Focus
News of interest about creation and evolution. Items are based on articles from
sources shown.
‘Walking whale’ doubtful
Paleontologists claim they have found a ‘walking whale’ which, they
say, was an ancestor of modern whales.
The skeleton is highly fragmented and incomplete. No pelvic bones or nearby backbones
were found to show that the reconstructed upper leg bone (femur) belonged to the
rest of the skeleton, or that it was used for swimming and walking in the manner
claimed.
The upper forelimb bone (humerus) and shoulder-blade (scapula) were also not present,
so it is not possible to say much about how the forelimb was used.
Science, January 14, 1994 (pp. 210–212).
True whales have been found in strata of the same evolutionary ‘age’
as the so-called ‘walking whale’, so ancestry cannot be claimed. (See
Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, Vol. 8 (Part 1), 1994, pp. 2–3 for more
details.)
Goldilocks cosmology?
In trying to explain how a universe resulting from a ‘big bang’ could
structures such as galaxies, astronomers proposed the presence of vast amounts of
‘cold dark matter’. Others proposed vast amounts of ‘hot dark
matter’.
Neither cold nor hot dark matter can be seen, but other astronomers now suggest
a mixture of the two—one that is ‘just right’.
Many astronomers dislike the new idea because it is too complex. Jeremiah Ostriker
of Princeton University commented that the universe could be even more complex,
or it could be far simpler, than most astronomers imagine.
Scientific American, November 1993 (p. 10).
Fast fossils bug those long-agers
Occasionally, some fossils show extremely well preserved details. In such specimens,
phosphate minerals have replaced delicate soft tissues, including gills, muscles,
even shrimps’ eggs, in such a way that every detail, even down to the cell
nuclei, can be seen.
Many people think such replacement of soft tissue by minerals must take a long time,
but in recent years it has been realized that bacteria play an active role in this
rarer form of fossilization.
Researchers have imitated this process with bacteria-laden sea water of low oxygen
content. In fact, dead shrimps became so mineralized in only four to six weeks that
their, ‘mineral composition, textures and features’ were very similar
to the shrimps found in the stomachs of certain well-preserved fossil fish from
Brazil.
New Scientist, March 19, 1994 (p. 17).
The article also says of the researchers: ‘In only a few weeks, they managed
to mimic a mineralisation process that takes millions of years in nature’
Yet the article has shown that such preservation does not need millions of years.
Common sense indicates that whatever the process, it had to be rapid for the tissues
to escape decay.
Fresh dino bones
Bones of a young duckbilled dinosaur found in Montana (USA) have been viewed under
a microscope. The fine structure had been preserved to the extent that cell characteristics
could be compared with chicken bone cells.
Claudia Barreto and others said, ‘In the dinosaur specimens, the same high
degree of structural resolution can be seen as in modern specimens.’ Even
the calcium and phosphorus ratios were comparable.
In other words, these appear to be fresh bones, not fossilized—even though
they are claimed to be more than 70 million years old according to evolutionary
dating assumptions.
Science, December 24, 1993 (pp. 2020–2023).
Such research casts doubt on the age-authenticity of all bones claimed to be millions
of years old by evolutionary dating assumptions and techniques.
Comet collision coming!
Astronomers say that in late July, comet Shoemaker Levy 9 (SL 9) will smash into
Jupiter, giving observers a heavenly spectacle (especially from cameras on the Galileo
spacecraft, which has a direct view of the potential impact site).
Comets, huge balls of dust and ice, often break up. Since they need to be billions
of years old in evolutionary theory (yet those with short inner orbits could last
only a few thousand years) evolutionists theorize a non-observed cometary ‘deep
freeze’ around the solar system to ‘resupply’ the inner regions.
SL 9 broke up a short while ago into at least 21 pieces between one and four kilometres
across, travelling at 60 kilometres (37 miles) each second.
When each of these pieces hits, it will unleash an energy equal to many trillions
of tonnes of TNT. As each piece hits Jupiter’s atmosphere, it should create
a huge fireball of intensely hot gases thousands of kilometres in radius.
New Scientist, March 5, 1994 (pp. 24–27).
This catastrophic event is particularly relevant to criticisms of creationist astronomy
concerning how long it would have taken to get all those craters on the moon and
Mars. A large crater on the moon is about 40 kilometres across; this event anticipates
one broken up comet giving rise to at least 21 such craters.
Open season on Aborigines
Scores of Australian Aborigines were killed by station owners and public officials
in the late nineteenth century One official was Korah Wills, Mayor of Bowen in Queensland,
in 1866.
Even Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney from 1874 to 1894,
encouraged the slaughter by buying Aboriginal skulls for evolutionary research and
evolutionary displays, according to a documentary, Darwin’s Bodysnatchers,
on Australian national television. (See also Creation magazine, Vol.14 No.2, 1992,
pp. 16–19.)
British museums paid from 5 to 10 shillings for skulls in good condition. But research
was not the only motive—part of the skin of the last male Tasmanian Aboriginal
was made into a tobacco pouch!
Another person involved, German evolutionist Amalie Dietrich, was known as the ‘Angel
of Death’ because of her request for Aborigines to be shot to provide specimens
for museum displays in Germany.
ABC television (Australia), October 14, 1993, and April 2, 1994.
The theory of evolution involves the ‘survival of the fittest’ through
the death of the weakest. Tragically, Aborigines were believed to be less evolved,
and therefore were not treated like humans.
Russians seek creation education
A Russian education official who visited Australia in March said that her department
is seeking creationist material to improve its education programs.
Dr Olga Polykovskaya, a specialist in the department of extra-curricula studies
in Russia’s ministry for education, said that after 75 years of communism
and evolutionary teaching, re-education had become one of the country’s greatest
needs.
‘There is a lot of interest in creation science among Russians’, she
said. Much of this had stemmed from a major creation conference two years ago.
‘Several Russian scientists were there—and other specialists as well.’
Dr Polykovskaya said Russian parents were looking for correct information to teach
their children. Her department was looking at special programs to prepare children
for family life—to teach girls what it means to be a wife and mother, and
boys to be a good husband and father.
‘We want to have very strong moral children’, she said. Dr Polykovskaya’s
visit was sponsored by ORA International. She said materials such as Creation magazine
would be extremely useful in pointing students and their parents in the right direction.
‘Yeti’ another living fossil?
Natives in Brazil’s rain forests have reported a red-haird bear-sized animal
with a loud cry. They call it mapinguari. Brazilian museum scientist David
Oren has spent eight years collecting eyewitness accounts and believes mapinguari
could be a ground sloth. (Evolutionists believe ground sloths existed from 30 million
to about 10,000 years ago.) The accounts are from diverse parts of western Amazonia
have strikingly similar details, which are ‘consistent with characteristics
gleaned from fossilized remains’—such as red hair and tough skin.
Scientific American, December 1993 (p. 18).
The recent case of a large antelope in the Vietnamese jungle, known to locals but
only recently ‘discovered’ by scientists, reminds us that indigenous
accounts of animals which evolutionists believe to be extinct should be investigated.
This includes not only mapinguari, but the reported Congolese dinosaur Mokelembembe.
Belgian ‘Piltdown’ unmasked
The famous ‘Piltdown man’ hoax in England consisted of an ape’s
jaw and a human skull doctored to look old. Many Ph.D. theses were written on the
evolutionary significance of this Eoanthropus (‘Dawn Man’)—a prime
human-evolution textbook exhibit for more than 40 years.
Another hoax regarding ‘early man’ was carried out about the same time.
Outside Mons, in Belgium, a spectacular ‘find’ was unearthed in 1891—ancient
humans apparently had been digging in flint beds when buried in a sand-fall. These
‘Neolithic (late Stone Age) flint miners’, with antler picks found nearby,
were displayed as proof of the mining techniques of the time.
This now appears to have been a fraud. The bones show no sign of burial at that
locality, and one skeleton even has a male head and female torso. Carbon-14 dating
suggests they lived more recently than the so-called ‘Neolithic’. The
antler picks appear to have been deliberately ‘aged’ by physical treatment
and staining.
Geology Today, September–October, 1993 (p. 176).
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