They are blind but they claim to see - Paleontologists!
One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
Malcolm Muggeridge
I once wanted to be a paleontologist. I thought dinosaurs were the coolest thing ever. The imagination brought them to life, huge reptilian beasts that dwarfed the cows and bulls and bears and other beasts common to Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, the homes of my youth. How I loved to explore the sedimentary rocks of Southern Indiana, finding shellfish in abundance and even a field of trilobites, hundreds of them all neatly exposed to the world in the Whitewater River basin South of Connersville, Indiana. I found lots of arrowheads, spearheads and one or two hatchet heads in Southern Indiana and Illinois and even found trilobites in the limestones of the North near Chicago. Also numerous fossils would be washed ashore on Lake Michigan but usually they were simply crinoids. I did hunt for them in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (the Yoopie) as well. In later years I explored many other states. I discovered that similar rocks could be found in multiple states but in some places layers were missing or seemed to be in differing orders. I did not think much about that at the time, as I was an amateur and I supposed the professionals had figured it all out. I just collected the best fossils I could find.
Malcolm Muggeridge
I once wanted to be a paleontologist. I thought dinosaurs were the coolest thing ever. The imagination brought them to life, huge reptilian beasts that dwarfed the cows and bulls and bears and other beasts common to Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, the homes of my youth. How I loved to explore the sedimentary rocks of Southern Indiana, finding shellfish in abundance and even a field of trilobites, hundreds of them all neatly exposed to the world in the Whitewater River basin South of Connersville, Indiana. I found lots of arrowheads, spearheads and one or two hatchet heads in Southern Indiana and Illinois and even found trilobites in the limestones of the North near Chicago. Also numerous fossils would be washed ashore on Lake Michigan but usually they were simply crinoids. I did hunt for them in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (the Yoopie) as well. In later years I explored many other states. I discovered that similar rocks could be found in multiple states but in some places layers were missing or seemed to be in differing orders. I did not think much about that at the time, as I was an amateur and I supposed the professionals had figured it all out. I just collected the best fossils I could find.
Another hobby of my youth was catching and examining various crayfish, salamanders, snakes, turtles, tortoises, frogs, toads, lizards and etc. I'd catch and examine and then release...except for poisonous snakes. I would get away from rattlesnakes and copperheads and they were in no hurry to hang out with me, either. But I discovered that cottonmouths would attack you aggressively and chase you as well! So if you see a cottonmouth get away from it and be sure it is not chasing. They do not tend to go after you on land very far but if you are in the water and they come after you better be ready to kill if you cannot escape! I also liked to check out spiders and beetles and other animals and have seen pretty much any North American mammal you can name in the wild other than maybe a lynx and a puma. I've seen a wildcat which was probably not a lynx and I have seen a big cat far off that may have been a puma aka mountain lion but I am not sure of it. Bears and moose and elk and bison and wolverines and skunks and pretty much everything else, including various moles. Birds of all kinds, even eagles and pelicans and various owls. I've "caught" a live bat and seen them in abundance. The bat story involves a birdcage, a bat that wakes up and escapes and zooms around the kitchen to the dismay of the female parental unit involved and remains a great family story! Oh, and of course I have caught and seen all sorts of fish and other aquatic creatures including a rare "hair snake" and have pond snails and fresh water shrimp living in my fish tanks gleaned from local waters.
The point is that I have climbed mountains and trod valleys and found fossils and observed nature for many decades. I see all kinds of creatures. I see what happens when they die. They do not turn into fossils, they become carrion. For any creature on this planet to be preserved and not recycled requires extraordinary circumstances. Those of you who believe in Darwinism may not have given that much thought. Certainly Darwinists don't! For instance, here is an article from a Darwinist source. Read it and think on what it says and doesn't say.
One of France's largest dinosaur fossil deposits found in the Charente region
October 4, 2010
Femur of a carnivorous dinosaur of the theropod family. © Didier Néraudeau
Coordinated by the Musée d'Angouleme and the Géosciences Rennes laboratory (France), the project involved researchers from CNRS and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (French Natural History Museum).
With more than 400 bones brought to light, this site is remarkable both for the quantity of discoveries and their state of preservation. The quarries have yielded a wide variety of fossils dating from the Lower Cretaceous Period, dating back 130 million years. The most impressive is a femur exceeding 2.2 meters, which could have belonged to the largest sauropod known in Europe. Unusually, the paleontologists at the site also discovered fossilized wood, leaves and seeds that will enable them to reconstitute the flora in which the animals lived. Based on these exceptional finds, the scientists hope to gain a clearer picture of the terrestrial ecosystems of the Lower Cretaceous, a little-known and insufficiently documented period in this region of Europe.
Although its existence had been suspected for years, the dinosaur fossil deposit in Angeac-Charente, near Angoulême, was only discovered in the Audoin quarries in January 2010, and turned out to be one of the largest paleontological sites in France. Covering several hundred square meters, the site consists of argillaceous strata from the Lower Cretaceous Period buried under the ancient quaternary alluvial deposits of the Charente River. The first excavation campaign took place over 20 days from late August to early September this year.
The first excavations at the Audoin quarries in the town of Angeac, in the Charente region of south-western France, have confirmed that the site is one of the richest dinosaur fossil deposits in the country.
Remains of herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs mixed with aquatic species
These initial excavations have already unearthed more than 400 bones, over 200 of which are of great scientific interest. The latter come from at least 3 dinosaur species, found alongside the remains of two types of turtle and three species of crocodile. The find is all the more exceptional as the bones are not only present in large numbers, but are also remarkably well preserved, having been buried rapidly in the argillaceous sediments of a marsh that covered the Angeac-Charente region during the Lower Cretaceous.
The most impressive finds are indisputably the remains of the largest known sauropod in Europe. Its femur, which has for the moment been left in situ, exceeds 2.2 meters in length, suggesting a weight of some 40 tons and a body length of about 35 meters. The biological links between this giant herbivore and other species have yet to be determined, but its anatomy is not dissimilar to examples found in Spain and dating from the same period. The presence of small herbivorous dinosaurs has also been evidenced by the discovery of a tooth and a few bones. The most abundant fossil material gathered this summer (nearly 80% of the bones exhumed) belongs to a large carnivorous dinosaur with a body length of about 9 meters. The number of femurs found points to no fewer than five individuals, young and adult.
Dinosaurs from the Lower Cretaceous are rarely found in France, and are usually identified on the basis of fragmentary remains. So far only three dinosaur genera have been identified: the ornithopod Iguanodon and the two theropods Genusaurus and Erectopus. Richer faunas, most likely contemporary with that of the Angeac site, have been described in Britain (in particular on the Isle of Wight) and Spain (Cuenca Province). The most remarkable animal remains from the period, including feathered carnivorous dinosaurs, were found in the Liaoning Province of China. The newly-found Angeac dinosaurs will be compared to these other specimens to determine their shared and distinctive characteristics.
For the paleontologists involved in the project, the next step will be to study and analyze their discoveries, whether it be the animal bones or the fossilized plants. In parallel with this scientific research, a project will be undertaken to enhance the site, enabling the public to view each phase of the operation, from excavation to museum display, over the next few years.
Provided by CNRS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let's see now. I can tell you that you do not find carnivorous and herbivorous animals happily co-existing in one place. Herds of herbivorous animals roam warily avoiding the carnivores. Also, they do not all "jump in the pool" with turtles and crocodiles! For a preservation of all of these various kinds of animals along with all sorts of plant life would require a catastrophe!!! A global flood would do the trick. Since we have hundreds of thousands of fossils of pretty much any organism you can name found and listed and know that there are actually millions that have been exposes, we can figure there must be untold millions more buried where no one is digging now or is likely to dig. If entire towns and cities have been built over layers of sedimentary rock we are not going to tear down the city to get to the fossils, are we?
The fossil record kills Darwinism in two ways. First, Darwinists should be amazed at the massive amounts of fossils we find! Uniformitarianism is dead but they have not quite been able to admit to the Noahic Flood so they pretend there were maybe 15 "local" catastrophic events that formed the sedimentary layers...even though some of the layers span hundreds or even thousands of miles and are millions of tons of rock! Second, they keep finding intact animals with full features and they do not find transitional forms with evidence of a new feature being evolved.
Darwin imagined that the relatively sparse fossil record of his day had not yet found the continuum of transitioning organisms his hypothesis would predict, but he expected time would fix that. It hasn't. He thought Lyell was right about Uniformitarianism and did not know that Lyell would purposefully deceive the world (misrepresenting the record of wearing away of the Niagara Falls, for instance) in his work. In fact Darwin could not know that Huxley would invent mythical creatures out of whole cloth or that Haeckel would deliberately deceive people with his work, either. You see, for all his faults Charles Darwin did think he was presenting real evidence to people. Lyell and Haeckel and Huxley and many others from that day to this (like Gingerich today) have no qualms about inventing Darwinist fairy tales, often knowingly deceitful, in order to prop up their worldview. My comments thread demonstrates that there are many who are either knowingly deceived or deceitful themselves. I would hope they are simply brainwashed and are unable to think their way out of it. When it comes to people like Haeckel, we know they knew better are or were simply deceptive, evil men.
In honor of Friday the 13th, here is Creation-Evolution Headlines with their grab-bag of articles. Enjoy!
Science Grab Bag
Here’s a random assortment of things floating around in the science news media – some fascinating, some informative, some disgusting. We’ll let the readers decide which is which. Since it’s Friday the 13th, a day to enjoy like any other day, we’ll give you a baker’s dozen to sample.
- Optical illusion: You won’t believe your eyes at this optical illusion posted on New Scientist.
- The Science of Tebow: Watch Stephanie Pappas on Live Science explain the Tim Tebow phenomenon from a naturalistic perspective. Can Tebow pray for her?
- Drunken sailor in your muscles: A walking machine in your cells does the sidestep, explains Science Daily.
- The Plantimal: It’s half plant and half animal, claims New Scientist, playing “merry hell” with our classification systems. “The division between plants and animals is collapsing completely.”
- Spider clothes: This is really noteworthy. “Eighty people collected, harnessed, and released wild spiders” in Madagascar “every day to produce enough silk” to make some clothes, reports the BBC News in a slide show worth watching. Did you know spider silk is golden yellow?
- Saturnalia: Browse through the 10 biggest discoveries from the Cassini mission to Saturn in 2011 (Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
- Reagan vindicated: Remember the laughter when Ronald Reagan said trees cause acid rain? Now read this. PhysOrg confirms that trees cause 90% of it.
- Microribbit: The world’s tiniest frog has been discovered in New Guinea (BBC News), so small a dime is a large lilypad for it. It’s a contender for the world’s smallest vertebrate.
- Wonder machines of the nucleus: Helicases drive down DNA strands covering hundreds of bases per second without falling off. Let Live Science tell you how (100% Darwin-free).
- Weird dinosaur: This otherwise fierce-looking dinosaur would never win an arm-wrestling contest (PhysOrg).
- Breath of life: Evolutionists have their Genesis stories, too: this one on Live Science uses “may have” and “appeared” in classic Darwin storytelling style, alleging that a complex protein “appeared” to give life its first breath. Invokes the mythical Great Oxygenation Event (see 1/09/2012 commentary).
- Babel artifact: Fox News showed a photo of pictorial cuneiform inscription that shows King Nebuchadnezzar II and a ziggurat, with the Babylonian king’s own words. Readers can decide whether it (1) refers to a historical Tower of Babel, (2) inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, as the article claims, or (3) none of the above. (Hint: If professor Todd at BiblePlaces believed it, he would have said so.)
- Apps for apes: New Scientist informs us that orang-utans at the Milwaukee County Zoo seem fascinated by iPads, provided they can’t take them with them into the cage. They like to use the finger-painting apps. Buried in the article: “If they got a hold of it, they’d take it apart… Orang-utans pee on everything.” Don’t expect an ape-designed app any time soon.
We hope you enjoyed this piñata of news nuggets. For every post on CEH, hundreds of headline titles are scanned from science journals and science media outlets, a few dozen are noted, and one to a dozen are reported on. This takes a lot of time and effort. If you appreciate this service, consider donating to support it, posting comments, and promoting it on your social media any way you can. Use the convenient buttons below to spread the word. (go here to see them)
One - we always get our dogs from shelters or from families who cannot keep a puppy or juvenile dog due to a move or some other reason. Please DO NOT support puppy mills by purchasing dogs from pet stores! Only use reputable private breeders for pure breeds and go to shelters or check online rescue sites to obtain dogs. The two dogs we have now? One came from the local County dog pound (Faith the Alaskan Husky) and another from a rescue operation (Chloe, the Bloodhound/German Shepard mix). Our daughter Amanda married last spring and she and her husband got a Greyhound rescue dog they named Danny. Here are some pics of Faith (top dog pictured) and Chloe (last dog pictured) and I think you can tell them apart! Chloe was still a pup when we took that last chair picture. You can blame my wife for putting coats on them in that winter picture.
Two - Many pro athletes and in fact athletes at all levels pray before, during and after games. Television rarely shows it, but if you go to a football game you will notice a large group of players after the game from both sides kneeling down and praying together. Athletes mostly pray to do their best and that no one gets hurt.
Three - I have put up a youtube of Kinesin "walking" within the cell. Yes, scientists know all sorts of molecular machines are continually working within the cell. Eventually this is part of what will kill off Darwinism.
Six - Enceladus spewing picture from the article. The JPL was formed in part and headed by Werhner von Braun and later David Coppedge was a lead on the project until illegally fired by the JPL for being a creationist. Eventually the JPL will wind up being yet another group of Darwinists forced to pay for being in contempt of the First Amendment. Go to Spike Psarris' website to get a cool DVD about the Solar System as revealed by Cassini and other space probes or learn more about the entire Universe.
Seven - picture from the article. Seems that Ronald Reagan was right about almost everything. Too bad there is no Reagan around to depose King Obama...but that is another subject altogether.
Eight - It should be a continual nightmare for Darwinists to find that more and more complete varieties of all kinds are found on the Earth. Some of them thought to be extinct, some of them unimagined before. Picture from the article.
Nine - More bad news for Darwinists as DNA is even more complex and apparently designed with every new discovery.
Ten - As asserted previously on this blog, both the story of Beowulf and an Egyptian tomb etching indicate that such dinosaurs had a weakness and could be slain by a strong man ripping off a forelimb, causing the animal to bleed to death. Also see here and here and here and here and here and here for more about dinosaurs alive after the Flood and living near people. I have more than just those. The evidence is rather overwhelming. Darwinists try to hide, lie, or ignore.
Eleven - Sometimes the Darwinist fairy tales are obvious. This one is a gas! (wink). A quote:
"Oxygen is toxic, so why would a living organism generate oxygen?" study lead author Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, a biologist at the University of Illinois, said in a statement. "Something must have triggered this."
Yes. We call Him God! As if photosynthesis could gradually develop and the building blocks of life could withstand all the chemical and molecular barriers to life...not to mention the concept of life itself. Science cannot tell you what "life" actually is.
Twelve - Bible students are already familiar with good old 'Neb and his propensity for building monuments and such. He lived long after the Tower of Babel and ziggurat-like structures found around the world are probably echoes of the original. We find ziggurats and pyramids and similar structures on multiple continents build by multiple cultures, all pointing to a common ancestry dating from Noah's family. Genealogical records around the world usually reference one of Noah's sons as a patriarch. Again, I have blogged often on this subject concerning records and also the population of the world.
Thirteen - So orang-utans like to play games and can learn words? Big deal. I had a dog who understood a wide variety of words and concepts. If I told him that "Momo and Popo were coming" he would keep hopping up on the couch and watch for their car. If any other car stopped by the house he would not react but he recognized their vehicle and would bark and run around when he spotted it. He knew the names of specific relatives and would look for them if I told him they were coming. He also ran and hid when someone broke into the garage, leaving me and my baseball bat to deal with the intruder. Smart dog, but not too brave! He knew specific words for his different toys. So yes, many animals are relatively intelligent. Heck, my oldest Plecostomus fish have learned to come to the top of the tank and float like dugongs in order to eat the food flakes faster rather than waiting for them to come to the bottom of the tank. I have a dog that has a specific word that means "rawhide chewy" and if she comes to me and gives me a specific combination woof-roo that sounds like "arooooof" with a bit of guttural to it, she is specifically asking me for a chewy. Everyone knows that dogs and porpoises and all sorts of animals can be trained and can think. Get back to me when apes begin writing computer code...
Speaking of which, DNA is far more complex than any computer codes man can devise and it gets more complex the more we study it. Are you going to admit that organisms are designed and get over the random miraculous fifty gazillion miracles of pure chance that Darwinists depend on instead of logic and reason? One more article about design in nature:
Nature Does It Right
Scientists and engineers continue to find well-designed features in living things that are worth imitating.
Get a tail: Extinct velociraptors, the terrors of the Jurassic Park movies, are inspiring robot designers. Live Science and PhysOrg told about how Tailbot, developed at UC Berkeley and modeled after “leaping lizards,” can right itself after stumbling and can jump without tumbling. “Engineers quickly understood the value of a tail,” said Thomas Libby, a grad student involved in the development of Tailbot. “Robots are not nearly as agile as animals, so anything that can make a robot more stable is an advancement, which is why this work is so exciting.” The PhysOrg article includes two entertaining video clips showing the robot clumsily attempting to duplicate the leaps a lizard does naturally (Tailbot’s attempt might be described as “falling with style”). Prof. Robert J. Full remarked, “Inspiration from lizard tails will likely lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots, as well as ones having greater capability to more rapidly detect chemical, biological or nuclear hazards.”
Good design in bad water: A briny pond at the lowest spot in the western hemisphere has a simple but descriptive name: Badwater. Yet in this pond in Death Valley lives a microbe worth noting. Science Daily says the “Death Valley Microbe May Spark Novel Biotech and Nanotech Uses.” Why is that? Dennis Bazylinski (U of Nevada) is impressed at the ability of the microbe to orient itself to magnetic fields. The magnetic bacterium BW-1 has genes that produce nano-sized crystals of the minerals magnetite (a form of iron oxide) and greigite (a form of iron sulfide); BW-1 is the first microbe isolated capable of synthesizing greigite. Bazylinski sees treasure in these microbes: their magnetosomes make them “useful in drug delivery and medical imaging.” The article states that “Magnetotactic bacteria are simple, single-celled organisms that are found in almost all bodies of water.” They can’t be that simple, though, to do what they do: “As their name suggests, they orient and navigate along magnetic fields like miniature swimming compass needles.”
Insect cuticle for the environment: “Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed a new material that replicates the exceptional strength, toughness, and versatility of one of nature’s more extraordinary substances—insect cuticle,” reported PhysOrg. They call it “Shrilk.” Look for it in these products of the future: disposable diapers that degrade quickly, an environmentally safe alternative to plastic, biodegradable trash bags and packaging, sutures for wounds, and a scaffold for tissue regeneration. Look at the praise they give to this material insects make on the fly:
Natural insect cuticle, such as that found in the rigid exoskeleton of a housefly or grasshopper, is uniquely suited to the challenge of providing protection without adding weight or bulk. As such, it can deflect external chemical and physical strains without damaging the insect’s internal components, while providing structure for the insect’s muscles and wings. It is so light that it doesn’t inhibit flight and so thin that it allows flexibility. Also remarkable is its ability to vary its properties, from rigid along the insect’s body segments and wings to elastic along its limb joints.A bird, a plane: In the tradition of the Wright Brothers, another aeronautical engineer has taken inspiration from birds. PhysOrg calls “Queensland University of Technology PhD student Wesam Al Sabban” a genius for his “unmanned aerial vehicle that uses wind power like a bird.” Does that imply that birds are even more intelligent for coming up with the design first? To develop his Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) called the Green Falcon II, Al Sabban had to learn from the masters.
“As part of my PhD topic we are studying the way birds make use of wind energy to fly with minimum power, the way they glide and use all types of wind to move and change their flight path.” He boasts, “The Green Falcon II will be a zero-emissions UAV capable of round-the-clock service.” Birds are kind of like that. Unreported is whether the robot will leave spots on your car.
Outdoing plants? PhysOrg reported, “Researchers figure out how to outperform nature’s photosynthesis.” The body of the article, though, reveals that they didn’t invent a light-gathering engine from scratch. Rather, “They frankensteined together proteins from Synechococcus sp. with those from Clostridium acetobutylicum using molecular wire to create a ‘hybrid biological/organic nanoconstruct’ that was more efficient than either on their own.” So, even though “These researchers have created a tiny solar-powered device that works twice as fast as nature to produce hydrogen biofuel,” it would be more impressive if they got their own dirt.
Slimy computers: Some Japanese researchers became fascinated with slime molds. “A brainless, primeval organism able to navigate a maze might help Japanese scientists devise the ideal transport network design,” PhysOrg wrote. “Not bad for a mono-cellular being that lives on rotting leaves.” Somehow the cells of amoeboid yellow slime mold can find the most direct route through a maze to get to their food: “the cells appear to have a kind of information-processing ability that allows them to ‘optimise’ the route along which the mold grows to reach food while avoiding stresses – like light – that may damage them.” This means that we have something in common with slime. “Humans are not the only living things with information-processing abilities,” said Toshiyuki Nakagaki. Sloughing off his Ig Nobel Prizes for loving slime, he sees a bright future: “it could provide the key to designing bio-computers capable of solving complex problems.”
Butterfly materials: The blue mountain swallowtail butterfly is not just pretty; it’s downright inspiring. “Butterflies have inspired humans since the time of ancient Egypt, but now they’re also inspiring researchers to look toward nature to help create the next generation of waterproof materials for electronics and sensors,” reported PhysOrg. That’s why researchers in America and South Korea are looking carefully at the wings of this butterfly. “The wings shed water easily because of tiny structures that trap air and create a cushion between water and wing which allows water to roll easily off the surface.” Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cell phone that repels water, instead of shorting out when doused? One team member said, “Mimicking biological surfaces in nature is an important part in a variety of practical applications.”
Spider silkworm: The desire to imitate spider silk was one of the first biomimetics stories reported in these pages. In the years since, scientists have had only partial success at duplicating the strands, or at genetically engineering goats with the silk genes to produce it in their milk. Now, researchers from Wyoming, Indiana and China have succeeded in transplanting the genes for spider dragline silk into silkworms. Since ancient times, humans have farmed silkworms, so we know about their care and feeding; wrangling spiders is much more difficult. Reporting in PNAS (Jan 3, 2012, 73/pnas.1109420109), they announced,
The development of a spider silk-manufacturing process is of great interest. However, there are serious problems with natural manufacturing through spider farming, and standard recombinant protein production platforms have provided limited progress due to their inability to assemble spider silk proteins into fibers. Thus, we used piggyBac vectors to create transgenic silkworms encoding chimeric silkworm/spider silk proteins. The silk fibers produced by these animals were composite materials that included chimeric silkworm/spider silk proteins integrated in an extremely stable manner. Furthermore, these composite fibers were, on average, tougher than the parental silkworm silk fibers and as tough as native dragline spider silk fibers. These results demonstrate that silkworms can be engineered to manufacture composite silk fibers containing stably integrated spider silk protein sequences, which significantly improve the overall mechanical properties of the parental silkworm silk fibers.
None of these articles mentioned evolution. It’s all design, inspiration, and motivation. Bio-inspired researchers want to produce better products, safer for the environment, safer for humans, helping humanity without damaging the planet. Home school parents should use stories like these to fascinate their precocious youngsters with the wonders all around them, right in their back yards. It can lead to a new crop of highly-motivated scientists, 100% Darwin-free (which means, safer for the environment, safer for humans, helping humanity without damaging the planet).
Haste the day Darwinism with all of the wasted time and effort is cast aside and all of science gets to work on curing diseases, warding off mutations and improving ways to generate energy, share information and other such projects!
I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
Malcolm Muggeridge