Land Plants Came First

 One of the paradoxes from nature and scripture had been that Genesis describes land plants coming before the seas were full of living creatures. The fossil record had indicated the reverse- that the seas were full of living things prior to plants making their way to land. 

Two studies now indicate this may have been an instance of science needing more time to catch up to scripture. This study from Nature, "The late-Pre-Cambrian Greening of the Earth" claims evidence of terrestrial photosynthesis as early as 850 million years ago. Long before even the Edicaran fauna. That study inferred the existence of these first land plants based on change in the carbon cycle, but this study may have found tiny fossils (1 millimeter or less) of them. 

That leaves only the question of why plants took so much longer to unfold into their current diversity than did ocean animals. My book on early Genesis already addressed that issue, but I am not sure talking about it in isolation would make as much sense as it would from seeing the larger case about the nature of creation being laid out and how it would be just what should be expected given a close reading of the text. The best I can do is say that it has to do with the fact that God commands the land itself to bring forth the plants and the land does so without any further help from Him, but when He commands the seas to bring forth He also participates in the process. 

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Strother, Paul K.; Battison, Leila; Brasier, Martin D.; Wellman, Charles H. (2011). "Earth's earliest non-marine eukaryotes". Nature. 473

Knauth, L. Paul; Kennedy, Martin J. (2009). "The late Precambrian greening of the Earth". Nature. 460

Should Neanderthals Even be in the same Genus as We are?

This researcher says "no", and he gives a lot of good reasons, He also gives some interesting history about the classification of Neanderthals. There was considerable support for placing them in a different genus until World War II. At that point, he claims that Hitler's talk of a "master race" led to social and political pressure for scientists to go the other way- to lump everything they found in together. So he implies the decision was a political one, not a scientific one. If we based our classification of hominids on the same standards we used for other creatures, Jeff Schwartz says most of them, even some classified as "Archaic Homo Sapiens", would not even be in the same genus that we are.

The science media's big push to repeat the false idea that Neanderthals were very much like us also ties in to transhumanist ideas. That is, there is nothing special about mankind and if we have any ethical obligations at all it is to change humans into something better- to improve on the blind creator that is naturalism. 

I found this history of interest. What science is supposed to do is make finer and finer distinctions. What it does now in the case of hominids is to blur those distinctions. This is a sign that politics has infested the science. It isn't reasonable to "trust the science" when it has been tainted by political agendas. 

Kings from ancient times used to hire men to be priests, dress them in robes and speaking in the name of the gods they would support what the rulers who hired them really wanted.

But those were primitive times. Now days the state hires men to be 'scientists', dresses them in labcoats and degrees, and they speak in the name of science to support what the rulers that hired them really wanted.

For some reason, one of the things they seem to want science to say is that humans are not special, that other hominids were basically the same as us. They ignore a category that the ancients had of creatures that were like us, interested in us, but yet distinct from us.

Schwartz says that based on the fossil differences, not even many of these things that are considered "archaic Homo Sapiens Sapiens" should not be in our genus, much less Neanderthals. This is something I've said myself. Not even many of those so-called "archaic modern humans" were in our lineage. Humanity isn't 6,000 years old, but it isn't 106,000 years old either. We are a distinct population which appears relatively recently. I urge you to read his whole article, linked at the top, for details. 

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Other People Survived Noah's Flood - refuting a rebuttal

I don't normally get serious attempts at rebuttals when I share the Christ-centered model for Early Genesis. It doesn't matter the denomination or education status of whoever I am attempting to dialogue with, the pattern is consistent that they simply will not seriously engage. I finally got one, and I thought it deserved a thought-out answer, so I am making a post about it. This is best read with your bible open to Genesis chapter eleven. 

My claim that Genesis chapter eleven suggests that there were other people besides the clan of Noah after the flood- 
“Gen. 11 says that the whole earth shared one manner of speech yet the reason given for building a city was to 1) keep them from being scattered over the whole earth and 2) make a name for themselves. If Noah's clan were all the humans in the world, then who is doing the speaking "over the whole earth" since they were not at that time scattered over the whole earth. Also, re "making a name for themselves" who were they trying to impress?”

Here is the closest thing I have gotten as a serious answer in five years of doing this – They weren’t “speaking ‘over the whole earth.’" It was the “whole earth” which had one language.
1) “The whole earth” can mean a number of things: the whole planet, just a region (Gen. 2:11, 13), or as here, all of the human population.

Genesis 11:1-2 tells us that the “whole earth” had the same language, and that this “whole earth” moved from the east, or to the east (it can be translated either way). So, although a large group, it’s small enough to move as one. In Genesis 11:6, God indicates that this “whole earth” is a group of people. \

So KH is saying that "the land" was the people of the land. So it meant "the clans of Noah" were of one manner of speech as they travelled. While the phrase "the land" can refer to just the people of the land, I've never seen it used of people who did not yet have a land, a tribe on the move. When "the land" is used of people in scripture, it is quite sensibly using it as shorthand to describe the inhabitants of a particular region, not nomads on the move. 

Further, it is unlikely that the writer would use "the land" to mean the inhabitants only in verse one while using it to mean the literal territory in verse four, but this is what KH is suggesting. He seems to think that the "they" in verse two ("as they journeyed from the east") refers to "the whole earth" (or land). It doesn't. The chapter headings came along later. Just go up to the last verse of the previous chapter and it tells you who the "they" are. It is the families of the sons of Noah. The text isn't saying that they were the "whole earth" that was of one manner of speech, it is just saying that the whole earth was of one manner of speech when they, the clans of Noah, found Shinar. 

And to ice it, when he mentions verse six and it says "the people are one", the word for people there is "am", which means people in the sense of a nation, not the whole human race. So it isn't saying that "humanity is one", it is saying that particular nation, the clans of Noah that entered Shinar, are as one. Verse five doesn't help because when it says "the children of men" the Hebrew says "children of Adam". IOW this is also perfectly consistent with the Christ-centered model where there was Adam and Even inside the garden and other people outside it. 

KH even recognizes this in a way when he then says...

Based on Gen. 10:32, these are the descendants of all three sons of Noah.

Yes, that is who the "they" is in verse two, which means the "they" in verse two is not referring to "the whole earth:. When it says "by these were the nations divided" KH takes it to mean (like most people) that this is saying that the nations were exclusively composed of descendants of these individuals. That's not what that means when it says "divided". The early patriarchs normally attracted large groups of people to their households. Not all were their direct descendants, but they could easily form the core of a new nation. But I think if we just stick with what the text is saying there and not add meaning to "divided" that isn't there, then we can see that this verse isn't a statement that the descendants of Noah constituted the entire population of earth. 

As to my question of "who were they trying to impress" when they said they wanted to "make a name for themselves" KH wrote...

The name/reputation was for the current and future generations to remember. It need not have anything to do with there being contemporaneous populations around them.

I can't take this argument as seriously. "Making a name for yourself" is superfluous if your name is the only one on earth. No one is going to forget your name if it is also their name. I don't think he's answered the question "who were they trying to impress" at all by saying in effect "themselves". That's not "making a name". 

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Religious Exemption Letter to Injections of a Particular Nature

                         

What is Man? Mario Chamorro and I differ on the answer. 

Preface: My employer has been really good about this so far. They appear to be doing what is necessary to comply with what they feel they are obligated to do, but are not going beyond it with the fervor of some corporations. That said, they have instructed us to prepare and have ready any exemption letters we may have and I have done as they instructed. Mine is below...

Dear (REDACTED),

I have greatly enjoyed serving (REDACTED) and our client for the projects to which I have been assigned. I believe that I have served well, and brought credit upon (REDACTED) for hiring me. Nevertheless, I object on religious grounds to each of the three injections which the present administration of the federal government is attempting to force upon the very people that any government must rely on- its productive workers. I am writing in order to obtain a religious exemption from (REDACTED) in order to continue my service to this company. It is my hope and belief that the client will be amenable to this request.

Each person will have their own way of documenting the sincerity and depth of their religious viewpoints. Perhaps the easiest way for me to do so is to point out that I have authored a book on early Genesis that runs over four-hundred pages in length. You may or may not agree with the conclusions I come to, but I do hope that you will acknowledge the depth and sincerity of my religious convictions.

In evaluating the substances which the present administration is attempting to coerce me into injecting into my body under the threat of impoverishment for me, my wife, and our three children, it should be noted that one of the injections is not like the others. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine does not use the same methods as the Pfizer or Moderna injections. Although I have religious objections to all three, my reasons are different for the Johnson and Johnson vaccine as compared to the other two.

As a part of my religious convictions, I favor respect for innocent human life and regret the prevalence of abortion in America. If they have to happen, we still don’t have to profit off of them. And we surely don’t have to inject products produced from the same into our bodies! I can document the sincerity of these convictions not only by producing a long list of pro-life political candidates to whose campaigns I contributed, but also by the accounts in another book I wrote- my political autobiography. 

It is my understanding that the Johnson and Johnson vaccine uses aborted fetal cells in all three stages; creation, manufacture and testing. The other two only used such cells in testing. In perfect frankness, using them in testing is more of a gray area for me. The substance could still exist without the testing.

Not so in the case of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. They are intrinsically bound. The product could not exist without aborted fetal material. Therefore, I cannot in good conscience take an injection derived from such sources. I am astounded that I should even have to write a letter in order to say so, it should be so obviously a matter of conscience.

The other two vaccines operate by a different and novel principle. Indeed, the CDC changed the definition of vaccine just this past September. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” It is doubtful that the action of the Pfizer and Moderna products would even meet the CDC’s definition of “vaccine” prior to this change.

This is because these substances are not “products that stimulate a person’s immune system to produce immunity” like every past vaccine. Rather, these preparations change the human genetic material itself in such a way that our own bodies produce spike proteins like those in the initial version of the COVID-19 virus. Our immune system is then stimulated by the newly-engineered products of our co-opted genomic material.

Unlike vaccines of the past and present, the product in the original injection doesn’t stimulate our immune system, rather it changes us so that our own bodies would stimulate our immune system. If they hadn’t changed the definition, it would not be accurate to even label the Pfizer and Moderna injections as “vaccines” because they don’t directly stimulate our immune systems, rather they change us in such a way that we stimulate them.

It is my contention that what is happening here is more than an inoculation against COVID-19. It is also an initiation into what amounts to a new quasi-religion. One that has a view of man that is the polar opposite of that of classical Christianity. That quasi-religion is “transhumanism”. It turns people into unwitting practitioners of a belief system incompatible with the Christian faith.

In Christianity, man is a creation of God, capable of bearing the very Image of God, and the pinnacle of His creation. Though it is understood that we fall short of His glory, we are but for a little while lower than the angels as it says in the Psalms. This life is just the test, and we look forward to new bodies from God in the resurrection. If humans are to be more than they are now, it will be the gift of God.

Transhumanism holds the exact opposite assumptions about the nature of man. That man is the product of imperfect natural forces, there is nothing special about him other than his ability to shape things by his own power. And they would apply that power to the human form itself, using technology to produce “humanity 2.0”. Indeed, it would be considered an ethical imperative to use man’s power to change in order to change man himself into something they deem better. They would cure us of perceived human imperfections by making us into something else, something greater. By our own wisdom and power, not God’s.

Some even speculate on ways that we could escape the limitations of our own bodies in death. In direct contrast to Christian ideas, they want to elevate us to god-like beings in our own strength. They would have us put an end to death not through the grace of God, but the technology of man.

I want to emphasize that I am not against the use of science and technology on a restorative basis. If for example, someone has lost their sight because of a genetic defect which fails to produce a necessary protein, by all means we should correct that unruly part of nature which is responsible for this terrible result and introduce genes able to make the protein. I would argue that we have a moral duty to do so if we can. But this is not making them something other than what they were meant to be, it is simply healing them so that normal human function is restored in some area. We are not trying to re-make man into some other form in doing so, merely returning him to a condition more typical of our type.

We may have a moral duty to use technology to restore normal human capabilities, but this isn’t what these two COVID-19 injections do. Rather, they give us a capacity which is not natural to humans. It is on a tiny scale what transhumanists want on a large scale. It is the first step to being re-made by science and technology. I for one do not wish to be re-made. I don’t wish to participate in what amounts to their quasi-religious practices.

I do not have any special knowledge as to the motives of those at the highest levels of our government who selected these vaccines and are pursuing these policies. I know that many prominent and rich people are sympathetic to Transhumanist-ideals, but I am not saying that the selection of these particular vaccines is necessarily a ploy to condition the population participate in, and by habit accept the premises of, transhumanism. But I don’t need to know motives in order to judge actions.

In practical terms, this is the effect of their polices, which run counter to two-thousand years of Christian beliefs. Once people have been conditioned into practicing transhumanism by taking a battery of such genomic-altering products, transhumanists win the war of ideas without any ideas being considered. Any contrary theological objection Christians may have would be undermined without an intellectual shot being fired.

Again, I am not privy to the private motivations of those behind these policies. At the same time, the fervor and even fanaticism with which these injections are being forced upon the unwilling is consistent with religious motivations.

By now it is clear that these vaccines are failures. They don’t stop one from getting or spreading the disease. New permutations of the virus easily evade them. What immunizing effects they have are largely temporary. Regions with 90% plus vaccination rates are still seeing an explosion of new cases in the vaccinated. One might argue that they have a moderate effect on reducing fatalities among the infected, but no more so than that demonstrated by safer and time-tested products whose use the government is falling all over itself to suppress. Add to this that the benefits of the well-supported scientific concept of natural immunity are ignored in all their policies.

So while I have no definitive evidence of what would in effect be a conspiracy to condition the population to accept and unwittingly practice transhumanism, their actions are difficult to explain outside of some ulterior motive. Indeed, the more obvious it becomes that the vaccines are a failure, the more strident their efforts to pressure people to comply become. I don’t know that a quasi-religious belief in transhumanist ideas among the elites is responsible, but something must explain this increasingly bizarre and otherwise irrational behavior.

My spiritual forebears risked life and limb for refusing to participate in an innocuous act of burning incense to a statue of the emperor in a support of a state-belief system. From that spark developed the concept of human liberty and freedom which proved a blessing to the people of the west for centuries afterward. I intend to follow in their footsteps. I appeal for a religious exemption from this vaccine mandate.

                                                                                                Respectfully,

 

                                                                                                Mark M. Moore

***********************************

The books which I mention in the piece

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Chimp Genes Function Differently, Even if the DNA is the same

 

The headline declares "New Technique Underlies Genes in Human Evolution".

Strange how perspectives differ. They assume all of the differences, no matter how many they find, are due to "evolution".  I think the article highlights how different humans are from chimps, even if the genes seem identical. The article said they found "thousands" of genes that operate or regulate differently in human brains than in chimp brains. Well, we have maybe 30,000 protein-producing genes total. If "thousands" of them were found to operate differently (even if the underlying gene is identical) then the differences in humans and chimps functionally must be much greater than the 1.5% figure so often cited.

To use an analogy, it is almost like the gene has the job of building a carburetor. Same gene, if put in a push-mower builds one type of carb and the same gene if put in a Corvette builds another. How it expresses is coming from somewhere else. So it doesn't even matter if the genes are "98.5% identical". The gene somehow just says "build a carburetor", what that carburetor looks like depends on other things.  

Ergo, that the parts are the same does not at all demand natural evolution from a common ancestor any more than Briggs and Stratton and a 3.6 liter automobile engine must have even the same designer!
They have put jellyfish genes in mice and developed glowing mice. It isn't because they are closely related, but because the 'language' works. If I insert a word, "lavender" in one story from another in a place where color is a factor, it can still work even if the two stories were not in the same series or about the same subjects. That's because they were written in an intelligently, if haphazardly, designed code called "English". 

The more we learn, the less important similarities in chimpanzee vs human DNA seems to get. 

*****
The book is mostly not about evolution vs. creation, indeed part of it explains how most of the conflict is a false on. It is about something way more important than that- how early Genesis points to the work and person of Christ!

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Gobekli Tepe is Much Younger than 12,000 Years

 

Many are familiar with the fantastic site of Gobekli Tepe in south-central Turkey. It is very near one area where I speculated the original garden of Eden was located. There is little doubt it is near to where true agriculture and animal domestication originated. It appears to have been a religious center where a series of large enclosed but roofless temples were constructed, used, and then deliberately buried over and over for a long period of time. 

The researcher who first popularized the site, a man named Schmidt, claimed that the site dated from the tenth millennium B.C., that is up to 12,000 years old. That date always bothered me a bit for reasons I will describe later. People like to think they have found "the oldest site of its kind" rather than say, the "the fifth oldest site of its kind". Researchers are humans and humans tend to look at the evidence in ways that are best for them. It turns out that the "tenth millennium B.C." date has been contested for years. We just don't know about the research because science media is so terrible and sensationalistic. 

A researcher named Dimitrios S. Dendrinos wrote a paper in 2016 claiming Gobekli Tepe was a much younger site, and was ignored. But the evidence kept coming in. He wrote a paper in 2021 making the case that Gobekli Tepe was a sixth millennium B.C. site. His logic is strong 

It is hard to date stone structures. So they got the date from dating things in the earth that was used to fill the structures when they were buried, and also some plaster that covered one of the pillars. The problem with that is that the dirt used to fill and cover could be much older than the structure itself. You can't use the oldest dirt you find in a fill to date the fill, the best you can do is find the youngest. In addition. the type of plaster they dated at the site is extremely prone to contamination. It is is buried from dirt that contained ashes from a campfire 12, 000 years ago, both the dirt and the plaster will show an C-14 date of 12,000 years even if the structure that was buried was much younger than that. 

Dendrinos dates Gobekli Tepe to the mid-sixth millennium B.C. In other words, around 5500 B.C. He does this by comparing the complexity of the structures and certain symbols found at the site to surrounding sites that are more firmly dated. It really makes sense that they would not start out with the most lavish and gigantic form at the beginning. 

Now onto why I found this of such interest. The focus of each enclosure was two immense T-shaped pillars. One of them was given anthropomorphic carvings, the other had carvings representing many animals. I had suggested in my book on Early Genesis that there is a connection between the two pillars which are central to each enclosure at this site and the "two trees" that were at the center of the garden of Eden. The ceremonies at Gobekli Tepe would then represent an attempt to "re-do" the garden with a more favorable result, choosing the Tree of Life (the God figure) over the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As each attempt failed, they would bury it, construct a new one, and try it again for their generation. Please don't be confused because I am writing as if there were other people around besides Adam and Eve. I believe that scripture teaches this, and this video gives some of the reasons why. 

What had been nagging at me was the extremely ancient age ascribed to the original structures. Perhaps you have heard reports saying that this site was constructed around 10,000 B.C., or twelve thousand years ago. Others tried to pin it down a bit more and say 11,300 years ago or about 9,300 B.C. 

These dates are very early if what we see at Gobekli Tepe is indeed a response to Adam's fall. I consider the dates for Adam in the Masoretic text (4004 B.C.) to be too young. The numbers in the Septuagint (about 5,500 B.C.) may be correct, but it is also possible that these are only theoretical minimum dates for reasons I describe in this video. I suggested in my book that Adam could have lived as early as 10,587 B.C., but this near the extreme end of the possible range and I was really thinking a date sometime between this date and the Septuagint date of 5,500 B.C. would be more probable. Low and behold, along comes this paper pushing the date for Gobekli Tepe to quite near the Septuagint date for Adam. 

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Modern Marine Ecosystem in Place By Time Trilobite Fossils Appear

 This study made the case that the evolutionary rate of trilobites during the Cambrian wasn't all that extraordinary. Most naturalists look at that and say "See! The Cambrian Explosion wasn't all that explosive after all!" But if they do that they miss the fine print that makes their problem worse, not better. 

"We conclude that the Cambrian explosion was over by the time the typical Cambrian fossil record commences and reject an unfossilized Precambrian history for trilobites, solving a problem that had long troubled biologists since Darwin."

So they "solved a problem" about the Cambrian explosion by......saying the real explosion happened BEFORE the Cambrian trilobite fossils show up. Yet they also reject the idea that there was an unfossilized Precambrian history for trilobites. IOW, the explosion was over by the start of the typical fossil record, and there were none before that (in the Vendian).

"Our data therefore provide robust, quantitative evidence that by the time the typical Cambrian fossil record begins (∼521 Ma), the Cambrian explosion had already largely concluded. This suggests that a modern-style marine biosphere had rapidly emerged during the latest Ediacaran and earliest Cambrian (∼20 million years), followed by broad-scale evolutionary stasis throughout the remainder of the Cambrian."

I was glad they used the term "Cambrian explosion", as many science-deniers, of the naturalistic persuasion, have denied there was a true Cambrian explosion. Indeed the purpose of this study was to show that the Cambrian did not have excessively rapid rates of evolution- after the typical fossils of the period show up. But in so doing they are making what occurred before even more explosive!

They emphasize that trilobites did not have a pre-Cambrian history. Indeed one section of their report is "A Cambrian Origin for Trilobites". So somewhere between 541 million (edit, Wiki says 538.8 mya)  to 521 million years ago is when all of this change took place. By only looking at trilobites they are very much narrowing the scope of their problem because so many other forms show up too, including a host of trilobite-like creatures in addition to many other phyla. The oldest trace fossils of what can be described as euarthropods (a group which includes trilobites) are 537 million years old (last section). In other words, they show up at basically the same time everything else did (the Cambrian started 541 MYA). Indeed it apparently took only 410,000 years, a shockingly brief figure, for the Ediacaran biota to be replaced by Cambrian biota. This is made even more shocking compared to the very minimal evolutionary progress of the Ediacaran fauna. If evolution is universal, why didn't the Edicarans do much of it? The Cambrian biota showed much more diversification in their first eight million years (and likely much less) than their predecessors did in 80-100 million years. 

Saying that evolutionary rates were not much out of the norm for the Cambrian once typical (trilobite) fossils show up only solves the problem for the history of fossilization. It doesn't solve the problem of where this modern marine ecosystem came from, because it seems to be in place from the start, without reasonable ancestor forms. It would be like saying a billion dollars appeared in my bank account from nowhere but this is not unusual at all because after the billion dollars appeared my bank account behaved normally, changing with normal deposits and withdrawals. 

PS- there is an issue that defies naturalistic evolutionary expectations within the Cambrian, even if the overall rate isn't much out of the ordinary. The way things appear is strange. There are very few species per order (or sometimes "superfamily" depending on how they rate it). It is like things happened in the reverse of the description of evolution where a species over time becomes a group of closely related species called a genus. Then over more time one or more of those species gets so different than the rest that it becomes its own new genus. This in effect forms a new family that often contains many genera. Eventually that family may be so different from the original species, or other of its descendants, that it becomes a superfamily, or even a new order. But this isn't what we see in the Cambrian. New Orders show up without a lot of speciation. The leaps between form are bigger, even if there are fewer steps (species) between them. Saying that "speciation didn't occur at a fast rate during the bulk of the Cambrian" doesn't deal with this issue at all.

This study did not address how the evolution "started from the top" and went down rather than the standard bottom-up diversification we hear about. There isn't a lot of speciation going on, yet new types at higher taxonomic levels appear. Indeed simpler and more complex appear at the same time, defying naturalistic paradigms. But this isn't the only time that's happened in earth's history. It happened with tetrapods, it happened with comb-jellies, and it happened in the Ordovician. 

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Two Atheist Scientists Convert to Christianity

 And they were saying some of the same things I have been saying. The one says that "Believing is seeing" to describe they way that people pick a view and then accumulate evidence to support it. The way I have been putting it is "All evidence is a mirror. It says as much about the viewer as the thing studied". We look at the same facts and draw different conclusions and that's why. The difference is not the evidence, its us!

The second fellow said that he studied the mind, and that naturalism can't explain the mind, nor can it explain physics. I've said the same thing myself in my book, and further speculated that as more and more evidence about biology is uncovered the failure of naturalism as an explanation will become more clear in that field as well. 

Read it all here. https://medium.com/top-down-or-bottom-up/two-former-atheist-scientists-explain-how-science-changed-their-minds-cc4535fcadd6

Plants Were Late Bloomers (Plant Evolution)

 11And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants^e yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind."

These two verses in Genesis get the order right as far as the introduction of plants goes. The term "vegetation" is more general and includes things that sprout. I noticed that in scripture the adjective "green" is sometimes put in front of this word, making me wonder if it would not also include some things that we don't strictly regard as vegetation, such as lichens. The seed-bearing plants who bear fruit come last. This checks out with the order we see in nature. 

Plants seem to be late-comers to the earth. The seas were full of living things before the land was full of what we would call plants. Superficially, this would be a serious problem for a concordist view of Genesis chapter one. 

This isn't a problem for the Christ-centered model of early Genesis. Creation is supposed to be slow and awkward and even incapable of doing God's will without God's help. In other words, it is a suitable creation for beings like us! A close look at the text shows that while the filling of the seas and lands with animal life was a job God commanded the lands and seas themselves to do, He participated. They had to have help. In the case of plants, the situation is different. All God did was provide the dry land (itself pointing to the Resurrection) on the third day. He commanded the land to bring forth vegetation and the land did so without any record of God's further intervention. 

Creation wants to do His will, but it does so haltingly and imperfectly. It messes up a lot. Like us. This is why God can give the command to the land to bring forth plants first, but it takes much longer for the earth to pull it off compared to, for example, the seas where God provided more help. It all makes sense, but not under the view of creation that so many churches are teaching. 

I noticed that according to this report, the rise of plants took a while, and there was a modest "burst" followed by a much larger burst recently. That larger burst seems to have been driven by the variety of insects that served as pollinators. In other words, the plants didn't have a big burst until the animals were there as a driver. This is in contrast to the seas, where the biggest burst comes early (Cambrian Explosion) and others follow. This is a pattern that the Christ-centered model, but no other I have seen, would predict. 

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Traits are Linked. "Re-Thinking the Fundamentals of Evolution"

 Their headline, not mine. A study of a wide-spread African fish group has turned a quarter-century of evolutionary assumption upside down. Cichlids have a very complex set of double-jaws. Well, I will let the article tell it...

Researchers have long thought that the two sets of jaws are evolutionarily decoupled and can evolve independently of one another, pushing the boundaries of morphological evolution. However, Conith and Albertson demonstrated that such decoupling does not appear to be the case for cichlids, challenging a quarter-century-old assumption. "What we've found is not just that the evolution of the two sets of jaws is linked, but that they're linked across multiple levels, from genetic to evolutionary," says Albertson.

Traditional thinking is that genetically linked traits led to features that were constrained in terms of evolution. You could not tinker with the one without messing up the other, making accumulated changes much harder. You had to have a hail-mary that changed everything at once in a way that somehow still worked. 

any models of evolution theorize both that organisms are constructed from repeated units—digits on your hand or teeth in your mouth—and that these individual units evolve independently from one another. "It is this 'modularity' of organisms that is thought to facilitate the evolutionary process," Albertson notes.

Linked systems are usually thought to lack evolutionary potential. "They just cannot evolve in as many dimensions," Conith says. This is referred to as an evolutionary constraint, and it plays an important role in shaping biodiversity. Constraints determine what body structures are possible.

The article then does what such pieces typically do- take a discovery which ought to challenge naturalist premises and instead use it to claim support for them. All discoveries that naturalists were wrong about evolution automatically get re-interpreted to "this is how evolution works". When a quarter-century fundamental assumption is overturned, they don't even blink. Linked or unlinked, nature saw to all the changes unaided. It's a naturalism-of-the-gaps at work. 

"The constraint is actually facilitating cichlid evolution, rather than impeding it," says Conith.

Of course it is, because whatever happened, evolution did it.

"This tells us that we need to rethink the fundamentals of evolutionary mechanisms," says Albertson. "Perhaps constraints play a wider role in the evolutionary success of species around the world."

That sounds like however the constraints got imposed, it helped promote adaptation. Sort of like how God's commandments are not cages, but guard-rails. The so-called "constraints" imposed by the creator give us freedom, they don't remove it. 

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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right.  

 

                                                                        You Tube Channel 

Why Didn't the Ediacaran Biota Fill More Niches?

 The Ediacaran Biota seems to have been the first multi-cellular organisms on earth, living during the Vendian Period. No one is sure what they were. They died out once the Cambrian Explosion resulted in a large number of new forms of animal life appearing in the ancient seas. 

Most scientists acknowledge that the Ediacaran biota were not related to the later Cambrian forms. One role they play in the debate on creation is to show that hard shells are not required for fossilization- undermining the excuse that a lack of hard shells prior to the Cambrian explains the absence of reasonable evolutionary precursors to the explosion of forms in the Cambrian. Even without shells, if conditions are right, fossilization occurs. This makes it more likely that the reason that fossils of evolutionary precursors to the Cambrian forms are missing is that they did not exist. 

Of the many things that I find amazing about the Ediacaran forms is their lack of evolution. They expanded into a world where every macro niche was unfilled, yet over the course of 80-100 million years they apparently filled very few of them. This paper analyzed Vendian life-forms for where they lived in the ocean, their level of motility, and feeding strategy. This resulted in a matrix of 216 potential niches. As the paper notes:

The Ediacaran fauna utilized at most 12 modes of life, with just two practised by skeletal organisms.

They didn't evolve much. The Goldblum character from Jurassic Park's classic statement "life finds a way" wasn't true of Vendian Period forms. They didn't find a way. They left most niches wide-open for 80 to 100 million years. In contrast, the explosion of forms in the Cambrian quickly diversified as shown by their statement:

A total of 30 modes of life are recorded in the Early and Middle Cambrian, 19 of which were utilized by skeletal organisms. The other 11 are documented from soft-bodied animals preserved in the Chengjiang and Burgess Shale Konservat-Lagerstätten. The number of modes of life utilized by skeletal organisms increased by more than 50 per cent during the Ordovician radiation to a Late Ordovician total of 30....

The Ordovician radiation is another problem for naturalists. Life did not unfold they way their theories would have it. It isn't that species diversified into closely related ones, which over time became a new genus, then some from that became a new family, and then eventually some of that became a new order and so forth. Instead, the new phyla came first, then the new classes, and then the new orders. Only after an extended period of time did the process they call evolution begin to happen- with new species splitting and eventually forming a new genus and so forth. 

The early and middle Cambrian together lasted only 20 million years. Forty million years or so later the Ordovician came along. All of that together is less time than the Ediacaran forms had in the Vendian. Those forms basically didn't evolve. There was one burst in the Avalon where new forms show up. But they don't do a lot of subsequent changing. If evolution is fundamental to life, why didn't these things do it?

I don't have any hard answers here, only speculations. In the Christ-centered model Creation participates in its being filled to varying degrees by the "day" and type of living thing. With plants, it looks most like theistic evolution, with God simply commanding the land to bring forth "vegetation" and the land doing so without further direct intervention from God. God is giving the commands as if creation itself has some creative power. Later, God commands the seas to bring forth living creatures, but subsequent to that He intervenes on the job. One of the biggest theology points of the model is that the universe was made to be fit for beings like us- it can't do God's will without God's help either. 

So if I am speculating, and that is all this is at this point, perhaps the Ediacaran forms were an attempt of the earth to fill the waters with living creatures on its own. The result was inadequate and unsuitable. This deficit was cured by God's participation. This mirrors how our attempts to do good on our own fall flat, and are made fruitful only by operating in what He has done - the Atonement being the central example. 

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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. If you have found anything I say about the evidence from science in the least remarkable, know that it is nothing at all compared to the profound truths shown about the work of Christ in early Genesis as described in this book.

    You Tube Channel 

Chordates Also Show Complexity From the Start

I recently wrote a post about comb jellies and how, contrary to evolutionary expectations, the initial members of the group had more advanced neurology than later members of the group. It was like they started with even more complexity than they needed for their niche (without apparent precursors) and then various members of the group lost differing amounts of complexity over time. It's obvious to anyone who thinks about it objectively (which unfortunately is not very many I've found) that this is completely contrary to macro-evolutionary expectations but perfectly compatible with a creationist view.

What I most often get out of naturalists on this one is that the evidence must be misleading and incomplete. OK, but then what you are doing there is taking macro-evolution on faith. That is, even if the evidence says otherwise, you assume that the evidence is incomplete and misleading and that your beliefs contrary to the evidence are correct. That's fine, but don't claim the mantle of "science" for your beliefs then. 

Note that I am not saying "there is no evolution". I think scripture teaches that the earth and the seas have the power to bring forth various living things- but not without God's help in both sea and land. In such a scenario, one cannot appeal to the considerable evidence that nature has taken a single species and over vast amounts of time diversified it into a family of closely-related genera to explain the extra-ordinary times in earth's history when new phyla and classes appear seemingly out of nowhere with tremendous amounts of initial complexity. The former does not explain the latter, it doesn't look like the latter, and the most reasonable conclusion is that some other mechanism of formation was involved.

The best point my naturalist associates made in my prior attempt to show this was that I had only the example of comb jellies, a relatively obscure phylum. Why would a creator God start them off with maximum complexity but go from simplest to complex with other denizens of the deep? Thus, this data point could be considered a fluke, and not an example by which we could judge the origin of life in the seas. It was a fair point. 

Too bad for them, the point is invalid. It wasn't just comb jellies that started off with more complexity than needed for the niche occupied by the phylum. The same thing happens with chordates, a group which includes us vertebrates. It turns out that the simpler one (Pikaia), long presumed to be the ancestor of an array of more complicated chordates, does not appear earlier than those more complicated types. Dr. Fuzale Rana of Reasons to Believe explains the evidence here, but he links to the original research so there is no good reason to doubt his facts.

The short version of his article is that they assumed the simpler chordate came first (520 million years ago) then later more complex ones arose. Then they found the more complex ones in an earlier formation. So something similar happened with chordates and comb jellies- they start with more complexity than they need and some groups then mostly lose it! Bear in mind that, as Rana explains here, just twenty years ago evolutionary scientists thought that chordates evolved from invertebrate phyla that also appeared in the Cambrian. Now they not only have to explain away why the chordates show up too early and too distinct for that to be the case, but that it isn't even the case that the simplest versions of the type are first!

Dr. Hugh Ross, an associate of Rana at Reasons to Believe, points out that the genetic tree evidence is conflicting- if you insist on imposing naturalistic evolution. It isn't conflicting at all if you take the evidence at face value- phyla show up independently and rapidly and all in the same era without reasonable evolutionary precursors. 

I found one paragraph in the Ross link, from June of this year, particularly enlightening and satisfying. We are coming to basically the same conclusions based on the same evidence. This is mostly Ross citing two papers from secular researchers, which I provide the cite for below the paragraph..... 

"5 Furthermore, the fossil record shows that “there are no indications that the evolutionary activity at the family level was driving the origination of higher-level taxa.”6 In fact, “the diversification of phyla occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, and orders before that of families”7 

6. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1987.tb02459.x

7.Erwin, Valentine, and Sepkoski, Jr., “A Comparative Study.”

That sure sounds like these papers are saying that what I noticed about comb jellies isn't a fluke at all- it is typical of the origin of all living phyla. Life started in distinct forms and the phyla became classes and super-orders and so forth. Only when you get far down the taxonomic classification ladder do things start to go the other way and species began diversifying into genera. What is lacking is any evidence that new phyla, or even classes, can arise via that same process.

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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. If you have found anything I say about the evidence from science in the least remarkable, know that it is nothing at all compared to the profound truths shown about the work of Christ in early Genesis as described in this book.

    You Tube Channel 

Genes Can Respond to Coded Information in Signals

 https://phys.org/news/2021-08-genes-coded-signalsor-filter.html

I assumed that when God shaped new living creatures He operated on the quantum level, sending information from the eternal realm into the temporal realm. Things would look like "a series of extremely unlikely natural events". And I still think that. But wow, messages can be sent directing the genome via EM radiation, and how different genomes interpret the signal varies. So the same EM signal could tell some organisms to do one thing and another something else. Lots of ways the Creator could have done His handiwork. 

Comb Jelly De-Evolution

Nature keeps messing up. That is, naturalists come up with all of these wonderfully consistent (with their premises) hypotheses, but then when they actually conduct the research it turns out that nature has done the opposite. 

Take their recent research into comb jellies. Naturalists have assumed that living forms started out simple, and over time grew more complex. To be sure there have been cases where an organism lost complexity and returned to a simpler form, but this has to be the exception under naturalism, not the rule. After all, you can't go from amoebas to man by losing complexity. The early organisms have to start with less complexity and then develop more and more complexity over time. Yet ancient comb jellies had complex nervous systems. Modern ones have lost complexity, even though their lifestyles haven't changed much since the beginning. 

How did they get complex nervous systems, more complex than they needed- only to lose various degrees of it over time? Here is another quote from the article.... 

To better understand the evolution of this group, the team performed phylogenetic analysis which suggests the condensed nervous system is actually the ancestral condition and that only modern ctenophores have lost this complex nervous system and instead favored a more diffuse nerve net.......

The researchers conclude that Cambrian ctenophores had more complex nervous systems compared to those observed today. Living species of comb jellies have a diffuse nervous system similar to the structure of chicken wire, but very thin and transparent. Cambrian ctenophores' nervous systems were condensed with specific nerve tracks that basically ran along the length of the body and then as a ring around the mouth. This complex system is only seen in one living species, the Euplokamis, which is regarded as potentially being an early branching ctenophore living today. However, while Euplokamis has this elongated nerve structure that runs the length of the body, it does not have the ring around the mouth, so it too is simpler compared to Cambrian ctenophores.

So they can survive with a simple nervous system, or a complicated one, or something in between. How did nature produce the early models with the full suite of nervous system features when much simpler arrangements have actually proved to be perfectly satisfactory for what they do? The simple systems may even be a little better, based on the fact that most groups of comb jellies have that set up. 

Evolution isn't supposed to work like that. Animals are not supposed to start out with a bunch of complex systems that they don't need. Loss of complexity may come later, in certain exceptional cases when environment or lifestyle changes...for example if some group of them adopts a new life-style or environment where the original system is no longer used. Think blind cave fish who lost their sight. But this isn't that. Their life-style hasn't changed much. 

They are not supposed to start complex (where did that come from if simple was good enough?) and devolve to simple when the lifestyle is basically the same. It makes no sense- under naturalist premises anyway. It does make sense in the Christ-centered model for early Genesis. Nature does bring forth living creatures, but not without God putting her in position to do so. 

(Additional relevant note: This study says that ctenophores have such a different nervous system, including using different genes to form it, that it appears that nervous systems had more than one origin. 

Recent data show that neural systems of ctenophores are vastly different from those of other animals and use different sets of cellular and genetic mechanisms. Thus, neural systems appear to have at least two independent origins regardless of whether ctenophores or sponges are the earliest branching extant animal lineage.

So don't look for a common ancestor of regular jellyfish and comb jellies to solve this mystery. It wasn't the case that something with a regular nervous branched off and became comb jellies that didn't need one anymore. This group had its own independently derived nervous system, that most of the group got rid of after going to all the trouble to "develop". )

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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. 

    You Tube Channel 

Fast Tetrapod Evolution Looks like Slow Tetrapod Creationism

 
I saw a report on yet another study which challenges a naturalistic view of origins, though the government-funded researchers cited in the article didn't put it that way of course. 

Advocates of naturalism: I am going to start this post off with points you may have heard before but if you keep reading you will see I am going to take it somewhere you very, very likely have not considered before, because it is based on results discovered only in the last two or three years. I am asking that you not leap to conclusions based on the first paragraphs and dismiss it as something you've already considered. Try to hear what I am really getting at. It is amazing and frustrating at how hard it has been to get people, regardless of their philosophy, to do this. Everyone scans until they can put what they read into some box they have pat answers for. If you do this here, you are not getting it. Despite my writing this warning, I predict that most naturalists who read this post will still do it. That's how powerful and debilitating mental Pidgeon-holing is.

Consider these quotes:

"The researchers also found that most of the close relatives to tetrapods had exceptionally slow rates of anatomical evolution, suggesting the fish relatives to tetrapods were quite well adapted to their aquatic lifestyle.

"On the other hand, we discovered the evolutionary lineages leading to the first tetrapods broke away from that stable pattern, acquiring several of the major new adaptive traits at incredibly fast rates that were sustained for approximately 30 million years," said Simões."

So far interesting, but only a little out of line with the Punctuated Equilibrium view of evolution which popped up some decades back. That is, there are large periods of stasis which are broken by periods of very rapid change. Most don't dare call these events "macro-evolution" but that's what they are talking about. Notice two things. One is that the rate of change wasn't just fast but "incredibly fast". The fast changes continued for thirty million years, but that doesn't mean that the change from fish to tetrapod took that long. It is just how long the rapid changes went on for. With just a little more looking they may find what they found with the incredibly fast changes in the Cambrian Explosion.

That is, that while the period of rapid change in the Cambrian went on for 30 million years, the initial burst occurred in less than 410,000 years. This is obviously too fast for new basic body plans (phyla) to evolve by any mechanisms that we see operating today. Even if by some rare yet natural chance a hopeful monster could be born with a successful new body plan, it doesn't explain why over a dozen new body plans did so at the same time. How come all the miracles happened in such close succession? 

Under naturalist premises the original idea was that evolution was constantly occurring as creatures were shaped by their environment. Once they learned more they realized that while this does go on, it is limited in extent and forms are stable most of the time. There is a slow background sort of evolution as the earth fiddles within a type. It is only on rare occasions that this stability is punctured (thus the name Punctuated Equilibrium) by rapid change. In an impressive feat of cognitive dissonance, some naturalists will hold this view while at the same time denying there is any difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution, claiming one is just the cumulative effect of the other. 

Under the original idea a new niche opening up is what precipitated the evolution of new forms. This idea has been kept, without noticing how it is incongruous with newer discoveries in the field and Punctuated Equilibrium. Essentially, once in a great while by chance there will be an exceptionally unlikely event. Nature pops up with something very different from what was before it only a short while back. If there is an unexploited niche for it to fill then it prospers greatly. All by chance, no intent or Designer required. It seems like a reasonable idea on the surface. Yet people haven't stopped to realize that the party line on unexploited niches doesn't fit with the party line on P.E. and what we have actually found in the Cambrian. 

Hear this: even if they were right about this process, under P.E. an empty niche does not guarantee that a creature will show up to fill that empty niche. It still requires the exceptionally unlikely event. Under the old view, where change was steady state and continuous, and forms near infinitely malleable without islands of stability, it made sense that empty niches would be inevitably filled. Under P.E. it doesn't make sense and it surely doesn't make sense that the new forms would all arise in a batch as they did during the Cambrian. They'd have us believe that all of the exceptionally unlikely events occurred together, yet it was still chance and not intent which brought them about!

To many creationists, in particular Old Earth ones, P.E. is simply accommodating evolutionary theory to describe what things would look like if supernatural creation were also true. That is, the steady state sort of background evolution is the earth bringing forth living creatures and the establishment of new kinds is God helping nature fulfill His command to nature. My particular view of Genesis chapter one is a Christ-centered one: We live in a universe fit for beings like us- we can't do God's will without God's help and neither can nature. This is why, not only is there a difference in micro-evolution and macro-evolution, but macro-evolution actually happens much faster than all but the smallest variations via micro-evolution. When God gets involved, big changes can happen fast. When nature is left on her own, it takes a long time to make very little progress. It isn't that evolution is untrue, it is just a part of what is being done in creation. 

And then, the pattern seems to be repeating itself with the tetrapods. But something else happened with tetrapods, and it is a repeat of the pattern seen of ocean life in the Ordovician. See these quotes from the article:

The researchers also found that the fast rates of anatomical evolution in the tetrapod lineage were not associated with fast rates of species diversification. In fact, there were very few species around, so few they had a very low probability of being preserved in the fossil record.

This finding helps to answer an ongoing debate in evolution of whether new major animal groups originated under fast rates of anatomical change and species diversification (the classical hypothesis). Or, if there were high rates of anatomical evolution first, with increased rates of species diversification occurring only several million years later (a new hypothesis).

"What we've been finding in the last couple of years is that you have lots of anatomical changes during the construction of new animal body plans at short periods of geological time, generating high rates of anatomical evolution, like we're seeing with the first tetrapods. But in terms of number of species, they remained constrained and at really low numbers for a really long time, and only after tens of millions of years do they actually diversify and become higher in number of species. There's definitely a decoupling there," said Simões.

It sounds like they are saying that macro-evolution happens fast, but micro-evolution happens slowly in nature. That isn't what they expected under naturalist premises, that's why the idea is  "a new hypothesis". Note I did not put the parenthesis in the quote above, they were from the article.

Now here is the new observation I want to make: if this happened under naturalistic processes there would be no reason for diversification of a new type of creature into a new environment full of new niches to be delayed. It is like the new form of tetrapod was immediately well-adapted to be a generalist in its new niches. Under P.E. it is unlikely enough that nature even produces a new form, but when it does so, it is supposed to be a stroke of luck, not bit-by-bit shaping. So there is no reason for such a new form to be well-adapted to its new environment. Therefore there is no reason why speciation should be delayed. Indeed, there should be more impetus for it than there was in the original stable environment from which it came. Instead we see big changes continuing for millions of years and only many millions of years later species diversification occurring. 

This is nonsensical under naturalistic premises. One extremely rare event (high rate of anatomical 'evolution') is followed by others, but the normal sort of background evolution doesn't even start filling in with a diversity of species until much later. 

Someone suggested to me that the new tetrapods had a new environment so they didn't need to speciate to fill niches within that new environment. This doesn't take into account how things really work. If the first tetrapods fill a niche at the mouth of a river, after the first thousand years those down river are not competing with the population still at the mouth, but the original niche at the mouth of that river is very much filled, and if they try to go down river the adjacent population is already there, so the same evolutionary pressure that supposedly always work to drive speciation should be at work after a matter of centuries if not sooner. The great delay in this sort of background evolution while macro-evolution continues to churn out one miracle after another of creatures perfectly suited for their increasingly inland freshwater environment flies in the face of what we would expect to happen if natural forces are totally responsible for the change. The new form was supremely suited for the role of generalist in the new environment so that there was no pressure for speciation for a very long time. This only makes sense under the old slow environment-shaping evolution or special creation. Sudden appearance of a new form is incongruent with sublime suitability in the new environment, unless there is more than blind chance at work.

If natural explanations were correct then we should see new species branching off each new form very quickly. We don't. It is as if each new form was already well-adapted to its environment. That isn't the footprint of blind nature at work friends. It looks exactly like what things should look like if there was a Designer who knew what He was doing. 


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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. 

    You Tube Channel 

Have They Been Getting Evolution Wrong This Whole Time?

 Apparently so. Oh I don't mean in the vaguest sense of defining it as "change over time". If that is all it means then of course evolution is true. In this world change is inevitable. If all it means is "a change in gene frequencies over time" then again, of course that is correct. It is merely a subset of the first definition. Heck, even if God personally genetically engineered the founding members of every new family of life that ever lived on this earth, both of those definitions would still be true because neither specifies the power behind the change. 

Merriam Webster defines it as "descent with modification from preexisting species." There is no doubt that happens too, but even this definition dodges the real question of whether this process is responsible for all the variation in life in earth's history. For example, domestic dogs are an example of descent with modification from pre-existing species, wolves, but this does not mean that squid and eagles shared a common ancestor by natural descent. To assume otherwise based on the wolf-to-dog evidence alone is a gross example of the scientific error of "unsound extrapolation of data." This is the mistake of assuming that a given amount of known change can tell us about change that we don't really have the data for.  

One might even argue (as I would) that domestic dogs are an example of intelligent design (through selective breeding) as well as an example of Webster's definition of evolution. I would add further that if an Intelligent Designer fashioned every family of life on earth by modifying life forms from pre-existing families then this process would also meet Webster's definition of "evolution". So then one can legitimately "believe in evolution" and still "believe in creationism". One can believe that "evolution happened" without believing that evolution did it all. 

My point in the two-above paragraphs is that it is extremely difficult to extract a definition of "evolution" from naturalists which even acknowledges that a question might exist as to whether this process relies on natural means alone and can be extrapolated so that it can be rightfully considered the sole explanation for all variation in living things. The naturalistic premises are not stated in the definition, nor the absolute totality of the dogma as expressed in practice, but so many naturalists go on to act as if they were stated. 

Too many of them refuse to even see my point on this. They just won't allow themselves to see it. I don't like to start out by questioning motives, but when real engagement is avoided it leads to the question of motives. So by now I view this as a tedious attempt to rig the definitions in order to obscure the rational bases for reconsidering their premises. Is that science or dogma? Is it the business of science to obscure questions or answer them? It is particularly irritating coming from people who present themselves as the arbiters of honest inquiry. 

Those of you in the science community who may be tempted to feel offended by this, if there is substance to what I say then being offended doesn't do anything to solve the problem. I think many people outside the science community see things as I do even if they can't articulate why they find engaging with you so frustrating. You may be tempted to write off their reaction as a result of ignorance and hard-headedness on their part. Don't do that. You will never get better doing that. Even if your unwillingness or inability to consider the argument from truly neutral premises is even 1% of the problem, that's the 1% that it is your responsibility to do something about. Add to it that enhancing your ability to see things from other premises can only make you better at science and life. 

An honest definition of evolution as used by most in science today would be something like "The theory that natural processes alone produced changes in genes over time, and this combined with natural selection formed new varieties of organisms so that all living things are related to all other living things via natural descent". Webster gets closest to this with their alternative definition of evolution "the scientific theory explaining the appearance of new species and varieties through the action of various biological mechanisms (such as natural selection, genetic mutation or drift, and hybridization)". 

This definition is more forthright than those commonly used because it comes closest to specifying natural means and gives examples of those means. To use a science phrase, "it is more testable" than the definitions that naturalists often try to foist on me when I attempt to engage them on the issues I have described above. Even this definition from Webster doesn't address the totality aspect of the theory which naturalists attempt to impose. That is to say, the belief that this represents the only means by which new forms have appeared and it is powerful enough to have produced all of the change we have found in the time it is proposed to have done so.

I apologize for having taken so long to get to the evidence which prompted the title to this article. I am a mere messenger and in order to make the message clear I had to spend a great deal of time dispensing with the fog generated by those whose interests are not met by such clarification. But the bottom line to me is that even if every living thing on earth descended from other living things via natural descent with no assist from an Intelligent Designer (aside from us humans as described with dogs and wolves above) considerable evidence suggests that they still don't have the mechanisms by which this occurred correct. 

That's right, despite all the supremely confident assurances that they are right and implications that you are a dolt for failing to "trust the science" on these questions, some recent research has turned up some surprising mechanisms for change in organisms that have nothing to do with the traditional factors. 

This recent study shows how asexual organisms can adapt to their environment even in the absence of genetic information. It comes on the heels of earlier studies like one I wrote about here showing that fly behavior is altered without changes to the genome but rather through epigenetic changes that are not heritable the way genetic changes are. 

Another study I wrote about suggests that Lamarck was right even though his ideas have been rejected for over 100 years. Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the first to outline a coherent theory of evolution, though not the one accepted today. He didn't know about genes. He thought there was some material force in the universe, like electromagnetism, which drove life to increasing complexity. He called this a "complexifying force". But his second major thesis is the one he was most known for: that animals can prompt biological changes in themselves by the use or disuse of a function. There was, he proposed. an additional "adaptive force." In his mind this change would then be hereditary.

Well, it turns out squid edit their own RNA. Their DNA can say one thing, but the messenger RNA can be altered, outside the cell nucleus, to make different proteins. I don't think there is any evidence such changes would be heritable, but it does speak to Lamarck's second thesis within the life of an animal. As far as his first thesis goes, what if the "complexifying force" isn't a force at all? Whatever its called, his ideas were rejected long ago, but these studies all suggest some neo-Lamarckism is in order.

I haven't even seen any serious attempt to examine if these findings challenge the existing ideas about evolution, but it seems almost intuitively obvious that they do. Right off hand, I wonder how the cumbersome process described in traditional evolutionary theory can even get off the ground? If living things can adapt to their environment without waiting for chance to produce a gene that works better in that environment, then traditional evolutionary mechanisms seem an inferior redundancy. That one squid with a mutation which helps him survive better in a given environment is outcompeted by myriads of his kind who functionally adapt in a similar way based on epigenetic changes that respond directly to the environment and not chance. How then do even beneficial mutations become established in such cases? There is built-in variability in living things which occurs completely outside the process described in the textbooks. 

Look, maybe there will be a sensible way they can fold these findings into what they already know and improve the odds that nature did it all. Maybe they will just sweep these questions under the ever-more-lumpy rug. I don't know. I just know that the smug air of certainty that they have got most of this figured out is unjustified based on findings from their own community. And that their failure to engage in a reasonable manner is going to have consequences. The confidence-gap that people have in the voice of the scientific community is beginning to waiver, despite a ramp-up effort by the establishment media to herd everyone into line. And that gap is going to grow because its based on real underlying and unaddressed issues in the community. 

This is where I could go off on another long riff about what it means as a Christian who is a scientist to put your vocation under the Lordship of Christ. But I won't do that. There are others better positioned than me to do that, and they ought to be the ones to do it. But surely humility, a desire to serve, and considering others before yourself along with honesty are big factors in that endeavor. 

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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. 

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