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Huge interest in Moscow creation conference
Hundreds of scientists, and representatives from international church bodies, attended the second Moscow International Symposium on Creation Science in May.
The Russian media also showed great interest in the conference, which attracted more than 400 Russian scientists from 13 academic institutions, and representatives of 18 churches and missionary organizations from Russia, the Ukraine, Finland, and Australia.
Dr Olga Polykovskaya, from the Russian ministry for education, told the symposium there was a great need to include creation science in Russia's high-school curriculum 'to create a logical balance in science education.'
Conference speakers included Dr Duane Gish from the Institute for Creation Research in the United States, Dr Dmitri Kouznetsov from the Moscow Creation Science Fellowship, Professor Leonid Korochkin (one of Russia's foremost geneticists) from the Russian Academy of Sciences, and scientists from Russia, the Ukraine, Canada, the Czech Republic, and the United States.
The symposium was sponsored by ORA International (Fred Lutsenko, Executive Director).
Nationwide TV and radio reported on the event, and attendees bought more than 6,500 creationist books.
People: created to speak
In the 1960s, linguist Noam Chomsky seemed to show that human language skills were biologically encoded in the brain. This replaced previous 'behaviouristic' ideas that everything was 'learned from scratch'.
There was a subsequent move away from this, but recent studies have again favoured the idea that we are born with inherited language and grammar rules.
Stephen Pinker of Massachusetts Institute of Technology is at the forefront of this idea. In his new book, The Language Instinct, he is critical of those who try to show that chimpanzees and other animals understand language in the human fashion.
Pinker (an evolutionist) thinks that language is in any case not 'the measure of biological worth'. He says 'It's ironic that people try to "elevate" apes by forcing our communication system on them.'
New Scientist,
June 25, 1994 (pp. 28-31).
This again emphasizes the uniqueness of human language, with its built-in 'universal grammar' which allows an infant to pick up any language.
Leaves defy evolutionary timespans
Lake Eyre, a normally dry salt pan in the remote South Australian outback, has seen a number of land speed record attempts. This is one of the driest places on earth, yet both creationists and evolutionists believe it was once wetter and covered in rainforest.
Creationists believe this was at most a few thousand years ago, with subsequent drying after the Flood. Evolutionists believe it was tens of millions of years ago, which is why when paleobotanist Mary White found lots of fossil rainforest leaves, wood, seeds and fruit near Lake Eyre recently, they were dated at 45 million years.
However, many could not even be called fossilized, as the mud in which they were preserved 'was still soft enough to put a spade through'.
These 'mummified' plants were in 'almost the same condition as any growing today'. The leaves are reported to be totally unchanged, with no added minerals, 'exactly like a living leaf'. There were even delicate strands of a brown rot fungus.
A technical officer at a government laboratory said that to see the specimens in such good condition, 'it surprised me when I found out about the age.' He said it was like 'a scene from a science fiction movie' and that 'it makes you wonder about time.'
The Sydney Morning Herald,
May 19, 1994 (p. 7).
Hopefully others reading the report will wonder, too, about the accuracy of radiometric dating methods and the credibility of evolution's alleged time-spans and see that it makes far more sense to see these as recent.
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