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4/6/26 7:19 AM

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Joel Duff examines the oft-repeated claim that the amount of salt in the earth's water was not deposited over a long period of time -- there's not enough salt, the argument says. Duff argues that the amount of salt is, in fact, an argument for an old earth.

Duff also shows that the Young-earth Creationist explanation of why about 140 types of marsupial mammals came to exist in Australia and nearby land areas, but only a handful of types of  placental mammals are found there.

Gizmodo reports that China is successfully transforming a desert into growth that acts to remove Carbon from the atmosphere.

Gizmodo also reports that the Vera Rubin observatory, in Chile, ia locating lots of asteroids, previously unknown. Like hundreds or thousands' of them.

Ken Schenck argues, from the Bible, that heaven will be on earth.

UTNews reports that a large group of chimpanzees has split into two groups, and they are engaging in violence toward between the two.

Thanks for reading!

Sunspots 870

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to others*:

Computing: NPR reports that, in Belgium, some workers are not required to answer communications related to their job, at all hours of the day and night.

Politics: Relevant discusses the matter of white evangelicals being the only significant religious group that is strongly against allowing immigration, and a path to citizenship.

Pornography (There are no photos of pornography in the article(s) linked here): A Christianity Today article on what's wrong with pornography -- it's not about relationships.

Science: The Scientist reports that plants in the UK are blooming about a month earlier than they did a few decades ago.

Gizmodo reports on chimpanzees applying insects to a wound, probably as a treatment of some sort. 

The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

*I try not to include items that require a password or fee to view.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 678

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: A Relevant writer reminds us that contemporary worship style churches aren't the only viable options.

Christianity Today reports that former President Jimmy Carter spoke at the Liberty University commencement.

A Southern Baptist woman says that Jerry Falwell and Robert Jeffress stood up for her against abuse by her husband.

Politics: Benjamin L. Corey is not at all happy with President Trump referring to some immigrants as animals, not people, and Corey says this attacks the foundation of Christianity.

Science: Gizmodo reports that a study has found that chimpanzee beds are much less likely to contain germs or parasites than human beds do.

(or not) Gizmodo also reports that Mo Brooks, a congressman from Alabama, believes that erosion, and rocks falling into the ocean, are responsible for rising sea levels.

FiveThirtyEight discusses the relative intelligence of various kinds of animals. It's not sensible to rank animals by intelligence.

ListVerse tells us more than we knew about the Periodic Table of the elements.

ListVerse also reports on "10 body parts that are secretly awesome."

A BioLogos author tells us ways in which humans are unique.


Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 524

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Computing: Windows 10 is supposed to be out next month, free on computers with Windows 7 or 8. Gizmo's Freeware tells Windows users what to do if you don't want to upgrade to the new operating system.


Education: National Public Radio reports on a public school kindergarten teacher in Vermont, who has been taking her kids outside, one day a week, all day, regardless of the weather.


Politics: (or philosophy, or The Law) NPR reports that the legal status of chimpanzees is still undecided -- it is possible that they may be granted some legal rights, following a trial. (The judge hadn't ruled yet, at the time of the report.)


Christianity Today reports that evangelical Christians, including the Southern Baptist Convention, are starting to fight against predatory lending. (Some predatory lenders charge 300% annual interest.)


Science: Wired reports on why road rage is so common.


NPR reports that the use of embryo transfer techniques is fairly common in cows. Some "elite" cows have numerous offspring, but have never given birth themselves -- surrogates do this.



Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 519

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: Todd Wood, dedicated Young-Earth Creationist, and Darrell Falk, dedicated evolutionary creationist, have been having a long, loving discussion.
Computing: Gizmo's Freeware points to a page of "Best Free PC Games."
Education: Infotopia is a site that links to sources which would be useful in school, and especially for home schoolers.
Health: (and sex, and ethics) National Public Radio reports on a question that troubles many: "Can a Person With Dementia Consent to Sex?"
Philosophy: (Or something) Chimpanzees have been given some legal rights, according to an article in Wired.
Politics: (And Christianity) An interesting essay on "Shouldn't Christians Just Obey the Law." The author uses Martin Luther King, jr's argument to argue that laws requiring businesses to serve homosexuals are unjust. Hmmm.
Science: (or something) Wired reports on "The Surprisingly Complex Design of the Ziploc Bag."
The BBC on the sequencing of the genome of the wooly mammoth.

Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 439

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: National Public Radio reports on preachers who handle snakes. There are some of them.

Computing: National Public Radio on how various companies (and perhaps the government) are finding out about us from our on-line activity.

Humor: (or engineering) Wired reports, with photos and a video, on a pen made of magnets. It can do some interesting things, indeed.

Philosophy: The Skeptical Zone has a post considering moral behavior in chimpanzees, or at least in a single chimpanzee.

Politics: ABC News reports that North Carolina government workers can not make use of climate change projections, in planning for the future of the NC coast, because the state legislature has made it illegal to do so. If you don't like the science results, just make outlaw them. Right.



Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 345

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Humor: (or maybe not so funny) ABC News reports, with X-ray photos, on people who come to the emergency room with objects of various kinds stuck into their body openings.

Science:  Wired reports that a government study indicates that using chimpanzees in medical research is not necessary.

Politics: Demonstrators in Wisconsin may soon have to pay for the privilege, according to The Milwaukee Journal.

Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 329

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science: According to an article in Discovery, a parasite which lives in cats, in one stage of its life cycle, and in other animals, like rats, in the other, affects the brains of affected rats, so that they are less frightened, even -- you are reading this correctly -- attracted to cats! (This means that the parasites are more likely to continue their life cycle.)

The New York Times reports on a study of sharing behavior in chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, given the opportunity, are likely to help other chimps.

Politics:  (or Science) National Public Radio reports that supposedly silly scientific research, often cited by politicians, as an example of government waste, is usually not silly at all. I'm not suggesting that all taxes are good, but see my post, "Taxes create jobs!," which is related to this issue.

Sports: I am sorry to have read, in Sports Illustrated, that Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in major college basketball, has been diagnosed with the beginnings of dementia. SI has a tribute, which says, correctly, that Summitt made us take women's sports seriously.

Image source (public domain)

Chimpanzees and Humans share a lot of genes: so what?

You may have read or heard that chimpanzees and humans share a lot of genetic material. The exact amount is not clear, but whether it's 97%, 99%, or something in between, doesn't really matter. It seems clear that our genetic material is quite similar, but, of course, not identical, to that of chimpanzees. So what?

There are, in fact, two different species of animals that have been called chimpanzees. One is Pan troglodytes, the other, first recognized as a separate species less than a hundred years ago, is Pan paniscus, the bonobo, sometimes called the pigmy chimpanzee. The fact that there are two species is not well understood by the general public.

Studies on the genetic diversity of chimpanzees and bonobos have been undertaken. See here and here for reports on one such study, from 1999. This research, based on a small portion of the DNA of chimpanzees, found that chimpanzees were more unlike each other than humans are. The report led at least some scientists to propose that humans were, as recently as 100,000 years ago, a very small population. (This is consistent with the descent of all humans from Adam and his family, and/or Noah and his family.)

A book reviewer in Spiked claims (based on a recent book that makes the same claim) that sharing 98.4% of our genes doesn't really make chimpanzees very human. The reviewer, and, apparently, the author (I have not read the book) say that much of that 1.6% is regulatory genes, which have profound effects, meaning, as it were, that humans and chimpanzees are less than 98.4% alike. (There is no way to quantify this, in reality, any more than, say, you could give an unambiguous quantitative answer to the question "How much like your spouse are you?")

For more on chimp DNA, see the Wikipedia article on the chimpanzee genome project. (Yes, there is such a thing. There are similar projects on several other organisms, each interesting in its own right.) That article says that 30% of human and chimp proteins are identical. (This doesn't necessarily mean that the DNA which coded for them is identical, as different combinations of DNA bases can lead to the same amino acid. It also doesn't mean that we are as much as 70% different from chimpanzees. It is likely that the differences between some of our proteins, compared to those of chimpanzees, are considerably less than 1%.)

Leaving aside the statistics, it is obvious to anyone that humans and chimpanzees are quite a bit alike. Facial expressions, body structure, and behavior show this. I have never read any credible source, from young-earth creationists to atheists, who would try to deny this similarity. No other animal, even gorillas and orangutans, seems to be so much like we are.

So what?

1) We did not descend from chimpanzees (or they from us). No reputable scientist believes that. Many reputable scientists believe that chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor. Perhaps they are right, perhaps not.

2) Similarity does not prove that chimpanzees should be given the same rights as humans. A dead woman, or a convicted axe murderer, shares a lot of DNA with me, you, and President Obama. But neither of these should be given the right to vote, and one of them is not even alive, therefore they are not given the same rights as you, the President, and I. Chimpanzees, and other animals, should be cared for, under the God-given stewardship of human beings, and not treated cruelly, killed without reason, or deprived of their God-given habitat without very serious consideration. But they should not be given the right to hold office, or protected from killing at all costs. Early in Genesis, animals were killed for a cause, namely to provide clothing for Adam and Eve, by God Himself (Genesis 3:21). Also, in Genesis, animals were killed for another good reason, namely for sacrifices to God, which God accepted (Genesis 4:4).

(See here and here for posts on our responsibility for caring for nature.)

3) There are three possible reasons for the similarity between humans and chimpanzees.
One of them is that the two species have, indeed, come from a common ancestor.

The second is that God created the two species in separate creative acts, but chose to make them similar. (If that were the case, DNA similarity would cause and maintain other types of similarity.) A young-earth creationist would say that they were created a day or two apart. A believer in Intelligent design would say, I believe, that God designed them to be alike, even to using the same genes, or similar genes. A theistic evolutionist (this is too simple -- there are several categories of such) might say that God knew in advance what would happen, and designed the evolutionary mechanisms of living things so that humans would eventually come about, or that God took a pre-existing animal and specially endowed it with some special properties, that is, gave them a soul.

The third, which I don't think anyone really believes, is that the similarities are accidental.

4) Although we should understand that new findings may change scientific beliefs, we should also understand that there is a broad consensus among scientists about most of the fundamentals, in all fields of science, and Christians should not be anti-scientific. The consensus, for decades, has been that chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor.
Just because there is consensus doesn't mean that the scientists are always right. There used to be consensus that protein was the genetic material, and that DNA wasn't. The consensus on the common ancestry of humans and chimps may also be wrong. The Bible seems to be unambiguous that humans are special -- Their origin is described separately, and in more detail, than that of all the other animals. They alone are singled out as being in the image of God. (Although, in some sense, all of His creation must have some of His image -- His characteristics.) Humans were given special responsibility for other organisms. To most Christians, this argues for a special creation of humans. I suppose most of them would suppose that God specially created them, body and soul, in one event. Some Christians (Billy Graham among them) are willing to accept that possibly God took a pre-existing human-like being, and endowed that creature with His image. (Graham is not wedded to that belief, but is willing to entertain the possibility, and doesn't believe that it would contradict scripture.) Science is never going to give clear answers on the origin of the God-like qualities of humans, and Christians will probably always disagree over the exact process used.

5) Nothing in these discoveries should pose a serious new challenge to Christian faith. It is true that the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly against young-earth creationism, but that was true before we had statistics on the similarity between humans and chimpanzees. A believer in Intelligent design would be unable to present scientific evidence proving that theory for the origin of humans, and a Christian who believed in an important role for natural selection would be unable to demonstrate that God had a hand in the way things are now, but these were true before DNA was even known to be the genetic material. It is also true that no scientific experiment has ruled out a role for God in creation, or in making or keeping things the way they are now, so an atheist, also, is on less than solid ground.

6) Can chimpanzees sin, or be converted? There is some evidence that chimpanzees have a moral sense, and understand that some things are right, and some wrong. There is no evidence in the Bible that chimpanzees, or any other animal, can sin, and be converted, except that the whole creation is said to be fallen, in Romans 8, and it needs redemption from the consequences of human sin.

Thanks for reading. Let's act more like Christ than chimpanzees do.

Note: A recent review (Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Sept 2009, pp. 201-203, by Darrel R. Falk, which is not yet available on-line) of More than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation, by Hugh Ross, quotes Ross as being way off the mark on the amount of similarity between us and chimpanzees: ". . . the most complete analyses performed so far show that the similarity is closer to 85 to 90 percent." (Falk is quoting from pp. 183-4 of Ross.) Falk says that Ross, whose book was published in 2009 by Baker Books, wasn't even aware of the Chimpanzee Genome Project, which I referred to above. Ross, a prominent old-earth creationist, is, as Falk says, not a biologist. Even if Ross were right, it really wouldn't change the issues very much, if any.

On the similarity between humans and chimpanzees

I have recently come across a paper by a committed young-earth creationist, who deals honestly and forthrightly with one of the biggest problems with young-earth creationism, namely the similarities between organisms. His article gets right to the heart of the problem -- how to explain the similarities between humans and chimpanzees.

I am having difficulties in including the URL of the article, but here's an abstract, and the abstract includes a link to a .PDF file of the entire article. The article, by Todd Charles Wood of Bryan College, is 18 pages of scientific discussion, graphs, etc., hence, although written well, not for the casual reader. But it's an important topic, and Wood is not remiss in pointing out difficulties, and in pointing out some of the unfortunate attempts to dismiss such similarity as unimportant by other young-earth creationists. Wood writes: "If the fixed nucleotide mismatches between the chimpanzee and human genomes are 1.06%, then the original nucleotide identity could be as high as 99%. At that high level of similarity, perhaps it is not impossible to believe that God created humans and chimpanzees with identical genomes." A remarkable statement. He goes on to say that the main difference between the two is not the 1.06% of DNA, but the fact that humans are created in the image of God.

Similarity between humans and chimpanzees does not prove, beyond all possible doubt, that the two share a common ancestor -- we can postulate that God simply created two species that are very much alike -- but it is very good evidence that they do. I commend Wood for tackling this issue, for his thoughts on the matter, and his presentation.

Here's a post on what Billy Graham had to say about a closely related matter.