Piltdown Superman

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen I never thought that by the time I turned sixty, I would be writing about the foolishness of people who want personhood status for animals. It happened. It made a bit of sense when some activists failed in their attempt to obtain legal status for a chimpanzee  since they resemble humans somewhat. But an elephant? Credit: RGBStock /  Stella Bogdanic Just over an hour south of me at the Bronx Zoo  is an elephant named Happy. Animal rights extremists are unhappy and want the elephant to have personhood status. Let's ride this short side trail a spell. A woman was a vegetarian for many years, but ate a hamburger and was converted . Now she's a butcher and a pig farmer. She did the vegetarian thing because she was converted by reading a book by "bioethicist" Peter Singer . That name should get the attention of some people, as he is known for animal rights, but also abortion and infanticide. Don't eat meat because animals have rights,

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen It seems like a swell notion to save the planet, and it helps people feel like they are accomplishing something. People like to feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, the depredations of two-bit tinhorns promoting anthropogenic climate change have unduly distressed many people. Modified from an image at  Clker  clipart "But climate change is settled science, Cowboy Bob!" You might want to study on it a while. People making a claim like that are falling into the traps of climate change cultists, and if someone tries to disabuse them of that falsehood, they become hysterical like the guy that incorrectly glued himself to an airplane 1 or the woman glued her, uh,  sweater kittens outside Goldman Sachs 2 . What's with leftists and glue, anyway? (One tinhorn says they are not extremists, but simply people concerned for the welfare of the planet. Uh, sure.) Climate "consensus" is ridiculous 3 , and it shows the hubris of seculari

When Gregor Mendel (peas be upon him) pioneered the science of genetics, little did he dream that the field would develop so dramatically. With the advances came questions of ethics regarding genetic tampering  including the outrage caused by Dr. He Jiankui forumulating designer babies . The science can cause a passel of problems as well as substantial benefits. CRISPR genome editing / Image credit: National Institutes of Health (Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents.) Lives may be improved with the repair of congenital defects, but there is one very large problem: some of these owlhoots do not know what they are doing. They can use CRISPR-Cas9 and do some gene editing to some extent, but some seem to be the equivalent of people selling pharmaceutical products in dark alleys. To make the ethics questions worse Remember, using bad science techniques, lack of knowledge, and microbes-to-microbiologist evolutionary presuppositions, scientists came up with the seriou

If you happen to venture into Wales and want to see some ancient cathedrals, head west over to the county of Pembrokeshire. Before you ride into the sea, look for a small city (the population is just under 2,000) named St. David's. There is a cathedral that has something of interest to biblical creationists. Credit: Freeimages / John Noble St. Davids Cathedral has been existence since the 6th century, but like other cathedrals, it had repairs and upgrades over the years. In the late Medieval upgrade, folding seats were installed that feature a critter that looks quite a bit like a sauropod dinosaur. Regular readers know that there are historical accounts of dinosaurs (previously called dragons), indicating that despite the claims of Darwinists, they lived at the same time as humans. But this one has a mix of fantasy with reality, so we commence to doing some reasoning. This starts with the fact that the artist could not have seen fossils or reconstructions in museums. Its

One of the most frequently used false claims for fish-to-pharmacist evolution is antibiotic resistance, but what is seen is most definitely not evolution . What we do see is something akin to natural selection because antibiotics kill off some strains but leave others that are resistant. Then we have the problem of superbugs. Mostly made at Yukki.com's tombstone maker The ghost of Charles Darwin is rattling chains in the halls of academia and science labs (and starting the occasional dumpster fire), moaning piteously about his eternal destiny and trying to keep his disciples away from the truth. They don't need his help to reject the Creator, their own hard hearts can take care of that. This "evidence for evolution" is based on outdated and incomplete science coupled with plenty of hubris and wishful thinking. Some of our microbes already have antibiotic resistance. (For that matter, some people groups also have it !) New research shows that bacteria can share

You may be surprised to learn that the Big Bang model for the origin of the universe began way back in the 1920s and has been modified numerous times since then. However, the Big Bang simply does not work, so older ideas are being retooled, and new ones are being considered and slipped through the secular torpedo nets. Credit: Pixabay / Johnson Martin Astronomer Fred Hoyle came up with the title Big Bang out of derision. He and other scientists did not like the idea of the universe having a beginning, and preferred the even less scientific but predominant steady state concept. Since the Big Bang has been Frankensteined with parts added on through the years in futile attempts to keep it alive, some scientists are dreaming up other ideas to cling to their cosmic evolution ideas. They will not admit that the facts support  what the Bible said all along: God created. There is definitely no valid reason for professing Christians to use this philosophy as an add-on. A recent New Sc

A few weeks back, I met up with Rusty Swingset and his lady friend Jacqueline Hyde (who was not quite herself) before they headed back up to the Darwin Ranch near Deception Pass. They were discussing tunnel valleys, something I had never heard of before. Turns out some are a few days' ride (a few hours by car) from me. Finger Lakes image credit: NASA Just south of Lake Ontario in the state of New York is a region called the Finger Lakes. You can see why (besides, "Clawmark Lakes" could seem a mite scary), since there are about eleven of them going pretty much north and south, and quite narrow. How did they get there? Tunnel valleys like this are in many places when Earth wore an ice hat. More specifically, areas that were glaciated. Rapid meltwater during the Ice Age carved them out, but the timing details are sketchy. Some uniformitarian geologists think these happened over several ice ages, but they cannot provide evidence. More likely, the flows were catastroph

Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck may be coming back from the sepulcher of evolutionary philosophies. The secular science establishment decided to ride for the Darwin gang and Lamarck was essentially told, "Go away, boy, you bother me", but some of his contributions are acknowledged. Lamarck portrait by Charles Thévenin 1802 Although Lamarck is touted as the purveyor of inherited characteristics from his 1809 publication on evolution, he is somewhat misrepresented. The typical dismissal often includes the idea that giraffes developed longer necks to reach leaves in trees. While he was more wrong than Papa Darwin on evolution, he may have had a notion that was ahead of its time. Scientists are realizing that the nuclear genome is not the be-all and end-all of inheritance. Studies in epigenetics are showing that this area plays a large part in the inheritance of characteristics, and some behaviors are actually learned for a few generations . Some scientists are looking back on

Sometimes we may wonder why the names of planets were chosen after some very unsavory characters. Kronos was a Greek titan, son of sky and earth (Uranus and Gaia). In a violent coup with the help of Gaia, he overthrew Uranus which caused giants, fairies, and nymphs to form. He later ate his own children, but was forced to cough them up years later — none the worse for wear. False-color image combination of Saturn Credit: NASA / E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona) His rule was not much help against the Romans, who conquered and also merged Kronos with Saturn . Except for varying accounts of mythology, a nifty evolution-defying planet and its helpful moons, and the name of a day of the week, this sidewinder is pretty much forgotten. Misotheists say that the Bible reads like "fairy tales" or "mythology", but I lack belief that they are intellectually honest when making such foolish comparisons. No need to put on a saturnine countenance as we will now l

Many birds and animals communicate audibly, and even some fishes and whales make themselves heard to each other. Mates, offspring, and certain others recognize each others' sounds. The human voice, however, has many features to set us apart from critters. Credit: Pixabay / Free-Photos (edited) There are certain types of speakers that I like to hear, probably because of pitch and timbre . You have probably had the same experience where it is pleasant to hear someone talking. We can also tell people apart when they speak or sing (I'll allow that some are difficult until you listen for a spell). We have more range and versatility than the creatures God made — they're not built that way. Language is something that sets us apart (see " Language Itself Testifies of the Creator "). Pronunciations in some languages require a great deal of work (such as when someone who speaks English tries to learn Russian, for example). No animals write songs in a language, p