Large, Multicellular Creatures

In the writing, "Early life forms had a modular structure" found in (_Science News_ v. 166, 7/31/04, p. 78). "A cache of fossils recently unearthed in northeastern Newfoundland" includes "the oldest known examples of large, multicellular creatures and the first of their type to be found preserved as three-dimensional casts."

They are dated as pre-Cambrian at "about 565 million years ago." They reached sizes of 1 to 2 meters, and these particular fossils "preserved internal and external body features as small as 30 micrometers across." Scientists can see that their "main architectural element was a branching, frondlike structure...approximately 3 centimeters long and made up of branching tubes" from "a few millimeters in diameter" down to "less than 0.15 mm in diameter."

Yet with all this, "scientists debate whether they were animals, plants, or neither." Furthermore, "this type of creature--known as a rangeomorph--became extinct about 540 million years ago and doesn't appear to be related to any organisms that have lived since."

So not only do we have another case of the amazing diversity of life, we also have another major case of a life form that neither has transitional "ancestors" nor is in transition to anything else.

Until Next Time,
David Bump

Chimp Study Contradicts Another Chimp Study

Speaking of one recent study possibly contradicting or greatly affecting another, "Chimps mature with human ancestor" (_Science News_ v. 166, 7/31/04, p. 77) may relate to the recent report claiming a study of Neandertal teeth show these people were distinct from our ancestors humans.

This new study "challenges the view that evolution proceeded gradually from a fast-growing chimplike ancestor around 8 million years ago to a slower-growing Homo erectus, which lived from about 1.6 million to 400,000 years ago, and then to an even slower-developing Homo sapiens.

This view had been fostered by studies of captive chimps, but this new study looked at wild chimps and found that "dental growth occurs much more slowly." It appears in the July 20, 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I think the real significance of this study is that you can't tell anything about growth rates in the past by studying teeth of living creatures alone. As mentioned in an earlier Comments, a study of hyraxes showed that different diets changed the proportions of their faces.

This study shows that tooth growth (and outgrowing infancy and reaching maturity) can be altered by living conditions. Studies that try to draw major conclusions about extinct organisms based on one or two fossil characteristics and assumptions based on similar organisms living today are stepping out of bounds.

Until Next Time,
David Bump

Can A Determined Age of the Universe be Called a "Universal Truth"

From Science News v. 166, 7/31/04, p.69

The Article "Universal Truths: Distant quasars reveal content, age of universe" describes a report that studied light from quasars, 3,000 of them (!), using absorption effects to deduce the presence of dust and gasses between them and earth, thus deriving a picture of the structure of the universe out to 8-10 billion light-years away.

The researchers claim "they have pinned down the age of the universe to an accuracy 5 times greater than ever before. By their reckoning, the cosmos is 13.6 billion years old, give or take 200 million years."The study is also claimed to "uphold a leading model of cosmic evolution known as inflation" in that the distribution of matter matches the predictions of the theory.

Since the theory was cobbled up to explain why the distribution of matter in the universe didn't fit the Big Bang theory as it then existed, I can't help but wonder if there isn't a bit of circularity here.

The study also places "the tightest limits to date on the mass of ...neutrinos," which once were thought to be entirely massless, and "eliminates the possibility of an additional family of massive neutrinos which some particle physics experiments have suggested."

It also indicates that the "density of dark energy...is constant over time" and "serves as the best available signpost for dark matter." I'm sure there will be more interesting developments as further studies are conducted.

Until Next Time,
David Bump

Feeding on Whale Bones

Here's another report that I already shared on CRSnet (Creation Research Society found at www.CreationResearch.org

"Gutless Wonder: New symbiosis lets worm feed on whale bones"
found in Science News v. 166, 7/31/04, p. 68

I don't flatly claim, as some do, that any particular organism just can't possibly be "explained" by evolution, but I do think that the more examples of the amazing diversity of life that we see, the harder it is (or should be) to accept those explanations.

The critter described here (and formally reported on in the July 30th issue of Science) certainly is an extreme example.It was discovered in 2002, when a "remotely operated craft detected a dead gray whale in the mud at 2,800 meters underwater."

The bones were covered by these little things. One of the researchers "at first hesitated to identify the new creatures as worms." Similar ocean-bottom worms, like those that live near hydrothermal vents, "live in hard outer casings, yet the new creatures are sheathed in soft mucus."

The researchers were "convinced" by studying the DNA and later "found additional evidence ...from...morphological studies."

So, what are they like? Well, they don't have any mouths. The females have "hemoglobin-rich plumes" at the top end of "stalklike bodies." Within the "sheath that surrounds" this stalk (the entire body "can grow to the size of an index finger" live "More than 100 tiny males" which "don't appear to be parasitic and probably feed of yolk left over from early development."

One researcher says the males are "little more than larvae" and the size difference between males and females is "the most dramatic sexual dimorphism among worms and may be among the most dramatic in the animal kingdom."

But that's not the end of the weirdness! At the base of the females, the body swells with a number of relatively enormous ovaries in an irregular sack, and spreading out from this base are "green, rootlike growths" that are filled with "symbiotic bacteria."

Somehow these "bacteria-bearing projections penetrate the whale bones" and the bacteria feed on lipids in the bones, sharing the nutrients they derive from them with the worms.

A scientist commenting on this case for the article says, "I think there are a lot of discoveries to be made." Indeed. And they may be able to come up with explanatory stories for all of them, but how many such cases can we learn about and honestly expect such explanations to be valid?

Oh, you can see for yourself if you like: http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040726/full/040726-10.html Hmmm, that says "The researchers determined that the two new species diverged about 42 million years ago, which is about the same time that many whale species first arose. 'The implication is that these worms were doing this job on other whale bones quite some time ago,' says Bob Vrijenhoek, an evolutionary biologist from MBARI who is one of the authors on the paper."

But that would also mean the worms were able to do this about as soon as whale carcasses became available - did they evolve their special symbiotic form overnight, or were they already adapted to feed on the bones of....??? They don't seem to even consider this problem.

Until Next Time,
David Bump

That's One Tough Chipmunk

Science News_ v. 166, 7/24/04, p. 6

"Chipmunks in Wisconsin toughed out ice age"

This article claims that "At the beginning of the last ice age about 40,000 years ago...some chipmunk populations stayed in northern refuges" according to a report in the July 13 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Obviously, nobody actually observed such a thing. It's based on comparisons of mitochondrial DNA, using the "molecular clock" assumptions as well as the standard cladistic comparisons.

They used chipmunks from "Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan." Other results are that "the most recent common ancestor of all those chipmunks lived about 200,000 years ago" but "The most recent ancestor of the western-zone chipmunks probably lived less than 50,000 years ago."

So some chipmunks supposedly "rode out the last ice age in a hospitable zone." It might be interesting to look up some sources on the ice age and determine just how inhospitable the area at the time has been regarded. Wasn't Wisconsin supposed to be covered by a massive ice cap at the time?

Until Next Time,
David Bump

Two Steps Forward - 10,000 Years Worth of Steps Back

Here are some of my thoughts in regards to:

Science News_ v. 166, 7/24/04, p. 61, "Seeds of Agriculture Move Back in Time"

This article tells of an increase in the date assigned an event, but as in many such cases, it seems to pose a bit of a conundrum for evolutionists as well as YECs, although I've seldom if ever seen them notice this sort of thing.

In a report to appear (or now appearing?) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say they have evidence that as early as 23,000 years ago people in the area of the Sea of Galilee ate "a plentiful portion of seeds from wild grasses along with a side of grains from wild cereals, such as wheat and barley" in addition to what they could get by hunting and fishing.

"This discovery pushes back by 10,000 years" the date when humans started this diet. "That transition in eating habits set people on the path to farming, a practice that began in the Middle East between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago."Hmmmm, let's see, 23,000 minus 10,000... so the old date for the shift was 13,000 years ago, or 2-3 thousand years before farming began.

Think of the advancements in technology made since the time of Christ. And these people would be every bit as intelligent as us even in the evolutionary view. Could one argue that for all that time, nobody saw the possibility of or any advantage in saving some seeds and planting them in a convenient location? And now they supposedly took up to 13,000 years? More than twice the time since writing was invented? (and then another 5,000 years or so after farming started before that invention of writing?)

Also, what land animals in the area would have eaten fish? I ask because it seems very clever to me for early humans to figure out that fish were edible and then figure out how to spear them -- or did they actually use hook-and-line fishing? 12-13 thousand years of hunting, fishing, living off the land -- with all that intelligence and never settling down...you think the women would put up with that? 8-)

23,000 to 10,000 years would be from the peak of the Ice Age to just after it ended. I don't know what effects it had in that area, though. Still, if the Ice Age was an after-effect of the Flood, adjusting/collapsing these dates accordingly might well fit with the dispersal from the mountains of Ararat with a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle followed by a rapid re-establishment of civilization.

Until Next Time,
David Bump

Gorges That Were Carved Out Fast?

Comments About: Science News v. 166, 7/24/04, p. 52

"Quick Bite: Some Gorges Carved Surprisingly Fast"


This article is about the report in the July 23rd issue of Science. Scientists studied the gorges where the Potomac and Susquehanna rivers cut through "bedrock that's millions of years old" and found that "the chasms are much younger."

Of course, I have my doubts about all attempts to date things by studying their current properties (In this case "concentrations of beryllium-10, an isotope that's typically produced when oxygen-bearing minerals, such as quartz, are exposed to cosmic rays at Earth's surface."

Still, it's somewhat heartening to learn just how big a surprise the uniformitarians ran into. Their results "indicate that" the Mather Gorge (of the Potomac) "eroded downward between 37,000 and 13,000 years ago at a rate of about 80 centimeters per millennium" and the Susquehanna's Holtwood Gorge was carved at a rate of "about 50 cm per millennium.

These erosion rates are tens to hundreds of times faster than scientists had suspected."Wow, ten to hundreds of times difference? That's quite a surprise! But it still sounds too slow to me. 80 cm is a bit less than a meter, not quite 3 feet even. Rocks may be pretty hard stuff, but a thousand years is a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if rivers could cut down through 3 feet of rock in just 100 years.

Consider, too, that ordinary "abrasion of waterborne sediment" is now considered to contribute only a small part of the change. "Much of the sculpting occurs when strong floods pluck loose chunks of rock from the gorges' cracked walls and channels."

While "the Susquehanna carried meltwater from the ice sheet that invaded the northern reaches of its watershed, the Potomac had no such influx. Therefore, the scientists speculate, the boost in erosion at both locations is probably a result of other factors, such as changes in regional climate."

That might explain why the rate was greater than what they expected from their uniformitarian assumptions, but it doesn't explain why the Susquehanna didn't have a much greater rate from all that post-Ice Age glacial melt water.

Perhaps the major factor was the effect of large amounts of Flood waters draining off the continent as the still relatively soft sediments were pushed up by ongoing tectonic forces.

Until Next Time,
David Bump