Dialogue 2015 #1
Dragonflies: Fancy Catchers
The ball arcs into the air, and then downward. A player rushes forward. Whew!! Another save made. The player’s strategy was to move to intercept the ball as it follows a predictable trajectory downward. We are happy the ball was caught, but the situation was not complicated. This is called a “constant bearing strategy” in pursuit of a target moving in a predictable arc. The strategy becomes more serious however when we learn that many animals similarly catch their prey by converging on the straightforward escape route of the hapless victim. Read the rest of this entry »
Upside Down Source of Fancy Photosynthesis
During the 1960s and 1970s, improved strains of wheat and rice resulted in a doubling of crop yields. Despite predictions of disaster from some environmentalists, the world continued to feed quickly growing human populations. This green revolution, kick-started by the research of American plant scientist Norman Borlaug and Indian rice geneticist M. S. Swaminathan, provided much higher yielding crops. However for optimum growth, these crops require the widespread application of nitrogen fertilizers and other chemicals. As a byproduct of this practice, a significant amount of fertilizer ends up in natural waterways. As a result, scientists now consider the application of such chemicals as “so last century!” (Nature October 30, 2014 p. S52). The hunt is now on for crops that do not require chemical inputs and yet produce high yields. Read the rest of this entry »
Voyager I Finally Did It!
Launched in 1977, the two Voyager probes have seen some strange and unexpected sights as they cruised through our solar system. After passing the planets, the probes have continued outward towards the farthest reaches of the solar system. In the summer of 2012, Voyager I was now 18.2 billion km away from us, more than three times the distance between the sun and Pluto. The solar system however by definition consists not only of the planets, but of the volume in space to which the sun’s particles extend, or in other words the volume in space which is impacted by the sun. The question everybody was asking, was how long would it take Voyager I to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space? And what would Voyager find when it got to interstellar space? Read the rest of this entry »
Earthquakes, Fossils, Flood and Scripture
People came from hundreds of kilometres away to hear Dr. Steven Ausin speak at CSAA’s Creation Weekend in Edmonton in October. His first lecture on Friday evening, October 24 was on the global flood model, also known as catastrophic plate tectonics. This model provides an explanation for how the earth came to its present state (as a result of a worldwide flood). The model was first proposed in a paper in 1994. There were six authors, Drs. Steven Austin, John Baumgardner, Hubert Humphreys, Andrew Snelling, Larry Vardiman and Kurt Wise (each representing different relevant technical areas of expertise). Read the rest of this entry »
Manatees: A Unique Animal that Confounds Evolutionists
Manatees (family Trichechidae, genus Trichechus), often called sea cows, are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals. Three living species exist, the Amazonian, West Indian, and the West African manatee. These are huge animals weighing from 400 to 550 kilograms (880 to 1,210 lb), and 2.8 to 3.0 metres (9.2 to 9.8 ft) long. The females tend to be both larger and heavier.
In many ways manatees are unique compared to all other life forms, a fact that poses major problems for evolutionists. It is almost like a designer selected their traits from a wide variety of existing life forms, from reptiles to fish to mammals. For example, manatees feed almost entirely on aquatic plants and that is “unique among living marine mammals” (Berta, 2012. Return to the Sea: The Life and Evolutionary Times of Marine Mammals. University of California Press. Berkeley p. 127). Read the rest of this entry »