Author: Kraaifontein Church of Christ
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Food for thought #10
Lethal MutationsEVOLUTION NEEDS mutations in genes expressed in the early phases of embryonic development, since it’s in the early phases that basic body plans and organs are laid down. For evolution to do anything more than tinker with existing species within narrow limits, it has to be able to mutate the fundamentals—body plans, core architecture,…
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Food for thought #9
Orchestrating an AnimalFOR BIOMIMETICISTS, nature’s school room regularly puts on a clinic we might call “How to Build an Animal.” I refer not to the building of a fundamentally new animal form, such as the first birds far in the distant past, but just to the ordinary birds-and-bees process of embryo development. We know, of…
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Food for thought #8
Physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies understands cellular information thus:The living cell is best thought of as a supercomputer … Most of the workings of the cell are best described as information … which leaves us with a curious conundrum. How did nature fabricate the world’s first digital information processor—the original living cell—from the blind chaos…
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Food for thought #7
While lecturing years ago at the University of Helsinki, I told the audience that I do not know of a single case where the mutation/selection mechanism has created new information. I challenged the audience to help me. Maybe somebody knew of a good case. After a moment of silence, one man in the audience raised…
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Food for thought #6
Professor Jouko Virkkunen taught physics and electro-engineering at Helsinki University of Technology. He was a deep thinker and understood very well the difficulties with evolution. He deftly summarized the reason for his skepticism toward Darwinism. “I can understand that a creature without hands can obtain a kind of lump on the side as a result…
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Food for thought #5
For over forty years I have had numerous discussions both within and without the science community concerning the origin of life and the origin of species. Practically all of the hundreds of scientists I know admit in private, confidential discussions that science does not have a clue where genetic language, proteins, cell membranes, metabolic pathways,…
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Food for thought #4
James Tour is a leading origin-of-life researcher with over 630 research publications and over 120 patents. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” Magazine. Here is how he recently described the state of the field:We have no idea how the molecules that compose…
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Food for thought #3
[Several stories of how life could have developed from non-life saw the light of day in the early search for the origin of life. Added as explanation of what follows here–MG] Darwin contributed to this tradition of imaginative origin-of-life storytelling in an 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker:It is often said that all the conditions for…
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Food for thought #2
ICONS OF EVOLUTION by Jonathan Wells, PhD. As I was finishing my Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology, however, I noticed that all of my textbooks dealing with evolutionary biology contained a blatant misrepresentation: Drawings of vertebrate embryos showing similarities that were supposed to be evidence for descent from a common ancestor. But as an…
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Food for thought #1
The Universe operates according to precise astronomical laws. This is why rockets can be launched to the moon, etc., and directed to land within feet of their intended target, and why solar/lunar eclipses can be forecast centuries in advance. Science writer Lincoln Barnett comments: “This functional harmony of nature Berkeley, Descartes, and Spinoza attributed to…