Have you ever seen the movie Weekend at Bernie’s, where the corpse of the recently murdered Bernie Lomax is paraded around town by two of his employees who are desperate to convince everyone that he’s alive?

Similarly, despite being presented as the best (the only) explanation for just about anything – from homology to morality; from origins to oration; from lifeless mindless chemicals to living thinking reasoning beings – some have likened evolution to a corpse being paraded around as if alive. For example, there is an apparent pattern of reporting in the secularised mainstream media (MSM) that builds up this facade by trumpeting the latest evolutionary interpretation, while remaining silent as it falls from grace (e.g. see the development on Tiktaalik below). Each new story then, has a cumulative affect, giving the impression that Neo-Darwinian evolution is being constantly validated.

In quite dissimilar fashion, every December, the Access Research Network^[1] publish a relatively unique list that summarises their top ten science news stories that have impacted the development of evolutionary and/or intelligent design perspectives on science. Or to be more specific, it highlights the many ways in which an intelligent design perspective is continuing to have increasingly more explanatory power in the investigation of “natural” systems, while underscoring the epic failure of the evolutionary paradigm to do likewise.

Honourable mentions on the list (those that didn’t make the top ten) include:

(1) The death of the “Primordial Soup” theory for the origin of life. (2) Recent genetic research indicating that chimps are more distant from humans than popularly argued by evolutionary proponents. (3) Evidence suggesting that Neanderthals were in fact fully human, having interbred with them. (4) Automatic turnstiles in cell membranes that expel up to 1500 molecules of toxins from the cell per minute.

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I was having a conversation with my Dad last night about the size and complexity of things at the microscopic level.

“For example”, I said, grabbing my copy of Jonathan Sarfati’s ‘By Design’ off the bookshelf and opening up to the chapter on motors, “the E.Coli bacteria is only 2µm long and the motor assembly that drives it is only 45nm in diameter. Not only that, but this is a real motor, much like the kind that you’d find in your car – with a stator, rotor, drive shaft, etc.”^[1,2]

“I don’t even know how to think of things that are so small,” he replied. “Once you start talking about things that size I just can’t even begin to imagine it?”

And perhaps with people like my Dad in mind, the University of Utah have set up a website that will help people to gain an appreciation for the size of the complex machines that get about in a largely unseen part of the world.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

Just drag the cursor below the image from left to right to zoom in from the size of a coffee bean to a carbon atom [well technically, if you pay attention you'll notice the water molecule is smaller]. Very, very cool!

1. Jonathan Sarfati, By Design, (Creation Ministries International, 2008), p.136
2. As you drag the cursor from left to right, you’ll see the E.Coli about halfway down the scale, with a bunch of filaments extending from its cell walls. The flagellum rotary motors are embedded in the cell wall of the E. Coli at the other end of those filaments, although the program is not particularly set up to identify them.