sermons from science -- jan 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 1 月

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Sermons From Science -- Jan 2013科学布道 -- 2013 年 1月Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube

under the name “Pastor Chui” and also in PowerPoint slides in the website http://ChristCenterGospel.org.

The contents of this presentation were taken from Dave Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. May God have all the glory.

Pastor Chui

http://ChristCenterGospel.org

[email protected]

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Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 Two articles in secular science literature point to possible

upsets in long-age assumptions for the earth and mankind. Most Human Mutations Are Recent A press release from the University of Washington states,

“Harmful protein-coding mutations in people arose largely in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years.” The Exome Sequencing Project, a consortium of evolutionary geneticists, surveyed a million single-letter changes in the human “exome” (protein-coding genes) for 6,515 people. “Overall, the researchers predicted that about 81 percent of the single-nucleotide variants in their European samples, and 58 percent in their African samples, arose in the past 5,000 years.”

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Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 The researchers were able to fit this surprise into the “out-

of-Africa” hypothesis by claiming that mutations became fixed more rapidly among Europeans after they migrated. “The Out of Africa bottleneck led to inefficient purging of the less-harmful mutations,” one explained. Still, if 150 mutations are passed from parent to offspring on average, it would seem that rate of damage could not go on for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. See also the Science Daily article on this, that states, “The researchers pointed out that the results illustrate the profound effect recent human evolutionary history has had on the burden of damaging mutations in contemporary populations.”

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Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 The consortium agrees that their results indicate most

harmful mutations in the human gene pool are “of recent origin, evolutionarily speaking.” Without supporting evidence, though, the researchers used standard Darwinian talking points to hope for a positive outcome, hoping that the large number of recent mutations “may have created a new repository of advantageous genetic variants that adaptive evolution may act upon in future generations.” Whatever the meaning, Science Daily said that the researchers stated, “The recent dramatic increase in human population size, resulting in a deluge of rare functionally important variation, has important implications for understanding and predicting current and future patterns of human disease and evolution.”

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Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 Tree Rings Point to a Recent Cosmic Ray Event What on earth happened in 768 A.D.? Charlemagne was busy

building his empire, unaware of something happening over his head. The “Charlemagne Event” was not caused by him; something beyond earth sent a shower of cosmic rays our way. PhysOrg asks some pointed questions:

Until recently, the years 774 and 775 were best known for Charlemagne’s victory over the Lombards. But earlier this year, a team of scientists in Japan discovered a baffling spike in carbon-14 deposits within the rings of cedar trees that matched those same years. Because cosmic rays are tied to carbon-14 concentrations, scientists around the world have wondered about the cause: a nearby supernova, a gamma ray burst in the Milky Way or an intense superflare emanating from the Sun?

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Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 In the article, Adrian Melott (U of Kansas) presents his

argument that the spike came from a coronal mass ejection from the sun. This CME could have been 10–20 times larger than the largest spike observed in recent times (1859), called the Carrington Event. Stars beyond our sun have been observed to have very large flares. Other cosmic sources might include a gamma ray burst or nearby supernova, though the latter would have been observable in the sky.

If an extra-large CME occurred during Charlemagne’s battles, it might not have been noticed. It might have caused a slightly higher risk of skin cancer. But today if one that size occurred, it would disrupt the world’s power grid and blow out transformers over a wide area. We’d only have a few minutes warning before our civilization would become seriously disrupted.

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Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 We offer these findings as stimulations for further

research by asking some questions. If a CME or other cosmic source could dramatically increase carbon-14 production in the atmosphere, what does that do to the calibration profile for radiocarbon dating? What could be the impact of a large shower of cosmic rays on the atomic clocks used for radiometric dating in general? Could a cosmic event stimulate accelerated nuclear decay, lowering the activation threshold to give a false reading of longer ages (e.g., more fission tracks) than actually occurred? If not, how would we know? Open-minded physicists may want to look into this.

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Two Studies May Indicate Problems for Vast Ages两项研究表明广大年龄的问题 Regarding the mutation rate, the finding appears to add

more impetus to Dr. John Sanford’s theory of genetic entropy, that the human race could not purge harmful or nearly-neutral mutations fast enough to avoid extinction in very many thousands of years, let alone tens of thousands. The evolution-talk in the article seems concocted to rescue Darwin’s long ages rather than face the clear implication that humans have not been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. Even with lower population sizes, genetic entropy takes its toll. And if you think bullets to the genome provide a pool of variants that natural selection may act upon in future generations, good luck outrunning extinction while the bad ones add up.

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Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ Scientists are only people, and most people do or say

dumb things sometimes. You can decide how to classify these “scientific” ideas.

Overhyped Martian claims of the past: While the world eagerly awaits NASA announcing “something big” about Mars next week,* Clara Moskowitz reminds us on Space.com that there were at least five overhyped claims in the past: (1) the canals on Mars, (2) flowing water on Mars, (3) the face on Mars, (4) microbes in a Martian meteorite, and (5) claims of possible life from Vikings 1 and 2. Many of these were taken very seriously by renowned scientists of the day.

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Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ Alien Breck: A long time ago in a beauty salon far,

far away: We may be able to detect aliens by their hairspray, Charles Q. Choi announced on Space.com: “Alien hairspray may help us find E.T.” Presumably space babes would wish to keep their locks in place with chloroflurocarbons, which astronomers might detect in a planetary atmosphere. That’s probably enough said, except to note that NASA considered this story newsworthy enough to give it good press on their Astrobiology Magazine website.

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Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ Organized ignorance: When you don’t know what you

are talking about, does it help to organize your ignorance? Apparently Claudio Maccone thinks so. Astrobiology Magazine said Maccone took another look at the Drake Equation for calculating how many aliens inhabit the galaxy.

But the Drake equation must not be evaluated only by the numerical values it produces. Some say the Drake equation is a way to organize our ignorance. By exposing the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis mathematically, we limit the real possibilities to each term and approach the final answer: how many alien civilizations are there?

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Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ Maccone massaged the ignorance with new

inputs and came up with a new estimate of how many alien civilizations there are, which nobody can check. He simultaneously solved another problem of organized ignorance: why hasn’t SETI detected any aliens yet? Answer: the average distance of these unknown civilizations might put them too far for our current detectors to find. How convenient; maybe we can use that method to explain why we haven’t found ghosts.

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Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ Minds by mistake: Someone didn’t think this through.

Maybe Darwin made him do it. Take an ape brain and zap it: instant intelligence! That seems to be the gist of a story on Science Daily, “Origin of Intelligence and Mental Illness Linked to Ancient Genetic Accident.” What does the prestigious University of Edinburgh think of one of their own, Seth Grant, proposing that a genetic accident led to his brain? He proposes that a mistake caused a gene to make multiple copies of neurons, which led to both intelligence and mental illness. This makes mental illness the flip side of intelligence, leading readers to believe that Grant may not be able to tell one from the other.

*We learned later the latest Mars hype was due to a misunderstanding; see Live Science’s explanation.

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Are Scientists Capable of Stupidity? 科学家能够愚蠢吗？ What’s disturbing is that nobody in the

press called these people on these claims, although Clara Moskowitz came close.

Evolutionary scientists have the gall to declare their critics ignoramuses. We simply show you what they say; you decide.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） A historian tells science teachers that “To Teach Evolution,

You Have to Understand Creationists.” Should that advice apply both ways?

In The Chronicle of Higher Education last month, Adam Laats seemingly advised a kinder, gentler treatment of creationists than the usual outrage from the secular Darwinian camp. There was no name-calling of them as ignorant, anti-science flat-earthers (or worse) from this historian and author from Binghamton University: instead, he urged that science teachers try to “understand” them. Cool your jets, he advised; attack-dog responses to creationist comments are uncalled for, as are the even milder (but no less virulent) comments from the likes of Bill Nye the Science Guy (see 8/27/2012).

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） Laats’s reasons for moderation seem open-minded. He

acknowledges that some creationists are not ignoramuses: U.S. Rep. Paul C. Broun Jr., Republican of Georgia, for instance, who took a “ferocious” beating after criticizing Darwinism and the Big Bang (he called them “lies from the pit of hell”), has a bachelor’s in chemistry and is an M.D. (Secular scientists are up in arms that he sits on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee of the House). A number of leading creationists have scientific credentials, Laats pointed out. He even praised William Jennings Bryan as a well-travelled man of letters with many degrees, who remarked that he had never been called an ignoramus “except by evolutionists.”

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） The “snarky” remarks by some scientists who are “flummoxed

by the durability of creationism,” he says, can’t on the one hand claim Broun is unqualified for his position, and on the other “demand that an elected official not fight for the ideas in which his constituents believe”. It’s time for carrot, not stick, Laats advises:

As it stands, scientists’ blundering hostility toward creationism actually encourages creationist belief. By offering a stark division between religious faith and scientific belief, evolutionary scientists have pushed creationists away from embracing evolutionary ideas. And, by assuming that only ignorance could explain creationist beliefs, scientists have unwittingly fostered bitter resentment among the creationists, the very people with whom they should be hoping to connect.

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） Laats also rejects the notion that creationists belong to

a right-wing fringe. “As Berkman and Plutzer demonstrate, the creationist beliefs of teachers embody the creationist beliefs of Americans in general,” he said. “The teachers are not ignorant of evolution, yet they choose to reject it.” Remarkably, Laats is also willing to concede that some students who turn to embrace evolution might have done so not because of the facts of biology, but for personal moral failings or other motivations. Here, though, Laats reaches the limit of his tolerance for creationists:

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） If we hope to spread the science of evolution, it does not

help to charge forward in blissful ignorance about the nature and meanings of creationism. Broun may be wrong about evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang. But his scientific errors do not instantly disqualify him as a representative of the American people. Nor can they be explained away as a product of ignorance.

Rather, those of us who care about promoting evolution education must admit the hard truth. It is not simply that creationists such as Broun have not heard the facts about evolution. Broun—along with other informed, educated creationists—simply rejects those facts. Evolution educators do not simply need to spread the word about evolution. We need to convince and convert Americans who sincerely hold differing understandings about the nature and meaning of science.

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） So in the end, Laats continued to hold that evolution is a

matter of science, facts, and being right. Even if he allows that creationists are not ignoramuses, he implies that they hold “differing understandings” (by implication, misunderstandings), about the nature and meaning of science. More of the same presentation of the “facts” of evolution, therefore, is not going to convert those who reject “facts”. He didn’t go any further, but others have suggested forms of mind control to influence those with false beliefs (see 9/27/2012). Given the limits of his toleration, others could well propose such measures as more effective than name-calling; for example, see 12/21/2005, “How to Overcome Student Objections to Evolution.”

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） If you are a Darwin doubter, as you read this, you

must guard against the tendency to want to leap up and hug Adam Laats for his tolerant attitude. Yes, it is refreshing to see someone in the secular journals actually say that Darwin doubters are not all ignoramuses. After being hit by that rock on the head for so long, it does indeed feel good when it stops. Your response, instead, should be, Why were you hitting me with that rock in the first place? What right do you have to call me an ignoramus when you believe everything in the universe, including your reason, emerged from nothing by an unguided process?

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） This is not just tit-for-tat. You need to reason with

the evolutionist that his very use of reason shows that evolution is self-refuting. The evolutionist believes that reason emerged in the human mind by an unguided natural process; it did not exist before that. Therefore, he has no basis for trusting its validity (some very good treatments of this “argument from reason” in the new book The Magician’s Twin discussed in the 11/20/2012 entry). Laats needs to see that evolutionists are the ones who have denied the facts. They are the ones who have misunderstood the nature and meaning of science.

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） That being the situation, there is no reason that an

articulate creationist could not write the very same article in inverted form: “To Teach the Science of Creation, You Need to Understand Evolutionists.” That spokesperson could employ the same arguments: admitting that not all evolutionists are ignoramuses, and that some who believe simply reject the facts of creation. Some even believe it for non-rational reasons. The person who should be cowering in shame for promoting a self-refuting worldview (which, by definition, cannot possibly be true), is Adam Laats and his fellow science teachers who promote it.

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Understanding Creationists (and Evolutionists)了解创造论者（和进化论者） If, and only if, Laats is willing to acknowledge,

“you have a valid point there,” and that evolution could be the view that is factually wrong and unscientific, could there be a true meeting of the minds toward progress in mutual understanding. Anything less is a mere feint in a pitched battle. It just means the evolutionists will be kinder when they take creationists prisoner. Demand the evolutionists drop their arms and surrender the castle they have unrighteously usurped.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Eye Retina Is Analog-to-Digital Converter 眼睛视网膜模拟到数字转换器 Before you see, your retina has done multiple digital

transformations on the incoming signal. A new study by opthalmologists at the University of

Tübingen, Germany has confirmed that the eye goes digital. Bipolar cells at the base of the retina, long thought to send continuous analog signals to the retina, have been shown to generate action potentials, or spikes, that represent on-or-off conditions (the basis of digital programming). The paper in Current Biology is technical; the interesting part is in the press release from the university, entitled “The end of a dogma: Bipolar cells generate action potentials.” The article explains the advantages of digital processing:

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Eye Retina Is Analog-to-Digital Converter 眼睛视网膜模拟到数字转换器 Action potentials allow for much faster

and temporally more precise signal transmission than graded potentials, thus offering advantages in certain situations.

Even more amazing is how the eye massages its digitized information for the brain. The description sounds like a computer system:

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Eye Retina Is Analog-to-Digital Converter 眼睛视网膜模拟到数字转换器 The retina in our eyes is not just a sheet of light sensors that – like

a camera chip – faithfully transmits patterns of light to the brain. Rather, it performs complex computations, extracting several features from the visual stimuli, e.g., whether the light intensity at a certain place increases or decreases, in which direction a light source moves or whether there is an edge in the image. To transmit this information reliably across the optic nerve — acting as a kind of a cable — to the brain, the retina reformats it into a succession of stereotypic action potentials – it “digitizes” it. Classical textbook knowledge holds that this digital code – similar to the one employed by computers – is applied only in the retina’s ganglion cells, which send the information to the brain. Almost all other cells in the retina were believed to employ graded, analogue signals. But the Tübingen scientists could now show that, in mammals, already the bipolar cells, which are situated right after the photoreceptors within the retinal network, are able to work in a “digital mode” as well.

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Eye Retina Is Analog-to-Digital Converter 眼睛视网膜模拟到数字转换器 The researchers were able to classify bipolar cell patterns

into at least eight classes. “Therefore, the systematic projection pattern of BCs provides distinct temporal ‘building blocks’ for the feature extracting circuits of the inner retina,” the abstract of the paper states. Could this be analogous to bits being organized into bytes for a kind of visual code? If nothing else, it improves reliability of the signal: “To make information transmission to the brain reliable, the retina first has to ‘digitize’ the image,” the press release began.

Why is this the end of a dogma? Action potentials had been noticed before, but were considered rare exceptions. “The results from Tübingen call a widely held dogma of neuroscience into question — and open up many new questions,” the press release ended.

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Eye Retina Is Analog-to-Digital Converter 眼睛视网膜模拟到数字转换器 As could be predicted, none of these articles mentioned

evolution. How could they, when talking about computer cables and digital codes?

There are two take-home messages from this paper. One is that the closer science looks at life, the more intelligently designed it appears. The autonomous bipolar cells cannot “know” what the brain needs. They had to be pre-programmed to send the most valuable information so that the brain can respond appropriately. They have to “format” the signal, using a code the brain can understand. And they have to get it there fast; that’s why digital is the way to go. The exquisite interaction of parts here, sending digitally-encoded information down a “cable” of sorts, is really mind-boggling. It’s not just a camera chip; it’s a whole Photoshop!

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Eye Retina Is Analog-to-Digital Converter 眼睛视网膜模拟到数字转换器 The other take-away message is that we don’t really see

what’s “out there” in the world as it really is. What’s out there are just photons bouncing off objects. Before we see what we think we’re seeing, a long series of intermediaries (the cornea, the aqueous humor, the lens, the vitrious humor, the rods and cones, the bipolar cells, the retinal ganglion cells, the optic nerve, and who knows what else) has massaged, transformed and formatted the signal from the initial impingement of photons on the cornea. Philosophers can have fun with this (see David Chalmers discuss the “hard problem” of neuroscience on Evolution News & Views). Creation apologists can also use this information as a response to skeptics who say they only believe what they see with their own eyes.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Hindcasting the Grand Canyon: Geologist Rejects Dam Breach Theory 后报大峡谷：地质学家拒绝溃坝理论 A geologist rejects the idea that an ancient lake spilled and

carved Grand Canyon, but maybe he misrepresents the theory. Besides, how can geologists “hindcast” an unobserved event without philosophical assumptions?

“Grand Canyon Carved by Flood? Geologist Says No,” reads a headline on Live Science, but the URL is stronger: “Megaflood debunked as Grand Canyon cause.” Debunked is a strong word. It implies permanently laid to rest, or falsified, by a concurrence of geologists. In the article by reporter Becky Oskin, however, it appears that the debunking is just the opinion of one geologist, Bill Dickinson, an emeritus professor of geology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who could provide no better explanation.

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Hindcasting the Grand Canyon: Geologist Rejects Dam Breach Theory 后报大峡谷：地质学家拒绝溃坝理论 Tracing the history of the Grand Canyon is

controversial. The deep gorge exposes a billion years of Earth history in its candy-colored cliffs, but geologists can’t agree when it formed, or exactly how.

A long-standing hypothesis by both creationist and secular geologists places a vast lake, called Hopi Lake, to the southeast of the current canyon, proposing that a dam breach carved at least much of the canyon rapidly and catastrophically. The Painted Desert and other remnants called the Bidahochi Formation would be remnants of the old lake bottom.

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Hindcasting the Grand Canyon: Geologist Rejects Dam Breach Theory 后报大峡谷：地质学家拒绝溃坝理论 Dickinson doesn’t believe the dam breach is a valid

story, so he said “my main purpose is to dismantle it.” He argues that the lake would have been too shallow, and that the waters could not have climbed over the Kaibab Upwarp. This argument, though, overlooks the proponents’ scenario that the upwarp and the dam breach were tied together. Dickinson and others mentioned in the article additionally argue that there’s no way the lake could have existed for 10–20 million years. Creation geologists, however, do not need the millions of years, while secular geologists have no agreement on the sequence of events in the region, begging the question that the lake required the time.

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Hindcasting the Grand Canyon: Geologist Rejects Dam Breach Theory 后报大峡谷：地质学家拒绝溃坝理论 It would seem hard for Dickinson to triumph over a

competing theory when he is admittedly baffled by the origin of the canyon:

Knocking down Hopi Lake leaves a major puzzle: What was the course of the Colorado River before the Grand Canyon deepened? Some geologists think the early Colorado River flowed south into the lake.…

“One of the hardest things to hindcast is to know how big a river you’re looking for in Grand Canyon country,” he said. “What was the river like up in Utah? I hope that if people would just abandon the Hope Lake spillover game, their thoughts would lead them on to worrying about Utah.”

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Hindcasting the Grand Canyon: Geologist Rejects Dam Breach Theory 后报大峡谷：地质学家拒绝溃坝理论 Although Dickinson presented a proposal that the

ancestral river flowed northwest across northern Arizona, his idea hardly accounts for many features of the canyon, including its crossing the Kaibab plateau. Oskin implied that no other geologist is likely to come up with a better idea any time soon: “Part of the challenge of solving the Grand Canyon’s history is that so much has changed in the ensuing millions of years: climate was different then, the topography has changed dramatically, and tectonic forces continue to reshape the plateau.”

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Hindcasting the Grand Canyon: Geologist Rejects Dam Breach Theory 后报大峡谷：地质学家拒绝溃坝理论 It seems hardly appropriate for Oskin to say

the megaflood theory has been “debunked” when all the other theories have just as many or worse problems. Oskin misrepresented the megaflood theory by assuming the millions of years as part of the story. It’s the millions of years that are a large part of the problem with competing theories. This was no debunking; it was rather a story of a man on a mission to discredit competition so he could present his own fallible hindcast.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ Globular clusters supposedly all formed at the same time

long ago, but some look young. How do astronomers rescue the belief that they are ancient groupings of stars?

Live Science (echoed on Space.com) introduced, once again (10/05/2003, 7/12/2008), the problem of “blue straggler stars” (BSS) – blue supergiant stars in globulars that appear too young to inhabit such old clusters (the hot blue stars are thought to form and explode in too short a time to exist in ancient clusters that supposedly formed soon after the big bang). Reporter Mike Wall personified them thus:

While such star clusters are many billions of years old, some of them manage to stay young at heart while others speed along toward decrepitude, astronomers found.

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ Given this range of incompatible ages, how

can astronomers explain it? One way is to tweak the “evolutionary rate” dial:

“By studying the distribution of a type of blue star that exists in the clusters, we found that some clusters had indeed evolved much faster over their lifetimes, and we developed a way to measure the rate of aging,” lead author Francesco Ferraro, of the University of Bologna in Italy, said in a statement.

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ The astronomers used an analogy of

sediment sinking in a tank to classify clusters with blue stragglers concentrated near the center of some clusters, while others appear more homogeneous. It’s not clear, though, that astronomers can simply tweak a dial to keep theory intact. Why would some clusters evolve faster than others?

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ A few clusters had blue stragglers distributed

throughout, making them appear young. Some seemed old, with the stragglers already clumped in the center. And others were somewhere in between.

“Since these clusters all formed at roughly the same time, this reveals big differences in the speed of evolution from cluster to cluster,” said co-author Barbara Lanzoni, also of the University of Bologna. “In the case of fast-aging clusters, we think that the sedimentation process can be complete within a few hundred million years, while for the slowest it would take several times the current age of the universe.”

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ Apparently their response boils down to, that’s just the way things

are. Did the original paper in Nature by Ferraro et al. come up with any

better explanation, perhaps some law of nature that tweaks the evolutionary rate dial in a predictable way?

Globular star clusters that formed at the same cosmic time may have evolved rather differently from the dynamical point of view (because that evolution depends on the internal environment) through a variety of processes that tend progressively to segregate stars more massive than the average towards the cluster centre. Therefore clusters with the same chronological age may have reached quite different stages of their dynamical history (that is, they may have different ‘dynamical ages’). Blue straggler stars have masses greater than those at the turn-off point on the main sequence and therefore must be the result of either a collision or a mass-transfer event.

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ The fixed parameter in this story is the supposed ancient

date of cluster formation. So far, the variables are undefined: a “variety of processes”. However, that word “process” never appears in the rest of the paper. The authors referred to “the long-term effect of dynamical friction acting on the cluster binary population (and its progeny) since the early stages of cluster evolution,” but did not explain why that fraction should vary all over the map from cluster to cluster. With “crude approximations” they claimed some success for a few clusters.

It’s also not clear why the “dynamical age” should differ from the absolute age. A cluster should only have a true age. Despite their hubris, if the “dynamical age” appears young, what are they saying?

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ The signature of the parent

cluster’s dynamical evolution encoded in the BSS population has now been finally deciphered: the shape of the radial distribution of BSSs is a powerful indicator of dynamical age. A flat radial distribution of BSSs … indicates that dynamical friction has not yet had a major effect even in the innermost regions, and the cluster is still dynamically young.

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ The authors still don’t seem to understand the

issue. Why should dynamical friction (if it is a law of nature) work differently in different clusters? Isn’t this begging the question of dynamical age? Calling a cluster “dynamically young” because friction hasn’t yet pulled the BSS stars into the center is theory-laden – dependent on the notion that all globular clusters formed around the same time after the big bang. The authors did attempt independent confirmation:

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ The quantization into distinct age-families is of course an

oversimplification: in nature a continuous behaviour is expected and the position of rmin should vary with continuity as a sort of clock hand. This allows us to push our analysis further and define the first empirical clock able to measure the dynamical age of a stellar system from pure observational quantities (the ‘dynamical clock’): in the same way as the engine of a chronometer advances a clock hand to measure the flow of time, in a similar way dynamical friction moves rmin within the cluster, measuring its dynamical age. [Note: rmin refers to the radius of the portion of the distribution of blue stragglers beyond the cluster core].

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ Their “empirical clock,” however, is calibrated to two

other theory-laden models on how long a cluster should take to reach its relaxation state, based on the theory that globulars are ancient: i.e., “two theoretical estimates commonly used to measure the dynamical evolution timescales of a cluster, namely the central and the half-mass relaxation times”. But those models are said to be less precise than the new proposed model: “In fact, the radial distribution of BSSs simultaneously probes all distances from the cluster centre, providing a measure of the overall dynamical evolution and a much finer ranking of dynamical ages.”

04/20/23 57

Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ In the end, then, their taxonomy of

“dynamical ages” looks like special pleading to maintain big-bang and stellar-evolution theory, without independent support for believing it represents “the way things are,” other than the anomaly can be made to fit current thinking.

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ This episode serves as a demonstration of

how normal science is conducted in a post-Kuhnian world. To see why, you need to come at the article and the paper as a fair-minded skeptic. Don’t just take their word for it that clusters are ancient but have different dynamical histories: say, “Show me.” Are you convinced by their hand-waving attempts to rescue their theory?

04/20/23 59

Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ To a member of the guild working within the paradigm,

everything makes perfect sense. Guild members are not asking whether the paradigm is true. Instead, the name of their game is keeping the paradigm going. An anomaly shows up: blue stragglers that shouldn’t be there. Moreover, these BSS intruders are distributed all over the map from cluster to cluster: some concentrated at the center, some homogeneous with BSS at the edges. The “way things are” is not “the way things should be” if the paradigm were true. No problem; we’ll just invent a new parameter called “dynamical age” that is calibrated to the assumed age of the clusters; the more concentrated the BSS, the older the dynamical age compared to the cluster age. Very useful, isn’t it? It serves as a way to classify the clusters within the paradigm. Theory rescued.

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Globular Clusters Look Young and Old: Is This Scientific Explanation? 球状星团看起来年轻和老：这是科学的解释吗？ If this sounds like self-serving poppycock,

you have not yet been hoodwinked by “normal science.” You were thinking that science is supposed to be an honest search for the truth about the universe. How naive. If that were the goal of science, reporters would certainly not have regurgitated the oracles of the guild uncritically.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 Holly leaf shape may be due to epigenetic control – one of

several recent developments in the field of epigenetics. Epi-Deck the Halls: National Geographic reported that the

prickly outline of holly leaves appears to be an epigenetic response to predation. The same plant can have smooth leaves and prickly leaves. Browsing by animals sets off an epigenetic response, leading to the prickly outline, even though each leaf cell has the same genetic code.

Sex cells: A protein named Tet that erases epigenetic markers may be responsible for turning on the meiotic genes that switch regular cells into sperm or eggs, reported Nature on Dec. 20.

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 Gene accessibility: A paper in the journal Cell (Hihara et al.,

Dec. 13) found that local chromatin dynamics, including Brownian motion, plays a role in the accessibility of molecular machines to stretches of DNA. “We propose that this local nucleosome fluctuation is the basis for scanning genome information,” the authors said.

Large-scale organization: Another research article in Cell (Sandhu et al., Oct 25) discussed “Large-Scale Functional Organization of Long-Range Chromatin Interaction Networks.” These networks play important roles in transcription regulation. They are organized into “nonrandom spatial clustering” the authors dub “rich clubs,” communities and spokes. This large-scale organization helps repress mutations among vital genes, and “shapes functionally compartmentalized and error-tolerant transcriptional regulation of human genome in three dimensions.”

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 Add another dimension: Speaking of 3-D, a paper

in Science today (Dec 21) discussed alternative splicing in 4 dimensions. Alternative splicing “leads to different patterns of splicing that represent cell type–specific alternative interpretations of the genomic information,” the authors said. “Alternative splicing allows the shuffling of protein-coding domains or confers distinct sensitivity of the spliced mRNAs to regulatory factors.” Though evolutionary in tone, the article’s science concerned “modulating the scope of signaling, gene regulation, and protein-protein networks” that speak of organization and control.

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 The paper they referenced in the same issue

of Science by Barbosa-Morais et al. was also evolutionary, but the actual data do not require a common ancestry interpretation, especially since it concerned “vertebrate splicing codes.” The overall finding was that “overall organ AS[alternative splicing] profiles more strongly reflect the identity of a species than they do organ type.” For more on alternative splicing, see a PhysOrg entry, “Alternative splicing of RNA rewires signaling in different tissues, may contribute to species differences.”

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 Epigenetic islands: In Nature on Nov. 9, Dirk

Schübeler discussed “Epigenetic Islands in a Genetic Ocean.” He talked about the latest discoveries in methylation patterns: “This inheritability makes DNA methylation highly attractive as a potential means to store information in a form of epigenetic memory that regulates genes over developmental processes or in response to environmental conditions.”

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 Not parasites: In a Presidential Address

in Science Nov 9, Nina V. Federoff debunked the idea that transposable elements (TE) are parasites on the genome. TE’s comprise more than half of many mammalian genomes and were thought to be junk or selfish invaders:

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 My purpose here is to challenge the current, somewhat

pejorative, view of TEs as genomic parasites with the mounting evidence that TEs and transposition play a profoundly generative role in genome evolution. I contend that it is precisely the elaboration of epigenetic mechanisms from their prokaryotic origins as suppressors of genetic exchanges that underlies both the genome expansion and the proliferation of TEs characteristic of higher eukaryotes. This is the inverse of the prevailing view that epigenetic mechanisms evolved to control the disruptive potential of TEs. The evidence that TEs shape eukaryotic genomes is by now incontrovertible. My thesis, then, is that TEs and the transposases they encode underlie the evolvability of higher eukaryotes’ massive, messy genomes.

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 Systems biology meets

epigenetics: PhysOrg reported that some Swiss scientists are making progress understanding the interplay of epigenetic interactions with a systems biology approach. Combining both approaches with a computational model is providing insights into concepts like how a stem cell differentiates into a tissue cell, or how chromatin modifications affect gene expression.

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The Holly and the I.D. – News from Epigenetics Holly 和 I.D. - 表观遗传学新闻 Epigenetics is proving to be a fruitful field for

research, possibly as fruitful (or more so) than the discovery of the genetic code itself. As stated earlier (8/21/2012, 9/06/2012), it involves “codes upon codes” explaining how a human being can develop from a small set of genes through regulation, alternative splicing and post-transcriptional modifications. The proliferation of codes is inversely proportional to the credibility of Darwinism.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Skin Uses Master Control 皮肤使用主控制 It would be hard to see how evolution would deal with a

story about skin development. Maybe that’s why it was barely mentioned.

The story on Medical Xpress begins, The surface of your skin, called the epidermis, is

a complex mixture of many different cell types—each with a very specific job. The production, or differentiation, of such a sophisticated tissue requires an immense amount of coordination at the cellular level, and glitches in the process can have disastrous consequences. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a master regulator of this differentiation process.

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Skin Uses Master Control 皮肤使用主控制 Dr. Paul Khavari at Stanford described TINCR, the

master regulator, as a traffic copy directing precursor cells to their proper developmental fates like a traffic cop directing cars to parking spaces in a crowded lot. In this “entirely unique” system, the molecule is not a protein but a long, noncoding RNA (lncRNA). It works by stabilizing messenger RNA transcripts to “fine-tune gene expression.” The article said, “In this way TINCR may serve as a scaffold for many mRNAs involved in epidermal differentiation.”

The only mention of evolution was near the end:

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Skin Uses Master Control 皮肤使用主控制 “This effect is quite specific for epidermal

tissue,” said Khavari, “and it suggests that nature has evolved a simple mechanism to control the tissue-specific expression of a large number of genes.”

Needless to say, such a statement merely assumes evolution instead of explaining how a finely-tuned master control could have arisen by a blind, unguided process.

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Skin Uses Master Control 皮肤使用主控制 Evolutionists, please tell us how Darwinian

ideology helps in any way explain this phenomenon. Dr. Khavari appears to have been more intrigued by the complex, orderly process that looks designed: it involves sophisticated parts, it requires an immense amount of coordination, and it usually works well—otherwise there would be disastrous consequences. Assuming a purpose and finding it provides a better approach to biology than weaving imaginary tales about an assumed unobservable past.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 For year’s end, here’s a clean-out of astronomy

articles—from planetary science to cosmology—to motivate further inquiry.

Venus volcanoes: Science Daily asked, “Have Venusian Volcanoes Been Caught in the Act?” but spent most of the article talking about how difficult it is to find a smoking gun.

Night lights: A beautiful set of 39 images of the Earth at night was posted on Space.com. The images were taken by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The data was mapped over NASA’s Blue Marble images of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 A moon is born: With the triumphant title, “The Origin of the

Moon,” Science Magazine merely updated the ongoing rounds of computer models that try to account for Earth’s unique large and life-enabling moon, each with its suite of misfits to observations. Highlighting the latest 3 models, Alex Halliday remarked, “Distinguishing among these three models is going to involve further simulation and debate.”

Martian floods: An article on PhysOrg has an intriguing headline for a dry planet unable to sustain liquid water: “Vast systems of ancient caverns on Mars may have captured enormous floodwaters.”

Moons from rings: A new bottom-up theory of moon formation from ring systems was tried in Science Magazine Nov. 30 by Crida and Charnoz, “Formation of Regular Satellites from Ancient Massive Rings in the Solar System.”

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Kuiper belt comets: Nature claimed (Dec. 20)

that small Kuiper belt objects (objects beyond Neptune) are abundant enough to be a source for short-period comets.

Tidal heating: Icarus has a paper entitled “Spatial patterns of tidal heating,” with models showing the heat is not evenly dispersed. Mikhael Beuthe claims his model works for Europa, Io and Titan, but the abstract did not mention if it would work for Enceladus.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Europa geysers: The prominent flanking ridges on Europa are

examined in another paper on Icarus. Dombard and team rule out causes other than “a cryovolcanic model in which the growing ridge is underlain by a cryomagmatic sill that locally heats and thins the lithosphere.”

Pac-man and pac-woman: Another pac-man-like shape of heat distribution has been found on a Saturnian moon. Mimas was the first, and now Tethys has one. Joking away the mystery for the BBC News reporter, Carly Howett of Southwest Research Institute remarked, “The Saturn system — and even the Jupiter system — could turn out to be a veritable arcade of these characters.”

Oort cloud: Fouchard and team began a series in Icarus about the Oort Cloud. Part 1 deals with planetary perturbations.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 From dust to dust: Astrobiology Magazine touted dust grains

as the progenitors of planets (again). It’s not clear how astronomers could tell from a star light years away that “these dust grains are colliding with and adhering to each other, a process that will lead to their eventual formation into planets.” They might want to revisit the stickiness problem (dust grains don’t stick to each other) and realize that dust clumps lack the gravity to grow. Anyway, the reporter joyfully triumphed that “The researchers were fortunate to witness dust particles at a critical phase in their path to becoming a fully-grown planet in the protoplanetary disk.”

Star birth: On Dec. 6, Nature announced “A truly embryonic star,” claiming “The discovery of what may be the best example yet of a forming star caught in the moments just before birth.” One wonders what took so long.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Dark matters: The headline

on Space.com says, “Dark Matter Mystery May Soon Be Solved,” but the body of the article is less sanguine. One astronomer says, “If we don’t find it in this next round of experiments, I think everyone will be a bit discouraged.” The last part of the article is subtitled, “Keeping the dark matter hope alive.”

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Dark energies: “Is dark energy static or dynamic?”

Who cares? PhysOrg assumes somebody does, even though the hypothetical entity continues to defy description. If dynamic, whatever it is could evolve, the article posits. “While hypothesized dark energy can explain observations of the universe expanding at an accelerating rate, the specific properties of dark energy are still an enigma.” In another article on Science Daily, the BOSS survey looked at 48,000 quasars for its effects, whatever it is. Hopefully they cleaned all the known artifacts and distortions out of the signals. No one knows if they got the unknown ones out.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Galaxy upset: The title “Giant Black Hole

Could Upset Galaxy Evolution Models” on a Science Daily article begs the question that the model was standing up in the first place. As for the record-setting black hole, “At 17 billion times the mass of the Sun, its mass is much greater than current models predict — in particular since the surrounding galaxy is comparatively small,” the article worried.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Early supernovae: In Nature last month (Nov. 6),

Stephen Smartt said, “The discovery of two superluminous supernovae at large distances from Earth pushes the frontier of supernova studies to just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, and suggests that they may be common in the young Universe.” In fact, galaxies are found just 500 million years after the Big Bang, highlighting the problem of getting dense, clumpy structures from an expanding cloud of gas—the only thing the Big Bang could deliver—comparatively quickly in cosmological time. “Astronomers thrive in unexplored territory,” Smartt remarked.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Grand goal or grand claim: A Science

Magazine article (“Embers of the Distant Past, Nov. 30) begins, “Modern cosmology has come a long way in fulfilling its grand goal of reconstructing the entire history of the universe.” Skeptics might want to compare this claim with the critical analysis in Dismantling the Big Bang by Williams and Hartnett, who find multiple imaginary leaps over insurmountable problems at every major step.

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 All for one: One thing cosmologists don’t lack

is chutzpah. Penn State astronomers titled a press release last month (see also Science Daily), “The Beginning of Everything: New Paradigm Shift for the Infant Universe.” (Note: any paradigm shift implies the former paradigm is obsolete.) The press release features a new fad called “loop quantum cosmology.” The Penn State astronomers claim to take scientific knowledge even before the Planck era, all the way to the beginning – often claimed impossible by other astronomers.

04/20/23 91

Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Before the beginning: Speaking of chutzpah,

Marcus Chown at New Scientist took readers where no man has gone before: before the beginning. In “Before the big bang: something or nothing” (Dec. 3, subscription required), his imagination danced where angels had never tread. After a brief survey of modern cosmology, concluding that the universe had a beginning, Chown entertained that the universe popped into existence with a quantum fluctuation. He seemed to sense, though, that the theologians would be at the doorstep, so he ended,

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 So the next question is surely: where did the laws of

quantum theory come from? “We do not know,” admits [Alex] Vilenkin. “I consider that an entirely different question.” When it comes to the beginning of the universe, in many ways we’re still at the beginning.

That’s one way to escape the Kalam Cosmological Argument.* Just say “We do not know.”

*Kalam: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe had a cause. Corollary: Since the Cause brought time, space and matter into existence, the Cause had to be eternal and exist outside of those entities. (See series of objections to the Kalam by William Lane Craig on YouTube.)

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Astronomy Grab Bag 天文集锦 Marcus, we have a better position than ignorance. It’s

called knowledge. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This answers to all the observations and gives purpose and meaning to existence. What’s your problem? If you’re more comfortable with ignorance emanating from people who admit they do not know, so be it. Human observation can only take one so far. It cannot in principle go before the beginning. Secular astronomy is therefore stuck with ignorance. The cause that was there before the beginning had to be without beginning. He is the only possible source of knowledge. Jesus, the Logos, who was in the beginning with God (John 1:1–3), said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Ignorance is not bliss. Choose truth; choose freedom.

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Pastor Chui


[email protected]

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Red Blood Cells Are Frisbees, Tanks and Wheels 红血细胞是飞碟，坦克和轮 Cells as commonplace as red blood cells still keep

researchers wondering how they perform their job so well.

Red blood cells (RBCs), also called erythrocytes, are unique for their biconcave shape, lack of a nucleus, and high concentration of hemoglobin. Their main task is to deliver nutrients and oxygen (picked up in the lungs) to all the cells of the body. To accomplish this task, they need to negotiate all the blood vessels, from the superhighways of main arteries to the single-file capillaries. Their unique biconcave shape enables them to do this – but it’s more than shape.

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Red Blood Cells Are Frisbees, Tanks and Wheels 红血细胞是飞碟，坦克和轮 In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences (PNAS, Dec. 3 issue), Dupire, Socol and Viallat said that the deformation state of the RBC is not known, nor is its stability. They observed the dynamics of RBCs in a dextrose solution with video cameras at 25 frames per second to watch that happens. Individual cells transition from a rolling state to a Frisbee-like spinning state to a “tank-treading” state in free flow, depending on the shear rate. The cells transition into these modes that are more efficient than “flipping” or tumbling against the current.

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Red Blood Cells Are Frisbees, Tanks and Wheels 红血细胞是飞碟，坦克和轮 In all cases, the cells have “shape memory” that pops

the cell back into its biconcave shape when a deforming force is removed. This appears to be the most natural, low-energy state. The biconcave shape is more deformable than a sphere. The shape memory depends on “rheological properties” of the cell, including the viscosity of the interior fluid, the membrane, and the internal cytoskeleton. In free flowing blood, RBCs can sometimes stack like coins. Their dynamical behavior affects the viscosity of flowing blood.

Even with their observations and videos, the researchers realize there is still much to learn:

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Red Blood Cells Are Frisbees, Tanks and Wheels 红血细胞是飞碟，坦克和轮 Our results raise new questions about the behavior of

viscoelastic particles in a viscous fluid at very low Reynolds number. Future models and simulations on RBCs should consider that the axis of revolution of the cell does not necessarily lie in the shear plane. Whether the observed orientational behavior can be explained by the minimum energy dissipation, as speculated by Jeffery, is still an open question, and we hope our work will stimulate new theoretical numerical studies. We also hope it will generate works on the strain energy of tank-treading buckled shapes of elastic capsules, starting from a quasi-spherical spheroid stress-free shape. Finally, the high stability of the biconcave RBC shape makes analytical shape preserving models (AFV, SS) very attractive.

Their work thus represents an incremental step in a complex subject regarding fluid dynamics, shape dynamics and shape memory.

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Red Blood Cells Are Frisbees, Tanks and Wheels 红血细胞是飞碟，坦克和轮 In an old (c. 1962) Moody Institute of Science film about blood

called Red River of Life, Dr. Irwin Moon used slide rules, calculators and an early IBM computer model to show that the optimum shape to balance volume against surface area was a biconcave shape exactly like a red blood cell (see the episode on YouTube). In a later Moody Institute of Science film series called Wonders of God’s Creation (initially released singly as Distinctively Human in 1987), blood was likened to a system of canals in a city, bringing free goods, food and tools to every home. We should certainly be thankful for this river of life inside us. Here we are in 2013, many years after those films were made, and there is still more to learn. The closer one looks at life, the more amazing it becomes. As Dr. Moon said in that early film, “To me, the only adequate explanation is intelligent design.”

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sermons from science -- jan 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 1 月

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