Science & You

For evolution to have occurred requires the ability to create massive amounts of information to drive an increase in complexity. Natural Selection cannot be the mechanism which accomplished this because selection acts to reduce genetic variation in a population.  Kenneth Miller disagrees, claiming that evolution starts with existing genes, duplicates them and then introduces variation which is filtered by selection.  Simple!  Unfortunately, Miller; the scenario he presents of the evolution of the complex vertebrate blood-clotting system is not plausible.  All he can offer in the place of proof is faith in a story he already assumes to be true.  Uplook Magazine, May-July 2010, p.4.  References:  Miller, KR.  Finding Darwin's God (New York, NY:Cliff Street Books, Harper Collins, 2000);  Miller, KR, The Evolution of Vertebrate Blood Clotting, http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/DI/clot/Clotting.html;  Sanford, JC, Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome;. (Lima, NY: Elim Publishing, 2005).

Every year the incredible biological machine called a green plant produces millions of tons of wheat, corn, beans, grass, shrubs and trees.  Since the late 1700's it has been known that the actual organic substance of the plant comes, not from the soil, but from the air!  But plants don't just absorb sunlight energy which they use to remove carbon dioxide from the air, but they also release molecular oxygen.  Humans, animals and many bacteria use this oxygen and, in turn, release carbon dioxide.  Exactly the opposite of plants.  So it seems that the web of interdependent life on earth, which is based on this foundational relationship, is not a random development nor does it just give the appearance of having been designed, because it is designed.  Uplook Magazine, September-October 2005, p.22.  References:  Ray, PM.  The Living Plant.  Second edition.  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.  1972, p1.

A thermostat is an example of a mechanical feedback loop.  It monitors and maintains the temperature in, say, your house.  Living things use similar mechanisms to maintain body temperature, blood pressure, blood sugar levels and many other factors.  But where did these biological feedback loops come from and who or what determined their setpoints?  Uplook Magazine, August 2005, p.18.  

"SETI" is the acronym for the organization called  "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence".  The goal of SETI is to find signs of intelligent life beyond earth by monitoring light and radio waves hitting earth from space and searching them for patterns.  However, in 2004 their director admitted that they really don't know what type of pattern to look for.  Is it possible that in their zeal to validate their belief of life beyond earth that many, like those in SETI have missed the many non-random patterns which characterize life and living things on this planet?  Perhaps they have simply missed the obvious, even while searching for it.  Uplook Magazine, October-November 2004, p.21.  References:  Scientific American, July 2004, Ask the Experts, p. 120.

Until recently it was a common practice by many in Hawaii to pick up white coral skeletons on the beach and arrange them into words or hearts etc. against the black lava flows along the coastal highway.  One formation simply read "WE GO BEACH".  Is it possible that wave action threw these bits of coral up onto the island where they randomly fell into letters and words?   Yet this is the type of magic which standard evolutionary theory asserts since there must be a mechanism by which new genetic information arises by random processes and drives the change from one type of living thing into another.  But does this story fit with the world as we know it to be?  Uplook Magazine, March-April 2007, p.4.  References:  M Behe, W. Dembski, S. Meyer, Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute, vol. 9.  Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000).

Parents are the ultimate detectives when it comes to their children's health.  This is especially true when they are very young and don't speak yet.  To make a diagnosis, a physician relies on the patient voicing some type of symptoms like pain or aches in the muscles.  This is paired with the results of specific tests, called signs, which help to confirm a diagnosis.  Together, signs and symptoms are a call to action and, with a correct diagnosis, there may be an effective treatment available.  Ignoring signs and symptoms may have serious or even deadly consequences.  Just as in the physical realm, spiritual signs and symptoms serve to call attention to an underlying spiritual problem.  But what might be the cure?  Uplook Magazine, July 2007, p.8. 

Temple Grandin is an autistic professor of animal science at the University of Colorado whose techniques for calming cattle as they moved into the processing plant changed the beef industry in the U.S.  In the 2010 movie about her life, Temple is confronted with the death of her science teacher and mentor.  After viewing his lifeless body, she asks her mother with characteristic abruptness, "Where do they go?"  Where do people go who were present at one moment, inside their bodies, and in the next moment are suddenly gone?  Could it really be that people like you and me are  really just the result of very complex chemistry which only gives the illusion of being a real person?  Uplook Magazine, March 2012, p.9.

By one estimate, there is a 67% chance that God exists.  This seemed too high of an estimate for the editor of Skeptic magazine.  So he used his own numbers in the calculation and came up with a, shall we say, more skeptical estimate of 2%.  What he seems not to grasp is that this 1 out of 50 chance that God exists is actually billions of times more likely, or probable to be true, than his evolutionary faith that a single, small but functional  protein, made of specific amino acids, could form by random chance.  Given this fact, whose faith, then, is the more improbable?  Uplook Magazine December 2004, p.18.  References:  Shermer, M, "God's Number is Up" Skeptic, July 2004, p 46.;  Hoyle, F and Wickramisinghe, C. "Where Microbes Boldly Went."  New Scientist. 91:412-415, 1981; Morris H. The Biblical Basis of Modern Science. Baker Book House, 1984.

The process of human conception, development and birth requires the perfect choreography of many factors if there is any hope of the infant arriving alive in her mother's arms.  Similarly, sending a very complex vehicle to explore the surface of Mars, some 39 million miles (or more) away from earth, requires the landing sequence to be fully automated.  If the launch and landing of the Curiosity and Perseverance vehicles on Mars required many years of intense engineering and careful planning by highly skilled NASA engineers to ensure their success, why would the much more complex process of human development and birth need no designer at all?  Uplook Magazine October-November 2012, p.30.  References: YouTube: 7 Minutes of Terror: Incredible animation and explanation of Mars landing of Curiosity Rover, 2012.  http://bit.ly/7min-terror-curiosity.  YouTube: 6.6.3 Annotate a graph showing hormone levels in the menstrual cycle, 2012.  http://bit.ly/graph-menstrual-cycle.

The North American horseshoe crab is a survivor.  Comparing horseshoe crab fossils to the living creature suggest It has  changed little over time, even through major environmental changes which may have caused the extinction of many other creatures.  A recent conservation campaign in Delaware Bay encourages people to "just Flip 'em" when they see a horseshoe crab turned upside down by the waves.  But the horseshoe crab already has a perfectly good solution to this problem in its' long, rigid tail.  Will such a campaign make any impact on horseshoe crab survival?  The jury is still out. But perhaps we can learn something about ourselves from this example.  Uplook Magazine September-October 2009, p.4.  References: Royal Ontario Museum, "Oldest Horshoe Crab Fossil Found, 445 Million Years Old,"  Science Daily (Feb 8, 2008); JH Mattei & MA Beckey, "The Horseshoe Crab Conundrum: Can we Harvest and Conserve?"  Wrack Lines 8:1 (Spring/Summer 2008); Microsoft; Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2009, s.v. "Extinction (biology)."