“We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality”

More nightmares for the Darwinist Rage Boy (aka Charles Johnson.)

From ApologeticsPress.Org

For decades, Darwin’s evolutionary tree of life has been deeply embedded into the walls of science classrooms, the pages of biology textbooks, and the lectures of evolutionary biology teachers. Multiplied millions of high school and college students have seen illustrations of the supposed unicellular common ancestor of all living things at the base of a tree that branches into a plethora of more complex living organisms.

Supposedly, certain unicellular organisms slowly evolved into multicellular organisms, and some multicellular organisms evolved into fish, which then evolved into amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. The image below, which shows a poster that once hung prominently in a university science lab in Searcy, Arkansas, briefly illustrates the standard, widely accepted history of evolutionary progression.

Now, scientists admit that “the tree-of-life concept...absolutely central to Darwin’s thinking, equal in importance to natural selection...lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence” (Lawton, 2009, 201[2692]:34, emp. added).

On the cover of a recent issue of New Scientist was Darwin’s tree of life, along with the statement “Darwin was Wrong” (2009, 201[2692]). Cover-story author Graham Lawton admitted, “The tree of life, one of the iconic concepts of evolution, has turned out to be a figment of our imagination” (p. 34). Lawton reminded readers of Dr. W. Ford Doolittle’s 1999 claim that “the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree” (p. 37).

Lawton also interviewed evolutionary biologist Eric Bapteste of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who exclaimed, “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality” (p. 34, emp. added). Though Darwin’s tree of life has been taught as fact for decades, the truth is, “we have no evidence at all” for it.

Go figure.

Although Baptiste, Doolittle, and many other evolutionists admit that “the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works” (p. 39; Was it ever?), they are not willing to give up their theory.

Baptiste and Doolittle “stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn’t mean that the theory of evolution is wrong—just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe” (p. 39).

It is amazing how year after year, decade after decade, as more information becomes available, yesterday’s standard, rock-solid “proof” of evolution becomes tomorrow’s admission of error. Ernst Haeckel’s professed biogenetic “law” (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) turned out to be nothing more than a hypothesis. Piltdown Man was fraudulently constructed from the jawbone of an orangutan and cranium of a man, though it was paraded before the world as proof of evolution for 40 years (cf. Jackson, 1981; Major, 1996).

Now another “iconic concept of evolution” has fallen on hard times. One wonders what it will take to convince evolutionists that it is not just Darwin’s tree of life that needs to be cast aside, but the entire theory of evolution.

REFERENCES

Jackson, Wayne (1981), “Frauds in Science,” Reason & Revelation, 1[2]:6-7, February, [On-line], URL: http://lovingword.wordpress.com/articles/336.Lawton, Graham (2009), “Uprooting Darwin’s Tree,” New Scientist, 201[2692]:34-39, January 24-30.

Major, Trevor (1996), “Low Down on Piltdown,” Reason & Revelation, 16[10]:77, October, [On-line], URL: http://lovingword.wordpress.com/articles/245.

---

Copyright © 2009 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.We are happy to grant permission for items in the "In the News" section to be reproduced in their entirety, as long as the following stipulations are observed: (1) Apologetics Press must be designated as the original publisher; (2) the specific Apologetics Press Web site URL must be noted; (3) the author’s name must remain attached to the materials; (4) any references, footnotes, or endnotes that accompany the article must be included with any written reproduction of the article; (5) alterations of any kind are strictly forbidden (e.g., photographs, charts, graphics, quotations, etc. must be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original); (6) serialization of written material (e.g., running an article in several parts) is permitted, as long as the whole of the material is made available, without editing, in a reasonable length of time; (7) articles, in whole or in part, may not be offered for sale or included in items offered for sale; and (8) articles may be reproduced in electronic form for posting on Web sites pending they are not edited or altered from their original content and that credit is given to Apologetics Press, including the web location from which the articles were taken.

For catalog, samples, or further information, contact:

Apologetics Press

230 Landmark Drive

Montgomery, Alabama 36117

U.S.A.

Phone (334) 272-8558

http://www.apologeticspress.org/

Read More

The Darwinist Rage Boy

Over at Debbie Schlussel:

PerpetuaRe:
Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. I used to post regularly there but his blog has become almost unreadable due to his obsession over “creationism”. In fact many people are referring to him now as “The Darwinist Rage Boy.”

Charles Johnson = The Darwinist Rage Boy!

Think it will stick?

Read More

Charles' Non-Controversial Theory Generates Controversy

The real world has the habbit of denying darwinian pipe dreams.

Darwinist Charles Johnson believes that there is no controversy "among real scientists" about "evolution".

Putting aside Charles' definition of "real scientist" (which in darwinian vocabulary means "he who believes in evolution") and putting aside whatever he means by "evolution" (which in darwinian mantra means "change" - hmm...where have I heard that before?), the truth of the matter is that there are qualified non-young earth creationist (YEC) scientists who look at Neo-Darwinism and say: No enough evidence to suport it's claims!

Perhaps PhD Skell doesn't know about science

National Academy Scientist Says Darwin's Theory of Evolution is Being Oversold

A robust debate about Darwinian evolution has been taking place over at Forbes.com recently. The venerable techonomy site published over 20 articles in honor of Darwin's birthday, four of which were from ID proponents.

As usual, having any articles skeptical of Darwinism is a bridge too far for some, namely Darwin defender Jerry Coyne who attacked not just the authors, but Forbes itself for the temerity to discuss such views publicly.

No less than a member of the National Academy has responded. Forbes.com has just posted a piece by Philip S. Skell, The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution.

Skell argues that ...

Darwinian evolution is being pushed as a theory of everything.

According to Skell it is being oversold to the public as the foundation of all modern scientific breakthroughs without any basis in reality.

Writes Skell:

To conflate contemporary scientific studies of existing organisms with those of the paleontologists serves mainly to misguide the public and teachers of the young. An examination of the papers in the National Academy of Sciences' premiere journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as well as many other journals and the Nobel awards for biological discoveries, supports the crucial distinction I am making.

Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today's cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions.

It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.

It is widely accepted that the growth of science and technology in the West, which accounts for the remarkable advances we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, travel, communications, etc., coincided with the separation, several centuries ago, of the experimental sciences from the dominance of the other important fields of philosophy, metaphysics, theology and history.

Yet many popularizers of Darwin's theory now claim that without the study of ancient biological history, our students will not be prepared to engage in the great variety of modern experimental activities expected of them.

The public should view with profound alarm this unnecessary and misguided reintroduction of speculative historical, philosophical and religious ideas into the realms of experimental science.

It is more crucial to consider history in the fields of astrophysics and geology than in biology. For example, the electromagnetic radiations arriving at our detectors inform us of the ongoing events that occurred billions of years ago in distant parts of our universe that have been traveling for all this time to reach us. And the rock formations of concern to geologists have resided largely undisturbed since their formations.

But fossils fail to inform us of the nature of our ancient antecedents--because they have been transformed into stones that give us only a minuscule, often misleading impression of their former essences and thus are largely irrelevant to modern biology's experimentations with living organisms.

For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year's more virulent strain.

That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics.

Read the entire essay here.

If you're interested in more about what Dr. Skell thinks about Darwinian evolution, and about how he came to be a Darwin skeptic you can listen to three short but informative interviews with him at ID The Future.

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part One
In this ID the Future podcast, Casey Luskin interviews Philip S. Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Skell discusses his research, which has included work on reactive intermediates in chemistry, free-atom reactions, and reactions of free carbonium ions.

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Two
On this episode of ID the Future, National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell shares his story of becoming a Darwin-skeptic with Casey Luskin, explaining how his experience in antibiotic research and the questions he posed to his colleagues inspired his 2005 article in The Scientist, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?: Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology.”

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Three
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell on his advice for young scientists who may be Darwin-skeptics. Dr. Skell has been outspoken in his stand for academic freedom and against intolerance.

Read More

May the Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, Bless America

Read More

Bobby Jindal: Charles' Terrifying Ghost

Darwinist Charles can't stand academic freedom, and people who believe in it. He cannot accept also that americans overwhelmingly suport freedom to discuss other origins theories. It seems that for him, that is a step closer to a theocracy.

Bobby Jindal became Charles' worse nightmare when he aproved the academic freedom bill, allowing teachers to discuss the evidence for and against evolution.

It's kinda pathetic for people try to prevent students from hearing both sides of this issue, when evolutionary scientists are already discussing how some facts don't match with the theory. So it's rather weird for Charles to insinuate that the Law atempts to "sneak the teaching of creationism into Louisiana schools", when it actually it does not. But Charles gets his queue from liberals like Panda's Thumb and PZ Meyers, so it's no wonder that he can't even get the facts straight.

Conservatives worlwide should apreciate political conservatives who show how liberal politics is bad for a nation, but we should be very weary of "conservatives" who want to keep social conservatives as far as possible.

John McCain, even after invinting social conservative Sarah Palin to his side, was weak on the social conservative side. American conservatives turned his back on him, obviously. He clearly was not aware that the strenght of the republican party comes from it's strong morals advocated by social conservatives.

If you destroy the social conservatives from the republican party, the GOP won't be much diferent from the liberals. If you think I am wrong about this, just look at europe.

Some LGF readers ask me: Am I “obsessed?” Do I “hate Christians?” Why do I keep “harping” on this issue?

Answer: The top 3 GOP governors in America are all creationists, who have no problems with teaching pseudo-science to American children.

So presenting the kids with peer reviewed evolutionary articles showing the problems with the theory is "pseudo-science". Hmm. Ok, I guess.

That’s why. This is wrong, and it’s one reason why the Democrats now control both houses of Congress.

Yeah, right. The democrats control both houses because republicans endorse creationism.

But wait! Bush endorses evolution, doesn't he? How come he was not that popular among other liberals?

Secondly, John McCain also seems to endorse evolution. How come he was not elected?

If this anti-scientific insanity continues, the Democrats will be in power for the next 20 years.

Thus saith Charles, son of John, the prophet of California.

Read More

Charles Warns America: If a Creationist Becomes President, the Sky Will Fall!!

Ok ok. Perhaps the title of this post was not exacly what Charles said, but, hey, reading what he believes inteligent design is, is my post really out of touch with his mindset?

You may say "Oh, but you are wrong! Surelly Charles is not advocating that the GOP rejects candidates because they trust in what the Bible says, are you?".

hmmmmm. YES, I am! According to Charles, no creationist president will ever be elected in the USA. Is this true? Is Charles right on this one? Or is he scaremongering conservatives?

Well, first of all, we must understand that, in Charles worldview, "creationist" is anyone who criticizes the belief that the living world created itself. This includes the vast majority of republicans, and perhaps a large percentage of democrats. Is Charles really saying that people who believe that God created by non-evolutionary means are not capable of leading the USA?

Oh, say it isn't soooo!

In the real world, however, things work in a diferent way. Not only the belief that the world created itself is irrelevant for science, but I am pretty much sure that most charismatic american president in the second half of the 20th century (Ronald Reagan) believed that the living world displays evidence for real design.

So if Charles is right, the GOP should have never acepted Ronnie to become a candidate. Fantastic!

Read More

Americans Agree With Darwin: Evaluate Both Sides

From "Evolution News"

Americans Agree With Darwin That the Only Fair Way to Evaluate His Theory Is by “Fully Stating and Balancing the Facts and Arguments on Both Sides of Each Question.”

Anika Smith

From the new Zogby poll this week:

QUESTION: Charles Darwin wrote that when considering the evidence for his theory of evolution, “…a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with Darwin’s statement?

Strongly agree 45%
Somewhat agree 31%
Total Agree 76%
Somewhat disagree 6%
Strongly disagree 12%
Total Disagree 19%
Not sure 5%

Three-quarters (76%) say they agree with Darwin’s statement, while about a fifth (19%) say they disagree.

At a time when Darwin’s words and ideas are being showcased, it is interesting that his own support for academic freedom and freedom of scientific inquiry is largely being ignored by the media and downplayed by the scientific community. Darwin famously wrote in On the Origins of Species that when considering the evidence for evolution, “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” More than three-fourths of respondents said they agreed with Charles Darwin’s statement. This is in line with the results for each of the other questions supporting teaching both the evidence for and against evolution.

Read More

The Strange Case of Little Green Footballs II

About the Darwin-Hitler connection, I’ve written many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), quoting Hitler himself, his standard biographers, and Hannah Arendt. What emerges is that Nazism is indeed a kind of applied Darwinism, unintended by Charles Darwin himself, of course. Ideas have consequences, and some of them are unintended. Obvious, right?

Not to blogger Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs, who jumped on me in a recent post for writing two sentences in a Jerusalem Post op-ed to the effect that “Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers.

In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.” And that remains true, despite the fact that Hitler doesn’t cite Darwin as an intellectual influence. Citing influence wasn’t Hitler’s style, but it seems he absorbed his Darwinian worldview from the poisonous popular Viennese press. Richard Weikart goes into detail about this in his important book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which I’ve drawn much from.

Hitler certainly doesn’t cite Christian teaching as an influence either—but that hasn’t stopped critics of Christianity from tying that faith to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Yes, someone will object at this point, but what about the famous line at the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, “In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord”? When Hitler invoked “the Lord,” this was not the God of Christianity, as the immediate context makes crystal clear. “Eternal Nature,” he writes in the preceding paragraph in the same chapter, “inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin’s laws. Those are Hitler’s “Almighty Creator,” as he goes on to say, the “Lord” whose work he proposes to do by making war on the Jews.

The chapter to read in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, “Nation and Race,” where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is transparently phrased in Darwinian terms.

But you don’t have to be an advocate of intelligent design—or that hooded, phantom menace, a "creationist"—to see this. In Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson writes that “Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism” (p. 5).

If you want the assurance of a liberal and a critic of Catholic Christianity, turn to James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Carroll notes that the ideal of Nazi-style “blood purity” was articulated by thinkers in the Catholic Church as far back as 1449, specifically by Spanish “Old Christians” who feared that Jewish-born converts to Catholicism would spoil the Spanish Christian limpieza de sangre. Carroll calls Hitler a “product” of this line of racially based anti-Jewish thinking. But for all that the historian wants to emphasize the Church’s guilt, such as it may be, he acknowledges that “the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist…, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin.”

Carroll quotes Darwin’s fell prophecy in The Descent of Man that “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” He acknowledges the influence exercised by the “‘Germanizing’ of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler’s all-encompassing ideology of race was a ‘vulgarized version,’ in one scholar’s phrase, of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd.”

“Social Darwinism” is a phrase used to insulate Darwin himself from the consequences of his ideas and his words. Carroll concludes, “So however much Hitler twisted what preceded him, it is also the case that he emerged from it” (p. 477).

I have argued just that, adding only that the influence of Darwinism is the more concrete, since he used biological language in couching his call for race war, whereas he did not use the ancient Christian vocabulary that assailed Jews as “Christ killers.”

We know from other sources of his contempt for Christian belief. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes that what Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was precisely its rejection of the conclusions that followed from Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

That is point number one I would make to Charles Johnson and other conservatives who share his perspective. There is nothing in defending Darwinian science, if you choose to defend it, that should make you feel obliged to deny the influence that Darwin had on the rise of Nazi race theory.

No, and let me emphasize this because it otherwise always gets lost when people get upset, this doesn't make Darwin a proto-Hitler and it doesn't mean Darwin somehow caused the Holocaust. But it does remind us of an obvious truth: The way you picture how the world works must inevitably influence, somehow, the way you think it should work. Not determine it, but influence it. It's a reason to take a second, critical look at Darwinian theory, not necessarily to reject it. Just that.

The second point is less obvious but possibly more interesting. More tomorrow.

Posted by David Klinghoffer on February 6, 2009

Read More

The Strange Case of Little Green Footballs I

The Strange Case of Little Green Footballs II

About the Darwin-Hitler connection, I’ve written many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), quoting Hitler himself, his standard biographers, and Hannah Arendt. What emerges is that Nazism is indeed a kind of applied Darwinism, unintended by Charles Darwin himself, of course. Ideas have consequences, and some of them are unintended. Obvious, right?

Not to blogger Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs, who jumped on me in a recent post for writing two sentences in a Jerusalem Post op-ed to the effect that “Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers. In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.”

And that remains true, despite the fact that Hitler doesn’t cite Darwin as an intellectual influence. Citing influence wasn’t Hitler’s style, but it seems he absorbed his Darwinian worldview from the poisonous popular Viennese press. Richard Weikart goes into detail about this in his important book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which I’ve drawn much from.

Hitler certainly doesn’t cite Christian teaching as an influence either—but that hasn’t stopped critics of Christianity from tying that faith to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Yes, someone will object at this point, but what about the famous line at the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, “In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord”? When Hitler invoked “the Lord,” this was not the God of Christianity, as the immediate context makes crystal clear. “Eternal Nature,” he writes in the preceding paragraph in the same chapter, “inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin’s laws. Those are Hitler’s “Almighty Creator,” as he goes on to say, the “Lord” whose work he proposes to do by making war on the Jews.

The chapter to read in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, “Nation and Race,” where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is transparently phrased in Darwinian terms.

But you don’t have to be an advocate of intelligent design—or that hooded, phantom menace, a "creationist"—to see this. In Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson writes that “Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism” (p. 5).

If you want the assurance of a liberal and a critic of Catholic Christianity, turn to James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Carroll notes that the ideal of Nazi-style “blood purity” was articulated by thinkers in the Catholic Church as far back as 1449, specifically by Spanish “Old Christians” who feared that Jewish-born converts to Catholicism would spoil the Spanish Christian limpieza de sangre.

Carroll calls Hitler a “product” of this line of racially based anti-Jewish thinking. But for all that the historian wants to emphasize the Church’s guilt, such as it may be, he acknowledges that “the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist…, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin.”

Carroll quotes Darwin’s fell prophecy in The Descent of Man that “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” He acknowledges the influence exercised by the “‘Germanizing’ of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler’s all-encompassing ideology of race was a ‘vulgarized version,’ in one scholar’s phrase, of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd.”

“Social Darwinism” is a phrase used to insulate Darwin himself from the consequences of his ideas and his words. Carroll concludes, “So however much Hitler twisted what preceded him, it is also the case that he emerged from it” (p. 477).

I have argued just that, adding only that the influence of Darwinism is the more concrete, since he used biological language in couching his call for race war, whereas he did not use the ancient Christian vocabulary that assailed Jews as “Christ killers.”

We know from other sources of his contempt for Christian belief. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes that what Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was precisely its rejection of the conclusions that followed from Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

That is point number one I would make to Charles Johnson and other conservatives who share his perspective. There is nothing in defending Darwinian science, if you choose to defend it, that should make you feel obliged to deny the influence that Darwin had on the rise of Nazi race theory.

No, and let me emphasize this because it otherwise always gets lost when people get upset, this doesn't make Darwin a proto-Hitler and it doesn't mean Darwin somehow caused the Holocaust. But it does remind us of an obvious truth: The way you picture how the world works must inevitably influence, somehow, the way you think it should work. Not determine it, but influence it. It's a reason to take a second, critical look at Darwinian theory, not necessarily to reject it. Just that.

The second point is less obvious but possibly more interesting. More tomorrow.
Posted by David Klinghoffer on February 6, 2009

Read More

Scientists Copy God’s Design—Without Giving God Credit (Again!)

This item is available on the Apologetics Press Web site at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3829

AP Content :: In the News

Scientists Copy God’s Design—Without Giving God Credit (Again!)
by Eric Lyons, M.Min.

Man has been constructing airplanes for more than a century. From the Wright brothers’ first gliders to Boeing’s popular 747s to the U.S. military’s stealth bombers, flight technology has become so advanced and high-tech that one can only imagine what aviation engineers will invent next, or whence they will get inspiration for new flight designs.

Wonder no more. According to Live Science senior writer Jeanna Bryner, a team of mechanical and aerospace engineers is designing a new, 32-inch spy plane called Pterodrone. According to the design team,

The next generation of airborne drones won’t just be small and silent. They’ll alter their wing shapes using morphing techniques to squeeze through confined spaces, dive between buildings, zoom under overpasses, land on apartment balconies, or sail along the coastline (Bryner, 2008).

Scientists expect Pterodrone to be equipped with gyroscopes and a GPS, while being able to walk as well as fly.

What exactly inspires a group of highly educated, 21st-century engineers to design such a flying machine? Whence is the self-styled “design team” getting inspiration for their new flying mechanism? Answer: From Tapejara wellnhoferi, a flying reptile that supposedly evolved and went extinct 60+ million years ago. Bryner called the pterosaur “one of the savviest movers of the Cretaceous...a morphing machine” (2008). Based upon their study of the fossil record, scientists believe

Tapejara walked on four legs before rearing up on its two back limbs and running to reach takeoff speed. Once airborne, the beast could cruise at some 19 mph.... [T]o snap up fish food, the reptile would bend the tips of its wings up to form a three-mast sailboat structure with its body. The membranous crest atop its head would have served as the third sail, used as a rudder for steering (Bryner).

Mankind has been building flying machines of all shapes and sizes for more than 100 years. Just when you might think that engineers have perfected aircraft design, they improve by mimicking movements of an extinct pterosaur. Amazingly, though evolutionists admit Tapejara was a “morphing machine,” which had “nerves that served as sensors for temperature, pressure and wind direction,” and now has “inspired” a “design team” to build a “newly designed spy plane” (Bryner, emp. added), allegedly the pterosaur itself was simply the product of millions of years of blind, non-intelligent, random chance processes. So “the real deal,” as Bryner called Tapejara, was not designed by a designer, while the copycat is meticulously “designed” by a “design team” during a “design phase” (Bryner). Once again, we see how far copying kings (bio-inspired scientists) will go to reject and dishonor the Creator, the King of kings (Colossians 1:15-18).

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things (Romans 1:20-23).

REFERENCE

Bryner, Jeanna (2008), “New Flying Dinosaur Drone to Look Like Pterodactyl,” Live Science, [On-line], URL: http://www.livescience.com/technology/081008-pterodactyl-revival.html.

---

Copyright © 2008 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

We are happy to grant permission for items in the "In the News" section to be reproduced in their entirety, as long as the following stipulations are observed: (1) Apologetics Press must be designated as the original publisher; (2) the specific Apologetics Press Web site URL must be noted; (3) the author’s name must remain attached to the materials; (4) any references, footnotes, or endnotes that accompany the article must be included with any written reproduction of the article; (5) alterations of any kind are strictly forbidden (e.g., photographs, charts, graphics, quotations, etc. must be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original); (6) serialization of written material (e.g., running an article in several parts) is permitted, as long as the whole of the material is made available, without editing, in a reasonable length of time; (7) articles, in whole or in part, may not be offered for sale or included in items offered for sale; and (8) articles may be reproduced in electronic form for posting on Web sites pending they are not edited or altered from their original content and that credit is given to Apologetics Press, including the web location from which the articles were taken.

For catalog, samples, or further information, contact:

Apologetics Press

230 Landmark Drive

Montgomery, Alabama 36117

U.S.A.

Phone (334) 272-8558

http://www.apologeticspress.org

Read More

“So We Make Up Stories” About Human Evolution

by Kyle Butt, M.A.

Dr. Richard Lewontin is the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Harvard University Press describes him as one of their “most brilliant evolutionary biologists.” A Harvard professor since 1973, he has impeccable academic credentials, and has gained worldwide notoriety for authoring several books, including The Triple Helix, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, and Biology as Ideology.

During the week of February 14-18, Dr. Lewontin was invited to speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting held in Boston, Massachusetts. Michale Balter, writing for Science magazine, reported briefly on Lewontin’s comments that caused quite a stir in the evolutionary community. Balter titled his article “How Human Intelligence Evolved—Is It Science or ‘Paleofantasy’?” (2008). In the first paragraph, Balter quipped that Lewontin really “knows how to grab an audience’s attention.”

What did Lewontin say that was so noteworthy and attention-grabbing? Lewontin “led off a session titled ‘The Mind of a Toolmaker’ by announcing that scientists know next to nothing about how humans got so smart. ‘We are missing the fossil record of human cognition,’ Lewontin said at the meeting. ‘So we make up stories’” (Balter, 2008, emp. added). While Balter spent the rest of his article scrambling to show that Lewontin’s conclusions are not recognized by all in the scientific community, Lewontin’s devastating blow to evolution’s long-cherished scenario of human development could not be papered over so easily.

James Randerson, science correspondent for the United Kingdom’s Guardian, wrote an article titled “We Know Nothing About Brain Evolution” in which he, too, reported on Lewontin’s speech. Lewontin titled his speech, “Why We Know Nothing About the Evolution of Cognition.” Randerson reported that, in the lecture, the eminent Harvard professor “systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line” (2008, emp. added).

Lewontin then turned his attention to the fossil record. Randerson summarized Dr. Lewontin’s statements by saying: “The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m [million—KB] years or so, we can’t be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches” (2008). Randerson continued, stating: “Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means,’ Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?” (2008).

Of course, Lewontin’s comments fly in the face of everything the general population has been led to believe about human evolution. The beautiful drawings showing ape-like creatures gradually evolving in a straight line into humans have been plastered on science-lab walls, in science textbooks, and in popular science magazines for the last five decades. We have been told that the hominid fossil record is so complete that it provides irrefutable evidence verifying human evolution. We have been told that our “ancestral” fossils indicate exactly when our ancient great-grandparents began to walk upright, when they evolved greater cognitive skills, and when they evolved into us.

Lewontin was not finished tearing into the standard evolutionary party line about hominid fossils. Randerson noted that Lewontin “is even skeptical that palaeoanthropologists can be sure which species walked upright and which dragged their knuckles. Upright posture is crucial for freeing up the hands to do other useful things” (2008).

What, then, did Lewontin conclude regarding the prevailing status of ignorance that pervades the scientific community regarding the supposed evolution of humans? He said: “We are in very serious difficulties in trying to reconstruct the evolution of cognition. I’m not even sure what we mean by the problem” (as quoted in Randerson, 2008).

The bombshell that Lewontin dropped on the 2008 AAAS annual meeting will leave devastating and lasting carnage in its wake in the evolutionary community. He debunked 50 years of orchestrated evolutionary propaganda. Randerson concluded his summary of Lewontin’s statements by observing: “All in all, despite thousands of scientific papers and countless National Geographic front covers, we have not made much progress in understanding how our most complicated and mysterious organ [brain—KB] came about” (2008).

After reviewing Lewontin’s statements and the various journal articles describing them, the writers of Creation/Evolution Headlines appropriately admonished the reader:

Remember this entry the next time you get a National Geographic cover story of a hominid with a philosopher’s gaze. Remember it when you are told stories about hominids walking upright, their hands now freed to scratch their chins and think. Remember it when you are shown a chimpanzee on NOVA performing memory tricks for a banana or smashing bugs with a rock. Remember it when a stack of erudite scientific papers on human evolution is placed on the witness table at a trial over whether students should be allowed to think critically about evolution in science class (“Paleofantasy...,” 2008).

REFERENCES

Balter, Michael (2008), “How Human Intelligence Evolved—Is It Science or ‘Paleofantasy’?” Science, 319 [5866]:1028, [On-line], URL: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5866/1028a.

“Paleofantasy: Brain Evolution is Mere Storytelling” (2008), Creation/Evolution Headlines, February 22, [On-line], URL: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev200802.htm.

Randerson, James (2008), “We Know Nothing About Brain Evolution,” Guardian, [On-line], URL: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/02/the_distinguished_biologist _pr.html.

---

Copyright © 2008 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

We are happy to grant permission for items in the "Sensible Science" section to be reproduced in their entirety, as long as the following stipulations are observed: (1) Apologetics Press must be designated as the original publisher; (2) the specific Apologetics Press Web site URL must be noted; (3) the author’s name must remain attached to the materials; (4) any references, footnotes, or endnotes that accompany the article must be included with any written reproduction of the article; (5) alterations of any kind are strictly forbidden (e.g., photographs, charts, graphics, quotations, etc. must be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original); (6) serialization of written material (e.g., running an article in several parts) is permitted, as long as the whole of the material is made available, without editing, in a reasonable length of time; (7) articles, in whole or in part, may not be offered for sale or included in items offered for sale; and (8) articles may be reproduced in electronic form for posting on Web sites pending they are not edited or altered from their original content and that credit is given to Apologetics Press, including the web location from which the articles were taken.

For catalog, samples, or further information, contact:

Apologetics Press

230 Landmark Drive

Montgomery, Alabama 36117

U.S.A.

Phone (334) 272-8558

http://www.apologeticspress.org

This item is available on the Apologetics Press Web site at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3641AP Content :: Sensible Science

Read More