evolution – Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment.

Daisy World, The Gaia Hypothesis and the real story of Creation. Part 6 addendum: “Day 5:” The birds and the fishes: The peacocks tail; evolution or creation?

One of the most beautiful sights to watch is the full plume of the peacock’s tail.

Even Darwin had trouble explaining evolution when he saw the peacock’s tail. It is in strict violation of the “survival of the fittest”. The tail is so heavy that a peacock can barely fly, and it has underdeveloped wings and cannot climb more than about 50 feet, and must land on a tree limb or a roof to seek safety and wait out the threat. Darwin suggested “sexual preference”, meaning that peahens were attracted to the largest and most spectacular plumes, and only the most outstanding peacocks were allowed to breed. Then over millions of years and through random mutations these impressive tails developed. There are many reasons this is impossible, and I will concentrate on just one; the geometrical pattern of the “eyes” as seen from an observer. Every feather that has an eye has it in a mathematically correct place on the feather, and that is dependent on the order of the feather. The only way I can see this being possible is if there is a designer that encrypts the DNA correctly, so when it is time to form the yearly plume, the feathers form correctly and in its place. No element of random processes can produce that!

Enjoy God’s creation.

Daisy World, The Gaia Hypothesis and the real story of Creation. Part 7: “Day 6a:” Creation of the mammals.

First now it was time to create the mammals. This is Genesis 1:24-25 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. i²⁵God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

What the creation story has described so far is the creation of a functional ecosystem. It starts simple with water, ice and clouds, populating the atmosphere with water molecules. The earliest life forms are not preserved so we have no physical record of the order and how it occurred, but it started in the ocean (God’s spirit hovered over the waters). `then plant life with chlorophyll using sunlight was created, then fish and birds and finally mammals. Every step took place in order. Each step occurred after the conditions had been met to sustain the new life forms with food. The fossil records indicate there were long phases of stability, and suddenly the next level of ecosystem was generated. Our ecosystem is fragile and must operate within strict limits, not too warm, not too cold for life to flourish. In addition the Ph of the ocean must be within limits and land and sea must be reasonably free from poisons. Every now and then there are great extinctions of life, such as the dinosaurs and the woolly Mammoth. The cause for extinction was always that the Earth got too cold or too poisoned, never too warm. some extinctions occurred because a more efficient life form took over. All this speaks of evolution as I got taught in biology 70 years ago. Since then much have been learnt of what goes on in life, so let’s look at what goes on in the body of a mammal, let’s say, the Virginia Opossum.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is opossum6c065f8b80c5155bb1b3877e2f0b7dfc.jpg

Opossums come in 126 species, in 16 genres and has one of the most complicated DNA of any mammal. They are marsupials. I was taught that the evolutionary inferior marsupials were extinct except in Australia, but the opossum doesn’t know that, so it still thrives among all the other evolutionary superior mammals.

Let’s look at what is inside every cell in the Opossum (except the eggs or sperm cells)

The cell consists of many interesting parts, all of which have to be there for the cell to function. The control center is the nucleus, and it consists of among other things the DNA.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is genetic-material-dna-rn.png

The DNA is formed as a double helix and could be seen as containing information code. There are 4 different states, C,G,A and T (see figure above); this is the basic encryption in the double helix. There are about 3 billion so called base pairs in the nucleus of every cell in the opossum. To grasp the size of the code, let’s say you are a court recorder, typing away the letters at a speed of 18.75 letters a second (the qualification speed for court recorders). You do it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year (2 weeks vacation and 11 holidayWe were created by God in his image with an expanded brain, capable of lifelong learning. This included a spiritual connection directly with God through His Spirit. This is the connection that died when Adam sinned and people decided they could function quite well without constant communication with God. Yet there remained a god-shaped void in their brains, a longing that wanted to be satisfied.s), it would take over 23 years to transcribe the code. A court recorder has to have better than 95% accuracy, but we are dealing with genetic encryption, so it has to have been done with much better accuracy for it to be valid for reproduction. This code defines the species, in this case the opossum. It has all information necessary to reproduce the species. Sometimes cosmic radiation or strong ultra violet light can cause breaks in the DNA, but the resulting mutations tend to reinforce the species boundaries rather than cause evolution.

Of course, an encrypted message is totally worthless without a decrypter. The one that is successfully mapped is the RNA decrypter, called messenger RNA. It interprets 3 base pairs as a codon. This is a code that is optimally designed, but since there are only 20 amino acids, most are expressed more than once. In addition 3 of the codons tell when the decoding stops.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is genetic-code.jpg

Messenger RNA (mRNA): Created during transcription, mRNA carries the genetic code from the cell’s DNA to the ribosome, where it is used as a template to build a protein. Below is a picture of the ribosome RNA (rRNA) as well as the transfer RNA (tRNA).

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screenshot-2025-09-25-at-15-37-15-ribosome-structure.png

The properly decrypted mRNA with its proper length is transported to the ribosome units. With the help of the tRNA that transports and checks in the proper amino acid, the ribosome binds the one amino acid to form an amino acid chain. Here is a picture of hemoglobin:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screenshot-2025-11-07-at-09-45-11-edtech-books.png

What makes hemoglobin usable is the heme structure containing iron. It is very similar to the structure in Chlorophyll:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 7a_structure.jpg

But back to the DNA, the super encrypted code that makes advanced mammalian life possible, from how to make an egg or a sperm, how to perform fertilization in the right environment, how to do cell multiplication and perform specialization in the cells, how to form part of an eye iris or an eyebrow, it is all there, how to make joints and nerves, how to make bone structure and place marrow inside it, cells that produce hemoglobin, which is somehow transported into blood that is pumped around in the body via the heart, and so on, It is all information encrypted in the DNA. But not only that, the DNA contains repair code that kicks in when damage occur, wounds, viruses, harmful bacteria, bad fungus, poisons and even cancer.

This was the first half of the sixth day, and God saw it, and it was good.

God was not finished with the sixth day, so next installment is the creation of man.

Scientists’ march on DC, a Limerick.

A scientists’ march on D.C. ?

It can’t apolitical be.

For they must get their grants

through political chants.

Conform or get cut, can’t you see?

Sometimes in the near future there will be yet another march on Washington. This time it is from “concerned scientists” that want to take politics out of science, be allowed to be true scientists with no biases or prejudices. To prove the point they have laid down the ground rules for participation in the march and produced this manifesto: There are certain things that we accept as facts with no alternatives. The Earth is becoming warmer due to human action. The diversity of life arose by evolution. Politicians who devalue expertise risk making decisions that do not reflect reality and must be held accountable. An American government that ignores science to pursue ideological agendas endangers the world.

Let’s take a look at that manifesto. There are certain things that we accept as facts with no alternatives. What happened to scientific curiosity? Is science ever settled? Do they mean there is nothing new to discover?

The Earth is becoming warmer due to human action. Well, for once I agree. We are returning CO2 to the atmosphere in increasing amount, and that is good. If nothing else changed, the logarithmic temperature increase with increased CO2 levels would cause the earth to warm up by 0.9C for a doubling of CO2, more if there is a gain in the system, less if there is negative feedback. The gain factors are mostly due to increased evaporation from warmer oceans, the negative feedback is supplied mostly through increased clouds, coming from increased absolute humidity. (I realise there are many other factors affecting climate, but this is a start, science is by no means settled). What is observed is that the earth is getting greener, and the increased CO2 from 280 PPM to 405 PPM makes the earth able to feed another two billion people without starving, not to mention plants and animals, and also use less water in doing so. Check the figure:The growth without added fertilizers 11%, extrapolated from the beginning of burning fossil fuels to now the increase is about 42%. This is a transfer of wealth from areas burning the fuel to agricultural areas, mostly in developing countries.

The diversity of life arose by evolution. Now that is a limiting statement. While there is great evidence for adaption, a valid scientific explanation for evolution simply is not credible, apart from intelligent design. The math is not there for another explanation, the DNA code is too complicated and complete including repair codes, start and stop codes to induce aging, and with codes to allow for future adaption already built in!

Politicians who devalue expertise risk making decisions that do not reflect reality and must be held accountable. The number of guilty politicians are too numerous to count.

An American government that ignores science to pursue ideological agendas endangers the world. Agree. No government exemplified this more than the Obama Government. The Trump administration will restore balance in science, no longer excel in nonsense like this from Charles Bolden “When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,”

Thought for the day. Jesus Christ and gravity waves.

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17, NIV)

In 1905 Albert Einstein proposed that the speed of light in vacuum is the same, regardless of the speed relative to the observer. That being the case, if the relative speed of light does not change, then something else must change. After much thinking and a few false starts he determined the dimension that changes is time, and published the theory of specific relativity. He then spent 10 years trying to include acceleration in his equations and published his theory of general relativity in 1915. In it, he determined that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity.

The equation for general relativity is elegant in its simplicity:

R_m_n – ½ g_m_nR = 8pG T_m_n.

It is not as simple as it seems, the suffix _m_n describes curved space-time and the equations grow until the whole blackboard is filled, and then, that was just the beginning.

On Feb 11 it was published that Einstein’s prediction of gravity waves were confirmed. A billion dollar set of gravity detectors verified gravity waves from a pair of rapidly rotating black holes. This was a giant step forward of science, we now can understand mathematically what holds the universe together.

At the other end of the space-time spectrum is the question: What holds the nucleus of an

atom together? Using the curvature of space-time as a model the scientists derived mathematically 11 total dimensions that can explain the glue that holds everything together. They stopped there, for the 12th dimension would be an alternate time, and since we are bound in space-time there is no way to verify the existence of alternate time.

All of these mathematical formulas describing the universe and how it is stable assume that the laws of Physics are unchangeable through time and space. This is the universal question: If the laws of Physics cannot change, how come we exist? There must have been a creation. Current scientific thinking is the Big Bang, creating the whole universe out of a singularity, and maybe an anti-universe as well filled entirely with anti-matter. But even this indicates there was a beginning, during which time the laws of Physics were established.

This begs the question: Are we really only a product of time plus chance plus nothing? The probability of this being the case is much less than finding the needle in a haystack, more like finding the right elementary particle in the universe. Yet, that is what is taught in school.

It is far more reasonable to assume the existence of a God, a God that created it all including the mathematical formulas which rules the universe.

The Bible explains Creation in the first three verses of Genesis: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

To believe the Biblical account requires a step of faith; it is free from all scientific explanations, concentrating on the spiritual truths. In the first three verses it introduces all three members of the Godhead, the Father, the Word and the Spirit. (In other passages of scripture Jesus Christ is described as the Word: And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.) Reading the Bible from a spiritual perspective made a believer out of me, and this explains the meaning of Colossians 1:15-17.

Now the little song for kids makes perfect sense:

He’s got the whole world in His hands,
He’s got the whole world in His hands,
He’s got the whole world in His hands,
He’s got the whole world in His hands.

He’s got my brothers and my sisters in His hands,
He’s got my brothers and my sisters in His hands,
He’s got my brothers and my sisters in His hands,
He’s got the whole world in His hands.

He’s got the sun and the rain in His hands,
He’s got the moon and the stars in His hands,
He’s got the wind and the clouds in His hands,
He’s got the whole world in His hands.

He’s got the rivers and the mountains in His hands,
He’s got the oceans and the seas in His hands,
He’s got you and he’s got me in His hands,
He’s got the whole world in His hands.

He’s got everybody here in His hands,
He’s got everybody there in His hands,
He’s got everybody everywhere in His hands,
He’s got the whole world in His hands.

The evolution of evolution. An elusive quest for truth.

Ever since Charles Darwin’s book, “The origin of the species” evolution has been used to justify the social bias de jour, from white supremacy to male supremacy, to evolution of thought, evolution of speech, evolution of social behavior. The argument is: “There is no god, therefore all has congealed by chance, we are all animals anyway.”
In my childhood in Sweden our family lived is a small community where grades 3-6 were taught together in one class. This meant that the teacher did allow a lot of freedom to explore on my own books in the school library. They had not thrown away any old books the last forty years, so I had quite a selection of old textbooks to choose from. One in particular caught my eye. It was about anthropology and classification of races by skull index (Cephalic index, see fig). It was originally based on the works of the Swede Anders Retzius (1796-1860). His research was to classify old bone fragments, but his findings were now extrapolated to explain the evolution of man. There were pictures of people of all kinds of races, with the Nordic, blond and blue eyed being the most evolved, and the black race, with some exceptions much closer evolutionary to the apes. Not only that, but since men have 40% larger brain volume on the average than women, men are further evolved and that is the reason women should not vote. Being 9 years old I believed everything, since it was in a book. I especially liked being superior to girls.
The next time evolution was taught it was the standard stuff with the horse’s hoof being a nail; fishes grew legs instead of fins and so on. We also have a lot of rudimentary organs, not only the appendix, but tonsils and tailbones too. Since the organs are rudimentary, we can remove them without impunity, especially tonsils. And this time around in evolutionary teaching dogs can evolve to look quite different, but people are all equal, and girls are as smart as boys (especially the blond Lithuanian girl that later emigrated to Canada. I had to admit she was both cute and smart).

The third time around, this time in high school biology we tackled some of the hard stuff, mutations being a necessary ingredient for evolution. I read up on radiation gardens, where we can grow superior plants, since we know that at least 10% of mutations are beneficial, just weed out the bad ones and superior plants will emerge.
The radioactive gardens are now but a memory, since it was discovered that nobody could find any positive mutations that way. The closer you got to the source, the worse it got.
It turns out that positive mutations are rare indeed. The ones most commonly found are in viruses, but they are positive only from the virus’s point of view. Survival of the fittest tends to weed out bad mutations, but does nothing to explain the mechanism for speciation creep; it tends to reinforce the speciation boundaries. The genetic code that allows adaptions in species is already there, so when the changed environment occurs, we are changed accordingly. None of the mechanisms we have used to explain evolution holds up to examination. The mathematics is just not there. And a system this complicated and beautiful, where so many parts of it are at a mathematic optimum is not possible to bootstrap. The mathematical probability that this could have occurred by chance is less than the chance of finding the right elementary particle in the known universe. We are left with the humbling fact that we do not know the mechanisms. Yet the textbooks still explain discredited mechanisms as evolutionary facts to yet another generation of kids, thus depriving them of the wonder that there is something beyond themselves, which they can try to grasp. They are left not realizing that there is always one more level of understanding that is beyond them. By not accepting any explanation other than what can be deduced from observation and then presenting them as sufficient facts to explain a mechanism that cannot mathematically have occurred, the scientific community is violating the fundamental rules of scientific exploration. Do not present as fact a mechanism that has no possibility of having occurred by chance.

The evolution of evolution from my childhood to now. Science is not settled.

In my early childhood in Sweden we lived is a small community where grades 3-6 were taught together in one class. This meant that the teacher did allow a lot of freedom to explore on my own books in the school library. They had not thrown away any old books the last forty years, so I had quite a selection of old textbooks to choose from.

One in particular caught my eye. It was about anthropology and classification of races by skull index. It was originally based on the works of the Swede Anders Retzius (1796-1860). His research was to classify old bone fragments, but his findings were now extrapolated to explain the evolution of man. There were pictures of people of all kinds of races, with the Nordic, blond and blue-eyed being the most evolved, and the black race, with some exceptions much closer evolutionary to the apes. Not only that, but since men have 40% larger brain volume than women, men are further evolved than women. Being 9 years old I believed everything, since it was in a book. I especially liked being superior to girls.

The next time evolution was taught it was the standard stuff with the horse’s hoof being a nail; fishes grew legs instead of fins and so on. We also had a lot of rudimentary organs, not only the appendix, but tonsils and tailbones too. And this time dogs can look quite different, but people are all equal, and girls are as smart as boys (especially the blond Lithuanian girl who emigrated to Canada. I had to admit she was both cute and smart).

The third time around we tackled some of the hard stuff, mutations being a necessary ingredient for evolution. I read up on radiation gardens, where we can grow superior plants, since we know that at least 10% of mutations are beneficial, just weed out the bad ones and superior plants will emerge.

The radioactive gardens are now but a memory, since it was discovered that nobody could find any positive mutations that way. The closer you got to the source, the worse it got. It turns out that positive mutations are rare indeed. The ones most commonly found are in viruses, but they are positive only from the virus’s point of view.

Survival of the fittest tends to weed out bad mutations, but does nothing to explain the mechanism for speciation creep; it tends to reinforce the speciation boundaries. The genetic code that allows adaption in species is already there, so when the changed environment occurs, we are changed accordingly. None of the mechanisms we have used to explain evolution holds up to examination. The mathematics is just not there. And a system this complicated and beautiful, where so many parts of it are at a mathematic optimum is not possible to bootstrap.

We are left with the humbling fact that we do not know the mechanisms. Yet the textbooks still explain discredited mechanisms as evolutionary facts to yet another generation of kids, thus depriving them of the wonder that there is something beyond themselves, which they can try to grasp, but realizing that there is always one more level of understanding that is beyond them.