Odds n Ends (5)

Good Day to you (snow and nasty wind here in Minnesota this morning). Here are the stories I found interesting from the past week:

 

1. Best-selling author Joel Rosenberg gives 4 Signs of the End-Times on Glenn Beck last night. Perhaps the leading voice of Pre-Trib/Pre-Millennialism end-times views is writer Joel Rosenberg and his new book 'Dead Heat' was on cable news shows of Glenn Beck last night. Here is his list of 4 warning signs Jesus' return is near:
   

• A Dictator appears in Russia who threatens Israel;
  
• An speedy building of the city of 'Babylon';
  
• Re-building of the 3^rd Temple in Jerusalem;
  
• Missiles striking Israel from Hamas.
  

Joel Rosenberg's website (www.joelrosenberg.blogspot.com) has a portion of the interview from Glenn Beck's show.

 

1. Increase in "Plague of Autism" may just be change in reporting methods. There is more evidence this month demonstrating that we are not, in fact, presently suffering through an age of increased incidence of autism, but rather as the definition of autism is refined, we discover individuals who were previously misdiagnosed… Using today's criteria, the researchers found nearly a quarter of the participants to have an autistic disorder rather than one based on spoken language. "Our study shows pretty direct evidence to support the theory that changes in diagnosis may contribute towards the rise in autism," says Dorothy Bishop, the lead on the new study. "These were children that people were saying were not autistic in the 1980s, but when we talk to their parents now about what they were like as children, it's clear that they would be classified as autistic now." http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/increase-autism-due-only-changes-diagnosis
   

 

1. New chip will let an IPOD store 500,000 songs. Hey, I like this one! No more worrying about whether or not to download every song from a CD? I'm in – Here's the link: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3728060.ece. "Mobile phones, iPods and other consumer devices may soon be able to hold a hundred times more information than they do at present thanks to a breakthrough in storage technology…"
   

   
    

2. Major Merck clinical trial was cancelled when vaccine may have actually increased the chances of people developing Aids.. Most scientists involved in Aids research believe that a vaccine against HIV is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunization against the virus may never be possible, according to an unprecedented poll conducted by 'The Independent'. Nearly two thirds believed that an HIV vaccine will not be developed within the next 10 years and some of them said that it may take at least 20 more years of research before a vaccine can be used to protect people either from infection or the onset of Aids. But a substantial minority of the scientists admitted that an HIV vaccine may never be developed. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-it-time-to-give-up-the-search-for-an-aids-vaccine-814737.html.

What are the Implications of the Evolution of Malaria/HIV

What are the implications of what I previously described in man’s battle against malaria and HIV? In both malaria and HIV (Prof. Behe also examines e-coli) we see that evolution does assist a cell in fighting off man-made drugs. Evolution helps by making one or two point changes in an amino acid sequence (amino acids make up the proteins who are the workers in a cell). But from this great sample of evidence, we see that evolution does NOT make new machinery in a cell, and does not make anything new.

So what is the conclusion that we can draw as to Darwinism’s claim that beneficial small changes over time (random mutation/variation) will succeed in future generations and be added to through natural selection (the short formula used is RM + NS = Evolution). The claim is that through successive generations these small changes will result in greater changes, ultimately resulting in all that is contained within humans beings.

But does this make sense? I don’t think it does. Darwinists claim that everything starts from what was contained on early Earth: rock, water and sunshine, all of which are dead, non-living materials. So how do we get living cells from non-living things like rock and water? The Darwinists claim is that by adding something like electricity a real life “Frankenstein” can be made to come to life. I hope to discuss this more in future posts. But for now, let me say that it is FOOLISH to believe that intelligence (specifically human intelligence) can come from non-life. Not even today’s best of Designers can accomplish this, and it is foolish on its face to believe this happened through random forces in Earth’s past.

And the great benefit of Prof. Behe’s ‘Edge of Evolution’ is that it shows what are the limits of Random Mutation. So besides common sense/reason telling us we are the result of a Designed, we also see that the scientific evidence clearly shows that Darwinism cannot make progressively more complex living things. The evidence shows that larger beaks can be developed in a Galapagos finch. The evidence also shows that malaria or HIV can defeat most drugs used to fight it, through the small changes to a protein’s amino acid sequence. But that’s it – Darwinism cannot create anything as complex as a brain, a central nervous system, or sexual organs. Again, the answer seems too obvious to dwell upon.

And added to this is that the math does not add up for Darwinists. When we see 1 trillion malaria cells in an infected person, and 500 million people infected each year, we see an enormous amount of living cells going through the process of Darwinism. The number of malaria cells produced in a single year is roughly equal to 100 times the number of all the mammals that have ever lived on Earth (!!!). Let me say this again – All of the mammals that have lived on Earth does not equal even 1% of a single year’s production of malaria cells. And so, if we are going to see evolution do something before our eyes, it would be done in the cells of malaria or HIV or E-Coli. But Darwinism has done nothing.

So could we see the large diversity of mammals (I believe I read that there are 5,300 different mammal species) being created over the last 200 million years? No, of course not – think about the math: If malaria has had a two point change in its amino acid sequence to fight off the drug Chloroquine only 10 times over the past 50 years, what are the odds of any single mammal developing anything greater than a 2 point change? Science teaches us that it can’t happen.

So my conclusion is that the Darwininian process of Random Mutation/Variation is only a minor process. It is helpful in fighting off manmade drugs that are attacking it. But evolution is not a Creator, it cannot develop brains, a circulatory system, or anything this complex. And so, if life’s complexity is beyond the Edge of Evolution, this means that some sort of Designer was involved. And the Designer is not unknown to us here living in the 21st century: He is the triune God of the Bible. As Genesis 1:1 says – In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…

Is the Evolution of HIV different from Malaria?

In my last post, I provided a brief description of the battle between man and malaria. Malaria is the best studied example of evolution for a simple reason: numbers. With so many people infected and up to 1 trillion malaria cells in an infected person, science has learned much about fighting malaria. But malaria is still winning the battle, still killing 1 million people each year. And the best drug that has been developed is Chloroquine. But malaria has found a way to counter even Chloroquine – with the odds of developing resistance to Chloroquine roughly one in a hundred billion billion. Written in shorthand this is 1 in 10²⁰. But perhaps the study of HIV has revealed something more or different.

HIV is a virus attacking cells of a person’s immune system, while the P. falciparum / malaria is a eukaryotic cell, which typically has a cell nucleus with DNA in the nucleus. With HIV being the simplest form of life, a virus, this means that it is much less complicated than the malaria cell. While malaria has thousands of genes, HIV has only 9 genes, and only 1/1000th of the DNA information. But HIV is a mutational freak: it has a mutation rate 10,000 times faster than malaria. This is an enormous tragedy throughout the world where millions have been killed by it. So does the simplicity of HIV (being only a virus) along with a very high mutation rate mean that evolution will work more powerfully in HIV? Again, as with malaria the answer is a clear: NO.

So what do we see from the large amounts of scientific research spent on studying HIV? Yes, because of the high mutation rate, it is even more able to resist the drugs used against it. This is why a drug cocktail is used to fight HIV – so as to raise the chance against HIV’s high mutation rate. But this is similar to what scientists discovered in their research about malaria. But otherwise, HIV is “a complete stick-in-the-mud”, the only changes are “biochemically trivial”. There have been no biochemical changes in the virus at all.

While HIV has huge population numbers and intense selective pressure (because of man’s use of drugs against it), evolution works in single and double (and because of the high mutation rate, even more) point mutations, but there are no new useful protein-protein interactions,, and no new molecular machines. HIV has not discovered a way to enter different kinds of cells, beside the immune cells it attacks. It has not developed any new way to interact with other proteins, and nothing has happened at the molecular level: no new machinery, no new gene duplications that could lead to a new function. BOTTOM LINE: While Darwinists loudly celebrate studies of finch beaks, showing the most modest of changes over time as the finches’ food supply changes. But here we have genetic studies over thousands upon thousands of generations, of trillions upon trillions of organisms, with nothing of biochemical significance being shown.

Again, I am using Prof. Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution book as my source. Next time, I will try and draw some conclusions and tie together what this impressive amount of scientific evidence shows.