Work and Visits

On my blog I have commented about Creationism and Intelligent Design as well as a variety of other subjects. I’m also writing a book, and had been working in a part-time job. So for a while the blog was left to simmer, with a few posts at very long intervals. Well, the place I was working closed, and I have a little more time. I’ve enjoyed writing so much since the job closed that I’m going to try to continue. This means finishing my book and trying to get it published, as well as working on the next books down the line when the first is complete. Therefore I’m still busy, and probably still won’t write that much here. But I think about what I’d like to say and hope to do a little more blogging again.

I used to comment on a few other websites, but I think I need to concentrate on my own writing since I have trouble getting it done. I’m sorry I don’t visit others, and realize that’s probably why I don’t get much traffic here. I’m not on Facebook at all—if I hardly have the time here, I’d never have it for there. I know there are those out there who like to comment on other sites as well as those who have their own and I imagine much of that happens on Facebook. Still, there are those who use the regular old Internet, and anyone who visits and wants to comment here is welcome.

This blog has been an on-again off-again affair and will probably continue to be. But it is nice to have a little more freedom to work on it, at least for now. I hope you may find my occasional posts interesting and just want to repeat (as I’ve said in previous posts) that I’m glad to be here and to have you visit.

Thanks at Thanksgiving

There have been newspaper columnists and now are bloggers who list the things they have been thankful for.  I’d like to list some of the things I’m thankful for at Thanksgiving.

I’m thankful for a great and glorious Lord who is such a genius that He could create the world and all that is in it.  If not for Him, we wouldn’t have life at all.  When I think of what He had to know in order to make us, most of it is above my head.  But I’m thankful He has allowed me to understand and have access to read about some of the new discoveries of His creation.  I enjoy them so much.  Biology is absolutely wondrous.

I’m thankful for our house, which is not big or fancy but is homey and warm in the cold weather.   I pray for those who are displaced by the storms or having economic problems, that they will be restored soon. 

I’m thankful for my laptop computer and the Internet.  They both boggle my mind as far as how they work but I’m sure glad they do.  The ability to connect to the world in this way is so much fun.  What would I do on winter nights without them?  (Or winter mornings—I’m usually up by 5:00 am.)  Although cable TV is also a connection to the world, there is just something special about the web.  I guess it's more hands-on and personal.  I pray that Christian communicators may use it to spread the Word of Truth to all.

I’m thankful for doctors and researchers who try to treat disease, not just to make a living but to help others.  I pray for cures for the many ill people who still need them.

I’m thankful for my family and friends.  I’m thankful for our church family, and I pray we may all love and appreciate each other as the years go by. 

I know I haven’t listed everything, but perhaps I’ll be here next year to list more.  Just like the others, whom I am thankful for.

Thanks to Veterans

Today is Veterans Day and I thank all veterans for the sacrifices they have made for all of us.

I've been reading the Book of John in the Bible and just today came to the verses in Chapter 15 where Christ said:

11. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.  12. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.  13. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  14. You are my friends if you do what I command you.  15.  I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.  16.  It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.  17. This I command you: love one another (John 15:11-17 NABRE).

A soldier often faces immediate death and must come to terms with it.  Though I've never been in the armed forces, I'm sure that is a difficult task.  But we will all die eventually, barring the Second Coming before that.  In the meantime we can give ourselves to each other in the way we spend our time and act on what we believe is important.

I pray the Lord help us to love each other as we should.  To do this, many emphasize charity in material ways.  But we also love others by telling them about God and how He has given us physical life through His creation and gives eternal life through belief in His son, Jesus Christ.

Evolutionese and lncRNA

The ENCODE research that I have written about in the last two posts said that 80% of the DNA in our cells is functional.  By that they meant that it is copied and so has biochemical activity.  However, some evolutionists still resisted accepting the functionality of all that DNA by denying that this copying was really purposeful. Previously, only about 1-2% was understood to be the active part of genes, and the rest of DNA believed to be just a broken-down relic of millions of years of evolution.

Now, research by a commercial lab has been published which has discovered that some of this extra DNA which was formerly called "Junk" is necessary for regulating RNA translation into protein.  DNA is copied into RNA, and more and more types of RNA are being found.  Not only does RNA get directly translated into proteins which are the work-molecules of the body, other types of RNA can either stimulate or stop the protein production.  Among them are long, non-coding RNA (lncRNA) which does not code for proteins directly (as does messenger RNA) but is part of a regulatory system.  It is further described by Casey Luskin at Discovery Institute Evolution News HERE if you are interested. 

It is quite ironic that a group of evolutionists are fighting this new knowledge, since the scientists in the ENCODE report do not give up on materialistic, naturalistic evolution themselves.  For example, two MIT scientists integrate ENCODE findings with the Human Genome Project in Ward and Kellis, "Evidence of abundant purifying selection in humans for recently acquired regulatory functions," Science 337, 6102 (Sept. 28, 2012): 1675-8.  The first sentence of the abstract reads:

Although only 5% of the human genome is conserved across mammals, a substantially larger portion is biochemically active, raising the question of whether the additional elements evolve neutrally or confer a lineage-specific fitness advantage.

This is Evolutionese for insisting that the possibility of materialistic, naturalistic evolution by chance mutation and natural selection still exists.  I speak Evolutionese about as well as I speak Spanish.  I've studied both quite a bit and can pick up pieces of meaning.  I can read the languages, but they don't always make sense to me.  In Spanish, though, the translation problems are my fault.  In Evolutionese, there always seems to be an attempt at obfuscation.  (The Freedictionary definition of obfuscate is: 1. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand.) 

To digress a bit, just once I'd like to see a paper come out and talk about the findings and their evolutionary implications in English.  Though most sciences have their own jargon, many people are concerned about the teaching of evolution in the classroom.  Especially now that materialistic evolution has been proven wrong, scientists' statements on this topic should be made plain.

I got the Ward and Kellis article and read it.  I would have really liked to understand their work, but I didn't.  Many people yell when they speak to foreigners, assuming they will then understand them.  I'll try it.  "ARE YOU SAYING ONLY 5% OF THE HUMAN GENOME IS THE SAME AS OTHER ANIMALS BUT AT LEAST 80% IS ACTIVE AND THE ENCODE SCIENTISTS ARE SAYING IT MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE 100%?  I HAVEN'T HEARD MUCH ABOUT THAT IN THE PRESS. SO WHERE DID ALL THE UNRELATED, FUNCTIONAL DNA COME FROM?"

As you can see from the above quote, they would then say to me, "WE ARE WONDERING WHETHER THE ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS EVOLVE NEUTRALLY OR CONFER A LINEAGE-SPECIFIC FITNESS ADVANTAGE."

Well, I know that the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution never had a chance in the first place before we even found out that DNA is all functional.  The probabilities of getting functional proteins by chance have been known since the 1990's at least to have been astronomically small even if organisms had billions of years to give it a try.  Not all proteins are closely related, and only 1 in less than an estimated trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion is functional (1 in 10^63 by the research of Reidhaar-Olsen and Sauer which I mention in a previous post.)  The chance mutations coming from the reproduction of organisms from one generation to the next were supposed to take place in the part of the gene not used by the organism, only to take over when forming something functional, but the numbers did not add up. It is estimated the Earth could have supported less than 10^50 organisms in the supposed billions of years it has been habitable.  So all those organisms couldn't have produced enough changes to get one functional protein operating in time to be selected for better fitness than the ones already working.  But with all of DNA having a function, very little sifting power is left.  Gauger and Axe have done great research in showing the problems of molecular evolution.

And now Ward and Kellis wonder about a lineage-specific fitness advantage?  "AY?  SAY WHAT?" I ask.  "ARE YOU PROPOSING THESE GENES ARE WHAT MAKE HUMANS WHO THEY ARE?"

I'll finally go back to the point of why evolutionists are fighting about the functionality of DNA:  they KNOW what a fully functional DNA molecule means.  All we heard from the press after the first comparative genome projects was how DNA genes in humans matched 98% of monkeys. At the time, they thought the rest of the DNA was worthless.  Everyone in that camp was crowing that evolution was now a fact.  But the 98% similarity was just the protein-coding part, only about 1-2% of the whole length of the DNA in each cell. They know that if DNA proves fully functional, it doesn't matter what scientists say with their Evolutionese.  It won't matter how they mix words together.  We will all be able to really understand what that means: materialistic, naturalistic evolution is impossible.  And fully functional DNA is already proving, from the ENCODE project and the work on long, non-coding RNA's, to be true.

More Than Millions

The National Human Genome Research Institute, under the National Institute of Health, located in Bethesda, MD, announced the results of the latest 5-year project in a continuing study of human DNA. (2019 Update: the press release of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or ENCODE, project was an archived web page, but as of 2026, Encode website HERE.) The article states in part:

During the new study, researchers linked more than 80 percent of the human genome sequence to a specific biological function and mapped more than 4 million regulatory regions where proteins specifically interact with the DNA. These findings represent a significant advance in understanding the precise and complex controls over the expression of genetic information within a cell. The findings bring into much sharper focus the continually active genome in which proteins routinely turn genes on and off using sites that are sometimes at great distances from the genes themselves. They also identify where chemical modifications of DNA influence gene expression and where various functional forms of RNA, a form of nucleic acid related to DNA, help regulate the whole system.

Though I don’t want to overload you with numbers, I assume you can easily imagine winning a million dollar lottery. Take a million times a little more than 3 thousand and that is about how many DNA units carry on their work in our body’s cells: over 3 billion. Take a million times 75 million and that is approximately how many cells we humans each have: 75 trillion. Almost all of these cells contain the full 3 billion complement of DNA with the functions identified by this ENCODE project. Among other things, they have found that various, specific sets of switches are active depending which cell type is studied.

Before this latest part of the project was released, we were under the impression by an initial study, called the Human Genome Project, that there were only about 20,000 genes comprising about 1-2% of the DNA code. There were inklings that other things were going on, but by and large scientists thought that the rest of the DNA, which was called “junk,” was accumulated from millions of years of evolution and basically worthless. However, they were getting practically nowhere in understanding how some genetic diseases and even cancerous tumors come about. Now they are seeing that these previously unknown switches have a great deal to do with the actions of DNA and small mistakes in their functions can cause big problems.

This false prediction of evolutionary theory is no joke. It cost precious time and kept monies from being available to learn more about the rest of the DNA. Fortunately, scientific curiosity prevailed. After the Human Genome Project, the first ENCODE endeavor included looking at just 1% of the rest of DNA. The scientists found activity for the small molecules that were made from DNA but not translated into protein. These, therefore, were useful products from parts of the non-gene-producing DNA. Surprised by this study, scientists desired to know more and procured the necessary money and manpower needed (both considerable). The results of the ENCODE research were published in over 30 papers in several scientific journals in early September, 2012. Numerous other journal articles have already been spawned from the basic research.

Sadly, the scientists still refer to evolution. Though evolution has many definitions, the one accepted in modern scientific terms is the one that refers to totally materialistic, naturalistic, random formation of life, both originally and in developing speciation. It relies only on the laws of chemistry and physics to bring about the first creature known as the common ancestor and develop diversity from it. There has been no discussion of which I’m aware in all the scientific articles of any other possibility.

Let me be the first to tell you, then, that the latest ENCODE results prove that materialistic, naturalistic evolution is impossible. Scientists already knew that active parts of DNA were too valuable to change much. Mutations are usually bad for the metabolism of the organism. That’s why they focused on the “junk” as available to change “neutrally,” part of their “neutral theory of molecular evolution.” Though this already was doubtful to anyone who understood probabilities, the theory should have been scrapped for sure in 1990, when two MIT scientists published a paper about their tests on what proportion of the combinations of amino acids, components of proteins, would be found functional. The paper is JF Reidhaar-Olson and RT Sauer, "Functionally acceptable substitutions in two alpha-helical regions of lambda repressor," Proteins, 7, 4 (1990): 306-16. They gave the astounding number of 1 in 10 to the 63rd power (written 10^63). 10^63 is a 1 with 63 zeroes following. A trillion is a million times a million, or 10^12. You would find less than 1 functional protein in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion of them. A billion years would be a drop in the bucket to form even 3 useful proteins, much less for them to find each other. A free-living organism is estimated to need 1000 self-producing proteins to survive.

It was then that every headline should have shouted: "Discovery Brings End to Darwin’s Theory!" Of course, one study could be wrong. But since then, similar results have been produced. And now the ENCODE project has shown that the “junk” is not available for mutational experimentation and re-arrangement anyway. The non-gene part of the DNA, now being called “dark matter,” is projected to be found almost 100% functional by the time more experiments evaluate even more types of cells.

But the headlines never seem to come that announce even the possibility that blind physical forces are not the whole story of life. And scientists and the media wonder why people don’t trust them. Even before these revelations, many persons thought there could have been evolution over eons directed by God as well as those who believe in a young Earth. I know from studying genes that though I am amazed by the discoveries of technology, it is unlikely I will get the whole truth from modern scientific journals and the media. I hope that though the jargon and numbers may be difficult, people will realize they can understand what the research reveals. It’s worth more to them than a million dollars.

ENCODE: DNA Junkless

ENCODE is a project that has been studying DNA since the Human Genome Project (HGP) laid out the entire sequence for humans. Results have just been published by The ENCODE Project Consortium, "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome," Nature 489 (Sept. 5, 2012): 57-74 on the latest research concerning the function of DNA in the areas between genes.  They have found at least 80% of DNA to be functional, from a previous estimate of 5% to 10% (a pretty big miss).  Before, many scientists insisted that most of DNA was junk, accumulated through totally random mutation of genes.  Francis Collins himself, leader of the HGP, used junk DNA as an example of materialistic biological evolution. I'm generalizing by putting all scientists in a lump, but let's face it, we don't see many supporting Creationism or Intelligent Design Theory.  However, though they are saying one thing, they must be thinking another, since they sunk about $200 million into the study.  Why study junk?  Because more and more small studies supported evidence that non-protein-coding areas had to do with gene regulation.  They could no longer ignore it.  They may even find that 100% of DNA is functional when they further improve their ability to detect activity. 

The findings are described in a number of scientific journal articles. You can find much more at a website arranged by Nature called the Nature ENCODE Explorer. It has various threads to help you, as it says there, to "Access the collected papers by exploring the thematic threads that run through them, such as DNA methylation, RNA and machine learning."

Most evolutionists want you to believe evolution is totally materialistic, without any Divine guiding hand.  This affects our school textbooks and even what they want parents teaching their children.  Researchers now think there are 4 million switches in DNA for gene regulation to form parts of the body and get it to work.  Billions of years sounds like a lot of time, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the probability of all this coming together by chance.  Changing one's mind can be very difficult, but on the other side is an amazing world of wonder. 

One down-side to this research is that human embryonic stem cells have been used for it and are continuing to be used for further discovery.  If there are other ways to learn about these things I would challenge scientists to use their ingenuity to find them. That is a discussion the whole country (and world) needs to go into.

Even without the use of human embryonic stem cells, we are seeing more of the complexity of DNA and the cell.  May more and more of us praise the Lord, through Jesus Christ, for His wondrous, amazing works.

Happy Summer or Winter

Hi there.  Hope you are having a nice summer (those of you in the northern hemisphere).  I wish a nice winter to the folks down under (not just Australia). 

2019 Update: I previously had some instructions here for printing out the booklets, Heaven's Passport and Creation Science for Biology.  But that was a long time ago and would probably not be applicable any more. I still feel these are good booklets for edification and evangelization.  I see them as a way to approach and teach people about the subjects. So I hope anyone interested will read them from the blog, either online or downloaded. I do print them out once in a while to distribute, but anyone interested in doing that themselves would have to work out their own printer settings for booklets. Thanks for your interest.