News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

-BACK TO GENESIS ~

-Fishy Evolutionary Explanations
-By: Frank Sherwin, M.A.

Evolutionists tirelessly beat the drum of humanity’s supposed fish ancestry. Paleontologist Jennifer Clack stated:

Although humans do not usually think of themselves as fishes, they nonetheless share several fundamental characters that unite them inextricably with their relatives among the fishes.

In a recent amusing story by the usually staid BBC, Michael Mosley claimed to find evidence of “fishy features” in human anatomy. Mosley, Clack, and others who reject the biblical account of creation must attempt to shoehorn scientific discoveries into uncomfortable—and often conflicting—evolutionary interpretations. For example, Clack admitted:

To be truthful, there is still not much real data, so that speculation is still active, and whatever is concluded today may be overturned by the discovery of a new fossil tomorrow.3

Dr. Mosley’s BBC article began by stating:

It may seem strange that humans have evolved from fish, but the evidence can be found not just in fossils but also within our own bodies.

Yes, it is eminently strange, as well as unscriptural and unscientific. It has long been known by many researchers, both evolutionists and non-evolutionists, that the fossil record fails to document Darwinism’s claim of gradual change from one kind of creature into another as one ascends the sedimentary rock units. Mosley tried to spin the evidence in favor of evolution:

The early human embryo looks very similar to the embryo of any other mammal, bird or amphibian—all of which have evolved from fish.

Mosley used a tautology, presupposing evolutionary ancestry to explain the embryo’s developmental process. His arguments mirror the long-discredited “recapitulation” theory of German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who infamously stated that human embryos develop through ancestral stages—such as the fish stage—before specializing into people.

Mosley then wrote:

Your eyes start out on the sides of your head, but then move to the middle.

So what? Eyes have to start somewhere. It makes sense they should start on the sides of the head rather than the top or bottom.

And only in the strange land of Darwinism would someone suggest that hernias are throwbacks to a fish stage:

Inguinal hernias often require surgery, and if you are unfortunate enough to get one, blame it on fish.

How could a patient say with a straight face, “This hernia is due to my fish ancestry”?

Mosley played the “no obvious function, so it must be an evolutionary leftover” card in regard to the philtrum, the grooved area on the upper lip just below the nose. He wrote:

[The philtrum] has no obvious function. Instead it is an accident of our origins, a clue to our fishy past and how our faces first formed.

But the same “non-function” argument was erroneously applied to the appendix, adenoids, tonsils, coccyx (“tailbone”), and other structures and tissues that have since been found to have biological—not evolutionary—functions. The philtrum could allow people to show a wider range of lip motions, which enhances non-verbal and vocal communication. It has nothing to do with fish ancestry.

Amazingly, Mosley even tried to tie hiccups—that irritating spasm of the diaphragm—to evolutionary ancestry, although he stated it’s a “bit of evidence” that “we seem to have inherited from an amphibian ancestor,” a speculation based purely on the assumption of evolution.

It is hardly surprising that people and animals have blemishes such as hernias and hiccups. They are the result of the Fall and the Curse—not a fishy ancestry.

References/ www.icr.org

-BACK TO GENESIS -

-Fit for Flight
-By: Brian Thomas, M.S. *

Why are pilots and airplane mechanics so meticulous in their upkeep and maintenance of aircraft? The fact that one critical misstep would spell disaster shows that anything that flies must have many interdependent parts that are all narrowly specified for flight.

Birds, for example, were clearly designed for flight and were not formed by any purposeless natural process. The ancient book of Job stated as much:

"But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:…Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?" (Job 12:7, 9)

Some of the required parts for flying birds are visible from the outside, such as wings and an aerodynamic body shape. Other characteristics are less obvious, but equally important.

Anything that flies must have a specific power-to-weight ratio. If the wing construction material, for example, was strong enough to resist air but too heavy for its “engine” to lift, such a creature would never get off the ground. The useless, dangling wings would also make it unfit for land life. Bird feathers are made of expertly “knitted,” strong, lightweight keratin protein fibers.

Also, a bird’s center of mass is toward the front, in between its wings. This is a crucial aerodynamic arrangement that enables in-flight control of balance and maneuvering. It is also one evidence that birds are not descended from dinosaurs. A dinosaur’s bulk was situated above its hind legs, and there is no fossil—let alone a series of fossils—showing that bulk gradually shifting forward. In fact, a creature with its mass centered in the middle would not yet be able to control itself in the air. It would also not be able to maneuver on the ground as well as its dinosaur peers. Surely, such an imaginary creature would have become food for its better-equipped companions, thus ending the whole evolutionary experiment.

A small but crucial feature on many birds is the alula feather. This is precisely positioned at the front of the wing and is pushed forward just before landing to prevent stalling at low airspeeds. Without it, these birds would crash-land. The pterodactyl’s equivalent of the alula feather was the pteroid bone, which moved a small flap of skin forward when landing. Flaps on the front of jet airliner wings serve the same purpose.

There are many more specific, required features, like retractable landing gear and horizontal stabilizers, not to mention damage repair mechanisms. But all this precision hardware, assembled in perfect order, still would not fly without the right software. Flight controls constantly detect wind speed and direction, and monitor visual, magnetic, and three-dimensional orientation inputs. Based partly on this data, the system then produces a myriad of finely controlled outputs, including the timing and activation of the large pectoralis muscles that power the wings, as well as tiny muscles that adjust the camber of many individual flight feathers in a coordinated effort to fly.

Airplane caretakers cannot afford to overlook any detail. The pilot’s and passengers’ lives depend on all parts being specified to within a very narrow range of sizes, shapes, and strengths. So, noticing that no specification was left out of the flying bird’s design, the straightforward inference from engine to engineer, from design to designer, or from detail to detailer is perfectly valid.

And this does not even take into account the beauty of bird flight, bird songs, or their various colorful feathers, which constitute art that demands an Artist who can blend high flights of imagination with the most intricate engineering quality.

Surely the great Creator deserves credit for His fantastic handiwork!

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* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.

Cite this article: Thomas, B. 2011. Fit for Flight. Acts & Facts. 40 (8): 17.

-BACK TO GENESIS/ ICR

-Doubt Versus Unbelief
-By: John D. Morris, Ph.D. *

Teachers and Christian leaders often encourage students to question things, for this can be a real impetus to growth. There’s nothing wrong with asking questions or even with having doubts, for they often expose wrong information and encourage further study. As it relates to Scripture, there will always be a good answer, even if an initial lack of ready answers requires that we shelve the question for a future time. Our faith in the Word of God should be firm.

For a Christian, questions regarding evolution’s claims should lead to greater understanding, or a postponement of answers—not to disbelief. As they relate to evolution and the Flood, we have answers to many difficult questions now, and have reason to believe we’ll soon have more. We’ll never have all the answers this side of eternity, but there’s no need to disbelieve.

Unfortunately for our theological forefathers in the 1800s, their doubts led to unbelief, and soon pages were being ripped from Scripture. In those important decades, Charles Lyell and others championed the questions, insisting that the Bible could not be believed, and many Christian leaders caved in. Scientists minimized the impact of Lyellian-inspired compromise in the church by holding fast to creation and Flood doctrines, but the appeal of more autonomy from Scripture came to full flower when Darwin proposed his views.

Striving to accommodate long ages and evolution to Scripture, ardent Bible-believing Christians proposed various ways to incorporate them, concepts that still plague Christianity today. Those holding a higher view of Scripture gravitated to the gap theory, which places long ages between the first two verses of Genesis 1, followed by global destruction due to Satan’s fall and six days of re-creation. This allowed Christians to embrace both Christianity and long-age evolution.

Similarly, others succumbed to theistic evolution, for the same reason. Since in their minds science had “proved” evolution, they felt they salvaged Scripture by claiming evolution was God’s method of creation. More recently has come the day-age concept, which holds that the days of the creation week were equivalent to the geologic ages, during which God occasionally created some new thing. In each case, Scripture was altered. These accommodationist views compromised only Scripture—never was the evolution/long age/uniformitarian view altered at all.


All such views suffer from the same weaknesses and can be refuted at length, as they have been in other writings. Suffice it to point out that all include a downgrading of the Flood to a local or tranquil flood that is not responsible for the rock and fossil record. They also weaken the doctrine of God’s creative majesty, substituting a trial and error approach for His sovereign, omniscient will.

Each also disregards a cardinal doctrine of Christianity: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), spiritual death and physical death that necessitated the death of Christ to pay sin’s penalty, for “Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3). According to all compromise views, death of conscious living things long predated man’s appearance, and certainly was present long before man’s sin incurred the Curse. But if physical death was here before sin, then it could not really be the “wages of sin” since it is indeed the key to man’s evolution. In evolution, death produced man by causing less fit types to go extinct over time. Thus, death is regarded as good, and by extension Christ’s death paid no such penalty.

In this way, all compromise views negate non-negotiable doctrines. While it is not impossible for a Christian to believe in any of the compromises mentioned above, it is impossible for any one of them to be true if Christianity is true. And if any are true, then many of Christianity’s core doctrines are wrong.

* Dr. Morris is President of the Institute for Creation Research.

Cite this article: Morris, J. 2011. Doubt Versus Unbelief. Acts & Facts. 40 (8): 15.

-Evolution/ Birds
-By: Elizabeth Mitchel / AiG

“‘Oldest bird’ knocked off its perch”
It’s a bird … It’s a dinosaur … It’s a ???

For over a century evolutionists have intermittently speculated that birds evolved from dinosaurs. The current wave of dino-bird popularity continues as evolutionary paleontologists strain to see feathers in dinosaur fossils. Particularly popular members of the “feathered dinosaur” club often surface in China’s Liaoning Province. Xiaotingia zhengi—the latest so-called feathered fossil in Liaoning—is providing a creative way to draft the Archaeopteryx into the deinonychosaurian part of the dinosaur family.

No one can be certain where the Xiaotingia zhengi specimen came from “because it was purchased from a dealer, but all indications are that it comes from the Tiaojishan Formation, which dates from the Late Jurassic, some 155 million years ago,” according to Ohio University’s Dr. Lawrence Witmer.1 Paleontologist Xing Xu describes the fossil as “a new Archaeopteryx-like theropod.” Xu describes the fossil as having “faint feather impressions” and “some faint integumentary impressions,” adding, “Unfortunately, the feathers are too poorly preserved for details of their structure to be apparent.”2 The paper does not describe or picture any distinctive feather characteristics such as rachis and barbs.

Archaeopteryx is a fossilized extinct bird with exquisitely developed real feathers identical in preserved microscopic details to those of extant birds. Some evolutionists insist the Archaeopteryx is a transitional form because it had teeth, fingers on its wings, and a long tail. However, these features occur in other extinct or living birds. Evolutionary paleontologists assign it an age of about 150 million years. Though Archaeopteryx has long been the object of a tug-of-war between the dinosaur-camp and bird-camp, it is now commonly accepted as a bird. (Yet, many evolutionists3 claim that birds are dinosaurs anyway.)

Along comes the latest Chinese feathered dinosaur: Xiaotingia zhengi. Paleontologist Xing Xu’s team added Xiaotingia’s skeletal measurements (like long robust forelimbs) to “a computer database with measurements from 89 fossilized dinosaur and bird species, including Archaeopteryx.” Computer analysis had previously classified the Archaeopteryx “on the evolutionary line leading to modern-day birds.” When the Xiaotingia’s measurements were factored in, the computer decided the Archaeopteryx was a dinosaur after all.

But even the researchers admit, “Our phylogenetic hypothesis is only weakly supported by the available data.”4 They hasten to add that they would expect the distinctions to be fuzzy because they’re dealing with creatures similar to the common ancestor of birds and dinosaurs. In other words, the hypothetical common ancestor is assumed to have characteristics present in all its presumed descendants.

The ploy here is clear: if you can’t find a dinosaur with indisputably feathery feathers, recruit a bird by reclassifying it as a dinosaur. There are a host of problems in the evolutionary dinosaur-to-bird scenario. Respiratory systems, body aerodynamics, finger embryology, and the complexities of the feather compared to scales present irreducible complexities for the evolutionary paradigm. Evolutionists keep finding little bits of “dino-fuzz” on fossils, which other evolutionists believe are just fossilized collagen filaments. But if they can convince people that Archaeopteryx is a bona-fide dinosaur and not a bird, then they can stop hunting for a good example of a feathered dinosaur, having adopted one into the family.

How very convenient that the measurements of some bones suddenly tipped the classification scheme—which cannot reasonably get around the other dino-bird difficulties—into the very conclusion evolutionists have needed for decades. And as we have said before, even if a real feathered dinosaur were found, it would not be an evolving transitional form but only a demonstration that our human-designed classification schemes need revision. --