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In the April 24, 2012 eNews article “Humans Were Human Earlier Than Thought,” we argued that Homo erectus was indeed a human – while using the “millions of years” terminology of the paleoanthropologists. We regret we did not clarify the long-held Koinonia House position that humankind did not, in fact, evolve from apes at all, but was specially created by God a few thousand years ago. The point of the article was that even according to the “millions of years” timeline of evolutionists, the early humans were still humans; they were not ape-men. We regret any confusion and have edited the original article to make the article’s purpose more clear.
From their first books on dinosaurs, our children are told that life was evolving “millions of years ago.” The majority of geologists today tell us that radioisotope dating has narrowed the age of Earth to about 4.5 billion years, give or take 330 million. Recently, two dating methods have been updated, and scientists say the earth might not be as old as they thought it was, but they may not recognize how “off” the dating methods truly are.
How accurate is radiometric dating? Should we accept the “millions of years” scenario that easily, or are there alternate possibilities that get rejected because they don’t fit an evolutionary model of origins?
The Grand Canyon:
The age of the earth is not a purely academic matter. The deepest held values and beliefs of many people are tied into whether the earth has been around billions – or only thousands – of years. The Bible says God created the physical universe in seven days. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for life to evolve from primordial amino acids.
Where does the evidence honestly lead? On one hand, Hadrian’s Wall has survived the erosional forces of wind and rain and ice for nearly 1900 years. With that in mind, it is obvious the Colorado River would have required a great deal more than 6,000 years to scratch out the Grand Canyon. On the other hand, perhaps the mighty Colorado River did not carve the Grand Canyon at all. Consider, mud flows after the eruption of Mount St. Helens gouged sizeable canyons through solid rock in just a few days…
Radioisotopes: The measurable breakdown of radioactive isotopes, like the Grand Canyon, appear to give an ancient age for the Earth. Measuring the amount of uranium-238 parent material as well as the lead-206 daughter material in a zircon theoretically allows geochronologists to date the zircon in which these “before” and “after” materials are found. By comparing the derived date to that produced by U-235 and Pb-207 in the same sample, geochronologists believe they can get fairly close results.
The age-dating methods are not perfect, however. There is far less U-235 than U-238 in natural uranium, and by consensus, geochronologists have long used a U-238/U-235 ratio of 137.88 to simply calculate the amount of U-235 in a zircon rather than try to measure it. The original consensus ratio was determined to have some flaws, however, and researchers from the British Geological Survey and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently did do some careful measuring. They found the average ratio to be a more accurate 137.818 ± 0.045.
“Firstly, the consensus value of 137.88 couldn’t be traced back to international standard units like the kilogram. Secondly, the old consensus ratio had no uncertainty assigned to it, [and] thirdly, the previous measurements were made on materials like uranium ores — and not on naturally occurring minerals that are routinely used for U-Pb dating studies,” wrote Joe Hiess, a Marie Curie ITN Experienced Researcher.
This ratio adjustment would take a few hundred thousand years off the widely accepted view of the planet’s age. That’s not much, but it does raise a question: how many other dating method particulars have been accepted by consensus while including glaring flaws?
Decay Rate Changes:
Last year, researchers at Purdue and Stanford published evidence that radio decay rates are not as constant as geochronologists have thought. Dating the earth through radiometric methods may therefore be even less simple than previously believed.
Dec 13, 2006, a magnificent solar flare flung radiation and solar particles toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins had been measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, and he noticed that a day and a half before the flare, the decay rate of Mn-54 started to drop a little. That was interesting.
Ephraim Fischbach, a physics professor at Purdue, had already found a variety of disagreements on decay rates in the literature. Fischbach had been looking for a good way to generate truly random numbers and had turned to radioactive isotopes. Chunks of radioactive elements might decay at steady rates, but the individual atoms within them decay unpredictably. Fischbach could therefore use the randomly timed ticks of a Geiger counter to generate lists of numbers.
As he did more research, though, Fischbach found variations in the published decay rates of certain isotopes. He also found that the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 showed seasonal variation, according to data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany. When the decay rate of Jenkins’ Mn-54 dropped during the solar flare, Jenkins and Fischbach stood up straighter and paid attention.
“Everyone thought it must be due to experimental mistakes, because we’re all brought up to believe that decay rates are constant,” Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics, commented on the issue.
There was more to the issue than instrumental error. Jenkins, Fischbach and their colleagues proceeded to publish papers on the variations in radiometric decay rates in journals like Astroparticle Physics, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. They argued that the variations were not caused by weaknesses in their detection systems, but were actual variations in the decay rates themselves.
Radioisotope Dating 101:
While radiometric dating sounds like a jazzy way to find a mate, it’s actually about unruly isotopes.
The world around us is made up of atoms, each with a specific number of positively charged protons, negatively charged electrons, and neutral proton-sized neutrons in their nuclei. Neutrons and electrons are important, but it is the proton number that defines an element. All carbon atoms have six protons, iron atoms have 26, and platinum atoms have 78. If a sodium atom loses an electron, it’s still sodium, it’s just a positively-charged sodium ion, ready to ionically bond with a negatively charged chlorine ion to make table salt for mashed potatoes. If iron loses electrons, it starts to rust, but it’s still iron.
If carbon gains an extra neutron, it still behaves like carbon. Carbon generally has six neutrons with its six protons, giving an atomic weight of 12. Adding one neutron makes carbon-13, a stable isotope that makes up about 1.1% of the carbon on Earth.
Not all isotopes are stable, though. In a crowd of one trillion carbon atoms, one can always find a single unstable carbon-14 isotope sipping on the punch. Over the course of about 5730 years, half of a sample of C-14 will decay into nitrogen-14. A scientist can take a carbon sample, measure the amount of C-14 among its trillions of C-12 atoms, measure the N-14 in the mix, and put together a ratio of the two isotopes. C-14 has a half-life of 5730 years – the amount of time it takes half a sample to decay. Theoretically, if the scientist measures a sample and finds an equal amount of C-14, the parent material, and N-14, the daughter material, then 5730 years should have passed since that hunk of carbon formed. Theoretically. This is the idea behind radioisotope dating.
Chemists have been able to measure the half-lives of most isotopes and, for the most part, have found their decay rates consistent. The accuracy of the dating methods hangs on a few assumptions, though. First, we have to assume that no extra daughter material contaminated the sample from an outside source. We have to assume that only parent material and no daughter material was in there at the start. We have to assume than no parent material leached out of the sample during its lifetime. Ultimately, we have to assume that the decay rates for various isotopes are the same now as they always have been, without variation. To deal with these obvious problems, geochronologists work to correlate dates through the use of several different dating methods – as in the U-238/U-235 method.
Not all half lives have been precisely determined. The half-life of samarium-146 has been measured at between 50 million and 103 million years, and the older age was accepted. Only recently, using better instrumentation, have researchers dropped the half life of Sm-146 to 68 million years. While Sm-146 dating is not used often, it raises the question of how precisely certain well-accepted half lives have been measured.
Meteors:
In Brent G. Dalrymple’s book The Age Of The Earth (1991), he includes lists of meteorites that have been dated between 4.23-4.88 billion years old. These lists are often cited as evidence for the age of the earth, because meteorites are believed (by most parties) to be from material that formed at the same time as Earth. Earth has a dynamic crust that is constantly changing; it wears away and gets torn up in earthquakes; it gets cooked and crushed and covered with volcanic ash and ocean sediments. Earth’s surface has taken a lot of abuse through the years. On the other hand, meteorites have been floating around in space untouched, and the trace elements in them are fairly evenly mixed. They are therefore considered good subjects to determine Earth’s age.
Dalrymple includes the specific radiometric dating methods that were used to date the meteorites. Argon-argon dating was used most frequently in dating the meteorites, but rubidium-strontium and samarium-neodymium dating methods were also used. Dalrymple makes the case that three different dating methods, measuring three different mother-daughter pairs, all gave basically the same age dates. This has been seen as solid well-correlated evidence that the given chondrite age-dates are reliable.
Dalrymple’s lists do raise some issues, however. It is worth noting that all three of the methods used to date those meteorites involved parent isotopes with massively large half lives. The half life for rubidium-87 is approximately 50 billion years. The alpha-decay of Sm-147 to Nd-143 has a half life of 1.06×10^11 years. That’s 100 billion years! The argon-argon method depends on the 1.25 billion year half life of potassium-40 decaying to argon-40, which is still high. Geochronologists using these dating methods have to detect trace amounts of elements that would hardly have had time to decay, even with billions of years at their disposal. The dates of these specific meteorites may correlate, but it is difficult to determine whether there was just so little of each element in the first place that there was not much room for variation. It is also difficult to know whether the chondrites did not have relatively homogenous amounts of parent and daughter materials from the start.
Were there outliers that Dalrymple didn’t list? Were there other meteorites that gave significantly higher or lower ages? Did Dalrymple only include the meteorites that fit his position, or did all the meteorites truly date between 4.29 +/- .06 and 4.55 +/- .33 billion years? Also, should we consider the age-date span of 650 million years – more than half a billion years – as significant?
Discordant Dating:
There is reason for skepticism. Age dating methods do not always produce correlating results. [See links below.] Wood buried in igneous rock in Queensland Australia has been dated to 40,000 years, while the basalt around it dated to 45 million years. Both dating subjects should have given the same date, since the igneous rock was formed at the same time the wood was buried (and the wood still had plenty of carbon-14 in it). Dalrymple himself reported “excess argon-36″ in three out of 26 lava flows in his article, “40Ar/36Ar Analyses Of Historic Lava Flows”. The excess argon gives negative age-dates because of too much daughter product. Since it is impossible to date a rock that hasn’t formed yet, there was a good indication that the Ar-36 wasn’t coming from just the parent material.
Geologist Steve Austin describes discordant age dates in his article “Excessively Old ‘Ages’ For Grand Canyon Lava Flows.” He tested different layers of the Grand Canyon and got age dates for older layers that tested younger than the layers above them. The science of geochronology has a lot of room for error.
Ultimately, the researchers who age-dated the meteorites on Dalrymple’s lists assumed the rocks were billions of years old, they used methods that fit their presuppositions, and they got results that fit their presuppositions. Would they have gotten younger chondrite ages if they had used different dating methods?
It is always dangerous to come to science with assumptions, regardless of one’s position. Scientists have long assumed that radioisotope decay rates are constants, but the evidence now indicates that decay rates vary over time. If, as Jenkins and Fischbach have argued, solar neutrinos zipped through space, effecting Mn-54′s decay rates in a Purdue laboratory, then those tiny energetic particles certainly have had the capacity to affect the decay rates of trace nuclides in chunks of rock floating out in space.
Are the observations of Jenkins and Fischbach minor fluctuations, or have decay rates actually slowed down over time? Has the very speed of light slowed through the years, and how might that have affected decay rates? Are there truly any physical constants in the universe?
These are the questions that astrophysicists and geochronologists can have a fun time trying to answer. In the meanwhile, we’ll keep on watch for further developments. The variability of decay rates has massive implications – for medicine, for technology, and for mankind’s longing to produce a birth certificate for the Earth.
Science artists love to depict early humankind as intelligent apes – standing upright, but hairy in a specifically primate-looking fashion, eyes and ears high on the head. Yet, as paleoanthropologists uncover more information about ancient humans, the evidence consistently points toward a race of beings that were intelligent and capable, different from anatomically modern humans primarily in that they camped out in caves. Recent discoveries show that fire was tamed by the earliest of humans, and they used it for more than just keeping warm.
Researchers from Boston University found ash and bone remnants in Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, according to details published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. The ash and bones and been heated to nearly 1000 degrees Fahrenheit (500 C) in what appear to be a consistent series of controlled fires 100 feet inside the cave. The site has been dated to the early Acheulean period, about a million years ago, a time when Homo erectus (Homo ergaster in Africa) was busy making tools. Whether the dating of the site is absolute or relative in the timeline of human history, it does offer strong evidence that humans were using fire to cook their food much earlier than previously thought.
Prior to this discovery, there were indications that humans used fire as early as 1.5 million years ago, but most paleoanthropologists agreed that only the 400,000-year-old use of fire could be well-established. It is well known that Neanderthals and modern humans used fire; it appears that early Homo erectus was able to control fire as well.
Paleoanthropologists commonly place H. erectus at between 1.9 million and 143 thousand years ago, when these early humans lived in groups found in spots from Indonesia and China all the way to the southern tip of Africa. Because the brain cases of H. erectus were on average smaller than the brains of people today (yet within the modern-day range of brain size), with thicker face and jaw bones, artists often portray H. erectus with ape-like features. Yet, the evidence has long demonstrated that these early men were just as human as the humans of today. We cannot go back in time and have a conversation with them, but we can examine the tools they left behind, and they were not the handiwork of a people who were intellectually defective.
Tool-Making
Homo erectus craftsmen chiseled tools from stone in a distinctive teardrop or oval shape, chipping stone hand axes and other cutting tools from the earliest time of their known existence. The cutting tools were used to butcher the large animals they hunted. The H. erectus people are always described as hunters and gatherers, yet their tools also included picks, which means they also spent time digging in the ground. While the “cave man” has long assumed to have been intellectually weak, the sophistication of the artifacts indicates otherwise. (Let’s see Warren Buffet go out and use his bare hands and local rocks to make a stone knife sharp enough to field dress a deer.)
Communication:
While there has been question about whether H. erectus could communicate as we do today, this people did have a human hyoid bone. Also, the Broca’s area of the H. erectus brain was like that of modern humans, according to studies of skull endocasts done by Thomas Wynn. Scientists have been slow to agree that H. erectus communicated just as well as we do (perhaps better), but the paleoanthropological community has also been reluctant to agree that Neanderthals sat around chatting, and Neanderthals had larger brains than modern man. Considering their sophisticated tool production, sufficient brains and a hyoid bone, there seems to be little reason to believe that H. erectus did not use spoken language, except for the same assumptions about early man that cause the artists to draw him looking like an upright chimpanzee.
Red Deer Cave People:
Even modern man gets sketched as ape-like because he is determined to have “primitive” features. A recent article on the Red Deer Cave People in Southwest China published in last week’s China Daily shows a fine ape-man pencil drawing at the top, even though the Red Deer Cave People were dated to less than 15,000 years ago, nearly 60,000 years after the time when scientists say men were using fire to blacksmith tools. According to the common paleoanthropology timeline, these are young humans who should look anatomically modern, yet they have “archaic-looking” parietal lobes, large molars, and thick skull bones – qualities that H. erectus also shared. The most important difference is their lack of a strong modern human chin. “They look very different from all modern humans, whether alive today or in Africa 150,000 years ago,” Darren Curnoe of the University of New South Wales told the BBC.
The Red Deer Cave People were also tool makers that used shovels and stone hammers. Even pyramids and quartz stone-cutting tools have been found in their isolated Asian home.
“It is not rare to see fossils that carry both early and modern Homo sapien traits. In the same era, there were many human groups in China. Red Deer Cave people could just be ordinary Chinese,” an anonymous paleoanthropologist in China told reporters.
The skulls of modern humans are relatively similar, but that does not mean that ancient people who had different skull characteristics were any less human than we are. It simply indicates that certain human family groups died out while one group lived on.
A computer specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is going to court over allegations that he was wrongfully terminated because of his belief in intelligent design.
Openings statements in the lawsuit by David Coppedge were expected Monday afternoon in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Coppedge, who worked as a team lead on the Cassini mission exploring Saturn and its many moons, claims he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work.
Intelligent design is the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone.
Coppedge lost his team lead title in 2009 and was let go last year after 15 years on the mission.
In an emailed statement, JPL dismissed Coppedge’s claims. In court papers, lawyers for the California Institute of Technology, which manages JPL for NASA, said Coppedge received a written warning because his co-workers complained of harassment.
They also said Coppedge lost his team lead status because of ongoing conflicts with others.
Caltech lawyers contend Coppedge was one of two Cassini technicians and among 246 JPL employees let go last year due to planned budget cuts.
The case has generated interest among supporters of intelligent design. The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian civil rights group, and the Discovery Institute, a proponent of intelligent design, are both supporting Coppedge’s case.
The National Center for Science Education, which rejects intelligent design as thinly veiled creationism, is also watching the case and has posted all the legal filings on its website.
Coppedge’s attorney, William Becker, contends his client was singled out by his bosses because they perceived his belief in intelligent design to be religious. Coppedge had a reputation around JPL as an evangelical Christian, and interactions with co-workers led some to label him as a Christian conservative, Becker said.
In the lawsuit, Coppedge says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a Christmas party.
Coppedge is seeking attorney’s fees and costs, damages for wrongful termination and a statement from the judge that his rights were violated, said Becker.
Humanity has long dreamed of perfection, striving to be faster, stronger and brighter, pushing nature to the limit. Four centuries before people were conceived in a petri dish, Swiss alchemist Paracelsus claimed flawless little beings could be grown in pumpkins filled with urine and horse dung, but there is no record he produced a crop.
With the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the test tube finally succeeded where the pumpkin had failed, and the year she turned 11, scientists moved beyond making life in a lab: They found a way to peer into an embryo’s genes and predict what that life might be like.
That ability is now morphing into a whole new approach to baby-making, one that gives people an unprecedented power to preview, and pick, the genetic traits of their prospective children.
Just as Paracelsus wrote that his recipe worked best if done in secret, modern science is quietly handing humanity something the quirky Renaissance scholar could only imagine: the capacity to harness our own evolution. We now have the potential to banish the genes that kill us, that make us susceptible to cancer, heart disease, depression, addictions and obesity, and to select those that may make us healthier, stronger, more intelligent.
The question is, should we?
It has been barely a year since the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the federal government’s attempt to regulate assisted reproductive technology, handing the reins to the provinces, most of which have done nothing to fill the void.
During that year, fertility clinics across the country have begun to take advantage of the technology’s latest tools. They are sending cells from embryos conceived here through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to private U.S. labs equipped to test them rapidly for an ever-growing list of genetic disorders that couples hope to avoid.
Recent breakthroughs have made it possible to scan every chromosome in a single embryonic cell, to test for genes involved in hundreds of “conditions,” some of which are clearly life-threatening while others are less dramatic and less certain – unlikely to strike until adulthood if they strike at all.
And science is far from finished. On the horizon are DNA microchips able to analyze more than a thousand traits at once, those linked not just to a child’s health but to enhancements – genes that influence height, intelligence, hair, skin and eye colour and athletic ability.
Such tests were devised to help those suffering from infertility. But people well able to have babies the old-fashioned way now opt for IVF and embryo screening, paying a steep premium in return for the chance to have greater genetic control over their offspring.
Critics ranging from religious conservatives to advocates for the disabled worry that a new age of eugenics is rising, propelled not by racists, despots or elitists but by parental aspiration. Says Bernard Dickens, an expert in reproductive law and bioethics with the University of Toronto, this technology is “all part of the quest for the perfect child.”
That quest was once the domain of science fiction. But last year the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration compiled a list of the most plausible sci-fi films. From thousands of candidates, NASA picked seven, led by the 1997 thriller Gattaca. Set in “the very near future,” it depicts a eugenic dystopia created by embryo screening, in which people born naturally suffer in the shadow of those who begin life in a lab.
In one scene, a geneticist reassures a couple that “this child is still you, simply the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.”
But the film’s protagonist disagrees: “What began as a means to rid society of inheritable diseases has become a way to design your offspring – the line between health and enhancement blurred forever.”
It’s a sobering prospect, yet in the real world, at least one prominent Oxford scholar supports such “unnatural selection” wholeheartedly, arguing that people who procreate are morally obliged to improve the species.
Many in the medical community also take a positive outlook.
“Parents are always choosing what they think is best for their children,” says Jeffrey Steinberg, whose Fertility Institutes has branches in Los Angeles, New York and, for those on a budget, Mexico. “The dilemma we’ve got,” he adds, “is that … there are no rules.”
Psalm 139:16
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in Thy Book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
He doesn’t create and then abandon. WHATEVER HE CREATES HE FAITHFULLY OVERSEES, GUIDES, HELPS AND NOURISHES.
We begin to realize that He who fashioned such an intricate and complex creation can surely oversee and bring to completion the complexities that afflict us in our present suffering. When we see the Creator, we see One who is big enough to handle any challenge we might face. Our soul can find its proper posture of simultaneous rest and intensity [quietness and confidence] only as we gain insight into the all-capable wisdom of our Creator Father.
He is a “FAITHFUL” CREATOR. When God creates something or someone, He is always faithful to that creation. He doesn’t create and then abandon. Whatever He creates He faithfully oversees, guides, helps, and nourishes. Since I am “twice created” by God – created the second time when He made me a new creature in Christ – God is doubly “faithful” [if that is possible] to me as one of His precious saints. All of God’s promises of faithfulness spring alive at this point, including that precious assurance, “Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” [Philippians 1:6].
Psalm 139:16 asserts that when God creates us, He establishes and numbers our days. So in the time of delayed answers I can abandon myself to my Creator, who will grant me every day for which He has fashioned me.
Psalm 95 expresses most beautifully what our attitude should be in the presence of our Creator: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand” [Psalm 95:6-7]. As our Maker, we should kneel adoringly before Him, bowing to His will in our lives. If He purposes that we suffer for a season, we bow to that in reverence. Furthermore [together with Psalm 100:3] these verses link the truths of God as Creator and God as Shepherd.
What God creates, He shepherds. So even though you may be suffering, dear saint, your Creator is shepherding you, feeding you, and leading you toward His Eternal city. Hallelujah! –Bob Sorge : From: The Fire of Delayed Answers.
There were once a much wider variety of human beings on this planet than there are now, according to new genetic analyses of Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in East Asia. Modern humans once interbred with these other groups, apparently sharing genetic material that includes the ability to fight off certain diseases. Yet, not all creatures designated as “hominids” are related to humans.
In 2008, a piece of bone and a tooth of what is believed to be a young girl were found in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, along with stone blades and body ornaments. Twenty years ago the small bone and a tooth would not have been much to go on. These days, however, 40 mg of real bone from a fossil can tell researchers a great deal of information – if the bone contains enough genetic material for researchers to sequence the DNA.
Researchers were able to compare DNA all around, and it turns out that the Denisovan girl and Neanderthals are related, but not directly. According to comparisons of genetic code, the Denisovan shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals and modern humans.
“It amazed me that we found this other extinct group of humans,” evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, Germany, told LiveScience. “When we got this little finger bone from Siberia, I was totally expecting it to be either Neanderthal or modern human. When it was something else, that was totally surprising and shocking to me.”
Ancient humans might bear some superficial physical differences from modern homo sapiens, but they were all still humans and able to breed with one another. In fact, interbreeding between modern-form humans and Neanderthals may have given us modern humans certain genes that helped boost our immune systems.
At the least, Neanderthals share key immunity genes with us, namely the HLA (human leucocyte antigen) class 1 gene. HLA proteins are important in helping the body defend itself against new infections. A variant called HLA-B*73 is found both in modern humans and Denisovans.
There’s quite a bit of Neanderthal DNA floating around out there in the population. According to researchers, up to four percent of Neanderthal DNA and up to six percent of Denisovan DNA have survived in modern humans. It’s been known for some time now that Neanderthals bred with the people whose descendants are now found in Europe and western Asia. Denisovan genes can also be found in the population of Europe and especially in the people of Asia and the oceanic islands.
No Missing Links
For more than a century, Neanderthals were portrayed as brutish, evolutionary missing links. They brought to mind the knuckle-dragging cave man, little better than apes themselves. Those pictures of Neanderthal are sadly incorrect. Evidence consistently points to Neanderthals as an extinct, but completely human, group of individuals. Neanderthals used tools, buried their dead, and even made musical instruments. The Denisovan bones were found with tools and body ornaments, which are both characteristic of human beings.
In the Bible, Adam’s son Seth was born as a replacement for Abel, who was murdered by Cain. However, Cain, Abel, and Seth were not the only children Adam and Eve produced. Genesis 5:4 states that Adam lived another 800 years after Seth was born, and he begat sons and daughters. Seth’s importance in the story comes from the fact that it is through his descendants that Noah is born. The only human genetic lines that survived the Flood were those that climbed on board the ark – namely, the genes of Noah’s three sons and their wives.
With the Flood, God wiped out nearly all of humanity. He preserved one slender group of genes to continue on through the children of Shem, Ham and Japheth. It should therefore be no shock that we find the remains of other extinct humans that don’t look exactly like us. Their gene pools were nearly wiped out.
Apes Are Still Apes: On the other hand, paleoanthropologists are constantly seeking out new fossils they hope will finally provide science with the missing links between apes and humans. The newest human precursor is Australopithecus sediba. A. sediba was discovered in South Africa in 2008 by a little boy and his dog, and later identified as an australopithecine, a cousin of the famous Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy.
While A. sediba provides an exciting new puzzle piece for evolutionary paleoanthropologists, its similarities to humans – just like Neanderthal’s differences – are superficial. A. sediba has been lauded for having hands strong enough to grasp tree branches while at the same time have hands that could use tools. Its pelvis is also more curved than other australopithecines, which the researchers believe would have made it easier for females attempting to give birth to babies with larger heads and brains. The fact that A. sediba itself has a small head, with a brain capacity of only 420 cc, doesn’t discourage the scientists. They consider A sediba to be a possible human ancestor, and therefore the researchers see a human head-friendly pelvis in A. sediba. Whether this is a case of, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it,” requires a second opinion.
“They are important fossils and remarkably detailed,” said paleontologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in D.C.. Wood stood among those paleontologists who were not yet willing to support A. sediba as a human ancestor. “I have some resemblances to Warren Buffett, but I’m not a billionaire,” Wood says. “A few resemblances does not an ancestor make.”
At the end of the day, A sediba is still an ape. She is an ape with long fingers and a wide pelvis. No tools or jewelry were found with A sediba. The apes did not bury their dead nor play handmade flutes. A. sediba simply represents the longing of paleoanthropologists to fill in the gaps between humans and apes on an evolutionary tree.
The difficulty is that the gaps are fairly large. Each new fossil discovery adds just one more individual to either the human family branches or the ape family branches. As much as paleoanthropologists want the two sets of branches to eventually run into each other, as time progresses, they look more and more like two, many-branched bushes and not one single tree at all.
“To become an embryo, you had to build yourself from a single cell. You had to respire before you had lungs, digest before you had a gut, build bones when you were pulpy, and form orderly arrays of neurons before you knew how to think. One of the critical differences between you and a machine is that a machine is never required to function until after it is built. Every animal has to function as it builds itself.” –Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology (eighth edition).
Human embryos cannot be patented, according to a law signed by President Obama on Friday. These days, biologists can swap out the genetic material of newts and frogs, clone a lamb from a single adult sheep cell, or “knock out” a specific gene in a mouse in order to see what happens. These technological powers make the concern about patenting experimental humans less than farfetched. In the effort to escape disease, federal funds are once again free to support embryonic stem cell research. The days of quilting together bits of DNA to create the perfect baby may or may not be years off. As technology advances, humankind must continually balance the pursuit for good health with the ethical concerns endemic in toying with human life.
No Patenting Humans: President Obama signed the “America Invents Act” (H.R. 1249) on September 16th after the US Senate passed it September 8 by a vote of 89 to 9. The legislation is primarily an adjustment and updating of U.S. patent laws, but in section 33, the new law specifically states: “Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no patent may issue on a claim directed to or encompassing a human organism.”
This little slice of the law prohibits an inventor from obtaining exclusive rights to certain technology used in human embryos. National Right to Life feared the biotechnology industry would develop lines of human embryos with certain genetic characteristics and would then patent and market these embryos as “models” for doing research on cures for certain diseases. There had been a temporary ban on issuing patents for human embryos, but this law makes it permanent.
Biotechnology Industry Organization fought against the ban because it would prevent patents from being issued on embryos produced by human cloning. (Attempts at cloning humans have so far had very little success.) BIO argued in a memo that because there was human intervention taking place in the creation of a “genetically modified embryo” then that embryo should be patentable.
NRLC’s Douglas Johnson commented, “This law recognizes that human life is not a commodity, and that a member of the human family can never be regarded as a mere invention, or as ‘intellectual property.’”
Stem Cell Research:
In the meanwhile, two scientists are seeking to bring back the ban on using tax dollars for embryonic stem cell studies. Dr. James Sherley, a biological engineer at Boston Biomedical Research Institute, and Theresa Deisher, of Washington-based AVM Biotechnology, have appealed the July ruling that overturned the prohibition on federal funding for stem cell research on human embryos. The scientists have argued that, among other things, federal funds have been diverted from their research that uses adult stem cells for therapies.
The Amazing Body:
Most of us really have no clue how fantastic our bodies are. Every part of the body develops from the single cell of the fertilized egg, from the kidneys and the brain to the cartilage in the ear and the lining of the alveoli in the lungs. Every cell nucleus contains the same DNA, yet each cell uses the genetic coding in the DNA in a specific way, whether to form hard bone in one case or eye jelly in another. The cells pick and choose which portion of the gene they need.
One of DNA’s jobs is to code for proteins, which get assembled as chains of amino acids that fold up naturally, comfortably, into globs. Big, messy globs. Yet, each protein is useful because of the precise way it folds up. It’s the specific sequence of amino acids that determines how a protein wants to fold, and the shape it takes is what makes it able to do its job. One kind of protein goes into making the heart muscle. Another becomes an enzyme. Certain proteins mesh into the scaffolding of the cell, or form gateways into the cell, or hold cells together. And some get the honor of becoming part of the sonic hedgehog signaling pathway between cells in the hand to make sure babies’ fingers form properly. Yes. There are even sonic hedgehog proteins.
We haven’t even mentioned the transcription factors that have to be in place for DNA to make RNA copies, or the sentries outside the nucleus waiting to let in only those molecules with the right ID cards. We haven’t described the ribosomes or lysosomes or white blood cells or neurotransmitters, or crazy biochemical cascades that go into making blood coagulate after the knife slips when we’re cutting onions.
Each cell has a city’s worth of industry, and a multitude of these busy little cells make up each organ. The organs don’t work in a vacuum either. Each of the organs in the digestive and circulatory system cooperate with the skeletal and muscle and endocrine systems, which are all told what to do by the nervous system. A trillion tiny bits and pieces all do their jobs to make up the organism that we call, “me.” And all of it takes place without our thinking about it, while we sit and read this article, only half conscious of our hands on the keyboard and mouse.
We are intricately knit together. Each living creature is a wonder, a masterpiece. Yet, on top of everything else, the trillions of tiny actors that make up “me” don’t come together just to move us around like robots. They all work together as we laugh and love and rejoice in life. Our trillions of parts act in harmony so that we can knit hats and play piano concertos and devise cones for the holding of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.
Hold Awe:
We have the ability to screen new embryos for potential deformities before implanting them in a uterus. We have the ability to stick human cells into frogs and plug human DNA into cow eggs and genetically modify embryos to take on certain traits. We need to retain some awe. The overwhelming details that go into life should astonish us and make us pause, especially as we make decisions about experimenting on human beings, however small they are. We need to be careful. Designer babies may not be the worst thing we create… and their siblings might not be the only things we destroy.
According to most respected geologists, the Earth is 4.7 billion years old, give or take a few days. Suggesting that the Earth is much younger can raise the ire of even the most chipper, likeable geology professor. Yet, there is evidence that geological processes can take place in a much shorter time span than historical geologists tend to assume, and odd things have been found out of place – in the wrong time and the wrong geological layer. Surtsey On the 14th of November in 1963, a steaming, smoking volcanic eruption that had started 426 feet below sea level produced enough cooled rock to peek out of the water. Over the course of that week, the island grew to a height of 145 feet. When the island finally stopped growing in June of 1967, it had risen to a height of almost 500 feet and covered an area of two square miles. The island was named Surtsey after the Norse god of fire, Surtur.
Because of its newness, Surtsey has been closely studied by scientists who want to watch how the flora and fauna of the island develop and by others who have monitored its growth and its subsequent decay. The amazing thing about Surtsey, though, is not just its rapid birth, but its rapid maturity as well. In 1964, when Surtsey was just a year old, Iceland’s top geophysicist Sigurdur Thorarinsson described the island in his book, Surtsey: The New Island in the North Atlantic:
“On Surtsey, only a few months sufficed for a landscape to be created which was so varied and mature that it was almost beyond belief… You might come to a beach covered with flowing lava on its way to the sea with white balls of smoke rising high up in the air. Three weeks later you might come back to the same place and be literally confounded by what met your eye. Now, there were precipitous lava cliffs of considerable height, and below them you would see boulders worn by the surf, some of which were almost round… and further out there was a sandy beach where you could walk at low tide without getting wet.”
The geologist continued his amazement later in National Geographic ( 127(5):712–726) in 1965, saying: ” … in one week’s time we witness changes that elsewhere might take decades or even centuries … Despite the extreme youth of the growing island, we now encounter a landscape so varied that it is almost beyond belief.”
Perhaps “elsewhere” the changes did not take decades or centuries after all. Perhaps geologists just assume they did. Without the ability to watch features form firsthand, geologists can infer the history of a site based more on reasoning than on experimental evidence. Unless they can watch the same geologic processes take place elsewhere, producing the same results, they can err in the story they put together from the rocks.
Mt. St. Helens: When Mount St. Helens erupted in late May of 1980, it created geological results in minutes and days that were previously believed to take vast lengths of time. On June 12, 1980, a mud flow left a deposit 25 feet thick with thin laminae and beds. These kinds of sedimentary laminae and beds had been assumed to represent thousands or millions of years as they were laid down one season at a time. Instead, this mud flow produced 25 feet worth of thin layers in a single day.
Mount St. Helens taught geologists that erosion can take place rapidly as well. Badlands topography in the form of rills and gullies appeared at the margins of seam explosion pits within five days after the Mount St. Helen’s pumice had been deposited in May of 1980. Nearly two years after the explosion, on March 19, 1982, a mud flow eroded a canyon much like a miniature form of the Grand Canyon in the headwaters of the North Fork of the Toutle River Valley. It did not take millions of years for this canyon system to erode; it took a day.
Mount St. Helen’s rapid formation of geologic features should give geologists pause. The results of the mountain’s eruption and mud flows do not prove that Earth is extremely young, but they do demonstrate that canyons and thick layers of sediment are not necessarily old.
There’s more than growing islands and volcanic eruptions to disrupt the textbook story about the age of the earth. From their early school days, children are taught that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous. Yet, in art and in mud, there are signs that dinosaurs and humans weren’t always apart.
Dinosaurs With Humans: In 2000, Alvis Delk and James Bishop of Stephenville, Texas were excavating along the Paluxy River in Glen Rose, Texas when they discovered a clear five-toed human footprint that shows uplift from a three-toed dinosaur print that pressed into it. The Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose has the original Alvis Delk footprint on display (and in person it is quite impressive. Photos do not do the print justice).
The Creation Evidences Museum has hosted an annual July dig in Glen Rose since the early 1980s, and the public is welcome to join in on future excavations. The Paluxy River is famous for its dinosaur prints and for its steady supply of very human-like tracks right alongside them.
Dinosaur Art: Legends of dragons can be found in cultures across the world, from China to Norway. Dinosaur-like creatures are also found in a wide variety of ancient art that can be readily seen today – at ancient sites around the world, at various creation museums and in pictures conveniently placed online [see links below]. Sauropod-shaped handles on pottery jugs from the Mississippi Caddo Indians of the 13th century AD; a stegosaurus carving on a column of the Ta Prohm monastery in Cambodia, dedicated in 1186; burial stones from Ica, Peru showing pictures of dinosaurs and humans together; the faint, desert varnished pictograph of a sauropod on the wall next to other Anasazi wall art on the inside of the Kachina Bridge at the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah, and many other forms of dinosaur art demonstrate that human beings did see dinosaurs in times far more recent than 65 million years ago.
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” – Genesis 1:24-26
“Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee;” -Job 40:15
The true age of Earth remains somewhat of a mystery. God told Moses He took six days to make everything, indicating that the Earth is still quite young. When human footprints show up in rock that is supposed to be millions of years old, and when dinosaurs are found in ancient art, it gives us reason to suspect that geologists don’t really know as much as they claim to, and there is a lot of room for argument against the conventional word on the matter.
“Gee, what do you wanna do tonight, Brain?”
“Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”
Researchers in China have made news by mixing the stem cells of humans with goats in the name of medical research, and they’re not the only ones playing with DNA like modeling clay. A wide variety of miniature genetic hybrids have been created in the laboratory for experimentation purposes. While scientists have not yet managed to grow goat heads or snake tails on the bodies of lions, British scientists are concerned enough to call for rules to govern biologists’ growing power to manipulate genes.
Humankind’s recent advances in decoding the genome have opened a jungle of possibilities that would likely have turned Gregor Mendel’s pea-digesting guts. Right now the work being done has remained apparently benign and even quite helpful. Laboratory rats with spinal cord injuries have been infused with human stem cells that caused enough healing to take place for the injured rats to regain motor function. In July, a study was released showing that human cardiac stem cells were successfully used to heal damaged tissue in mice hearts.
The Chinese goats have been the subjects of a bit more intense experimentation. Professor Huang Shuzheng, of Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, spent five years implanting goat embryos with stem cells from human umbilical cords. By genetically manipulating the goats so that their blood and internal organs more closely matched those of humans, the animals could be used to test treatments for human blood clotting disorders.
The practice of mixing human and animal DNA is not exactly new. Creatures that are part of this kind of experimentation even get their own acronym: ACHM, for “animals containing human material.”
It sounds like somebody clearing his throat.
The (achum) ACHM experiments offer scientists the means to test new drugs and therapies on human-like cells without having to experiment directly on humans.
The speed at which scientists develop new abilities, however, has raced ahead of the clear thinking about what is and is not acceptable, ethical work. Do a few stem cells really make a monster? Do we put a limit at growing human organs in animals? What if giving mice human immune systems allowed us to find a cure for AIDS? Researchers in the US have considered genetically engineering human brain cells in mice. Where should the line get drawn?
The British Academy of Medical Sciences released a report in July in order to address these sorts of questions and to seriously place ethical boundaries on ACHM research. While the Academy notes that ACHM experiments are useful in the search for cures for the diseases that plague humanity, there are certain places researchers should not tread.
Martin Bobrow, a professor of medical genetics at the University of Cambridge, and the Academy’s working group leader, cited three particular problem spots in this kind of experimentation.
“Where people begin to worry is when you get to the brain, to the germ (reproductive) cells, and to the sort of central features that help us recognize what is a person, like skin texture, facial shape and speech,” he told reporters.
In other words, don’t give animals human brains, human eggs and sperm, or human looks.
In his 1943 book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned that scientific advances have their dangers because human beings cannot all be trusted to use those advances for good:
“Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.”
If one scientist can mix human and animal DNA, it is certain that another can find some way to use it for the greater harm. Whether these experiments are ethical in the first place, whether they can be used for good or for evil, we know one thing; we do not want any mice sitting around contemplating a takeover of the world.
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