Ichthyosaur, Ichthyosaur, I've Heard Such Talk as That Before

I want to make a note of this report on a study of Ichthyosaurs. The article leads with a quote that sounds familiar to me in reference to many other groups.

Dr Ben Moon, who led the research, published in the journal Communications Biology, said: "Ichthyosaurs are a fascinating group of animals to work on because they evolved so many adaptations for living in water very quickly: a fish-like body and tail fin, giving birth to live young rather than laying eggs, and lots of different feeding styles.
"Because of this we expected to see a rapid evolution early after ichthyosaurs first appeared, but we were staggered by just how big this early burst was and how relatively short it was."

It was the sort of statement I had heard many times before, both for smaller clades of creatures at various points in earth's history and for the origin and diversification of aquatic life. For example the Cambrian Explosion (which revisionists are continually striving to minimize and re-interpret to make it seem less dramatic) and the later Ordovician. There is a repeating pattern. Basically there is a low-grade "steady state" evolution which just seems to tinker with existing types within a limited range, and then something else. Something which produces vast amounts of change in lengths of time which, though they may be long compared to humanity, are extraordinarily short in terms of an evolutionary time scale.

Something weird is going on and being co-flated with something ordinary, all of it being lumped together under "evolution". Since those who ought to won't differentiate these results with separate process names, I will. As a peace-offering, I will even use their language to do so: I will call the ordinary change that continues "evolution", and I will call the astounding large-scale and rapid change which comes and goes away "macro-evolution".

The article notes that after their big burst of diversification Ichthyosaurs stayed diverse for quite a while, but ceased the rapid macro-evolution noted earlier. Then there was a mass extinction event which  only one line of the Ichthyosaurs survived. This surviving lineage went on for an extended period, but never diversified much. Sure there were a number of different species, but they stayed close in form to the one original surviving line. This despite being in all sorts of circumstances similar to the original diversification, such as times of mass extinctions. Why did this lineage quit macro-evolving?

This is something I have noted before. It is like "evolution", or at least "macro-evolution" plays with a group for a while, and then fixes its attention elsewhere. In the big picture I noticed that reptiles pretty much stopped macro-evolving while the line leading to mammals seems to have continued to do so. Why did one group (the one which includes us and the animals most connected to our lives) continue to develop while the other forms lock in place for vast eons of time? "Macro-evolution" is not behaving so much as a universal natural force, but as a Designer with intent. Once one part of the job is done, once the playing-around with certain concepts is fully explored, attention is directed elsewhere.

Perhaps the reader is a bit confused as to what I am getting at with all this, so I will spell it out. I don't think the "macro-evolution" part is just nature. I have described elsewhere the gray areas between creation and evolution. There are some things that can occur which fit the standard definition of evolution, but are nevertheless special creation. The two blend into one event once one sees past the naturalist paradigm.

*******

This article is not directly related to the Christ-centered model for early Genesis as described in my book. Still, I ask you to get the book...

Get the book.

You Tube Channel

Please "like" and "share".

Bats and Dolphins Share Genomic Regions

Bats and dolphins both use echo-location, albeit one in the water and the other in the air. Still, not many other creatures share such a trait, and scientists wondered, out of the hundreds of special genes required to produce this special feature, how many of them were similar in both types of animals?

In a way it was a crazy question to ask if macro-evolution is true. After all, they are not closely related. They are about as far apart as they can be and still be in the same class of organism. As the article concedes, these two groups would have evolved echo-location independently of one another, so what would the odds be if they used more than a few of the same genes to do it?

The vast number of genome regions which have to change together to successfully acquire the ability to echo-locate is problem enough for the macro-evolutionary hypothesis. The results of their study astounded them and made the macro-evolutionary hypothesis even harder for thinking people to accept. It turns out almost 200 genomic regions were virtually identical in the two groups of organisms. "We had expected to find identical changes in maybe a dozen or so genes but to see nearly 200 is incredible," explains Dr Joe Parker, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences.

They chalk it all up to the power of evolution of course, because they have an "evolution of the gaps" bias. Whenever they see something that "astounded" them, as this did, they chalk it up to the power of evolution via some undefined pathway. They called this an example of "evolutionary convergence". Honestly though, a finding like this gives a lot more support for the Intelligent Design Theory. That is, two vastly dissimilar organisms can share the same genes because they had a common Designer, who used a similar idea for a similar function in the same genes of the two groups. Under that scenario, it is not necessary for the two groups to have had a common ancestor in order to wind up with the same genes.

Evolutionary convergence used to mean animals which were not related had a similar form due to performing similar functions. The classic example is sharks and dolphins. Their physical forms were shaped in a similar way by a common function. Evolutionists are trying to shoe-horn this idea into the exciting findings they are making in genetics. But it doesn't fit. There is no reason to expect that the same genes would be adapted in both species for such a novel function as echo-location. It is basically describing "conservation" of individual genes that were not inherited from a common ancestor, which of course goes against the very definition of conserved genes.

Example: If I build a grandfather clock from metal shards, and a man in China does the same, the faces of our clocks may look alike, but there is no reason to expect that a specific part from my clock would even exist, much less fit, in his clock. Evolution shapes the end result, but the means to get to that result are supposed to be random, chance changes being selected for or against by the environment. When the means are the same, it is a mark against the hypothesis, or would be if they were not trying to rig the terms of the debate so that no matter what the evidence shows, "evolution did it". That's an "evolution of the gaps."

It is just a way of saying that whatever happened, evolution did it. If sharks and dolphins look similar but have different genes to breath, why evolution produced the differences, while if dolphins and bats use the same genes for echo-location, why, evolution did that to. It makes the idea impossible to falsify via the scientific method. Which of course, means that it is no longer science at all.

*******

This article is not directly related to the Christ-centered model for early Genesis as described in my book. Still, I ask you to get the book...

Get the book.

You Tube Channel

Please "like" and "share".

Between the Fall and the Flood

The evidence shows a massive loss in male diversity around the world starting around 10,000 years ago until around 5,000 years ago when diversity recovers. Click for larger view.

"11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth." - Genesis chapter six

The Christ-Centered model for early Genesis is a different take about what the text is saying from the traditional view that the church inherited from Judaism. Adam doesn't have his traditional, but non-biblical, role of "sole male progenitor of the human race". Instead he has his New Testament role of "figure of Christ" (Rom. 5:14). He is only the first man in the sense that Christ is the second, or last man (1st Cor. 15). That is, in God's plan to reconcile humanity to Himself. There was a population of "Adam", IOW humans, outside the garden and the LORD God formed Adam and Eve inside it. Some of you reading this may think that you know of other scriptures which contradict what I have written above. I once thought I did too, but I was wrong about what I thought they meant.

Jesus said in John 5:46 that Moses was talking about Him. If we don't see the text as pointing to Him, then we don't have the view of the text that He has. The Christ-centered view of the text does that, the traditional, non-New Testament, view of Adam does not.

The Christ-centered model has Adam introduced up to 12,500 years ago (but perhaps somewhat less, the key is that Ussher's accounting gives dates which are too young) along with "helper" animals and plants which gave mankind a "leg-up" in shifting from hunter-gatherers to agricultural and animal pastoral lifestyles. Ground zero for plant and animal domestication fits very well with the Christ-centered model for Adam.

All of that brings me to the graph pictured above from this report in "Nature".  Astoundingly, the evidence suggests that there was a massive plunge in Y-haplogroup diversity, passed from fathers to sons, starting about eleven thousand years ago but accelerating steeply until perhaps five to seven thousand years ago, and then a radical recovery. Many of the surviving Y-haplogroups saw a burst in diversity from seven to five thousand years ago, indicating that the conditions which produced the plunge in diversity were mitigated. The diversity of females, as shown by mtDNA, did not take a corresponding plunge. This would be what the data looked like if females outnumbered men, at least in terms of genetic diversity, seventeen to one! It is an astounding period as this happened globally, albeit with a slight lag in Africa.

The most reasonable explanation for the vast drop in male diversity suggested by the paper is that clans of related males wiped out competitors and took their women. In other words, a surge of violence. Though I don't give exact dates for the fall, a point at which everyone's eyes are opened to their own sinfulness and innocence is lost, the range fits extremely well with the date range shown in the graph above where diversity first starts taking a dip (due presumably to an increase in violence). My proposed date range for the flood of Noah (which did a reset- not on all life on earth but only the more limited set of living things formed in chapter two including the line of Adam) fits very well with the point at which diversity begins to increase again- from five to seven thousand years ago.

The paper speculates as to why diversity decreased and why it started up again once city-states came along. I don't dispute those claims. I just think they go hand-in-hand with the scriptural account. People became aware of their own sinfulness, and there will always be those who, when faced with the reality of their own nature, embrace it and go even worse. It is true that with agriculture and herds and flocks there was more to fight over, but Adam had a role in that too. And despite their attempts to draw some comparisons to other much smaller events, this period seems unparalleled in scale and degree.

Look, the world today is full of those who "deny the truth in unrighteousness". Remarkable correlations such as the ones shown in this piece won't move them, because they will simply deny the evidence means anything. Deny. Deny. Deny. That's what they do. And we shouldn't be surprised by this, but we should understand the reason for it. It's not that the evidence is lacking, but that the conditions of their hearts to receive it are lacking. They are unwilling to receive for whatever reason, evidence which points to the truth of God and His Word. Someone who is able to receive can look at the same evidence, as I have, and be astounded at how strongly the signal matches up with the account in scripture once rightly understood. In the same time frame that scripture reports that the earth was full of violence, scientists find strong evidence of violence to a degree which has not been equaled globally before or since. It ends about the time of the flood which scripture says God used to wipe out those who were leading the earth astray. The unbelieving heart is hard to it all, and well able to dismiss it all with the waive of a hand. We should pray that their eyes become opened so that they may see what is, without letting it get us down. Rather, let us wonder and glory at the truth of His Word displayed in our natural world.

Get the book.

You Tube Channel

Please "like" and "share".

The Christ-Centered Model for Early Genesis- Just the Narrative

Because you should not have to wade through the evidence in a four-hundred page book to hear the narrative.

Gap in Kura River Valley Settlement 4th-5th Millennium B.C.

So I am still trying to sort things out on the flood of Noah. I think Adam's line lived in the area of the Aras or Araxes river near the border of Turkey and Armenia. I simply can't find good information about continuity of occupation of this river valley during the period I am interested in, other than a cryptic note in one paper claiming a "sharp discontinuity" between the previous culture and the Kura-Araxes culture which came after it in the 4th Millennium B.C. (i.e. from 3,000 B.C. to 4,000 B.C.). That was promising because it was consistent with the scenario I proposed that the flood was aimed at the line of Adam, whose habitations were centered around the Aras river valley, roughly 4,000 B.C. or even a bit earlier. A sharp discontinuity fit with a scenario where they were wiped out, and others came later and occupied their former territory.

But that was just a note. It seems the river valley to the north of the Aras, the Kura, has gotten a lot more attention. On page five section 2.5 of this paper there is another interesting paragraph shows up:

"This attractive region was occupied by communities who took up farming and herding towards the end of the 7th mill. BCE at the latest (Lyonnet, 2007). Subsequent to this first period of settlement, during the 6th mill. BCE, several transformations affected both settlement patterns and lifestyles. For unknown reasons, archaeological sites dated to the 5th and 4th mill. BCE are barely visible in the archaeological record. At the beginning of the 4thmill. BCE, new types ofmonuments, such as visible burialmounds or Kurgans, appear"

So it was occupied by people advanced enough to be farming and herding from at least 6,000 B.C., and therefore quite probably earlier. This is surely one of the first agrarian and pastoral societies in the history of the earth. Is this the line of Adam? Some of their near-neighbors who had learned some of their advanced ways? Then the paper makes a vague reference to transformations affecting settlement patterns and lifestyles in the 6th millennium B.C. An increase in violence and corruption perhaps? They don't say. Then for a good chunk of the next two thousand years archaeological sites are "barely visible" in the record. When steady habitation re-appears in the 4th millennium B.C. it is a different culture- the Kura-Araxes culture. That sounds consistent with a flood wiping out settlements on the surface sometime between 3,000 B.C. and 4,999 B.C. Then being replaced by others because the original inhabitants were gone. That fits my timeline quite well.

Maybe I have the wrong valley, maybe the line of Adam was in the Kura valley rather than the Araxes which was just on the other side of the South Caucuses. Maybe they were in both and other places besides and those places will also show a "sharp discontinuity" in habitation. I am at the mercy of the archaeological community which is not oriented to look at things like this!

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

You Tube Channel

Please "like" and "share".

Explanation on Supposed Admixture Sounds Much Like My "Adamics" Proposal

This article is pretty much speculation. I am not convinced of any of it, but recent discoveries do open some possibilities, and I am musing over them here. Recent Denisovan admixture? Let's start with a quote from an expert in the field...

Not everyone is convinced by the late dates Cox proposes. “There are definitely multiple Denisovan populations, but the claim that they interbred 15,000 to 30,000 years ago is extraordinary,” population geneticist Benjamin Vernot of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Science.

“I’m skeptical,” added Cosimo Posth of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. He suggests the hints of a late mating could reflect an encounter of previously isolated modern populations rather than of moderns and Denisovans. In this scenario, modern humans mated with Denisovans, then the modern populations diverged, with each branch retaining a different set of Denisovan genes. The moderns then reconnected, mixing the two sets of Denisovan DNA together again."

The above is a quote from an article about a purported introgression of Denisovan DNA into a modern human population in Papua only 15-30K ago. Posth proposes an alternative explanation. That is that this wasn't a true admixture of modern humans and Denisovans in the relatively recent past, but rather two groups of modern humans- each with their own genes from a much earlier admixture event, produced this effect. It doesn't mean he is right. There were some odd hominins walking around apparently even in the fairly recent past over in Asia. But it does mean that there is starting to be a little push-back and a pro is appealing to the same sort of alternative explanations I have.

This is very similar to what I proposed in my article explaining why I believe that Eurasians don't have 1.5% of their genes from Neanderthals. I think the actual amount directly obtained from Neanderthals is zero. Rather than take a super-broad view of the word "human" I take a narrow one. Human's aren't anything that walks upright with a big brain and makes tools. We have other traits, like recursive thought and speech, we make art for its own sake, and have true empathy along with a desire to connect to something bigger than ourselves- culminating in religion. If the other hominins didn't have that then we would not have much to say to each other, even if they could talk.

So I propose that around 50K ago a special group of hominins came to be. I think created by a Divine Act, but we can argue about that later. I call them "Adamics" since the word "human" has been mis-appropriated to mean any hominin. They entered a world with a "zoo" of creatures which looked a lot like us on the outside but not the inside. Some of these would be classified as "Archaic Homo Sapiens" but they were not our ancestors. Perhaps early on our ancestors had limited inbreeding with them, but not directly with Neanderthals and Denisovans. If these Archaic Homo Sapiens had ancestors which interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans then our ancestors could have picked up some segments indirectly from limited interbreeding with them. This is much like the way Posth is describing the supposed recent introgression of Denisovan genes.

Most of the genes from this admixture won't stick out, and many more have been lost. But a few do stick out, and we interpret that as stretches where we interbred with Neanderthals or Denisovans. What may have happened instead was that Adamics did a limited amount of interbreeding with "other" Homo Sapiens that were either more like these creatures genetically to start, or had interbred with them and had stretches of their DNA which they passed to some of our ancestors.

IOW words I am offering an explanation (and this is an alternative explanation, not my current actual view which aligns more with Dr. Amos referenced below) very much like the one Cosimo Posth gives for the supposed signal of "recent Denisovan admixture" and applying it to all instances of supposed admixture. The "limited admixture" scientists are detecting would then be with things that would be classified as "Archaic Homo Sapiens" or perhaps even modern humans, but they lacked those traits I mentioned earlier. Still, it wasn't as big a jump as they think, and once the Adamics got their feet under them even that introgression completely or almost completely ended.

That's why there is no sign of any admixture between living Europeans and Neanderthals once we got to Europe despite the thousands of years they supposedly lived side-by-side. The party line requires introgression with them 50K ago that was so significant that it is still easily detectable in all Eurasians today. Yet somehow there is no genetic trace in living Europeans of any more such intermixing from 40K ago or 30K ago. My explanation for the disparity is simple. The Adamics didn't mix with Neanderthals 55K ago either, but did to a very limited extent with lines of Archaic Homo Sapiens in the Near East who had some genes that were much closer to Neanderthals. The reason we can't detect any introgression from later in Europe in living Europeans is because there were few to no "other" H. Sapiens to be had there- just Neanderthals. Adamics had no interest in Neanderthals. They may have viewed them like trolls.

So then why are Eurasians less diverse than Africans except for Neanderthal/Denisovan genes? The same thing happened in Africa, but the "others" the Adamics in Africa intermixed with were not in the same environment with Neanderthals and Denisovans so their genetic input didn't look like what the Eurasian Adamics got. It could be part of the explanation for increased African diversity however. IOW some of the Eurasian diversity looks like the genes of other hominins we know about, so we call it such. The African diversity may be the result of something that we don't know about, so we think they have been around for 200K years diversifying.

We don't have hominin suspects for the increased African diversity, so we just say they were more diverse before any introgression. But maybe that's not so. Fact is, sub-Saharan Africans get most of their greater diversity from a few small populations, like Pygmies and San. Take away the few hot spots of extra diversity and Sub-Saharan Africans aren't so much more diverse than the rest of us. Maybe there was one recent (50-70Kyears ago) population of H. Sapiens that had the traits I described above that made them "Adamics". They started in NE Africa and the Mid-east. From there one group went south and another east and another north. Each of them had some limited admixture with the "other" Homo Sapiens who were already in decline. The reason that the most human genetic diversity is at the edge of the range- south Africa, far west Africa, and in far east Asia with Denisovan-like genes, is that the genetic signature of the "others" has not yet been so swamped at the extreme ends of our range as it was in the middle.

Others, albeit not under their real name, have advanced an idea like I am suggesting. See this article and plug in "Adamics" for what he calls "Afrasians" and the "other Homo Sapiens" for what he calls "Paleoafricans" and its pretty much the same idea. See also here.  The only difference is he thinks the "Afrasians" who went to Eurasia had limited mixing with the more distant Neanderthals and Denisovans while the outlier Afrasian group in Africa had limited mixing with "other" H. Sapiens which he calls "Paleoafricans". I am suggesting that both groups of Afrasians/Adamics had limited mixing with "other" H. Sapiens. The ones that lived in Eurasia just looked genetically a whole lot more like the other hominins there.

All that is if any explanation is necessary. A Cambridge professor has a lot of documentation showing the signal of introgression is an illusion. So far, I still think he has made the best case.

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

The article really has very little to do with my book on the work of Christ in Early Genesis, but here it is....

You Tube Channel

Please "like" and "share".

A Bad Day for "Science" Worshipers

I love science, that is why I taught it in public school for twelve years. I love it for what it is, not for what it isn't. Science is a process by which we discover things about the natural universe. It operates by assuming that all events have natural causes. This is called "methodological naturalism". This doesn't mean that all events are really explainable by natural causes, this is just the only kind of cause that the Scientific Method can investigate regarding phenomena in the natural universe.

**********************
Update and disclaimer - I don't mind offending those who are actively resisting the knowledge of God, because they need to come out of it and if directly confronting them on what they are doing will accomplish that then I will take the abuse necessary in the role of "bad cop." But I am not writing this to offend honest scientists whom I greatly respect. Most of the people I say are "hiding" behind science" are not themselves professional scientists. They may not even really love science, except in concept as the excuse to avoid the knowledge of God. That is why this scene works as "art". And to clarify my position on the science, while the reversal on the Dark Matter evidence discussed below is shocking, there is something out there preventing gravity from collapsing the universe, and maybe it is dark energy in a much smaller quantity than they thought. Or maybe it is just light pressure, or maybe gravity has a maximum range. Doesn't change the point of the article, which is not aimed at professional scientists but layman using "science" as an excuse to hide from the knowledge of God.
************************

Some people I've interacted with have turned a methodology into a philosophy. Philosophical naturalism proposes that only natural phenomena exist and that there is nothing outside of nature. They frequently speak in the name of "Science", even though what they say doesn't make a lot of sense. For example, science can neither prove or disprove the existence of God, since science is only capable by definition of discovering things about the natural universe. It can find the laws, but it can't determine by itself the existence of the Lawgiver. You have to think beyond the tool you are using to determine that. So elevating the method of naturalism into a philosophy is problematic.

Anyway, yesterday, January 6th, in the Year of Our Lord 2020, was a bad day for those hiding from the knowledge of God behind claims of "Science".  It was a day reports came out which illustrated that we don't know nearly as much as we claim we do about the natural universe. This report came out that shows the main evidence supporting the idea that our universe is mostly a mysterious thing called "dark energy" is in error. This overturns decades of scientific belief about the ultimate nature, structure, and perhaps even fate, of our universe. It turns out the galaxies may not be flying away from each other at increasingly fantastic speeds after all. Therefore there is no need to postulate that most of the universe is composed of an energy which is propelling them against the pull of gravity at those fantastical speeds.

I've had to listen to a couple of unbelievers recently earnestly insist that arguments for the fine-tuning of our universe to support beings like us (the Anthropic Principle) is not really evidence for the existence of God. Their support for this claim is the alleged existence of a vast array of other universes which some esoteric mathematical models predict could exist. IOW, the fine-tuning of our universe is an illusion because if enough universes are out there by chance one of them could happen to have the right balance of forces necessary for the structure we see- even if the odds of it happening in any one universe are mindbogglingly remote.

Well, excuse me if I don't have a lot of confidence in your appeals to a vast number of supposed universes we can't see based on some hypothetical mathematical model. Especially when the same scientific community can make such a titanic mistake for so long when it comes to measuring the properties of the one universe we can in fact detect. It sounds to me like you are resorting to desperate escapism to avoid the knowledge of God. Your belief that these universes exist is on pretty shaky ground- and the existence of multiple universes in itself doesn't rule out the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God anyway, those universes would also have to have certain properties and not others). If we can't detect God scientifically at least we have evidence of His existence by other means, which is not the case with your hypothetical other universes!

It is small-potatoes next to the Dark Energy May Be Wrong story, but last month it was discovered that a supposed ground-breaking fossil of a spider with evolutionary traits which made it a missing link with other arthropods was in fact a badly preserved crayfish with legs painted on it by forgers! And the original finding was in a journal, so the fraud passed peer-review with flying colors!

Meanwhile most papers can't even get looked at, particularly ones with politically incorrect conclusions. That's one reason why many, including many scientists, are suggesting that the peer-review process is broken. Check that, it works great for preserving the status quo. If your paper supports the existing paradigm, it can get peer reviewed even if your underlying evidence is painted-on-"crab"-legs. But papers that challenge the status quo languish. They simply don't make it through the gauntlet. This PC gate-keeping is impeding our progress in understanding the natural world- IE science. I've seen plenty of science people even in informal settings decline to discuss or evaluate papers with controversial conclusions even from well-qualified researchers on the basis that it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet. It has become more of an excuse to hide behind than a successful sorting mechanism.

But it gets worse for science-worshippers. It turns out that most scientists can't replicate studies by their peers. This goes to the very heart of why scientific finding should be accepted as true. If they can't be replicated, then claims should be evaluated on the same basis as claims that information was received by Divine Revelation! Whether this lack of replication is due to poor documentation of methods, deliberate fraud, or a falling standard of professionalism in those attempting to replicate findings, it's a problem which threatens to undermine the rational basis on which we give heed to scientific truth claims.

I have warned in my book about the danger to science when it becomes captured operationally by the state. A premium is put on conclusions which support the state's objectives, not on those which are sound or repeatable. Thus glorious science is demoted to mere propaganda. The state definitely has a history of trying this with theistic religion too, not just the "religion" of science. So we should be cautious. We should love science for what it is, and be wary of those people and forces who would try to make it into something that it is not.

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

You Tube Channel

Please "like" and "share".