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Male Bowerbirds Impress the Ladies

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Want to come over and see my place? I designed it with you in mind, and if you step inside, I can show you a good time. As a matter of fact, you probably heard about my reputation for pleasing women... Credit: Wikimedia Commons / JJ Harrison  ( CC BY-SA 3.0 ) How did you like my impression of the great bowerbird? I've seen human versions of the male bowerbird, and it's tempting anthropomorphize by assigning human behaviors and my values to a critter, so let's move on. These are down 'Straya and New Guinea way, and are grouped with certain catbirds that have a greater sense of morality (sorry, there I go again), what with being monogamous and all. There are ten species of bowerbirds, and they get their name because, well, they build bowers . They work hard to make them aesthetically pleasing. If you set down your ring and can't find it later, it may not have been a packrat that picked it up, but a bowerbird getting the place all gussied up. Yes, they use a variety of

Lacking Belief in Feathered Pterosaurs

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Sometimes people are a mite casual in their use of the word dinosaur , using it to mean woolly mammoths, sauropods, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and so on. It is easy group them all together, though, because they lived at the same time. Credit: Flickr / theilr  ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ) Many believers in dust-to-dinosaur evolution insist that certain dinosaurs evolved into birds. They tend to "see" signs of feathers in fossils, ignoring other (and more reasonable) explanations. Some extravagant claims have been made regarding filaments on pterosaurs, and then unwarranted guesswork was passed off as science. What's a Darwin devotee to do when the same things are not unique to pterosaurs, but are found in dinosaur fossils as well as carcasses of marine reptiles, sharks, and the like? It would be helpful to admit that the Creator made these things, and to stop pretending that they are looking at skin collagen, not protofeathers. In December 2018, researchers claimed to have found feather

Scientists Should Test and not Assume

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There are some things we know because we know them. You know? That is, we have some things we presuppose without verification. When we discover that we had something wrong, we are often surprised. Since this is human nature, it happens in science as well. Dr Sherry Mayo operating the XuM ultra-high resolution X-ray microscope Photo by Mark Fergus for CSIRO ( CC BY 3.0 ) (Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents; this is a picture of a scientist doing science stuff) If you study on it, things that are taken for granted and "conventional wisdom" can be overturned with a bit of research or testing. Sometimes that startles us reg'lar people, and I reckon it does the same for scientists. One example is that because of their presuppositions of deep time and evolution, carbon-14 dating of coal, diamonds and other items was slow in happening because they "knew" there would be no carbon in them. There was carbon in them after all, and those of us who support rec

Evolutionists Conjure Spirit of Darwin with Bad Science

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A spell back, we saw how some of Darwin's disciples were erroneously asserting that a certain artery in the arm was evolution in action . That was a detailed example, and we can see that it was not simply an outlier. Mostly Made at FotoFunia Numerous instances of fake science presented as evidence of molecules-to-magician evolution are seen here, with links to other sites for more information.. They presuppose that evolution happened, never questioning if  it happened, then assume that whatever they see in nature (or think  they see) helps them further understand it. Although we have been taught that evolution takes a very long time, somehow it is so flexible that rapid changes are conflated with evolution and used to support it. Except that there really is no actual evolution happening. Still, they conjure up the spirit of Darwin (blessed be!) to give themselves credibility and get money for their phony baloney jobs. Naturalism and denying the work of the Creator is more important

Concretions and the Genesis Flood

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Even though I am not listening to it as I write, sometimes I like some hard rock. So do geologists (but this is a fallacy of ambiguity because of different definitions of hard rock). In geological terms, concretions  are very hard rock that uniformitarian geology cannot explain. Arizona concretion image credit: Smithsonian /  C Gilmore "Arizona Concretion" would be a good name for a hard rock band It may seem that geology is rather simple. You learn some expensive words and identify rocks, but there is much more to it. Geologists also deal with chemistry, biology, and other natural sciences. The article linked below makes this evident. Because this article was published in the Journal of Creation , it has some technical lingo. Concretions  are basically pieces of harder rock embedded in other rock. They vary in size from huge boulders that threaten to flatten Indiana Jones to bits and pieces that are easily overlooked. Concretions are probably formed by diagenesis , where se

A Light Story about Petrified Wood

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One of the deep-time myths that gets carried around is that wood takes millions of years to become petrified (turned to stone). Even secular geologists now know something creationists have long said, that it depends on conditions, not time. Building built in 1932 made of petrified wood that is inaccurately claimed to be 175 million years old. Credit: Library of Congress / Carol M Highsmith (Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents) There are many anecdotes and actual examples of organic compounds being fossilized of sorts, and even sacks of flour turned to stone . What follows is a simple story about a piece of petrified wood that has a somewhat interesting background, and it illustrates once again that conditions are more important than time for this process. Years ago, an attendee at an ICR Back to Genesis seminar approached me with a fossil he and his daughter had found while on a hike in Washington State. It was obviously petrified wood, which is common in many lo

Creationists, Secular Peer Review, and Guard Dogs

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A common falsehood spread by those with atheism spectrum disorder and other anti-creationists is that biblical creationists do not publish in secular peer-reviewed journals. Sidewinders like that prefer to use prejudicial conjecture instead of doing their homework. The facts are quite complicated. Original image by Pixabay / skeeze , modified with Pablo The guard dogs protecting secular journals are vicious. While biblical creationists do indeed get published (as we have said before) , the equivalent of throwing the guard dogs raw meat is to say that their material does not threaten Darwin (blessed be!) or support creation science. Naturalists become frenzied when the truth of the Creator receives even a hit, such as when someone let a paper go through that said "creator" , even though it means something different in the author's native language. My conclusion is that they are cowards and willfully ignorant (Used under Fair Use provisions for educational purposes) Athe