A while back, I published an article about world famous archaeologist Nelson Glueck and his strong statement …

“As a matter of fact, however, it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. (Glueck, Nelson, Rivers in the Desert, New York: Grove Press, 1959, pp. 31-32.)

Glueck apparently also claimed to have found King Solomon’s mines in Faynan/Edom and got laughed at. But a recent discovery has vindicated him. Enjoy …

King Solomon’s Copper Mines?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2008) — Did the Bible’s King David and his son Solomon control the copper industry in present-day southern Jordan? Though that remains an open question, the possibility is raised once again by research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
…
For years, scholars have argued whether the Edomites were sufficiently organized by the 10th to 9th centuries BCE to seriously threaten the neighboring Israelites as a true “kingdom.” Between the World Wars, during the “Golden Age” of biblical archaeology, scholars explored, as Levy describes it, with a trowel in one hand and Bible in the other, seeking to fit their Holy Land findings into the sacred story. Based on his 1930s surveys, American archaeologist Nelson Glueck even asserted that he had found King Solomon’s mines in Faynan/Edom. By the 1980s, however, Glueck’s claim had been largely dismissed. A consensus had emerged that the Bible was heavily edited in the 5th century BCE, long after the supposed events, while British excavations of the Edomite highlands in the 1970s-80s suggested the Iron Age had not even come to Edom until the 7th century BCE.

“Now,” said Levy, director of the Levantine Archaeology Lab at UCSD and associate director of the new Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), “with data from the first large-scale stratified and systematic excavation of a site in the southern Levant to focus specifically on the role of metallurgy in Edom, we have evidence that complex societies were indeed active in 10th and 9th centuries BCE and that brings us back to the debate about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible narratives related to this period.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases…1027174545.htm

Yes, it sure does. Combine this kind of cool stuff with the ongoing demise of the Documentary Hypothesis, the Rise of the Rohl Chronology and such, and Biblical historicity advocates like me are finally starting to have fun again!

Evolution has a new wrinkle. So says Science Daily in report that came out this month. I would not call it a wrinkle. I would call it a fatal flaw. But you’ll never get scientists steeped in evolutionary doctrine (yes, I said doctrine) to admit this. Something tells me that they will hear about this and just try to work it into evolutionary theory. It appears to me that most scientists do not want to admit that the evidence for an Intelligent Designer (the God of the Bible) is overwhelming and getting stronger every day. Enjoy …

Evolution’s New Wrinkle: Proteins With ‘Cruise Control’ Act Like Adaptive Machines

ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2008) — A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

The research, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on evolution, the scientists said.

Yes … a new perspective. Like perhaps we should quit calling it ‘evolution’ which carries implications of randomness and blind forces. Let’s start calling it what it is … Designed Adaptation. Which of course causes us to ask ‘Who is the Designer?’ Other evidence indicates that it’s the God of the Bible.

Let’s keep reading …

The research, published in a recent edition of Physical Review Letters, provides corroborating data, Rabitz said, for Wallace’s idea. “What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness,” said Rabitz, the Charles Phelps Smyth ‘16 Professor of Chemistry. “The data just jumps off the page and implies we all have this wonderful piece of machinery inside that’s responding optimally to evolutionary pressure.”

The authors sought to identify the underlying cause for this self-correcting behavior in the observed protein chains. Standard evolutionary theory offered no clues. Applying the concepts of control theory, a body of knowledge that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems, the researchers concluded that this self-correcting behavior could only be possible if, during the early stages of evolution, the proteins had developed a self-regulating mechanism, analogous to a car’s cruise control or a home’s thermostat, allowing them to fine-tune and control their subsequent evolution. The scientists are working on formulating a new general theory based on this finding they are calling “evolutionary control.”

‘Standard evolutionary theory offered no clues.’ Imagine that. Haven’t creationists been saying for a very long time that evolutionary theory offers no clues for the origin of species? Yes, work done in microevolution is helpful, but macroevolutionary theory has no support.

“In this paper, we present what is ostensibly the first quantitative experimental evidence, since Wallace’s original proposal, that nature employs evolutionary control strategies to maximize the fitness of biological networks,” Chakrabarti said. “Control theory offers a direct explanation for an otherwise perplexing observation and indicates that evolution is operating according to principles that every engineer knows.“

Hmmm … but there’s no Super Engineer who created it all?

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.

Interesting how Intelligent Design (that is, evidence for a Creator) can stare them right in the face, yet they emphatically deny it. Sounds like a philosophical problem to me.

Chakrabarti said that one of the aims of modern evolutionary theory is to identify principles of self-organization that can accelerate the generation of complex biological structures. “Such principles are fully consistent with the principles of natural selection. Biological change is always driven by random mutation and selection, [or at least so he's been taught and so he is supposed to say, and should probably keep saying in order to keep his job] but at certain pivotal junctures in evolutionary history, such random processes can create structures capable of steering subsequent evolution toward greater sophistication and complexity.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081111183039.htm

They cannot really, but it’s fashionable in science to believe they can.

PDF of the Chakrabarti paper available HERE.

An article just came out this month about ‘junk DNA’ and how that they have now found that not only were they wrong about it’s ‘junk’ status, it’s actually “one of the important ingredients distinguishing humans from other species.”

‘Junk’ DNA Proves Functional; Helps Explain Human Differences From Other Species

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2008) — In a paper published in Genome Research on Nov. 4, scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) report that what was previously believed to be “junk” DNA is one of the important ingredients distinguishing humans from other species.
…
“The findings by Dr. Bourque and his colleagues at the GIS are very exciting and represent what may be one of the major discoveries in the biology of evolution and gene regulation of the decade,” said Raymond White, Ph.D., Rudi Schmid Distinguished Professor at the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and chair of the GIS Scientific Advisory Board.

Not only that, but the “Central Dogma” set forth by Francis Crick 50 years ago is also wrong. There are now whole websites dedicated to documenting the history of this collossal failure of evolutionary theory, such as this one … http://www.junkdna.com/ and this one … http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/junk_dna.html

The following quotes from two of today’s leading evolutionists illustrate just how wrong evolutionary biologists have been …

“Genomes are littered with nonfunctional pseudogenes, faulty duplicates of functional genes that do nothing, while their functional cousins (the word doesn’t even need scare quotes) get on with their business in a different part of the genome. And there’s lots more DNA that doesn’t even deserve the name pseudogene. It, too, is derived by duplication, but not duplication of functional genes. It consists of multiple copies of junk, “tandem repeats”, and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn’t seem to be used in the body itself. Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.” Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, 2003, p.99.

No, Prof. Dawkins. YOU need to spend some earnest time speculating on why the scientists in your camp have been wasting our wasting our research dollars for so many years on a failed paradigm — the Theory of Evolution (ToE).

“From a design point of view, pseudogenes are indeed mistakes. So why are they there? Intelligent design cannot explain the presence of a nonfunctional pseudogene, unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, however, can explain them easily. Pseudogenes are nothing more than chance experiments in gene duplication that have failed, and they persist in the genome as evolutionary remnants of the past history of the b-globin genes.”
Kenneth Miller, Life’s Grand Design, Technology Review, February-March 1994, Volume 97(2): pg. 24–32.

Evolution can explain them easily? But it didn’t. Oops.

Evolutionists say that humans and dinosaurs did NOT co-exist, but numerous pieces of evidence indicate that they did, including the Biblical Book of Job, Chapters 40 & 41, legends of knights fighting “dragons,” artwork of dragons and dinosaurs, and fossilized tracks of human and dinosaur footprints together in the same strata.

The evolutionary establishment goes to great lengths to indoctrinate kids with their views about evolution, but apparently, the Lego artists who created this play set didn’t get the message. Way to go, Lego!

Yes, according to two of today’s most vocal Evolution advocates on the web — P.Z. Myers of the Pharyngula blog and Nick Matzke of Panda’s Thumb.  These quotes from PZ and Nick were related by a good friend and fan of mine who goes by CK1 on all the forums where I post.  She is a professional virologist and an editor of several professional science journals and can always be counted on for insightful comments on the topics I start.  We’re having a little problem right now at the Talk Rational Forum — my current favorite hangout.  Two of the E&O moderators have decided that they don’t like the topics that I start and so they have begun banishing my topics to the Compost Heap.  They are doing this in spite of the fact that all the intelligent posters like CK1 LIKE the topics that I start and want them to stay put.  Anyway, here’s what CK1 wrote over at TR …

The issue of whether the OOL is distinct from TOE has been addressed in various Evo/Cre sites, including this comment by PZ Myers:

I’m going to be somewhat heretical, and suggest that abiogenesis as the study of chemical evolution is a natural subset of evolutionary theory, and that we should own up to it. It’s natural processes all the way back, baby, no miracles required. Life is chemistry, vitalism has evaporated and is one with phlogiston, and scientists legitimately and respectably study physical processes that were the potential instigators of life.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/life_is_chemistry.php

More recently, Nick Matzke summarized research into OOL and ended with this:

Splitting the OOL from evolutionary theory, is only technically correct in a sort of legalistic, hairsplitting way. Sure, it’s true that technically, “evolution” only happens once you have life, or at least replicators, but getting from replicators to the last common ancestor is most of what most people think about when they’re thinking about the origin of life, i.e., “where did the evolutionary ancestor of all life today come from?” and all of that is evolution all the way. Furthermore, even the origin of the first classical “replicator” was itself very likely an evolutionary process, in that it occurred in stepwise fashion and not all-at-once, and that the first replicator was likely preceded by various sorts of pseudoreplication, statistical inheritance and kinetic biases. If you remove evolution from your thinking about the origin of the first replicator then it is very likely you will never understand how it happened, or what the current research on the question is about. Finally, even apart from these detailed considerations, “evolution” reasonably has a broader meaning – the evolution of the universe, the solar system, the planet, and the planet’s geochemistry, and the origin of life and the origin of the first replicator must be understood as part of that larger evolutionary history.

One other telling point is that the statement “but the OOL is outside of evolutionary theory” response also has the problem of simply dodging the hard work of describing the discoveries and work of modern science, a problem I have already described. In conclusion, if it were up to me, I would completely scrap this statement from the rhetorical toolkit of evolution defenders.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/07/what-critics-of.html

Elsewhere on my blog, I have recorded this quote from the great Theodosius Dobzhansky …

“Evolution comprises all the stages of development of the universe: the cosmic, biological, and human or cultural developments. Attempts to restrict the concept of evolution to biology are gratuitous. Life is a product of the evolution of inorganic matter, and man is a product of the evolution of life.” (Dobzhansky, Theodosius, Science, 27 January 1967, Volume 155, Number 3761, p.409). http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/155/3761/409.pdf

Well … I think that settles that. So much for my critics who, for the past two years, have constantly ridiculed me for lumping OOL under the ToE. Sorry guys … you’re wrong again!

Life on our planet is dying out. Species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. Two recent articles highlight this fact …

Scientists alarmed by ocean dead-zone growth

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Friday, August 15, 2008

(08-14) 18:03 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — Dead zones where fish and most marine life can no longer survive are spreading across the continental shelves of the world’s oceans at an alarming rate as oxygen vanishes from coastal waters, scientists reported Thursday.

The scientists place the problem on runoff of chemical fertilizers in rivers and fallout from burning fossil fuels, and they estimate there are now more than 400 dead zones along 95,000 square miles of the seas - an area more than half the size of California.

The number of those areas has nearly doubled every decade since the 1960s, said Robert J. Diaz, a biological oceanographer at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

“Dead zones were once rare, but now they’re commonplace, and there are more of them in more places,” he said. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/15/MNLD12ADSN.DTL

And this on on amphibians …

Dying frogs sign of a biodiversity crisis

By Rachel Tompa, Media Relations | 12 August 2008

BERKELEY – Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just frogs, salamanders and their ilk, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley.

In an article published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers argue that substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet.

“There’s no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now,” said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn’t. The fact that they’re cutting out now should be a lesson for us.” http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/08/12_extinction.shtml

So I say, “Where’s Evolution when you need it?” All the biology professors in all the major universities are saying that Evolution created all of life on Earth. Really? Then now would be a great time for some life creation, don’t you think? When everything is dying off? How about it boys? Can we please get a little Evolution going on out there?

Well the fact is … you CAN’T just get a little evolution going because Evolution DIDN’T create life on Earth. God did. Oh yes, species adapt and species change, but this is only because they are essentially programmable biological robots and they were programmed to adapt and change. And since God created life on Earth and since the Bible contains the most important information about life on Earth, let’s see what the Bible has to say about the future of life on Earth. It says this …

Romans 8:22 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Hebrews 1:10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: 11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;

Not exactly encouraging words if you think that this earth is the only one that will ever be. Thankfully it’s not though. God has promised to make a New Heaven and a New Earth at some point in the future …

2 Peter 3:9 ¶ The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. 11 ¶ Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, 12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? 13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

Over at Kids4Truth International, we recently wrote a fanciful Dynamation to highlight the fact that scientists are looking for aliens but have missed the most obvious “Alien” … the Creator Himself. It appears from the following article that interest in aliens is starting to pick up again.

From The Telegraph.co.uk …

By Tom Leonard in New York
Last Updated: 6:40PM BST 19 May 2008

English students at the University of Wyoming are being encouraged to consider the possibility that humanity might one day make contact with aliens and then not know what to say.

“Interstellar Message Composition”, a creative writing class, is believed to be the first of its kind to engage writers in a potential cosmic conversation, say its founders.

“We’ve thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds, but we haven’t thought much about what we’d actually say,” Prof Jeffrey Lockwood, the course leader, told ABC News.

The course, currently being taken by 11 students, is partly financed by Nasa’s Wyoming Space Grant Consortium, which sponsors educational and research projects in the state that support the agency’s missions.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1989062/nasa-sponsors-course-on-how-to-talk-to-aliens.html

Many of my close friends know that I think Joel Salatin is the most ahead-of-his-time, revolutionary, forward thinker in agriculture today. He describes himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.” (Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma). When asked what he does for a living, he replies: “Mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.” (Salatin, Joel, “Tall Grass Mob Stocking: An Aggressive Approach to Controlled Grazing,” Acres USA Magazine, May 2008, p. 16) Gotta love it. You’ll have to read the article to find out what he’s talking about. Joel strikes so many chords with me I feel like a piano. Bob Jones grad. Insightful. Contrarian. Home school father. Unbelievably frugal. Out of the box thinker. Not afraid to get his hands dirty, and he can string together some pretty powerful paragraphs to make a point. I have a hard time deciding which book of his to recommend first, but way up there is Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front which will make you laugh, cry and get mad all at once. Then there’s Family Friendly Farming: A Multi-Generational Home-Based Business Testament which I think is destined to motivate hordes of Dilbert Cubicle Workers (Joel’s term) to once and for all tell their Faceless Bureaucrat Companies to take a hike and don a permanent pair of overalls.

Here’s a little more about Joel …

Called “the high priest of the pasture” by The New York Times, Joel Salatin likes to refer to himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.” He lives with his family on Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  Salatin has developed a system of pasture rotation that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximizes the composting of animal waste. Each species on the farm is dependent on another. The cows, for example, eat the nutrient rich grass in Pasture A and then are moved to Pasture B. The chickens then move to Pasture A where they pick through the cow pies … LINK HERE

NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE

I want all my blog readers to notice that I have added a new Post Category — Healthy Agriculture — of which this post is the first of many to come. And with that … I’m off to Polyface! See you soon!

I am an avid reader of Joel Rosenberg’s blog and you should be too. Joel Rosenberg is the author of the uncannily accurate predictive fiction works, The Last Jihad, The Ezekiel Option, The Copper Scroll and Dead Heat, all runaway best-sellers.

Yesterday, he highlighted and commented on an article which appeared in Haaretz (a leading Israeli daily newspaper).  From Joel’s blog …

The Messiah stories are particularly interesting to me. Iran, as I mentioned the other day, is running a new documentary TV series on Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology (End Times theology), consistent with President Ahmadinejad’s on-going call for the Muslim world to prepare for the “imminent” arrival of the Islamic Messiah, known as the Mahdi. The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?

The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?

“Nearly one generation after the effort to reduce misconduct in science began, the responses by NIH scientists suggests that falsified and fabricated research records, publications, dissertations and grant applications are much more prevalent than has been suspected to date. Our study calls into question the effectiveness of self-regulation. We hope it will lead individuals and institutions to evaluate their commitment to research integrity.” –Nature 453, 980-982, 19 June 2008 (Illustration credit: J. Taylor)

MY OPINION: External policing won’t work any better than self-regulation. Nothing will change without a change of heart and only the Creator Himself can do that. The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah once wrote … “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jer 17:9 (KJV). But the good news is that God is in the business of changing people’s hearts. He only requires us to acknowledge that He exists and submit ourselves to Him.

My experience has been that anti creationists accuse creationists of fraud quite often, they are usually not subtle about it, and they almost never provide proof for their accusations. Then they often shout “libel, libel” when creationists like me dare to question scientists’ work even if I’m not making an accusation of fraud (which I have never done). But I do think scientists are human and they are biased strongly by their pre-existing beliefs. So this provides temptation to at least ignore contrary data if not commit outright fraud.

Free Bloomberg News article on this HERE.

Related to this topic, here is an interesting editorial on how academia really works by Gary North …

Academia is a self-certified guild that is funded mainly by tax money. Each year, something in the range of $350 billion goes into higher education in the United States. This figure keeps rising. So, the stakes are high.As with any guild, it must limit entry in order to preserve above-market salaries. It does so primarily by academic licensing.

The primary licensing restriction is university accreditation, which is a system run by half a dozen regional agencies. To get degree-granting status, a college or university must be certified by one of these agencies. They certify very few.

The next screening device is the Ph.D. degree. This system was imposed on academia nationally by John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, beginning in 1903, when Congress chartered it. He gave money to colleges, but only if they put people with Ph.D. degrees on their faculties.

Next comes faculty tenure. After about six or seven years of teaching mainly lower division classes that senior professors refuse to teach, an assistant professor comes up for tenure. If he gets it, he can never be fired except for moral infractions far worse than adultery committed with female students. Very few assistant professors are granted tenure. The Ph.D. glut then consigns the losers to part-time work in community colleges for wages in the range of what apprentice plumbers receive. I have written about this glut elsewhere.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north632.html