Biblical Creation vs. Evolution

[Soldier4Christ]

 Evidence for a Young World
by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D.

Abstract
Here are fourteen natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the universe is billions of years old. The numbers listed below in bold print (usually in the millions of years) are often maximum possible ages set by each process, not the actual ages.

Here are fourteen natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the universe is billions of years old. The numbers listed below in bold print (usually in the millions of years) are often maximum possible ages set by each process, not the actual ages. The numbers in italics are the ages required by evolutionary theory for each item. The point is that the maximum possible ages are always much less than the required evolutionary ages, while the Biblical age (6,000 years) always fits comfortably within the maximum possible ages. Thus, the following items are evidence against the evolutionary time scale and for the Biblical time scale. Much more young-world evidence exists, but I have chosen these items for brevity and simplicity. Some of the items on this list can be reconciled with the old-age view only by making a series of improbable and unproven assumptions; others can fit in only with a recent creation.
1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast.

The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.1 Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this "the winding-up dilemma," which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same "winding-up" dilemma also applies to other galaxies. For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the puzzle has been a complex theory called "density waves."1 The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the "Whirlpool" galaxy, M51.2

2. Too few supernova remnants.

According to astronomical observations, galaxies like our own experience about one supernova (a violently-exploding star) every 25 years. The gas and dust remnants from such explosions (like the Crab Nebula) expand outward rapidly and should remain visible for over a million years. Yet the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants. That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years worth of supernovas.3
3. Comets disintegrate too quickly.

According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about five billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of less than 10,000 years.4 Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical "Oort cloud" well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed.5 So far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated either by observations or realistic calculations. Lately, there has been much talk of the "Kuiper Belt," a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Some asteroid-sized bodies of ice exist in that location, but they do not solve the evolutionists' problem, since according to evolutionary theory, the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it.

4. Not enough mud on the sea floor.

Each year, water and winds erode about 20 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean.6 This material accumulates as loose sediment on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the sediment in the whole ocean is less than 400 meters.7 The main way known to remove the sediment from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year.7 As far as anyone knows, the other 19 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present mass of sediment in less than 12 million years. Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged three billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with sediment dozens of kilometers deep. An alternative (creationist) explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of sediment within a short time about 5,000 years ago.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

5. Not enough sodium in the sea.

Every year, rivers8 and other sources9 dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year.9,10 As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today's input and output rates.10 This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, three billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations that are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years.10 Calculations11 for many other seawater elements give much younger ages for the ocean.

6. The earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast.

The total energy stored in the earth's magnetic field ("dipole" and "non-dipole") is decreasing with a half-life of 1,465 (± 165) years.12 Evolutionary theories explaining this rapid decrease, as well as how the earth could have maintained its magnetic field for billions of years are very complex and inadequate. A much better creationist theory exists. It is straightforward, based on sound physics, and explains many features of the field: its creation, rapid reversals during the Genesis flood, surface intensity decreases and increases until the time of Christ, and a steady decay since then.13 This theory matches paleomagnetic, historic, and present data, most startlingly with evidence for rapid changes.14 The main result is that the field's total energy (not surface intensity) has always decayed at least as fast as now. At that rate the field could not be more than 20,000 years old.15

7. Many strata are too tightly bent.

In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.16

8. Biological material decays too fast.

Natural radioactivity, mutations, and decay degrade DNA and other biological material rapidly. Measurements of the mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA recently forced researchers to revise the age of "mitochondrial Eve" from a theorized 200,000 years down to possibly as low as 6,000 years.17 DNA experts insist that DNA cannot exist in natural environments longer than 10,000 years, yet intact strands of DNA appear to have been recovered from fossils allegedly much older: Neandertal bones, insects in amber, and even from dinosaur fossils.18 Bacteria allegedly 250 million years old apparently have been revived with no DNA damage.19 Soft tissue and blood cells from a dinosaur have astonished experts.20

9. Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic "ages" to a few years.

Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay.21 "Squashed" Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the conventional time scale.22 "Orphan" Polonium-218 radiohalos, having no evidence of their mother elements, imply accelerated nuclear decay and very rapid formation of associated minerals.23,24

10. Too much helium in minerals.

Uranium and thorium generate helium atoms as they decay to lead. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research showed that such helium produced in zircon crystals in deep, hot Precambrian granitic rock has not had time to escape.25 Though the rocks contain 1.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay products, newly-measured rates of helium loss from zircon show that the helium has been leaking for only 6,000 (± 2000) years.26 This is not only evidence for the youth of the earth, but also for episodes of greatly accelerated decay rates of long half-life nuclei within thousands of years ago, compressing radioisotope timescales enormously.

11. Too much carbon 14 in deep geologic strata.

With their short 5,700-year half-life, no carbon 14 atoms should exist in any carbon older than 250,000 years. Yet it has proven impossible to find any natural source of carbon below Pleistocene (Ice Age) strata that does not contain significant amounts of carbon 14, even though such strata are supposed to be millions or billions of years old. Conventional carbon 14 laboratories have been aware of this anomaly since the early 1980s, have striven to eliminate it, and are unable to account for it. Lately the world's best such laboratory which has learned during two decades of low-C14 measurements how not to contaminate specimens externally, under contract to creationists, confirmed such observations for coal samples and even for a dozen diamonds, which cannot be contaminated in situ with recent carbon.27 These constitute very strong evidence that the earth is only thousands, not billions, of years old.

12. Not enough Stone Age skeletons.

Evolutionary anthropologists now say that Homo sapiens existed for at least 185,000 years before agriculture began,28 during which time the world population of humans was roughly constant, between one and ten million. All that time they were burying their dead, often with artifacts. By that scenario, they would have buried at least eight billion bodies.29 If the evolutionary time scale is correct, buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 200,000 years, so many of the supposed eight billion stone age skeletons should still be around (and certainly the buried artifacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the Stone Age was much shorter than evolutionists think, perhaps only a few hundred years in many areas.

13. Agriculture is too recent.

The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and gatherers for 185,000 years during the Stone Age before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years ago.29 Yet the archaeological evidence shows that Stone Age men were as intelligent as we are. It is very improbable that none of the eight billion people mentioned in item 12 should discover that plants grow from seeds. It is more likely that men were without agriculture for a very short time after the Flood, if at all.31

cont'd

 

[Soldier4Christ]

14. History is too short.

According to evolutionists, Stone Age Homo sapiens existed for 190,000 years before beginning to make written records about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Prehistoric man built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases.30 Why would he wait two thousand centuries before using the same skills to record history? The Biblical time scale is much more likely.31
References

   1. Scheffler, H. and Elsasser, H., Physics of the Galaxy and Interstellar Matter, Springer-Verlag (1987) Berlin, pp. 352-353, 401-413.
   2. D. Zaritsky, H-W. Rix, and M. Rieke, Inner spiral structure of the galaxy M51, Nature 364:313-315 (July 22, 1993).
   3. Davies, K., Distribution of supernova remnants in the galaxy, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1994), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 175-184, order from http://www.icc03.org/proceedings.htm.
   4. Steidl, P. F., Planets, comets, and asteroids, Design and Origins in Astronomy, pp. 73-106, G. Mulfinger, ed., Creation Research Society Books (1983), order from http://www.creationresearch.org/.
   5. Whipple, F. L., Background of modern comet theory, Nature 263:15-19 (2 September 1976). Levison, H. F. et al. See also: The mass disruption of Oort Cloud comets, Science 296:2212-2215 (21 June 2002).
   6. Milliman, John D. and James P. M. Syvitski, Geomorphic/tectonic control of sediment discharge to the ocean: the importance of small mountainous rivers, The Journal of Geology, vol. 100, pp. 525-544 (1992).
   7. Hay, W. W., et al., Mass/age distribution and composition of sediments on the ocean floor and the global rate of sediment subduction, Journal of Geophysical Research, 93(B12):14,933-14,940 (10 December 1988).
   8. Meybeck, M., Concentrations des eaux fluviales en elements majeurs et apports en solution aux oceans, Revue de Géologie Dynamique et de Géographie Physique 21(3):215 (1979).
   9. Sayles, F. L. and P. C. Mangelsdorf, Cation-exchange characteristics of Amazon River suspended sediment and its reaction with seawater, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 43:767-779 (1979).
  10. Austin, S. A. and D. R. Humphreys, The sea's missing salt: a dilemma for evolutionists, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1991), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 17-33, order from http://www.icc03.org/proceedings.htm.
  11. Nevins, S., [Austin, S. A.], Evolution: the oceans say no!, Impact No. 8 (Nov. 1973) Institute for Creation Research.
  12. Humphreys, D. R., The earth's magnetic field is still losing energy, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 39(1):3-13, June 2002. http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/39/39_1/GeoMag.htm.
  13. Humphreys, D. R., Reversals of the earth's magnetic field during the Genesis flood, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1986), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 113-126, out of print but contact http://www.icc03.org/proceedings.htm for help in locating copies.
  14. Coe, R. S., M. Prévot, and P. Camps, New evidence for extraordinarily rapid change of the geomagnetic field during a reversal, Nature 374:687-92 (20 April 1995).
  15. Humphreys, D. R., Physical mechanism for reversals of the earth's magnetic field during the flood, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1991), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 129-142, order from http://www.icc03.org/proceedings.htm.
  16. Austin, S. A. and J. D. Morris, Tight folds and clastic dikes as evidence for rapid deposition and deformation of two very thick stratigraphic sequences, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1986), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 3-15, out of print, contact http://www.icc03.org/proceedings.htm for help in locating copies.
  17. Gibbons A., Calibrating the mitochondrial clock, Science 279:28-29 (2 Jan-uary 1998).
  18. Cherfas, J., Ancient DNA: still busy after death, Science 253:1354-1356 (20 September 1991). Cano, R. J., H. N. Poinar, N. J. Pieniazek, A. Acra, and G. O. Poinar, Jr. Amplification and sequencing of DNA from a 120-135-million-year-old weevil, Nature 363:536-8 (10 June 1993). Krings, M., A. Stone, R. W. Schmitz, H. Krainitzki, M. Stoneking, and S. Pääbo, Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans, Cell 90:19-30 (Jul 11, 1997). Lindahl, T, Unlocking nature's ancient secrets, Nature 413:358-359 (27 September 2001).
  19. Vreeland, R. H.,W. D. Rosenzweig, and D. W. Powers, Isolation of a 250 million-year-old halotolerant bacterium from a primary salt crystal, Nature 407:897-900 (19 October 2000).
  20. Schweitzer, M., J. L. Wittmeyer, J. R. Horner, and J. K. Toporski, Soft-Tissue vessels and cellular preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex, Science 207:1952-1955 (25 March 2005).
  21. Gentry, R. V., Radioactive halos, Annual Review of Nuclear Science 23:347-362 (1973).
  22. Gentry, R. V. , W. H. Christie, D. H. Smith, J. F. Emery, S. A. Reynolds, R. Walker, S. S. Christy, and P. A. Gentry, Radiohalos in coalified wood: new evidence relating to time of uranium introduction and coalification, Science 194:315-318 (15 October 1976).
  23. Gentry, R. V., Radiohalos in a radiochronological and cosmological perspective, Science 184:62-66 (5 April 1974).
  24. Snelling, A. A. and M. H. Armitage, Radiohalos—a tale of three granitic plutons, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (2003), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 243-267, order from http://www.icc03.org/proceedings.htm. Also archived on the ICR website at ICCRADIOHALOS-AASandMA.pdf.
  25. Gentry, R. V., G. L. Glish, and E. H. McBay, Differential helium retention in zircons: implications for nuclear waste containment, Geophysical Research Letters 9(10):1129-1130 (October 1982).
  26. Humphreys, D. R, et al., Helium diffusion age of 6,000 years supports accelerated nuclear decay, Creation Research Society Quarterly 41(1):1-16 (June 2004). See archived article on following page of the CRS website: http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/41/41_1/Helium.htm.
  27. Baumgardner, J. R., et al., Measurable 14C in fossilized organic materials: confirming the young earth creation-flood model, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (2003), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 127-142. Archived at http://www.icr.org/pdf/research/RATE_ICC_Baumgardner.pdf. See poster presented to American Geophysical Union, Dec. 2003, AGUC-14_Poster_Baumgardner.pdf.
  28. McDougall, I., F. H. Brown, and J. G. Fleagle, Stratigraphic placement and age of modern humans from Kibish, Ethiopia, Nature 433(7027):733-736 (17 February 2005).
  29. Deevey, E. S., The human population, Scientific American 203:194-204 (September 1960).
  30. Marshack, A., Exploring the mind of Ice Age man, National Geographic 147:64-89 (January 1975).
  31. Dritt, J. O., Man's earliest beginnings: discrepancies in evolutionary timetables, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1991), Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 73-78, order from http://www.icc03.org/proceedings.htm.

Additional Resources for items 9-11.

    * DeYoung, D., Thousands ... Not Billions, Master Books (2005) Green Forest, AR.
    * Vardiman, L, Snelling, A. A., and Chaffin E. F., editors, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Vol. II, Institute for Creation Research and Creation Research Society (2005) El Cajon, CA and Chino Valley, AZ. (Technical).

*Dr. Humphreys is an Associate Professor of Physics at ICR.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Darwin's Passion for Hunting and Killing
by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D

Abstract
In the latter part of my school life I became passionately fond of shooting, and I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds.

One side of Darwin rarely discussed in popular and scientific literature was his powerful sadistic bent. One of his passions that reflected this was his love for shooting, hunting, and guns. Darwin's interest in shooting and hunting was not unusual in nineteenth century England, but he carried it far beyond that of most of his contemporaries. Many people hunt for food and/or sport, then as well as now, but wanton killing for its own sake can hardly be justified. With Darwin it was an obsession which involved behavior that, at the least, bor-dered on sadism.

Early hints of this dark side included Darwin's propensity to lie and steal in order to create excitement and to get attention. In his own words, "as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement" (1958, p. 23). Darwin also admitted to stealing for the fun of it (p. 24). A clearer example of his sadistic impulse was when, as a young boy, Darwin "beat a puppy . . . simply from enjoying the sense of power." He even admitted that he later felt much guilt over his behavior, indicating that he knew his actions were wrong (p. 27). At this time, he still had a strong faith in God, and this fact may partly explain his guilt (p. 25).
Darwin's Sadistic Impulses

Although Darwin first learned to handle a gun before he was about 15, it evidently did not become a passion until he killed his first animal. His "passion for shooting, . . . would stay with him through all the years of his formal schooling and some years beyond" (Gale, 1982, p. 9). Darwin loved killing so much that when he killed his first bird, he literally trembled with excitement. His own words, recorded in his biography, provide a vivid illustration of just how important killing animals was to him:

    In the latter part of my school life I became passionately fond of shooting, and I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds. How well I remember killing my first snipe, and my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands. This taste long continued and I became a very good shot (1958, p. 44, emphasis mine).

He also wrote in his autobiography, "How I did enjoy shooting" (p. 55), and "If there is bliss on earth, that is it" (quoted in Browne, p. 109). He even declared: "My zeal was so great that I used to place my shooting boots open by my bed-side when I went to bed, so as not to lose half-a-minute in putting them on in the morning" (p. 54).

By 1828, his ambitions for killing animals had outgrown his equipment. He wanted a more powerful double-barrelled gun, and so petitioned his father and sisters for the money to buy a new one. He threatened them with dire consequences if he continued using his old gun, which he claimed could, at any moment, "destroy the aforesaid Charles Darwin's legs, arms, body & brains" (Browne, p. 110). He soon got his new gun, which he later used as a student at Cambridge to practice. When he could not be outside, he would practice shooting in his room! While at Cambridge, he joined the "sporting set," and "did a good deal of drinking, hunting, and riding" (Gale, p. 13).

Browne claimed that every summer and autumn of Darwin's youth, after about 1826, was dedicated to killing birds and other animals. Nonshooting months were passed by "studying handbooks about guns and in writing down useful information about the diameter of shot" needed to kill different animals (Browne, p. 110). Darwin gleaned numerous books, such as Instructions for Young Sportsmen by an Old Sportsman, for their advice to help him improve his already considerable skills in killing animals. His "beloved shooting" came first in his life (Gale, p. 144).

His passion for hunting was so great that Darwin even had much difficulty waiting until hunting season to stalk his prey. So he weighed "the financial penalties for killing game out of season," and he even considered ignoring the law since "no common person or gamekeeper can demand your certificate without producing his own" (Browne, p. 110). He was also very aware that he had an obsession with shooting and killing animals, for he once said: "I must have been half-consciously ashamed of my zeal, for I tried to persuade myself that shooting was almost an intellectual employment" (p. 55).

His passion for shooting was well known and, as a young man, was greater than for any other activity, although later in life his love for science also became very important. Browne noted that:

    The only object that could possibly have matched a microscope in Darwin's affections at that time was a gun; and a gun he already had. Shooting completely dominated those thoughts not given over to beetles (p. 109).

Darwin admitted that shooting was for a long time even more important than science:

    I visited Barmouth to see some Cambridge friends who were reading there, and thence returned to Shrewsbury and to Maer for shooting; for at that time I should have thought myself mad to give up the first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other science (p. 71).

Darwin even compiled an elaborate system to accurately record his numerous killings. His list was subdivided into partridges, hares, and pheasants in order to keep a running total of "everything he killed through the season" (Browne, p. 110). How important killing animals was to him is also indicated by the following experience:

    I kept an exact record of every bird which I shot throughout the whole season. One day when shooting . . . I thought myself shamefully used, for every time after I had fired and thought that I had killed a bird, one of the two acted as if loading his gun and cried out, "You must not count that bird, for I fired at the same time," and the gamekeeper perceiving the joke, backed them up. After some hours they told me the joke, but it was no joke to me for I had shot a large number of birds, but did not know how many, and could not add them to my list. . . . This my wicked friends had perceived (Darwin, p. 54).

Browne concluded that his sporting ledger was emotionally as important to him as was shooting itself, indicating an obsession similar to a murderer who notches his gun after each killing. Darwin's own father saw his obsession as a problem. He once said that Charles cared "for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching," and, as a result, he "will be a disgrace" to himself and his entire family (Darwin, p. 28). Even Darwin himself had regrets about spending so much time shooting as a youth, but he never expressed any regrets for his sadistic behavior, only his extreme obsession with it. According to Bowler (p. 39), Darwin "developed a passion for shooting that was to survive into his university days, to be repudiated eventually as useless slaughter." Of course, it was not just useless slaughter, but much worse. One wonders if this "passion" for killing and death might have played a part in developing his ruthless "survival of the fittest" tooth-and-claw theory of natural selection.

The attitude of Charles contrasts greatly with several members of his family. His sister concluded it was not proper even to kill insects for collections, and that "dead ones would have to do" (Desmond and Moore, p. 16). Darwin acquiesced to her ideals, and concluded that it "was not right to kill insects for the sake of making a collection" (Darwin, p. 45). Later, he ignored this ideal, and collected with abandon (p. 62). Darwin's attitude toward killing for collections also contrasts with that of certain renowned biologists. Professor August Forel said that he was allowed, as a child, to collect only dead insects. Then in 1859 he was allowed to collect living specimens after his uncle, also an entomologist, showed him how to kill the creatures painlessly (1937, p. 33).

Darwin claimed, regarding his father (even though he was a doctor), "To the end of his life, the thought of an operation almost sickened him and he could scarcely endure to see a person bled" (1958, p. 30). It is interesting that Darwin sat in on two "bad oper-ations," one on a child, but he walked out before they were completed, "this being long before the blessed days of chloroform" (p. 48). He had no such qualms about "stuffing birds," an area in which he took lessons to develop his taxidermist skills (p. 51).

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Darwin's behavior is ironic, in view of his complaint that God is sadistic. In a letter to his friend, Professor Hooker, dated July 13, 1856, Darwin said in reference to pollen "in which nature seems to us so clumsy & wasteful" that "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!" (Darwin, p. 1990, p. 178).

In another letter, this one sent to Asa Gray on May 22, 1860, Darwin wrote that he could not believe in the Christian creator God because there is so much misery in the world. The example he gave was:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic insects] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice (Darwin, 1993, p. 224).

Some may see it as the height of irony that Darwin argued the Christian God does not exist because Darwin thought He did the very same things that Darwin himself enjoyed as a youth!
Conclusions

Darwin evidently suffered from an inordinant desire to kill animals for most of his life, especially when he was a young man in the prime of his life. Unfortunately, most writers have shied away from the implications of this trait of Darwin's, indicating only that he liked to hunt (hardly an accurate assessment of his behavior). One possible reason why many writers avoid this topic is because Darwin is now idolized by many scientists (and others) and wanton killing of animals is not. Often listed as one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, if not the greatest scientist that ever lived, Darwin is one of the few scientists known to most Americans. To understand Darwin as a person and his motivations, though, one must evaluate his almost pathological drive to kill, and consider how it may have affected his conclusions about natural selection.
References

    * Bowler, Peter J. 1990. Charles Darwin; The Man and His Influence. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
    * Browne, Janet. 1995. Charles Darwin: Voyaging. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    * Darwin, Charles. 1958. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882. New York: Norton. Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton. Edited by Nora Barlow.
    * _____ 1990. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Volume 6 1856-1857.
    * New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt
    * and Sydney Smith.
    * _____ 1993. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Volume 8. New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt.
    * Desmond, Adrian and James Moore. 1991. Darwin: The life of a Tormented Evolutionist. NY. Warner Books.
    * Forel, August. 1937. Out of My Life and Work. New York: W. W. Norton.
    * Gale, Barry G. 1982. Evolution Without Evidence: Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

* Dr. Bergman is on the Biology faculty at Northwest State College in Ohio.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Do Tsunamis Come in Super-size?
by William Hoesch, M.S.

Abstract
The catastrophe began on December 26, 2004, with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the deep-water Sunda Trench offshore Sumatra. Within 3-4 minutes, a 1200 kilometer-long rupture opened the seafloor, and a region roughly the length and half the width of California was displaced vertically by about two meters.

Fast-food consumables like french fries are known to come in "super-size." According to Hollywood, tsunamis do also. But is there scientific evidence for super-size tsunamis in the past? The Indian Ocean tragedy has brought attention to the fact that these large water waves rank among earth's most severe natural disasters. Because water is incompressible, disturbance at the ocean floor generates a surface wave. In deep water such waves propagate at speeds (celerity) as high as 800 kilometers per hour, and their passage through the deep ocean is barely perceptible. As water depths shallow, however, wave energy becomes packed into a smaller column of water, the wave slows, or "shoals," and its form builds to fearsome proportions.
The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004

The catastrophe began on December 26, 2004, with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the deep-water Sunda Trench offshore Sumatra. Within 3-4 minutes, a 1200 kilometer-long rupture opened the seafloor, and a region roughly the length and half the width of California was displaced vertically by about two meters. The work involved is a measure of the raw energy imparted to the tsunami. In this case, it was equivalent to about 100 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.1

Directly east of the epicenter lies the coastline of Sumatra's Aceh province which experienced wave run-ups as high as 30 meters above sea level (height of a ten-story building). Across the Indian Ocean, the Sri Lanka coast received devastating waves with run-ups to 10 meters. Hollywood imagery of steep-fronted and curling waves may appear spectacular, but are generally not true. Rather, tsunamis are best likened to an advancing plateau of water, and the shape of the wave front has probably less significance than the mass of water behind it. Both the rushing waves and receding waves do geologic work, creating distinctive sedimentary deposits.
Earthquake-generated Waves

Four mechanisms are responsible for most, if not all, tsunamis: earthquake, landslide, volcano, or extraterrestrial impact. The Indian Ocean tsunami was an example of the earthquake-generated type, but there have been many others. In 1755 a big wave struck Lisbon, Portugal, following an estimated 8.7M earthquake that reduced that nation's shipping industry and navy to a shambles overnight. A seismically active deep-sea trench very similar to the Sunda Trench seems poised off the Washington-Oregon coast. Evidence for several tsunami strikes over the past few hundred years has been found by geologists in the coastal marshes of the Pacific Northwest.2 The tsunamis in these cases were probably comparable in size to the December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean event.

Shallow-focus earthquakes, the kind that generate most tsunamis, seem to be size and energy limited. Deep-focus earthquakes, on the other hand, are generated by an entirely different process. Low density minerals (like olivine) can transform to higher-density minerals (like spinel and perovskite), abruptly changing the volume of rocks.3 Volume reduction associated with this sudden phase-change is capable of delivering an immense seismic jolt. Historic deep-focus earthquakes may represent mere residual stresses left over from much greater, planet-wide plate movements that are modeled to have accompanied the Genesis Flood. Magnitude-13 earthquakes and greater are conceivable during this time of theoretical whole-mantle overturn.4 Herein lies a mechanism for generating "super-size" tsunamis in the past.
Landslide-generated Waves

Big waves that struck the sparsely populated Newfoundland coast in 1929 and the north coast of Papua New Guinea in 1998 testify to landslide processes. Landslide scarps and debris deposits from both tsunamis have been located on the ocean floor.5 Thus, the evidence for past tsunamis can be found by wash marks on shore, or, indirectly, in the form of large landslides, scarps, and debris piles lying on the deep ocean floor.

Landslide debris covers the mostly underwater Hawaiian Ridge over an area that is five times greater than the area of the Hawaiian Islands themselves.6 Individual landslides have been identified that are as large as 17,000 cubic kilometers. Underwater mapping reveals a lumpy appearance to the deposits that is strikingly similar to that left by the 1980 Mount St. Helens landslide, only 1000 times larger. These landslides must have traveled underwater at speeds on the order of 100 kilometers per hour and unquestionably caused monstrous tsunamis. But how big were they? Basalt cobbles and reef debris found 375 meters above present sea level on the island of Lanai, testify that waves ten times the height of those that recently struck Sumatra washed the debris onto the Hawaiian mountainsides. Similar landslide debris offshore from both New Jersey and Oregon testify of enormous past tsunamis that struck the U.S. mainland.7

The largest landslide-generated tsunami appears to have occurred when the entire continental shelf surrounding the Gulf of Mexico gave way, and produced 200-meter-plus tsunamis across that region.8 The trigger for this simultaneous collapse across such a large area is postulated to have been the Chicxulub (extraterrestrial) impact on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Some of North America's largest oilfields owe their existance to sediments moved by this tsunami.9 Oilfield geologists take catastrophic geology seriously in the Gulf region.
Volcanic-collapse Generated Waves

Large composite-cone volcanoes usually collapse inward after eruption and form a crater like depression called a caldera. If near sea level, the sudden rush of ocean waters into a hot and instantly formed caldera can generate impressive tsunamis. The crater left by the explosion of Krakatoa (1883) in Indonesia's Sunda Strait measures about 5 kilometers by 6 kilometers. The sudden infilling of this caldera with seawater is the probable cause for tsunami wave runups of 37 meters on neighboring coastlines that killed 36,000 people. Santorini Volcano in the Aegean Sea erupted explosively around 1490 B.C., and left a caldera of about 8 by 11 kilometers, over ten times the collapsed volume of Krakatoa. Sea-borne pumice deposits 250 meters above sea level on the nearby island of Anaphi, and an unusual deep-sea deposit tens of meters thick across much of the eastern Mediterranean, have both been attributed to the Santorini tsunami.10 Globally, at least 37 volcanic craters are known to be more than ten times bigger than Santorini and Krakatoa, and many of these are found at, or near sea level.11 Certainly volcanic-collapse generated waves, including some of super-size, played a major role in earth history.
Impact-generated Waves

Craters and suspected craters have been found in continental margins that record at least 18 large asteroid or comet impact events.12 Despite the lack of historical precedent, tsunamis of potentially super-size by impact have occurred in the past. The 90-kilometer-diameter Chesapeake Bay structure lies beneath 400-500 meters of coastal sediments in northeastern Virginia.13 Seismic imagery reveals a near circular crater as deep as Grand Canyon and encompassing an area twice that of Rhode Island. Waters that rushed into this instantly formed crater must have generated outward-bound waves with initial or "primary" heights of up to 500 meters, modeling predicts, which probably put the Appalachian foothills underwater.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Impacts of much larger proportions struck when most of the continent was under water, probably during Noah's Flood. Across a 10,000 square kilometer area in southern Nevada, disrupted limestone blocks and as many as five graded beds occur, as if great tsunamis sorted debris by size.14 The Manson impact structure, located in north-central Iowa, also took place when the continent was underwater, and is associated with a widespread limestone tsunami deposit.15
Do Tsunamis Have a Size Limit?

Life on our blue planet has had to cope with tsunamis of super-size, even in human history. Science has discovered this fact. What is the size limit for tsunamis? An ancient text says, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened" (Genesis 7:11). The text provides the date, the duration, the depth and the extent of a seafloor disturbance that began a Flood affirmed to be worldwide by the prophet Moses, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the apostle Peter. If this really happened in the fabric of space-time history, it surely would have created the greatest of tsunamis. As the people of South Asia pick up the pieces from the Indian Ocean catastrophe, perhaps they will discover a new and unique perspective on this passage of Scripture. May they find the Ark of salvation that is in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Endnotes

   1. Tsunami energy of 8 x 1015 joules is estimated from disturbance map in: Science News, Jan. 8, 2005. Total energy of the earthquake is 2 x 1018 joules.
   2. Atwater, B. F., 1987, Evidence for great Holocene earthquakes along the outer coast of Washington state: Science, 236:942-944.
   3. Dabler, R., and D. Yuen, 1996, The metastable olivine wedge in fast subducting slabs: Constraints from thermo-kinetic coupling: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 137:109-118.
   4. Baumgardner, J., 2003, Catastrophic plate tectonics: The physics behind the Genesis Flood, in R. L. Ivey, editor: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 113-126, also in http://globalflood.org.
   5. 5Monastersky, R., 1998, Waves of death: why the New Guinea tsunami carries bad news for North America: Science News, Oct. 3, 1998.
   6. Normark, W. R., and others, 1993, Giant volcano-related landslides and the development of the Hawaiian Islands: United States Geological Survey Bulletin, 2002:184-196.
   7. Driscoll, N. W., and others, 2000, Potential for large-scale submarine slope failure and tsunami generation along the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast: Geology, 28:407-410; and C. Goldfinger, and others, 2000, Super-scale failure of the southern Oregon Cascadia margin: Pure and Applied Geophysics, 157:1189-1226.
   8. Bralower, T. J., and others, 1998, Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary cocktail: Chicxulub impact triggers margin collapse and extensive sediment gravity flows: Geology, 26:331-334.
   9. Including the giant Canterell field (17 billion barrels, original reserves) and others in Mexico's prolific Campeche Platform: J. M. Grajales-Nishimura and others, 2000, Chicxulub impact: The origin of reservoir and seal facies in the southeastern Mexico oil fields: Geology, 28:307-310.
  10. Yokoyama, I., 1978, The tsunami caused by the prehistoric eruption of Thera, in Thera and the Aegean World I: Santorini, Greece, Second International Scientific Congress, pp. 277-283; and M. Cita, and others, 1996, Deep-sea tsunami deposits in the eastern Mediterranean: new evidence and depositional models: Sedimentary Geology, 104:155-173.
  11. Mason, B., and others, 2004, The size and frequency of the largest explosive eruptions on earth: Bulletin of Volcanology, 66:735-748.
  12. Dypvik, H., and L. Jansa, 2003, Sedimentary signatures and processes during marine bolide impacts: a review: Sedimentary Geology, 161:309-337.
  13. Poag, C. W., and others, eds., 2004, The Chesapeake Bay Crater: Springer, New York, 522 pp.
  14. Warme, J. E., and H. C. Kuehner, 1998, Anatomy of an anomaly: The Devonian catastrophic Alamo impact breccia of southern Nevada: International Geology Review, 40:189-216.
  15. Hartung, J. B., and R. R. Anderson, 1996, A brief history on investigations of the Manson impact structure, Geological Society of America, Special Paper 302, pp. 31-43.

* William Hoesch, M.S. geology, is Research Assistant in Geology, and Steven Austin, Ph.D. geology, is Chairman of the Geology Department, both at ICR.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Recent Rapid Uplift of Today's Mountains
by John Baumgardner, Ph.D.

Abstract
This lack of agreement between field observation and uniformitarian expectation has led to conflict among specialists in the ranks of the larger earth science community.

An ongoing enigma for the standard geological community is why all the high mountain ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time scale. In terms of this time scale, these mountain ranges have all undergone several kilometers of vertical uplift since the beginning of the Pliocene about five million years ago. This presents a profound difficulty for uniformitarian thinking because the driving forces responsible for mountain building are assumed to have been operating steadily at roughly the same slow rates as observed in today's world for at least the past several hundred million years.

But the uplift history of today's mountains is anything but uniformitarian in character. Observational evidence indicates that the terrain where these mountains now exist, in many if not most cases, was nearly flat and near sea level when the recent intense pulse of uplift began. The expectation of uniformitarian thinking generally is that most of the time denudation by erosion ought to be more or less in equilibrium with uplift.

This lack of agreement between field observation and uniformitarian expectation has led to conflict among specialists in the ranks of the larger earth science community. Theorists who address these matters, confident that their uniformitarian models are sound, tend to ignore the observational reports or reinterpret them as much as they can to match the predictions of their theories. Geomorphologists who focus on this topic, on the other hand, confident their observations correspond to reality, tend to dismiss the explanations of the theorists as hopelessly out of touch with the real world. However, because of the specialization that typifies most of science today, a sizable fraction of the earth science community is largely oblivious that the uplift history of today's mountains is even an issue at all.

This disconnect between the uniformitarian theorists and uniformitarian observationalists on the issue of mountains is nicely documented in a recent book by Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain entitled, The Origin of Mountains.1 The authors are geo-morphologists who focus on field data relating to the processes such as faulting, uplift, volcanism, and erosion that sculpt mountains. In their book they repeatedly relate how geological features they and other fellow geomorphologists observe in the field fail to match the explanations of their theorist colleagues. Yet in the end they offer no suggestion as to how the disparity between the existing uniformitarian theories and their observational data can be resolved, or where the errors in the theoretical framework might lie.

The Biblical record concerning the Flood that destroyed the earth and its inhabitants in Noah's day just a few millennia ago, however, provides a straightforward and credible way of resolving this uniformitarian impasse. In a nutshell, the catastrophic processes unleashed in the Flood not only deposited thousands of feet of fossil-bearing sediments on all the continents and moved North and South America some 3000 miles westward relative to Europe and Africa, but also increased the thickness of the buoyant crustal rock in the belts where high mountains now exist. When the catastrophic driving processes shut down, the zones with the thickened crust promptly moved toward a state of what is called isostatic equilibrium, resulting in many thousands of feet of vertical uplift of the surface.

The principle of isostatic equilibrium is similar to Archimedes' principle concerning objects that float. According to Archimedes' principle, the weight of a floating object equals the weight of the volume of fluid it displaces. For example, an ice cube, weighing one ounce and floating in water, displaces exactly one ounce of water. Because the density of ice is about 10% less than that of water, its volume for an equal weight is about 10% greater. From Archimedes' principle one can calculate the fraction of the ice cube that extends above the water surface. It is about 10%.

The principle of isostasy is very similar. It states that when in isostatic equilibrium, all columns of rock of equal cross sectional area (including any height of water that may be present) lying above some "compensation depth" in the earth weigh the same. The compensation depth is a point sufficiently deep in the mantle such that the rock is warm enough and therefore weak enough to flow plastically so as to relax any horizontal differences in hydrostatic pressure. This principle simply expresses the fact that when horizontal pressure differences are relaxed, the pressure at depth is equal to the total weight per unit area in the column above.

To apply this principle it is helpful to realize that the ground beneath our feet consists of two primary kinds of rock. One type, known as continental crust, rich in quartz and feldspar minerals, has a typical density of 2800 kg/m3. The other type is mantle rock containing denser iron-bearing minerals with a typical density about 20% higher, or 3400 kg/m3. Areas away from mountain belts such as the U.S. Midwest commonly display a crustal thickness on the order of 35 km. Mountain belts, however, frequently have crustal thicknesses greater than 50 km and sometimes as much as 70 km. Under conditions of isostatic equilibrium, continental regions with thicker crust usually display higher surface topography. For example, relative to a region with a 35 km crustal thickness, a zone with a 60 km crustal thickness, for the densities quoted above, would have a surface 14,500 feet higher.

So what is behind the uniformitarian puzzle concerning the uplift history of today's mountains? In terms of the time scale, it is useful to stress the vast difference between modern uniformitarian geology on one hand and the Biblical account of earth history on the other. Uniformitarians interpret the rock record since the abrupt appearance of multi-celled organisms in the rocks to represent more than 500 million years of time, while Biblical creationists interpret all but the topmost of these fossil-bearing rocks to represent the destructive work of a year-long global cataclysm that took place less than 5000 years ago. The Pliocene-Pleistocene timing of the main phase of mountain uplift, corresponding roughly to the Ice Age, while brief in the uniformitarian framework, still requires several million years on their calendar. By comparison, in the Biblical time frame, this uplift unfolds over several centuries following the main Flood cataclysm that itself lasted but a single year.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

The case is compelling that the Flood involved massive tectonic transformation of the earth's surface. Many lines of evidence show that today's igneous ocean floor—all of it—has formed via seafloor spreading since roughly mid-way through the Flood. This implies that all the ocean floor formed prior to that point in earth history, including all the ocean floor formed at Creation and existing at the beginning of the Flood and all the ocean floor formed during the interval in which Paleozoic sediments were being deposited on the continents during the earlier stages of the Flood, has vanished from the face of the planet. Seismology provides a clue as to where it went. Seismic images of the mantle reveal a ring of dense, presumably cold, rock at the base of the mantle beneath the subduction zones surrounding the Pacific Ocean.

It has long been my conviction, along with several of my ICR colleagues, that the only way to fit all these observations together in a consistent manner is to conclude that the Flood involved an episode of extremely fast plate tectonics that cycled the pre-Flood ocean floor, as well as that formed early in the cataclysm, into the earth's mantle.2 The energy to drive this event was readily available in the form of gravitational potential energy of the cold, pre-Flood ocean floor rocks. The stress-weakening tendency of silicate minerals comprising mantle rocks allows the process to unfold in a runaway manner.3 Laboratory experiments document that these minerals can weaken by as much as 8-10 orders of magnitude for shear stress levels that can occur in the mantles of planets the size of the earth.

Calculations performed over the past decade show that the pattern of flow generated by subducting seafloor around a Pangean-like supercontinent similar to the one we believe existed prior to and again during the Flood, pulls the continental blocks apart in a manner similar to that indicated by the earth's present day seafloor record.

In addition, the huge amount of subduction at continent margins during an episode of runaway sinking of ocean floor leads to considerable thickening of the continental crust via two main processes. One is the melting of subducted sediments as they reach a depth of about 75 miles. This magma penetrates into the crust above as sills and dikes, with some being extruded at the surface as lava and volcanic ash. The other main process is the physical dragging of warm and ductile lower crust inboard relative to the continent by the subducting ocean slab. Both processes serve to produce zones of thickened continental crust at a continental margin adjacent to where slabs of ocean floor are plunging into the mantle. The west coast of South America is a prime illustration, where the crust has reached thicknesses of up to 70 km.


During the rapid subduction, the overlying continental surface tends to be depressed, even below sea level, due to the powerful dynamical forces produced by the sinking ocean slab below, despite the buoyancy of the thick layer of continental crust above. But when the process of rapid subduction shuts down, these dynamical forces disappear, and the buoyancy forces take over to elevate the zone of thickened crust toward a state of isostatic balance. The uplift of high mountains at the close of this episode of rapid subduction is therefore a logical after effect of this runaway process. Within the Flood framework, the timing of the uplift, unfolding in the centuries following the cataclysm, is just what one should expect based on simple mechanics considerations. On the other hand, no mechanical response in terms of uplift during tens of millions of years of tectonic forcing followed by a sudden pulse of uplift poses a serious problem for the uniformitarian framework.

Yet an equally bewildering difficulty for a uniformitarian is the widespread presence of what are known as planation surfaces that pre-date this global pulse of mountain building. Ollier and Pain document dozens of examples where regions that were later uplifted to form mountain ranges were first beveled to nearly flat surfaces by intense erosion just prior to uplift. These authors puzzle how the tectonic forces could have ceased operating long enough for erosion to have abraded away hundreds to thousands of feet of rock to form flat topography and then be unleashed again to uplift rapidly the entire region by many thousands of feet. The Flood framework provides the obvious answer. The beveling flat of such broad expanses of terrain was the logical consequence of the runoff from the Flood. And it would have occurred just prior to when the uplift took place.

Whitcomb and Morris, 45 years ago in their classic book, The Genesis Flood, pointed out the remarkable timing of the uplift of the present mountains as being after the Flood. They write, "It is extremely interesting . . . to note that most of the present mountain ranges of the world are believed to have been uplifted (on the basis of fossil evidence) during the Pleistocene or late Pliocene."4 They then quote a paper that provides documentation from North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. Surely it is time for evolutionists as well as creationists to give attention to this evidence that so strongly supports a recent global Flood.
References

   1. Ollier, Cliff, and Colin Pain, The Origin of Mountains, Routledge, London, 2000.
   2. Austin, Steven A., John R. Baumgardner, D. Russell Humphreys, Andrew A. Snelling, Larry Vardiman, Kurt P. Wise, "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History," Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, 1994, Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA.
   3. Baumgardner, John, "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: The Physics behind the Genesis Flood," Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, 2003, Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA.
   4. Whitcomb, John C. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian and Reformed, pp. 127-128, 1961.

* Dr. John Baumgardner is Associate Professor of Geophysics at the ICR Graduate School and Director of the new ICR Computing Center.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Stem Cell Research: Greasing the "Slippery Slope" to Godlessness
by Daniel Criswell, Ph.D.

Abstract
If these cells can provide a cure for many who suffer from degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and diabetes, why would anyone object to stem cell research and its applications?

In November 2004, California voters passed a ballot measure providing $3 billion for stem cell research to find cures for a plethora of degenerative diseases. Many prominent individuals made pleas for the passage of this measure including California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former First Lady Nancy Reagan, and actors Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's Disease (PD), and Christopher Reeve, who died recently of complications from a spinal cord injury suffered several years ago. But what is stem cell research and why is there a controversy concerning the use of stem cells in medicine? If these cells can provide a cure for many who suffer from degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and diabetes, why would anyone object to stem cell research and its applications? A close examination of this issue reveals the objection is not regarding the use of stem cells, but from the source of those stem cells.

By definition, stem cells are capable of self-renewal and differentiating into many cell types to form tissues in humans and other organisms. A pre-embryo (an embryo less than 14 days old) possesses stem cells that are totipotent, which means they are capable of differentiating into any one of the 200 cell types in the human body. This potential to differentiate into any cell type of the body has encouraged scientists to pursue embryonic stem cell research for medical purposes. Stem cells persist throughout development and into the adult where they are referred to as multipotent adult stem cells. Adult stem cells are capable of differentiating into one of several (multipotent) cell types, but presumably not into any cell type (although this dogma is now being challenged). Adult stem cells can be collected from a donor or even from the individual needing treatment, whereas the collection of embryonic stem cells requires destruction of the embryo (presumably a human individual).

From a scientific perspective adult stem cells have several clinical advantages over embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells are maintained throughout the body, they are currently used in many clinical applications, and if a patient uses his own adult stem cells, an immune response causing tissue rejection is avoided. Recent progress in research involving adult stem cells may make the use of the ethically challenged embryonic stem cells irrelevant.

Multipotent adult stem cells can be found in many regions of the body called stem cell niches and collecting cells from these niches neither creates a viable embryo nor harms the donor. These niches have been identified in many locations including the kidneys,1 hair follicles,2 nervous tissue,3 and bone marrow.4 From these niches several different cell types are generated to replace worn-out, diseased, or damaged cells that no longer function. The haemopoietic stem cells found in bone marrow provide a good example of adult stem cell function. These cells can differentiate into various blood cell types including erythrocytes (red blood cells), thrombocytes (platelets), and several types of leucocytes (white blood cells).4 Additional adult stem cells found in bone marrow, the mesenchymal cells, differentiate into bone, cartilage, and fat cells.4 Multipotent stem cells are also found in umbilical cord blood and can be collected and stored at birth with no discomfort or threat to the life of the infant or mother.5

Adult stem cells from these niches are currently being used to treat a number of diseases and more applications are in clinical trials. Adult stem cells from bone marrow are used to treat more than 70 diseases including leukemia and breast cancer.6 In addition to these treatments, bone marrow transplants have been shown to supply stem cells that regenerate cells in the liver.7 The exact mechanism has not been conclusively identified, but it likely occurs through transdifferentiation, the ability of haemopoietic stem cells to change into liver cells instead of blood cells, or the fusion of mesenchymal or haemopoietic stem cells with existing liver cells.7 Using stem cells from another niche in the body will make it possible to treat an individual who is suffering from organ failure with their own stem cells, eliminating an immune response that frequently leads to tissue rejection of a transplanted organ. Austrian researchers have successfully treated stress induced incontinence in women using muscle-derived stem cells taken from the arm of the patient.8 Clinical trials with neural stem cells to treat a neurodegenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS),9 and bone marrow stem cells to replace damaged heart tissue from the effects of myocardial ischaemia (decreased blood flow to the heart associated with heart attack)10 have also demonstrated the potential of adult stem cell treatments. Animal models indicate that adult stem cells may be effective in treating diabetes,11 blindness,12 and heart failure13 as well. These are just a few of many examples of the success of adult stem cells in regenerating damaged tissues.

Even with the success of adult stem cell research, the potential of embryonic stem cells to develop into any human cell type is the driving force of stem cell research. To acquire these cells, the trophoblast (the protective covering of the embryo) is stripped away and the inner cells are harvested after the initial zygote has undergone several divisions. These cells grow on media containing nutrients and biochemical factors that stimulate development into various cell types. Using this technology, scientists hope to regenerate tissues and organs for those who suffer from many degenerative diseases.

An even more disturbing procedure to acquire embryonic stem cells approved by the California ballot measure is somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).14 In this procedure a nucleus is removed from a donated ovum (human egg) and a nucleus with a full set of chromosomes from a donor somatic cell (any cell of the body except sex cells) is implanted into the enucleated ovum. The developing cells from the genetically engineered individual are grown on media and extracted as described above for embryonic stem cells. The recipient of the stem cells could also be the donor of the somatic cell nucleus, making the stem cells genetically identical to the recipient and less likely to cause an immune response. Treatments using non-self embryonic stem cells would elicit an immune response by the recipient and promote the complication of using immune-suppressing drugs and tissue rejection. Unfortunately, harvesting these cells from the engineered embryo, results in the death of a sibling. This should be the very reason for using the recipients own adult stem cells, not stem cells created through SCNT.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

If SCNT looks like cloning, that's because it is! Creating embryonic stem cells through SCNT for the purpose of treating diseases has been termed "therapeutic cloning" because, theoretically, the resulting cells will only be used to treat diseases. However, SCNT was the same method used to clone Dolly the sheep15 and other animals, and although science has labeled this "reproductive cloning" the two procedures are virtually the same in the early stages.15,16 Presently, no one has succeeded using SCNT for human therapeutic or reproductive cloning, but success in getting human stem cells through SCNT will certainly lead to the knowledge and use of human cloning.

Stem cell use will benefit man in treating a multitude of human disorders, but science and society must be careful to respect the life of the unborn by using only those cells that can voluntarily be donated from adult individuals. Scripture has much to say about man's responsibility to treat all stages of human life as sacred. The Bible teaches that man is a special creation (Genesis 1:27), life begins at conception (Jeremiah 1:5; Galatians 1:15), and the pre-born are human beings (Luke 1:41; Exodus 21:22). Further-more, we are specifically told not to murder, which includes abortion. However, science and society are on the verge of allowing another form of abortion and using it to obtain what belongs to someone else. The Tenth Commandment tells us, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife . . . nor any thing that is thy neighbor's" (Exodus 20:17). Embryonic stem cells belong to our "neighbor," and killing an embryo for his stem cells breaks this commandment. These differing world-views, Biblical versus secular, are eloquently spelled out in this statement by Anne McLaren in a commentary in Nature magazine.

For those who believe the human embryo from the one-cell stage onwards has absolute moral value, equal to that of a newborn baby or an adult, any embryo research . . . is tantamount to murder. But life is continuous. . . . and although a new genetic constitution comes into being at fertilization, many people feel that moral value develops gradually.17 [Emphasis added.]

This statement attempts to explain the justification of harvesting embryonic stem cells even though adult stem cells are readily available and effectively being used to treat diseases without the moral baggage that plagues embryonic stem research. It seems as long as an evolutionary worldview of man dominates scientific inquiry we will continue to see a disregard for the sanctity of human life and continue down the "slippery slope" towards total godlessness.

References

   1. Oliver, J.A., et al., 2004. The renal papilla is a niche for adult kidney stem cells. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, 114(6):795-804.
   2. Fernandes, K.J.L., et al., 2004. A dermal niche for multipotent adult skin-derived precursor cells. Nature Cell Biology, 6(11):1082-1093.
   3. Gage, F.H., 2000. Mammalian neural stem cells. Science, 287:1433-1438.
   4. Marieb, E., 1998. Human Anatomy and Physiology, 4th ed. Benjamin Cummings, Publ. Menlo Park, California.
   5. Chao, N.J., et al., 2004. Stem cell transplantation (cord blood transplants). Hematology, 2004:354-371.
   6. National Marrow Donor Program, website: www.marrow.org.
   7. Willenberg, H., et al., 2004. Myelomonocytic cells are sufficient for therapeutic cell fusion in liver. Nature Medicine, 10(7):744-748.
   8. Klauser, A., et al., Nov. 29, 2004. Radiological Society of North America Public Release. www.RSNA.org/press04.
   9. Janson, C.G., et al., 2001. Human intrathecal transplantation of peripheral blood stem cells in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Journal of Hematotherapy Stem Cell Research, 10:913-915.
  10. Strauer, B.E., et al., 2002. Repair of infracted myocardium by autologous intracoronary mononuclear bone marrow cell transplantation in humans. Circulation, 106:1913-1918.
  11. Zalzman, M., et al., 2003. Reversal of hyperglycemia in mice by using human expandable insulin-producing cells differentiated from fetal liver progenitor cells. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 100:7253-7258.
  12. Otani, A., et al., 2004. Rescue of retinal degeneration by intravitreally injected adult bone marrow-derived lineage-negative hematopoietic stem cells. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 114(6):765-774.
  13. Yeo, T.P., 2004. Heal thyself: Potential applicability of stem cell therapy in the management of heart disease. The Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, 19(6):396-403.
  14. Vogel, G., 2004. California debates whether to become stem cell heavyweight. Science, 305:1544-1545.
  15. Wilmut, I., et al., 1997. Viable offspring derived from fetal and adult mammalian cells. Nature, 386:810-813.
  16. Campbell, N.A. and J.B. Reece, 2002. Biology 6th ed. Benjamin Cummings, Publ. San Francisco.
  17. McLaren, A., 2001. Ethical and social considerations of stem cell research. Nature, 414:129-131.

* Dr. Daniel Criswell has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and is a biology professor at the ICR Graduate School.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Rapid Petrification of Wood: An Unexpected Confirmation of Creationist Research
by Andrew A. Snelling, Ph.D.

Abstract
The July 2004 issue of Sedimentary Geology included a paper by five Japanese scientists reporting their experiments on the rapid petrification of wood as an indication that silicified wood (fossilized by impregnation with silica) found in ancient strata must likewise have been rapidly petrified.

It is extremely unusual for creationist research to be favorably reported and referenced in a technical scientific paper by academic geologists published in a major, secular, geological journal. However, not only has this just happened, but the same paper reported experimental research that confirms the conclusions of the creationist research published in a young-earth creationist journal!

The July 2004 issue of Sedimentary Geology included a paper by five Japanese scientists reporting their experiments on the rapid petrification of wood as an indication that silicified wood (fossilized by impregnation with silica) found in ancient strata must likewise have been rapidly petrified. 1 After noting that "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood," 2 these authors state:

    Snelling (1995) reviewed previous laboratory experiments, silica deposition of wood at Yellowstone National Park and various reports of natural petrification, and concluded that wood can be rapidly petrified by silicification under the right chemical conditions.

Then the Snelling (1995) Creation magazine article 3 was listed in the references. In that article it was further concluded that:

    the timeframe for the formation of the petrified wood within the geological record is totally compatible with the biblical time-scale of a recent creation and a subsequent devastating global Flood.

The Tateyama Hot Spring

The experimental research conducted by these five Japanese scientists was located at the Tateyama Hot Spring in the Toyama Prefecture of central Japan (figure 1). A hot spring lake 30 meters wide occupies one of several explosion craters of the Tateyama Volcano, which currently is relatively quiet, except for the spouting of hot water. The lake's average water temperature is approximately 70°C. The spring water spouting from the lake bed is highly acidic (pH 3) and has a high silica content. This has resulted in the precipitation of opal around the lake's shoreline. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) examination of this opal reveals that it consists of an irregular arrangement of silica spheres of different sizes.

The hot spring water overflows the lake as a 30 meter high waterfall. Abundant fragments of naturally fallen wood from nearby trees have adhered to the rocky wall of the waterfall, becoming impregnated with silica and hardened (somewhat petrified). This silicification obviously has resulted from the precipitation of silica spheres onto the cell walls in split surfaces of the fallen wood. Akahane and his fellow Japanese scientists observed that the textures of these wood tissues are the same as those in naturally silicified (petrified) wood found associated with volcanic strata in the geologic record, such as the Miocene sedimentary and volcanic ash strata of the nearby Noto Peninsula. They thus concluded that these naturally silicified wood fragments in the geologic record would seem to have been petrified by the same process under the same conditions as the wood fragments in the hot spring water.

Experimental Studies

To confirm the silicification process involved and to evaluate the silicification rate, ex-periments were undertaken. Ten pieces of fresh alder wood (Alnus pendula Matsumura), indigenous to the area, were tethered with stainless steel wire and placed into the hot spring water stream on August 28, 1990. Specimens were removed after one year (August 27, 1991), after two years (July 21, 1992), after four years (August 25, 1994), after five years (September 2, 1995), and after seven years (October 3, 1997). The hot spring water at the experimental site maintained a temperature of 50-52°C and a pH of 2.95-3.0 throughout the whole experimental period.

Both these experimental wood specimens and the silicified naturally fallen wood fragments were then chemically analyzed to determine how much silicification had occurred in them. Furthermore, to confirm the nature of any silica impregnation of the inner part of the wood tissue, the distribution of the silica in the wood tissue of the specimens submerged in the hot spring water for seven years and some of the naturally fallen and silicified wood fragments, was studied by SEM mapping.

Results and Discussion

The amount of silicification in the experimental wood specimens, measured as the silica content of the ash after the organic matter had been removed by heating the wood in an electric furnace, increased from 0.7% to 38.1% as the submerged time period increased from 1 to 7 years. Silicification during the first 1-2 years was found to be negligible (0.7-2.9%), but then increased markedly after 4-5 years to 10.7%-26.8%, and finally to 38.1% in the specimens submerged for 7 years in the hot spring water (figure 2).

By contrast, four specimens of the silicified naturally fallen wood fragments had silica compositions varying from 9.7% to 39.2% of the total weight of the wood. From 14C measurements it was determined that three of these four specimens must have fallen into the lake overflow stream after 1955. Thus the silicification rate of the naturally fallen wood pieces in the hot spring water was 9.7% to 39.2% in a period of less than 36 years (between 1955 and 1991). This silicification rate would appear to be much slower than that of the experimental wood specimens, perhaps due to their likely intermittent immersion in the hot spring water, compared with the constant total immersion of the wood pieces in the experiment.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

A comparison of SEM photographs of the silicified naturally fallen wood and experimentally silicified wood revealed that silicification had occurred by deposition of silica spheres (2-3 µm diameter) onto the surfaces of the wood tissue (figure 3). This is consistent with the hot spring water depositing opal, made up of these same tiny silica spheres, on the lake bed and shores. Within wood tissue are vessels and intervessel pits that are passageways along which water passes. Thus Akahane and his colleagues concluded that the hot spring water containing silica spheres passed into the wood through the vessels and intervessel pits and deposited the silica spheres onto the individual cell walls, finally occupying the inside of the wood, including the vessels, cells, and fibers. Furthermore, in the Miocene petrified wood, not only were the same silica spheres found similarly deposited onto cell and vessel walls and in fibers and cells, but aggregations of silica spheres had replicated the structure of the vessel walls.
Figure 2. Graph showing the progress in the silicification of the wood specimens with the increasing experimental period of their submersion in the hot spring water.

Figure 3. Silica distribution and silica spheres in the wood experimentally si-licified by submersion in the hot spring water for 7 years. Left: SEM back-scattered electron image. Right: X-ray scan of the same wood cross-section showing the distribution of silicon (SiKa). V=vessel, Si=silica. (Photomicro-graphs by Hisatada Akahane and others, 2004.)

Conclusions

Akahane and his fellow Japanese scientists concluded that silicified (petrified) wood had been formed naturally under various conditions by deposition of tiny silica spheres (opal) within it. Although there had been a different rate of silicification within each piece of wood studied, at 7 to less than 36 years the silicification of the wood had been very rapid, compared with claims of several millions of years. They also concluded that petrified wood in ancient volcanic ash beds and sedimentary strata in volcanic regions could have thus been silicified by hot flowing ground water with high silica content in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years" by the same mechanism.

These experimental findings validate, and vindicate, the evidence documented by Snelling (1995) in Creation magazine "that under the right chemical conditions wood can be rapidly petrified by silicification," and "thus the timeframe for the formation of petrified wood within the geological record is totally compatible with the biblical time-scale of a recent creation and a subsequent devastating global Flood." Furthermore, because the silica in the rapidly petrified wood in these experiments is in the form of opal, this also confirms creationist documentation of other experiments that demonstrate opals form rapidly within months. 4

References

   1. Akahane, H., T. Furuno, H. Miyajima, T. Yoshikawa, and S. Yamamoto, 2004, Rapid wood silicification in hot spring water: An explanation of silicification of wood during the Earth's history, Sedimentary Geology, vol. 169, pp. 219-228.
   2. Siever, R., 1972, Silicon, in, K. Wedepohl, ed., Handbook of Geochemistry, New York, Springer-Verlag, vol. II/3, pp. 241-265.
   3. Snelling, A.A., 1995, "Instant" petrified wood, Creation, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 38-40.
   4. Snelling, A.A., 1994, Creating opals: opals in months—not millions of years! Creation, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 14-17.

* Andrew A. Snelling, Ph.D. geology, is an Associate Professor in the Geology Department at the ICR Graduate School.

[Soldier4Christ]

 The "Evolution" of Antibiotic Resistance
by Daniel Criswell, Ph.D.

Abstract
Since World War II many more antibiotics isolated from fungi (molds) and bacteria have been used to treat a wide range of human and animal infections. One group of bacteria, the Streptomyces, produces most of the medically important antibiotics.

An increase in the frequency of antibiotic resistance in bacteria since the 1950s has been observed for all major classes of antibiotics used to treat a wide variety of respiratory illnesses, skin disorders, and sexually transmitted diseases. Is this resistance the result of bacteria evolving new genes in response to the presence of antibiotics, or are antibiotic-resistant bacteria selected for in the environment by possessing antibiotic resistance genes beforehand? To answer these questions a discussion of several factors involved in antibiotic resistance will show that resistance is a designed feature of pre-existing genes enabling bacteria to compete with the antibiotic producers in their environment.

A brief look at an example of penicillin resistance reveals the increase in the frequency of antibiotic-resistant organisms since the time when antibiotic use became common. Penicillin is an antibiotic produced by the common bread mold Penicillium that was discovered accidentally in 1929 by the British microbiologist, Alexander Fleming. By the 1940s, penicillin was available for medical use and was successfully used to treat infections in soldiers during World War II. Since then, penicillin has been commonly used to treat a wide range of infections. In 1967 the first penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae was observed in Australia, and seven years later in the U.S. another case of penicillin-resistant S. pneumoniae was observed in a patient with pneumococcal meningitis.[1] In 1980 it was estimated that 3-5% of S. pneumoniae were penicillin-resistant and by 1998, 34% of the S. pneumoniae sampled were resistant to penicillin.1 Antibiotic resistance by other organisms reflects the same trend observed between S. pneumoniae and penicillin. Tetracycline resistance by normal human intestinal flora has exploded from 2% in the 1950s to 80% in the 1990s.[2] Kanamycin, an antibiotic used in the 1950s, has become clinically useless as a result of the prevalence of kanamycin-resistant bacteria. The increase in resistance among these organisms clearly indicates a change in the frequency of antibiotic resistance genes.

Since World War II many more antibiotics isolated from fungi (molds) and bacteria have been used to treat a wide range of human and animal infections. One group of bacteria, the Streptomyces, produces most of the medically important antibiotics.[3] Streptomyces release antibiotics into the soil in a sort of "biochemical warfare" scenario to eliminate competing organisms from their environment. These antibiotics are small molecules that attack different parts of an organism's cellular machinery. Streptomyces-produced quinolone and coumarin antibiotics, such as novobiocin, interfere with a protein called gyrase that assists in the normal separation of double-stranded DNA during replication of DNA or transcription of messenger RNA.[4] Failure of DNA to properly separate during these processes results in a bacterium not being able to divide normally or produce functional proteins. Ribosomes, the structures where protein synthesis is catalyzed, are the targets of many other Streptomyces antibiotics such as spectinomycin, tetracycline, and streptomycin. Spectinomycin and tetracycline prevent proteins from being assembled by the cell and streptomycin induces the assembly of the wrong amino acids into the translated protein.[5,6] Without proteins, which are necessary for normal cell function, the cell dies. The slight differences between human ribosomes which are not bound by these antibiotics and bacterial ribosomes make this type of antibiotic ideal for treating many illnesses. Other antibiotics, such as penicillin, block the assembly of the bacterial cell wall causing it to weaken and burst.[7] Penicillin is an effective antibiotic for human diseases because it interferes with a biological component in bacteria (cell wall) not found in human cells. The production of antibiotics by these organisms provides them with a competitive advantage over non-resistant bacteria in their environment. Just as large organisms such as plants and animals must compete for living space, food, and water, these microbes use antibiotics to eliminate competition with other microbes for these same resources.

However, not all bacteria are defenseless against the antibiotic producers. Many possess genes that encode proteins to neutralize the affects of antibiotics and prevent attacks on their cell machinery. Efflux pumps, located in the cell membrane, are one method of protection that many bacteria use against the influx of antibiotics.[6] The offensive antibiotic is pumped out of a cell that possesses these pumps before the antibiotic can cause harm to the cellular machinery. Although many efflux pumps may be specific for the substrate they pump out of the cell, they are not uncommon. Ribosomal protection proteins (RPP) are another source of resistance bacteria use to protect themselves from antibiotics. These proteins protect ribosomes by binding them and changing their shape or conformation. The change in the ribosome shape prevents an antibiotic from binding and interfering with protein synthesis.6 The RPP-bound ribosomes are able to function normally during protein synthesis, an important feature of this method of antibiotic resistance. Some bacteria produce enzymes that neutralize antibiotics by adding acetyl (COCH3) or phosphate (PO32-) groups to a specific site on the antibiotic.[8] This modification reduces the ability of the antibiotic to bind to ribosomes, rendering it harmless to the cell.[9] Interestingly, all three types of antibiotic-resistant genes that produce efflux pumps, ribosomal protection proteins, and modifying enzymes are found in Streptomyces species, the producers of many antibiotics. It appears this is the method Streptomyces uses to protect itself from its own antibiotics.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Is it possible to transfer these resistance genes to other bacteria? A unique bacterial characteristic that has not been demonstrated in plant and animal cells is the ability to transfer genes from one bacterium to another, a process called lateral gene transfer. Genes located on a circular strand of DNA called an R-plasmid may contain several antibiotic-resistant genes. Through a process called conjugation an antibiotic-resistant bacterium can transfer the antibiotic resistance genes from an R-plasmid to a non-resistant bacterium.[10] Ironically, several antibiotic resistance genes found in other pathogenic bacteria are very similar in DNA sequence to the genes found in Streptomyces species.[11] The efflux pumps that Streptomyces use to pump out antibiotics to eliminate their competitors are likely the same pumps that other species of bacteria are now using to pump out the offensive antibiotic delivered from Streptomyces! The antibiotic-resistant bacteria likely have acquired the genes for these efflux pumps through lateral gene transfer. The presence of ribosomal protection proteins and antibiotic modifying enzymes in resistant bacteria has also likely originated from Streptomyces or some other antibiotic-producing microbe.6 Bacteria don't appear to be evolving new genes; they are acquiring previously existing antibiotic resistance genes through lateral gene transfer. This allows a species of bacteria to possess enough genetic variability to adapt to a changing environment and to compete with its neighbors. (This method of defense is very similar to the genetic variability of mammalian antibody-producing B lymphocytes—a topic for another Impact article.) The bacterium that acquires the antibiotic resistance genes still has the physical and metabolic qualities that distinguish it from other bacteria kinds and associates it with its own kind of bacteria. The observed increase in the frequency of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has resulted from the increased use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, resulting in the reduction of organisms that do not possess antibiotic resistance genes.

Antibiotic resistance in bacteria can also be achieved when mutations in a ribosome or protein change the site where an antibiotic binds. For example, four of the antibiotics mentioned earlier, tetracycline, streptomycin, kanamycin, and spectinomycin, bind to a specific region of a ribosome and interfere with protein synthesis. Mutations may prevent an antibiotic from binding to the ribosome (kanamycin)[12] or allow the ribosome to function even while the antibiotic is bound (streptomycin and spectinomycin).[5] Although it appears these mutations are beneficial and provide an advantage to the bacterium possessing them, they all come with a cost. Ribosomal mutations, while providing antibiotic resistance for the organism, slow the process of protein synthesis, slow growth rates, and reduce the ability of the affected bacterium to compete in an environment devoid of a specific antibiotic.[13,14] Furthermore, a mutation that confers resistance to one antibiotic may make the bacterium more susceptible to other antibiotics.[15] These deleterious effects are what would be expected from a creationist model for mutations. The mutation may confer a benefit in a particular environment, but the overall fitness of the population of one kind of bacterium is decreased as a result of a reduced function of one of the components in its biological pathway. The accumulation of mutations doesn't lead to a new kind of bacterium—it leads to extinction.

References

   1. Doern, G.V. et al., 2001. Antimicrobial resistance among clinical isolates of Streptococcus pneumoniae in the United States during 1999_2000, including a comparison of resistance rates since 1994-1995. Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy 45(6)1721-1729.
   2. Shoemaker, N.B. et al., 2001. Evidence for extensive resistance gene transfer among Bacteriodes spp. and among Bacteriodes of other genera in the human colon. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 67:561-568.
   3. Tanaka, Y., and S. Omura, 1990. Metabolism and products of actinomycetes: an introduction. Actinomycetologica 4:13-14.
   4. Contreras, A., and A. Maxwell, 1992. gyrB mutations which confer coumarin resistance also affect DNA supercoiling and ATP hydrolysis by Escherichia coli DNA gyrase. Molecular Microbiology 6(12):1617-1624.
   5. Carter, A.P. et al., 2000. Functional insights from the structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its interactions with antibiotics. Nature 407:340-348.
   6. Chopra, I., and M. Roberts, 2001. Tetracycline antibiotics: mode of action, applications, molecular biology, and epidemiology of bacterial resistance. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 65(2):232-260.
   7. Garrett, R.H., and C.M. Grisham, 1999. Biochemistry 2nd ed., Saunders College Publ., New York.
   8. Wright, G.D., 1999. Aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes. Current Opinion in Microbiology 2:499-503.
   9. Llano-Sotelo, B. et al., 2002. Aminoglycosides modified by resistance enzymes display diminished binding to the bacterial ribosomal aminoacyl-tRNA site. Chemistry and Biology 9:455-463.
  10. Campbell, N.A., and J.B. Reece, 2002. Biology 6th ed. Benjamin Cummings, Publ. San Francisco.
  11. Benveniste, R., and J. Davies, 1973. Aminoglycoside antibiotic-inactivation enzymes in actinomycetes similar to those present in clinical isolates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 172:3628-3632.
  12. Recht, M.I. et al., 1999. Basis for prokaryotic specificity of action of amino-glycoside antibiotics. EMBO Journal 18(11):3133-3138.
  13. Zengel, J.M. et al., 1977. Role of ribosomal protein S12 in peptide chain elongation: analysis of pleiotropic, streptomycin-resistant mutants of Escherichia coli. Journal of Bacteriology 129:1320-1329.
  14. Gregory, S.T. et al., 2001. Streptomycin-resistant and streptomycin-dependent mutants of the extreme thermophile Thermus thermophilus. Journal of Molecular Biology 309:333-338.
  15. Recht, M.I., and J.D. Puglisi, 2001. Aminoglycoside resistance with homogeneous and heterogeneous populations of antibiotic-resistant ribosomes. Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy 45(9):2414-2419.

* Dr. Daniel Criswell has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and is a biology professor at the ICR Graduate School.