Alfred Russel Wallace and Evolution

Instead of Darwinism, we almost had Wallacism. Alfred Russel Wallace was a contemporary of Darwin, and arrived at very similar ideas on evolution by natural selection. Perhaps they were both influence by Comte de Buffon. Like other evolutionists at that time, he had little or no formal scientific training (Darwin studied theology), but Wallace did a passel of fieldwork and did some real science. When Chuck found out about Alfie's ideas, he hurried up and had his book published first.

Alfred Russel Wallace, circa 1895 via Wikimedia Commons

One major difference between Wallace and Darwin was the teleological (purpose and design) views of Wallace. For Darwin and his disciples, any hint of a Creator was bad medicine. Don't be disunderstanding me now, the two gents rode for the evolution brand for the most part, but Wallace was not an atheist. Although Darwin and Wallace had some disagreements, I am not aware that they went on letter-writing campaigns to discredit each other or say, "You're a liar!" Rational thinking does not work that way.

Wallace supported "Spiritualism" (really, it's spiritism) like A. Conan Doyle and other people in Victorian times. This spirit stuff detracted from the status of his work as a naturalist.

It is interesting that Wallace could be considered a forerunner of the Intelligent Design movement. I need to reign in a moment here and explain something. Biblical creationists tend to distance ourselves from the ID movement per se because their organizations reject unguided natural processes and believe that something, somewhere, was behind it. They do not proclaim the Creator as revealed in the Bible; their adherents include folks from several religions as well as agnostics. However, creationists use intelligent design examples and arguments quite frequently, but within a creationary framework. Seems that Alfred would have fit right in with some of the ID organizations that exist today.

It is interesting that Alfred rejected what is now the pseudoscience of astrobiology. When Percival Lowell said there was life on Mars and someone up there built canals, Wallace debunked the claims and also professed disbelief that life existed beyond Earth.

A few years ago, I posted material about Professor Michael Flannery, author of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life and his short documentary, Darwin's Heretic. Now we have some new material for you. Flannery has a new book, Nature's Prophet, and he was on Real Science Radio for an interview. It's in two parts, totaling just over an hour. Free to listen online or download, and there is some additional information at the site:

• Stigler's Law Aside, Shouldn't Darwinism Be Wallacism?
• Stigler's Law Aside, Shouldn't Darwinism Be Wallacism? Pt 2

I have no idea if Flannery is a biblical creationist, but this interview was both interesting and informative. Unfortunately, I have to point out that while RSR host Bob Enyart has some excellent material supporting biblical creation, he supports "open theism", so I recommend suspicion of some of his theology.





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More Plain Truth about Planation Surfaces

Ever notice how some mountains are not pointy on top, but look like a giant sander came down and flattened them out? Those are planation surfaces. They span large areas in many cases. Geologists reckon that huge amounts of sediment has been removed from the mountains, but secular scientists have no idea how — and why it is not happening today.

Cape Breton Highlands National Park
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Dr. Wilson (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Geomorphology (the way the land gets shaped) of planation surfaces is very pronounced up in Canada, eh? Cypress Hills have a very big and very flat plateau, and they provide useful information about the Genesis Flood. Uniformitarian geologists say that something "looks old", but that is not science, that is opinion. After all, they have nothing with which to compare something and choose "young" or "old". Hint: the earth is young.

During the Recessive Stage of the Flood the mountains rose up and the valleys sank. This caused huge quantities of rock and dirt to wash into the new oceans of the world. The magnitude of this, such as the estimated thickness of sediment eroded, is largely undisputed among geologists of all persuasions. For example, it is accepted that erosion has removed about 6,000 m (20,000 ft) of rock from the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern USA. They are therefore said to ‘look old’—because the conventional (uniformitarian) notion is that it happened gradually, over millions of years, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

To read the rest, click on "Testimony to the Flood — A remarkable planation surface in Canada". You may also like to see "Geologists Puzzled by Planation Surfaces".



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Design in Early Fruit Fly Development

A while ago, we had a short article on fruit flies, how they defy evolution and affirm creation. My wife detests the things. I have a slightly higher tolerance, but get a mite cranky when they try to fly up my nose. They are tiny, so pictures need to be magnified. Those of us who want to avoid fruit flies can avoid bringing fruit home, but they are attracted to other things as well. Because they eat decaying material, they are considered beneficial. Want to just wait until they die off? Sure, they live less than two months. But boy do they breed! So, it's not so easy.

Fruit fly liking a coffee fruit / Image credit: USDA-ARS
(Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents)

Enough about the annoyance part. Now that scientists have the equipment to see tiny things, and are learning more about proteins and mRNAs, we can see that they testify to the genius of the Master Engineer. There is no logical place for evolutionary ideas in the life cycle of the lil' ol' fruit fly. I have to warn you about something. The following article is made available here, and was written for people with a strong science background, not us reg'lar folk. The author his his doctorate in biochemistry.

While design may be seen in all living creatures as well as many nonliving objects, the early development of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, clearly shows that the making of a “simple” fruit fly exhibits forethought. The Lord had to predetermine where the head (rostral or anterior), the tail (caudal or posterior), the back (dorsal) and belly (ventral), all the organs, and appendages would be in the finished product. In other words, God had to envision what the final product would look like before beginning construction, then bring together in the proper juxtaposition all the pieces necessary for construction.

The entire can be found at "Early Development of the Fruit Fly as Evidence of Design".



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Astrobiology and the Other Richter Scale

Purveyors of universal common ancestor evolution cannot explain the origin of life on Earth, so they give the problem to their imaginary invisible friends, the space aliens. Evolutionists presuppose their belief system, and then insist that life must have not only originated, but evolved somewhere far away. Then they want to commence with conversation. That's assuming the aliens exist, are advanced enough to receive and send signals, everyone's using the proper signals, they want to talk in the first place, and so on. Not to mention the time lag, since they are supposedly zillions of light years away.

Credit: Pixabay / VirajTamakuwala

There was a time that people played the odds (the so-called Fermi Paradox) and insisted that life had to exist on other worlds. Problem is, the more scientists learn about the hazards of space and the "habitable zone", the less likely those odds are going to play out. From a biblical creationist perspective, most of us reject ETs on both scientific and theological grounds.

Some of those jaspers get all het up about alien life, saying how it will be one of the most important discoveries for humanity. Maybe they'll dazzle us with their know-how. I lack belief that such a claim is true. Farmers will still have to farm, medical professionals will still have to do medical stuff, delivery drivers will still have to drive, politicians will still have to do whatever it is they do — you get the idea. I also think that if we found alien life, they would still go around doing alien stuff like they were before.

Reading the speculations about the search for life out there — well, it seems increasingly desperate. There is a prairie schooner-full of words like "maybe", "could be", "perhaps", "scientists think possibly", and so on. It sounds like schoolchildren playing make-believe, which is not such a faulty analogy. F'rinstance, Jupiter may have been a watery world before it became a gas giant, and water means life, hey presto! Or, globular cluster like Omega Centauri could — oh, wait. No they couldn't. You can read about these and other stories by clicking on "Astrobiology Survives on Passionate Hope", then you can come back for the next item, below.

If I told my boss that although I had zero production, I had papers describing how wonderful it would be if I actually worked, just give me more time and eventually I'll produce results — you can guess how long I'd be employed. Alien enthusiasts want our tax dollars for a "science" that has no results and really has no right to exist; you can't have a science without something to study, old son. They had to move on and go with donations, but they hope to get more government handouts like other Darwinists who produce nothing. 

They even has a scale of importance, and this importance is entirely subjective. Sure is a lot of work to deny special creation and to reject the Creator who gave us life! Dr. Henry Richter has a list of important factors for habitability, and making a "Richter Scale" with reasonable estimates makes ET unlikely to phone home, have a home, or exist in the first place.

Should the government fleece taxpayers again for a project with almost zero chance for success? Consider two “Richter scales” that should inform hopes.

NASA has gritted its teeth ever since SETI went on the government-funding chopping block in the 1990s. They keep titillating the public with hopes for finding their invisible friends in space. Microbes are not enough, even though NASA gets loads of money for “astrobiology,” the big-tent search for even one-celled life. They want someone to talk to. Let’s see how they express their motivations:

To finish reading about all this far-out bioastrology stuff, click on "Richter Scaling: Is Funding for Astrobiology and SETI Justified?"



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Galapagos Islands Showcase Creation

Devotees of Darwin can head down yonder to Ecuador and take a jaunt into the Pacific Ocean to see the sacred site known as the Galapagos Islands. Even though we hear about all the scientific research being conducted, people take vacations there. The Bearded Buddha made many observations there while making his voyage on the Beagle, but made seriously erroneous conclusions.

Credit: RGBStock / Stella Bogdanic

One writer referred to the Galapagos Islands as a "laboratory for evolution". Unfortunately, Darwin's disciples deceive others as well as themselves by conflating variation with evolution, implying dust-to-deceiver evolution. What we see is a passel of different critters, and varieties of those critters, just as the Master Engineer designed them to have. We do not observe evolution.

A recent Livescience article is entitled “The Galápagos Islands: Laboratory of Evolution.” It addresses, among other things, “unique examples of plant and animal life.” The islands contain a variety of biota (the animal and plant life in a particular area), such as the Galápagos giant tortoise, sea lions, the varieties of finches, waved albatrosses, penguins, marine iguanas, and hundreds of native plants. A wide variety of unique species are normal for environments around the world, but where is evidence for real, demonstrative, vertical evolution that the title of the article alludes to? 

To read the rest of this short but interesting article, click on "Are the Galápagos Islands a Laboratory of Evolution?"




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Rewriting Dinosaur Evolution Again

Once again, the hands at the Darwin Ranch have to put in overtime at the propaganda mill. This is because the story dinosaur evolution needs to be reconfigured and rewritten yet again. This post will link to three articles — I have five or six available, but that is asking too much of y'all.

Original image: The Passion of Creation by Leonid Pasternak, 1880s

"Why does it need rewriting again, Cowboy Bob?"

Evolutionists and other old-earth believers have their anti-creation assumptions and presuppositions. Then, they commence to plugging in data where it fits. When the data are recalcitrant to evolution, they torture the facts until they confess to whatever is needed. This includes changing the storyline. In today's exciting episode, we see how the narrative of dinosaur evolution keeps on shifting.

What really takes the rag off the bush is when Darwinists claim that they have evidence for evolution that actually works against evolution, or get all fired up over facts that simply lay there doing nothing. In this first article, we have a nice change where papers on largest dinosaur foot ever discovered prudently omitted evolution. We also have a huge dinosaur found in China that causes consternation, "appearing much earlier than expected" and forces timeline rewriting. Another big boy was discovered that also fouls up the timelines because of its development.

You have to squint hard to see the image of Charles Darwin in these bones. It works better if you close your eyes.

Evolutionists do not ‘own’ the history of dinosaurs, even though they pretend to. Do these fossils support the idea that dinosaurs evolved from smaller, simpler animals?

You can read about the three items listed above, and more, by clicking on "Dinosaur Era Fossils Fail to Support Evolution". Our panel of experts agree: no evidence for evolution.



Next up, we have a big pterosaur that evolutionists call "primitive". Why is it primitive? Because it is in the strata where critters existed that Darwinists have arbitrarily assigned "primitive" status. Also, a tinhorn managed to bring global warming into the story!

A large pterosaur in Utah is 65 million Darwin Years older than thought, but was already built for flying.

Very few pterosaurs are known from Triassic rock; this one is amazingly well preserved. What does evolutionary paleontologist Steven Brusatte think of it? He tells the BBC News,

Find out what Steve said, and more about bad pterosaur tales, by clicking on "Good-Flying Cosmopolitan Pterosaur Found Earlier Than Thought".

Finally, the first article linked above touched on the subject of a longneck dinosaur being found in the "wrong place". This one goes into more detail, and shows how Darwinoids are on the prod because the facts are a mite recalcitrant to their metaphysical opinions — that is, their beliefs are not based on actual science, but on rewriting history.

One of their most surprising results was that the new dinosaur was found in rocks well below all other similar diplodocoid discoveries. This fossil stretches the global time span of sauropods to include the early Middle Jurassic—about 174 million years ago, according to secular thinking. However, most diplodocoids, and sauropods in general, do not appear in strata until the Late Jurassic System which was supposedly about 160 million years ago.

To read the entire article, click on "Diplodocoid Dinosaurs Found in Unexpected Place". All of these instances of facts slapping leather with a good story could be mitigated if scientists had the proper starting point. Deep time, evolution, and other creation-defying assumptions simply do not work. The truth is that the world was created recently, and the Genesis Flood explains what has been found far better than secular beliefs.



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Physical Death Provides for Life

"Sure is mighty hot, Luke. You sure we can make it to the next town?"

"Yep. Not much father, Clem. Then you, me, and these hosses will get watered."

"Them vultures look impatient for us to give up the ghost."

"They gotta eat too, ya know. But it won't be us."

Luke was right, and after plenty of water and cooling down, Clem commenced to cogitating on the physical part of life and death. We see carrion birds eating roadkill, and know that some scavengers are not too proud to drag off a carcass as a present for the wife and kids. But there is a great deal of activity in death of which we are unaware.

Credit: US National Park Service / Sally King (usage does not imply endorsement of site contents)

Our Creator knew that with sin, death would enter the world (Romans 5:12). Things die, but can't just lay there. He made provision for them to go away — eventually. It's interesting that some of the microscopic organisms that help creatures survive also help break them down. Sort of like working at a gathering and then having to help with the cleanup detail afterward. No chance of fossilization happening under normal conditions, old son.

Now I'm going to warn you that the disgust factor is very high in the rest of this post. Scavengers are not the only things benefiting from death. There are microbes in the decay process, the patch of land gets fertilized, predators eat scavengers, and so on. The whole process is both disgusting and fascinating. Even more interesting is that Jesus died, but his body did not have decay before he arose from the dead — which fulfilled prophesy (Psalm 16:10, Acts 13:37).

By the way, I reckon that people who get afraid of the "zombie apocalypse", where dead people attack the living, seem to put science aside, and know nothing of the necrobiome. If decay stops, then it's magic or aliens, and you have just another sci-fi horror story. But I'm just speculating here.

Quick show of hands. How many of you have spent time watching an animal decay? Anyone? Unless you live on a farm, the closest you’ve come is probably a squashed squirrel or skunk. You catch a flash of innards as you drive by and that’s enough. Yuck!

But all vertebrates (animals with backbones) go through a similar process when they die. In fact, by all appearances, God put in place a sophisticated system to deal with dead things. Death wasn’t part of the original “very good” world (Genesis 1–3), but we can be glad that after Adam’s sin brought death into the world, the Creator made sure dead animals get absorbed back into the dirt.

For more "yucks" (but still a very interesting subject), click on "Death's Cleanup Crew". 




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