The Wandering Albatross is a Stool Pigeon

We have a pair of articles to ponder today. First, we can take another look at how the Master Engineer designed the wandering albatross (who is reluctant to ask for directions). Expect to see an adult weighing in the neighborhood of 18 pounds (8.16 kg), with a wing span of 10 feet (305 cm.) That's a big birdie.

Credit: Flickr / dfaulder (CC BY 2.0)

The albatross was designed to ride the air currents and travel huge distances over its lifetime, but becoming airborne requires far more energy than flying. They also need to make decisions and adjustments for weather patterns and deal with high-speed winds. There was a recent study about how the albatross uses the wind more than experts previously realized.

Wandering albatrosses have the largest wingspan of any living bird, so they live much of life soaring above the oceans. With their wings—and a lot of winds—it is no wonder that their use of wind-power would be studied by scientists, as a recent report illustrates. And, because albatross males are bigger, they need more wind.

To finish reading, glide over to "Wandering Albatross: Wide Wings on the Winds". (A similar article can be found at "The Energy-Efficient Albatross".) I'd be much obliged if you'd come back for the next article.

The term "stool pigeon" is not used much nowadays, but it usually refers to an information. This was often a criminal who would make a deal with law enforcement about activities of a criminal gang and such. This same wandering albatross has been collateral damage from illegal fishing activities in international waters. You'd think that there is no law beyond a country's limits, but there are treaties in place regarding overfishing, which threatens the populations of fish.

In a bit of serendipity, special tracking units were placed on birds to signal their locations. Although they didn't respond to "One-Adam-Bird, One-Adam-Bird, check for furtive behavior...", the signals also helped track down illegal activities.

Recently, albatrosses were used for a surprising and unintended purpose: catching criminals.

On behalf of BBC News, Samantha Patrick reported on her tagged and satellite-tracked albatrosses. . .  

These albatrosses help Patrick gather information on fish-poaching pirates who are routinely guilty of harming albatrosses as by-catch casualties. (“By-catch” means that one species is accidentally caught while fishing for another species.)

. . . 

The spy-like surveillance program began, Patrick says, as an attempt to track the albatrosses who were vulnerable to fishing by-catch risks in the open ocean.

You can observe the full article by clicking on "Albatrosses Aid Law Enforcement". Albatross lives matter.



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No Evolution Needed for Plagues

My prospector friend Stormie Waters was heading out Folly Road, but she was woolgathering and not paying attention so she missed her turn-off. Out past Stinking Lake, near Deception Pass, almost to the Darwin Ranch when she met up with Jacqueline Hyde. For some reason, they commenced to jawing about evolution and plagues.

Original image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Modified with oil painting effect from FotoSketcher
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As I heard about it, Jacqueline was saying that the hands at the Darwin Ranch are trying again to make everything about evolution, like they are doing with the COVID-19. Those sidewinders should learn that evolution corrupts science. There were two studies released in the week of July 20, 2020 regarding plagues and diseases. One involved mosquitoes that involved speculations that were self-refuting, the other was about smallpox and the activities of viruses. Instead of applying evolution, the studies would have made sense if the researchers weren't locked into their old-earth naturalism and used recent creation for their framework.

Smallpox and mosquitoes illustrate how diseases can arise quickly and spread through human populations.

This year, or late in 2019, a virus jumped from an animal host (probably a bat) to humans, and within months, the world is suffering the consequences of SARS-CoV-2. Is this an example of “evolution”? We can see from two other plagues reported in science news this week that pathogenicity can arise quickly by gene inactivation or opportunism – not evolution.

To read the rest, click on "Plagues Can Arise Quickly Without Evolution".



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The Puzzle of Flightless Birds

Both biblical creationists and the disciples of Darwin need to explain the source of flightlessness in some birds. Some evolutionists have the paralogical remark that birds "acquired" flightlessness. Sure, pard, and millions of people acquired unemployment because of COVID-19 shutdowns.

Tinamou art by Joseph Smit, 1895, then modified at Big Huge Labs

Many of us are aware of the ostrich, kiwi, greater rhea, and other birds that don't seem to care that they are not airborne. There are many of them in diverse places. Darwinists evosplain this through the secular miracle of convergent evolution — which means they don't have a clue. Interesting that evolution is supposed to go from simple to complex, but they claim loss of traits is evolution as well. Strange.

It's acknowledged that losing the ability to fly is not too difficult, but evolutionists are not only confounded by the origin of flight itself, but going down Mexico way, the tinamou reminds them that they have to explain how it regained the ability to fly. The evidence from genetic switches supports the work of the Master Engineer, who apparently front-loaded critters with abilities to be turned off and on when their environments needed them — or not.

Some organisms in nature have lost an organ or the ability to use an organ. This is commonly observed in insects that have lost their wings on islands and blind cave fish.

. . .

The origin of flightless birds, especially those found on islands, is also a challenge because evolutionists believe it is a form of evolution. Flightless birds are known from Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, islands of the south-west Pacific, South America, and elsewhere. Many of these birds went extinct during the past 2,000 years, likely because of human hunting. . . . Moreover, Feduccia, an evolutionary ornithologist, notes that there are or were flightless birds on numerous islands across the South Pacific—at least one flightless species on almost every large island, including the remote Hawaiian Islands.

To read the entire article, fly on over to "The origin of flightless birds".





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Evolutionists Misrepresenting Biblical Creationists — Part 1

Naturalists execrate what biblical creationists believe and teach. We get that. They misrepresent and even lie about us, often appealing to "legitimate scientific sources" (meaning atheistic naturalism) and inefficient peer review. It is worse when professing Christians ride for the Darwin brand.

Least weasel image by FreeDigitalImages.net / Phil_Bird

As we have seen in other posts, peer review has numerous problems, including the reproducibility crisis, bad papers being passed, citing of citing of poor documentation, and more. Peer review is by no means a guarantee of truth and accuracy. Add misrepresentation to the mix and things get worse.

Some theistic evolutionists decided to slap leather with Dr. Nathaniel T. Jeanson, author of Replacing Darwin, and not only put words in his mouth (and other creationists), but blatantly misrepresented what he teaches. Despite inaccuracies and glaring omissions, it passed peer review. Dr. Jeanson indicates that these evolutionists are inadvertently supporting his point.

When mainstream reporters ask me to explain these survey results, they like to ask whether I believe in conspiracies. Do I think there is a vast conspiracy among scientists to suppress the truth about human origins? Do young-earth creationists like myself reject science altogether—as if science itself was a conspiratorial illusion?

. . .

In the US public educational system, the courts have effectively forbidden the teaching of [specific creationist claims]. Not surprisingly, since the vast majority of scientists are trained in this public education system, they are completely unaware of the existence of my conclusions.” How can people reject methods, data, and conclusions when they’ve been shielded from them their whole life?

I’ve found this to be especially true for non-Christian evolutionists—even when explicitly invited to engage with creationists. 

But what about evolutionists who do wrestle with creationist views—and then reject them? What if those people also happen to be professing Christians?

To read the full article, visit "When Evolutionists Help Creationists Make Their Case: A Shocking New Case of Professional Criticism Gone Bad". You may be interested in this video discussion with Dr. Jeanson, and my article, "Peer-Reviewed Hoaxes and Postmodernism".



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New Discoveries in Sequencing Human DNA

No need to get excited, this post is not going to saddle you with technical details. The science of genetics that was initiated by Gregor Mendel (peas be upon him) has been growing in recent years, and recent developments are unfriendly to universal common ancestor evolution.

Credit: CSIRO/Garry Brown (CC by 3.0)
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In their determination to establish that humans are related to apes, the chimpanzee genome was sequenced. Only, not really. It was very incomplete so it was stitched together. (Some atheists have lied outright to protect their faith, one even claiming that every creature has had its genome sequenced!) With better and more honest science and technology, the gap between human and chimp DNA is widening. New areas of the human genome can be more accurately sequenced now, and creationists expect more bad news for evolutionists.

Most people might be surprised to learn that the human genome has not been fully sequenced. Gaps still remain that have not yet been bridged because of the nature of the DNA sequence coupled with past limitations on DNA sequencing technology. Nevertheless, a study has just been published using new and improved technologies that have allowed for the first complete sequence of a human chromosome.

. . .

Because the older style DNA sequencing produced very short snippets of sequence and certain regions of chromosomes had groups of DNA letters (words) that were repeated over and over, it was difficult to computationally reconstruct long contiguous repetitive DNA stretches. New, long-read technologies that produce extremely long snippets of DNA are now allowing these difficult regions to be traversed.

To read the article, click on "First Human Chromosome Fully Sequenced".





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Lunacy from the Moon for Secular Scientists

It seems that our moon is trolling materialists. Secular astronomers and cosmologists have no verisimilar explanations regarding its origin, but they cling to faulty stories rather than admit that it was created recently along with the rest of the solar system.

Credit: NASA / ISS / Col. Jeff Williams (usage does not imply endorsement of site's contents)

Some resort to the poorly-considered method of counting craters so they can provide Darwinists the deep time that they demand. Our moon, like others in the solar system, show that they are far younger than materialists expect — or desire. It is cooling and shrinking, which contributes to tectonic activity. Then there are the many paradigm problems caused by lunar volcanoes...

We have a couple of recent items about how the moon is putting burrs under the saddles of secular scientists and defying cosmic evolution.

The neat theories for the origin of the moon and its subsequent evolution unravel when you try to stuff long ages into a young body.

Forget what the textbooks and documentaries on TV say about how our moon became what it is today. The theories don’t work. Scientists are confused. The moon was supposed to have formed from a giant impact billions of years ago, then after some hot lava eruptions, it should have settled down into a cold, dead ball. Peter Schultz of Brown University summarizes the current feeling when he says, “There’s this assumption that the moon is long dead, but we keep finding that that’s not the case.”

Here are some recent articles about the moon, with “surprise effects” quoted.

To read the rest of this moon-shaking article, click on "Our Moon Refuses to Obey Scientists". Be sure to come back for the next startling article.

Rockfalls, landslides, and such tend to decrease over time because things are leveling out. There have been rockfalls on the moon, but should not have been happening comparatively recently. But this should be happening billions of Darwin years after the impacts that set them in motion. What kind of rescuing device will be generated to keep their faith in deep time?

A team of researchers used more than two million images obtained by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to construct the first near-global map of rockfalls on the moon. The map shows more than 136,000 rockfalls between 80° northern and southern latitudes on the lunar surface. Interestingly, the scientists—who were from ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research—were surprised to find that even parts of the lunar surface thought to be 3.8 billion years old had experienced relatively recent rockfall events.

You can learn the rest of the hard truth by clicking on "Billions of Years of Lunar Rockfalls?"






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China Sea Coal Beds and the Genesis Flood

Once again, drilling for oil has been a problem for uniformitarian geologists. This time some mighty thick coal beds way out yonder in the sea. Excuses were needed in a big hurry to protect the narrative, but fail as usual. They should be embarrassed by the speculation-as-science stories. 

Credits: original image from RGBStock / Michal Zacharzewski, modified at Big Huge Labs

The naturalistic stories for coal formation are unrealistic at best — uniformitarian scientists should be embarrassed by the rising and falling coal formation tales. The excuse given by this tinhorn is that the material washed out to sea. Let's see if he can wave off the problem of C-14 in coal while he's at it. Since secularists have an a priori commitment to naturalism, they will not consider the fact that creation science models of the Genesis Flood have the best explanations for observed evidence.

Recent geological discoveries are defying standard uniformitarian explanations. First, there was the massive Whopper Sand found in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico. And then there was the dinosaur bone washed 70 miles offshore and buried 1.5 miles deep. And now, researchers have come across another startling discovery— coal beds hidden far beneath the South China Sea.

Peter Lunt reviewed recent oil well drilling data in an area in the South China Sea known as North Luconia, about 175 miles off the coast of Borneo.  The oil wells were drilled in over 3,000 feet of water and yet penetrated a thick section of bedded coals at the bottom. Coal deposits form when land plants are buried between sedimentary layers, but no land is near these particular deposits. So, how did these coals form in such deep water so far offshore?

You can read the rest at "Deep Water CoalsDiscoverySupports Flood".



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