Evolution Whispering "Secrets"?

On Christmas Eve, Australia's The Sydney Morning Herald felt that it was their duty to inform the world by looking back "on a momentous year in science," which they wrongly consider synonymous with evolution. "Evolution whispers some secrets," by Deborah Smith, starts in almost poetic fashion reflecting on man's current accomplishments in areas of astronomy. Then, the article turns to set the stage for its main point.

But anyone gazing at the heavens was brought back to earth often in the past 12 months, watching helplessly as nature flexed it muscles with a devastating tsunami in Indonesia, hurricanes in the US and an earthquake in Pakistan. The global threat from an old foe, influenza, also hit home to many people for the first time.

Yes, these are terrible tragedies. Thousands are now in eternity due to natural disasters and killer diseases. Truly, "we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now" (Romans 8:22). Now that the stage is set, The Sydney Morning Herald makes its blatant attack against established science.

One hundred and fifty years after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, diehard opponents argued in a US court this year that children should be taught an alternative explanation of life's complexities, a supposedly scientific theory called intelligent design. They lost, with the concept dismissed as creationism in disguise.

"Federal judge rules on landmark Intelligent Design case," by Pam Sheppard, explains the decision much better.

With this in mind, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has declared discoveries about evolution the 2005 winner of its annual list of top 10 breakthroughs.

Whoa. The AAAS has chosen evolution discoveries as the top ten for 2005 solely because of the debate over alternative theories! This seems like an obvious push to combat whatever doubt that people had with ten evolution discoveries in order to showcase evolution hypothesis as crucial to scientific advancement, or so they would like to believe.

"Today evolution is the foundation of all biology, so basic and all-pervasive that scientists sometimes take its importance for granted," Science concludes.

This is actually scary. How would you feel if a doctor was about to operate on you and he says, "I just wanted you to know that I have lots of theories about this operation based on my personal assumptions about the past. I've never been able to actually prove any of those assumptions because we have no way to test them (being that they were past events). But my belief system about the past has enabled me to perform this surgery on you now." GET ME OUT! Evolution is not science. It's a belief system about the past. Reality is that any beliefs about the past can never be proven unless there is a trustworthy, first-hand account of the past. Evolutionists will readily point out that no one ever observed evolutionary events of the past, so there is no first-hand account. But Christians have the Bible as the literal history book of the universe, so if it can be trusted, then it is our first-hand account through which we should test our theories.

The genetic code of a chimpanzee named Clint was deciphered this year, for example, revealing that 96 per cent of our DNA is identical to his. This will help us learn much more about our closest living relative, but on the other hand the mysteries of humankind's past deepened this year. [Emphasis mine]

I love that. They're saying that the more they study, the less they know about their own theories. On the opposite side, the more scientific studies that are conducted, the more that the Bible's history is confirmed. No wonder the "mysteries" deepen for evolutionists! Skipping past some fluff, let's get to the actual top "breakthroughs." Are you ready for this? Here's the "winning breakthrough":

Knowing Clint's genetic code is expected to bring medical benefits for us. While humans are highly susceptible to conditions including AIDS, coronary heart disease, hepatitis and malaria, chimps are not.

Most may not catch what this means. If chimps are not susceptible to diseases that we are, then that supposedly 4% difference has got to be huge.

Researchers this year also used tissue from a body frozen in the Alaskan permafrost to sequence genes from the 1918 flu virus that killed 20 million to 50 million people. Chillingly they concluded it started out as a pure avian strain, like the H5N1 bird flu virus now endemic in Asia and causing worldwide concern.

That's good, but I'm sorry, I don't see how this is a discovery in evolution. This is classic operational/observational science! The researchers started from recorded facts in history. Combining what was already recorded about the past with what they observe about the present, they developed a testable theory. How is this an evolution-based discovery?

By painstakingly observing creatures in the wild, including birds, caterpillars and crickets, much was also learnt about behaviours and environmental conditions that can lead to the evolution of new species.

Here, they are really mixing up different theories. The "evolution of new species" to which they are referring is really just observable speciation within a single animal kind by natural selection. This, however, is not a suitable mechanism for evolution because it's only working with the present genetic information, or even discarding it, but it never adds new genetic information that would be necessary to advance from one kind of animal to another.

One study found just a small genetic change can turn one species into many.

That is actually true. If a bird's beak is altered through mutation of its genes, and that mutation multiplies into a population, then you have a new species. But the bird still remains a bird!

Marine stickleback fish ended up in different lakes when the last Ice Age ended. Their descendants have evolved into dozens of different species, each of which lost their protective armour plates. The same defect was the cause in each case.

Whoa. Hold on! Did they actually admit that the stickleback fish lost genetic information? Yes, this makes a new species, but where is the evolution? The poor fish lost something! There was no upward step in the evolutionary progression! If this is evolution, then expect humans to be just genetic blobs in billions of years when we've lost genetic information for all features. The article then cites other "breakthroughs."

Miswiring of the brain A common theme emerged this year as researchers discovered more genes linked to brain disorders such as schizophrenia, dyslexia and Tourette syndrome. The new finds suggest that many genetic mistakes don't cause psychiatric disorders directly. They affect brain wiring in the womb, predisposing people to problems.

This is evolution? They are saying that genetic mistakes cause problems in resulting generations. If this was the means for evolution, then we would expect far more diseases today that we currently observe.

Climate change Not even the US President, George Bush, could ignore the historic hurricane season in the north Atlantic this year. While researchers have been producing scientific papers for decades on the possible impact of human activity on global warming, the evidence became so ominous this year, even climate change sceptics had to take note. This was Australia's hottest year on record. Arctic ice cover hit a record low. The number of intense storms has increased as oceans have warmed. And climate change is having an impact ranging from altering the migratory patterns of Australian birds to dissolving the shells of tiny marine snails as the ocean become more acidic.

So what is the mechanism for this change? Evolutionists and liberal environmentalists blame these events on pollution by humans. While I agree that we need to take better care of the planet that we enjoy, I think that people should re-examine the facts. (Read "Fouling the nest," by Dr. Carl Wieland.) If biblical history is true, then there was a global flood about 4,500 years ago that totally changed Earth from its created state. A result of the catastrophic flood would have been a recent, rapid ice age from which Earth is still recovering. Being only a few thousand years ago, it is quite understandable that Earth is still warming back up. Again, true science confirms the Bible's history!

Earth's origins The accepted view until this year was that the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago from a well-mixed mass of dust and ice. New techniques for measuring isotopes, however, showed that terrestrial rocks did not match primitive meteorites supposedly made from the same material. Some scientists now argue that about 30 million years after the earth was formed its still molten mantle - the layer between the core and the crust - separated into chemically distinct layers. A section rich in heat-generating elements such as uranium and thorium sank, they believe, and is causing our planet to remain geologically active. The hot layer could keep the outer core molten so circulating iron produces earth's magnetic field. It could also help send plumes of hot rock to the surface, giving rise to volcanically active islands such as Hawaii.

This actually amuses me because I think of all of the supposedly irrefutable evidence that has just been discarded in acceptance of a new hypothesis. If the former beliefs were so concrete, then why did they discard them? Some would say, "Well, because they found a better theory!" But realize that discarding one idea for another means that the discard idea had wrong assumptions. So if evolutionists are now discovering that their previously held assumptions were wrong, then how can they know if their current assumptions are correct?

Nuclear fusion A bitter battle over where the world's first fusion reactor will be built was settled, with France victorious over Japan. The $US12 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor will operate at 100 million degrees, and generate electricity by re-creating the power of the sun. It is expected to begin operation in 2016.

By now, I'm convinced that there are no "top ten evolution discoveries." But hey, this kind of reactor sounds really cool!

The cell's gatekeeper Special proteins that sit in the membranes of cells act as gatekeepers, opening and closing to let potassium ions in and out. Without them, our muscles and nerves wouldn't work. Scientists still don't know how these so-called ion channels operate, but they now know what they look like. Researchers this year obtained an atomic picture of their structure.

I like this one because it's another discovery that showcases the incredible handiwork of God. This is also a great example of more irreducible complexity, which is when a system is so complex that removal of any of its parts disables the system. If muscles evolved before these gatekeepers, then muscles would have been unnecessary to evolutionary progression and would have been discarded. But what good are these gatekeepers without the potassiums or even a system to process the potassiums? Or what would life have been like if the nerves did not have the gatekeepers to regulate the nervous system?

Nature of neutron stars The brightest explosion ever detected, lasting only a fifth of a second and coming from near the centre of the Milky Way, occurred on December 28 last year. Scientific suspicion fell this year on a rare kind of young neutron star with an incredibly strong magnetic field. Neutron stars are the city-sized, collapsed cores of massive stars. Observations of mysterious, short gamma ray bursts this year also suggest they may be the result of a merger of two ancient neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole.

That's cool.

Secrets of flowering How plants know when and where to blossom is becoming less of a mystery. Several genes and chemical signals that control flowering were discovered this year.

Awesome! But may I ask a question? How did the planets acquire this ability? If several genes and chemical signals are involved, then how did they come to work together in the first place? In fact, flower reproduction could have been extremely difficult without these flowering mechanics. Again, irreducible complexity.

Cell communication The cells in our body are constantly bombarded by chemical signals. Most scientists until now have tracked each particular pathway of communication in an attempt to understand how cells respond, but now engineers used to dealing with complex systems like the internet have joined the fray. Biologists have tracked up to 8000 chemical signals that are simultaneously involved in causing a cell to die.

8,000? Wow. That's a lot. Good thing that our bodies have such a highly advanced communication system to process all of those signals. I wonder how we got that.

Voyages to the planets From Mars, three orbiters and two rovers beamed back more information about the red planet. And Voyager 1, launched in 1977, reported it was near the solar system's edge. But the highlight of planetary exploration is regarded as the touchdown of the European spacecraft Huygens on Titan. It found a world where liquid methane rains down to create valleys and lakes.

And still no signs of extraterrestrial life? I'm not surprised. Boy, I would love to see a thunderstorm on Titan! Space exploration will only increase a long-standing problem for evolutionists. If molecules-to-man evolution is true, then life on other planets would not only be consistent but expected. But the more that we explore, the more we discover lifeless destinations. But this causes me to look back at Earth is see how we are "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139). This "top ten" seems a weak attack against strong science. With the accumulation of knowledge and information, we continue to discover the wonders of creation. And when we observe our world around use the lens of biblical history, everything makes perfect sense and the Bible continues to be confirmed as the infallible Word of God our Creator.