People may scoff at those who believe the Bible to be the very Words of the Living Creator God but it is they who are proven over and over to be wrong. If they would only believe when it is said that He …hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth… Acts 17:26. Belief in that statement would have seen history changed. The Holocaust would not have occurred along with many other atrocities against mankind. Darwinism is not a friend but a foe, an enemy! The article below states that ‘In the Germanic countries at this time, “Darwinian rhetoric was widely accepted within medical circles and a discussion about race also ensued among eugenically inclined members of the . . . medical community.” https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/arj/v13/jewish_inferiority_skeleton.pdf
Human Evolution
All posts tagged Human Evolution
‘Dogs don’t read the words on a page. Neither did Coco, the famous gorilla that learned to communicate using simple hand signs. So what affords humans the unique ability to read and write, and why do we do it? These kinds of questions drive Zeynep Saygin’s research at Ohio State. Her team’s recent discovery sets the stage for some answers.
Brain experts already knew about the visual cortex—an area of the brain where neurons fire as we interpret faces, shapes, and words. But Saygin’s group seeks to understand what happens in our brains as we learn to read.
The team compared functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data sets from 40 newborns to similar scans of 40 adults. fMRI shows neuron activity within the brain, so the comparison would indicate if baby brains come into the world already equipped with the wiring necessary to perceive and process letters later in life.
Literate adults have close connections between the part of the brain that processes the sight of letters, called the visual word form area (VWFA), and the brain’s nearby language network. The researchers discovered that newborn brains come prewired with similarly tight connections between the two areas.
They published their discovery in Scientific Reports.1
Saygin, the senior author of the study, told Ohio State News, “Even at birth, the VWFA is more connected functionally to the language network of the brain than it is to other areas. It is an incredibly exciting finding.”2
Lead author Jin Li said, “It’s interesting to think about how and why our brains develop functional modules that are sensitive to specific things like faces, objects, and words.”2
Why indeed?
From a Darwinian perspective, our brains’ functional modules would have incrementally developed over eons for our survival. But in what scenario would our ancestors have been forced to read or die? For that matter, how could such pressures reach into and rewire our brains?
On the other hand, if humans came from supernatural creation instead of mere nature, then the possibility opens for God to have intentionally prewired our brains “to see words.”2 And why would a Creator do that?
Reading is the key to understanding the most important information for time and eternity found in the Bible. Scripture says we were created for God, that our sins have driven a wedge between us and God, but that God sent His Son to take our sins upon Himself in order to restore our relationship with Him.
So, it makes sense that a God who has invested so much into us would also have endowed us with the prewiring needed to see letters. That way each can learn to read, take up the Bible, and discover the way back to Him.
References
1. Li, J. et al. 2020. Innate connectivity patterns drive the development of the visual word form area. Scientific Reports. 10: 18039.
2. Grabmeier, J. Humans are born with brains ‘prewired’ to see words. Ohio State News. Posted on news.osu.edu October 22, 2020.
*Dr. Brian Thomas is Research Associate at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in paleobiochemistry from the University of Liverpool.‘https://www.icr.org/article/baby-brains-arrive-ready-to-read/?utm_source=phplist9212&utm_medium=email&utm_content=HTML&utm_campaign=Merry+Christmas+from+ICR%2C+Babies+Are+Born+Ready+to+Read%2C+and+More%21
‘Humans still evolving, claim scientists, according to Flinders University News and SciTech Daily 8 October 2020, BBC Science Focus and Science Alert 9 October 2020, Interesting Engineering 11 October 2020, and Journal of Anatomy published online 10 September 2020 doi:10.1111/joa.13224.
Researchers at Flinders University and University of Adelaide have found an increase in the number of adults who have an artery named the median artery in their forearms. This artery is formed during embryonic development and does a very important task in supplying the growing forearm and hand. But in most people it disappears as the two main arteries of forearm, the radial and ulnar arteries, develop and take over.
The research team found median arteries were present in 26 of the 78 forearms of adult bodies donated to the medical college in 2015 and 2016. Most of the bodies were from people born in the first half of the 20th century. The researchers checked older records and found that only 10% of people born in the 1880s had a median artery.
According to Teghan Lucas of Flinders University, “This increase could have resulted from mutations of genes involved in median artery development or health problems in mothers during pregnancy, or both actually. If this trend continues, a majority of people will have a median artery of the forearm by 2100.”
Maciej Henneberg, a professor of medicine at Adelaide University and member of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, commented: “This is micro evolution in modern humans and the median artery is a perfect example of how we’re still evolving because people born more recently have a higher prevalence of this artery when compared to humans from previous generations.”
Links: BBC, Flinders University, Interesting Engineering, Science Alert, SciTech Daily
Editorial Comment: In spite of the BBC’s claim that “Humans are evolving an extra artery in the arm” no extra artery is evolving. All humans possess a median artery in their early development, so no new structure has evolved.
In case you are thinking that having three arteries in the forearm would be an evolutionary gain, it isn’t. There is no benefit from having a median artery when you have two other fully functional arteries, and for some people it is associated with carpal tunnel syndrome – a painful condition of the hand.
They only reason this study was reported so widely in general science news is because of the claim ‘humans are evolving’. If the statistics quoted in this study do represent a real change in the number of people retaining this artery into adulthood, then the explanations given by Tegan Lucas but not reported widely in the media are probably true, i.e. the cause is either loss of genetic control, or the effect of disease. Both of these are degeneration, not evolution! Such findings are another reminder that human beings, like all living things, are going downhill, not evolving upwards.’https://creationfactfile.com/6103/humans-still-evolving/