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Brainy creaturesRanking not very high at all in terms oftheir cuddliness or familiarity to thegeneral public, are slime-moulds. Thesestrange creatures are actually not mouldsbut protists - single-celled organisms thatpulsate continually as they move around insearch of their prey of yeast, bacteria andfungi.

But protists have no brain or centralisednervous system, so how do they decidewhere to go to locate their prey? Thisquestion has been addressed by a researchgroup in Australia who have been studyingthe behaviour of a bright yellow slime-mould called Physarum polycephalum.

According to a report on the BBC Newswebsite (http://goo.gl/9Mknd, accessed10th October) the researchers tested thenavigational abilities of the slime-mould inan experiment more commonly used toanalyse the artificial intelligence of robots.They placed a slime-mould on one side ofa petri dish of agar gel, and a sugarysubstance attractive to the slime-mould onthe opposite side. In between was a U-shaped “maze”. Remarkably, 96% of theslime-moulds tested found their way to thesugary substance.

So how did they do it? Slime-moulds aremade up of bits of pulsating tissue thatchange the speed of their pulsationsaccording to what is detected in theimmediate environment. Pulsating partsare also affected by neighbouring pulsatingparts within the cell, meaning that someinternal communication is going on.Furthermore, the researchers discoveredthat the slime-mould, which leaves a trailof slime wherever it goes, does not revisitareas where its slime is already present.

This has led the researchers to a profoundconclusion: the slime-mould has in effectan external “memory”. As the articlequotes, “In essence, the slime-mould is

Fuligo septica, another brightly coloured slime-mould from Australia. Image: KeresH, Wikipedia,under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike

3.0 Unported licence.

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memorising where it has been - storing thismemory in the external environment andrecalling the information when it latertouches the slime-coated area”.

This raises some very interesting questions:How does the slime-mould know whatvalue or intepretation to give to the cues itreceives from its immediate environmentand from the communications it receivesfrom adjacent pulsations? Impressions areone thing, but the meaning of theimpressions is quite another. And how doesit know that the correct response toperception of its own previously laid-downtrail is not to go there again? This suggestssome application of meaning from anexternal intelligent source. What could thatsource possibly be, but an extremelyintelligent Person?

From time to time we have alsocommented on the developing science ofbio-mimetics, where scientists look to thenatural world to find inspiration to solveengineering problems and so on. Recentlythe BBC News website reported on anotherfascinating example (http://goo.gl/huQ04,accessed 08 October), in which a team ofscientists from the Universities of Sheffieldand Sussex is endeavoring to create modelsof the neural systems in a bee's brain thathelps it make sense of what it sees andsmells.

The article reports, “Dr James Marshall, acomputer scientist at the University ofSheffield co-ordinating the project, saidsimulating a brain was one of the "majorchallenges" of artificial intelligence.Before now, many of the attempts torecreate biological brains in silicon havefocused on the cognitive systems found inhumans, monkeys and mice. But, he said,simpler organisms such as social insects

have surprisingly advanced cognitiveabilities”.

The team will run models of the sensorysystems on a cluster of powerful graphicscards that can carry out the calculationsneeded to simulate bee brains. Apparentlymany scientists are starting to to usegraphics cards as number-crunchingengines in preference to traditionalsupercomputers as they are cheaper andeasier to use. The research team hopes thesimulated bee brain can be used in theproduction of a robot that can makedecisions about what it senses rather thanjust carry out pre-programmed tasks.

It takes a sophisticated sensory system to makesense of sights and smells, navigate to their sourceand return to the hive successfully. This speaks of

intelligent design. Image: Michaela Kobyakov,www.rgbstock.com.

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So let’s just run through that again:simulating a brain is a “major challenge”even for teams of highly intelligentscientists, including experts on artificialintelligence, who are devoted to the task;these social insects have “surprisinglyadvanced cognitive abilities”; and yet thesebees are supposed to have developedpurely by chance, through the randomevents of evolution?? As a number-crunching scientist might say, “somethingjust doesn’t add up”.

Cuttings & Commentsfrom New Scientistby Dr David Rosevear

14 July p.6 – New particle, new questionsThere is great euphoria (p.3) amongscientists at the Large Hadron Collider atCERN, Switzerland. They have detectedparticles resembling the long-sought Higgsboson which should complete the ‘standardmodel’, being the particle that gives massto everything.

“Joe Incandela of CMS and FabiolaGoanotti of ATLAS both reportedseeing excesses of particles that fit theprofile of a Higgs, with masses of 125and 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV)respectively (in particle physics energyand mass are interchangeable).” Whatthey have observed have been the particlesformed by the collision of the newly foundparticle with protons fired at it at highspeed. “Although spotted at last, manyproperties of the new particle – thoughtto be the Higgs boson, or at leastsomething similar – have yet to betested… So it is possible the new particleis something much more exotic, such asa member of a more complete model of

the universe that includes the mysteriousentities of dark matter and gravity.

“It is clear that the standard model isinadequate, not least because it can’texplain 80 per cent of the matter in ourgalaxy – dark matter – and makes nomention of gravity.”Of course, if the universe is not the resultof an uncaused big bang some 13.6 billionyears ago, but rather was created onlythousands of years ago by the God bywhom all things, visible and invisible,consist (Col. 1: 16-17), we can forget darkmatter and dark energy.

21 July p.17 – Water hitched to Earth onasteroidsEarth has an abundance of water, unlikemost places in the Solar System. It is

Unlike any other planet in the solar system, earthhas an abundance of water, essential for life -anyone would think the planet was designed.

Image: CSM.

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necessary to support life. So where did it allcome from? Arguing from the proportionof heavy hydrogen, deuterium, in waterfrom comets and meteorites, an Americanresearcher concluded: “Water and othervolatile elements arrived on Earth viameteorites called carbonaceouschondrites… the exact birthplace of thecarbonaceous chondrites is far fromcertain…” With all those oceans and seas,there must be a lot of carbonaceouschondrites somewhere. But why shouldthey all make for Earth?Genesis 1 offers a simpler explanation: thatin the beginning God created the heavenand the earth, that darkness was upon theface of the deep and that the Spirit of Godmoved upon the face of the waters.

21 July p.28 – Why it’s nice to be rightsometimesFollowing the recent discovery of a highenergy particle that could be the elusiveHiggs boson, it is not surprising that somearticles, letters and comments today focuson this. Here we have an interview withPeter Higgs, who had proposed the particle48 years ago.

“‘I don’t call it ‘the God particle’. I hopethat phrase won’t be used as much. Ikeep telling people that it’s someoneelse’s joke, not mine…it hasconnotations that are misleading. Itcauses some people who don’t know howthe phrase arose to say foolish things.I’ve heard some with a background intheology try to make sense of it in termsof that. They don’t understand it was ajoke and wasn’t meant to be takenseriously.”

28 July p.5 – Dark matter WIMPs out“The stuff making up 80 per cent of the

universe’s matter stubbornly refuses tocome out of the shadows. The latest

results from the underground Xenon100detector in L’Aquila, Italy, show no signof WIMPs, the particle thought to makeup the invisible stuff.”

28 July p.10 – Bearing climate changefor millions of yearsThe lengthy time estimate is arrived at bycomparing genomes from living polarbears with a “110,000-year-old polarbear jawbone” and with DNA from blackand brown bears. This date is probablyguessed at from the sediment in which thejawbone was buried, so involves bigassumptions.Regarding the hundreds of millions ofyears in the past when the polar bears aresaid to have evolved, an expert opines “It’sa good new educated guess based on a lotof exciting data, but the actual numbersand assumptions on which the earliersplit rely remain open to debate.” Youbet!With rising temperatures and loss of sea ice,polar bears have been observedinterbreeding with brown bears. “Analysisreveals that polar bear DNA has lostdiversity as populations have dwindled,drifted apart and become geneticallyisolated, suggesting today’s bears haveless resilience to the environmentalchange, habitat loss, pollution anddiseases they now face.”The different bear types are, of course,variations within a created kind, capable ofinterbreeding. It is no more evolution thanit is so in different colours of humans.Moreover, loss of genes over time is theopposite of supposed evolution. [See thebook ‘Genetic Entropy & the mystery of thegenome’ by Dr John Sanford, atwww.csm.org.uk /shop.]

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28 July p.14 – Neanderthals had herbalknow-how

“Call it the Neanderthal health service.Chemicals trapped in the tartar ofNeanderthal teeth show they ate bitter-tasting plants with medicinal properties.The find is the earliest direct evidence ofself-medication in prehistoric times…One ate yarrow, an astringent, andcamomile, an anti-inflammatory. It’svery surprising that the plants we wereable to securely identify were those witha bitter taste and no nutritional qualities

– but known medicinal properties.”Clearly, Neanderthals were not pre-humans, but sons of Eve living during theice-age following the flood of Noah.

28 July p.32 – One and only youIllustrated by a pair of ‘identical twins’,this interesting article shows many of theways in which we are all 7 billion of usunique.Our DNA can vary by up to 0.5 per cent,but with 3.2 billion letters of the DNA code,this small proportion adds up to a variationof 16 million letters. “The code has fourletters, so the number of possiblecombinations is four raised to the powerof 16 million – an absolutely vastnumber of possible human genomes…

“Everyone knows that fingerprints areunique, so it might come as no surprisethat their size and shape is largelydetermined by genes.

“Faces are our most obvious badge ofidentity, but… there are plenty ofdoppelgängers…”Gait – we all walk in a slightly differentstyle, and can be recognised by our gait.Ears are all unique.Iris recognition can be used to verify whowe are, and one’s voice is fairly distinct,though we can deliberately alter it(impressionists make a living by this skill).

It depends on the shapes of larynx, mouth,nose, palate, tongue, lips and cheeks.As our dogs are aware, we all carrydifferent scents made up of a cocktail of atleast a couple of dozen odorants composedof nearly 5,000 acids, alcohols, ketones andaldehydes. Think socks! Some 100 trillionbacteria live on and in us, adding to thecocktail.Heartbeat and brainwaves differ fromperson to person; no two heartbeats areexactly the same.The amazing thing is that our Creatorknows us individually, and has said ‘I amthe Good Shepherd and know my sheepand am known of mine’. [John 10]

Beautifully designed for hearing and balance, yetspecific to the individual, ears are just two of themany features that make you uniquely you.

Image: www.sxc.hu.

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4 August p.6 – Many roads to the RedPlanet

“Scheduled to touch down on the RedPlanet on 5th August via a nail-bitinglyintricate autonomous procedure [whichit did successfully], NASA’s Curiosityrover will undertake an unprecedentedtwo-year hunt for signs of alien life.”I guess someone realised that failure to findsigns of life would cast doubt on the ideathat life could evolve from non-livingchemicals. Hence, a TV news item on the5th modestly claimed that Curiosity was notlooking for signs of simple life forms, noreven for signs of past life, but only forevidence that past conditions were capableof supporting living cells. Today Mars isbarren, as reported by previous probes.

“Costing $2.5 billion, Curiosity – knownformally as the Mars Science Laborato-ry (MSL) – is the biggest, boldest, mostexpensive Mars mission ever attempted.”The European Space agency with theRussian Federal Space Agency is due to

launch a rover, ExoMars, in 2018 that “willdrill 2 metres into the surface to see if lifecould have had a toehold on Mars up to3 billion years ago”. (How they arrive atthat date isn’t disclosed.)

BTW, on Tuesday 7th August the death wasannounced at the age of 98 of Sir BernardLovell, pioneer of the Jodrell Bank spacetelescope. The BBC news item said that heremained a Christian believer despite hisscientific studies! They quoted him ashaving said that a decade ago we were surewe understood the universe, but today werealise we know almost nothing.(Subsequent BBC news bulletins omittedreference to his faith and of now knowingalmost nothing.) Your reviewer’s interestis heightened by the fact that Sir Bernardwent to his old school at KingswoodGrammar.

4 August –Instant Expert 25 – FossilsThis 8 page insert is by Pat Shipman, apalaeo-anthropologist, and offers thestandard view of fossil succession anddating, namely that fossils are found wherethey lived and evolved, rather than wherethey were buried catastrophically. She tellsus that the earliest (or if you prefer, theones that were buried first in the lowestsedimentary layers) were soft-bodied, theirpetrification something of a puzzle. Theyoccur world-wide, and are named after theEdiacaran Hills in Australia. “What isindisputable is that they were highlycomplex, multicelled creatures.” For thisreason they are thought to be the distantdescendants of much earlier, simplercreatures too primitive to have beenfossilised.

“The strange world of the Ediacarans wasfollowed by something even morebizarre. About 505 million years agothere was an explosion of biological

Representation of Mars. One of our nearestneighbouring planets, yet very different from our

own - so maybe they were individuallydesigned? Image: CSM.

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diversity called the Cambrian...Exactlyhow they were preserved is a mystery.All the fossils are flattened and someseem to have been broken up bychurning of the sediments.”The fine grained rocks of Messel andSolnhofen in Germany preserve exquisitedetails of their varied fossils. These includefish, snakes, turtles, lizards, crocodiles andalligators, birds, horses, carnivorousanimals and an extinct lemur-like primate.There are also dragonflies, beetles andjellyfish.Shipman suggests that their habitatincluded a lake whose sediments, when

disturbed, belched out poisonous gases thatasphyxiated the nearby fauna. Beingdevoid of bacteria, the lake allowed thecreatures to be fossilised rather than tosimply decay. Just So!In truth, such a mixture of marine andterrestrial animals must have been sweptaway by a worldwide flood and buried sorapidly that they were preserved in thefine-grained sediment.The “oldest feathered dinosaur”, calledAnchiornis, could not have flown becauseits wings were not large enough. “Thesefossils have forced us to consider thatfeathers evolved for a function otherthan flight.” Yet display and insulation donot require the intricate design of barbs andbarbules that give an air-tight aerofoilnecessary for flight. An accompanyingpicture shows a fossil with “insulatingfluff”, not at all like feathers.A 2010 study of the genomes of 3Neanderthals led to the conclusion thatthese humans interbred with Homo sapiens.I guess they all derived from Eve, themother of all living.Some ancient remains belie the datesattributed to fossils. Mary Schweitzer’steam extracted soft tissue such as red bloodcells from dinosaur fossils. These are notmentioned here.

11 August p.5 – Historic ice loss“The dramatic ice loss from Greenland

between 2005 and 2010 drove up sealevels around the world – but it was notunprecedented.”Satellite monitoring goes back just 20years, but researchers from the Universityof Copenhagen have shown from aerialphotographs that similar melting took placebetween 1985 and 1993 and in the 1930s.

“He says that surges of ice loss may be aregular occurrence.”

Typical of the so-called Cambrian period aretrilobites, such as this example from Field, Canada.

Practically complete and flattened, the fossilspeaks of a creature that was buried very rapidly

by a huge quantity of sediment. Image: CSM

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18 August p.4 – Record heat at LHCIf the universe had started with theproposed Big Bang, where nothingexploded into everything, there would havehad to have been a phase change when thehigh energy plasma of quarks and whatnotscondensed to produce the protons andneutrons that today are the constituents ofatoms. In order to look into this, the LargeHadron Collider has been smashing leadatoms together. This has made a quark-gluon plasma reaching over 5 trillion ºC,the hottest temperature ever created in anexperiment. It was reported that “We arelooking further back into the universethan ever before”.The experiment is interesting, but hasnothing to do with how the Creator madethe universe.

18 August p.5 – Brain’s drainThe more we research, the more amazinglyintricate the world is found to be.

“A waste-removal network similar to thelymphatic system has been discovered inmouse brains. The glymphatic systemcleanses the brain with cerebral spinal

fluid. The finding mayprovide fresh insight intodisorders like Alzheimer’s,in which waste productsaccumulate in the brain.”Without this continuouswashing with cerebral spinalfluid, waste products wouldbuild up in our brains leadingto deterioration in function.Even mouse brains need thissystem. A less than fully-functioning system would beuseless, because a partiallyevolved drain couldn’t work,and would decompose withtime.

25 August p.6 – The spirals that don’tmake senseA software program has studied thedirection of spin of spiral galaxies alongtwo axes at right angles to each other.Looking at a quarter of a million galaxies,observers found to their surprise apreponderance of left-handed spins. Theuniverse seems to have a net angularmomentum. “Since angular momentumcan neither be created nor destroyed, theuniverse must have come into existencein a spin…Amino acids are more oftenleft-handed than right, while allsubatomic neutrinos that have beenobserved have a left-handed spin.” Aplanned survey will look at 10 billion or sogalaxies.Then again, the universe may have beendesigned with a spin to provide dynamicstability.

25 August p.8 – DNA smashes its owndata-storage records

“In theory, DNA can encode…roughlythe capacity of 100 billion DVDs – pergram of single-stranded DNA, making it

Recent surges of ice loss in Greenland are causing concern - but is it aregular occurrence? Image in the public domain.

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five or six orders of magnitude denserthan currently available digital media,such as flash memory. Informationstored in DNA can also be readthousands of years after it was first laiddown.” That’s orders of magnitude!Both complex chemistry and informationrequire a Designer.

25 August p.34 – Rooted in sensationThis 4-page cover story provides yet moreevidence that the world was designed by aCreator rather than gradually perfectingitself by nature selecting from chancechanges.It is found that plants, like animals, can see,touch, smell, taste and hear.We reported on similar research findingsfrom New Scientist 28 September, 1998,and included it in my book Has Darwinhad his Day? pages 91-93.Sight. Plants have photoreceptors through-out their stems and leaves that allow themto react to light, its direction, intensity andcolour. Photosynthesis turns atmosphericCO2 into sugar, starch and cellulose usingsunlight. Plants use a hormone, auxin, tobend towards the light. Red or blue lightprompts plants to shut down for the nightor waken after dawn as by an alarm clock!Touch. “Plants live in a very tactile world.Branches sway in the wind, insects crawlacross leaves, and vines search outsupports to hang on to.” They respond toheat and cold. Shaking a plant will reduceits growth. Windswept plants are stunted.The carnivorous Venus flytrap is aspectacular example of touch sensitivity.

“What’s really fascinating is that even atthe level of individual cells, plants andanimals use similar proteins to feelthings.” Of course, proteins can’t makethemselves. They need both a selection ofother proteins and specific informationcarried in coded DNA and RNA.

Smell. Plants have receptors to smell vola-tile odours. Ripening fruit gives off ethyl-ene gas, so that placing a ripe fruit amongunripe ones promotes ripening. So an or-chard brings all its bounty to harvest at thesame time, attracting animals to eat thefruit and disperse the seeds. Leaf colourchanges are also coordinated by ethylene.Trees attacked by caterpillars send anairborne pheromone message to nearbytrees. These trees then produce anunpalatable chemical in their leaves todiscourage the pests.Taste. While smell deals with volatilechemicals, taste deals with soluble ones.Methyl jasmonate, a constituent of theperfume Chanel no. 5, diffuses through thepores of leaves and is converted into thewater-soluble jasmonic acid. This triggersthe plants defence responses. Plant roots

The Venus flytrap is alerted to the presence of itsprey through touch-sensitive hairs. Image: K.

Szkurlatowski, www.rgbstock.com

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can also communicate with neighboursusing water-soluble messengers.Hearing. Is talking to your house-plants arecipe for better growth? Probably not,though the disciples did pluck ‘ears’ ofcorn (J). (A letter – 22/9/12 p.28 – inresponse to this article reported thatstriking a middle C tuning fork caused aflower to shed its pollen.) The human voicehas been used to double the growth ofdwarf sweet peas by stimulating theproduction of the growth hormonegibberellic acid. I was a research chemistwith ICI half a century ago, and we studiedthe complex structures of the gibberellins.But we didn’t attempt to synthesise them.We extracted tiny quantities of them fromsacks of coconuts. No way might they ariseby naturally selected chance developments.Seeds. Plants also have a varied repertoireof tricks for dispersing their seeds awayfrom the parent plant. These include windwith sycamore and dandelion, birds eatingtasty fruit with berries and bees collectinghoney. Could these mechanisms haveevolved over time? No way! They had tobe fully ready from the start or therewouldn’t have been a second generation.

1 September p.38 – Shaping life“It starts with a single cell. From this can

come a dizzying variety of shapes andforms, from trees to jellyfish to people.We take this process so much for grantedthat we forget how extraordinary it is.”While we have found which genes directgrowth we know very little of how theirinstructions lead to final shape. We nowknow that plant growth is triggered by highlevels of auxin, a plant hormone. (Readersof this column may remember that it is thebuild-up and removal of auxin in the stemsof sunflowers that make them bend tofollow the sun through the day and returnto face East again at night.) So how does

the auxin know where to site itself? Aprotein called PIN1 pumps auxin out ofcells. The use of fluorescent labels on thePIN1 proteins in thale cress revealed thatthey congregated in spots at the end of cellswhere leaves later emerged. “Theirstudies and models show that simplefeedback loops, involving the funnellingof auxin by PIN1, can producealternating peaks of auxin and thegrowth suppressor along the margin of aleaf, and thus a serrated shape.”

This “simple” jellyfish is actually a highly complexmulti-cellular organism derived from the

enormously sophisticated growth and developmentof a single cell following the encyclopaedic

instructions of its DNA. Just by chance? Image: K.Szkurlatowski, www.rgbstock.com

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Growth hormones, suppressors and proteinpumps are produced from the precise orderof nucleotides in the genes, in concert withother proteins and RNA. Their complexityis irreducible. Since all this pointsinevitably to an intelligent Designer, whocannot be recognised by scientificexperiment, the article concludes:

“But evolution has produced manyfantastical forms, from birds of paradiseto stick insects to the blue whale, andingenious designers should eventually beable to outdo nature.”

‘But God has chosen the foolish things ofthe world to confound the wise.’ I Cor. 1:27.

8 September p30 – Ghost matterFollowing the finding of decay products ofwhat is thought to be the Higgs particle,Nobel prizewinning physicist JackSteinberger pointed out that still “‘thereare many unanswered questions that areextremely elusive at the moment’. Thosequestions include the nature of darkmatter – the mysterious, invisiblematerial thought to make up more than80 per cent of the mass of the universe.Then there is dark energy, the stuffreckoned to be causing the universe’sexpansion to accelerate. In what mustrank as our worst prediction, particlephysics overestimates dark energy’smagnitude by a factor of 10120. Thestandard model also cannot explain howmatter survived the big bang [it shouldhave been annihilated then by an equalamount of antimatter], or how gravity fitsinto the picture. It is riddled with so-called ‘free parameters’, troublinglyarbitrary numbers that have to be fedinto the theory by hand, for example toset the strength of the interactions itdescribes.”Because the Higgs hasn’t answered thesequestions, this cover article wonders

whether the key may lie with a differentsort of particle: neutrinos. There are 3 sortsof neutrinos together with 3 correspondingkinds of antineutrinos, collectively knownas leptons. There might be more than 3 ofthem, their masses are not known, and theycan ‘shape-shift from one type into another.This is according to “our bestunderstanding of the building blocks ofmatter.”

“Many questions about neutrinos remainopen … what is needed are more andbetter experiments. This is one of theareas in which new discoveries arepossible, but we don’t know from whichdirection these discoveries will come.”The problems of dark matter and energy,and of matter and antimatter at thebeginning, are solved at a stroke byaccepting that in the beginning God createdthe heavens and the earth. We also thenhave no need to postulate a multiverse,because our home was designed with manin mind – the anthropic creation.

8 September p.40 – Unfathomable – Themore we learn about the human genome,the less we seem to know about what allthat DNA actually does. Linda Geddesreports on the major new findingsreleased this week.

“After the genome was sequenced,another major project was launched totry to understand which bits of thegenome do what. The results, releasedthis week, reveal that our genome is farmore complex and mysterious thanbiologists imagined just a decade ago.”Just 1.2 per cent of our DNA codes forprotein. Some suggested that the rest wasmostly junk. However, making RNAcopies of genes – transcription – involvesclusters of proteins binding to specificsequences near the genes. These proteinscontrol the activity of genes by either

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boosting or blocking transcription. The‘junk’ sequences to which they bind arenow known as regulatory DNA, orswitches. This week, results of the study byteams worldwide found 4 million switchsites in 8.5 per cent of the genome, far morethan expected. Nearly every part of thegenome is near a switch. It is estimated thatalmost a fifth of the genome consists ofvital switches. Moreover, individualswitches interact with many genes, andmost genes are being influenced bynumerous switches at the same time. Farfrom being garbage left behind in a processof evolution from the proposed first livingcell, what we have in every cell nucleus isan interacting network of instructions,switches and feedback mechanisms ofincredible complexity that shouts design.

“‘Almost every gene we look at isphysically touching other pieces of DNA,and it’s never just one, it tends to be five,eight, 10 sites, and each site in turn hasRNAs on it, proteins on it, histones on it,’says team member Job Dekker of theUniversity of Massachusetts.”The project estimates that up to 80 per centof the genome is active, being involved insome kind of biochemical event daily.Much of it is transcribed into RNA. RNAcan code for proteins or regulate geneactivity while some RNA sequences act astaxi drivers to deliver proteins around thegenome. They can tether one part of thegenome to another, acting as a bridge.Ewan Birney of the EuropeanBioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UKsays: “‘We don’t yet have a definitiveanswer to how much of it is important,but we’ve discovered a lot more thingsthat could be important than anybodyhad ever suspected. People often say it’sthe protein coding region, plus a bitmore. It’s not a bit more, it’s a lot more…Our genome knows how to make a

human, but I think it is hubris to thinkthat that recipe book would be simpleand well laid out. We are one of the mostcomplicated things that we know about,and indeed it does look verycomplicated.’”Tellingly, the NS editor (p.3) commentsupon this article: “But not so fast. It hasyet to be shown that most of this activityis adaptive. In fact, there are still verygood reasons for thinking that most ofour DNA is far from essential.’”I guess it all depends on your worldview.

15 September p.30 A brief history of thegenomeThis 6-page cover story gives anevolutionary story of how the genome isthought by some evolutionists to havedeveloped from nothing to us. It begins byquoting a 60 nucleotide long sequence thatis common to all life (GTGCCAGC…) andclaims it has survived for 3 billion years.Given today’s rate of mutation with eachgeneration, we agree that this is

“unimaginable”! “You have around 100mutations in your genome that are notpresent in your mother or father,ranging from one or two-letter changesto the loss or gain of huge chunks ofDNA.” About 3.5 billion years ago, LUCA

– the Last Universal Common Ancestor – isthought to have evolved. It is said to havecontained recipes for making RNAs andproteins. One wonders how simplerpredecessors of LUCA survived without allthis necessary kit. Then, “around a billionyears ago”, oh my best belovéd, “abacterium ended up inside an archaeon.Instead of one killing the other” (immunesystems hadn’t yet evolved), “the twoforged a symbiotic relationship, with thedescendants of the bacterium graduallyevolving to take on a crucial role: theybecame mitochondria, the power

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factories inside cells thatprovide our energy.” Without animmune system or a source ofenergy in the cells for theprevious alleged 2.5 billion years,survival of the seriously unfitwould have been miraculous.

“The presence of introns [theyused to call them junk sequences],and thus exons, in effect madegenes modular. In anuninterrupted gene, mutationsthat add or remove sectionsusually change the way the restof the gene is read, producinggibberish. Exons [coding forproteins], by contrast, can bemoved around without disrupting therest of the gene.” That looks suspiciouslylike a design feature.Eukaryotes, which have cells with anenclosed nucleus containing the geneticmaterial, somehow evolved, and this is saidto have given rise to organisms with manycells. Cells then started to differentiate,producing varied kinds of tissue fordifferent uses – muscle, liver, limbs andbrains. If you don’t think about it for toolong, it seems credible.Duplication of genes or even wholegenomes permitted the extra genes tomutate into Hox genes, encouraging theevolution of vertebrates.It seems we have “an ancient parasite” tothank for the “mind-bogglingly complex”human immune system.Apparently the human brain evolved fromthe ape by way of thousands of smallchanges. The fact that the vast majority ofmutations are harmful, lethal, or at bestneutral, makes this idea hard to justify.

“Along the way, there were uncountablefailures, with trillions of animals dyingoften horrible deaths.”

The revealed truth is that God createdeverything fully formed, with the ability toproduce varieties within genetic limits. Hepronounced the whole creation ‘very good’.Sin came by one man, and death throughsin, and so death passed upon all men, forthat all have sinned. Then, in the fullness oftime, the Father sent the Son to be theSaviour of the world. His death andresurrection was a sufficient sacrifice forour sin, so that a loving God could be bothjust and also the justifier of those whobelieve. Wow!

22 September p.36 – Truth decayThe ‘facts’ of science have an expiry date.

“In 1953, the prominent cell biologist LeoSachs even said that ‘the diploidchromosome number of 48 in man cannow be considered as an establishedfact.’” It is now confidently asserted thatthere are 46 chromosomes in the humangenome.Science is about getting closer to the truththrough observation and experiment. Someideas have to be discarded. Eating meat hasbeen good for you, then bad, then good,and now it’s a matter of opinion. I think

God made everything fully formed, with variation within limits, andpronounced it very good. Subsequently sin has spoiled this, but

God has provided a Redeemer. Image: CSM.

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that at the moment red wine is good for you,in moderation of course. (the apostle Paulwould agree.) A group of French scientistsstudied 500 articles from over 50 years onthe subject of liver disease. They checkedwhether they were still regarded as factual,out of date or now disproved. They founda clear decay in the number of papers thatwere still factual. By measuring the timefor half the articles to become redundantthey obtained an average half-life of 45years. “Through this we can begin to getrough estimates of the half-lives of manyfields. For example, a study of all thepapers in the Physical Review journals, acluster of periodicals of greatimportance to physicists, found that thehalf-life in physics is about 10 years.”

“Many medical schools inform theirstudents that within five years, half ofwhat they have been taught will bewrong – and the teachers don’t knowwhich half it will be.” Sometimes, wehave to wait for the experts to pass awaybefore their pet theories can be abandoned.It isn’t easy to acknowledge that what youhave spent your career researching is a loadof cobblers. If enough observationsdisagree with current theory, collapse canusher in a whole new paradigm, as oncehappened with combustion theory.We await the overthrow of the theory ofmacro-evolution, and the generalacceptance of the unchanging facts ofbiblical history. But don’t hold your breath.Science cannot study God.

29 September p.30 – Theprogress illusionAccording to this piece, our‘technological evolution’ haslacked steady progress. “Infact, over the whole ofhuman history, we haveprobably lost more

innovations than we now possess…”Some of these lost arts are cited. Also, it’ssuggested, we made a very slow startbecause of Stone Age man’s “limitedcognitive abilities”. It took, we areinformed, two million years for thesehunter gatherers to perfect the flint stoneaxe.It is true that we have lost some ancientcrafts, but then we started at a high point.Adam’s son Cain built a city for his manydescendants during his long life. One ofthem, Jabal, raised cattle, while his brotherJubal played the harp and the organ. Theirhalf-brother, Tubal-cain was an instructorof every artificer in brass and iron (Genesis4). They had a cousin several timesremoved who was a master boat builder.Flint axes would have been needed afterthe flood, in a harsh climate, before theywere able to mine metal ores again. Therenever were primitive hominines chippingflint for 2 million years. Adam and Evewere made ‘at the beginning’ (Matthew19:4-5). Further, they recorded their familyhistories for us.

29 September p.34 - RealityOver 14 pages, this article explores whatwe understand of the world around us.Science can describe a rock by itsconstituent atoms (a handful of differentparticles), plus some rules laid down byquantum mechanics. But electrons canbehave as tiny particles or as a wave, and

Neolithic flint axe, about 31 cm long. Flint is hard to work with: shaping itrequires considerable technical abiity. Image: Dr. H. Krämer, Wikipedia,under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

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change from one pattern to the other.Everything is reducible to fundamentalparticles that can act as waves. The

‘standard model’ describes the particles, but,for workers in this field it is unsatisfactorybecause it cannot describe dark energy anddark matter that are thought by them tocomprise 96 per cent of the universe.

“The universe is a computer, andeverything that goes on in it can beexplained in terms of informationprocessing” according to a New Scientistconsultant. “Quantum physics is almostphrased in terms of informationprocessing… It’s suggestive that you willfind information processing at the rootof everything.” The article does notconclude that since information processingis a mental exercise, we might find themind of God at the root of everything.

Perhaps, it is wondered, “there actually isno reality independent of ourobservations. But if there is - how can weknow?”The article concludes by hypothesising thatsome advanced alien civilisation may haveproduced a sort of computer simulationthat we are part of! We might be their videogame.However, God’s Word offers this insight:-

‘We look not at the things which are seen,but at the things which are not seen: for thethings which are seen are temporal; but thethings which are not seen are eternal.’II Cor. 4:18.

Genesis ExpoWe have all been very busy, and there arejust a few things left to do before we throwopen the doors again.

There have been a lot of repairs necessaryto this 19thC building, and we have spent alot on new exhibits. Satisfying the newsafety regulations, especially for fire andelectrical devices, had become a necessity.Altogether this year we have spent over£41,000 on these one-off expenses. TheLord continues to keep us in the blackfinancially without asking anyone forfunds apart from membership subscription(kept at £10 since 2008). Thank you foryour generosity to His work.

We are celebrating the 80th year of theMovement (1932-2012) with a dayconference at the Royal Maritime Club,just round the corner from the GenesisExpo, on 3rd November. Those comingwill hear four presentations plus a Q&Asession from the floor, and then visit theThe refurbished Genesis Expo includes, among

many other things, a number of “soundbite” boardsgiving scientific information that supports Creation

rather than Evolution. Image: CSM.

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newly refurbished exhibition. There arestill places available.

Please continue to pray for the creationistcause in the UK. John Mackay is currentlyon an extended tour here.

Malcolm BowdenWe are delighted to announce that MalcolmBowden has accepted an invitation tobecome a Vice-President of CSM.Malcolm joined the CSM council in 1976and has written, lectured and debated for uson numerous occasions. He is also theauthor of three excellent creationist booksstocked by CSM - Science versusEvolution, The Rise of the Evolution Fraudand True Science Agrees with the Bible.

Quotes“Requiring students to leave their religion atthe door of the science class is denyingthem a proven tool of systematic enquiry.”Steve Fuller, Dissent over Descent

“Since the flagellum is so well designed andbeautifully constructed by an orderedassembly pathway, even I, who am not a

creationist, get an awe-inspiring feelingfrom its ‘divine’ beauty. However, if theflagellum has evolved from a primitiveform, where are the remnants of itsancestor? Why don't we see anyintermediate or simpler forms of flagellathan what they are today? How was itpossible that the flagella have evolvedwithout leaving traces in history?”Shin-Ichi Aizawa, in an essay, What isessential for flagellar assembly?

Creation Science MovementPO Box 888, Portsmouth PO6 2YD, UK

Founded 1932, Registered Charity 801745www.csm.org.uk; info@csm.org.uk; 02392 293988

Articles in the Journal are generallyby the editor, R. Cambridge, unlessotherwise stated. Articles, letters,notes and other contributions fromnew writers are warmly welcome.

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