Archive for January, 2010

Scientific Hoaxs

January 31st, 2010

PILTDOWN

Piltdown Man Hoax: Perpetrated in 1912. The Piltdown Man Hoax led to erroneous pictures of mankind’s supposed ape-like ancestors in textbooks for 70+ years.

Editor’s Note: This hoax has recently been spotted as an example of evolution nearly 100 years after it was found to be one of the greatest hoaxes in history. “The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern man.”

haeckel

Biogenetic Law Fraud: Ernst Haeckel was actually called before a board of examiners and chastised for fudging the data. He proposed Biogenetic Law was supported with fraudulent pictures showing similarities of human embryos to those of fish, pig, chicken,etc. This was his attempt to demonstrate our common ancestry with animals. Although discredited 100 years ago, his drawings are still in some textbooks today.

Stem Cell Fraud: South Korean stem-cell researcher, Woo Suk Hwang, was “the centre of one of  the largest investigations of scientific fraud in living memory.” Hwang was discredited by his own home research institution,  Seoul National University, for presenting fraudulent data,  Nature Reported.  “The revelation has destroyed the best evidence so far that stem cells can be extracted from a clone matched to a specific patient. With Hwang discredited, both the field of therapeutic cloning and the public’s trust in science have suffered a serious setback.”  Nature, 1-11-2006

Scientists Invent Results: Times Online (June 4, 2009) headline reports that “One in seven scientists say colleagues fake data.” That figure applies to serious breaches of “acceptable conduct by inventing results.” The article went on to say that “46 percent say that they have observed fellow scientists engage in ‘questionable practices‘, such as presenting data selectively or changing the conclusions of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.”

ClimateGate: Washington Times (Nov 20, 24, etc. 2009) reported on potential fraud relating to global warming turned up by hackers breaking into the e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UAE) in England. “Those e-mails involved communication among many scientific researchers and policy advocates with similar ideological positions all across the world. Those purported authorities were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global-warming claims.” If investigations confirm that climate data has been hidden which negates the currently “politically correct” global warming hysteria, as well as the attempt to silence the “dissenters,” this would likely become the biggest scandal ever perpetrated on the whole world.

Editor’s Note: These are just a small sampling of the plethora of  “scientific” frauds that have been told and written over and over again. Creation-Facts will continue to expose these frauds a few at a time.

The above articles were taken from Think & Believe (January/February, 2010 Vol 28, No 1) newsletter written by Dave Nutting of Alpha Omega Institute of Grand Junction, CO.

Are Humans as Close to Chickens as They Are to Chimps?

January 27th, 2010

y_chromosome_wide Written by :  Brian Thomas, MS *

A recent comprehensive analysis compared the human Y chromosome with the chimpanzee Y chromosome, and the researchers found that they were “remarkably divergent.”1

The Y chromosome is found only in males and contains many genes that specify male features, as well as genetic and regulatory information that is expressed throughout the whole body. In a study published in the January issue of Nature, a large team of scientists encountered so many unforeseen differences in the DNA sequences of the human and chimp Y chromosomes that the research took much longer than they had originally anticipated. Among their discoveries were interesting features unique to certain “sequence classes” within each chromosome.

Most of their findings do not fit well with the often-repeated erroneous statement that humans and chimps are 98 percent similar, nor with the more general hypothesis that they share a common ancestor.2 One sequence class within the chimpanzee Y chromosome had less than 10 percent similarity with the same class in the human Y chromosome, and vice versa. Another large class shared only half the similarities of the other species, and vice versa. And one whole class on the human Y chromosome “has no counterpart in the chimpanzee MSY [male-specific Y chromosome].”1

Under evolutionary assumptions of long and gradual genetic changes, the Y chromosome structures, layouts, genes, and other sequences should be much the same in both species, given the relatively short—according to the evolutionary timeline—six-million-year time span since chimpanzees and humans supposedly diverged from a common ancestor. Instead, the differences between the chromosomes are marked. R. Scott Hawley, a genetics researcher at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City who wasn’t involved in the research, told the Associated Press, “That result is astounding.”3

The Nature paper expressed the mismatch between this data and standard evolutionary interpretations in a more muted tone: “Indeed, at 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310 million years of separation.”1 Autosomes are the chromosomes other than the X and Y.

So, the human Y chromosome looks just as different from a chimp’s as the other human chromosomes do from a chicken’s. And to explain where all these differences between humans and chimps came from, believers in big-picture evolution are forced to invent stories of rapid wholesale rearrangements, and rapid generation of both new gene-containing and regulatory DNA.

But since each respective Y chromosome appears fully integrated and interdependent with its host organism, the most logical conclusion is that humans and chimpanzees were each specially created as distinct creatures.

References:

1.  Hughes, J. F. et al. Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content. Nature. Published online January 13, 2010.

2.  Tomkins, J. 2009. Human-Chimp Similarities: Common Ancestry of Flawed Research? Acts & Facts. 38 (6): 12.

3.  Borenstein, S. Men more evolved? Y chromosome study stirs debate. Associated Press, January 13, 2010. *

Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.

The entire article above was taken from The Institute For Creation Research.