Fairywren on my table

The calendar bird on my kitchen table today is a Splendid Fairywren. https://animalia.bio/aplendid-fairywren Isn't that a splendid name? We see tiny birds I've been calling wrens (but probably aren't) when we eat dinner on our deck, but they don't look like this although pretty. If we were lunching in Australia, we might see them. Males and females of most species are dimorphic (2 forms), and usually the males are the showiest to attract the females. The girly birds are attracted to the best and biggest show-offs so they can have great babies and continue the breed/ race/ species.

Whether you are a creationist like me, or an evolutionist like most are taught in schools, you know males and females in all human cultures are different so that the race can continue. Until recently, that is. Only the leftist ideologs of the late 20th, and early 21st centuries don't want the human race to continue. Yes, they hate Christians and conservatives, but apparently, they also hate themselves.

Biology made easy and understandable

Are you confused or angry about the transgendered lies about women and men? Here's a great video by someone I trust (a fired university professor) Heather Heying on the After Skool website. She's an evolutionary biologist, and will tell you all you need to know about humans, animals, the birds and the bees, nature and nurture, averages and exceptions.  Plus in the style of education videos, there are some great illustrations.  She reads from the book she co-authored with her husband, The hunter gatherer's guide to the 21st century, 

https://youtu.be/AkjL58HOS60?si=a0zb419myTBw5XOe

I know just the guy for this position

"The Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology (EEOB) in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor Rank in Evolutionary or Ecological Genomics. We seek outstanding individuals who address fundamental questions in evolution and/or ecology either through the generation of large-scale sequence or gene expression data or by using either computational/statistical approaches for the analysis of genomic data."

Paul's letter to the church at Colossae explains creation and beginnings.

Colossians 1:15-23
15 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation, 16 for through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see—such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him. 17 He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together.

18 Christ is also the head of the church, which is his body. He is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead. So he is first in everything. 19 For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, 20 and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.

Did you evolve from slime, ooze and sludge?

Here's what the guys who think you did, think of you if you believe the Bible (In the beginning God. . .; In the beginning was the Word. . .; He is before all things. . . ; Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?. . . ):

"It is very troubling to think that with all the billions of dollars we have spent on "education" that we have so may uneducated people. It's even more troubling to think about how the trillions of dollars wasted on religious "stuff" (buildings and properties, salaries, lawsuit settlements, velvet slippers and gold chapeaux, etc., etc.) could have been better served invested in new technology, basic research, infrastructure construction and maintenance, "real" education, social services, etc.). Shameful foolishness."

Found at a "science" blog comment.

Rick Perry on evolution

If there's anything the media hate more than a pro-life candidate, it's one who doesn't believe the theory of evolution has all the answers to origins. On the other hand, maybe they love these candidates because they get so much press out of these gotcha comments.

According to the New Testament, Jesus existed before everything and created everything. Now why would he devise such a loopy plan that would take millions, maybe billions of years of death, disease and destruction before the final product finally evolved, and then have the audacity and duplicity to blame Adam and Eve for bring death into his "perfect" creation?

Paul's letter to the Colossians, Chapter 1
15 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation,[e]
16 for through him God created everything
in the heavenly realms and on earth.
He made the things we can see
and the things we can’t see—
such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.
Everything was created through him and for him.
17 He existed before anything else,
and he holds all creation together.
18 Christ is also the head of the church,
which is his body.
He is the beginning,
supreme over all who rise from the dead.[f]
So he is first in everything.
19 For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.

Belly fat, shin splints and bumble bees

The clouds in the west are very dark this morning. I know Illinois* had some tough weather, and it is probably our turn. So I changed into my newish athletic shoes and walked briskly for a mile. Boy! I just hate to sweat, and I'm not athletic, but I read that it's easier to get rid of belly fat through brisk walking even if the same amount of calories are burned with a stroll. Belly fat was not in my range of vision until about 7 or 8 years ago, and then suddenly it appeared. If your bottom rib doesn't reside on your pelvis, you have a huge advantage, but when you get broad band and write 11 blogs, that advantage leaves you. (That's my excuse, not aging.) Yesterday our exercise class couldn't get in the room to get out the weights, so we all took a walk (started briskly, slowed to a crawl) over to Thompson Park, then to Rita's house for a bathroom break, then back to UALC Lytham.

But when I walk, I get shin splints, so I stop and do some stretches--and that seems to help. For me, stretching during the walk helps even more than stretching before, although that seems backwards. Still, when walking around the condo grounds I think I must look a little odd in the half crouch--but at 9 a.m., maybe everyone was still in bed.

On my walk I saw a dead bumble bee--a big one in someone's driveway (there are more than 250 species and subspecies in 15 subgenera, so I can't say which one). Not sure what happened. Maybe he had a collision, wasn't looking both ways when a car backed out. Death. Have you read Genesis lately? There was no death before Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They had tried to use vegetation to hide, but God gave them animal skins. Death of animals even before Cain murdered Abel. But the theory of evolution, the original hate speech, teaches us that millions, maybe billions of years of death transpired so that poor dead bumble bee could throw his magnificent body away on May 16 here at the condo.

*The 3 story apartment building reported in this story is the former Kable Inn, built in 1894, but it had several names before the Kable Brothers Co. bought it in 1921. The earliest family story I heard about this place was that my great-grandfather checked in there with his large and growing family when they arrived from TN, and he was told to get a house.

Photo from Bird Perch She has great stuff!

How does evolution do this?

"Desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (DESI-MS) reveals that a simple red seaweed uses 28 different chemical weapons to defend itself against a single fungal attack." Even back in the days when I was a humanist Democrat, I didn't believe in evolution. So don't think this is confined to conservative Christians. Even when I was taught it all through 12 years of public school and college and my master's degree. Even when I was Associate Professor working in a science library. Even when people would point and laugh and loan me books to show me the error of my ways. And this DESI-MS story (which I only found today) is a good example of why at age 6 I had figured it out. So, while chemicals 5, 15 and 27 were evolving over a few million years, how did the seaweed protect itself from fungal attack (which was also evolving at a different pace, I assume). And will it die out before it can evolve #29 because the fungus is also evolving?

The Bible begins in a garden with a man and woman and ends with a city and a bride and bridegroom. You can trust it.

Theistic Evolution

Hank Hanegraaff, the Bible Answer Man, says the banner of theistic evolution that many Christians wave (God used evolution as His method for creation) makes as much sense biblically as the phrase flaming snowflakes.

You've probably heard of Lyme Disease--nasty stuff. Starts out as a rash, then fatigue, chills, fever, headache, and muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes, moving right along to painful neck, dizziness, heart palpatations, arthritis in the knees, sleep disturbances and fatigue (according to the CDC site). You get that from a tick bite--but what you really get is an infection from a bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. You see, the tick doesn't just grow a bacteria--first it bites an animal like a deer or mouse that has it. Ticks don't fly, they can't jump on the deer, and they rarely move more than a yard from where they are hatched. So they have to wait for the "host" animal to brush up against the weed where it has spent its little smarmy life just waiting. Ever wonder how it (or other bacteria, viruses, microbes, etc.) developed over millions of years if the deer or mice or weeds weren't also evolving with the same plan in mind? Sort of like those little methane microbes under the ocean I mentioned yesterday, without which our global temperature would be 50 degrees higher.

I can see why atheists want to believe in evolution. But Christians? It really isn't even rational that an omnipotent God would bumble through billions and billions of years of mistakes and trial and error just so a deer could brush up against a piece of grass waving in the wind with a tick who never left home. To say nothing of the fact there was no disease until Adam sinned. So what were the little buggers passing along?

What liberal bias?

Seen at a library digitization publication, Digital Document Delivery:

A 2005 cartoon by Pat Oliphant depicts God working at a drawing board, with a bearded angel looking over His shoulder, and ascribes to God the words,

“I’ve been trying to perfect some kind of intelligent design, but all I keep coming up with is a bunch of simple-minded, right-wing, fundamentalist, religious fanatics. I think I’ll just let the whole thing evolve.”

They don't mind insulting millions of Christians and Jews who think evolution is a pile of horse pucky, but they are careful to note that they are not reproducing the cartoon out of fear of copyright violation.

3678

Lest we diverge from the evolution party line

The Feb. 15 issue of Nature (445/7129) has an interesting article on the plants native to South Africa's Cape region. There are more than 9,000 plant species, 6,000 found in no other country in the world, and most of those are in the western region. Compare this to the entire area of the British Isles which is home to about 1500 plant species.

There seems to be some fear by the author that a person might conclude such fantastic variety, beauty and diversity were designed by a mind larger and more complex than ours rather than just happening by accident over a few million years. The terms "evolutionary approach," "evolutionary isolation," "evolutionary tree linking," and "bouts of evolution," appeared once; "evolutionary heritage," "evolutionary radiations," "evolutionary tree," and "evolutionary diversity," appeared twice; but the phrase "evolutionary divergence," (which reminds me of idiopathic, meaning "we don't know why this happened") appears 10 times in the article. And it isn't even a very long article!

3572

Mismatch: Why our world no longer fits our bodies

The review of this 2006 title in Nature, Feb. 8, 2007, caught my eye because of the 1/3 page photo of an obese guy, remote in one hand, huge bowl of chips in the other, sitting on the edge of his easy chair so his belly could rest on his thighs, bathed in the blue light of the TV, probably watching a sporting event while reliving the memories of the days he could put one foot in front of the other without heavy breathing. According to Michael Sargent, the reviewer who is a developmental biologist at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, authors Gluckman and Hanson believe humans are not adapting in the proper evolutionary way to increased energy dense food and our 21st century sedentary ways. Look at that guy. He has adapted just fine! All that's happened is he's just not "evolving" in the direction biologists had hoped. According to their theories, those species who don't adapt, die off. Aren't we doing just that? No. We just get fatter--and they've been keeping track since our Civil War. But the line that really made me burst into laughter (well, OK, just a smile) was Sargent's: "[I was] horrified by persistent references to the 'design' of organisms--a usage notably obstructive to an understanding of the evolutionary process, the disclaimer notwithstanding." Mr. Sargent, sir, deal with it!

Mismatch: why our world no longer fits our bodies, by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

3494 Why we need dissenters in science

Global-warming predictions are currently hampered by uncertainties about the amount of heat and carbon dioxide that the southern ocean will take up according to a report in the Journal of Climate, v. 19, 2006:6382-6390. A computer model developed by Joellen Russell of the University of Arizona in Tucson suggests that the ocean will be able to absorb more than previously thought. How much more? No way to know, plus she has to bow before the warming throne to even get this much research published.

And they've decided upon analyzing 580 million years old rock* that oxygen entered the deep oceans at the end of an ice age known as the Gaskiers glaciation. Fossil evidence indicates that large multicellular organisms appeared on the sea floor shortly after (i.e., 5 million years). End of an ice age? This was apparently some time before the industrial revolution and humankind messing everything up. Science: Vol. 314. no. 5805, p. 1529

Egyptologists have been arguing with materials scientists for about 20 years on whether the pyramids have blocks made up of a synthetic mix like concrete. Fifteen samples scanned by electron microscopes show calcium and magnesium which do not exist in nearby limestone. See? Scientists don't agree on a lot of things. The limestone guys probably are trying to shut down the synthetic mix guys with threats of "denial" charges. Journal of American Ceramics Society v.89, 2006:3788-3796.

Battle of the biofuels is heating up. Follow the money. Prairie grass will mop up more carbon than it produces, dwarfing the amount of carbon dioxide released during production and combustion. Look out corn and soybean growers. I still think the inputs will cost more than any benefit we get from this, so we REALLY need to encourage dissension in this field.

A 60 year old Somalian woman has had her IUD removed in Seattle. She continued to have children after it was inserted and (it) migrated after perforating her uterus. Seems they do that about 1-2 cases per 1000 insertions. Would you fly if 1-2 out of every 1000 jets disappeared? New England Journal of Medicine 356(2007);4:397

*I personally don't believe the earth is that old, but I can read and report it without having my mind all bent out of shape like the evolution people.

3482 Can you believe Scripture and be a scientist?

Sure. But it makes the academics awfully mad if Christians are more liberal (in the true sense of the word) than they are, that Christians will study and discuss and write about ideas and theories that are in conflict with their own, but academics can't.

This young man's research is impeccable. But some find these concepts "imponderable." He is able to describe events that happened 10 million years ago, but personally believes the earth is 10,000 years old. So do you have to believe in warlocks and witches to read Harry Potter?

"May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?"

And they claim it isn't discrimination. Can you believe they're debating whether to even admit committed Christians who don't follow the party line to advanced degree programs? "Graduate admissions committees were entitled to consider the difficulties that would arise from admitting a doctoral candidate with views "so at variance with what we consider standard science." She [Eugenie C. Scott] said such students "would require so much remedial instruction it would not be worth my time." Remedial instruction? What makes her think she has to brainwash graduate students? Will religious questions be part of the college interview now? She's right up there with the "some of my best friends are black" folk who want Christians in the back of the academic bus.

3459 What are they so afraid of?

Over at Bloomberg.com Susan (Boom Boom) Antilla writes about the new Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky. The sarcasm, the smears, the snarls and sneers--what are these guys so afraid of? Don't they know they are winning the battle for men's minds, and everyday in every way we are getting better and better? Gracious, the Departments of Biology at colleges and universities across this country have renamed themselves so the word "Evolution" is prominent--letting anyone who even entertains a thought outside that box will know not to enroll. Yes, we are all evolving to be sooooo open minded and newyorkerd that we aren't even threatened by a new or different thought. But I digress.

"Forget Disney World and Epcot Center," writes Antilla. "You haven't seen anything until you've seen the Creation Museum set to open in Petersburg, Kentucky, this year." I don't think she's actually been there or seen it (opens in June), but relies on second hand information with the fair and balanced title, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" by Chris Hedges, a former reporter for the New York Times, obviously an unbiased source.

I don't care if Ms. Antilla and Mr. Hedges want to believe they've evolved from something slimy and not human--if that's what gets them up every day and helps them live a better life, fine. Be my guest. But don't drag me down to your level.