ossesses 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) adds to the mounting evidence that complex characteristics are lost, not gained. In this case it was the ability to recognise and reject their own pollen, thereby avoiding self-fertilization and the harmful effects of inbreeding. In plants that have lost that ability (e.g. certain varieties of garden tomato), it has not been regained.
‘An intriguing aspect of this study is that the mechanism for ensuring cross-fertilization is very old, often lost, and never regained,’ said lead researcher Joshua Kohn, of the University of California, San Diego.
Indeed. Organisms originally were made ‘very good’, and in this ‘cursed’ world which is ‘in bondage to decay’ (Genesis 3:14-19, Romans 8:21), as mutations (copying mistakes in the genes) have accumulated, it’s been downhill ever since. As reports of this latest study put it, ‘evolution’ has been ‘unidirectional’ or ‘one-way’—the wrong way, so really devolution. Thus ‘evolution’ involves loss of traits, which is irreversible. So how did those traits evolve in the first place?
Physorg.com, www.physorg.com/news10022.html, 9 March 2006.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 31 January 2006, pp. 1359–1363.
With a grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers at Michigan State University are developing a computer program ‘to bring students face to face with evolution.’ Dubbed ‘Avida’, the program shows digital ‘organisms’ called Avideans allegedly becoming more complex through replication, mutation and natural selection.
University staff praised Avida. A professor of philosophy said that ‘it lets students see that evolution works as advertised.’
Actually, it does nothing of the sort, for many reasons (see Information Theory Questions and Answers). Watching preconfigured images of ‘Avideans’ on a computer screen behaving according to instructions written by a programmer is in no way representative of the claims made of biological evolution. For one thing, the pretty screen ‘organisms’ don’t have to contend with the destructive effects of real-world chemistry. T