Biblical Creation vs. Evolution

[Soldier4Christ]

 The Vatican's Chief Astronomer says Intelligent Design is not Science

The Director of the Vatican Observatory, George Coyne, said recently that Intelligent Design is not science and it does not belong in the science classroom. He added that Intelligent Design pretends to be science, but it is not science.

The Vatican's Chief Astronomer said that placing the Intelligent Design Theory alongside Evolution in school programs was wrong and was akin to mixing apples with oranges. Coyne's statements are in line with other critics of Intelligent Design who say it's merely Creationism, a literal reading of the Bible's story of Creation, camouflaged in scientific language.

Officials from the world's largest religious group declaring that Intelligent Design is Creationism camouflaged as science is a precursor to the time when Jesus Christ will return, that is according to Bible prophecy. The debate over the moves by public officials wanting to place the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools has reached a level of great intensity.

Even the president of the United States, George W. Bush, has weighed in on the issue saying that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside the Theory of Evolution in the public classroom. Now, this declaration by the Vatican Chief Astronomer, a scientist as well as a religious leader, who says that Intelligent Design is not science and should not be in the science classroom.

The Apostle Peter warned true believers in Jesus Christ that in the last days there would be those who would be willfully ignorant in other words dumb on purpose and they would deny that the Lord created all things in the heavens and under the heavens, Second Peter 3:4-5. These same people would also deny the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Second Peter 3:3-4 and this would actually be a proof that we are in the days of His return.

Jesus Christ is coming and it could be today. Bible prophecy will be fulfilled.

[nChrist]

Pastor Roger Said:

The Apostle Peter warned true believers in Jesus Christ that in the last days there would be those who would be willfully ignorant in other words dumb on purpose and they would deny that the Lord created all things in the heavens and under the heavens, Second Peter 3:4-5. These same people would also deny the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Second Peter 3:3-4 and this would actually be a proof that we are in the days of His return.

Jesus Christ is coming and it could be today. Bible prophecy will be fulfilled.

Amen BROTHER!

The arguments of the world are most certainly DUMB! ALMIGHTY  GOD - OUR CREATOR, will not share HIS GLORY with false gods, and all gods but HIM are false! It seems as if mankind is intentionally attacking the absolute DEITY and MAJESTY OF ALMIGHTY GOD more and more these days. HIS RIGHTEOUS WRATH will eventually be poured out, and that time might be near.

Brothers and Sisters, GOD THE FATHER, GOD THE SON, AND GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT are the CREATOR - ALMIGHTY GOD! The only and complete truth about CREATION is in Genesis of the Holy Bible. ALMIGHTY GOD told us what HE wants us to know about CREATION. The single and most important FACT is that ALMIGHTY GOD is the CREATOR! This is the truth that our children need to know. We need to read Genesis 1 and Parts of Genesis 2 to our children and lovingly share the ONLY TRUTH about CREATION with them. In fact, all Christian parents should be reading the Holy Bible to their children before they can even talk. Teaching our children the things of the LORD is our highest priority.

Love In Christ,
Tom

   

[Soldier4Christ]

 Varves: Proof for an Old Earth?
by John Morris, Ph.D.*

Visit any anti-creationist website and you're certain to find a discussion of varves, tiny laminae thought to be annual deposits within sedimentary strata. In some areas millions of these are found in succession, which are offered as "proof" of long ages. More importantly, many feel that this proves the Bible's account of recent creation to be in error.

Most often mentioned is the Green River Shale in the western U.S., famous for its precisely preserved fossilized fish. Here several million varves are found, one on top of the other, throughout this wide depositional basin. Does this discovery really disprove the biblical chronologies, or is there another explanation? First, let's gather the data.

It is true that under perpetually calm and regular conditions, varves do form in winter-summer couplets, with coarser materials on the bottom. But it's also true that in many natural settings, multiple pseudo-varves have formed quickly due to individual storms or unusual conditions. In many field observations and in laboratory experiments, multiple laminae can form almost instantaneously in simulated bottom-hugging density flows, now widely recognized as frequent throughout the geologic strata. Few knowledgeable geologists still cling to the myth of one varve equals one year.

One major problem has to do with the untold millions of fish fossils entombed within, exquisitely preserved over the extensive area. These fish are complete with eyes, scales, and other fine details. But fish quickly rot and disintegrate unless they are rapidly buried and kept away from scavengers, oxygen, and bacteria. Some appear to have burst from gases formed in their body cavities after death, but no evidence for much time can be adduced. Furthermore, the fish fossils are found in great numbers, which is hardly how fish carcasses behave under normal circumstances. Perhaps during a rapid deposition event one fish might be rapidly buried, but millions? Some of the fish appear to have been caught in life activities, such as in the process of eating another fish, not in a position a dead fish would assume if it quietly floated to the bottom of a lake to slowly await burial and fossilization.

This problem for uniformitarian thinking is compounded by the great numbers of other fossils present in the same formation. Many species of fish are preserved, seemingly from different habitats. Certainly different habitats are implied from the many reptile fossils found, as well as the varied plant fossils, upland species along with sub-tropical species. Many insects are present, as are marine invertebrates. Most remarkable are the multitudes of bird fossils, from shorebirds to forest dwellers to ocean feeders. Truly a remarkable mix of environments! Surely, this was not an everyday event. A rapid burial of organisms from varied life zones over wide portions of the continent is demanded.

Creationists haven't solved all the problems associated with this classic site, but research is continuing. We can be certain it won't be solved by the sterile uniformitarian thinking of the past. However, reasoning from the standpoint of the great Flood of Noah's day and its aftermath holds promise.

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

[Soldier4Christ]

 Megafloods in the English Channel
by William Hoesch, M.S.*

Sir Charles Lyell, the father of geological gradualism, may have just turned in his grave. A hidden series of gouges on the floor of the English Channel suggests that huge torrents of water once traveled west from Dover Straits. The massive valleys, 50 meters deep and tens of kilometers wide, have puzzled geologists since the 1970s, but a recent high resolution sonar survey has sharpened the focus of scientific research.

The picture that has emerged includes long ridges and grooves that run parallel to the Channel, v-shaped scours that taper upstream, streamlined islands, and at least one "hanging valley." All these features are remarkably well-preserved in the subsea bedrock, and represent geological scars from a decidedly non-gradual event.

The sub-sea features point in the direction of the 21-mile-wide Dover Straits. For over a hundred years geologists have been puzzled by these narrows that connect the English Channel to the North Sea. The scenic chalk cliffs that line the straits on both the English and French sides are familiar to many. What is perhaps less obvious is that the cliffs are the interrupted edges of a once-continuous ridge that spanned the straits, called the Weald-Artois anticline.

At a time when sea level was about 100 meters lower, during the post-Flood Ice Age, this ridge apparently formed a dam that held a large lake, perhaps the size of one of the smaller Great Lakes. Breaching of the rock dam at Dover Straits instigated catastrophic drainage of the lake; peak discharges on the order of one million cubic meters per second (200 times the discharge of Niagara Falls) are demanded to explain the scours in the lowlands below. The scours resemble those caused by the Lake Missoula Flood (17 times this discharge), another Ice Age deluge. When sea level rose to present levels following the Ice Age, the scoured lowland became the English Channel and the Dover "dam breach" became the Dover Straits. The course of English history was forever changed.

The new findings add to a swelling body of evidence for Ice Age megafloods as major landform-generating agents. Evidence suggests that the Ice Age ended abruptly and catastrophically. A few regions of the world that have been shaped by Ice Age megafloods include: a major portion of Washington state, the Snake River Plain of Idaho, the Altai region of southern Siberia, the Black Sea basin, the upper Mississippi River Valley, the Hudson River Valley including New York City, Wyoming's Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, Owens River Gorge in California, and the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence drainage basin, including Niagara Falls. Now the English Channel and Dover Straits can be added to the list. A few decades ago it would have been preposterous to appeal to such non-observable events. Mere extrapolation of the processes operant in observed historic floods cannot approximate the power of the megaflood. For example, cavitation is a rock-pulverizing process that operates only when certain thresholds of velocity and power are crossed. There is a need to break away from the kind of linear thinking that was so encouraged by Lyell and others; secular scientists are to be praised for being unafraid to do so today.

Catastrophism has finally come of age.

* William A. Hoesch, M.S. geology, is Research Assistant in Geology.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Spewing Hot Rocks on Old Ideas
by David F. Coppedge*

The most volcanically active body in the solar system is a little moon of Jupiter named Io. This moon is pumping out the hottest lavas known, from equator to pole, 24/7. That a small body could be this hyperactive is one of the major mysteries for adherents to the billions-of-years-old universe hypothesis.

Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory stood astonished when Voyager 1 transmitted the image of a volcanic plume rising above the limb of Io in 1979. These volcanoes have not ceased in the 28 years since. Io's pizza-like surface, devoid of impact craters, suggests this activity has continued much longer. Every square inch of the moon has been resurfaced by volcanic ejecta. In comparison, the surface of Io emits five times more energy than Yellowstone's thermal basins: 13.7 watts per square meter.

When the New Horizons spacecraft passed Io on March 1, 2007, it photographed a plume shooting 200 miles high near Io's north pole. This area sported a bright lava fountain when the Galileo spacecraft photographed it in 1999. Now, eight years later, the lava lake remained visible as a bright spot. Galileo observed one plume 370 miles high. Material from these eruptions forms a large donut-shaped ring, or torus, around Jupiter. This little moon has mountain ranges rivaling the Rockies and Himalayas.

Spectra of the lavas show them to be much hotter (2000° K) than earth lavas (1200° K). These ultramafic lavas contain the heavy elements iron and magnesium. If Io were as old as claimed, the heaviest elements should have sunk to the core, leaving a light crust 50km thick that heavy elements could not penetrate. Yet if the interior were mushy, it could not support the high mountains. And what generates all that heat?

The usual explanation is that Io is squeezed by the gravity of Jupiter and its neighboring moon Europa. Calculations show, however, that the tidal energy is an order of magnitude too low to produce the observed heat flow. A series of papers on "Io after Galileo" in the May 2004 issue of Icarus could not solve these problems. One scientist calculated in 2003 that if Io has been erupting over "geologic time" at 10% its current rate, it would have erupted its entire mass 40 times over by now.

Meanwhile, Io continues to sneeze at old-age beliefs. A record outburst on February 22, 2001, was the largest ever seen in the solar system. It covered a thousand times the area of Mt. Etna. This one outburst rivaled all of Io's other volcanoes put together. Another significant burst occurred less than a month later at a different location. Observations published in July 2007 indicated a doubling of sodium in the torus over a few months.

Io stands as a dynamic witness against the belief that the planets are 4.5 billion years old. Unfortunately for evolutionists, it's not the only one.

* David F. Coppedge works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Creation Cosmologies Solve Spacecraft Mystery
by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D.*

A groundbreaking new technical paper1 shows that several creationist cosmologies can explain the "Pioneer anomaly," a decades-old mystery about distant spacecraft. Big Bang theorists cannot use this solution, yet they have found no alternative explanation they can agree upon. Thus the Pioneer data are evidence against the Big Bang and for a biblical, young universe.

In 1980, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena,
California, began to notice a peculiarity in the trajectories of their spacecraft Pioneer 10 and 11, which are now very distant, far beyond the orbit of Pluto (Figure 1). Later they noticed the same peculiarity in the trajectories of the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft. Radar-like signals between earth and these spacecraft showed that the spacecraft were slowing down in their outward travels away from the sun more than computations of all the gravitational forces (mainly from the sun) could explain. They checked the calculations thoroughly, even using a different program on a different computer. Year by year, the anomaly (the difference between expected and observed speeds) continued to increase.

Finally, in 1998, they reported their observations in a major physics journal.2 All the spacecraft were losing speed more than expected by about 0.85 billionths of a meter/sec per second. Theorists were quick to notice that this number is very close to the Hubble constant (H) times the speed of light (c). The Hubble constant describes how redshifts in the light spectra of galaxies increase in proportion to their distance. This apparent connection to cosmology stimulated a flood of theoretical papers trying to explain the anomaly.

Some theorists suggested the number was only a coincidence, and that the cause of the deceleration was something simple, such as gas leaks at the right rate in the right direction on all four spacecraft. The JPL team quickly answered such remarks, and then in 2002 completely refuted them in a detailed fifty-page review3 of the data from Pioneer 10 and 11, the two spacecraft showing the effect most clearly. Other theorists invented new laws of physics, invoking such exotica as "braneworlds" or "mirrorworlds." A few theorists tried to apply conventional physics in new ways, such as appealing to larger-than-expected gravitational forces from the as-yet-unobserved Oort comet cloud. The JPL team surveyed all the theoretical offerings, and as of late 2005 found them all unsatisfactory. Below I outline how the essential features of several creationist cosmologies offer a coherent solution to the mystery.

The cosmos has a center and has expanded

My 1994 book Starlight and Time4 pointed out a "trade secret" of Big Bang cosmologists: they assume that at all times, all the space that exists is completely filled (roughly uniformly) with matter and energy. That means the Big Bang has no "farthest galaxies" beyond which there is a lot of empty space. It has no "edge of space," either. Some versions of the Big Bang have infinite space (and matter), while other versions have the fabric of space curved back upon itself. (If you don't understand the latter, buttonhole your nearest available Big Bang theorist and make him explain it to you!) The Big Bang theories do not have a large empty space surrounding all the galaxies. That means the Big Bang theories cannot have all the stars falling toward, or orbiting around, a common center of mass. The Big Bang is centerless.

But the Bible implies that the real universe indeed has a center! Appendix B of Starlight and Time details much of what follows. After creating a light-years-size ball of water (Genesis 1:2, "the deep ... the waters"), God said, "Let there be an expanse |or "firmament"| in the midst of the waters" (Genesis 1:6, italics mine). So the expanse started near the center of the large ball of water as a thin spherical layer separating a planet-size ball of water inside it from the much larger amount of water outside it (Genesis 1:7).

Then Genesis 1:8 adds, "God called the expanse heavens." Moses' first readers, the Israelites in Sinai, would have understood the heavens as being the space that, after the fifth day, would contain not only clouds and birds, but also the sun, moon, and stars (e.g., Deuteronomy 4:19). The distinction between "atmosphere" and "outer space" is a modern idea that is foreign to the original meaning of the word.

Next God stretched out the expanse. Not only is the idea of "spreading out" implicit in the Hebrew word for expanse, but seventeen verses in the Old Testament affirm it, such as Isaiah 40:22, which declares that God "... stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in."

God wanted the expanse to be big enough to contain all the stars He created (Isaiah40:26) on the fourth day (an ordinary-length day by earth's clocks): "And God made the two great lights ... and the stars ... and placed them in |not 'above'| the expanse of the heavens" (Genesis 1:16-17, my translation and italics). So the heavens include everything from the earth's surface out to "the waters above" the expanse. Psalm 148:3-4 implies that "the waters above the heavens" still exist and are above the stars and "highest heavens." (They are not the "windows of the heavens," one of the sources of water for the Genesis flood.)

The "waters above" are beyond the most distant galaxy our telescopes have detected, at least 12 billion light years away (1 light year = 6 trillion miles). If the waters were only a little further away, 13.8 billion light years, they would be beyond current estimates of the "redshift horizon," which is the distance limit of what we can observe.

From my interpretation of the Pioneer data, at that distance the waters would have a total mass of about twenty times the mass of all the stars. This shell of water would now be so thin that it would probably have frozen and broken up into a tenuous veil of ice particles. If its composition is similar to the ice particles in Saturn's rings, it would be about 40 meters thick. Though the "waters above" are as insubstantial as a cloud, they cover such a large area that they have an enormous total mass, which affects the physics in the neighborhood of our solar system.

Lest we forget where the earth is in all this, Genesis 1:9 tells us that the "waters below the heavens" became the seas and solid earth on the third day of creation. Because the initial spherical expanse contained those waters and was "in the midst" of all the waters, it appears that the earth is approximately (on a cosmological scale of distances) at the center of the cosmos. (In contrast to geocentrism, I am not claiming the earth is at the exact center or is motionless with respect to it.)

Expansion causes the Pioneer anomaly

A backyard trampoline helps to illustrate how the expansion of a cosmos with a center explains the mystery of the apparent slowdown of the Pioneer spacecraft. This trampoline has thumbscrews around the rim that can tighten and stretch out the elastic fabric considerably. Now make a two-foot diameter ring of heavy wet sand on the trampoline. The weight of the sand makes a dent in the elastic fabric. Inside the ring of sand, the fabric is flat. The depth of the dent is, say, four inches below the rim of the trampoline.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Now turn the tightening screws and stretch out the fabric until the ring of sand is larger, three feet in diameter. The tension in the fabric (force tending to pull it apart) has become greater, and the dent is shallower, say only three inches deep. Stretching out the fabric has raised the sand ring and the dent by one inch. That has increased their gravitational energy, the energy it takes to lift an object.

The trampoline has only two horizontal dimensions, say east-west and north-south. Except for that limitation, it obeys the same kind of equation that gravity does, either Newtonian (three dimensions) or Einsteinian (four dimensions). As God stretches out the fabric of space, the spherical shell of waters expands outward with it. Inside the shell, the gravitational energy of the fabric of space increases, just like the gravitational energy of the trampoline fabric did. The tension of the fabric of space also increases.

Now imagine waves traveling in the trampoline. If you karate-chop one side of the trampoline fabric, a wave travels out from the point of impact. The higher the tension in the fabric, the faster the wave travels. You can see the same effect more easily with a heavy cable attached to a tree. Stand a few dozen feet away from the tree with the loose end held near your eye. Pull steadily on the cable to apply some tension to it. Move the cable sharply up and down, just once, and you will see a pulse move down toward the tree and bounce back to you. The harder you pull on the cable, the higher the tension, and the faster the pulse will move.

The same thing happens to the fabric of space. The main differences are that the tension of that fabric is its total energy per unit volume, and the waves are electromagnetic. The gravitational energy contributes to the total energy of the fabric of space, so when the gravitational energy increases, the total energy increases, and so does the tension of the fabric. Looking at it another way, the increase of the gravitational energy of the fabric of space and the shell of waters comes from God increasing the tension in the fabric of space to stretch it out. The increase of tension increases the speed of light waves and radio waves through space.

The upshot is that God's stretching of the fabric of space increases the speed of radio waves, the basis of radar measurements. Recall that in the first paragraph of this article, I said that it was "radar-like signals between earth and these spacecraft" that showed the changes in the spacecraft speeds. In the technical paper I show that the speeding up of the radio waves reduces the "radar" distance of the spacecraft below what is expected in precisely the right way as to explain the apparent deceleration. The Pioneer anomaly is the first evidence we have that the expansion of space is occurring today and locally, not just in the past and far away.

The bottom line

Another important result is that to fit the Pioneer data, the "dent" in the fabric of space has to be very deep, so deep that only thousands of years ago there would have been strong time dilation (changes in the rates of physical processes). That can explain how light from distant galaxies got to the earth quickly, by the end of the fourth day of creation. Several creation cosmologies (not all developed by me) feature recent time dilation, a center of mass, and expansion of space. These essential features explain the Pioneer anomaly. In contrast, Big Bang theories cannot invoke this explanation. So the Pioneer data represent striking support for a straightforward biblical view of a young universe, while presenting yet another serious problem for Big Bang cosmologies.

For more references, please see the end notes of the technical paper cited in the first footnote listed below. Email questions and comments to Info@icr.org. Please do not relay technical remarks before reading the technical paper.

References

1. Humphreys, D. R. 2007. Creationist cosmologies explain the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer spacecraft. Journal of Creation 21(2):61-70. Can be downloaded as a PDF document from the following page of the Creation Ministries International website: http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5181/.
2. Anderson, J. D. et al. 1998. Indication from Pioneer 10/11, Galileo, and Ulysses Data, of an apparent anomalous, weak, long-range acceleration, Physical Review Letters 81:2858-2861.
3. Anderson, J. D. et al. 2002. Study of the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11, Physical Review D65:082004-1 to 082004-50.
4. Humphreys, D. R. 1994. Starlight and Time. Master Books, Green Forest, Arkansas. Available at: http://www.icr.org/store/.

* Dr. Humphreys is Associate Professor of Physics at ICR Graduate School.

[Soldier4Christ]

The Creationist Worldview
by Henry Morris III, D.Min.

"For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." (Proverbs 23:7)

None but the most radical libertarian is comfortable with the way things are in society. Much of the argument among politicians is over their "cure" for the problems that plague us. But this approach simply treats the symptoms, rather than going after the real cause of the disease.

We have abrogated the issues of human relationships to meaningless debates over techniques, programs, and economic distribution. We have reduced the universal human search for meaning to nothing more than a "fulfilling self-image"--whatever that means. We have encoded the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" with the New Age jargon of empowerment to "be all you can be."

Governmental leaders try to secure peace and prosperity. Educational planners attempt to resize or uplift the classroom environment, hoping that practical knowledge will "end poverty" or "break the stranglehold of crime." Business executives and consultants around the world strive for ways to eliminate employee problems and re-engineer the corporation. Religious clerics, teachers, and gurus stress everything from "positive thinking" to "seeker-driven" environments in their worship--all in an effort to lessen the impact of sin-filled hearts.

The various programs to redistribute income, provide free education, eliminate abortion, subsidize the arts, help the homeless--or whatever the focus--may provide some relief in the short run, but they will never "cure" the disease. It's like fighting the common cold. Medications are designed to relieve the symptoms, to make the disease less painful to bear, not cure the virus.

In biblical terms, the disease is sin, curable only by regeneration through the work of the Holy Spirit, which is made possible by the love of God the Father expressed in the substitutionary death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In human terms, the disease is a naturalistic worldview, curable only by embracing a genuinely theistic worldview that acknowledges the Creator.

ICR's Creationist Worldview online program of study has been designed to address these complex issues and prepare kingdom saints to become part of the solution. If you have not yet seen the course outlines, check them out at www.icr.org/cw and discover for yourself how your prayers and financial support are contributing to the ultimate cure--the Creator Himself.

[nChrist]

Amen!

Fascinating!

Thanks!

[Soldier4Christ]

The baby born with a tail is no evidence of evolution

Crowds converged on temples in India to see a baby born with a “tail” in 2001.

Many believed the boy was a reincarnated Hindu god. The boy, at one-year old when this report came out in early 2002, is named Balaji, another name for the monkey-faced god Lord Hanuman.

The baby's “tail” was 10 centimeters long, and the boy was being exhibited in temples throughout India, where people paid to see him.

Indian newspaper The Tribune said the boy's grandfather showed journalists nine spots on the baby's body, which is what Lord Hanuman supposedly had.

Cases of babies with “tails” surface occasionally. A paper in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1982 by Dr. Fred Ledley was titled “Evolution and the Human Tail.”

There are two types of tails involved in this discussion. The non-bony tail, and the bony tail.

Non-bony tails

This Indian baby's “tail”, like nearly all cases of human “tails”, is not a real tail. And it is not evidence of evolution. It doesn't have any bones in it, and doesn't have a nerve cord either.

Does this baby's tail have anything to do with the idea that humans and monkeys may be related? Not in the slightest. It is just skin and fatty tissue, and can easily be cut off.

As biologist Dr. Gary Parker once said about these fatty tumor tails: “So far as I know, no one claims we evolved from an animal with a fatty tumor at the end of its spine.”

Bony Tails

The second type of “tail”, a rarer type, is one that has bone in it. For some strange reason, a few evolutionists think this is clear evidence that humans evolved from creatures with tails.

But this is like recognizing faces of your friends in clouds. You read into the facts an assumption that is not supported by the facts.

Abnormalities, sadly, occur in humans as well as in animals. And sometimes simple ailments such as back aches are wrongly claimed to be a result of evolution.

Evolutionists have for decades pooh-poohed anyone who says humans evolved from monkeys. They insist we evolved not from monkey-like creatures, but from ape-like creatures (they usually phrase it: “humans share a common ancestor with apes”).

But monkeys have tails and anthropoid apes don't. If evolutionists believe that the bony tail is evidence that we evolved from monkey-type creatures, why do they insist that we evolved from a common ancestor with apes, which generally don't have tails?

They change their evidence to suit the occasion. So they can't blame people for treating evolution as something of a “fairy tail”.

[Soldier4Christ]

Human tails and fairy tales
Have there really been people with functioning tails, and if so, are they vestigial?

Much of the material on the TalkOrigins website is either woefully out-of-date, or severely misleading, or both. For a typical example, see our article Evolution by fiat and faith, which deals with a meretricious century-old claim about speciation in evening primroses. The particular webpage1 you referred to is a case in point, having not merely interpretations with which we disagree, but information that is out of date, and facts that are presented in such a way as to almost certainly leave the reader with a wrong impression. TalkOrigins is a source of many of the spurious objections that witnessing creationists continually encounter. As one former atheistic evolutionist put it, most evolutionists use the TalkOrigins website as their ‘Bible’. Creationist refutations of many of their claims are available on the TrueOrigin website.

In fact that x-ray shows a normal healthy spine, as admitted in the original research paper by Bar-Maor et al. from which that x-ray image (Figure 3 in the paper) was taken.2 Doubtless other readers of that webpage will have gained the same incorrect impression that you (and I, at first) got, namely that there exist people whose coccyxes (or ‘tailbones’) are longer than normal and form the core of a protruding and movable appendage, i.e. a functioning tail. This turned out not to be the case. And as a modern embryology textbook notes, ‘Rarely a caudal appendage is found at birth. Such structures are of varied origin (some are teratomata); they practically never contain skeletal elements and are in no sense tails.’3

Caudal appendages occur in around 1 to 3 people per thousand. Most consist of skin and fatty tissue, and are located 1.5 centimetres from the midline of the back. Many are removed surgically shortly after birth.

The Bar-Maor paper discusses three patients, all children:

    * Child 2 was a three-month old baby, with a coccyx of three vertebrae, plus a soft caudal (lower back) appendage a few centimetres long lying flush against the body. There were ‘no pathological findings’ (i.e. no disease or pain) and the coccygeal vertebrae were ‘well-developed’. For cosmetic reasons, the parents had the appendage surgically removed.
    * Child 3 was a six year old girl. She also had a coccyx of three vertebrae, plus a soft caudal appendage. The researcher described her condition as being the same as that of Child 2, so her caudal appendage was presumably also a few centimetres long, and lying flush against the body, and her coccyx healthy and well developed. There was no pain and no cosmetic complaint, so surgery to remove the appendage was not undertaken.
    * Child 1 had a long coccyx consisting of five vertebrae, but no caudal appendage, i.e. no ‘tail’. He was prone to occasional pain at the base of his spine, especially if he had been sitting on hard concrete surfaces. Surgical shortening of his coccyx was considered, but not undertaken, because his parents felt their son’s symptoms were not sufficient to warrant surgery.

The x-ray that appears on the TalkOrigins webpage is of Child 3, who had a healthy, well developed coccyx. Being soft tissue, Child 3’s benign caudal appendage does not appear in the x-ray, except perhaps to the trained expert eye. What does appear is the normal healthy coccyx, albeit of only three bones—most of us have four coccygeal vertebrae; a few percent of people have five and a few percent have three.4

Alarmingly, despite Child 2’s coccyx being normal and healthy, the Bar-Maor paper goes on to say that part of the coccyx was removed during the surgery, i.e. not just the fatty caudal appendage was removed.5 I say ‘alarmingly’ because unnecessary removal of part of the coccyx can have potentially tragic consequences. This danger had long been recognised in sober medical circles at the time Bar-Maor and colleagues published their paper in 1980. As one writer commented in 1961:

    Take it away and patients complain; indeed the operation for its removal has time and again fallen into disrepute, only to be revived by some naive surgeon who really believes what the biologists have told him about this useless ‘rudiment.’6

In the past, bolstered by the idea that this organ was vestigial and unneeded, surgeons would sometimes remove a person’s coccyx peremptorily (as was once done routinely with tonsils). But this results in severe problems for the patient, because the coccyx serves as a crucial anchor point for various important muscle groups. Victims of coccygectomy (tailbone removal) in the past have had as a consequence difficulty sitting down and standing up, difficulty giving birth, and difficulty getting to the toilet in time.7 Nowadays, coccygectomies are only performed as an extreme last resort, and involve reattachment elsewhere of the crucial muscles.

Both the TalkOrigins webpage and the original Bar-Meor paper promulgate the false idea that in the womb people have an ‘embryonic tail’. The correct term for the structure in question is the caudal eminence. They claim it contains extra somites8 (the embryo's bead-like somites are precursors to several different structures, including vertebrae) and that if these continued growing instead of degenerating and getting reabsorbed that they would develop into extra tail bones, adding to the regular three to five coccygeal vertebrae that develop normally. They thus call these features ‘coccygeal somites’. But since they do not develop, it is pure evolution-inspired supposition to presume to know what they would develop into, and to label them ‘coccygeal’. As one modern human embryology textbook puts it, ‘Supernumerary vertebral centra that would later degenerate are not present and hence no tail exists’9 and ‘the caudal tip of the trunk appears particularly tapered at 5 weeks, because it contains merely neural tube, but is in no sense a (future) vertebrated “tail”.’10 Only three to five bones have ever been recorded in the human coccyx.

Even if there were/are several extra incipient caudal vertebrae that disappear before birth, such structures could have a purpose unrelated to that of vertebrae in grown people. Several examples are known of organs appearing and then disappearing during embryonic development. Generally the organs involved seem to play a structural role in the development of parts of the body. For example embryonic baleen whales have teeth which serve as a sort of scaffolding for the growth of their massive jaws, but these teeth disappear by the time they are born. Grown baleen whales are filter-feeders, with baleen and no teeth.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Horse ‘chestnuts’ are another example. These are thick calluses on the inside legs. Far from being a useless remnant of a vestigial toe as claimed by evolutionists, these cartilages play a vital role in utero, keeping the foal’s legs joined knee to knee, and thus reducing the risk of internal damage to the mother while the foal grows, and especially during delivery.11

Several sorts of anatomical anomalies are caused by developmental processes finishing up earlier than usual, or continuing on for longer than usual. Having one fewer or one extra coccyx bones may be an example of this type of thing. This may be aberrant, or it may be within God’s original designed range of physical variety within humans. There are genes known as control / switch / signalling genes that regulate the number of digits, limbs, etc. that people and animals grow. Interfering with these signalling genes (dozens are involved) can result in non-typical numbers being produced. This signalling is a big-cast high-precision ballet of ‘intricate overlapping patterns’ and ‘unimaginable complexity’, resembling ‘a tangle of circuits that loop vertiginously across time and space’.12

From fossils we know that amongst horses in the past there was a considerable range in the number of lumbar vertebrae, from as low as 15 to as high as 19. But it seems that all horses today have 18 lumbar vertebrae. The former variation was probably part of the original created variety within the horse kind, and not abnormal.13,14

In contrast, there are some variations that are almost universally considered aberrant. From the ancient past to the current day there have been recorded cases of people with six fingers and/or six toes. Most creationist scientists think this is abnormal, rather than part of the original created variety within humankind.

In a high percentage of cases, people with a caudal appendage will also have another medical condition too, such as spina bifida, in which a vertebra is incompletely closed.15 People with caudal appendages, spina bifida, and other conditions are not regarded as more highly evolved. In fact many thousands of human genetic mutations have been identified that are causatively linked with crippling and lethal diseases16, and yet the basic premise of neo-Darwinian evolution is that such mutations provide the material from which natural selection will bring forth upward evolution!

Note that even if there occurs or has occurred a case of a person having a movable tail-like caudal appendage containing bone, that does not mean the appendage is vestigial. And even if human caudal appendages were vestigial (which they are not) this would constitute degenerative change (loss of an organ) whereas evolution requires generative change, producing new types of organs that did not exist before.

These ‘even ifs’ indicate assumptions on the part of evolutionists. Caudal appendages and short and long coccyxes are facts—observable, measurable, and hence scientific facts. But the idea that they are vestigial (evolutionary ‘left-overs’ or ‘throwbacks’) is pure assumption. And the idea that a vestigial organ would be evidence of evolution is just fallacious logic. Evolution would require nascent (beginning development) organs of new types, not degenerate or aberrant organs of existing types.

We think that photo of anomalous bones taken from a whale is genuine. There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the facts of the case reported in the original research paper17 though of course we reject the evolutionary interpretation of these bones as vestigial legs.

[Soldier4Christ]

LIZARD SPONGE described in article in ScienceNOW 17 Aug 2007. Some desert
dwelling lizards are able to soak up water into their skin from any damp
surface, as well as from rain. It was once thought that they were able to absorb
water through their skin, but reptile skin does not allow water to pass directly
through it, so they must transport it to their mouths and drink it in.
Scientists at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia have carried out a
microscopic study of lizard skin to see how they do this. They found that water
harvesting lizards, such as the Australian thorny devil and Texas horned lizard,
had a network of tiny tubular channels in the "scale hinges" between their
scales. The channels were the width of one or two human hairs - a good size for
promoting water flow by capillary action. Lizards that don't harvest water did
not have these channels in their skin. The scientists are unsure how the lizards
keep the water flowing in the right direction, but suggest it is with repetitive
tongue movements that suck the water into their mouths.

ED. COM. Such capillary plumbing would be an ideal way for collecting water in
the original good world that is described in Genesis where we are told that the
earth was watered by a mist rising up each morning. Lizards with such capillary
plumbing could simply stand out in the air and collect water. After Noahs flood
when the climate degraded and deserts started to appear, this sophisticated
system for collecting water would be an ideal pre-adaptation for living in
deserts. The lizard can survive in such an inhospitable environment because it
already had the necessary features. A good example of natural selection but not
an example of evolution.

[Soldier4Christ]

OLDEST GORILLA TEETH FOUND, according to articles in BBC News Online and
Nature, vol. 418, p145, 22 Aug 2007 and New Scientist, 25 Aug, p12. Japanese and
Ethiopian Palaeontologists have found nine fossil teeth in the Afar valley in
Ethiopia that are "collectively indistinguishable from modern gorilla
subspecies". The teeth have a distinctive structure that enables gorillas to
feed on very fibrous plant material, such as stems and leaves. They are dated as
10 million years old, making them the oldest gorilla fossils so far found. This
age challenges the theory that ancestors of gorillas separated from the
ancestors of chimpanzees and humans eight million years ago. The fossils have
been given the scientific name, "Chororapithecus abyssinicus" after the
geological formation they were found in, the Miocene Chorora formation, and the
old name for Ethiopia, which was Abyssinia.

ED. COM. Not the naming ploy - these fossils have been given a different genus
and species name from present day gorillas despite the fact that they are
"collectively indistinguishable from modern gorilla subspecies". Giving them a
different name simply because they are dated as being older than evolutionary
belief about when gorillas evolved, is not evidence for evolution; it is
applying already held evolutionary prejudice to the facts which actually are
undeniable evidence that gorillas have reproduced after their kind, just as
Genesis says they were made to do.

[Soldier4Christ]

FIRST FOSSIL ORCHID FOUND, according to reports in Harvard University
Gazette, BBC News Online, ABC (Australia) News in Science, news@ nature 29 Aug
2007and Nature, vol 448, p1042, 30 Aug 2007. Santiago Ramirez of the Museum of
Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Massachusetts, and colleagues have
found a bee preserved in amber that was carrying orchid pollen on its back. It
was immediately recognisable as orchid pollen because orchids package their
pollen in distinctive clumps called pollinia. The pollen grains were so well
preserved that the researchers were able to classify it as belonging to the
orchid subtribe Goodyerinae. The structure of pollen grains is similar to that
of two living species of Goodyerinae, but it has been given a new genus and
species name "Meliorchis caribea." It must have had the same method of
pollination of one species of living Dominican Goodyerinae orchids that attaches
its pollinia to back of bees. The bee is an extinct stingless bee named
"Proplebeia dominicana" and is also "exquisitely preserved." The amber was found
in the Dominican Republic and is dated as belonging to the Miocene period, i.e.
15 to 20 million years old. The preserved pollen is the first fossil orchid ever
found and the first fossil of an insect-orchid interaction. Because of the lack
of fossils there has been much dispute about when orchids first evolved and
estimates have varied from 26 to 112 million years ago. Those who believed in
the older dates claimed that in spite of the lack of fossils, orchids are the
largest, most diverse, highly specialised and widespread group of flowering
plants and it must have taken a long time for them to evolve into all those
varieties and spread all over the world. Now that they have a date to start with
Ramirez's colleagues at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at
Harvard University and Nationaal Herbarium Nederland in Leiden, The Netherlands,
have used "molecular clock" method of estimating ages by comparing genes of
living orchids and building a family tree by working out which plants are most
closely related and working back. By assuming a constant rate of evolution, the
scientists estimated that the oldest common ancestor of orchids lived over 76
million years ago. Ramirez commented: "The dinosaurs could have walked among
orchids."

ED. COM. We have no doubt that dinosaurs walked among orchids, but not because
of any reasons given by the authors of this report. The "molecular clock"
depends on applying already held evolutionary assumptions to the facts. Let's
separate the facts from the assumptions in this story. The facts are that a bee
with pollen on its back was preserved well enough for both the bee and the
pollen to be identified. The pollen can be identified as belonging to a known
group of orchids, the Goodyerinae, which are still alive and growing all over
the world. None of these facts are any evidence for the theory of evolution. The
bee and the orchid show no sign of having once been any other kind of living
thing or of changing into another living thing. If the bee and the orchid are
both extinct that is evidence that there used to be more orchids and bees than
there are now. The facts fit Genesis, which tells us that plants and animals
were created as separate kinds to reproduce after their kinds. The pollen
attached to this bee reminds us of the working relationship between insects and
plants that enables plants to multiply after their kind, and couldn't work until
both were carrying out their function. Since then the world has degenerated
because of human rebellion and God's judgement. This has meant many living
things have died out, but no new ones have been created.