Once we reach 3.5 billion years ago, we find many more fossilized microbes in rocks that were not melted by volcanic activity. According to Dr. Johnjoe McFadden, “The world is just not big enough to evolve life if it relied entirely on chance. . . . These fossil microbes look like organisms alive today, and are likely to have been just as complex. Life may be improbable, but it was quick.”8 Just to prove how ridiculous the odds really are, an MIT biologist calculated how likely it is that even one protein with a hundred amino acids could form by random mutation—and it came out to one chance out of a number with sixty-five zeroes.9
A 2008 article in Wired magazine revealed new discoveries that bacteria can live in the earth’s most inhospitable areas—including the smoldering heat inside volcanoes and nuclear reactors, and the freezing cold temperatures deep within the Antarctic ice. In fact, Antarctic bacteria were able to be thawed out and brought back to life after ten million years. The article also says that microbes can survive the shock of being launched into space, and amino acids—the precursors to all biological life—have been found in the dust from comet 81P/Wild 2.10 Another recent study from the Imperial College of London found uracil and xanthine, the precursors to DNA, in fragments from a meteorite that crashed in Australia in 1969.11 In January 2011, the Geological Society of America announced that living bacteria were found floating in fluid that was trapped inside salt crystals for 34,000 years. They were shrunken and small, and appeared to be in a hibernation-type state. It took them about two and a half months to wake up and begin reproducing normally. “We’re not sure what’s going on,” Professor Tim Lowenstein said. “They need to be able to repair DNA, because DNA degrades with time.”12
An even more stunning discovery was made by British astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Dr. Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, who explored the composition of galactic dust in the 1960s. More and more, the evidence suggested that the vast majority of dust throughout the entire galaxy—some 99.9 percent13—is actually freeze-dried bacteria. This discovery began when Hoyle and Wickramasinghe studied the infrared light from the dust in our galaxy, and concluded that these dust grains had to be 70 percent hollow on the inside. Bacteria have a hard outer cell wall and a softer interior. They were stunned when they found out that freeze-dried bacteria are also 70 percent hollow on the inside. By simply assuming that galactic dust grains were freeze-dried bacteria, they found a perfect fit to their observations.14
This led them to an utterly stunning conclusion: “Interstellar grains must surely be bacteria—albeit freeze-dried, perhaps mostly dead. At the very least this was a hypothesis that had to be explored.” In a lecture from April 15, 1980, Hoyle spelled it all out.
Microbiology may be said to have had its beginnings in the nineteen forties. A new world of the most astonishing complexity began then to be revealed. In retrospect I find it remarkable that microbiologists did not at once recognize that the world into which they had penetrated had of necessity to be of a cosmic order. I suspect that the cosmic quality of microbiology will seem as obvious to future generations as the Sun being the centre of our solar system seems obvious to the present generation.15
Some thirty years later, as I write this book, that predicted change in scientific thought has obviously still not arrived. Most scientists who even bother to write about interstellar bacteria still try to stick with the comfortable idea that they evolved by Darwinian mutation, freeze-dried in space, and then crashed to earth where they then seeded all life. It’s a much greater step to realize that bacteria are everywhere, because that’s what the Universe does—create life. If this is true, then how could we possibly have missed such a stunning discovery in the history of science?
In his noteworthy book Sparks of Life, Harvard professor James Strick revealed that there was an extensive conspiracy in the 1800s to suppress any scientific discoveries of microbes that appeared spontaneously, from nonliving material, rather than through allegedly “random Darwinian mutation.”16 Dr. Strick clarified his position at a 2003 conference held by the Wilhelm Reich institute, and it was written up and published online by Jack Flannel.17 In the 1800s, the French Academy of Sciences offered prize money to any scientist who could conclusively prove that life was either spontaneous or random—and Louis Pasteur won the contest. When you see a carton of milk that says it is pasteurized, this means it was cooked to kill all the bacteria—and this process was named after Louis Pasteur. The problem is that Pasteur’s competitors did get life-forms to grow out of nonliving environments—such as by using preparations of hay that had been totally sterilized in water. Pasteur simply refused to repeat these experiments. It’s even more disappointing that Pasteur found life that spontaneously appeared in a small percentage of his own experiments, but he never even wrote about them—because he felt they had to be mistakes, and were not worth mentioning.18
The biogenesis side of the debate had evidence to support its conclusions going all the way back to 1837, with the little-known work of Andrew Crosse. At the time, electricity was a new and exciting phenomenon. Crosse wanted to try to grow crystals artificially, by zapping chemicals with a weak electrical current. Specifically, he mixed up a silicate of potash and hydrochloric acid, and then dropped a fist-size chunk of iron oxide rock into it. He then zapped the acid bath with a small battery, and hoped to find artificial silica crystals growing on the rock. Instead, he got something much, much weirder. After fourteen days, whitish specks started forming in the center of the electrified stone. Four days later, each speck was twice as large, and had six or eight tiny strands growing out from it. Each strand was longer than the speck itself.19
Crosse reported what happened next in a paper he wrote for the London Electrical Society in 1837.
On the 26th day of the experiment, the objects assumed the form of perfect insects, standing erect on the bristles which they were growing. Although I regarded this as most unusual, I attached no singular significance to it until two days later, the 28th day of the experiment, when the magnifying lens showed that these things were moving their legs. I must say now that I was quite astonished. After a few more days, they detached themselves from the stone and moved about through the caustic acid solution. In the course of a few weeks, more than a hundred of them made their appearance on the oxide of iron.20
The creatures appeared to be similar to the genus Acari, which is a form of mite: “Under a microscope I examined them, and found that the smaller ones had six legs, the larger ones had eight. Others who have examined them pronounced them to be of the genus acari, but some say they are an entirely new species.” Crosse knew he would be attacked by his colleagues, so he carefully repeated the experiment by sterilizing all the ingredients with heat in a closed container before he ever started it—but the little critters still appeared the same way.
Other scientists repeated Crosse’s experiment and got the same results, but according to the 1959 article by Frank Edwards that we pulled the above quotes from, they were too afraid to speak out about it.21 This finally changed when the legendary Michael Faraday reported to the Royal Institution that he, too, had gotten these small creatures to grow under the same conditions.22 He was not sure whether they were actually created spontaneously in the sterile solutions, or brought back to life by the electricity—but either result is a total challenge to mainstream science and biology as we now know it.
Another early pioneer we briefly mentioned in chapter 1 is Wilhelm Reich. His research into orgone energy, as he called it, was dismissed as a joke. Nonetheless, given everything we’ve been uncovering in this investigation, he appears to have been on the right track. Reich concluded that orgone fills all space in the Universe, does not have mass, penetrates matter, has a pulsating movement that can be measured, has a strong attraction to water, and is accumulated naturally in organisms by eating, breathing and taking it in through the skin. So far this all sounds very familiar. Reich created accumulators that concentrated this orgone energy, and found they remarkably increased the speed tha
t wounds and burns would heal in laboratory mice. These treatments also decreased shock. Seeds grew into substantially larger and healthier plants when zapped by Reich’s orgone accumulator.23
Reich also found evidence of spontaneous generation in sterile environments. He saw what he felt to be bluish points of light under the microscope, which appeared before the life-forms themselves were created—and he called these bursts of light “bions.” This theory was widely ridiculed, and is still attacked by skeptics on the Internet today—criticizing Reich’s protocols as scientifically unsound.24 Nonetheless, Professor Ignacio Pacheco successfully replicated Reich’s results in 2000—and the photographs of what grew in his test tube are quite stunning. 25 Pacheco heated ordinary sand from a nonpolluted beach to white-hot levels—namely, 1400˚ C. This destroys all known forms of biological life, other than the extremophile bacteria we spoke about earlier that appear in volcanoes and nuclear reactors. The sand was then cooled off in a sterile environment, poured into a sterile test tube with distilled water in it, and capped off. Each tube was then sterilized in an autoclave, two times in a row, with twenty-four hours between each sterilization. This process is used to destroy all known spores and vegetative cells. Pacheco then studied the particles floating at the top of the water under a microscope after each twenty-four-hour period following sterilization—and that’s where the magic happened.
Amazingly, a variety of different structures appeared in the water that looked like complex living organisms—capable of growth and division. They were actively moving around in the solution, and Pacheco videotaped the results. Although Pacheco has not yet identified whether these structures have DNA in them, he feels “these bions can be considered living structures in almost every sense.” Some of them look like simple microorganisms, but others were much more complex.
This included microscopic sea vegetables similar to Gorgonia. Some of Pacheco’s most compelling photographs are of single leaves that broke off from these plants when they were put on the microscopic slide. He also found soft-looking blobs which then started to grow a bright white spiraling shell of calcium around themselves—showing what appears to be the formation of an ordinary ocean shellfish at a very tiny level.
Dr. Ignacio Pacheco’s photograph of a microscopic leaf-shaped object that formed in a sterile solution containing nothing but beach sand and distilled water.
The beginning spiral of the outer shell can be clearly seen, and it matches what we would expect to see perfectly—even though the soft inner body is still partially exposed.
My favorite photograph, as you can see on the next page, is of what looks like a critter with an obvious head, and a roughly spherical body that is covered with spikes for self-defense. Pacheco believes these are “transitional forms from the inorganic stage of organization to the organic and living condition of evolution.”26 Interestingly, if he did not sterilize the beach sand first, none of these little things would grow. It seems that the purity of the molecules was a very important element that allowed life to form. When we look at these little guys the obvious question is this: Where did their DNA come from?
Pacheco’s photograph of what appears to be a shellfish beginning to form in a sterile solution containing only beach sand and distilled water.
The same question needs to be asked for all the bacteria we find in the most inhospitable places on earth—and indeed throughout all the dust in the galaxy. Pasteur may have made off with the prize money in the 1800s to support Darwin’s model of evolution, but in the process we’ve been robbed of a much greater truth—that life is indeed a product of intelligent design. You don’t have to be a Bible thumper to see that—all you need is rational thinking in the face of all the evidence.
The Darwin Problem
Now let’s talk about evolution. Although the official view is that Darwinian evolution is a proven fact, many scholars have concluded that it is simply impossible—and these are not creationists, but grounded scientific researchers with professional credentials. For example, Professor Louis Bonoure, Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research, said, “Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless.”27 Wolfgang Smith, a mathematics professor from MIT and Oregon State University, made his position very clear.
Pacheco’s photograph of what appears to be a complex, multicellular organism, with a head and defensive spikes, formed out of a sterile solution of sand and water.
Today . . . the Darwinian theory of evolution stands under attack as never before. . . . A growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. . . . For the most part, these “experts” have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds.28
Niles Eldredge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History, discussed the speed with which complex life suddenly appeared on earth.
Beginning about six hundred million years ago . . . all over the world, at roughly the same time, thick sequences of rocks, barren of any easily detected fossils, are overlain by sediments containing a gorgeous array of shelly invertebrates: trilobites, brachiopods, mollusks. . . . Creationists have made much of this sudden development of a rich and varied fossil record where, just before, there was none. . . . [This] does pose a fascinating intellectual challenge.29
J. R. Norman, a zoologist from the British Museum of Natural History, said in 1975 that “the geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of the fishes.”30 In 1960, W. E. Swinton, also from the British Museum of Natural History, said, “The [evolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved.”31 Professor Derek Ager, from the Imperial College of London’s Department of Geology, wrote in 1976 that “it must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student . . . have now been ‘debunked.’ ”32
The Darwinian crowd has naturally fought vigorously against this opposition, claiming there have been new advances—but in light of all the evidence we’ve been presenting, along with many other data points, the theory simply doesn’t hold up very well. The fossil record consistently shows us one type of creature, which then upgrades into a new, improved, more evolved version over a very short period of time, geologically speaking. There are very few transitional fossils that could support Darwin’s original theory. We don’t see any examples of fish where the skeleton is half in and half out of the body—we have shellfish and bony fishes, with nothing in between. And that’s just one of many curious examples. Even in the case of human evolution, there are significant and unsolvable problems. If you remember hearing about the search for a so-called missing link, a transitional species that can explain how human brain size suddenly doubled in a short time, bear in mind that it still hasn’t been found. According to Lord Solly Zuckerman, Chief Scientific Advisor to the United Kingdom and a professor of anatomy at the University of Birmingham, “If man evolved from an apelike creature, he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record.”33
If it’s not Darwinian “random mutation” causing these changes to occur, then what is it? Two University of Chicago paleontologists, David Raup and James Sepkoski, may have found the answer. Together, they carefully assembled the largest collection of marine fossils ever accomplished—comprising an incredible 3,600 genera of ocean life. In 1982, they first published an article in the journal Science describing four mass extinctions they’d found in the fossil record, as well as a fifth one that was less significant.34 As they continued to process this data, they faced a perplexing problem—patterns were increasingly appearing in the fossil record that shouldn’t be there. Yet, the more research they did, and the harder they tried to get rid of it with the facts, the stronger the pattern became. In 1984, two years after they released their initial paper, they came clean—
publishing their astonishing results, which still haven’t had the effect on the scientific community that they should have. In short, new species were spontaneously appearing in short bursts in the fossil record—in a repeating cycle of approximately 26 million years.35 This pattern extended back some 250 million years—out of a total of 542 million years of fossils they cataloged.
The story became even more interesting in 2005, when Dr. Richard A. Muller, a physics professor at University of California, Berkeley, and his graduate student Robert Rohde discovered another cycle of evolution in Raup’s and Sepkoski’s data. This time, it went all the way back to the beginning of the marine fossil record—some 542 million years ago. Muller and Rohde found that every 62 million years, more or less, all life on earth went through a relatively spontaneous upgrade—transforming the existing species into newer, more evolved forms.36 In a National Geographic article that same year, Muller said, “I wish I knew what it all meant . . . I’m betting it will be astronomy, and he’s betting it will be something inside of the earth.”37
In a Daily Galaxy article originally from 2009, Muller seemed to be closer to winning the bet. As it turns out, astronomers have discovered that our solar system travels in a long, see-sawing wavelike motion, continually moving above and below the galactic plane as it goes along. One complete cycle of up-and-down movement takes approximately 64 million years—suspiciously close to the 62-million-year cycle discovered by Muller and Rohde. Obviously, such long-range astronomical calculations could be slightly incorrect, and the real figure for the galactic see-saw could actually be 62 million years. University of Kansas professors Adrian Mellott and Mikhail Medvedev believe this galactic cycle is the answer to the puzzle. The top half of our galaxy faces the Virgo cluster as we shoot through space, and Mellott and Medvedev believe this area should have an increased number of charged particles and cosmic rays—just like we see at the front end of our solar system from galactic dust. Their theory is that every time we rise out of the magnetic fields of the galactic plane and move into the northern area, we get a boost in cosmicray exposure. This radiation could then lead to more genetic mutations, and possibly create new species.38
The Source Field Investigations Page 21