Age of Globular Clusters
"Science" Article Items
Science and religion should be mutually compatible and supportive; when they are not, there is something wrong about our understanding. The progress of science has provided increasing evidence for the truth of Scripture; never before in the history of humanity has there been so much supportive evidence.
Why Mass Matters
Astronomy found that its mass determines nearly every aspect of a star’s physics; in the end, mass matters most. Its mass and lifespan primarily determine the star’s place on the HR diagram. The star’s position on the HR diagram determines its absolute brightness and color. The problem was that astronomers did not understand why this was so at the beginning of the twentieth century. First, they had thought that maybe younger stars would burn brighter, but this was not necessarily so. Then astronomers hypothesized that larger stars would be brighter, which is also not necessarily so. The reason why so… Read More »
Star Clusters
Stars are not uniformly distributed throughout the night sky but are often clumped together in star clusters. These star clusters were of some nuisance to astronomers trying to discover comets or deep sky objects because they appeared similar to the casual observer. Charles Messier gained some fame in cataloging some of these annoying clusters so they could not be confused with other objects, especially comets. His occupation as the Astronomer of the Navy for the government of France afforded him some opportunity to gain familiarity with the night sky. He made a catalog of star clusters so that he and… Read More »
Stellar Mass
The next mystery to be addressed by astronomy concerned stellar mass. Henry Russel proposed in 1914 that the hotter, more luminous stars had greater mass, while the cooler stars had a lower mass. This means that the stars on the upper left of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram were had a greater stellar mass and had a blue color, while those on the lower right corner of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram were red stars with much lower masses. Unfortunately, early in the twentieth century, there was no way astronomers could measure stellar mass. How astronomers figured this out represents one of the greatest… Read More »
The Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) Diagram
The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is foundational to an understanding of stars and virtually everything astronomers have learned about stars, galaxies, and the universe. The diagram plots the absolute magnitude of a star against its spectrum. Thus, to put any star on the diagram, we only need to know its surface temperature (which relates to its spectral type) and the absolute brightness. Astronomers can determine the spectral type for visible stars if the telescope can gather enough light. The amount of light collected from a star can be increased with a larger telescope, longer collections time, or more sensitive equipment. In addition,… Read More »
Fossil Apes
Fossil Apes and Man The prevailing scientific narrative regarding human evolution is that humans originated from the great apes and that this evidence is clear. The 150 years since Darwin speculated that human originated from the monkeys as seen the number of proposed human ancestors explode in number. There is little agreement in the scientific community concerning the origins of the human lineage (“hominins”) due to the large number of putative ancestors. The prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science has taken a look at this controversy. Paleoanthropologists have attempted to reconstruct the physical characteristics of human ancestors, where this ancestor originated, and how… Read More »
Long Term Evolution Experiment
The long-term evolution experiment is one of the most exciting studies on the feasibility of evolution to produce complicated metabolic systems and new systems of information within cells. Evolution holds that mutations occur through natural processes which by chance, produce advantageous changes. These changes enhance the organism’s ability to survive and thus over time, become dominant within the population. The problem with substantiating evolution is that these changes take considerable time to accumulate within a population and show a survival benefit. Since people reproduce every 25 years, the time required to see inherited beneficial mutations accumulates with a human population… Read More »
Repetitive DNA
Much of the non-protein-coding portions of DNA consists of repetitive DNA sequences. This seemingly wasteful repetition of DNA sequences has been taken as support for evolution. Certainly, a wise and intelligent designer would not have included nonsensical repetitive sequences of nucleic acids in the DNA molecule. This support for evolution was proposed by Kenneth Miller when he noted that, the human genome is littered with so many repeated copies of pointless DNA sequences that it cannot be attributed to anything that resembles [an] intelligent design. Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian and believer in theistic evolution, acknowledge this DNA feature in… Read More »
Pseudogenes
Pseudogenes have been a hot topic for discussion since their original discovery about fifty years ago. They were originally found in frog DNA and were found to be apparently inactive copies of genes found elsewhere. They were called “pseudogenes” as they were thought to not make active proteins but represented mutated trash. Thousands of other pseudogenes were subsequently found in humans and many other animals and plants. Many mammals have now been found to have as many pseudogenes as actual protein-coding genes. Importance in Evolution Evolutionists jumped on the pseudogenes as showing changes consistent with natural evolution, and inconsistent with… Read More »
Junk DNA
Finding Junk DNA in your DNA Watson and Crick discovered the chemical structure of the DNA molecule. These brilliant scientists were able to determine the structure consisted of two complementary strands wrapped around each other, with one strand going in one direction while the other strand went in the other direction. Each of these strands was composed of subunits called “nucleotides,” each strand containing a sugar molecule (deoxyribose in the case of DNA) attached to a phosphate group and one of four bases: adenine, thymine, cytosine, or guanine. The Code for Life DNA is really an immensely complicated code for… Read More »