The evolution of the evolutionary tree diagram

Don't be fooled by the "Tree of Life" diagram from your standard evolutionary textbook. Real evolutionary scientists know that is just to get you started, they now have any number of diagrams to choose from that don't look like trees at all.

It's much better to get the truth about life not from any diagram, but from the Bible - given to us by the Creator Himself. He created all living kinds to be similar in some ways, different in others!

(excerpts from David Coppedge, Convergence Convenience, published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 17, Number 5, September/October 2012, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2012/CM17%2005%20low%20res.pdf)

 

Darwin's tree diagram was
based on "homologous" traits.

In Charles Darwin's original tree diagram (1837), animals with similar structures on the same branch are said to have “homologous” traits, because they derive from the same common ancestor. 

But the living world is filled with traits that resemble each other on different branches.

What caused that?  Ah, the evolutionist replies, those traits are due to “convergent evolution.”  The similarities are “analogous” traits, because they do not derive from the same common ancestor. With this classification scheme, evolution explains everything: if similar animals are related, they evolved; if they are unrelated, they evolved.


Let's consider some of many recent examples in the evolutionist storytelling:

Jellyfish and Birds. PhysOrg¹ wrote, “Ion selectivity in neuronal signaling channels evolved twice in animals.”   Sea anemones and birds have complex channels in their cell membranes called volt- age-gated sodium channels, responsible for passing signals along nerves. 

Jellyfish and Man. Nature News² claims that muscles, too, evolved twice.  In discussing the alleged dual origins of muscles, Andreas Hejnol said, "Jellyfish move using a set of muscles that look remarkably similar to striated muscles in vertebrates.  However, new data show that the two muscle types contain different molecules, implying that they evolved independently."

Resistance to Plant Toxins. Another paper in Nature³ begins, “In a remarkable example of convergent evolution, insect species spanning 300 million years of divergence have evolved identical single-amino-acid substitutions that confer resistance to plant cardenolide toxins.”

Odor Detection. Fruit fly maggots and humans could hardly be further apart in the evolutionary tree, but three Cambridge evolutionists found an “unpredicted degree of similarity” between their odor-detection equipment.⁴ They said, "Our results reveal an unexpected degree of similarity between the development of the olfactory systems in vertebrates and the Drosophila larva."

Blood Suckers.  A paper about fleas in PLoS ONE states, “Blood feeding evolved at least ten times within arthropods, providing a scenario of convergent evolution for the solution of the salivary potion.”⁵

Crayfish. Another paper in PLoS ONE found convergent evolution in 12 subgenera of Appalachian crayfish.⁶ "Convergent morphological evolution appears to be a common occurrence in invertebrates suggesting the need for careful phylogenetically based interpretations of morphological evolution in invertebrate systematics.:

The Tree Diagram isn't just a Tree Anymore. Darwin's original tree of life does not accommodate "convergent" evolution very well. If you really insist on drawing pictures of what evolutionists can pick and choose from, there are 5 varieties, as discussed in Evillusion's blog⁷:

To make the point of this chapter very clear, and to do a bit of a review, below is a list of all of the scenarios that are available and imaginable for evolution as an explanation for the appearance, formation, and migration of organs and bio-logical systems into multiple species and groups of species.  Each one is a biological and logical impossibility.... The list below includes all scenarios, no matter how absurd that could have brought a full inventory of organs and bio-logical systems into a common ancestor of any group of modern species.  I realize that evolution would say only one of the choices actually occurred.  For the sake of good science, these are all of the various impossibilities, no matter how absurd.



1. Each species fills in its own missing inventory



2. Coalescing of species

3. Inter-Species Procreation



4. One species evolves a full inventory

5. A string of species evolved a complete inventory

Convergent Everything! The Wikipedia entry on “Convergent Evolution” ends with a statement that reveals that “convergent evolution” is an incomplete and controversial notion:

Simon Conway Morris counters this …, arguing that convergence is a dominant force in evolution, and that, since the same environmental and physical constraints act on all life, there is an “optimum” body plan that life will inevitably evolve toward.... Convergence is difficult to quantify, so progress on this issue may require exploitation of engineering specifications (e.g., wing aero- dynamics) and comparably rigorous measures of “very different course” in terms of phylogenetic (molecular) distances.

Although the escape clause “convergent evolution” may be thought by evolutionists to be a work in progress, it remains little more than a convenient phrase for evolutionists to toss around in their papers!

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References (selected)

1. Univ. of Vienna (2012, July 26). Ion selectivity in neuronal signaling channels evolved twice in animals. PhysOrg. Retrieved October 11, 2012, from http://phys.org/news/2012-07-ion-neuronal-channels-evolved-animals.htm

2. Hejnol, A. 2012. Evolutionary biology: Muscle’s dual origins. Nature 487(7406):181–182.
3. Whiteman, N.K. and K.A. Mooney. 2012. Evolutionary biology: Insects con- verge on resistance. Nature 489(7416):376–377.

4. Prieto-Godino, L.L., S. Diegelmann, and M. Bate. 2012. Embryonic origin of olfactory circuitry in Drosophila: Contact and activity-mediated interactions pattern connectivity in the antennal lobe. PLoS Biology 10(10): e100014000. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001400

5 Ribeiro, J.M.C., T.F.C. Assumpção, D. Ma, P.H. Alvarenga, V.M. Pham, et al. 2012. An insight into the sialotranscriptome of the cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44612. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044612.

6. Breinholt, J.W., M.L. Porter, K.A. Crandall. 2012. Testing phylogenetic hy- potheses of the subgenera of the freshwater crayfish genus Cambarus (De- capoda: Cambaridae). PLoS ONE 7(9): e46105. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046105.
7. http://evillusion.wordpress.com/evolution-explodes-gets-hung-on-a-phylogenetic-tree/, retrieved 12/28/2012.

Methane lakes on Saturn's moon? Young creation yet again...

Planetary scientists think they have detected a lake filled with methane on Saturn’s moon Titan, as reported in the scientific journal Nature.¹


An artist imagines
methane lakes on Titan.

Nature pointed out that scientists are puzzled how any methane could still remain after the presumed 4.5 billion years of Titan’s existence, given that a methane lake like this must be replenished within a ten-thousand year time scale!

Marko comments: It is much easier to explain if we accept that God created the Earth and the planets of our solar system within the last ten thousand years, as taught in God's own word to us, the Bible.

(excerted from David Copperedge, "Titan Lake News: Throwing Caution to the Wind", Creation Evolution Headlines, June 15, 2012. Also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 17, Number 3, May/June 2012, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2012/CM17%2003%20for%20web.pdf)

Let's consider these scientists' conclusion in the Nature article:

General circulation models demonstrate that long-lasting tropical lakes several metres deep must be replenished, depending on the ethane content, within a ten-thousand-year timescale. Taken together, tropical lakes and studies of Titan’s lakes suggest that, currently, subterranean liquid supplies methane to Titan’s surface and atmosphere. A supply of on average 6 × 10⁻⁴ kg m⁻² yr⁻¹ is needed to explain the composition of Titan’s atmosphere, because methane, the progenitor of the moon’s organic species, is destroyed in 10–100 million years through solar ultraviolet photolysis. More observations are needed to determine whether this 4.5-billion-year-old moon is undergoing a specific recent flourish of geological activity, because it is freezing and its orbit decaying.

What that last sentence implies is that scientists are being forced by the evidence to consider special conditions – “a specific recent flourish of geological activity” – to account for the presence of methane on Titan at all. At most, the methane on this bizarre moon would all be gone in 100 million years, one fortieth the assumed age of Titan, unless it were constantly being supplied from somewhere. Underground reservoirs might provide a convenient (unobservable) hiding place for the stockpile, but that solution arouses geological puzzles about how deep the methane would need to be, how it would form, and how it could erupt onto the surface. Added to that are indications that since Titan is freezing and its orbit is decaying, there should be less geological activity, not more.

Secular scientists are generally reluctant to invoke any “specific recent flourish” of activity occurring right at the time humans are around to observe it. Why now, and not throughout Titan’s lifetime?

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References

1. Caitlin A. Griffith et al, Possible tropical lakes on Titan from observations of dark terrain, Nature 486, 14 June 2012, pp. 237–239, doi:10.1038/nature11165.

"Living Fossils" - another Bait and Switch Evolutionary concept

The term "living fossil" was coined by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species.  It is used to describe species that have survived for millions of years, exploiting niches that are so stable that there is little pressure on them to evolve.

Another living fossil announced recently is a “primitive” looking eel found swimming in a cave on Palau in the Pacific Ocean. According to Physorg.com, "it is astonishingly similar to the first eels that swam some 200 million years ago, biologists reported."

Evolutionists love to have it both ways.Their theory supposedly explains extreme diversification, even exploiting multiple simultaneous evolutionary paths to produce similar organisms. But when it is convenient, they bring out the "living fossils" idea to explain away extreme stability in pockets that have been somehow isolated for millions of years. It is explaining opposite things with equal ease. Therefore, the idea of “living fossils” explains nothing.

Stop letting Darwinists get away with these bait and switch word games!

(based on David Coppedge, Living Fossils Rise from the Dead, Creation Evolution Headlines, also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 4, July/August 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2011/CM16%2004%20low%20res.pdf)

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Temptations of Dinosaur Scientists

A new dinosaur species is named somewhere in the world every 2 weeks. But over half of the named dinosaurs are misclassified, according to paleontologist Michael J. Benton. Why? Scientists are blind to the problem.

Apparently a non-scientific concept, human pride, is to blame. “Part of the problem,” according to John Horner of Science Magazine News, “is that scientists are sometimes too keen on finding and naming new dinosaurs.” Naming a new dinosaur gets you noticed and published. As a result, fossil hunters tend to magnify fossil differences that they imagine instead of the similarities. Then they rush to name a new dinosaur, and are generally rewarded with recognition and additional funding.

Too many supposedly new discoveries are actually duplicates of animals already on the books. Additionally, paleontologists are coming to realize that the bones of an adult dinosaur can be very different from those of a juvenile animal of the same species and can easily mislead scientists into thinking they are two different species.

This is a scientific Ponzi scheme, where will it stop? Scientists will continue giving in to their temptations … It will take a Biblical perspective on human nature to turn Science around to truth.

(Based on from Dinosaur Classification is a Mess, by David Coppedge, Creation-Evolution Headlines, May 2011, also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 3, May/June 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2011/CM16%2003%20low%20res.pdf)

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Godless theories can't explain planets surrounding other stars

An illustration of a planet with a highly
inclined orbit found around
the star HAT-P-11.

Geoff Marcy, Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, is famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 to be discovered.  So it comes as some surprise that Professor Marcy has concluded: “The more new planets we find, the less we seem to know about how planetary systems are born. We cannot apply theories that fit our solar system to other systems. In theory, other stars with planets should have gotten similar starts. But theory has implications not born out in reality.”

Planetary orbits should be circular, but many extrasolar planets have elliptical orbits. Everything should orbit in the same plane and direction, but many have highly inclined or even retrograde orbits; Neptune-sized planets should be rare, since models of our water giants require highly unusual starting conditions. But there are too many out there. Marcy told the American Astronomical Society last month: “Theory has struck out.”

Marko comments: First, Marcy's conclusions show that our wonderful Earth is indeed a Privileged Planet, just as astronomer Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez found to be true in his research, and ended up being denied tenure at Iowa State University because this ran afoul of the godless scientific establishment. Second, godless theories can't explain planets surrounding other stars. They are yet another sign of our wonderful Creator God!

(based on "Busted! Planet-Making Theories Don’t Fit Extrasolar Planets", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011)

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 2, March/April 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

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A Goldilocks Planet needs just the right Tides

Artist's concept of a large,
rocky extrasolar planet. 

Lots of planets surround other stars ... but the idea that we will find life when we find a planet at just the right distance is far too simplistic. Science Daily reported that “Tides can render the so-called ‘habitable zone’ around low-mass stars uninhabitable.” Astronomers at the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam studied the effects of tides on planets around low-mass stars (the most numerous stars in the galaxy) and found that the lack of seasons, the increased heat and volcanism, and synchronous rotation (the same side always facing to the star) make them uncomfortable at best, and perhaps uninhabitable.

“I think that the chances for life existing on exoplanets in the traditional habitable zone around low-mass stars are pretty bleak, when considering tidal effects,” lead researcher Rene Heller remarked. “If you want to find a second Earth, it seems that you need to look for a second Sun.”

Marko comments: You won't find another Goldilocks Planet, because God created just one! Let's see, we need just the right distance from the star, just the right distance from the center of the galaxy, just the right tides, just the right temperature for liquid water, just the right amount of ultraviolet light, just the right protection from asteroids, just the right...

Those who insist on looking for this second Sun might as well look for someone else beside Jesus to save them, too. But sorry, there is no one who qualifies.

(Based on "Habitable Zones Constrained by Tide", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011)

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 2, March/April 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

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Evolution: A can of worms

So, are we descended from worms? Evolutionists have recently engaged in a pitched battle over where worms are found in their "tree of life". Another missing link has apparently appeared (or disappeared, depending on your point of view perhaps). A much better explanation is that God created all living creatures during the six days of creation as recorded in Genesis, and that he created them to have certain similarities. After all, how could any group of creatures be completely dissimilar one from another?

(excerpted from Amy Maxmen, “Evolution: A can of worms” Nature 470, 161-162 (2011), cited in "Evolution Running Backwards", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011), also cited in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

A marine worm in the
phylum Acoelomorpha.

 Accoels are tiny worms peppercorn-sized worms found in sea-bottom muck. They represent a crucial stage in animal evolution — the transition some 560 million years ago from simple anemone-like organisms to the zoo of complex creatures that populate the world today.


But a recent report published in Nature is causing scientists to rethink the storyline. It is titled Acoelomorph flatworms are deuterostomes related to Xenoturbella . The study by an international team of researchers, who used new analytical techniques and data, removes acoel worms from their position near the trunk of animal evolution and instead places them closer to vertebrates.

The rearrangement of the tree of life has triggered protests from evolutionary biologists, who are alarmed that they may lose their key example of that crucial intermediate stage of animal evolution.

If acoels do fit within the deuterostomes, the worms must have evolved from an ancestor with a central nervous system, a body cavity and a through-going gut that connected an anus and mouth. So researchers would need to explain how acoels and Xenoturbella lost those and other characteristics. They would also be left to search for another primitive-looking lineage that represents the evolutionary step between jellyfish-like animals and bilaterians. If one even exists.

"I will say, diplomatically, this is the most politically fraught paper I've ever written," says Max Telford, a zoologist at University College London and last author on the paper. "This means that we have no living representative of this stage of evolution: the missing link has gone missing."

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.JPEG for compression? God's algorithm .BRAIN is far better

How can the brain transmit and process that much visual information? The answer is, apparently, it uses compression – just like computers compress raw camera photos into more manageable JPEG images. That’s the title of an article on Science Daily: “JPEG for the Mind: How the Brain Compresses Visual Information.” \

The .JPEG Compression Algorithm.

“Computers can beat us at math and chess,” said Ed Connor of Johns Hopkins, “but they can’t match our ability to distinguish, recognize, understand, remember, and manipulate the objects that make up our world. “This core human ability depends in part on condensing visual information to a tractable level. For now, at least, the .brain format seems to be the best compression algorithm around.

(excerpted from  "This Is Your Brain on Bytes", Creation-Evolution Headlines, February 2011)

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 1, January/February 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

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Mummified trees found in Arctic can't be millions of years old

How could these mummified trees be millions of years old, since they are not fossilized? What we are seeing are trees that were buried catastrophically by landslides ... during Noah's global flood!!

Selections from Mummified trees found in Arctic, Creation-Evolution Headlines, December 2010.

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Like Narnian children finding a zoo of lifeless stone statues in the White Witch’s wintry realm, scientists have come across frozen trees, leaves and seed pods deep in the Canadian arctic, Quttinirpaaq National Park on Ellesmere Island. “The dry, frigid site is now surrounded by glaciers and is completely treeless,” said National Geographic News. What deep magic left this mummified forest “exquisitely preserved”? The scientific wizards say it was a landslide, up to 10 million years ago.

National Geographic News says “The mummified trees were likely preserved so long because they were buried quickly by landslides and thus protected from air and water, which hastens decomposition.”

But can it protect them for millions of years? How many landslides must be invoked to cover enough rotting mummified trees to raise concerns about greenhouse gases? Even so, no living material lasts forever in its original state, unless replaced by minerals, as in petrification and fossilization. This is real wood.

“When we started pulling leaves out of the soil, that was surreal, to know that it’s millions of years old and that you can hold it in your hand,” one of the researchers announced to the American Geophysical Union last week. A colleague familiar with fossil forests called this find “extraordinary,” speaking of “Finding wood that is millions of years old in such good condition—almost as if you just picked it up from the forest floor....”

The millions of years exist only in their imagination. So tenacious are their faith in millions/billions of years, they cannot see the trees for the forest, or the forest for the trees—the dogma is so thick that you can't see through it unless you are outside it. These trees are not that old. Neither are the dinosaur bones with blood vessels intact. Why do they tell such tales?

They must keep the tale going, because they live in a fantasyland, the world of Blarneya, where it is always winter and never Christmas. They like it that way, because they serve the White Beard, who rules Blarneya with an iron fist. The Chronicles of Blarneya stretch backward and forward billions of years, they teach the children, turning their minds to stone.

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 15, Number 6, November/December 2010, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

References (selected)

Inman, M. (2010, December 17) Mummified Forest Found on Treeless Arctic Island. National Geographic Daily News. Retrieved December 19, 2010, from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101217-mummified-forest-canada-science-environment/

Best Qualified Candidate Expelled Over Views on Evolution, Design

For daring to question evolution, an astronomer who was the best qualified candidate to become director of a new observatory lost out. “No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 – until his writings on evolution came to light,” a report on Courier-Journal reported. Martin Gaskell is suing the University, claiming that his views on evolution, religion and intelligent design cost him the position.

(for more of this article, see Best Qualified Candidate Expelled Over Views on Evolution, Design, Creation-Evolution Headlines, December 2010)

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 15, Number 6, November/December 2010, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

(for additional info see Daily Mail, Christian astronomer sues university that said his appointment would be 'huge public relations mistake', 17th December 2010)

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But they taught us that man evolved in Africa...

It is well known that the first human being evolved in Africa, and then migrated to all the other continents. Or is it really so?

Science Daily reported, “An international team of researchers, including a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has discovered well-dated human fossils in southern China that markedly change anthropologists perceptions of the emergence of modern humans in the eastern Old World.” Maybe it was out of Asia instead of Africa. The BBC News has a photo of the cave in China where the bones were found. National Geographic News said that these bones, 60,000 years older than previous finds, “presents a strong challenge” to the out-of-Africa theory and the “traditional early-human time line”.

(for more, see Early Man in Trouble, Creation-Evolution Headlines, October 2010)

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 15, Number 6, November/December 2010, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

Marko's comment: Did you know that Chinese tradition states that Noah (Fohi or Yao) founded Chinese civilization in 2240 BC, which was approximately 10 years after the Tower of Babel dispersion. Noah did live for 350 years after the Flood, and for approximately 250 years after Babel. Is it possible that he was the principle ancestor of the Asian peoples, as Japheth was of the Indo-Europeans, Shem of the Near and Middle Eastern peoples, and Ham of the Africans? See more at the Bible Time-Line.

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Purpose-Driven Science Ignores Darwin

"While some Darwinists feel that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement is a major threat to science, many scientists unconnected to ID are acting as if it provides for them a more fruitful approach to research. Several recent examples illustrated what might be called a silent “de facto” intelligent design movement.

"Purposeful proteins:  PhysOrg reported work at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Japan with the eye-catching title, “Searching for purpose in proteins.” 
 

"Imitating insects:  Meanwhile, inventors at Penn State, Harvard and the Naval Research Laboratory have developed “an engineered thin film that mimics the natural abilities of water striding insects to walk on the surface of water, and for butterflies to shed water from their wings.”  Inherent in biomimicry is the belief that the thing being imitated is well designed.
 
"Biophysics on birds: Researchers in Australia were curious why ostriches are such good runners compared to humans, so they compared their leg physics with a computer analysis. PhysOrg summarized the resulting paper by saying it’s spring in their step. Only this third team even mentioned evolution.

"Join the silent ID revolution! You don’t have to use the maligned phrase, or declare your allegiance to the Discovery Institute. Just stay focused on the design in your subject, and gradually say less and less about Charlie D. After enough good design science, fewer people will even miss him."

(for more, see Purpose-Driven Science Ignores Darwin, Creation-Evolution Headlines, October 2010)

(also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 15, Number 6, November/December 2010, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2010/CM15%2006%20low%20res.pdf)

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Only a Global Flood could have Moved Rocks 3,000 Miles!

"Geologists were baffled. Something moved rocks up to 3,000 miles across whole continents. They found evidence in Asia and also in America. How on earth could that happen? Their list of explanations omitted one possibility: the transporting power of water. Maybe it’s because it would have implied a global flood like the world had never seen.

"An international team publishing in the GSA Bulletin wrote about “Extraordinary transport and mixing of sediment across Himalayan central Gondwana during the Cambrian–Ordovician.” They found similar detrital zircon samples across a wide swath of the Himalayan foothills, covering “great distances” of at least 3000 km and perhaps as much as 5000 km. They emphasized: “In this regard, both transport distances and sediment mixing within early Gondwana are extraordinary for the geologic record.” It likely applies to “much, if not the whole of Gondwana” (the hypothetical supercontinent that broke up into today’s continents).

"The Himalayas are not the only location. They referred to evidence published earlier that assigns the origin of many of the Grand Canyon sediments to the Appalachian mountains thousands of kilometers to the east Again, extraordinary long-distance transport mechanisms must have been in operation. What could possibly do it? Their short list of possible mechanisms omits one that creation geologists would probably be saying is intuitively obvious: a global flood!!

(for more, see "Did a Global Flood Move Rocks Across Continents?  No, uh..." from Creation-Evolution Headlines)

Fireflies blink in sync! Irreducible Complexity on YouTube

Some fireflies exhibit synchronous flashing, in which large groups produce rhythmic, repeated flashes in unison -- sometimes lighting up a whole forest at once.

How can this be? "Animals have evolved to solve unique problems in many different ways, and I'm interested in how they do that," says Andrew Moiseff, from the Department of Physiology and Neurobiology of the University of Connecticut. "Fireflies have these tiny heads and these tiny brains, but they can do some complex and amazing things." His future research will focus on questions that address whether physiological constraints or behavioral decisions are driving the evolution of synchrony.

This is another example of evolutionists being stuck. Fireflies blinking in sync is a most obvious example of Irreducible Complexity! Ask yourself, how did the very first group of synchronizing fireflies evolve from their backward ancestors? Can you imagine any "intermediate forms" as expected by evolutionary theory? It is not conceivable to have a group of early fireflies who were experimenting with sync-blink, but were not quite all together. If there were no intermediate forms, there would have to be a single superfly ancestor who had a most complex mutation, and produced a large number of immediate children with the sync-blink complex... and other fireflies standing by who also happened to have just the right mutation to be attracted. If you wish, stay tuned to Andrew Moiseff et al and their stream of publications, where they will attempt to explain this.

Intelligent Design by a Creator God is a far better explanation, based on the Irreducible Complexity that is so evident here on YouTube. These fireflies are flashing witnesses to an amazing God!

References

Christine Buckley, Fireflies Blink in Synch to Send a Uniform Message, University of Connecticut, UConn Today, July 10, 2010, accessed 11/8/2010.

Electricity Forms Your Heart, Creation Evolution Headlines, July 2010, accessed 11/8/2010.

Fireflies Blink in Synch to Send a Clear Message, Science News, July 10, 2010, accessed 11/8/2010.

Remy Melina, Fireflies' Synchronous Flashes Are Booty Calls, Study Shows, July 8, 2010, accessed 11/8/2010.

Andrew Moiseff and Jonathan Copeland, Firefly Synchrony: A Behavioral Strategy to Minimize Visual Clutter, Science, July 2010: Vol. 329. no. 5988, p. 181 DOI: 10.1126/science.1190421.