The Dating Game In Death Valley

How old is the Ubehebe Crater? Estimates seem to be all over the map but one thing is for sure, geologists think it was a fairly recent event, recent enough for the possibility of happening again!

Science Daily reports…

“Up to now, geologists were vague on the age of the 600-foot deep crater, which formed when a rising plume of magma hit a pocket of underground water, creating an explosion.”

“The most common estimate was about 6,000 years, based partly on Native American artifacts found under debris. Now, a team based at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has used isotopes in rocks blown out of the crater to show that it formed just 800 years ago, around the year 1200.”

“That geologic youth means it probably still has some vigor; moreover, the scientists think there is still enough groundwater and magma around for another eventual reaction. The study appears in the current issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.”

This event which happened perhaps in 1200AD, replicates an atom bomb going off so park dwellers should be warned as this event could still happen again! How reliable do you think these old earth assumptions are when determining dates?  Geologists were over 700 percent wrong in the previous estimate.

This goes to show the need to tell the public that they are using “estimates” rather than telling them, X did this 5 million years ago, and Y happened 10 million and because of 5a, Z happened 100,000 years ago.  Rather just explain to the public that these are dating estimates using assumptions.

Evolution Observed Using Intelligent Design?

Breaking news, various media outlets report that what was expected to occur within billions of years, happened in a lab in just 60 days without “mystical complexity or a lot of the things that people have hypothesized — special genes, a huge genome, very unnatural conditions,” said evolutionary biologist Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota, co-author of a study that was published on Jan. 17, 2012.

Evolutionists believe multicellular life forms evolved from single-celled ones but are unable to explain how single cells could unlearn the selfishness that is required for survival and learn to work as a team.  Also a very important aspect that is used quite often to measure evolution is called fitness.  This is also  important to use in determining the value of this particular experiment.

The subject of the experiment was yeast. In Wired, the experiment went like this…

“Once per day they shook the flasks, removed yeast that most rapidly settled to the bottom, and used it to start new cultures. Free-floating yeast were left behind, while yeast that gathered in heavy, fast-falling clumps survived to reproduce.”

“Within just a few weeks, individual yeast cells still retained their singular identities, but clumped together easily. At the end of two months, the clumps were a permanent arrangement. Each strain had evolved to be truly multicellular, displaying all the tendencies associated with “higher” forms of life: a division of labor between specialized cells, juvenile and adult life stages, and multicellular offspring.”

The authors admitted that this was not “natural selection” at work,  ”by selecting for yeast cells or clusters that settled most quickly.”  Their reasoning for the lab experiment was this was give them knowledge on how this could have worked in the distant past. They have the idea if they can perform it in the lab, nature could surely do it also. A problem with that is, this is how they would accomplished it in the lab but how do that know that this is how nature would accomplish the same task in the real world?

So during the experiment the scientists would select to keep only the large clusters that sank to the bottom, then select the best snowflake-formers to survive and reproduce.

Remember evolution is measured in terms of “fitness” so how fit were the artificially produced ones from the originals? Michael Behe comments on the research with this…

“… Examination showed that the fast-sedimenting cells formed clusters due to incomplete separation of replicating mother-daughter cells.

“The cell clusters also were 10% less fit (that’s quite an amount) than the beginning cells in the absence of the sedimentation selection. After further selection it was seen that some cells in clusters would “commit suicide” (apoptosis), which apparently made the clusters more brittle and allowed chunks to break off and form new clusters. (The beginning cells already had the ability to undergo apoptosis.)”

The experiment fails the fitness factor, the yeast became less fit than the originals. Also how could it be called evolution in general when the yeast could form snowflake clusters before any selected pressure was applied to them? In other words, no new ability, they were the same snowflake clusters producers throughout the process. No new information had evolved in the lab and when you take into account the failed measure of fitness, the breaking news was just all hype.

How The Cambrian Explosion Has Been Amazing

Darwin considered the Cambrian fossils to be a problem for evolution because of their sudden appearance of complexity rather than slow and gradual.  One of which that could disprove evolution entirely. But it was widely believed that eventually answers would come with future science which is a common theme in various explanations of evolution. Well, with future science many more Cambrian fossils have been discovered!

And has it answered questions that plagued Darwin? No! There are attempted explanations of the data (like hyper-evolution) but the pattern of sudden appearance of complex remains.  Animals that have complex digestive systems, eyes, and nervous systems. Precambrian fossils were thought to be the answer to the problem, but the ones discovered there so far have no relationships with animals.

In the Deadwood Formation where it was thought to have formed very slowly, a group of scientists from different countries had discovered exquisitely-preserved crustaceans which they said had a ” surprisingly modern aspect” in the mudstone!

PNAS described it this way…

“The early history of crustaceans is obscured by strong biases in fossil preservation, but a previously overlooked taphonomic mode yields important complementary insights. Here we describe diverse crustacean appendages of Middle and Late Cambrian age from shallow marine mudstones of the Deadwood Formation in western Canada. The fossils occur as flattened and fragmentary carbonaceous cuticles but provide a suite of phylogenetic and ecological data by virtue of their detailed preservation. In addition to an unprecedented range of complex, largely articulated filtering limbs, we identify at least four distinct types of mandible.”

“Together, these fossils provide the earliest evidence for crown-group branchiopods and total-group copepods and ostracods, extending the respective ranges of these clades back from the Devonian, Pennsylvanian, and Ordovician. Detailed similarities with living forms demonstrate the early origins and subsequent conservation of various complex food-handling adaptations, including a directional mandibular asymmetry that has persisted through half a billion years of evolution.”

“At the same time, the Deadwood fossils indicate profound secular changes in crustacean ecology in terms of body size and environmental distribution. The earliest radiation of crustaceans is largely cryptic in the fossil record, but “small carbonaceous fossils” reveal organisms of surprisingly modern aspect operating in an unfamiliar biosphere.”

There were other crustaceans that had been discovered in the Cambrian. Since the fossil record disagrees with the evolutionary timeline of slow and gradual, these scientists pushed back the timeline for example, branchiopods were pushed back 80-100 million years. With the problem of complexity so early in the fossil record, these scientist tried their best to explain differences between modern ones but nevertheless, “direct evidence for sophisticated particle-handling” and represent “the acme of Cambrian differentiation within appendages…” 

In order to reconcile fossil copepods which are larger than modern ones. They suggested that there was a presence of fish with predatory eyes which drove the crustacean size down.  But perhaps they overlooked something, fish fossils were discovered by the Chinese back in 2002-03,  in the early Cambrian!

There biggest problem with these amazing fossils of animals is the fact that with all those complex body parts represented in an early part of the fossil record is how a gradual, unguided evolutionary process would lead to such complex levels of function in such a short period of time, abruptly, with no fossil pathway on how it got there, much earlier than expected.

In a more recent discovery, a new species of filter-feeding marine animal that resembles a tulip was discovered on Mt. Stephen in British Columbia.

Phys.org describes this way…

“Officially named Siphusauctum gregarium, fossils reveal a tulip-shaped creature that is about the length of a dinner knife (approximately 20 centimetres or eight inches) and has a unique filter feeding system.”

“Siphusauctum has a long stem, with a calyx – a bulbous cup-like structure – near the top which encloses an unusual filter feeding system and a gut. The animal is thought to have fed by filtering particles from water actively pumped into its calyx through small holes. The stem ends with a small disc which anchored the animal to the seafloor. Siphusauctum lived in large clusters, as indicated by slabs containing over 65 individual specimens.”

This amazing fully-formed animal, which includes a gut, foot anchor and pump to drive water through its complex and “unusual filter-feeding system” implies a very short time period between the Precambrian and its abrupt appearance.

This is why the Cambrian explosion has been and will continue to be quite amazing. Its data confirms creationism, while evolution the data continues to make predictions and expectations on what the explanation of evolution  is supposed to do rather than the other way around which generally is common with “theories” in science.

Cosmology: “In The Beginining” Controversy

In honor of Stephen Hawking’s 70thbirthday a conference was held.  And in this conference, there were two proposals posed being featured and one of which posed the greatest threat to the existing ‘models’ in cosmology.  You see, back in the 1970′s there was an uproar over a book called; “God and the Astronomers” by astronomer Robert Jastrow.

What was the uproar about? In the book, astronomer Robert Jastrow suggested that the universe had a beginning and he was very surprised on how much opposition came from cosmologists as a result. This is because they knew fully well if the universe had a beginning, this would suggest it was created out of nothing and they found that to be implausible therefore leaving the door open for a creator.  So  secular cosmologists embraced the idea of an eternal universe or universes that have no beginning.

Not only was the conference honoring Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday but also it was a conference that was trying to carefully explain the universe with a beginning while being concerned about making any inferences towards God being the creator. In New Scientist, “the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.”

Stephen Hawking told his audience in a pre-recorded speech, “A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God,’   Sadly, Hawking is wrong, science doesn’t break for a creator, science has broken down for natural causes being the creator of the universe. Take the big bang ‘theory’ for an example, if it was true then scientists would be observing a chronological structure of different stages concerning galaxies development as one looks deeper into space. But like in biology, this hasn’t been the case, astronomers have discovered galaxies and stars that are more fully ‘evolved’ in a segment of distant space where it was thought to represent the early, immature universe. One such discovery was discovered not long ago, a cluster of galaxies known as CL J1449+0856.

Stephen Hawking likes to invoke the “M-theory” at the very core of his beliefs.  But calling “M” a theory is a bit misleading because currently M-Theory is really not a theory at all, rather it’s a collection of different ideas (stories) with no observational or experimental data. He also invokes physical laws as the origin for the beginning of the universe.

However…

“… physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions.”  -Professor and creationist at Oxford, John Lennox

John is correct, giving natural laws such profound abilities is not science but merely a man-made story in attempt to replace an intelligent creator namely, God. Back to “in the beginning”, there is a reason why a proposal of this kind has come out despite many objections for suggesting similar things in the past. New Scientist states this about the current status about an eternal universe, “cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead.”

Here are some of the reasons why these models have failed and considered to be “dead”…

The “cosmic egg” model where the universe hatches out of an existing eternal state.  Last year, “Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096).” 

The universe bouncing eternally in an organized state from expansion to contraction. This doesn’t fit the laws of the physical universe, because “disorder increases with time.”  So after each cycle the universe increases in chaos, so given the old universe time frame, it would have already reached maximum disorder.

Inflation with eternal life.  Extrapolated from Alan Guth’s 1981 inflation proposal where universes forming and inflating spontaneously forever and ever. Why does this model fail? Because equations still require a boundary in the past as pointed out by Vilenkin and Guth back in 2003.

No model of an eternal universe has been shown to work. New Scientist calls it a “Genesis Problem”. Science has not broken down, it’s as good as ever and it is confirming God’s word! What is breaking here are these man-made stories from unbelievers who are bent on disproving God.