Dr. Jerry Bergman has written a book about whale evolution. It is titled "Whale Evolution: A Whale of a Tail" and it exposes the strange idea that dog-sized precursors to the whale evolved from a land mammal and returned to the sea. Some of the early false claims about three of the so-called "walking whales" (Pakicetus, Rodhocetus and Ambulocetus) have been exposed. Since then, evolutionists continue to crank out new theoretical land ancestors, and each claim contradicts the previous claims. Jerry describes the anatomy of the whale and the impossibility for land ancestors of the whale to survive the migration of the nose to the back of the head, lose its legs and develop flippers and fins, develop the ability to drink sea water, dive without getting the bends, and develop echolocation.

The RNA World Hypothesis proposes that life could have evolved from inanimate matter through initially forming self-replicating RNA. There are immediate problems with that hypothesis. The mechanism to form RNA requires nucleotides to form. For nucleotides to form, you need amino acids, phosphates and sugars. There are already problems isolating left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. Then somehow, DNA has to be reverse engineered from RNA, and that process needs RNA and amino acids in their right forms. The reagents needed to form amino acids conflict with the reagents needed to form nucleotides. The synthesis of nucleotides and the components of life are considered in this video. Nineteen difficulties are presented. Two studies from Germany have proposed ways RNA could have been the link between inanimate molecules and living microbes. Benedikt Obermayer’s Munich group has reported a computer simulation of "prebiotic RNA" in Physical Review Letters. Christopher Deck and colleagues from Stuttgart reported their work synthesizing RNA in Nature Chemistry. Both groups are trying to demonstrate how RNA molecules could have built and replicated themselves to transmit useful information. The mystery of abiogenesis - getting life from non-life - is a major hurdle for evolution. Abiogenesis violates a basic principle of biology. Since living cells need both proteins and DNA to function and reproduce, evolutionary theorists have struggled with the problem of how one could have evolved without the other. RNA is an intermediary-of-sorts between DNA and proteins (able to carry out some enzymatic function and to transmit information), so the “RNA world hypothesis” paints a scenario in which the earliest life forms would have only required RNA. The discovery of bits of self-replicating RNA increased the popularity of the RNA world. Efforts to synthesize self-replicating RNA strands long and varied enough to actually encode for a functional biochemical molecule have been unsuccessful. The Stuttgart group decided to immobilize an 8-base-strand of RNA and surround it with chemically-activated nucleotides and "micro-helper" pieces of RNA. They hoped such immobilized RNA strands would lengthen. Some RNA chains added 4 bases. Some, however, failed to copy correctly. Twelve bases is not long enough to code for functional molecules, but Deck considers the work a success. The group suggests that early life forms may have gotten by with simpler molecules. And although the experiment required pinning down the RNA starter strand with a bit of DNA, the group proposes early RNA got "adsorbed and immobilized on surfaces billions of years ago." The Munich group didn’t actually grow any RNA. They performed a computer simulation proposing a "natural" hydrothermal "RNA reactor" (i.e. porous rocks on the sea floor where nucleotides can accumulate in the pores and be exposed to strong temperature gradients) in which aggregates of nucleotides can randomly bond to build RNA. During normal transcription of RNA, only certain nucleotide pairings are stable. Therefore, in this computer-simulated reactor, randomly generated bits of RNA hybridized by matching up properly with other bits of RNA, thereby outlasting improperly paired molecules.

The Lewiston Area Historical Society is dedicated to preserving the history of the Lewiston lumbering industry and how the town preserved itself when the lumber boom closed down. This video features Julie Giorgano who is the new coordinator of the museum, Greg Arbogast, one of the museum's main tour guides, tells about some of the items in the museum. Doug Sharp gives an account of the history of the vacation home when he was a boy, and Steve Spracklen plays the ragtime piano for us.

The argument made by atheists and anti-creationists is that as scientists solves problems, our God gets smaller. This has never been an impressive argument, as my observation is that when one question is answered, six more unsolved mysteries appear. For scientists to make the god-of-the-gaps argument, they need to have knowledge about everything and be omnipotent, even to be able to time travel into the past. This argument is a fallacy. Divine intervention is used to explain phenomena currently missing a scientific cause. While critics suggest that increasing knowledge eliminates the need for a creator, Jerry Bergman points out that modern discoveries reveal greater complexities that naturalism cannot explain. Scientific progress has exposed vast new questions in fields such as cellular biology and cosmology, suggesting that they are better explained by intelligent design than by materialistic evolution by mutations and natural selection. Evolutionists rely upon their own evolution-of-the-gaps by using speculative theories to bridge missing links in the fossil record. Intelligent design triumphs over materialism. Chemical evolution experiments fail to produce all 20 amino acids used in life, and int the laboratory they are produced in racemic mixtures with both left-handed and right-handed conformations. Chemistry in the laboratory is unable to replicate the conditions needed to remove the water molecule when forming peptide bonds. Life uses a complicated mechanism that codes for the formation of proteins using only left-handed amino acids. A naturalistic explanation is not possible. To claim that scientific progress will answer all questions will need no role left for God fails miserably. If naturalistic explanations are wrong, how does it eliminate the possibility that God did it, especially if God really did do it?