Missing links?

“The fossil record has absurd numbers of missing links,” she said, expressing an opinion that is common enough among those opposed to an evolutionary model of physical history. However, that statement makes sense only if we should expect to find those fossils and yet come up empty. In other words, is it appropriate to call those fossils “missing” if we are not really expecting to find them in the first place?

“But,” she responds, “if evolution were true, we should expect to find them. There should be no gaps.” And thus she fails to realize how that does not follow. Given what we know about evolution as descent with modification from a common ancestor, we should expect lots of transitional forms. But then given what we know about geology—and also the tricky process of fossilization—we should expect very few transitional forms, that is, significant gaps in the fossil record of phylogenetic continuity, and not because evolution is false but because geology is true. It’s hell on fossils.

Quotes: Richard Clayton

The Theory of Intelligent Design: "Somewhere, sometime, somehow, something happened that wasn't evolution. Maybe."

Richard Clayton, "What Is the Theory of Intelligent Design?" talk.origins [newsgroup], posted August 13, 2013, https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/xhxOwoi4HzY/4JDcxk0lCVwJ

Planetarium

Explore the stars and planets from your web browser.

http://neave.com/planetarium/

Paul Cardall - Voices

From his album Sacred Piano (Amazon).

Conrad Hyers on Genesis 1

Read through the eyes of the people who wrote it, Genesis 1 would seem very different from the way most people today would tend to read it—including both evolutionists who may dismiss it as a prescientific account of origins and creationists who may try to defend it as the true science and literal history of origins. . . .

In the light of this historical context it becomes clearer what Genesis 1 is undertaking and accomplishing: a radical and sweeping affirmation of monotheism vis-a-vis polytheism, syncretism, and idolatry. . . .

On each day of creation another set of idols is smashed. These, O Israel, are no gods at all—even the great gods and rulers of conquering superpowers. They are the creations of that transcendent One who is not to be confused with any piece of the furniture of the universe of creaturely habitation. The creation is good, it is very good, but it is not divine. . . .

The fundamental question at stake [for the author and audience of Genesis 1], then, could not have been the scientific question of how things achieved their present form and by what processes, nor even the historical question about time periods and chronological order. The issue was idolatry, not science; syncretism, not natural history; theology, not chronology; affirmation of faith in one transcendent God, not empirical or speculative theories of origin. . . .

[Genesis 1] provides a Jewish cosmology to preface the story of Adam and Eve, on a scale equally encompassing to that of other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, yet without the polytheistic mythological dramatics. . . .

This does not mean that Genesis secularizes or desacrilizes nature; nature is still sacred by virtue of having been created by God, declared to be good, and placed under ultimate divine sovereignty. What it does mean is that Genesis 1 clears the cosmic stage of its mythical scenes and polytheistic dramas . . .

• Conrad Hyers, “Genesis knows nothing of scientific creationism: Interpreting and misinterpreting the biblical texts,” Creation Evolution Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (1983): 6-9.

A tale of two mechanics

So before we drove the 400 kms (240 mi) to Vancouver in order to visit Pastor Brent and Lauren last Sunday (June 30) I took the car in to have the brakes checked. Marianna thought they might be a bit worn from having driven so much in Kamloops. (There are lots of hills there.) So I took the car in to where my boss usually took his vehicles, City Auto Repair. The mechanic popped the wheels off, inspected the brakes, and assured me they were in great shape still. But he noticed there was a very slight ‘clunk’ sound in the steering and said that was a tie rod needing to be replaced, which would run me about $350. I said thanks and that I’d get back to him another time on the whole tie rod thing. The good news about the brakes (and tie rod) cost me $20. Whatever.

Except it could have cost me a lot more than that.

The trip was uneventful, but over the next few days in Kelowna we started hearing some strange sounds coming from the front end of the vehicle, like something was rubbing. And the rate would increase or decrease with the speed of the vehicle. An annoyance at first, since it was barely audible, but it began to get louder over the next day or two and I began to be concerned. During one trip I pulled over to inspect the front end to see if it was anything obvious, which is when I noticed that one of the lug nuts was missing from the passenger-side front tire! The stupid mechanic lost one of the lug nuts and never said anything to me about it? Grrr.

I could not see anything obvious—that is, anything else obvious that would be making that rubbing noise. So we continued driving the vehicle. And the sound continued to worsen. And now there was a distinct but ever so slight shake that could be felt in the steering wheel, a slight shake which the next day could be felt in the whole vehicle. That was the last day we drove it. It was a Friday evening and I assured Marianna that I would have it towed to the mechanic first thing Monday morning.

That Monday morning I found out from my boss that his mechanic stopped working for City Auto some time ago, that he had opened up his own shop on Highway 33 at Sadler Road. Well, that might explain the bewildering ineptitude and dishonesty I experienced at City Auto. So I called Doug Hoy at Hwy 33 Napa AutoPro and arranged to have the car towed up to his shop and properly cared for. “I don’t care what you need to do,” I said, “just get it purring like a kitten again.” I was expecting several hundred dollars in repairs because, honestly, the car sounded that bad. I was prepared for the worst, so at our Monday evening Bible study my prayer request was that God would be merciful to my bank account.

That brings us to this afternoon, when Doug called me up to tell me the news.

“Well, I am only going to charge you for the towing,” he said.

My heart sank, thinking the repairs were estimated to cost more than the vehicle was worth. “How bad is it?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s not bad at all,” he replied. “The lug nuts on the driver-side front tire were not torqued properly. The tire had almost fallen off. It’s a good thing you stopped driving it!” he laughed.

And that was it. That other mechanic had lost a lug nut for one of the front tires and didn’t torque them properly on the other one. Well, I’m sure glad I saw that stupid mechanic before making that long trip on the Coquihalla Highway through the Cascade Mountains!

I was so grateful for the answered prayer and Doug’s honesty and integrity that I could not leave it at just a tow bill. I asked him to maybe run a thorough inspection of the vehicle, and he suggested a maintenance service package which included a complete safety inspection and oil change. Sounds good, I said (and made an appointment for a tune-up next week, given the results of the inspection). When I arrived to pick the vehicle up Doug also told me that he had signed me up for free roadside assistance coverage from NAPA AutoPro. 24-hour roadside assistance anywhere in North America, covering me if I need a tow, lock my keys in the car, run out of gas, got a flat tire and so on. Yeah, free.

I told him that he is officially my mechanic, that I will never take my vehicle anywhere else but to him. That was great service.

T8, the bio-inspired 3D-printed spider octopod robot

Jason Mraz - I Won’t Give Up (performed live on Q)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV7B9VvspyY

Quotes: William H. Bragg

Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are—in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.

William H. Bragg (1862-1942)

Mouse cloned from drop of blood

So apparently some scientists in Japan have successfully cloned a female mouse from a single drop of blood, a mouse which “lived a normal lifespan and could give birth to young.” Circulating blood cells collected from the tail of a donor mouse were used to produce the clone, a team at the Riken BioResource Center reports in the journal Biology of Reproduction.

Although mice have been cloned from several different sources of donor cells including white blood cells found in the lymph nodes, bone marrow and liver, these scientists in Japan were investigating “whether circulating blood cells could also be used for cloning.” In their report in the American scientific journal Biology of Reproduction they said the study “demonstrated for the first time that mice could be cloned using the nuclei of peripheral blood cells.”

Their aim was to find an easily available source of donor cells to clone scientifically valuable strains of laboratory mice.

The team, led by Atsuo Ogura, of Riken BioResource Center in Tsukuba, took blood from the tail of a donor mouse, isolated the white blood cells, and used the nuclei for cloning experiments, using the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep in Edinburgh.

Read more here.

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• Helen Briggs, “Mouse cloned from drop of blood,” BBC News, posted June 26, 2013.