Welcome to all of the new subscribers!
This is the “When I get a round tooit” Creation/Evolution newsletter from Ian Juby and the traveling Creation Science Museum of Canada.
In this Saturday-the-14th newsletter (one day after surviving Friday the 13th):
1) Meet your relative, the sponge.
2) Oldest fossil trails.
3) Upcoming talks all over Canada
4) Thanks for the flood of feedback!
5) Lucy’s iphone
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1) Meet your relative, the sponge.
Flagrantly pilfered off the internet and used without any permission whatsoever.
Let’s have a show of hands: How many of you readers have heard that humans and chimps share 98.4% of their DNA?
Okay, so I can’t see you holding up your hand – but experience tells me that a great many of you are holding up your hand because you’ve heard this before (and because experience tells me that people are wierd, and will put up their hand in response to my asking them to put up their hand, even when I can’t see them put up their hand. heh heh). In fact, experience tells me that probably 1/3 or more of you will have heard this claim. This is an excellent example of the power of evolutionary propaganda, as this is a completely and utterly false claim. In fact, I was blown away when the head of human genome project (the project attempting to decode the human DNA), Francis Collins, stated this “fact” on the air during a radio interview. That such a brilliant man would make such an ignorant statement on something that is in his field of expertise, frankly blew me away. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have seen an incredibly brilliant, knowledgeable person say something in incredible err whilst trying to defend evolution and an old earth.
Let’s kill the myth:
It’s very simple to show just how wrong this claim is. It is well known (you can look this up on the innernet yerself!) that the chimpanzee genome is roughly 10-15% longer then the human genome (the chimpanzee DNA contains 10-15% more letters then the human DNA).
So therefore the chimpanzee genome is 115% the size of the human genome, yet, somehow the two are supposed to be 98.4% identical!
Does anyone else see a math error here???
Whaaa…? wait… How’d they get that numba?
So you’re probably asking how perfectly sane people who presumably graduated with high-school math could get it so wrong. Well, it’s because of what they didn’t tell you. But before we move on, settle it in your mind:
So what’s spongebob got to do with it…?
Bear with me here – we need to deal a little more with the chimp/human DNA before we get to the report comparing human and sponge DNA.
Basically, it’s been known pretty much since around the mid-70’s that the 98.4% figure wasn’t true. In fact, back in 2007, one evolutionist stated matter-of-factly that this untruth “served us well” !!!!!
Waidaminit – whadya mean it “served us well???” Who’s “us?” And in what way did an untruth serve you well??? How does an untruth serve? An untruth certainly does not serve the truth!
Dr. Coppedge had an excellent article on this in his creation-evolution headlines.
Well let’s say the untruth is truth – what would a measely 1.6% difference really mean? The human DNA is roughly 3.2 BILLION base pairs, or letters, long. So, 1.4% of 3.2 billion = 44,800,000 differences between the two strands of DNA. As little as one change in the DNA can be fatal! Now it’s true you usually suffer about 100 mutations, or changes, in your lifetime, but changes to the DNA are not healthy! You simply cannot make tens of millions of changes to the DNA without killing the organism. End of discussion. So such similarity would be meaningless, even if it were true. An airline pilot flying from Paris to New York flies roughly 5,900 kms, but if he lands early by a measely 1.6%, he’s landed some 82 kms short of the runway. Obviously, this is disastrous and so is a 1.6% difference in the genome.
To achieve the 98.4% number, the scientists first isolated portions of the two DNA strands that were already similar. They then compared those similar sequences. If the research had been reported honestly, you would have been told that huge portions of the DNA strands do not line up at all – in fact, one Nature article pointed out one study in which 83% of the genes compared were different!
We should expect there to be similarities between chimps and humans, after all, we are of such similar structure, shape and form.
In fact, from a common designer perspective (contrary to the view that chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor, common designer means that the chimps and the humans were both designed by the same being) it would make a whole lot of sense to incorporate DNA from one organism into another. For example, once a transmission is engineered, you’ll notice that engineers will use that same transmission in multiple vehicles. This saves a lot of time and energy – it’s smart engineering. So it would make sense that the designer (God) would use similar blueprints and plans in two similar organisms. So similarity between genomes is once again meaningless, because interpretation within the context of a common designer is just as valid as the interpretation of a “common ancestor.”
Uhhh….spongebob?
Ya, ya, I’m getting there.
Okay, so an article recently came out from University of Queensland, Australia. Lead researcher Bernard Degnan claimed that human and sponge genes had 70% similarity. Notice the term “genes.” Once again, like what was done with the chimpanzee genome, portions of the DNA were isolated to compare to the human DNA.
Using the gene isolation/comparison techniques, rumour has it that we also share 50% of our genome with the banana, 40-50% with the fruit fly, and some 97.5% with mice. In fact, laying out any random two genomes side by side, you only have four bases (letters) to choose from, so just mathematically speaking, you’re going to have a 25% match between any two letters! Therefore, based on the flawed logic of these “studies,” you share at least 25% of your DNA with the wombat, T-rex, elephant, killer whale, and the chicken.
Genetic similiarity has been continually, and falsely, parroted to prop up the false hope that is evolution. Genetic similarity is just as logically explained within the paradigm of a common designer, and thus claims of genetic similarity are useless as an argument for evolution.
Hop on creationwiki, read, follow links and read some more until your brain explodes:
http://creationwiki.org/Human_and_chimp_genomes_differ_by_more_than_one_percent_%28Talk.Origins%29
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2) Oldest fossil trails
Reports of the “oldest fossil trails” at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, are significant. First, the report:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100203085914.htm
This news article is from back in February actually. I was hoping to head back to Mistaken point when I was in Newfoundland in the late winter, but alas, I didn’t make it. I did get to visit this phenonenal fossil site in early winter last year however. The location is littered with hundreds of pristine, soft-bodied fossils. Quite an incredible sight to see actually.
The most common fossil found there is known as Charnia, which various researchers have taken great lengths to portray as not being sea pens. For instance, one article (http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/izg/EvolutionaryBiology.htm) takes great pains to point out the incredible diversity of sea pens and sea pansies (which really are both just variants of the sea pen), and then goes to great lengths to state that while yes, its structure is like a combination of sea pens and sea pansies, Charnia it isn’t a sea pen!
Oh C’maaawwn! Charnia is just another variation of the already incredibly variable sea pens/sea pansies. The evolutionary authors place Charnia into nice, pretty cladograms, which I respectfully submit are nothing more then fiction. They are nothing more then a “just so” story. (See my post “More badyear, and ‘Would you believe, a Hippo is a pig?’ ” at https://ianjuby.org/newsletter/?p=165 to read up on cladograms)
The point I wish to make once again is that nothing has evolved – sea pens/sea pansies have reproduced themselves all this time. They have reproduced with incredible variation, yes, but that has nothing to do with fish turning into people over millions of years, it has to do with sea pens reproducing sea pens, exactly as the Bible said they would.
More living fossils
As it turns out the Mistaken point fossil trails tell more of the same story – the trails look remarkably like the trails left behind by the modern sea anenome! The trails already raised excitement because such trails indicate the creatures that made them had some kind of muscles and rigid/semi-rigid framework (i.e., skeleton or stiff tissues), perhaps of collagen. So these fossils being so ‘old’ places muscular evolution way back in time. I would suggest it’s actually good evidence that the sea anenome has evolved into….the sea anenome.
So according to evolutionary theory, the mistaken point fossils are some of the oldest fossils in the world. According to evolutionary theory, organisms change over time. According to the Biblical account of Genesis, ten times in the first chapter it states that God created life to reproduce after its kind. What we see (i.e, the scientific evidence) in the ‘oldest fossils in the world’ is that everything remains the same – in spite of the contortions of some evolutionists who will try desperately to say that the sea pens aren’t sea pens, and the trails which match those of a sea anenome weren’t made by a sea anenome. This is good evidence that the Biblical account of creation is true, and the evolutionary account of change over time is false.
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3) Upcoming talks all over Canada!
I’m presently on the road in Alberta, have spoken in Alberta, B.C., and Northwest Territories, and it’s been awesome seeing souls saved and encouraged by the creation message. I’ll be on the road right through till the end of October, and then I’ll be trying to get bookings within Ontario so I can stay at home more and get construction started on the portable museum.
Looking for bookings in Newfoundland during the month of October, and bookings in Ontario from October through 2011 – drop me a line or call me toll-free to book the museum and a lecture for your group: 1-877-532-9160. Don’t forget the “everything you ever wanted to know about booking Ian and his traveling museum, but were afraid to ask” page at: https://ianjuby.org/promotional.html
August:
22-26th: David Thompson Bible Camp, teen week
29th: Rich Valley Community Church, Rich Valley, Alberta
September:
4-6th: Ross Haven Bible Camp, Homeschooler’s weekend
12th: Community Christian Center, Slave Lake, Alberta
22nd: First Baptist Church, Smiths Falls, Ontario
24th: Halifax, Nova Scotia – details to come
October:
17th: Rocky Harbour Pentecostal Church, Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland
19th: Carbonear Pentecostal Church, Newfoundland
20th: Full Gospel Tabernacle, Glovertown, Newfoundland
24th: Gander Baptist Church, Gander, Newfoundland
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4) Thanks for the flood of feedback!
Because I’ve been on the road pretty much non-stop for a couple of months now, I didn’t get a chance to write back to all of you who took the time to send in feedback in response to my questions in the last newsletter. I was inundated with responses, so thank you!
I also haven’t been able to send out news bites – internet connection has been sporadic, and it’s difficult to surf the web looking for news bite items and posting them to my blog while I’m driving. 🙂 So I don’t know when I’ll get back to them.
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5) Lucy’s iphone
A recent Nature article reported the evidence of tool-working on bones by an intelligent meat eater. Now Nature is an incredibly expensive mag (and thus probably none of my readers have access to it), but fortunately popular press articles abound, such as on science daily.
The “mammal bones” were found in layers dated the same time as Dikika, which is considered an Australopithecus afarensis. You’ll notice articles (like the Sciencedaily.com article) refer to “Lucy” using the tools. This is because Lucy (reconstruction shown right, photo courtesy of creationwiki.org, photoshop hack-job courtesy of yours truly) is considered an Australopithecus afarensis as well.
Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged, of the “Dikika research project,” pointed out the clear cut-marks made on some mammal bones found in the Dikika research area. There is no doubt these are markings from some kind of tool (presumably stone tool) that was used to cut the flesh off of the bones. There are also percussion marks on the bones, indicative of a creature breaking the bones to get to the marrow. So Alemseged and his evolutionary partners concluded that Lucy (Dikika actually) was the tool maker and user.
In a “WITW” moment (“What In The World…?” I made up my own acronym, instead of the commonly used internet acronym “WTF” cause then people will ask me what that means and I aint gonna tell’em), Alemseged said:
“Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories. It also led to tool making — a critical step in our evolutionary path that eventually enabled such advanced technologies as airplanes, MRI machines, and iPhones.”
The irony in Alemseged’s comment is too funny: the MRI was invented by a creationist, who would object vociferously to Alemseged’s claim (see “Canadian Minister of Science & Technology… *GASP!* a CREATIONIST???” https://ianjuby.org/newsletter/?p=157), and iphones and airplanes have absolutely nothing to do with stone tools. Yes, I know that Alemsegad is not saying that Lucy had an iphone, my photoshopped image was simply a satire, as Alemseged and his partners completely missed the obvious, blinded by their evolutionary assumptions.
The assumptions
Hold on a minute here: The evolutionary assumptions are staggering, and frankly, blinding what would normally be a perfectly rational mind. Notice that not once did Alemseged, or any of his team members, draw the obvious conclusion that should be reached:
In fact, this would make a whole pile of sense, seeing as the Laetoli fossil footprints, dated by the evolutionists to the time of Lucy and Dikika, are completely modern human footprints (photo right by Kenneth Garrett from National Geographic). You can read more about these tracks in a past blog article here: https://ianjuby.org/newsletter/?p=200
The reason these very smart people missed the obvious is because of their evolutionary preconceptions: the rocks these fossil bones were found in are “too old” – people had not yet evolved, according to evolutionary dogma. Scientifically speaking, humans are the only creature known which uses tools to systematically de-flesh animals for meat, and humans are the only creature -fossil or living- which make footprints like the Laetoli tracks. So, the most scientific conclusion would be that humans were the ones whoused tools to hack at these bones – not “Lucy” or any of her Australopithecus relatives.
The dating game
And once again, the dating of these bones is based on much cicular reasoning and evolutionary assumptions, as pointed out in the Sciencdaily article:
Ya, I still remember the last time we saw fossil hominids so “securely dated” – that subject was so lengthy it pretty much filled an entire session in “The Complete Creation” series, watch part 21 for the dubious dating of skull 1470 and how evolutionary assumption is what really decides what date is assigned to a fossil.
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