I received this newsletter update from the Creation Instruction Association this morning. It’s worth the read:
DISCOVERY CHANNEL FAIRY TALE:
TURNING A CHICKEN INTO A DINOSAUR
Discovery Channel aired a program on March 23rd entitled, “Dinosaurs Return to Life.” According to the Discovery Channel, this program “follows scientists who are using the latest technology and amazing advances in genetic research to revive the possibility of creating a living breathing dinosaur, but in a different way than we ever imagined.” They indeed are using the latest technology to revive the dead impossibility of creating a live dinosaur. The incredible, “different way” to get this job done is by working backwards. They want to take a chicken and return it to what it supposedly once was. . . a dinosaur. The program began with a clever way of admitting earlier defeat from other lies on earlier programs. Not long ago they showed a program trying to get people excited about cloning a Woolly Mammoth by taking DNA from the frozen mammoths found in Siberia. Even at the time of the program airing they knew this was impossible because the number of workable base pairs of DNA found were tiny compared to what would be needed to get this job done. Even back in 1992 scientists were wasting time trying to get DNA from insects in fossilized amber (You might recall this was the make-believe process done in the movie “Jurassic Park”). Although scientists were able to get a tiny amount of DNA from an insect, it was later believed to be contamination due to the fact they couldn’t replicate the process. As a result, this idea has now been abandoned by the scientific community. In 2003 Jack Horner and Mary Schweitzer found soft tissue and blood cells within the bones of a T-Rex. Even within these soft tissue cells there was not even a close amount of needed DNA that could be recovered. Interestingly, DNA should not last over 100,000 years, probably not even 10,000 years. Why then are they being discovered in something that went extinct 68 million years ago? The evolutionist’s answer is they were wrong and blood cells can last that long. The logical answer, is you’re right, you were wrong and dinosaurs lived with man when they were created together on the 6th day of creation about 6,000 years ago.
Because of the failed DNA attempts a new method of getting to a dinosaur is developing. In the 1990’s by examining fossils like the archaeopteryx scientists reasoned that birds had teeth, feathers and retractable claws. Some believe this was a dinosaur and thus related to birds. However, many believe this is nothing but a bird to begin with and we simply no longer have birds with teeth in their beaks. Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds from UNC said in Science magazine, “Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth bound feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.” Besides, in the fossil record there are many birds that have teeth in their beaks. Likewise, today, there are birds like the hoatzin, ostrich and chicken with claws on their wings. Therefore, this is not a big deal and this fossil is just a bird, not a dinosaur. In the program, Jack Horner says we have fossils of dinosaurs with feathers. This is not true! They assume that these bird fossils were dinosaurs, even though they are vastly different. Besides, Genesis 1:20 clearly shows us that birds and reptiles were made separately on different days: “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. … and every winged fowl after his kind: … let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth … and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: … the sixth day” (Gen 1:20-24). Other problems with this idea of birds turning into dinosaurs is that they are simply looking at the outside, forgetting that things are very different on the inside. First of all, lungs are totally different in birds than reptiles. Secondly, modern birds are found in layers with and lower than dinosaurs. (In the Minds of Men Ian Taylor p. 155 and Nature June 18, 1999). Third, scales and feathers attach to the body differently and develop from different genes on the chromosomes. Fourth, birds have a four chambered heart and most reptiles have only three. Fifth, reptiles lay leathery eggs unlike birds. All this, not to mention the different hip bones and the whole reproduction problem. Feduccia also agrees: “But there are plenty of other reasons to refute the dinosaur-bird connection, says Feduccia. ‘How do you derive birds from a heavy, earthbound, bipedal reptile that has a deep body, a heavy balancing tail, and fore-shortened forelimbs?’ he asks. ‘Biophysically, it’s impossible.’” (Geotimes, p. 7) The idea is that these birds have simply lost their dinosaur traits because certain genes have been turned off or slightly modified. Even though scientists once assumed that the human being would have about 100,000 coding genes the genome project revealed only about 20,000. (oops, evolutionists were wrong again in their predictions). Discovery channel said that surprisingly, “reptiles, birds and dinosaurs have about the same.” I find this interesting. I can understand and even agree that most reptiles and birds have this same smaller number of coding genes, however, how do they know that for a dinosaur? The answer is, they don’t! But this is the kind of hype used to get people interested in this program. This is a lot of assuming to be called science. To support this crazy theory they show you mutations of fruit flies where antenna have been replaced by legs and in other cases, wings have disappeared. These are called mutations. In fact, even though the program never mentions this, every mutation produced was inferior to the original fly. Some had stubby wings, others short wings and still others had extra wings. None could fly (perhaps they should be called fruit crawls) and all were sterile. So much for mutations being beneficial. This is the same garbage used in textbooks where they show you these fruit flies mutated and then say that beneficial mutations cause evolution. Well, if beneficial mutations cause evolution, why don’t you show me them instead of harmful ones? This is called bait and switch. They bait you with truth (fruit flies can mutate with radiation) and switch it to a lie (good mutations could turn a dinosaur into a bird). Even more importantly is that in all these mutations there is never an addition of information or an increase in complexity genetically. They go on to show how a fly has about 8 controller genes so that each of these 8 genes controls where a certain part of its body will form. There is a gene for its head, one for its legs, another for its abdomen and so on. Since other animals have controller genes (many more however) they assume they can just tell these controller genes what to do. However, note that the controller genes can only put the same information in different locations. The fruit fly put legs in the wrong place but he couldn’t run on his head, nor could it put tiny little human fingers on its body anywhere. There are many mutations like this today. They aren’t beneficial and most importantly again, it isn’t new information. I have a picture of a mutant bull with an added useless leg hanging from its shoulder. Once more, it is the same information in the wrong place. We have never seen a wing on a cow though have we? This would require new information to be put into the species and we don’t see this in nature or in a laboratory. Yet this is exactly what they want to do with a chicken. They give you one more supposed example of how this works by showing you that a caterpillar has genes that tell its legs where to go. These same genes tell the wings where the spots will be. They say, “old genes are picking up new tricks” and that it “doesn’t get new genes but uses old genes in new ways by turning off and on.” Again, this program admits there is no new genetic information but that it can only be turned on or off. However, with that said, they go on to try and show that really the only difference between a dinosaur and a chicken is the location of its scales and how long it’s tail is. This is absurd! This is not science! How do they do such things? Hans Larson points out that a relative of the T-Rex has 35 vertebrae. Archaeopteryx (supposed missing link between dinosaurs and birds that is really just a bird) has about 15 vertebrae and a chicken has 5-8 vertebrae. He says that over 150 million years they have simply lost the numbers of vertebrae in their tail. Why not say that an elephant is related to a mouse. After all, they both have four legs, and tails. Some mice even have big ears for the size of their bodies. Even though the mouse has a longer tail than the elephant, the elephant must have just lost some of it huh? No! The elephant and mouse have four legs because a common designer made them. Likewise the bird and dinosaur may have similar design because the same designer made them.
To support this fairy “tail” they stain the embryo’s of chickens at different stages of development. At just a day and half a chicken embryo has up to 16 vertebrae and as it develops it gets shorter and shorter until it has only about 5 when it hatches. Again, many assumptions are applied here. First of all, they assume what looks like vertebrae are actually vertebrae for the tail. Not true. Many of these need to be there for the backbone. It isn’t a tail getting shorter. Anyway, they take a bead of protein that is the same protein manufactured by this gene when active and then stick it where the tail is developing. By doing so, 3 extra vertebra developed in this embryonic stage. One must note that this chicken never hatched so we really don’t know what difference this would have made, good or bad. I assume it would be bad but I can’t say for sure. In any case, let’s assume it was not harmful to the chicken and gave it back problems. What would you have? A chicken with a longer chicken tail. The same information is simply multiplied. Just like you can’t put wings on a cow but can add extra legs, you can’t put a dinosaur tail on a chicken, you can only get an extra long chicken tail. If you can get a longer tail, what about teeth? Scientists inserted a virus into the embryo of a chicken in the area of the beak gene. The result was what “appears” to be teeth like formations much like an alligator. Once again, the result isn’t a baby chicken with teeth, but an embryo that doesn’t survive with bumps in its beak and that hopefully would become teeth if it hatched. No new information. Perhaps just protein or calcium, or just a beak with bony bumps. Teeth and longer tails aren’t enough to get a dinosaur so they must also search for a way to get scales. By going to the Chinese silky chicken (a mutant by the way) they observe that they have feathers on their feet. Normally, a chicken has a scaly skin on its feet. The feather and the scale are made of the same protein, much like fingernails. The idea is that perhaps you could therefore put feathers on top of scales or scales instead of feathers, thus returning to the dinosaur. Again, by going to the embryos, they covered the area of the chicken leg with a protein to trick the gene into turning on the information for feathers before the scale formed. Rudimentary feathers “appeared” to be in the beginning stages. Wow, big deal! Again, they CAN take the same information in a chicken and move it around. Try taking the information for a fish scale and put it into a chicken however. Try a snake scale and put it into a chicken. You can’t. If you can turn off the information for feathers
on the body and replace it with the same information already in the DNA for the scales on the feet, all you would get is a cold chicken that would almost certainly die shortly after hatching. This program is avoiding real science and duping our children into thinking this fairy tale is possible. What about the digestive system of a gizzard that isn’t in the DNA of reptiles? What about the ability to fly? These and numerous other problems show that you CAN NOT get one species of animals to turn into another kind of animal. Instead, it is just what the Bible says, things reproduce after their kinds. Birds have birds, dogs have puppies, fish have guppies and people have yuppies, no matter what you do with their DNA. Why do people believe such lies like evolution? Many believe it because that is all they have been taught. Others are silent because their job depends on them quietly going along with the system. Some simply hope there is no God to answer to while others have social-political reasons. But those who are truly honest with the science should consider the possibility that they may have too much pride to admit they have been wrong. As the Word of God tells us, “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie” (2 Thess 2:11).
Alan Feduccia- a world authority on birds from UNC Chapel Hill, quoted in “Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms,” Science Feb. 5, 1994, p. 764-5. “Jurassic Bird Challenges Origin Theories,” Geotimes, vol. 41 (January 1996), p. 7
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