Six monkeys and a computer…

Give six monkeys a
computer for one month and they will make a mess. Jill
Lawless Associated Press reports Researchers at Plymouth
University in England reported (May 9) that primates left alone
with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a
single word. "They pressed a lot of S’s," researcher Mike
Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first
language."

Faculty and students in the
university's media program left a computer in the monkey
enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six
Sulowesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead
male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.”
Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and
urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the
university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies. The
Plymouth experiment was funded by England's Arts Council and part
of the Vivarie Project, which plans to install computers in zoos
across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial
life. For more on the monkeys' output see:
http://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/

John's comment:
The idea that monkeys typing randomly should eventually produce
Shakespeare quality literature is usually associated with Thomas
Huxley, the 19th-century avid promoter of Darwin's evolution
theories. As far as we know this is the first time the
monkey/typing hypothesis has been scientifically tested. Seems it
doesn't help evolution theory at all.

Male chromosome
sequence disproves "genetic wasteland" theory, according
to Nature Science Update (www.nature.com/nsu) 19Jun 2003. 
Scientists have sequenced the 50 million genetic letters that
make up the information carried on the Y chromosome the
chromosome that carries the genes for maleness.  This chromosome
is unique in that normal males only have one copy.  Other
chromosomes come in pairs, so each cell has two copies of genes
carried on those chromosomes.  If a gene is damaged the other
copy can act as a back-up for gene repair mechanisms.  Because
the Male Y chromosome is not part of a pair it was considered to
be in great evolutionary danger of dying out due millions of
years of irreparable genetic mutations.  However, it seems the Y
chromosome has a back-up system (in its own DNA, the molecule
that stores genetic information, consists of two strands twisted
together in double helix.) This back up consists of long
sequences of DNA which read the same in opposite directions on
both strands of the double helix.   This means there is mirror
image copy of each gene contained within these sequences.

John's comment:
This discovery is a surprise only because evolutionists believed
the Y chromosome evolved from an "ordinary" chromosome that lost
most of its genes and became unpaired, which meant it lost the
back-up system provided by gene swapping across pairs. 
Fortunately human curiosity prevails and discoveries such as Y
chromosome back-up genes are being made. In this case - the
testable belief of evolutionists is provably wrong. The testable
belief of Creationists is that the Y chromosome was deliberately
created to carry out a specific function and would therefore have
design features needed to survive as an unpaired chromosome.  On
this basis creation proves to be a better scientific theory as a
predictor of discoveries.

Universe lacks
lumps, according to a report in Nature Science Update
(www.nature.com/nsu) 31 Mar 2003. Quantum theory states
that space is made up of indivisible lumps like grains in a
photograph or pixels in a digital image. Physicists were
therefore surprised by recent Hubble Space Telescope photos of
distant galaxies that indicate the universe is smooth. "Without
graininess, our current theories predict that the Big Bang was
infinitely hot and dense. Tough to explain, to say the least,"
writes John Whitfield for Nature. The observations cast doubt on
a physical quantity called the "Planck length", the distance a
photon (particle of light) moving at the speed of light travels
in Planck time: 5x10-44 seconds. According to the theory this is
the smallest measurable unit of space. Any smaller space should
become lumpy.

John's comment:
In 1999 Professor John D Barrow (UK) claimed that all the big
cosmological problems will simply melt away if you break one rule
- the rule that says the speed of light never varies. (See New
Scientist, 24 July, 1999. p.29) As "Planck length" is determined
by the speed of light, this may be one of the problems that could
be solved if we accept that light was faster in the past, as an
increasing number of creationists and non-creationist scientists
are claiming.

Dino dig a real
success as Creation Research geologists, Bob Powell,
Robert Stewart and John Mackay teamed up with FACT Montana to
explore a new site. Plan to join us in Montana July 2004 for one
week of great Fun, Fossils, Fellowship and plain hard work as we
excavate the evidence of Creation and search for the results of
Noah's flood. More details [email protected]

Water on mars
debate continues as space probes head to the red planet, as
reported by News Scientist online news service, 2 Jun 2003 (and
numerous other media sources). This year Mars passes relatively
close to the earth so several landing devices have been launched,
including one British built robot laboratory called "Beagle 2" in
honour of the ship Charles Darwin sailed in.  Scientists are
hoping these probes will resolve an ongoing passionate debate
about whether there is water on Mars and hence whether there is
or has been life on Mars.  The Beagle 2 probe will test for water
and other chemicals such as carbon that are found in living
cells.

John's comment:
Living cells certainly do need water to survive. Many
evolutionary scientists are convinced if they find water on Mars
they will find life.  The link between water and life comes from
the belief that as long as you have all the right chemicals life
will arise by itself.  But water and dissolved chemicals do not
make life. The genetic revolution has shown us, life requires
information, and information requires an intelligent Designer. 
It doesn't matter how much water may be on Mars, there will only
be life where God put it. (In the meantime - NASA is desperate
for funds and this is the best they've got!)

Fossil whale "Anatomically
identical to whales in the ocean today," as reported by
ABC News in Science (www.abc.net.au/science/news)
(Australia) 23 Apr 2003. The head, lower jaw and part of the body
of a fossilised humpback whale have been found in a layer of sand
believed to be 700,000 years old. The fossil is 6 metres long and
was buried in sand about 300 metres from the present day shore.
Japanese researchers estimate the complete whale was
approximately 15 metres long, but the rest of the body was lost
when sand was excavated for industrial use.

John's comment:
How ever old this specimen is, it adds to mountains of evidence
that living creatures have multiplied "after their own kind" just
as Genesis 1 states they were designed to do. Anyone who has ever
observed sand may also be sceptical of the 700,000 year age for
the whale. Difficult to conceive a pile of sand in wind or water
was remaining still long enough to preserve a fossil intact for
more than a few years!

Humans bumped off big
beasts, according to a report in ScienceNOW
(http://sciencenow.sciencenow.org) 8 May 2003. Many large
animals such as mammoths and mastodons which once roamed North
America were thought to have died out due to climate change
associated with the Ice Age.  After analysing the sequences of
mud layers in four sites in south eastern New York, looking for
evidence of big animals, in the form of spores from dung dwelling
fungi, and evidence of human activity, in the form of charcoal
from fires. Palaeontologists from Fordham University New York
concluded that the big animals had been almost wiped out due to
human activity rather than climate change. They also looked for
evidence of climate change in the form of pollen from cold
climate forests such as alder, birch and spruce.

John's comment:
Extinction due to human activity is not a recent phenomenon,
brought about by western industrialised societies. Societies
throughout history have contributed to it. Big animals, or "mega
fauna" were once found all over the world, e.g. giant kangaroos
and wombats once lived in Australia, giant sloth’s and
camels in the USA etc. But after Noah's Flood, human beings found
themselves living in a world newly subjected to winter, as they
spread around the world after the Tower of Babel, yet now they
were permitted by God to eat meat (Genesis 8:22-9:6). Hunters
would have killed big animals first simply because they were
easier to find. For more incredible information on creation go to
www.creationresearch.net