s 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. The strongly pro-evolution Scientific American, quoting the leading evolutionist John Maynard Smith, perhaps had the most astute criticism of this field:
‘Artificial life, a major subfield of complexity studies, is “fact-free science”, according to one critic. But it excels at generating computer graphics.’
And it begs the question: if there really is all the ‘evidence for evolution’ in the real world as evolutionists claim, why the need for digital simulation to teach students that evolution ‘works’? It speaks volumes that an Avida-proponent commented that the program is ‘your best counterattack to ID [Intelligent Design], which is not science.’
Yet watching Avideans is considered ‘science’?
Science, 10 February 2006, pp. 769–771.
Scientific American, June 1995, pp. 74–79.
Archaeologists have unearthed a shard of pottery in southern Israel bearing an early Semitic-style inscription saying ‘Alwat’ and ‘Wlt’, likely Philistine renderings of the name Goliath.
Dated to around 900 bc, the shard was found about two metres underground at Tell-es-Shafi—the site of the biblical city of Gath (1 Samuel 17:4).
The Guardian, 14 November 2005, p. 18.
The Cassini-Huygens probe has found abundant methane on Saturn’s giant moon Titan—and it is not of biological origin, but geological.
This discovery is being hailed excitedly by the increasingly vocal group of scientists who for some years have argued that oil and natural gas deposits on Earth are forming currently from geological sources of methane (See Creation 27(3):9) rather than over millions of years from ‘the debris of dead dinosaurs and ancient forests.’
Thomas Gold (1920–2004), an astronomer at Cornell University, was probably the leading advocate of this theory. He had wryly noted that he was sure there had not been any ‘big stagnant swamps on Titan’ to produce the biological debris that science textbooks teach was required on Earth to produce oil and natural gas as a ‘fossil fuel’. See also Gushing oil surprise.
(N.B.: Coal is a fossil fuel, but the evolutionists’ milli