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On Monday, one of the most important projects of the century officially opened to the public. Although I wasn't there, I had a friend who was, and he graciously provided the pictures for this post. The banner above was being pulled by an airplane through the morning sky, the work of anti-creationists who spent the day protesting this . . .

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This morning I stepped outside and heard a bizarre trilling from high in the treetops. It was a mid-toned shrill  that had a rapid rattle to it--like a coach's whistle with an ill-fitted ball. The song was joined by others, which together gave the woods and field a spooky liveliness. As each whistle ended, its pitch quickly fell away with a melancholy sweep, as if the lungs of the player had suddenly run out of air.  But cicadas don't use lungs: Their cacophony is produced from vibrating membranes called tymbals located on the sides of their abdomens.  After a weekend of rain these insects are out thick, and the males are making noise.

The matching wing was lying a foot away from this one. The owner may have served as an early bird breakfast.

The empty exoskeleton of a cicada that had probably molted during the night. 

 If you'd like to learn more about cicadas and other insects, check out the following books and DVDs. (Be advised: these products will likely offer an evolutionary history of their stars.)

The DVD series that the cicada YouTube video I linked to a couple weeks ago originally came from is called Life in the Undergrowth. It's a fascinating BBC documentary about the lives and abilities of different insects and ground-dwelling invertebrates. Although it's rather heavy-handed with evolutionist dogma, the cinematography is stunning and you'll learn creepy things about spiders, worms, and slugs you never knew. Minus the evolution, highly recommended.

For an informative and readable resource on insects, try the Firefly Encyclopedia of Insects and Spiders. It's illustrated with 240 pages.

If you'd like a field guide for identifying bugs next time you go hiking, get the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders.

And if you're really an insect nerd, get the technical guide to insect bodies, The Insects: Structure and Function. This 788-page textbook is not for the faint at heart.

Meanwhile, the Creation Museum in Cincinnati has officially opened; I have a "correspondent" there today who has promised to provide us all with some pictures of the museum's first day of being open to the public. I plan to visit myself in a couple weeks. My correspondent, Jay, told me security is tight at the grounds, yesterday he walked up to the locked front gate and was immediately approached and questioned by a guard on an ATV. During the ribbon cutting ceremony on Saturday evolutionist groups protested nearby. Sounds exciting.

cicada photos copyright Daniel James Devine. you may use them on your site if you credit the author.

The Creation Museum, which opens outside of Cincinnati on Monday, received a surprisingly fair review by the New York Times today. The story, written by Edward Rothstein, claims the museum offers an "alternate world"--one differing with the world of Darwinian "Natural History" to an extent that parallels the difference between the Garden of Eden and life outside. But as he admits, the alternate world turns out to be pretty attractive.

Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.

And rather than descending to the emotive lambasting that many critics of creationism retreat on, Rothstein asks a rather novel question:

[N]ow that many museums have also become temples to various American ethnic and sociological groups, why not a museum for the millions who believe that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old and was created in six days?

Perhaps the Times has finally become perceptive of the influence of these millions. After all, according to a 2005 Pew Research poll, half of Americans reject evolution as a theory of origins. And with a $27 million-dollar creationist museum constructed debt-free, there's money to had in this too. Money talks, as we all know, whether you're a skeptic or not.

Hopefully the money won't obscure the infinitely more important message the Creation Museum is seeking to spread--namely, the Gospel. The message of salvation is stacked squarely on the foundation of death, law, and sin, along with the bottommost portion, the creation of a perfect universe by an omnipotent God. Naturalism undermines the Gospel by rewriting the history of creation and death, and offering a plastered up perspective of life that seeks to answer all the big questions within an atheistic framework.

In order not to ruffle the more severe opponents of the museum, the Times story ends with with this question:

[O]ne problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope . . ?

It's a legitimate question to ask, and one I think I'll submit an answer to. Some of this might sound a bit technical, but hang with me and you'll be glad you did.

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Here they come. Introducing Brood XIII.

If you live near Chicago and had the opportunity to venture outside with a flashlight tonight (Monday, May 21), you probably saw something like this. Dozens of cicadas burrowing out of holes that served as their homes for 17 years. All at once, they've realized their juvenile years are over: They're coming to visit the open air again for a short time. They'll molt, mate, and quickly die.

Here's our culprit. Notice the hard, brown body and beady red eyes. They'll make their way right up your arm if you let them. (Never fear, cicadas are harmless.) 

Where will these zombie-like critters emerge? Around the bases of trees, where they've been feeding off roots for nearly two decades. Look for a tree older than that, and watch the ground and trunk for movement. In our yard, we found that oak trees were good breakout sites.

Also listen. You just might hear them tromping through leaves and grass as they make their way from their holes (like the one below) to the nearest plant or tree trunk.

 Once they've reached a trunk, they'll climb up to a comfortable perch and begin molting. Molting is a step in metamorphosis--the amazing process by which insects grow and change shape. Insect metamorphosis is evidence of God's creative abilities; despite what some people would like you to believe, there is no evolutionary explanation that fully accounts for its complexity and diversity. The brown cicada that emerges from ground has no wings, but it will after it molts--which may happen within an hour or two.

Look closely and you'll see the cicada's back has split open. A larger, folded, skin or exoskeleton is expanding beneath it.

Liftoff! The appendages sticking out on the right and left are four wings, tightly bundled. The cicada will slowly inflate and unfurl them. 

Of course the cicadas aren't alone in their pursuits--it's easy to find groups of cicadas perched next to one another, all unwinding their wings in harmony. But sometimes the socialization gets carried away. One interloper (below) decided to climb all over his neighbor, who was molting and quite unable to move (although he did wave his legs in protest.)

 The finished product. Isn't it a beauty?

In a few days all of Chicago will be covered with these loud insects. They'll be coating the trees and chirping for mates. If you live in the Windy City enjoy them now--you'll be sick of them soon enough.

photos copyright Daniel Devine. you may use these photos for your site if you credit the source and provide a link to globelens.com

In what may be the richest sunken treasure haul in world history, the company Odyssey Marine Exploration has announced the discovery of over 500,000 silver and gold coins from a 17th-century Atlantic shipwreck. Initial estimates place the total value of the coins at around half a billion (yes, that's with a "B"). Odyssey Marine Exploration recovered the coins from the code-named "Black Swan" shipwreck using a tethered submarine robot and state-of-the-art marine exploration equipment. There are already grumblings of the morality of allowing private and for-profit artifact collectors to exhume sites. Treasure envy, no doubt.

Although the ship hunters have not disclosed the location of the "Black Swan," BBC News has suggested the wreck is within 40 miles of Land's End--the southwest tip of Great Britain. (Go here for a 19th-century map of the cape.) Odyssey Marine Exploration will be returning to the location soon to begin a second phase of excavation and hopefully learn the original identification of the ship. The coins, meanwhile, have been flown to the U.S. in white plastic buckets.

Go here for "Black Swan" Q&A at the OME site. 

Also: C & B Research News has some info and photos of polystrate fossils and fast-forming stalactites. Go look at them: They demonstrate the point that rock layers form very quickly in certain conditions.

For anyone going (or already gone) to Jamestown this year to celebrate the Quadricentennial, this is what your destination looks like from far, far above. The hazy line dividing Jamestown Island shows the difference in topography and vegetation: The dark green areas are forest and lie on high ground, while the lighter areas are closer to sea level and contain low-lying plant life.

For more on Virginia's coastal geology, take a look at this chart. 

Thanks to the Earth Observatory and Lawrence Ong, EO-1 Mission Science Office, NASA GSFC for providing the satellite image.

Brood XIII, the 17-year cicadas that will emerge in Chicago this year, are expected to make their appearance around May 22. But why wait until then to discover these amazing bugs? Watch the following mini-film and view cicadas burrowing out of the earth, molting, and finding mates in beautiful time-lapse cinematography. I think you'll be as pleasantly surprised as I was.

(HT to Brian Vaszily.)

In physics, the Laws of Thermodynamics are elemental. Simply put, they define how energy moves throughout the universe; the First Law states that the total amount of energy in a closed system is constant (energy is neither created nor destroyed), and the Second Law says that heat always spreads out until it reaches a state of equilibrium. In the debate over cosmic and biological evolution, the objection is often raised that evolution contradicts these laws--in particular the Second.

Now for the most part, the First and Second Laws are accepted by Creationists, ID theorists, and Neo-Darwinists alike. There are those who do quibble a little bit: J.P. Moreland, for instance, once suggested to me (after I asked a question) that humans create "a little bit of energy" every time they exercise their wills--thus contradicting the First Law. Of course creationists accept that God did and can create energy at special times. For the sake of argument at least, let's set aside supernatural intervention and human wills for a moment, and assume the Laws work for all other known, natural circumstances.

Those who argue that evolution has occurred on cosmic and biological levels by naturalistic means have a grave problem: The Laws of Thermodynamics don't account for it. The Second Law, in explaining the dissipation of heat, also introduces the concept of entropy. The scientific definition of entropy is very technical (and abstruse, to be honest), but a broad definition, according to Webster's Dictionary, is "the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system." Bluntly put, the state of order in any closed system should be--according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics--constantly decreasing. The sad theory of evolution states exactly the opposite. Evolution needs another Law of Thermodynamics to explain itself.

If you don't believe me, keep reading. I didn't say it first.

Robert M. Hazen is a distinguished researcher, author and science professor who has won many awards for his work. He is the Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, and has written hundreds of articles and around 20 books, including Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy and Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins. His scientific work includes research into the role of minerals in the origin of life.

I'm nearly finished listening to a series of lectures by Professor Hazen called "The Joy of Science," published by The Teaching Company. Toward the end of the series, Hazen discusses the "fact" of evolution and compares it as a theory of origins with creationism.

As a quick side point, one of Hazen's arguments against creationism as a scientific theory is that "you can't scientifically test a past event" (my paraphrase of his words).  As far as it goes, I agree, but how then can Hazen call evolution a scientific theory (much less a fact) when the Theory of Evolution consists entirely of past events? I think a better way to state this problem is, we cannot directly test a past event, but we can test the results of that event, to determine if and how the event occurred. But I digress.

In his lecture on entropy, Hazen says something I certainly didn't expect. I'll practice my transcription skills here and share the quote with you directly (hmm, does an audio recording count as a direct test?):

There's one nagging aspect of energy that I believe science has not fully addressed. I may be in a minority on this, but think about it, there's a tendency for physical systems to become complex locally, as I just said, even though they become globally disordered. What do I mean by that?

Well there's a seemingly universal tendency for systems with large numbers of components to display complex behavior that you wouldn't normally see in the individual components. And you can see so many examples. Individual sand grains can just lie there, but if you put enough sand grains together you get dunes, you get ripples, you get all sorts of complex behavior that you'd never predict from a single sand grain. Atoms form planets, and then life forms from those planets. And then consciousness forms from life and you have these emergent, complex processes that seem to arrive spontaneously out of local order in an otherwise large system in which the entropy is increasing. In each of these cases you see local states of extremely high order arising from a large collection of small particles, whether they be cells or atoms or so forth. These are what we call emergent properties. Complexity seems to just arise in the universe, and of yet there's no law of thermodynamics that describes how complexity can arise. It doesn't fit into the First Law, it doesn't fit into the Second Law--perhaps there's a Third Law. Part of the answer may lie in deep connections between the concept of entropy and the concept of information. But we're really a long way from a full understanding of this point. In any case, I'm willing to bet personally that someday perhaps soon there's going to be a Third Law of Thermodynamics. That's one of the exciting things about science; we keep coming up with new ideas. Science is an endless frontier.     --Robert M. Hazen, "The Joy of Science"

 To clarify, a Third Law of Thermodynamics, along with the Zeroth Law, has already been developed, dealing with the relationship of entropy to absolute zero and heat energy transfer. I'm not sure why Hazen doesn't mention these other two, since he's a very educated guy and his "Joy of Science" series was recorded around the year 2000, as far as I can tell. Maybe he was trying to keep things simple. At any rate, what Hazen is hoping for is a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics.

It seems that the authors of this 2006 Chemistry paper (pdf) are hoping for the same thing. In it R.E. Morel and George Fleck propose a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics that (according to the abstract) "significantly extends the domain of thermodynamics by incorporating evolving systems and thereby adding richness to thermodynamic description." Throughout their paper the authors refer back to inadequateness of the "classic" laws of thermodynamics to account for dissipative structures--the ultimate of which are living organisms.

Let's understand what this has descended to: Because evolutionists disbelieve the account of creation, they are proposing new laws of physics. Now if there is observational evidence to support a fourth law, that's fine. But speculating that such a law must exist because life would not have evolved without it, sounds . . . ludicrous.

It goes to show that origin evolutionists (at least those who espouse methodological naturalism) aren't as confident in their theory as they would like us to believe. Their security lies in numbers, not in scientific laws. I'm willing to "bet personally" that once ID theorists (and, as I hope, creationists), become mainstream marketers of science, we'll see a mass exodus from evolutionist camps. And the practice of science will be much improved as a result.

ID theorists have actually proposed a fourth law themselves--but one built on the Second Law and based on the observation that information decreases over time ("information entropy"--actually sounds a little like what Hazen predicted). Salvador Cordova talked about it a couple years ago in this thread.

Here's a fascinating question: Will Evolution or Design establish the Fourth Law? 

water droplet image copyright Tomislav Stajduhar. used by permission.