Group

Here are science news items, with my comments in square brackets.

My last science news items post is at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign/message/9572 .

Steve

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http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1156792.htm ABC Bloody
stone tools tell hominids' tales ... ABC ... 19 July 2004 This quartz tool
gives clues to how ancient humans lived and ate two million years ago.
But not everyone agrees that biological material found on this tool and
others could have lasted that long ... Two million-year-old blood and fat
on stone tools found in South Africa are giving clues about what hominids
ate and how they lived, says ..., Dr Tom Loy ... reported his analysis of
biological residues found on quartz stone tools ... "I looked at them and
there was blood everywhere," Loy said of the tools, which are among the
oldest of their kind, and came from the Sterkfontein caves 60 kilometres
northwest of Johannesburg. Loy found intact and fragmented red and
white blood cells; fat cells from bone marrow; collagen from ligaments
and tendons; muscle tissue and even degraded hair on the tools. ... "They
were eating meat and tubers," .... "The residues on the stone tools tell us
what hominids ate, what kind of tools they made: those from horn, wood
and bone," ... the so-called Oldowan tools also gave clues about hominid
sophistication. ... While the tools were rudimentary, with a one-sided
blade and little ornamentation, they were specialised for working with
different materials, such as bone. Loy said a few pieces of worked bone
had also been found at Sterkfontein. "The thing that differentiates humans
from any other organism is our ability to think three steps ahead. Clearly
[the hominids] were thinking ahead," he said. "A hominid takes a rock,
makes or finds the proper edge, then goes off and finds a bone and then
works the bone to make it into a tool for something else. To me that's
'sapiency', that's human, even though they were only four feet high and
had a third of our brain." Loy said his findings also challenged the idea
that the hominids scavenged meat but didn't hunt. ... But Loy said the
blood he discovered on the tools indicated that it came from freshly killed
animals and that this was most likely to have come from hunting .... He
also found that silica in the surface of the stone tool causes the protein to
bind to it, anchoring the matrix and stabilising it. ... ensured any residues
remained on the stone tool over millions of years. ... But ... Dr Matthew
Collins ... who specialises in protein degradation, is sceptical of Loy's
findings. .... While Collins said he had not looked specifically at residues
on stone tools, his research had shown that in climates like Sterkfontein's
proteins wouldn't last much longer than 100,000 years. But Loy said
Collins was not taking into consideration the special circumstances that
had preserved the residues in the Sterkfontein tools. [I have no problem
with this, but it would have to be first ruled out that the tools werent
re-used by later humans using the same cave, i.e. the blood is comparatively
recent.]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1539&e=3&u=/afp/20040720/sc_afp/\
us_space_mars_040720213909
Yahoo! ... Piece of Mars discovered in Antarctica ... Jul 20 ...
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A new meteorite that came from Mars has been
discovered ... in Antarctica ... NASA announced. ... The 715.2-gram (1.6-
pound) black rock, officially designated MIL 03346, was one of 1,358
meteorites collected by ANSMET [Antarctic Search for Meteorites]
during the 2003-2004 austral summer ... the mineralogy, texture and the
oxidized nature of the rock are unmistakably martian. The new specimen
is the seventh recognized member of a group of martian meteorites called
the nakhlites, named after the first known specimen that fell in Nakhla,
Egypt, in 1911. Nakhlites are thought to have originated within thick lava
flows that crystallized on Mars approximately 1.3 billion years ago and
sent to Earth by a meteorite impact about 11 million years ago. ...
[Interesting that if one of these Mars meteorites left Mars 11 mya, but only
arrived in 1911, then it has possibly been orbiting the Earth for most of
that time. So any bacterial traces found in such a Mars meteorite could
conceivably have been collected during such a long Earth orbit.]

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1157172.htm ABC Earliest
songbirds had an Aussie twang ... ABC ... 20 July 2004 The world's
songbirds, including this tree sparrow, originated in Australia, then spread
throughout the globe ... Nightingales, mockingbirds and songbirds around
the world originated in Australia then populated the rest of the globe, a
new DNA study suggests. Until relatively recently, researchers had
believed the opposite, that sparrows, finches, wrens, crows, canaries,
ravens and sparrows originated in Europe and north America, then had
populated Australia. ... Dr Keith Barker ... looked at the passerines, or
perching birds, which make up half the world's birds. Three-quarters of
passerines are songbirds. The scientists conducted the largest ever analysis
of passerine DNA to trace the origins of perching birds back to the super-
continent Gondwana. The study showed passerines originated in Western
Gondwana, which split into Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica, with
the sub-species of songbirds evolving in what is now Australia. ... Wayne
Longmore ... said the hypothesis challenged 200 years of thinking. "Up
until the last four or five years it's always been thought that the passerine
birds originated in the northern hemisphere and spread south and that's
been the gospel for the last 200 years," he said. The oldest passerine fossil
was also found in Australia, dating back to the early Eocene period about
55 million years ago. ... [This supports my Gondwanan origin of birds
theory (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign/message/4440 &
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign/message/4447), which if
true would kill off the Chinese `feathered' dinosaur theory, which in turn
would be *very* embarrassing for evolutionists!]

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/SciTech/DyeHard/alien_abduction_dyehard_040721.ht\
ml
ABCNEWS Feeling Is Believing? Alien Abductees Reveal How Emotion
Can Cloud Reality ... ABCNEWS.com July 21, 2004 - Researchers at
Harvard University called on aliens from outer space to help them solve a
problem that surfaces frequently in everything from therapeutic sessions
to criminal trials, or even just chatting with a friend. How do you know if
someone is telling the truth when he or she recalls memories of childhood
abuse, or being raped by satanic cults, or some other traumatic insult?
One clue that many of us rely on is the emotional reaction of the person
telling the story. If the victim breaks out in sweat and becomes extremely
emotional while recalling those memories, it's more difficult to dismiss
them as false. But all that really means is the person truly believes his or
her memories are true, not that they really are ... "A therapist is more
inclined to credit the account as authentic if it's accompanied by really
intense emotion," he says. "The therapist thinks 'my goodness, something
must have happened.' " ... What the researchers needed was a group of
people who sincerely believed memories of something that clearly never
happened. So they put an ad in newspapers asking for people who had
been abducted by aliens from space. ... their subjects, six women and
four men who believed they had been abducted by alien beings. ... All of
the participants were wired so the researchers could monitor for heart rate,
sweat production, and facial muscle tension, three strong indicators of
emotional stress. .... The verdict was clear, McNally says. The emotional
reaction, which can be so convincing, had nothing to do with the veracity
of the memories of the folks who believed they had been abducted. Why
did they believe so strongly in something that is so implausible? ....
People with those traits tend to have "a rich fantasy life, and to endorse
unconventional beliefs," .... To the abductees, that meant they were
something special. All described the abduction as terrifying, but when
McNally asked them if they wished it had never happened, they all said it
was worth it. The abduction proved there were other beings out there who
cared for us ... Most of the participants came from traditional religious
backgrounds, but had drifted away. "These individuals have strong
spiritual needs that are not being met by conventional religions," ...
Whatever the cause, the research shows clearly that to these people, the
memories are real, even though it's safe to say the events never happened.
But there's no point in trying to convince them. Even if he could explain to
them exactly why they thought all this happened, and show convincing
reasons why the memories are false, "I strongly suspect they would not
buy it," he says. "A naturalist explanation robs the universe of its magic,"
he says. ... [This last comment misses the point. Belief in aliens, in the
place of God, *is* a "naturalist explanation"!]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3913145.stm BBC Wednesday, 21
July, 2004... Black holes turned 'inside out' ... Black holes in space:
Hawking says all is not lost Stephen Hawking has put forward a new
theory that changes the way scientists view black holes, saying he was
wrong about them in the past. ... he has revised his belief that black holes
destroy everything that falls on them. He now believes that black holes
may allow information to get out. His new research could even help solve
the "black hole information paradox", a crucial puzzle for modern physics.
... A black hole is an object from which once inside it is not possible to
escape. Its boundary is called its "event horizon". But now Hawking
believes that it might not be a one-way trip after all. ... Hawking's newly
defined black holes did not have a well-delineated event horizon that hid
everything in them from the outside world. In 1975, Hawking calculated
that once a black hole forms, it radiates energy and starts losing mass by
giving off "Hawking radiation". ... All a black hole had was mass, charge,
and spin. There was no information about matter inside the black hole, and
once the hole disappeared, all the information went with it. "It used to be
thought that once something had fallen into a black hole it was gone and
lost forever and the only information that remained was its mass and
spin," [Hawking said] "The Hawking radiation seemed to be random and
featureless so it appeared that all information about what fell into a black
hole was lost." But this runs contrary to the laws of quantum physics,
which describe the behaviour of the Universe at the smallest scales. These
dictate that information can never be completely lost. "If information can
be lost, it has important practical and philosophical consequences," he
added. "We could never be certain of the past or predict the future
precisely. A lot of people therefore wanted to believe that information
could escape from a black hole but they didn't know how it could get
out." ... "I have been thinking about this problem for 30 years, but I now
have an answer to it," .... "The black hole only appears to form but later
opens up and releases information about what fell in, so we can be sure of
the past and we can predict the future." ... [It is interesting how important
information is. This is a problem for materialism, and hence for evolution,
(http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pe02phls.html#mtrlsmprblmnfrmtn) but
I don't understand enough about this black hole issue (at least at present)
to cite it in my book.]
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PS: Here is a section of my "Problems of Evolution" book outline
(http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pe00cont.html)", section PE 2.4.1.1
Logic ... Contradiction ... Natural selection":

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http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/pe02phl3.html#lgc
"PROBLEMS OF EVOLUTION": 2. PHILOSOPHY (3) [...]
4. Logic
1. Contradiction
1. Natural selection
Evolutionists contradict themselves in claiming that natural selection is
both "chance" and the "antithesis of chance." For example, leading
evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma, when trying to show that a
"designer" is not necessary, claims that "natural selection ... is the
antithesis
of chance" (Futuyma, 1982, p.115). Similarly Dawkins, when defending
Darwinism from the charge that it is "tantamount to chance," asserts that
natural selection is "the antithesis of chance" (Dawkins, 1986, pp.xv,316-
318), and "Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe ... the most
important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially
nonrandom" (Dawkins, 1986, p.49). Yet Mayr, when he wants to rule out
natural selection as being a mechanism that a Designer could have employed,
calls it "a capricious process" (Mayr, 1983, p.36)! [...]
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"Devastating as the denial of teleology was for many of Darwin's
contemporaries such as Sedgwick and von Baer, the denial of design was
even more sweeping. To explain all the beautiful adaptations of organisms,
their adjustment to each other, their well-organized interdependence, and
indeed the whole harmony of nature, as the result of such a capricious
process as natural selection, was quite unacceptable to almost all of
Darwin's contemporaries." (Mayr E., "Darwin, intellectual revolutionary,"
in Bendall D.S., ed., "Evolution From Molecules to Men," [1983],
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1985, reprint, p.36)
Stephen E. Jones http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Moderator: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign
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