 a few centimetres up to tens of metres across. It had been thought that the rings were four billion years old—orbiting leftovers from the formation of the Saturn system. But the problem with that idea is that the rings’ material is clean and bright—99% pure ice.
As planetary scientists have realised, if the rings really had been gathering space dust for billions of years, their ice ought to be dark and grimy by now—but they’re too clean to be that old.
New Scientist, 14 January 2006, pp. 34–35.
In response to the question ‘What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?’, renowned atheist Richard Dawkins said:
‘I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all “design” anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.’
While many people (including Dawkins) believe evolution is a fact, his own response to this particular question makes it clear that ultimately his belief is something that can’t be proved, i.e. a starting assumption based on (blind) faith.
Edge, www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge152.html, 1 March 2005.
‘Simple’ organisms aren’t simple
According to evolutionary reasoning, ‘the more genetically complex an organism is, the loftier its place on the evolutionary tree.’ Or, put another way, ‘simpler animals ought to have correspondingly simpler genomes’.
So when researchers started identifying active genes in cnidarians, e.g. ‘the lowly sea anemone—one of the simplest animals on the planet’, they got a surprise. ‘We estimate they have somewhere between 20 and 25,000—the same ballpark humans are in,’ said one researcher.
This was not what evolutionists expected.
‘The genomic complexity of … cnidarians is much greater than expected,’ said John Finnerty, an evolutionary biologist at Boston University. ‘There is no simple relationship between the numbers of genes an animal possesses and its complexity at the morphological level.’
ScienceNOW Daily News, sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/1206/2, 9 March 2006.
New Scientist, 3 December 2005, p. 10.
The giant Andromeda galaxy is the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, and is surrounded by numerous dwarf galaxy satellites. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have found that 80% of Andromeda’s satellite mass lines up on a single plane perpendicular to Andromeda’s own plane. Traditional theories of galaxy formation cannot account for this.
The findings left cosmologist Michael Turner, of the University of Chicago, intrigued. ‘It’s getting at this very simple question: how did our backyard get assembled?’
The ‘strange’ lining-up of Andromeda’s satellite galaxies is yet another indicator that ‘our backyard’ did not assemble itself (Genesis 1:14–19).
Space.com, space.com/scienceastronomy/060123_andromeda_plane.html, 3 February 2006.
A hundred years of evolutionary teaching that only tiny, furtive shrew-like mammals lived with the dinosaurs has been overturned. A fossil of a beaver-like mammal unearthed in Inner Mongolia has been dated by evolutionists to 164 million years ago, around 100 million years before dinosaurs are said to have died out.
Of course, the evolutionists’ long-age view of rock layers and fossils as being a ‘record’ of evolutionary history is always going to be prone to revision. In contrast, armed with the biblical view of sedimentary rocks and fossils as being a legacy of the Flood and its aftermath, there’s no problem.
Science, 24 February 2006, pp. 1109–1110, 1123–1127.
Do evolutionists observe organisms gaining complex traits, in accordance with microbes-to-man evolution? Actually, no—but there’s abundant evidence of organisms losing traits (e.g. eyes, wings). And for years many have suspected the loss of complex traits is irreversible (an idea known as ‘Dollo’s Law’).
And now a study of variation in a gene found in many members of the plant family Solanaceae (e.g. tomato, tobacco plants) add