidence can we have that the known extents of fossil record existence has anything to do with the actual extents of their existence (i.e. if it went missing for 100 million years, how do we know that it wasn't around 100 million years before the first fossil, or that any fossil wasn't around in completely different time periods, or that the periods are even time periods at all).

However, we are more concerned about what this says about Creationary models. One thing I thought about was that many current flood theories explain the pattern of fossils through an ecological zonation theory -- that is, the fossil record is the record of successive habitats that were overwhelmed by the flood. That's why we find fossils in transitional habitats but not transitional fossils -- i.e. that first you have ocean-bottom dwellers, then fish (well, you have fish pretty much everywhere), and then you have amphibians, then reptiles (mammals are left out because they are usually just not found in flood sediments). So while they are transitions, they are not transitional fossils. Anyway, by looking at the habitats of "living fossils" we can better understand what the pre-flood ecology was like. Anyway, here is Mark's list of transitional fossils, as well as references:

Living Fossils

1. Diplopanax - Creation Ex Nihilo 12(4): 6,7 (Sept - Nov 1990)

2. Tuatara - Biblical Basis for Modern Science by Henry Morris (Baker Book
House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1984) pg.355; Scientific Creationism Edited
by Henry Morris (Master Books: El Cajon, CA, 1974) pg.89; The Genesis Flood
by John Whitcomb & Henry Morris (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing:
Philipsburg, NJ, 1961) pgs.176, 177; The Creation-Evolution Controversy by
R.L. Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.287, 289; "The
Tuatara: Why is it a lone survivor?" by C. M. Bogert, Scientific Monthly, 76
(1953): 165; Sphenodon - Gliedman "Miracle Mutations", Science Digest (Feb,
1982) pgs.90, 92; A Case for Creation by Wayne Frair & Percival Davis (Moody
Press, 1967) pg.65

3. Latimeria chalumnae (Coelacanth) - Also mentioned in Creation Ex Nihilo
15(4): 45 (Sept - Nov, 1993); Creation 23(2): 5 (March - May, 2001); Forey,
"The Coelacanth as a Living Fossil" in Living Fossils, N. Eldredge & S.
Stanley, eds, 1984) pg.166; A Case for Creation by Wayne Frair & Percival
Davis (Moody Press, 1967) pg.65; Genes, Genesis & Evolution by John W. Klotz
(Concordia Publishing House: St. Louis, Missouri, 1955) pgs.200-202; Darwin
Retried: an appeal to reason by Norman Macbeth (Harvard Common Press:
Boston, Massachusetts, 1971) pg.121; Biology: A Search for Order in
Complexity, Edited by John N. Moore & Harold Slusher (Zondervan Publishing
House: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1970) pg.264; The Biblical Basis for Modern
Science by Henry M. Morris (Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1984)
pg.355; Scientific Creationism Edited by Henry Morris (Master Books: El
Cajon, CA, 1974) pg.89; The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb & Henry Morris
(Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing: Philipsburg, NJ, 1961) pgs.177,178;
After Its Kind by Byron C. Nelson (Augsburg

Publishing House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.55, 56; Life (April 3,
1939) pg.26; The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry
Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.288, 292

4. Sea Lillies (echinoderm) - Also mentioned in The Creation-Evolution
Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.288,
293

5. Starfish - Also mentioned in After His Kind by Byron C. Nelson (Augsburg
Publishing House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.59; The
Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland,
Michigan, 1976) pg.287, 290

6. Lobsters

7. Nautilus - Also mentioned in Sturmer, "A small coleoid cephalopod with
soft parts from the lower Devonian discovered using radiography", 318 Nature
(1985) pgs53, 55; Ward, "Is Nautilus a Living Fossil?" in Living Fossils, N.
Eldredge & S. Stanley, eds, 1984) pg.247; The Creation-Evolution Controversy
by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.288

8. Cockroaches - Also mentioned in Kuisinitz, Cockroach: The Ancient
Super-Pest, Science World (Feb 4, 1983) pg.12; The Creation-Evolution
Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg. 287,
290; "Insects in Amber" by C. T. Brues, Scientific American, 185 (1951)
pg.57

9. Dragonflies - Also mentioned in Evolution from Space by F. Hoyle & N.
Wickramasinghe (1981) pg.86, 89; The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R. L.
Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.287; "The Dragonfly:
Fossil on Wings" Science Digest, 49 (1961) pg.6

10. Ginkgo tree (maidenhair tree) - Also mentioned in Genes, Genesis &
Evolution by John Klotz (Concordia Publishing House: St. Louis, Missouri,
1955) pg.200; Darwin Retried: an appeal to reason by Norman Macbeth (Harvard
Common Press; Boston,

Massachusetts, 1971) pg.121; After Its Kind by Byron C. Nelson (Augsburg
Publishing House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.58; The
Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland,
Michigan, 1976) pg.288, 291; Morphology and the Evolution of Fossil Plants
by T. Delevoryas (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962) pg.134

11. Sequoia - Metasequoia glyptostroboides trees mentioned in A Case for
Creation by Wayne Frair & Percival Davis (Moody Press, 1967) pg.65; Genes,
Genesis and Evolution by John W. Klotz (Concordia Publishing House: Saint
Louis, Missouri, 1955) pg. 200; Scientific Creationism Edited by Henry
Morris (Master Books: El Cajon, CA, 1974) pg.89; The Genesis Flood by John
Whitcomb and Henry Morris (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing: Philipsburg,
NJ, 1961) pg.179, 180; The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong
(Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.287,291; "Metasequoia Discovery"
by R. Chaney, American Scientist, 36 (1948) pg.490

12. Peripatus (Wasp)

13. Lingula (Crabs) - 2~13 mentioned in Creation Ex Nihilo 15(2) Our World
(March - May, 1993); J. Beerbower, Search for the Past 168 (1960); A Case
for Creation by Wayne Frair & Percival Davis (Moody Press, 1967) pg.65;
Darwin Retried: An appeal to reason by Norman Macbeth (Harvard Common Press,
Boston, Massachusetts, 1971) pg.121; Scientific Creationism Edited by Henry
Morris (Master Books: El Cajon, CA, 1974) pg.89

14. Robinia and Baetidae (mayflies) Creation Ex Nihilo 15(3): 51 (June -
August, 1993); Evolution From Space, pg.86, 89

15. Syncarid - Creation Ex Nihilo 15(4): 23 (September - November 1993)

16. Liquiddambar - Creation Ex Nihilo 15(4): 45 (Sept - Nov 1993)

17. Comptonia and Limulus (horseshoe crabs) Xiphosurans Creation Ex Nihilo
16(1): 6 (Dec - Feb, 1994); Gliedman, "Miracle Mutations" Science Digest
(Feb, 1982) pg.90, 92; A Case for Creation by Wayne Frair & Percival Davis
(Moody Press, 1967) pg.65; Galatheid crabs & horseshoe crabs in Of Pandas
and People by Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon; Academic Editor Charles Thaxton
(Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas, Texas, 1989) pg.99; "Living fossils"
Creation 26(4): 24,25 (September - November, 2004)

18. Penaeus and Antrimpos (shrimp) Creation Ex Nihilo 16(2): 6 (March - May,
1994)

19. Mapinguari - Creation Ex Nihilo 16(3): 9 (June - August, 1994)

20 Triops cancriformis (tadpole shrimp); Lepidurus apus, Triops - Creation
16(3): 51 (June - August, 1994); Also Creation 16(4): 50,51 (Sept - Nov,
1994); Creation 23(3): 15 (June - Aug, 2001)

21. Polistes (Wasp) - Creation 17(1): 28 (Dec 1994 - Feb 1995)

22. Wollemia nobilis (Wollemi pine tree) - Creation 17(2): 13 (March - May,
1995); Creation 23(1): 6 (Dec 2000 - Feb, 2001); Creation 23(3): 56 (June -
Aug, 2001); Creation 27(4): 8 (September - November 2005) Impact #394 (April
2006) "Wollemi Pine'-Old pollen records for a newly discovered genus of
gymnosperm" Geology Today 11(2): 48-50 (1995) by M Macphail, K Hill, A
Partridge, E Truswell, and C Foster; "Wollemi Pine" Nature Australia 25(2):
22 (1995) by K McGhee; The Wollemi Pine: The Incredible Discovery of a
Living Fossil from the Age of Dinosaurs, 2nd edition (Text Publishing
Company: Melbourne, Australia, 2002) by J Woodford

23. Pleurotomaria - Creation 17(2): 52 (March - May 1995)

24. Crinoid Anthedon - Creation 17(3): 52 (June - Aug 1995)

25. Busycon contrarium - Creation 17(4): 6 (Sept - Nov, 1995)

26. Northomyrmecia macrops (dinosaur ants) - Creation 17(4): 7 (Sept - Nov,
1995); Many ants, J. Beerbower, Search for the Past 168 (1960); A Case for
Creation by Wayne Frair & Percival Davis (Moody Press, 1967) pg.65

27. Bathynomus (Sea lice) - Creation 18(2): 7 (March - May, 1996)

28. Budgerigar (budgies) - Creation 18(3): 8 (June - Aug, 1996)

29. Acer monspessulanum (maple leaf) - Creation 18(3): 41 (June - Aug, 1996)

30. Lavarackorum elseya (turtle) - Creation 18(4): 7 (Sept - Nov, 1996)

31. Anadara (bivalve) - Creation 19(3): 52 (June - Aug, 1997)

32. Exocoetoides minor (flying fish) - Creation 20(1): 56 (Dec 1997 - Feb,
1998)

33. Bohartilla and Stichotreme - Creation 20(3): 55 (June - Aug, 1998)

34. Allaeochelys crassesculptata and Carettochelys insculpta (Fossil &
Living Turtle) - Creation 21(2): 29 (March - May, 1999); Snapping Turtle
mentioned in Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon; Academic
Editor Charles Thaxton (Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas, Texas, 1989) pg.99

35. Rhamphorhynchoid Pterosaur Scaphognathus Crassirostris - Proc 4th Int'l
Conf Creation (1998) pg.253-269

36. Koelreuteria (leaf) - Creation 21(4): 33 (Sept - Nov, 1999)

37. Nightcap Oak (Australian tree) - Creation 23(2): 6 (March - May 2001)

38. Prawn (genus Penacus) - Creation 23(3): 15 (June - Aug, 2001)

39. Raptophasma Kerneggeri (Gladiator insect) assigned to new order
Mantophasmatodea - Creation 25(2): 51,52 (March - May 2003)

40. Bacillus circulans - (bacteria) - 108 Annals N.Y. Acad. Science 453
(1963); Guiness Book of World Records by N. & R. McWhirter (New York:
Sterling, 1973) pg.97; The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong
(Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.287

41. E. elfriedae (squid) - Sturmer, "A small coleoid cephalopod with soft
parts from the lower Devonian discovered using radiography", 318 Nature
pg.53, 55 (1985)

42. Cephalocarids (mollusk) - Hessler, "Cephalocarida: Living Fossil Without
a Fossil Record, in Living Fossils, N. Eldredge & S. Stanley, eds, 1984)
pg.181

43. Neopilinia, Neomphalus, Neritopsis - Batten in id, Living Fossil
Molluscs, pg.218; A Case for Creation by Wayne Frair & Percival Davis (Moody
Press, 1967) pg.65; Scientific Creationism Edited by Henry Morris (Master
Books, El Cajon, CA, 1974) pg. 89; The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb &
Henry Morris (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing: Philipsburg, NJ, 1961)
pg.178; "New Missing Link Discovered" Science by Bentley Glass, Vol.126,
pg.158 (July 26, 1957); The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong
(Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.287, 289; Guiness Book of World
Records, Edited by N. & R. McWhirter (New York: Sterling, 1973) pg.89

44. Campanile symbolicum (snail) - Houbrick in id, The Giant
Creeper...Marine Snail, pg.232

45. Distoma melanioides - Houbrick in id, Snail from South Australia, pg.236

46. Nellia tenella (bryozoan) - Winston & Cheetham, "The Bryozoan Nellia
tenella as a Living Fossil, in id.at 257

47. Heliopora (coelenterate coral) - Colgan, "The Cretaceous Coral
Heliopora..." in id. at 266

48. Bowfin (fishes) - S. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable 83-84
(1981); Of Pandas & People by Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon; Academic Editor
Charles Thaxton (Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas, Texas, 1989) pg.99

49. Lepisosteidae (Gars) - Wiley & Schultze, "Family Lepisosteidae (Gars) as
Living Fossils" in Living Fossils at 160, 163 N. Eldredge & S. Stanley eds
(1984)

50. Lungfishes - S. Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable 84 (1981);
Darwin Retried: an appeal to reason by Norman Macbeth (Harvard Common Press:
Boston Massachusetts, 1971) pg.121

51. Chanidae (teleostean fish) - Patterson "Family Chanidae and Other
Teleostean Fishes as Living Fossils" in Living Fossils at 132 (N. Eldredge &
S. Stanley eds. 1984)

52. Denticeps clupeoides - Greenwood "Denticeps clupeoides Clausen... in
id.at 140

53. Polypterus and Erpetoichthys (osteichthyans) - Greenwood "Polypterus and
Erpetoichthys: Anachronistic Osteichthyans, in id.at 143

54. Sturgeons - Gardiner "Sturgeons as Living Fossils" in id.at 148

55. Amia (neopterygian) - Schultze & Wiley "The Neopterygian Amia as a
Living Fossil" in id. at 153

56. Bat - Mayr, "Discussion" in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian
Interpretation of Evolution 54,58 (P. Moorhead & M. Kaplan eds 1967); Jepsen
"Early Eocene Bat from Wyoming" 154 Science 1333 (1966); E. Russell, The
Diversity of Animals 123 (1962); The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L.
Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.287, 288

57. Protosciurus (flying squirrel) - Emry & Thorington "The Tree Squirrel
Sciurus...as a Living Fossil" in Living Fossils 23,30 (N. Eldredge & S.
Stanley eds. 1984)

58. Tapiridae and Tragulidae (Tragulids) - Janis "Tragulids as Living
Fossils" in id.at 87,93

59. Rhynchochyon (Elephant shrews) - Novacek "Evolutionary Stasis in the
Elephant-Shrew, Rhynchochyon" in id.at 4

60. Tupaia (Tree shrews) - Tattersall "The Tree-Shrew, Tupaia: A 'Living
Fossil Model' of the Ancestral Primate?" in id.at 32

61. Tarsiers - Schwartz "What Is a Tarsier?" in id.at 38

62. Bovidae (Bovids) - Vrba "Evolutionary Pattern and Process in the
Sister-Group Alcelaphini-Aepycerotini (Mammalia: Bovidae), in id. pg. 62

63. Tapirs - Janis "Tapirs as Living Fossils" in id. pg.80

64. Opossums - Also mentioned in A Case for Creation by Wayne Frair &
Percival Davis (Moody Press, 1967) pg.65; Darwin Retried: an appeal to
reason by Norman Macbeth (Harvard Common Press: Boston, Massachusetts, 1971)
pg.121

65. Pangolins

66. New world porcupines - Also mentioned in Of Pandas and People by
Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon; Academic Editor, Charles Thaxton (Haughton
Publishing Co.: Dallas, Texas, 1989) pg.99

67. Aardvarks - 65 ~ 68: W.R. Bird The Origin of Species Revisited
(Philosophical Library: New York, NY, 1987) pg.68; Of Pandas and People by
Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon, Charles B. Thaxton, Academic Editor (Haughton
Publishing co., Dallas, Texas, 1989) pg.99

68. Platypus - Darwin Retried: an appeal to reason by Norman Macbeth
(Harvard Common Press: Boston, Massachusetts, 1971) pg.121

69. Oyster - Darwin Retried: an appeal to reason by Norman Macbeth (Harvard
Common Press: Boston, Massachusetts, 1971) pg. 121

70. Lepidocaris (crustacean) - "Ecology, Paleontology, and Stratigraphy" by
Harry S. Ladd, Science, Vol.129 (Jan 9, 1959) pg. 74; The Genesis Flood by
John Whitcomb & Henry Morris (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing:
Philipsburg, NJ, 1961) pg.178;

Notostracan (crustaceans) in Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis & Dean
Kenyon; Academic Editor Charles Thaxton (Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas,
Texas, 1989) pg.99

71. Hickory (leaf) - After Its Kind by Byron C. Nelson (Augsburg Publishing
House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.52

72. Japanese Oak (leaf) - After Its Kind by Byron Nelson (Augsburg
Publishing House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.53

73. Walnut (leaf) - After Its Kind by Byron Nelson (Augsburg Publishing
House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.54

74. Grape (leaf) - After Its Kind by Byron Nelson (Augsburg Publishing
House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.55

75. Magnolia (leaf) - After Its Kind by Byron Nelson (Augsburg Publishing
House: Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1927) pg.57

76. Spider - The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry
Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.290

77. Myriopod (centipede-millipede) - The Creation-Evolution Controversy by
R.L Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.290

78. Cycad (tree) - Essentials of Earth History by W.L. Stokes (New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1960) pg.266; The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L.
Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg. 288,292

79. Switch-pine

80. Turnip-pine

81. Club-mosses

82. Horsetails

83. Ferns

84. Liverworts

85. Mosses

86. Hornworts - 80~87 in The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong
(Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.288

87. Apus (crustacean) - The International Wildlife Encyclopedia, Eds. M. &
R. Burton (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1969) pg.75; The Creation-
Evolution Controversy by R.L Wysong (Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976)
pg.288

88. Heterodontus Japonicus (Port Jackson Shark)

89. Cow Shark

90. Cat Shark - 89~91 in The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong
(Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.293

91. Sea Urchin - The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry
Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.288; Echinoneid Sea Urchin in Of Pandas
and People by Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon; Academic Editor Charles Thaxton
(Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas, Texas, 1989) pg.99

92. Spirula (squid) - The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong
(Inquiry Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.288, 294

93. Vampyroteuthis (squid-octopus) - The Nightmare World of the Shark by J.
Cook & W. Wisner (New York: Dodd, 1968) pg.12; Abyss - The Deep Sea and the
Creatures That Live in it, by C. Idyll (New York: Crowell, 1971)
pgs.232-253; The Creation-Evolution Controversy by R.L. Wysong (Inquiry
Press: Midland, Michigan, 1976) pg.288, 294

94. Alligators - Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis & Dean Kenyon;
Academic Editor Charles Thaxton (Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas, Texas,
1989) pg.99

95. Sirens (amphibians) - Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis & Dean
Kenyon; Academic Editor Charles Thaxton (Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas,
Texas, 1989) pg.99

96. Kakabekia (protozoan) - Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis & Dean
Kenyon, Academic Editor Charles Thaxton (Haughton Publishing Co.: Dallas,
Texas, 1989) pg.99

97. Salamanders - of the Cryptobranchidae family - Creation 26(2): 26,27
(March - May, 2004) by David Catchpoole

98. Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis - (frog) - Creation 26(3): 8 (June - August
2004) anon.; Nature (October 16, 2003) pp.669-670, 711-714; New Scientist
(October 18, 2003) p.19

99. Diplopanax stachyanthus - woody mastixioid fruit - "Fossil Mastixioid
(Cornaceae) alive in eastern Asia" American Journal of Botany 77: 689-92
(1990) by Richard H. Eyde and Xiang Qiuyun; "Problems in the interpretation
of variation within the fossil record" Creation Research Society Quarterly
28(2): 52,53 (September, 1991) by Trevor J. Major

100. Butterflies - "Fluttering among the dinos" Creation 26(4): 8
(September - November 2004); New Scientist, 27 (March 2004) p.17

101. Rhyniognatha hirsti - "'Evolutionary origins' continue to be pushed
back in time" TJ 18(3): 7 (2004) by Michael J. Oard; "New light shed on the
oldest insect" Nature 427: 627-630 (2004) by MS Engel and DA Grimaldi

102. Diatomyidae (Laotian rock rat) rat-squirrel (rodent) - thought to be
extinct for 11 million years; Science (March 10, 2006) co-authored by Mary
Dawson (Paleontologist, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Natural History)

103. Neoglyphea inopinata - lobster/shrimp-like crustacean; mentioned in
"Living fossil' found in Coral Sea" source:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12875772/; found in the southwest entrance to Manila
Bay, Philippinnes, 1908

104. Neoglyphea neocaledonica - mud lobster/shrimp-like creature; "Living
fossil' found in Coral Sea" http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12875772/ ; found in the
Chesterfield islands, northwest of New Caledonia, Coral Sea; thought to have
been extinct for 60 million years

105. Laonastes aenigmamus - Laotian rock rat; Southeast Asia; Systematics &
Biodiversity (April 2005) Believed to have been extinct for 11 million
years. A rodent in the mammalian group of diatonyids - Answers 1(1): 8, 9
(July - September 2006); "Kebab meat rodent gives birth to new family" New
Scientist 186(2500): 18 (2005) by J. Pickrell; "Rodent resurrection" Science
311(5766): 1341 (2006) by S. Hurtley & P. Szuromi; "Laonastes and the
"Lazarus effect" in recent mammals" Science 311(5766): 1456-1458 (2006)

106. Neoglyphea neocaledonica (crustacean) found in the Coral Sea between
Caledonia & Australia; believed to have been extinct 60 million years;
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12875772 (May 26, 2006);
http://www.msnbc.msn.com:80/id/12875772/ (May 19, 2006)

107. Gracilidris (ant) found in the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola Island;
believed to have been 15-20 million years; "Ants of the Dominican Amber
(Hymenoptera: Formicidae). 3 The subfamily Dolichoderinae" Psyche 92(1):
17-37 (1985) by E.O. Wilson; "Rediscovery of a fossil dolichoderine ant
lineage (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Dolichoderinae) and a description of a new
genus from South America" Zootaxa 1142: 57-68 (2006) by A.L. Wild and F.
Cuezzo

108. Priscomyzon riniensis (lamprey) believed to 360 million years old;
Nature 443(7114): 921-984 (October 26, 2006); Creation 29(2):10 (March - May
2007)

The Upright MRI and Creation in Biology

2007-06-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

Dr. Damadian, the inventor of the original MRI, has now made another breakthrough with the invention of the Upright MRI, as well as an MRI that can be used during surgery. [Hat Tip: creationsafaris]

Why is this relevant to this blog? Dr. Damadian has been openly a young-earth Creationist for his whole career.

In fact, sometimes people forget how much modern origins theory owes to Creation research. Consider the following:

Stratigraphy was pioneered by Steno, whose purpose was to recreate the history of the Genesis flood. His principles of stratigraphy are still taught today.

Taxonomy, which really invigorated the field of biology, was done by Linneaus in his attempt to understand the created kinds.

Genetics, which we all know how important it is, is founded on the principles that Mendel offered, in his attempt to understand change within fixed limits over and against evolutionary principles.

Art Chadwick is pioneering the use of 3D GPS in paleontology, so that he has the exact location and orientation of every bone he has dug up. You can even view maps of the bones in the quarry on his dig website.

Geologist John Baumgardner pioneered the modelling of the Earth's mantel processes in software. His software has been used by NASA as well as other groups, and in fact the Los Alamos National Laboratory wanted access to his code so much that they allowed him to spend half of his time researching Creationism. He also uses this code to analyze the dynamics of Noah's flood, and in fact examining the flood is what brought him to geology in the first place.

Also of note are two biologists who became creationists after making major contributions to the field of evolution:

Dean Kenyon wrote the book on origin of life studies in the 1960s with his book called "Biological Predestination". He is now, I believe, an Old-earth Creationist, doing work in the ID movement.

George Price pioneered the mathematics of group selection, and in the middle of his biology career, had an apparent conversion away from macroevolutionary theory.

John Sanford was co-inventor of the "gene gun" which, if I am not mistaken, was really the first commercially viable mechanism for creating transgenic crops. He is now a Young-earth Creationist and recently wrote the book "Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome".

Also of interest but not quite as groundbreaking as the rest (or maybe it is, I don't know a whole lot about geology so maybe this is more significant than I realize) is the group of Creation geologists who made the cover story for the journal Geology (actual paper is here). While their research was not about Noah's flood, they were investigating the physics of rapid burial, which is pertinent to understanding how creatures died in the flood. It's difficult to say that Creationists are not real scientists when in fact Creationists trying to understand rapid burial mechanisms make it to the front cover of one of the leading Geology journals. (There's many, many other ones I could tell you about, some of which are posted throughout this blog).

What's the point of all of this? Creationism is not a stopping of science. It has a long history of opening the door to new ideas and research that are useful in both Creationary and evolutionary circles.

Another BSG Conference Report

2007-06-16T21:52:00.000-07:00

Salvador Cordova weighs in with his impressions of the BSG Conference. And yes, Sal, more journals would be nice.

BSG Conference Proceedings

2007-06-16T07:13:00.000-07:00

I'm hoping to do more in-depth conversation on some of the individual topics in the conference proceedings. In the meantime, you can download the whole thing. Unfortunately, it has only the abstracts, but thankfully the BSG policy is that all important points and conclusions be covered in the abstract. Anyway, we'll cover them more in the future.

Also, just browsing around, I noticed that AiG has a brand new look.

BSG Conference -- Day 2

2007-06-14T20:27:00.001-07:00

Another report from Jean:

Today we spent the morning looking at the biblical implications related to the Fall and how that may have affected things. The afternoon sessions discussed design. Wilson pointed out in his talk that scary and even deadly strategies were used by prey to thwart predators (e.g. threatening displays and poisons). He argued that these characteristics were 'front loaded' at the time of creation although they may not have
been manifested until after the Fall. Dr. Gollmer discussed design patterns by using comparisons from computer programming. He pointed out that the modularity, reusability and robustness seen in living things were a sign that they had been designed from the top down. This is in contrast with what we would expect from an evolutionary process that would be developing things from the bottom up. There were many other interesting topics discussed that I won't have time to cover (I am supposed to be downstairs with my poster). I give my talk tomorrow.

BSG Conference -- Day 1

2007-06-14T15:03:00.000-07:00

I managed to get Jean Lightner to give me blog updates for the BSG (Baraminology Study Group) conference! Here's a quick recap of day 1:

Your live action BSG reporter here. After breakfast I spent the morning getting A Whirlwind Tour of Creation Biology from Todd Wood. He covered the historical development of ideas in this area. He showed how the authority of Scripture gradually eroded among Christian scientists. Where Scripture seemed at odds with the science of the day, some Christians said that God was just explaining things in simple terms so the ignorant masses could understand things. Those with special scientific knowledge knew that God didn't really mean what he said. This problem of accommodating 'science' appeared well before Darwin. Todd also pointed out a number of concepts, and even debates, within the modern creation movement that were around long before the rise of modern creationism.

I spent the afternoon in the Statistical Baraminology Workshop. Todd covered some basic concepts about baraminology and some statistical methods aimed at finding discontinuities. He showed how datasets could be copied from an Excel spreadsheet and pasted in the correct spot on the BSG website so the computer there would do all the calculations for us. Hopefully a lot more people will learn to use this incredibly valuable resource.

I have a plenary session to attend tonight. I hope to check in with you tomorrow.

Jean

They look like they have a lot of interesting things going on. I'm sadly not able to attend this year -- getting to meet a lot of Creation researchers (including Paul Nelson this year!) is always a ton of fun and enlightening as well.

iTunes University

2007-06-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

If anyone wants to brush up on any academic subject, you might check out the new "iTunes University". It's in iTunes under the iTunes store. I particularly suggest MIT's OpenCourseware as they have been working on their "open-source" course material for about 5 years now. I'm downloading their "intro to biology" courses now. I think I might need a bigger hard drive....

BSG Conference

2007-06-08T05:28:00.000-07:00

The BSG Conference is next week! Sadly, I am unable to go this year (new baby, finances, lots of overtime at work all getting in the way). However, I would love to hear from anyone who attends. The abstract list looks fascinating!

BryanCORE Revamps Website

2007-06-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

It appears that the Bryan Center for Origins Research (BryanCORE) has revamped its website. Of particular interest is its enCORE series which it is making publicly available, detailing for the public notes about the research that CORE is engaged in. Roger Sander's brief analysis of the biodiversity of the Galapagos islands was very interesting, and reminded me a lot of his talk at the 2006 BSG on stochastic versus adaptive radiations. Sanders had used his personal research on the biodiversity of the Robinson Crusoe islands (I think - I may be mistaken as to the location) to argue that species radiations are primarily stochastic rather than adaptive.

Anyway, hat tip to Sudden Creation for noticing the new site.

Estimating a Cell's Contribution to Directed Mutation

2007-06-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

There is a great presentation available from the International Symposium on Neural Networks on the No Free Lunch algorithms. The presentation points out that "evolutionary algorithms" often implicitly import solution space structure information into their search algorithms. It even gives an example of how to measure the imported information in bits based on the difference between the performance of the search algorithm and a random search. The presenter mentions that including the number of bits imported into the search algorithm should be included in every evolutionary paper. However, I think that there is a more significant idea lurking in there somewhere.

Since, according to Marks, you can measure the number of bits imported into a search algorithm by running trials, why don't we apply this to known cases of evolution? It seems that we should be able to calculate the number of bits the cell itself is applying to its own evolution, shouldn't we?

Now, before getting too excited, there are some caveats. The biggest one is that Marks doesn't separate importing information into the search algorithm versus importing information into the environment. Just like you can import bits into the search algorithm, given any search algorithm, you can also import bits into the environment to match the algorithm. So is the design in the search or in the environment? It's a thorny issue.

In any case, even if we can't follow all of the possibilities, we should at least be able to get an estimate of the number of bits being supplied by the cell for its own evolution. This would be interesting to apply to some of the existing data for evolutionary scenarios.

Baraminology from Past Generations

2007-05-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

Todd Wood has a new paper out on some of older discussions of baraminology from the 1500s and 1600s. It's very interesting because while it predates baraminology by several centuries, the framework of thought is already there. For instance:

"Kinds" are not equivalent with species (in fact they have rather broad kinds as well).

They had their own calculations of the space required for the animals on the ark (an interesting project would be to compare this with Woodmorappe's numbers.

Discusses predatory nature of animals pre-flood (though comes to a different conclusion than most modern creationists)

Discusses the shape of the ark for floating on the water

Anyway, it's interesting to see that although most Creationists in the current century knew little of these older works, that these answers are not unique to our generation, but have been recognized century after century.

Creation Research vs. Creation Apologetics

2007-05-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

Over the past 100 years, Creationism has been more apologetically-driven than research-driven. Before that, Creationism (though not called by that name) was actually a key stimulator of the research from the 1600s through the 1800s. The foundations of stratigraphy were laid out by Nicholas Steno, who interpreted the layers based on Noah's flood. The foundations of Taxonomy were laid out by Linneaus who sought to name all of the Genesis kinds. The foundations of Genetics were laid out by Gregor Mendel, who appears to be a creationist of some variety as well. All of these endeavors were laid out by people who used the Biblical account as a basis for further investigation, and founded whole new fields of study simply by trying to understand the full meaning of the Bible.

Over the last 100 years, Creationism has been on the defense from Darwinism (laid out by Darwin, obviously) and Uniformitarianism (laid out by Lyell). This has affected both the attitudes and mindset of those who were engaged with it. Rather than being a pioneering field, Creationism went into apologetics mode, where rather than search out new ideas using the Bible as a basis for understanding, Creationists simply aimed to defend the Bible from attack. I don't want to criticize that per se. I think it is useful and has its time and place. I do this myself on occasion (though rarely on this blog). However, I do want to criticize the general shift of emphasis from placing investigation as the first priority to placing apologetics as the first priority and investigation as a far second.

Thankfully, this trend has been reversing over the pas 10 years or so. But you may be wondering what the problem is with Creation Apologetics. Well, the issue is that doing apologetics tends to miss the point. This may seem counterintuitive, but lets look at a few classes of people who may be considered "open" to receiving the Creation message.

One kind is the "questioner". Someone who has lots of questions and few answers. The problem with apologetics here is that apologetics does not usually seek to engage the other person in their questioning, but instead to provide immediate answers. Whether or not the answers are correct, they completely miss the frame of mind of the one who is a questioner. They want to think through things, and know both what they can and they can't know. Apologists rarely even talk about problems with their theory, and thus leave the "questioner" thinking that they have talking to a used car salesman.

There's a great video dealing with questioners here. This type of person will not deal well with who puts forward a "canned" list of answers.

Another kind is the scientist. People often get the mistaken impression that scientists, and even biologists, are even vaguely represented by people in places like The Panda's Thumb or Talk.Origins. This is simply not the case. In fact, if you look at a lot of the big names there, very few of them are notable biologists. For instance, Nick Matzke's graduate work was in geography, not biology. This isn't to say that none of them (including Nick) know anything about science, but it is a mistake to think that these people are representative of scientists. Most scientists don't have the faintest care what are in the contents of Talk.Origins' index of Creation Claims, or what the Panda's Thumb blog says, or what is on Pharyngula. Most scientists are too busy teaching, researching, experimenting, and writing grant proposals to care about such things. So, while things like the responses to the index of Creationist Claims (also see this list) are useful (I myself have contributed to this from time to time), the fact is that if you are wanting to talk about Creation to a practicing scientist, they are not likely to care.

Jean Lightner permitted me to share this email, and I think it is relevant to this discussion (I've bolded the really interesting parts):

... my scientist/teacher friend who is now voraciously reading the creationist materials I give him, made a telling comment years ago when I first brought the subject of creationup. He said he had only seen one small tract on creation and that he was rather unimpressed. He thought that the arguments they used were a bit silly, but after looking through the on-line curriculum he taught and how it presented evolution, he admitted that maybe it was because of how evolution is presented (as an evolutionist he found the curriculum a bit embarrassing).

The bottom line is this: if you spend your time refuting talk origins material, many scientists will be unimpressed and it is NOT because they are opposed to hearing about creation. Instead, it is a reflection of you using a 'scientifically challenged' source. The best way to present creation to a scientist is to find out their field of study and offer them material by creationary scientists in that field. Dealing with axioms is important too, but then emphasize what will be most familiar to them. Have the courtesy of letting the Holy Spirit do the work. God spent 80 years preparing Moses to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt; we can give him a few years to work on the heart of an evolutionist.

More scientists are open to examining the creationary viewpoint than many of us realize.

The point being is that Talk.Origins vs. Creationists is not a scientific discussion, but rather a discussion of dogmatists and apologists on both sides. That's why such discussions never seem to move anywhere except in circles. Instead of being continually engaging in argument, the Creation Research proposition instead frees up the Creationist to push science forward, and lets the Holy Spirit be the one to do the convincing. Wouldn't it be great if scientists all over the world were reading CRSQ or JoC or some other creationary publication because it consistently had the most fascinating biological discoveries? Don't you think that that would be the best way to keep the gospel message on people's minds to let the Holy Spirit work?

Anyway, I think as we move from apologetics to research, we will find that we no longer need to be apologists.

Canadian Creation Science Museum Makes Front Page News

2007-05-24T21:12:00.001-07:00

The Edmonton Journal, Alberta's leading daily newspaper, has the Big Valley Creation Science Museum (no, this is not AiG's museum, this is another one in Canada) on its front page! The article is surprisingly positive -- you can read it here.

It also made the front page of the Calgary Herald as well, but I don't have the link.

Anyway, this is particular interest to us because Ian Juby (who allows me to post several of his reports on this blog) is one of the key players bringing that museum together.

The video below is their introductory video.

Polystrate Fossils

2007-05-17T22:23:00.000-07:00

Two items on polystrate fossils (polystrate fossils are fossils that form across multiple layers of rock):

CRSQ Paper

CRSQ recently published a paper (and made it available online) called Polystrate Fossils Require Rapid Deposition. It describes many polystrate fossils found, including polystrate trees in coal. The model that the paper describes for the formation of the fossils is a floating vegetation mat - "trees dropped vertically into the strata from a log mat floating on the water during the Genesis Flood...During the Genesis Flood, vegetation dislodged by rising waters would float. Many trees would float in a vertical position because of their heavy root ball"

Some of the evidence:

leaf litter from both deciduous and evergreen trees is abundant along some bedding planes and shows little or no decay

"in these figures that the tree seems to have pushed the strata downward. In Figure 16, the strata were bowed downward a distance of about 0.5 m. This would be unlikely if the trees grew in place. However, if the trees sank from a floating log mat, then soft strata would have been depressed into a bowl shape upon impact."

Another interesting tidbit:

It is interesting that some of the petrified logs are both permineralized and coalified. Some logs were petrified on the interior, but coalified on the exterior. Figure 17 shows one of the numerous trees left by the miners after excavation of the third coal mine. The tree is coalified on the outside, but coalification only locally penetrates into the interior of the tree. In some of the trees with rings, the rings alternated between petrified and coalified (Figure 18). We do not understand the meaning of this pattern.

Pictures from Ian

The second half of Ian's email is also about polystrate fossils. Ian Juby has been examining the Polystrate fossils at Joggins and has been taking lots of photos. Here's the rest of his email:

Here are three photos from Joggins:

The first one is a wide-angle shot of the cliffs so you can see the tilt to
the south, and the planation surface across the top. There is only one thing
that could plane the edges like that, with no differential erosion visible:
The receding flood waters.

The second one is a polystrate that seems to be everyone's favourite, but it's
actually quite small - maybe cutting through six feet total of strata.

The third one is a nicer one, the ruler on the right is 50 cm long, in 5 cm
increments.

If you use the photos in your presentations, I would appreciate a simple credit line link to my website (http://ianjuby.org) , but I realize that's not always feasible or terribly convenient. If you can, it's appreciated, if you can't, oh well then, use'em anyway. If you use them in a book I would appreciate credit line link to my website though please.

Fast-forming stalactites

2007-05-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

Here is the first part of a message I received from my friend Ian Juby, slightly edited (the second part is a different subject which I'll post later):

Here are two photos of stalactites:

Yes, the second one has my dirty, grubby paws in the photo for scale - what
can I say? I'm a working man! Cut me some slack *grin*

These stalactites are one year old. I know this because a year before I went
through this hydroelectric dam and cleaned house, collecting all the
stalactites for creation museums. When I came back a year later, this is what
had grown.

Vance Nelson and I had X-ray diffractometry performed on these (Rocktell labs,
Calgary, Alberta, Raymond Strom, operator) and stalactites Vance had collected
from other man-made structures around North America. The skeptics have
claimed that these fast-growing stalactites are chemically different than cave
stalactites, and that's why they grow faster. What we discovered (and proved
by X-ray diffractometric chemical analysis) was that reality was the exact
opposite: The fastest growing stalactites (the ones from the dam) were the
most chemically identical to cave stalactites and the ones which were the
dirtiest, most chemically different from cave stalactites grew the slowest.

Creation Custom Searching

2007-05-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

I've added a Google "custom search engine" to the right-hand column, which weights articles and sites I think Creationists would find informative. Still tweaking, but it might be useful to you all. Any informative sites that you all think I should include, let me know. Looking primarily for sites that will include original research or in-depth articles. I've actually left off AiG on purpose, because they are so easy to find in Google anyway (this doesn't mean that they won't show up on your searches, but just that I don't give them a special weighting), though I might add some of their most relevant articles.

Anyway, I can bump up entire sites or specific articles, so let me know what you think should be included.

Perhaps a good bibliography of secular research that I could bump up would be good, too.

New Baby (now with a picture)!

2007-05-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

(image is of #2 holding #4)

Crevo baby #4 has arrived today! He weighs in at 7 pounds 9 ounces, born after approx. 36 hours of labor. We had a wonderful doctor who helped us through it.

BSG 2007 Abstracts Being Posted

2007-04-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

BSG 2007 is just around the corner. They have already started posting a list of accepted abstracts.

The theme is exploring natural evil. Paul Nelson will be there, along with a lot of other great people.

One interesting-looking talk is:

"Taxonomic Distribution of 'Thorns and Thistles,'" by Sanders, Bryan College

This has me intrigued.

Another interesting-looking one:

"A systems biology paradigm for cellular pathways and organismic populations: insights from principles of systems engineering" by David Cavanaugh.

Team Creation in top 10% of Folding@Home Scores

2007-04-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

Check out our Latest Stats! We are #5487 of 62074 teams. Please join if you are interested.

Questions That Should Be Asked

2007-04-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

In the paper The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology, [Hat Tip: IDTF] the authors argue that in the (very, very far) future, we will no longer be able to detect the evidences that lead us to the conclusion of the big bang. And, in fact, our observational data would lead us to view the universe as static. IDTF thinks that this is evidence that we live in a privileged place and time in the universe. That may or may not be true, but the theoretical questions that this paper brings are far more interesting.

Assuming that the paper is correct (and I certainly don't know enough about cosmology to say anything there), then that means that we know that it is possible for the evidence to indicate a false understanding of the universe. Think about that -- we have a paper that demonstrates that physical evidence can lead to a false understanding of cosmology even if the data is measured 100% accurate.

So that brings up the question - how do we know that our current view of cosmology is not flawed? How do we know that the data that we need to understand the beginnings of the universe is still in existence? If we know that physical evidence can lead to a false understanding of the historical development of the universe even given uniformitarian assumptions, how do we know that we ourselves are not missing similar typea of evidence needed to understand the universe itself?

Let's extrapolate ourselves out into the far, far future described by Krauss et al. Let's say that some astronomers are doing some calculations and trying to come up with a cosmology. Let's say that all that is left from our century is a basic introductory textbook describing the universe. These astronomers/cosmologists are trying to create a cosmology based on the evidence. Based on the evidence, they propose a static universe (which is what Krauss et al say is what the data will in fact point to at that time). Let's say that a historian comes in and says, "Wait! The ancients (that's us) said that the universe is expanding!" The scientists would laugh and say, "those were primitive people and didn't have access to the same data that we do. Our data firmly supports a static universe. That "expanding universe"/"big bang" idea was just a mythology of creation that they made up to fill their gaps in knowledge." But in fact, it would be us (the ancients) who were the only ones able to detect the evidence. They problem is not that one group is smart and the other is stupid, but that one is working closer to the event and the other is extrapolating from circumstantial data (actually, in this case they both are extrapolating from circumstantial data, just different sets).

So, in the case of Genesis, why should we not believe what has been handed down? The question is not what does the evidence say. Today's evidence is only circumstantial, and, as this paper points out, circumstantial evidence can lead to dramatically wrong conclusions. The question is who do you trust? This is the ultimate question, and cannot be settled based on circumstantial data.

[Related Post -- History, Creation, Observables, and Scientific Theories]

Bear Tracks in the Permian

2007-04-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know if any work has been done in this area (if anyone knows any updated findings on these tracks, let me know), but a friend pointed me to this interesting article from the Smithsonian. Here's an excerpt:

The fossil tracks that MacDonald has collected include a number of what paleontologists like to call "problematica." On one trackway, for example, a three-toed creature apparently took a few steps, then disappeared--as though it took off and flew. "We don't know of any three-toed animals in the Permian," MacDonald points out. "And there aren't supposed to be any birds." He's got several tracks where creatures appear to be walking on their hind legs, others that look almost simian. On one pair of siltstone tablets, I notice some unusually large, deep and scary-looking footprints, each with five arched toe marks, like nails. I comment that they look just like bear tracks. "Yeah," MacDonald says reluctantly, "they sure do." Mammals evolved long after the Permian period [NOTE -- permian is at the end of the paleozoic -- jb], scientists agree, yet these tracks are clearly Permian.

New Creation Journal Call for Papers

2007-04-17T18:53:00.000-07:00

A new Creation journal by the ICR has issued a call for papers. We desperately need more journals. CRSQ is backed up about a year for papers.

I'd also like to see perhaps a non-peer-reviewed resource for Creationists who don't have the time to publish in a refereed journal. I know of many who would love to share their findings, but don't want to go through the pain of peer-review just to be rejected. Obviously such a journal would wind up having a good mix of wheat and chaff, but I think it might be necessary, considering the amount of ideas and research out there and the lack of publishing facilities.

The problem is that there isn't currently a good publishing model for Creationists. Traditional scientific journals have the authors pay for publication, at what are (to me) very expensive prices. Creation researchers are usually researching on their own dime, not with government grants, so they cannot pay publication fees. It's a dilemma to be sure.

Dealing with Tough Parts of Scripture

2007-03-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

Wonders for Oyarsa does an excellent job in struggling to understand the difficult parts of the Bible.

Sometimes we try to take the easy road in reading the Bible and not ask the tough questions. I appreciate Oyarsa's honesty with himself and scripture when reading through such a passage. It's a good example for all of us.

Team Creation for Folding@Home and Ideas for Creation@Home

2007-03-25T04:35:00.000-07:00

I just downloaded the Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3. It is very cool. For those of you who aren't aware, the Playstation 3 uses IBM's new Cell processor, which has 9 cores - a main processor called the PPE (basically a stripped down PowerPC core) and 8 "synergistic" processors called SPEs (kind of glorified altivecs - SIMD units capable of little else - the PS3 actually only has access to 7 of them). The SPEs each run at 3.2 Gigahertz and can each issue a 4-element SIMD floating-point operation each clock cycle, which can also be overlapped with certain other computations. Each Cell processor is worth about 10 normal processors when doing single-precision floating point operations. Anyway, this means that Folding@Home runs lightning fast on them.

Anyway, the Folding@Home client made it into the PS3's Online Network main menu. I downloaded it, and started team creation. If anyone else wants to boost the Creationist contribution to Folding@Home, download the Folding@Home client, and configure it to be on team 59478.

So this got me thinking... wouldn't it be cool to have something like Creation@Home? So that Creation researchers who want access to clustered machines for numerical calculations could simply use the home computing power of Creationists running Creation@Home. Now, this actually has a whole slew of different technical issues than something like Folding@Home. F@H is based on a small set of special-purpose algorithms. However, something general like Creation@Home would require that any arbitrarily-constructed algorithm be runnable on the systems. This might mean that different researchers might have different libraries they need to load, which means that the Creation@Home client would need fuller access to the system. In addition, to get the full benefit of the different platforms (like the PS3), the algorithms would have to be compiled for each platform on the network, and, in the case of the PS3, it would have to be not only re-compiled, but re-written. Also, it would likely be that we would need everyone running the same operating system (like Linux). However, running Linux on the PS3, while doable, is not something that people who have a PS3 for gaming would be willing or able to do.

Anyway, there is a lot of stuff to consider, and the architecture might be something like that of Planet Lab (a description of the architecture is available in this talk (the PlanetLab software is apparently available here).

Anyway, I'm curious to hear from my readers -- who here would run Creation@Home if it were created? How many have a PS3 that they would consider installing something like Creation@Home? Is there anyone here with a numerical simulation they would like to run on Creation@Home?

In any case, if you have a computer (especially a Playstation 3) that sits idle a lot, consider downloading Folding@Home and sign up for "team creation", team 59478.

Fast Formation of Gold Deposits

2007-03-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

GlobeLens has a great article on fast-forming gold deposits. It's interesting that in the last 20 years or so that in a huge number of cases, things that were thought to only form from long periods turned out to form very quickly under unique hydrothermal conditions (i.e. conditions that would be likely on a worldwide basis in a global flood). It has turned out in so many cases that the long ages were assumed, and not deduced, and when the experiments and observations actually occur, they, in many cases, wind up showing that many of these features are fast-forming.

Interesting Book on Natural Design

2007-03-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

Denyse O'Leary pointed out a book that I'm going to have to add to my every-growing list of books that I don't have time to read: J. Scott Turner's The Tinkerer's Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself.

According to the product description:

Physiologist Scott Turner argues eloquently and convincingly that the apparent design we see in the living world only makes sense when we add to Darwin's towering achievement the dimension that much modern molecular biology has left on the gene-splicing floor: the dynamic interaction between living organisms and their environment. Only when we add environmental physiology to natural selection can we begin to understand the beautiful fit between the form life takes and how life works.

More from Margulis - Pointers to Additional Symbiotic Research

2007-03-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to participate in Lynn Margulis's blog tour (also see our previous coverage of Dr. Margulis on this blog). The blog tour was held today at Memoirs of a Skepchick. Dr. Margulis has specialized in speciation through symbioses, so I thought this would be a great chance to ask a question that has been on my mind for a while:

In “symbiotic planet” you seemed to indicate that symbioses might be the driving factor behind speciation and novelty in life history. However, in many cases, you seem to restrict your arguments to the origin of eukaryotes and other microorganisms. I’m personally more curious in the application of these ideas in present biology. Do we know the mechanisms of symbiotic establishments in the wild? What interesting symbioses have we observed, and what mechanisms were involved? Scott Gilbert has done some interesting reviews of biological phenomena in predator/prey relationships, where, during development, a prey can detect its predator in the environment and develop accordingly. Has any such mechanism been established for symbiotic relationships?

In response, Dr. Margulis gives us several interesting things to read. I've added in links to her response to help locate the materials should my readers be interested (post is also slightly edited for spelling and formatting):

Jonathan Bartlett
Do we know the mechanisms of symbiotic establishments in the wild? What interesting symbioses have we observed, and what mechanisms were involved?
I never say anything “is interesting”..except to me or a colleague, family member or friend, but I love your question anyway.

First: Bacteria, including archabacteria, can mate either by cell to cell contact or by dropping one’s DNA into the wetness to be taken up by the other. All bacteria will rather mate than die when that is the choice. Since you can put them in the refrigerator in the evening and make them be another species by morning I agree with Sorin Sonea (book: Prokaryotology, Universite Montreal Press) that they have no species in the sense nucleated organisms have..Then we work with speciated protists that have no sexual life histories but surely that have species identity.

Jonathan, there is a fine literature dating back to the mid 19th Century that has been summarized in several books: Evolution by Association: a History of Symbiosis research (Jan Sapp) our book Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the origins (s, plural) of species (Margulis and Sagan, 2002 Basic Books) and now we found that most of the classical well studied cases were known to Boris Kozo-Polyanski in his book A new Principle of Biology [no link found] (he meant evolution by symbiogenesis) in 1926. This book is nearly all translated by Victor Fet, a biol. prof at Marshall univ in Huntington W V.

By no means are these ideas only in the microcosm. What is a cow (or a bison) unable to eat grass? A starved cow. What is a subterranean termite unable to eat and digest wood? A dead termite. Both these types of animals owe their existence to great communities of highly specific symbionts that digest their foodstuffs, make them change their bodies (over time, of course). The rumen, the hindgut. The literature is vast and so detailed that in 1924-26 K-P wrote a book explaining this..he united Darwin's “natural selection (which only ELIMINATES life forms, does not create them) with SYMBIOGENESIS that does create new species in the same genus. Other modes of species change include: polyploidy in plants, hybridization in marine larvae, karyotypic fissioning (centromere reproduction) in mammals and several other modes [emphases mine]. All are far more significant for the generation of new species than “random mutation”. Of course random mutations hone and refine the bigger hereditary processes but there is no evidence I know of that proves that random mutation GENERATES evolutionary novelty..i.e. new species. All this is detailed in the books I mentioned and see the ISS (International Symbiosis Society) and its journal called Symbiosis.

Platonic Forms and Front Loading

2007-03-13T03:29:00.000-07:00

At UncommonDescent, I put up the following post, which, to my surprise, generated quite a bit of discussion:

I’m currently working through Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems, and came across the following information which seems to be right in line with Denton’s evolution by natural law ideas:

A final, especially counterintuitive feature of RNA sequence space is that all frequent structures are near each other in sequence space. Consider a randomly chosen sequence that folds into a frequent structure and ask how far one has to step away from the original sequence to find a sequence that folds into this second structure…For instance, for RNAs of length n = 100 nucleotides, a sphere of r = 15 mutational steps contains with probability one a sequence for any common structure. This implies that one has to search a vanishingly small fraction of sequence space…to find all common structures.

One of the issues that came up was this -- just how much does this really have to do with intelligent design? If the evolutionary space itself is set up to evolve, does this really have anything to do with Intelligent Design?

Anyway, this is a very good question, and to begin to understand it we need to understand two distinct (but not mutually exclusive hypotheses) in the Intelligent Design world -- front-loading and platonic forms. Just to note, however, not everyone uses these terms equivalently. Especially front-loading, which has a different meaning for nearly every individual who uses it. Anyway, I will attempt to define these two positions, talk about how they relate to each other, and finally, how they relate to this quote from Wagner.

Front-loading

Front-loading is the hypothesis that at some point in the past (usually at the origin of life), organisms were given a rather large deposit of information. The history of life from that point onward has been primarily governed by that information, specializing into the different species we have today. In this view, the original organisms potentially had _more_ information in them than individual organisms do today. The original organisms contained the major patterns and building blocks for all of the major evolutionary themes. Biological patterns may have been stochastically mixed and distributed throughout life (i.e. there was necessarily not _one_ preset destination in mind, just a set of biologically-meaningful patterns from which organisms could choose), but ultimately, the main driver for life patterns comes from this deposit of information.

Now, information, in order to be information, is essentially physics-independent. For example, when you install software on a computer, while the physics of the computer are very much applicable for running the software, you cannot use the physics of the computer to create the software. Intelligent agents use creativity to create the software in a manner that is wholly independent of the physics of computers. Front-loading focuses on the informational aspect of biology -- the physics-independent deposit of information given to the original organism or organisms. Most people who hold to this view think that there is at least some of that original deposit left hanging around in "junk DNA".

The person most active in this area of thinking (if I understand him correctly) is MikeGene and others at TelicThoughts.

Platonic Forms

Platonic forms is the idea that physics is set up so that there are only a small set of possible configurations that life could have. The reason that life keeps coming up with the same type of solutions over and over again is that these are the forms allowed by physics itself. Therefore, biological forms are time-independent and almost completely non-contingent since they are mandated by physics (in the front-loading scenario, they were completely contingent on the information given in the front-loading act).

Michael Denton is the primary proponent of this view, contained in his papers The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms, Physical law not natural selection as the major determinant of biological complexity in the subcellular realm: new support for the pre-Darwinian, and The Laws for Form Revisited. I believe that this is similar to Conway-Morris's claim in Life's Solution, but I have not read it.

Benton's main point is that physics only allows certain biological motifs. And thus, while there are untold numbers of protein sequences, there are only a small number of folds available to them. Therefore, life, even life as we know it, is not contingent on accidents, but instead is the planned outcome of physics.

Comparing the Theories

Both theories are at least somewhat related to Intelligent Design, though platonic forms is more difficult to examine as a hypothesis. Front-loading puts the infusion of information into biological systems as a process that happens essentially within-time, while platonic forms has the design process occurring pre-time or outside of time.

Note that, on a detail level, the two are mutually exclusive. Information requires freedom of choice for the agent, while platonic forms is specifically about excluding freedom of choice through time. That doesn't mean there aren't both mechanisms in play, only that a single mechanisms cannot be simultaneously part of both (though there can be aspects of each -- the point is that one is the result of a limitting process and the other the result of a freeing process).

My own opinion is that there is a platonic-defined set of biological forms, but that they are fundamentally unreachable without an infusion of information. Both processes are active, with platonic forms being the part that keeps system perterbations from becoming catastrophic, but that the preloaded information is what helps adapt to new situations.

Theologically, I think that God did this in order to show both His transcendence and His immanence. He is transcendent, and made physics according to a specific biological plan. However, so that we would know that God is active (and required) in Creation, he made it so that the platonic forms were unreachable except through design (front-loading). That way, we know that biology is not necessary, but instead chosen.

So, in reference to the above-posted Wagner reference, the existence of a clustered functional space in RNA is clearly platonic, while the ability to find that space initially in the original organisms smacks of front-loading. I was going to include another instance of front-loading in this section of Wagner in this post, but it's already too late and I need to study for a test tomorrow and get some sleep.

Randomness and Casinos

2007-03-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to show that some degree of randomness is not incompatible with design (see here and here for starters). However, nullalsalus has a great analogy that should be fairly easy to understand - casinos.

Think of slot machines. The actual result that a given machine will give on any particular pull of the handle is random in many ways. But it is a designed randomness - whether or not a casino will make money on the slot machine is NOT something left up to chance. The individual pulls are randomized, but the effect is not. The individual events are randomized, but the long-range outcome (that the casino winds up winning in the long term) is not.

Large Water Stores Under the Earth's Mantle

2007-03-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

Just to remind everyone, I am not in any way knowledgeable in geology. However, s8int came across a very interesting article, especially considering Walt Brown's flood hypothesis (the water came from underground water-containing chambers):

The Method:

An increasingly popular method, which Wysession used, is to analyze the way waves damp out from their source...Attenuation data tell seismologists how stiff a region is, which is a function of how hot it is and how much water it contains. Looking at the seismic wave speeds and attenuation at the same time can tell whether an anomaly is due to temperature or water.

What was Found:

Beneath Asia, the fallen Pacific sea floor piles up at the base of the mantle. Right above that he observed an "incredibly highly attenuating region, that is both very damping and slightly slow," he said. "Water slows the speed of waves a little. Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well."
...
If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean's worth of water.

Where to Find More:

The research is described in a forthcoming monograph, Earth's Deep Water Cycle, which is in press to be published by the American Geophysical Union.

This work might be of interest to Creationists.

Apparently I need to pay more attention to American Idol

2007-03-07T21:47:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I was in AP Music Theory with Melinda Doolittle when I was in high school. Wierd. I haven't paid a bit of attention to American Idol at all until one of my classmates pointed this out. Go Melinda!

New Conference and New Blog

2007-03-07T11:03:00.000-08:00

Cedarville University (who hosted last year's BSG conference) is hosting a Creationism geology conference this year on July 26-28. Sounds exciting! If anyone manages to go to that conference and wants to post about it here, let me know.

I picked up this tidbit from a new blog on creation and evolution. Note that despite "Crevo Press" as the name of the blogger, this blog has nothing to do with this one (I actually found out about it from my referrer log).

Front-loaded/teleological Evolution, Baraminology, and Common Descent

2007-02-27T19:07:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of front-loaded evolution. I don't go to the same extent that MikeGene does -- I think that the original kinds were separately created, not programmed to evolve from a single-celled organism. However, one thing that many Creationists, ID-ists, and Evolutionists miss is that when one assumes that teleological evolution is possible (that is, evolution that proceeds based on "smart" systems that direct evolution to semi-specific targets), then most arguments against common descent are nullified.

What often happens in the Creationary community is that we have spent so much time arguing against Darwinism that we sometimes forget what it means for Darwinism to be false. That is, once we've won the argument against Darwinism, what then? This time is quickly approaching (or perhaps is already here). The issue is that the arguments against common descent were based on Darwinism. X couldn't evolved from Y because of the hideously complicated algorithms it would have to cross. The problem is that if Darwinism is no longer assumed, this argument doesn't work against common descent. If evolution is directed, then there is no limit to the sophistication of evolutionary pathways. Therefore, complexity cannot be used as an argument against common descent.

So how does this affect us? Not much. Baraminology proceeds from the assumption that the Bible is true, and uses that to move forward. It does not try to prove the Bible's correctness -- only takes it as a given.

However, non-Darwinian/teleological evolution does give Baraminologists a better working relationship with non-Baraminologists. Whether or not common descent is true, if evolution proceeds teleologically, it does mean that there are pre-defined possible forms and mechanisms for organisms to realize. Therefore, baraminology could serve them as well, for define the basic types for biology around which variation happen. Baraminology could determine the "core systems" in existance, no matter whether they happened by independent design or common descent.

So, all that to say, as far as I can tell, when Darwinism is put to rest, there isn't any good argument against (or for) common descent, and in fact the distinction becomes less important. Because the distinction is less important, and the design is recognized, baraminology becomes important both for Creationists and non-Creationists.

Feyerabend on Cranks

2007-02-25T19:12:00.000-08:00

I love Feyerabend. Always a good read. Here is an excerpt of his ideas on the demarcation between science and non-science (from the Galilean library [hat tip: macht]):

It is here, by the way, that the distinction between ‘respectable’ people and cranks must be drawn. The distinction does not lie in the fact that the former suggests what is plausible and promises success, whereas the latter suggest what is implausible, absurd and bound to fail. It cannot lie in this because we never know in advance which theory will be successful and which theory will fail. It takes a long time to decide this question, and every single step leading to such a decision is again open to revision. Nor can the absurdity of a point of view count as a general argument against it. It is a reasonable consideration for the choice of one’s own theories to demand that they seem plausible to oneself. This is one’s private affair, so to speak. But to declare that only plausible theories should be considered is going too far. No, the distinction between the crank and the respectable thinker lies in the research done once a certain point of view is adopted. The crank usually is content with defending the point of view in its original, undeveloped, metaphysical form, and he is not at all prepared to tests its usefulness in all those cases which seem to favour the opponent, or even to admit that there exists a problem. It is this further investigation, the details of it, the knowledge of the difficulties, of the general state of knowledge, the recognition of objections, which distinguishes the ‘respectable thinker’ from the crank. The original content of his theory does not. If he thinks that Aristotle should be given a further chance, let him do it and wait for the results. If he rests content with his assertion and does not start elaborating a new dynamics, if he is unfamiliar with the initial difficulties of his position, then the matter is of no further interest. However, if he does not rest content with Aristotelianism in the form in which it exists today but tries to adapt it to the present situation in astronomy, physics, and micro-physics, making new suggestions, looking at old problems from a new point of view, then be grateful that there is at last somebody who has unusual ideas and do not try to stop him in advance with irrelevant and misguided arguments.

Todd Wood's "State of Baraminology" Report

2007-02-25T18:35:00.000-08:00

In the latest CRSQ, Todd Wood wrote a paper describing the current state of baraminology.

Some interesting highlights:

Summarized methods of classifying baramins, including baraminic distance, ANOPA, and multidimensional scaling, while de-emphasizing interbreedability based on biblical and practical concerns (on a personal note, I am often skeptical of morphological statistical methods for anything simply because of a massive amount of selection bias -- Wood appeared to agree to an extent by mentioning that character selection techniques should be an important future research area for baraminologists)

Wood listed 66 animal groups which had been classified based on baraminology methods. The data that is in so far appears to confirm that "family" is a good starting point baraminology studies, and that while there is sometimes continuity above that level, there are no (or maybe few) instances where discontinuity occurs below that level.

Wood defended baraminology against the charge that there is no currently-known mechanism for producing such diversity in such a short timescale. His answer is:

Related to accepting "too much evolution" is the objection that there is no mechanism capable of producing intrabaraminic diversity in the short chronology (<6000 years) implied by the Bible. I agree completely (Wood, 2002b; Wood and Murray, 2003), but I do not believe that this is a legitimate argument against baraminology. Demanding a mechanism seems to be a prerequisite for acceptance among scientists, but it is not always necessary or even prudent. Consider the preformation/epigenesis debate. In the eighteenth century, when the formal study of embryonic development began, many scientists took the position (called "preformation") that the embryo was merely a miniature adult that mechanically unfolded during development. The epigeneticists argued that development was too complex to be merely the unfolding of preexisting structures, but they had no mechanism to propose instead. The preformationists argued on the basis of the well-known mechanism of Newtonian mechanics, but the epigeneticists held out for an unknown mechanism. Now we know that those who limited themselves to the known mechanisms of the day were wrong, and even 250 years later, we still do not fully understand how embryonic development works. I take from this history the lesson that mechanism is perhaps not as important as what the evidence actually indicates.

An interesting review, but nothing earth-shattering.

YEC and ID Blogs

2007-02-25T18:32:00.000-08:00

Two blogs that anyone interested in Creationism research should take a look at:

1) Salvador Cordova's new blog, Young Cosmos. The current entries are about the Setterfield's work, which is really fascinating.

2) This one isn't quite so new, but it has grown quite quickly in recent months: ResearchID.org. It is a great compendium of ID researchers (as well as Creationists operating within the ID paradigm).

BSG Conference

2007-01-31T23:02:00.000-08:00

I don't remember if I posted this before, but the BSG (Creation Biology Study Group -- formerly the Baraminology Study Group) conference this year is being held in Virginia, focusing on natural evil. I won't be able to make it because #4 is being born shortly before! Anyway, for all those interested you can find the conference details here including the call for abstracts, which are due February 28th. The conference itself is June 13-15.

Also, the BSG's website has a new look. You should check it out!

UPDATE: I just looked on the speakers list, and it turns out that Paul Nelson is one of the speakers! Hopefully, the baby will come a few weeks early and I can steal some time to go watch :)

Tandem Repeats, Growth and Form, Cellular Zip Codes, and Molecular Tags

2007-01-15T21:12:00.000-08:00

In a recent paper, Fondon and Garner found evidence that tandem repeats can control morphological variation in some instances (Hat Tip to Pharyngula). On UD I've pointed out before that tandem repeats can act as tuning knobs for large swaths of functionality in the genome. This appears to be another aspect of this. Obviously this plays into the notions we discussed about prepared genomes.

This also plays into observations made by D'Arcy Thompson, whose book On Growth and Form showed in many cases widely diverse species where features are separable by fairly simple mathematical deformation equations. I wonder if many of those might be specified within the genome by tandem repeats. The cis-regulatory development "kernels" perhaps provide the gross template, while the tandem repeats specify parameters to deformation equations to apply to the kernels.

The evolution of tandem repeats is very highly regular -- they seem to be tightly controlled by the cell to be almost entirely copy-number variations. This lends a lot of weight to the idea that they are indeed tuning knobs on the genome.

On a slightly different note, Rinn et all recently gave evidence that cellular knowledge of position within the body may rest with specific altered gene expression (Hat Tip to Creation Safaris). That is, cells know what kind of tissue and where they are in the body based on gene expression. I believe they were suggesting an epigenetic mechanism for this sort of differentiation (methylation possibly? Or simply a signalling switch left open/closed? chromatin modification? It would be even more interesting if it were a mutation.). The differential expressions they were able to detect were primarily for proximal/distal, anterior/posterior, and dermal/nondermal. You can see the gene expression maps here.

The interesting thing is that (a) there are positional determinants, but (b) the categories they were able to detect are fairly broad, while in ontogeny cells are very finely position-specific. This could mean either that their sample set was not large enough to determine the fine-grained expression pattern differences, they were looking in the wrong place for it, or perhaps that adults cells don't have nearly the same need for position-based knowledge as do embyos.

Anyway, we keep on finding more tagging mechanisms in biochemistry. Someday perhaps I should make a list! That would be fun.

Walt Brown Weighs in on the Canyon

2006-12-31T05:58:00.000-08:00

Walt added a new section to his book (purchase here, though I do not know if it will contain the new information), which is the problem of the creation of the Grand Canyon and his solution for it.

The Tsoan Monobaramin

2006-12-27T23:16:00.000-08:00

In the latest Journal of Creation, Jean Lightner has pointed out a new monobaramin (a monobaramin is a set of taxa which belong to the same baramin) based primarily on breeding studies.

Lightner's basic points:

Ovis (sheep) interbreed readily with each other

Capra (goats) interbreed readily with each other

Capra and Ovis mate often when in the same location. While viable offspring is rare, there are confirmed cases.

From the chart, it seems that the main confirmed data linking Ovis to Capra was a viable hybrid of O. Canadensis with C. Hircus.

UPDATE -- apparently my eyes deceived me. I don't have it in front of me, but Jean let me know that I misread the chart and Capra and Ovis are linked by a hybrid of O. aries and C. hircus.

She also pointed out the significant homology between the sheep, goat, and cattle genomes. Goat and cattle are the most closely aligned, both having the same number of chromosomes (60) and similar layouts (both have 29 pairs of chromosomes with the centromere near one end). The sheep genome differs slightly, but can be easily explained by two robertsonian translocations, which Lightner points out seems to be nonrandom and has a driving mechanism.

I find the genetic data very interesting, but would caution the reader against assuming too much, considering that the genome may not even be the primary originator of form.

Lightner pointed to an interesting paper, Parental origin and the timing of de novo Robertsonian translocation formation.

Lightner, Jean. "Identification of Species within the Sheep-Goat kind (Tsoan monobaramin)," Journal of Creation 20(3):61-65.

Environmental regulation of gene expression

2006-12-27T07:58:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading Gilbert's most recent open-access paper, Mechanisms for the environmental regulation of gene expression. It was decent, but I was hoping for more. So this post will be a suggestion to Creation researchers about better possibilities to investigate along these lines.

Gilbert argued that the environment regulates and instructs gene expression through:

The neuroendocrine system (example: Butterflies are differently colored based on ecdysone, which is produced based on temperature and daylight signals)

As an embryonic inducer (example: Bacteria help gut formation)

As a transcriptional modulator (example: proper methylation is dependent on diet)

Gilbert's main thesis is that the environment provides information to the developing organism. I actually agree with his thesis, but I don't think that what he has presented is a forceful argument for the proposition.

If I give you a set of instructions, and the instructions have a requirements list, if the requirements were not available then the end result would be different, probably a little worse off. For example, if you were baking bread and lacked flour, that would lead to improper bread formation (though I know a few cooks who could probably pull it off). That doesn't mean that the flour is in any meaningful way instructing the bread-making. The instructions are still fully-contained within the recipe and/or the cook's mind. If the requirements are not present, the result is deficient, not different.

If, however, the recipe says "buy X from the store and follow the preparation instructions on the package (varies by brand)", then in fact the ingredients are instructing the development of the recipe. Having different brands gives you different results, but none of them are deficient. Gilbert's paper suffered greatly because he used deficiency as a substitute for difference.

If the environment is truly instructing the organism (and I think it is), here's some things we may expect to find:

If an organism is transplanted from one environment to another, it will develop symbioses with different bacteria after a generation or two.

Different (healthy) diets of mothers will cause different methylation patterns. These methylation patterns will activate/repress genes as appropriate for the type and quantity of food being consumed. The methylation patterns will prepare the new baby for the nutrition available.

Different temperatures/conditions will cause a change in an organism that will benefit the organism in the environment they will face, for the season they will be born into..

In addition, there are probably also reciprocal effects, such as the ability of an organism to determine what the ecosystem needs, and activate/build/repress genes in order to make the organism provide for its environment, not just consume.

Gilbert's previous paper actually made a much better case, and I'm surprised he mentioned it only briefly. It focused on predator/prey relationships that were managed by kairomones (where the prey would develop differently based on predators in the area!) among other things.

Anyway, I have great hope for this line of research, but this particular paper doesn't get us there.

New Bookstore!

2006-12-27T07:50:00.000-08:00

I have opened up a Creationism Bookstore. My goal is to only carry high quality Creation material. Also, secular material is included (even if it is profoundly negative towards Creationists) if I think it would be of use to Creation researchers. I have not read all of the material, but believe it all to be of high quality. If anyone has suggestions, you can email me or post it on this page.

BSG 2007 and a Request for Help

2006-12-09T21:50:00.000-08:00

Since I haven't had time to post any real research, I thought I could at least post some news. The BSG has announced that abstracts for their 2007 conference are due February 28, 2007, and the conference will be held June 13-15.

Along those lines, I am requesting help for my own research project for the conference. I am looking for someone else in one of the following areas:

Evolutionary algorithms
Genetics
Biochemistry
Mathematical Proofs

Those are pretty broad categories, I know, but there are several different directions I could take the research, and it largely depends on who I can find to help! Anyway, email me at johnnyb@eskimo.com with the subject BSG 2007 if you are interested in possibly helping. You can be as involved or uninvolved as you want, but at minimum you have to be willing to co-present at the 2007 BSG conference.

Note that this project has nothing to do with the age of the earth, so OECs and ID evolutionists are welcome to help out as well.

Anyway, if you have the slightest inkling to want to help, let me know and I'll get you further details before you say yes or no.

Soon I'll be back, I promise

2006-11-14T20:35:00.000-08:00

I'll be back soon, at least for a little while. I promise.

By the way, for you computer Geeks out there, the Cell processor in the PS3 is really cool and really fun to program. It makes assembly language fun again. Memory access is deterministic so you can actually reliably count cycles again. Plus it is vector based, so you can have a lot of fun with it.

Anyway, if any of you are interested in assembly language, the Cell processor kicks butt (you can program it in other languages as well, but where's the fun in that?).

New Blog: Mindful Hack

2006-11-10T20:10:00.000-08:00

There is a new blog out there discussing the implications that ID has to neuroscience.

OT -- Censorship of VeggieTales on NBC

2006-10-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

Of all the things to be censored, it appears that the phrase "God made you special and He loves you very much" is offensive enough to be censored at NBC. Read more here.

Feyerabend and Creationism

2006-09-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't had time to read much of Feyerabend myself, from what quotes I have read from him, I really like him. His main work is Against Method. Anyway, Telic Thoughts had a great writeup on his views of Creationism. It is well worth the read.

A Creationist looks at the Royal Tyrell museum

2006-09-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

This is a message from a friend of mine, Ian Juby, who does in-the-field Creation research as well as hosts a travelling Creation museum. This post does not imply agreement on my part with everything Ian says, but I thought it might be interesting for the readers to see the types of things that a Creationist sees when looking at a museum. This post was slightly editted for web display. Also, it is a little more argumentative than is normally appropriate for this blog, but I think it has enough food for thought for Creationist researchers (as opposed to apologists -- I have another blog for that) that it would be appropriate to post here.

Report from the Royal Tyrell museum, Drumheller, Alberta

Visited there today, spent about two hours touring the facility. In a word, WOW. It is without question a world-class dinosaur museum. It brings a whole raft of pertinent information to the dinosaur bed studies, and to creation and the flood! Hope you enjoy this report:

The Big Bird:

Right outside the door are several beautifully made and positioned dinosaur sculptures. I couldn't help but notice how bird-like they were made to appear; in particular the eyes. I simply mention this in passing, because anyone seeing these would immediately recognize the bird-like characteristics that the ARTISTS have put into the sculptures. The evolutionary propaganda has begun, and with a very subtle tack.

The "Death pose":

The first thing you are met with is an in-situ dinosaur cast showing the "death pose" that I have been studying for the past year or so. It appears that numerous dinosaurs here in Alberta are still articulated (the bones in the skeleton are still joined together) which is excellent for the study of this "death pose."

Before today, I had the opportunity to study about six different animals and dinosaurs exhibiting this pose; archaeopteryx was the first one drawn to my attention. For those not familiar with this, long necked, articulated animals in the fossil record commonly have their heads arched back as far as they can possibly go.

As was pointed out at this first dinosaur that meets you at the door, nobody really knows why, but the conventional thinking is that they laid out and dried up, the tendons on the back of the neck shriveled as it dried up, thus pulling the head back.

This has numerous problems with it:

ALL dinosaur beds I have examined and read about to date are attributed to flash floods. There's a contradiction here: flash floods, meandering river beds, yet they "dry out in a desert", in the river bed they simultaneously never claimed dried up. At dinosaur monument for example, CLAMS are the most common fossil, not dinosaurs. Clams only live in continuous water, not streams or shallow rivers.

the other major tendons in the body (with the exception of the tail, more on this in a second) are NOT contracted - any size, any strength. If it was the result of the neck tendon drying out, why didn't they ALL dry out and shrivel up? Especially the back leg tendons which are as strong or stronger than the neck tendons

I have claimed that the heads are arched back due to suffocation: The last thing to go underwater when drowning is the head. Furthermore, while some of the animals exhibiting this death pose have their mouths open, others do not. In either case, even humans that are suffocating arch their heads back. I used to have asthma, that's how I know.

What I'm suggesting is that they were buried alive, and the stress of this event is exhibited in their taphonomy in burial.

At the Tyrell they had Archaeopteryx, compsagnathus, and at least EIGHT dinosaurs all exhibiting the death pose. Of those, NONE had tensed legs or arms. Some have the tails arched back as well, which could also be a reaction to being buried alive, or Joe Taylor also suggested defication.

They cheerily display the dinosaurs eating each other, yet this is NEVER seen in the fossils themselves. One dinosaur had healed bite marks on its jaw.

Lots of various hadrosaurs - the duck billed dinosaurs.

The Polystrate Worms of the Burgess Shale:

This blew me away - I HAD to go ask for more info. They had a very nice model of not one, not two, but THREE worms, buried and preserved in a POLYSTRATE POSITION. This was in the Burgess Shale section, and the model showed them cutting through dozens of extremely fine shale layers. It seems odd to me that it never seemed to dawn on them to ask the question "WHY????"

This caught my attention because about two years ago, some of you may recall a "unistrate" fossil earthworm was dug up in the overburden limestone at the Paluxy river dinosaur trackway excavations. It was pretty obvious this earth worm was trapped in the rapidly hardened limestone - and was preserved in its burrow! However, it did not cut through any strata.

I went back and asked around, the curator wasn't around for questions, but they did have one chap in the lab section who was clearly quite knowledgeable on the Burgess Shale. While he didn't know specifics, he did agree that if that is what is represented by the model, that is the way it would've been found. He did seem to know a little bit about that particular find though, as he was fairly certain that the worms were preserved pretty good. He seemed to think they cut through about 20 centimetres of shale or so, which agreed with the interpretive plaque which said they were about 24 centimetres long.

The Compsagnathus:

This is the first compsagnathus I've ever had the opportunity to see. Before I read the plaque, I saw it from a distance away and the first thought that went through my head was "What is that - an archaeopteryx?" Once I found out it was compsagnathus, I took many pictures. Conveniently, they had it placed immediately beside the Eichstatt archaeopteryx cast.

For those not familiar with the debate, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasigne had studied the lithographica Archaeopteryx years ago and had concluded that it was a FRAUD. That someone had put feather impressions on a compsagnathus skeleton. Some creationists and some evolutionists believe that to be true, others disagree and say it's legit. I'll admit I'm sitting on the fence on that debate - I've heard good arguments either way and actually have a cast of the wishbone from lithographica specifically because of that debate. I'm happy either way, but I just found it very funny that my first, immediate reaction was that what I saw was archaeopteryx, showing just how similar the two are!

The fossil scorpian tracks:

This was hilarious; and VERY subtle. Upstairs they had a nice display of various fossil trackways, including one they concluded looked identical to large, modern day scorpian tracks. Very nice fossil. One would miss the clincher of the deal if they didn't read the fine print.

Where did it come from?

Ellesmere Island, Nunavut! For those whose Canadian Geography is as lousy as my world geography, let me enlighten you. That's in the uh... ARCTIC. What on earth are fossil SCORPIAN tracks doing in the arctic???

The "PreCambrian" section was nothing less than fantastic. Many fine tax dollars indeed were spent on this room! Glass floor with large trilobites swimming around underneath your feet (well, staying still cause they're plastic, but you know what I mean), beatifully modeled sea life galore with incredible attention to detail. They've set the bar pretty high for us creationists.

Dinosaur skin impressions:

Several very nice dinosaur skin impressions were on display, including a fantastic, very large dinosaur track infill slab. The track itself must've been pushing thirty inches long, a theropod, and the pads and their texture were very clearly visible in the surprisingly coarse sandstone. It had to have been VERY watery mud to preserve such detail with such coarse grained sand.

Fossil "burrows":

These were the first fossil "burrows" from elsewhere in the world that I've gotten to see for myself. Down in my fossil stomping grounds in the Ottawa valley, I can get tons of these supposed "burrows" that evo's claim clearly represent long periods of time. I don't know what they are - but they're NOT burrows. They have dendritic branching patters and are clearly infilled with some kind of strange, fibrous material. They are definitely NOT burrows.

So these ones at drumheller caught my interest, because in pondering the debate I see the argument from burrows come up fairly regularly, yet no one ever provides photographs.

This blew me away as well because it was exactly like the "fossil raindrops" at Joggins, Nova Scotia. These are commonly cited by the skeptics as evidence for at least some period of time. Through a lot of hard, dangerous detective work last fall, I found one of the layers at Joggins that was covered in these "raindrop impressions." To sum it up, they were UPSIDE DOWN! i.e., they were BUMPS, not CRATERS. This even surprised Don, the owner of the Joggins fossil center, who's been collecting fossils at Joggins for 60 years!

Well, these worm "burrows" are along the same lines, and very difficult to describe. Yes, they look like burrows, but they're not HOLES or TUNNELS - they are bunches of sandstone cylinders bent in various directions! I don't know what they are, but they're NOT burrows! They may be the result of some kind of liquefaction or the like, but they're definitely not burrows.

Bioturbation and raised dinosaur tracks:

For those not familiar with the technical term, bioturbation is sediments that were disturbed by biology - i.e., a burrow. There was a very large, very nice slab with raised dinosaur tracks on it that had numerous burrows throughout it. Mike Oard has proposed that burrows are not necessarily an indication of a long time, but perhaps simply bugs or animals that were buried alive during the flood and were trying to burrow their way out - to escape.

I didn't look too long, but it looked to me as though ALL the burrows were coming from below and continuing up. In other words, there didn't seem to be any that went down and then up.

The raised dinosaur tracks are a bit of mystery, and I've seen this several times. The Paluxy, the coal creek trackway by Arches, and in a couple of displays at the Tyrell. I would propose that perhaps the dinosaur packed down the wet mud, making it more resistant to erosion, so that when the next layer of mud came in, it washed away a bit of the previous layer - leaving a RAISED dinosaur track. However, this particular slab would seem to refute my theory, as there seems to be no truncation or damage to the very, very clear burrows all throughout the rock.

But hey, let's not let evidence get in the road of such a beautiful theory!

Mass Burial Grave Sites:

Mass burials are the norm in the fossil record, not the exception. They made an excellent point at one of the displays of a mass burial site. They had a photograph of dozens of caribou in a river bed of Northern Manitoba during the Red River floods a few years back. These caribou had all drowned and wound up collecting in eddies and bays, making a "mass grave site."

It was an excellent point, and I'll mention several things here by first agreeing and then disagreeing.

I agree: What an excellent example of a mass burial site! Now, let's apply this to the dinosaur beds as they suggest. Let's take a quick look at some of these "mass burial sites" in the fossil record, shall we?

The Morrison formation is the one I'm most familiar with. It starts in New Mexico and Oklahoma, cuts through Utah and Colorado, up into Wyoming and North Dakota, and yes - right up here into Alberta.

In fact, really We have a mass burial site that begins in Alaska, follows the Rocky Mountain range all the way down to South America. Many of these areas have 3 to 30 bones per square metre.

Quick guess, we're talking TENS OF MILLIONS of dinosaurs.

Boy that's a big flood.

So let's disagree: The mass burial they show does not even remotely resemble the disarticulated MESS that make up the majority of the dinosaur beds. The bodies - even though they were being scavenged, are staying articulated. When they do decay and disintegrate, they do not retain the partial articulation we see in the dinosaur beds, such as at dinosaur monument.

The animals are not flattened by overburden as we see in the fossil record, and we need an awful lot of scavenging to disarticulate the fossils as we see them in the fossil record! It has to happen with essentially NO evidence of scavenging too! Though that was only a few years ago, there is no evidence of that mass grave left in Manitobe today. So how do we get mass dinosaur graves preserved when we do not see it happening today?

The Horse series:

Yup. Did I mention they have the Horse series on display?

The Design Matrix Blog

2006-09-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

For those of you looking for serious ID blogs, I suggest you check out Mike Gene's Design Matrix blog. He has several interesting ideas and links in there, some of which I will probably explore in this blog when I have the time.

OT: Big Idea on TV!

2006-09-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm really excited. I just found out that Big Idea's shows are going to air on network TV!! They are even doing new episodes, with the first one being The Asparagus of La Mancha! I am really excited. It seems that they are putting VeggieTales, 3-2-1 Penguins, and the adventures of Larry Boy all on television!

If anyone has never seen VeggieTales before, I suggest you start out with Dave and the Giant Pickle. The recent Larry Boy and the Bad Apple is good, too. And, actually, the best one is probably their feature film, Jonah, which is fun for all ages.

If you know nothing about VeggieTales, I suggest a quick viewing of The Pirates who Don't Do Anything on YouTube. It's fun. Loosen up.

Ancient Cosmology, Baraminology, and the Structure of Water (Plus my first day of seminary!)

2006-08-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day of seminary! Woohoo!

Anyway, interestingly enough, we talked about Genesis 1. The professor did an excellent job of walking us through the text and helping us read the text as it spoke to ancient Israel.

One thing that the professor emphasized was the cosmology of the ancients, and how tied Genesis is with that cosmology. For instance, the "firmament" that separates the waters above and below was likely thought to be a solid dome, to which the stars and the sun are attached. So when they are put in the firmament, it would conjure up to an Israelite the notion of a light being attached to a solid dome in the sky, kind of, as one student said, "recessed lighting". And because a cosmology such as that of ancient Israel does not allow for such things as Satellites and space technology, we should not use Genesis as a source of scientific inspiration.

Now, to begin with, I am unsure if the degree to which he expressed ancient cosmology as in disparity with modern cosmology is accurate. There is much in the Bible that seems to indicate that ancient societies were more sophisticated than we think. But even granting that the cosmologies were essentially incompatible, I think that this does not render the opening of Genesis as incompatible with scientific usefulness.

To begin with, I would agree with the professor that scripture should not be used as a science textbook. But rather, it _is_ a historical book, and as such can be used to aid in the understanding of science.

The issue is the same with any translation. In any translation, one must translate the categories of one language into the categories of another. People think, talk, and write according to their categories. Therefore, it should not surprise us that in a historical work about cosmology, that ancient Israelites employed their own categories to speak of it. This does not make it untrue. This is the same sort of thing when someone calls a whale a fish. Depending on how your categories are set up, a whale can in fact be a fish. And if you are observing or describing something, you can only report it with the categories that you have available to you.

And it is in this way that I take it that Genesis is true history, merely reported using the categories available to the writer at that time.

I am sure that if Genesis was reported using the categories available to us today, then in another few thousand years, people would have the same criticisms of us that we do of the ancient Israelites. But in fact, since we are treating it as history instead of science, the question is not "are the categories the Israelites using correct" (a question which would always be 'no' no matter what categories were in use -- simply on the nature of categories), but instead, "were the events reported with accuracy using the categories available to them, especially for the questions they are asking?"

[For a discussion of historical works in science, see this post of mine]

In a similar vein, let's look at The state of water in living systems: from the liquid to the jellyfish. In this paper Henry takes us on a fascinating philosophical tour of the role of water in ancient Creation stories. I'm not going to pretend to understand the whole paper (working on that, I'll hopefully have a whole report at some point in the future -- it's a MARVELOUS paper), but there is one part that stuck out:

[following a multipage analysis of water used in Genesis and other creation stories]
Scientists sticking to water as H2O, a tri-atomic molecule made from electrons, protons and neutrons, themselves made of quarks and so on may be quite skeptic about the usefulness of this analysis. It is however worth noting that words have been created for sharing ideas and concepts among human beings and not for assigning unambiguous names to material objects...

Focusing on immaterial attributes of liquid water (ability to flow) instead of its material composition (H2O), allows uraveling the deep wisdom contained in antique writings in deep coherence with other creation myths met around the world.

Anyway, I'm not quite sure how to put all that together, but I think it fits somehow :)

NOTE -- updated slightly from its original posting to correct an ambiguity

The World From Different Magnifications

2006-08-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to know what the world looks like from every magnification?. Fantastic demo. Requires Java.

Sources of Research for Design and Creationism

2006-08-20T19:14:00.000-07:00

For those wanting to go more in-depth to Creation research, I thought I'd post some of the primary sources for Creationist thought (in no particular order):

Creation Research Society Quarterly

Journal of Creation

Occasional Papers of the BSG

Proceedings of the International Conferences of Creationism

CORE Issues in Creaetion (brand new)

British Creation Society's Origins Journal

ICR's Research Papers (not often updated)

International Journal of Design & Nature (brand new)

Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (been a while since the last update)

Geoscience Research Institute's Origin's Journal (been a while since the last update)

And, of course, there are a number of individual monographs published by a number of publishers

A Second Look at Walking Australopithecines and the Direction of Evolution

2006-08-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

We have previously covered the question of whether or not australopithecines could walk upright. Lubenow had pointed out that the reconstruction used for establishing the gait of the australopithecus was actually based on a combination of fossils of multiple species, including homo habilus. Also, my own reading had led me to believe that the feet were the primary question, and that the work establishing australopithecus as being bipedal was based on the assumption that the Laetoli footprints came from australopithecus.

However, in the latest Journal of Creation, Matthew Murdock makes a case for Australopithecus walking upright on the basis of its pelvis rather than its feet. In particular Murdock uses muscle attachment evidence:

It is not only the shape of the pelvic bones that are important in locomotion, it is the attachment of the muscles. Abductors are pulling muscles that draw a body part away from the midsagittal line (midpoint or midline of the body), such as moving your arms outward, or spreading your legs apart. Quadrupeds have a gluteus maximus (muscle of the buttocks) that acts as an abductor of the thigh. In bipeds the ilium is expanded posteriorly, and the gluteus maximus originates behind the hip joint. So rather than abducting the thigh, it serves to pull the thigh back in one leg while the other is moving forward.

Both Lucy and Sts 14 have the posterior expansion of the pelvis that would allow the gluteu muscles to abduct the thigh in bipedal locomotion.

Both specimens (A.L. 288-1 and Sts 14) have a wide and thick ilium along with a long femoral neck which adds to the leverage the abductors can exert. The more leverage the abductors have the more efficient the creature can walk bipedally.

Murdock makes several additional points in favor of bipedality of australopithecines (if you want to know them all -- read the paper!).

As a side note, Murdock contrary to many creationists, Murdock puts homo erectus as an ape, rather than a human.

Murdock believes that australopithecus is an ancestor of modern chimps:

There are signs of degeneration in every bone of the chimpanzee body compared to an australopithecine. Every bone of the australopithecine body is more complex than a chimpanzee. There are differences in the skull, the vertebrae and the limbs that enabled the australopithecines to walk upright habitually, and which limits chimpanzees to walking upright only part of the time. When they do walk upright, they do so with knees and back bent slightly.

...[explains more interesting aspects of chimp walking]...

I will explore these differences and their implications at a later time, but can say that they all follow a degeneration pattern from biped to quadruped.

So Australopithecus could probably stand upright perfectly at first (in Eden for which we have no fossils) and then years later with difficulty, balancing as we see in Lucy (post-flood), and finally to what we now see today in chimps, which is habitual quadrupedalism, with only moments of awkward bipedality.

Murdock also commented that many of the problems in current human/ape paleontology come from coming to the data with the wrong assumptions. He says that the data, rather than pointing to australopithecus as an ancestor of humans, instead is like an ancestor of chimpanzees. Australopithecines are very much like a more complex chimp. The assumption that evolution is progressive is what prevents current paleontology from seeing the obvious patterns. As he says, "Nobody is looking for animals that are more complex than their living relatives in the fossil record (biblical view)".

Finally, he comments about the general relationship between australopithecines, humans, and chimpanzees:

Having studied not just the pelvis of australopithecines, but skeletons of three of them (two published, one unpublished), and comparing them with humans, other hominids and extant apes it is easy to see the similarities between australopithecines and chimpanzees. There are far more similarities than differences, whereas between ausstralopithecines and humans there are similarities yes...[description of dentition and pelvis]...but there are far more differences between the two.

Anyway, what I got most out of this article is:

Pelvic evidence favors Lucy being bipedal (however, I don't think it's a closed case -- Wieland's complaints weren't addressed, but I think I can certainly agree that Lucy was better at it than modern chimps)

Many of the problems in establishing phylogenies in evolution may stem from evolutionists looking at the wrong direction of evolution (this was also hinted at in a recent Science paper on prokaryotes/eukaryotes)

I am now eagerly awaiting Murdock to expound upon his thesis that chimpanzees are devolved descendents of australopithecines

Murdock, Matthew. 2006. "These apes were made for walking: the pelves of Australopithecus afarensis and Australopithecus africanus". Journal of Creation 20(2):104-112.

WARNING: This blog may make sudden stops

2006-07-26T20:36:00.000-07:00

In the last week I got accepted into seminary (as well as a partial scholarship -- yeah!) Therefore, it is very likely that between my full-time job, two (sometimes three) part-time jobs, family, helping out at the church, and now seminary, it is very likely that there will be long breaks between posts. If there is someone who would like to co-post with me, I'd love to have some help.

I've got a few posts I'm working on that I will hopefully get done before seminary starts in September, but just remember if you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I'm preparing for ministry.

Sadly, the seminary is doing a "special topics" course on evolution and theology this summer, which is before I officially enroll, so I'll miss it :( It would have been an interesting discussion. There were several books on the reading list I had wanted to read.

Anyway, I'm not done blogging. I just probably won't do it so often.

What is Baraminology?

2006-07-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

I had some friends ask me for my blog address today. Before giving it to them, I thought I'd search through my posts and find one where I explain what exactly is baraminology. However, it seems no such post exists! Anyway, so for those of you who have been confused as to what "baraminology" is, this post is for you!

In my mind, there's two meanings to baraminology -- the strict, technical definition, and then the worldview it entails.

Baraminology Technicalities
The strict definition of baraminology is that it is a method of taxonomy based on Biblical ideas. "baramin" comes from the Hebrew words "bara" and "min" which are the words used for creating after their kind in Genesis. Baraminology reclassifies the world into baramins -- originally created kinds. Note that a baramin is not the equivalent with a species. A good first approximation of a baramin is often the "family" level of standard taxonomy. For example, the entire "cat" family (felidae) is considered a baramin. Lions, tigers, and the house cat are thought to be all of the same created kind. Dogs, wolves, and coyotes are all thought to be of another created kind. However, because standard taxonomy neither cares about nor believes in "created kinds", this approximation is not always reliable. For example, recently chimps and other non-human primates have been moved into family hominidae in the standard taxonomy, but chimps and humans are not from the same created kind.

Baraminology is a holistic view of taxonomy. Because baraminologists believe that baramins were created holistically, it is thought that this is the best way to classify it as well. It is usually based on morphology and ecology as opposed to molecular (gene sequence) evidence.

Baraminology as a classification system recognizes both continuities and discontinuities as real. Traditional taxonomy considers only continuities as real, and considers discontinuities as being simply the result of incomplete information. While certainly incomplete information may create the appearance of discontinuity when it is only an illusion, baraminologists believe that in general the observed continuity and discontinuity are both real.

The Baraminology Philosophy

In relation to the larger Creation/Evolution divide, baraminologists are almost exclusively Young-Earth or Young Age Creationists. However, while traditionally Creationists have focused on proving the Bible true or beating the evolutionists, Baraminology takes a different approach. The goal of Baraminology is to develop a Creationist model of biology, based on the Bible and Biblical principles. Note that this means, since baraminologists are using the Bible as a starting assumption, baraminology cannot, even in principle, be used to argue for Creationism. This is not the intention. The intention is to simply perform research within the context of Christianity. This does not mean that baraminologists do not engage in such debates -- many do (including me). However, this is separate from the practice of baraminology itself, because, as mentioned above, baraminology itself does not lend itself to such arguments since it assumes the Bible as a starting point.

If you want to do biology research from a Christian perspective, baraminology is for you.

For more information, you can go to the Creation Biology Study Group website, read Todd Wood's book, Understanding the Pattern of Life, which explains the basics and research methodology of baraminology, or also, stay tuned to this blog.

This Blog

This blog tries to maintain the spirit of baraminology, by viewing research done by both Creationists and non-Creationists within the light of a Christian worldview, to see what we can learn about God's world through study. I try to avoid denigrating other positions and focus on constructive research and ideas. I certainly value very highly the work done by non-Creationists in biology (including many aspects of evolutionary biology), and I try to incorporate as much as possible in my thinking. But ultimately, scripture is authoritive in the matters of beginnings, and I trust what it says (my question -- why would someone trust the Bible as a source of salvation and not trust it regarding the question of origins?) An excellent essay on this is contained in the "Introduction" section (page 3) of last years BSG Conference Proceedings by Todd Wood (don't worry, it's not technical at all).

Is it possible to do science like this? Honestly, I don't really care. If you don't want to call it science -- don't. Names are meaningless. The question is, what is the truth about life? This is what I'm interested in. Personally, I think that this is compatible with science, and if you're interested I explain why I think so here. But if you don't disagree, I won't complain much. (However, just be aware that by most demarcation arguments, you have to either exclude both Creationism and Evolution or include both Creationism and evolution -- for a short essay see here).

Anyway, if you have questions, please post them below! Also, if I get too technical in my posts, please feel free to ask questions. I really have no idea who my readership is, so if you need me to re-explain something from the ground up, I'd certainly be glad to!

Some of the more interesting posts on this blog have been:

The influence of ecology on development

Gene mutation is a directed, regulated process

The role of chance happenings in genetic mutation

The meaning of Behe's "Irreducible Complexity"

The relationship between Creationism and Intelligent Design

Stasis and change within baramins, according to purpose

Genome Reconfiguration

The role of symbionts in ecology and creating new species

Discussing biological similarity from a Creation perspective

Post Removed

2006-07-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

You know, I haven't been reading the popular press for many years, and now I remember why -- there isn't anything in papers or television that even remotely resembles the truth of what is happening anywhere.

I apologize for all gullibility I engaged in by actually even bothering to read the popular press, much less attempt to use it as the basis of anything else (and to think that some people vote based on what they read in the popular press).

The article I am referring to is this one. From the article, it sounded like a regular fish had grown human-like teeth. But in fact it wasn't the case. It's just a fish with teeth. Not human-like teeth, just teeth. Here is a page about pacu, the type of fish that was caught.

Basically, the headline was Texas Man Catches Fish With Human-Like Teeth when in reality it should have simply been titled South-American Fish Caught in Texas.

How to Be a Scientist -- Look at Your Fish!

2006-07-14T21:23:00.000-07:00

My wife is reading the book Brave Companions by David McCullough. She shared with me the biographical sketch of Louis Agassiz. I found this story an almost perfect exemplar of the scientific endeavor:

Most unorthodox of all, and crucial as time would tell, was his manner of teaching. He intended, he said, to teach students to see -- to observe and compare -- and he intended to put the burden of study on them. Probably he never said what he is best known for, "Study nature, not books," or not in those exact words. But such certainly was the essence of his creed, and for his students the idea was firmly implanted by what they would afterward refer to as "the incident of the fish."

His initial interview at an end, Agassiz would ask the student when he would like to begin. If the answer was now, the student was immediately presented with a dead fish -- usually a very long dead, pickled, evil-smellling specimen -- personally selected by "the master" from one of the wide-mouthed jars that lined his shelves. The fish was placed before the student in a tinpan. He was to look at the fish, the student was told, wherupon Agassiz would leave, not to return until later in the day, if at all.

Samuel Scudder, one of the many from the school who would go on to do important work of their own (his in entomology), described the experience as one of life's turning points.

In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish....Half an hour passed -- an hour -- another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked at it in the face -- ghastly; from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view -- just as ghastly. I was in despair.

I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me -- I would draw the fish, and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature.

When Agassiz returned later and listened to Scudder recount what he had observed, his only comment was that the young man must look again.

I was piqued; I was mortified. Still more of that wretched fish! But now I set myself to my task with a will, and discovered one new thing after another....The afternoon passed quickly; and when, toward its close, the professor inquired: "Do you see it yet?"

"No," I replied. "I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before."

The day following, having thought of the fish through most of the night, Scudder had a brainstorm. The fish, he announced to Agassiz, had symmetrical sides with paired organs.

"Of course, of course!" Agassiz said, obviously pleased. Scudder asked what he might do next, and Agassiz replied, "Oh, look at your fish!"

In Scudder's case the lesson lasted a full three days. "Look, look, look," was the repeated injunction and the best lesson he ever had, Scudder recalled, "a legacy the professor has left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part."

The incident of the fish marked the end of the student's novitiate. As once Agassiz became more communicative, his manner that of a friend or colleague, now that the real work could begin.

The way to all learning, "the backbone of education," was to know something well. "A smattering of everything is worth little," he would insist in the heavy French accent that he was never to lose. "Facts are stupid things, until brought into conjunction with some general law." It was a great and common fallacy to suppose that an encyclopedic mind is desirable. The mind was made strong not through much learning but by "the thorough possession of something." In other words, "Look at your fish."

And so I encourage all of you who wish to engage in Creation research. Be prepared for hard, thorough, original research, with or without support of anyone else. It's not who has the best lab, best equipment, or even any equipment at all. It's about learning a subject deeply and thoroughly. It's about looking at your fish.

The Organosubstrate and the Symbiotic Planet

2006-07-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

I once asked the eloquent and personable paleontologist Niles Eldredge whether he knew of any case in which the formation of a new species had been documented. I told him I'd be satisfied if his example were drawn from the laboratory, from the field, or from observations from the fossil record. He could muster only one good example. Theodosius Dobzhansky's experiments with Drosophila, the fruit fly. In this fascinating experiment, populations of fruit flies, bred at progressively hotter temperatures, became genetically separated. After two years or so the hot-bred ones bould no longer produce fertile offspring with their cold-breeding brethren. "But," Eldredge quickly added, "that turned out to have something to do with a parasite!" Indeed, it was later discovered that the hot-breeding flies lacked an intracellular symbiotic bacterium found in the cold breeders. Eldredge dismissed this case as an observation of speciation because it entailed a microbial symbiosis! He had been taught, as we all have, that microbes are germs, and when you have germs, you have a disease, not a new species. And he had been taught that evolution through natural selection occurs by the gradual accumulation, over eons, of single gene mutations... From the long view of geological time, symbioses are like flashes of evolutionary lightning. To me symbioses as a source of evolutionary novelty helps explain the observation of "punctuated equilibrium," of discontinuities in the fossil record. [Margulis, Symbiotic Planet 7-8]

At the last ICC, Joe Francis submitted a paper describing what he called the organosubstrate -- the microbes and viruses which act as the link between the inert physical world and the higher organisms. According to Francis, "microbes and viruses could also be thought of as a single, complex, massive, multicellular, multitaxon organism with incredible and powerful life supporting properties."

Francis argues that the design of the organosubstrate is evident from the reproductive efficiencies and the adaptability of its members. The ability to adapt to a variety of environments, efficiently extract nutrients needed by macro-organisms, and establish a variety of symbioses is what allows it to function as the organosubstrate. Many members of the organosubstrate also have dispersal mechanisms that allow them to get to remote environments.

Most interesting to me, however, is the ability of microbes to form symbioses. Francis gives numerous examples of very interesting, highly intricate symbioses that microbes can form, some of which are so integrated as to suggest properties of multicellular organisms. But they can form symbioses with not only other microbes, but with macro-organisms as well. Digestive systems are the most obvious.

Interestingly, the concept of the organosubstrate has a number of similarities with the Gaia hypothesis as proposed by Lynn Margulis. First of all, please don't confuse Margulis's Gaia hypothesis with the New Age ideas of similar names. Margulis's hypothesis is simply that the earth behaves in a systems fashion. In fact, Margulis's book shares numerous similarities with Francis's hypothesis. [Note that Margulis's hypothesis also carries with it a lot of old-Earth, atelic baggage as well, but as a current, operational view they are largely similar]

However, Francis goes even further with a very interesting hypothesis about the creation of symbioses with macro-organisms. Francis speculates:

Further investigation into the symbiotic relationships between microbes and mammals may also lead to insight into the originally created purpose of the immune system. For instance, among microbes phagocytosis can function as a non-destructive mechanism to acquire symbionts and is common among unicellular and multicellular pond organisms. In contrast, phagocytosis in macro-organisms is an immune response that participates in destruction of pathogens. I predict that future investigation of this phenomenon will lead to a hypothesis that the immune system may have been originally created as an environmental sensing device that received data about the environment through the phagocytosis of beneficial microbes. Indeed the mammalian immune system possesses very specific and complex mechanisms that interact with microbes, often causing inflammation and tissue-destructive autoimmune responses and therefore appear to make little sense in the context of evolutionary biology. [emphasis mine]

In Francis's recent talk at the 2006 BSG meeting, he discussed a particular symbiosis with

Furthermore, Vibrio fischeri (a bacterium similar to V. cholera) also uses virulence factors, similar to several found in V. cholera and other pathogens, to establish a beneficial symbiotic relationship with the Bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes). In this symbiotic relationship, virulence factors are involved in tissue remodeling and morphogenesis of an elaborate light-producing organ. Interestingly, not only do these bacteria appear to be more fit for their beneficial ecological roles, but inflammation, tissue degradation and toxin production that cause pathogenesis in some ecological settings play beneficial roles in other ecological settings.

Francis discussed the fact that the inflammation response of the squid was used to isolate the specific microbe that it wanted to establish a symbiosis with.

As the Margulis quote indicated above, perhaps the genes are not the primary originating factors of speciation, but instead symbioses and ecological factors. Indeed it appears that the largest-scale changes that have been observed to take place revolve around symbioses. In a personal conversation, Francis related another symbiosis in which the organisms literally changed form in the presence or absence of the symbionts.

An interesting Creationist research possibility would be to attempt to catalog and systematize the types of symbioses available and the methods by which they are established. I hypothesize, as I believe does Francis, that we will find specific mechanisms that act to sense the available organisms in the environment, what sort of symbioses would be available, and can decide whether and how to establish that relationship.

Historically, I think Creationists have assumed that complex symbioses must have been original creations. However, as has been pointed out here repeatedly, complex interrelated processes need not be originally established, but can have the ability to assume those processes pre-coded for later activation. Therefore, we need not balk at the idea of the development of complex symbioses through time. Using an informationally-driven model we can see both the origination of the symbiosis as occuring post-flood, but also that the ability to form it was established as a part of the organism. Because of the short time span needed to establish a symbiosis, it can help explain the rate at which intrabaraminic diversification took place.

I think that a systematic researching of symbiosis could be a place where a Creationist could persue work that is both Creationist as well as usable (and possibly fundable) by non-Creationists. This is a wide-open field, especially with researchers such as Margulis concentrating so much on the origin-of-life/origin-of-eukaryote issues, the really interesting parts (systematic study of speciation through symbiosis) remains largely untouched (if this is in error, I would love to know of a good reference for a systematic treatment of mechanisms of symbioses -- please post in the comments).

Francis, J. 2003. The Organosubstrate of Life: A Creationist Perspective of Microbes and Viruses. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism.

Franics, J. 2006. The Role of Virulence Factors in the Establishment of Beneficial Ecological Relationships of Vibrio cholera and Vibrio fischeri. OPBSG 8:14-15.

Margulis, L. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New View of Evolution. Basic Books.

ADDENDUM

We've talked about this subject a little bit before. I thought I'd link to the other posts we've done on the topic:

Creation, Ecological Diversification, and Symbioses
Stasis of the Baramin, Purpose, and Inheritance Mechanisms
The New Science of Eco-Devo