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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