Science frequently moves from one position to another. As soon as a statement is made, defining some property of matter, or some finding has been established as certain, a revision appears in which the former statements have to be scrapped or modified. Many scientists have had to retreat from what they originally thought and 'swallow their words'. A few examples follow, drawn from the pronouncements of qualified experts, past and present:

If a vehicle travels faster than 30 mph the air will be sucked from the interior and suffocate the passengers. The universe is expanding/collapsing/neither expanding or collapsing. Stars are always being 'born'. The Grand Canyon was formed slowly over millions of years. Fossil beds contain millions of transitional forms. The moon was captured as it passed Earth a long time ago. A huge amount of human DNA is useless junk. An exclusive diet of meat is not good for you. Gem stones take millions of years to form. Oil takes about the same time. There are only about 5000 stars in the universe.

It has often been said, by scientists, that Neanderthals were one of the 'missing links' between primates and modern humans, and many textbooks pictured them as primitive ape-like humans, but as more evidence has coming to light this view has had to be revised. A recent book 'Neanderthals and Modern Humans' by Clive Finlayson points out that . . .

A heading to an article in the New Scientist magazine reads, 'dNA shows how different we are.? It went on to say, ?Humans and their closest relatives, chimpanzees, may be more different than geneticists have realized.?

The evidence comes from studies by the International Chimpanzee Chromosome 22 Consortium, (as reported in Nature, vol. 429, page 382) To begin with the article described the similarities: ?A comparison of the chimpanzee's chromosome 22 and its counterpart, human chromosome 21, shows that just 1.44% of the chromosome's 33.3 million DNA bases are different.? Only 1.44% is not much, so where are the differences?

The study revealed ?nearly 68,000 insertions or deletions of DNA, most of which were only a few bases long.? ?Because each gene contains hundreds or thousands of bases, even these differences are enough to alter more than 80% of the proteins produced by those genes.?

80% is a lot of difference.

Evolutionists work from the worldview that . . .

In the last week of March 2005 the BBC reported that several dinosaur experts had discovered samples of what appeared to be soft tissues from a tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone. The US researchers told Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels.

Of course the news was greeted with surprise, disbelief and astonishment, because it totally contradicts the assumption held by many scientists that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago. How could soft tissues survive so long? The explanations, devised by various scientists to answer this question, are quite ingenious.

One explanation is that "fairly remarkable conditions must have existed in the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago." Another suggests that 'tough? molecules replace the dinosaur tissues, cell by cell.

Normally, when an animal dies, worms and bugs and bacteria will quickly eat up anything that is soft, then the remaining bone material is weathered away and dissolved. Even a very large cattle beast, if left on a paddock, will totally disappear in only a year or two - only a few large bones will remain. Even if a beast sinks into mud, it will not remain intact for a thousand years, let alone 68 million! Again, if the beast is covered quickly and sealed by sediment, it will become . . .

In 1996 12 climbers on Mount Everest suddenly died. Many theories were at first put forward to explain this unfortunate event, but none of them stacked up. The climbers were well equipped, and they took all the correct precautions, yet all 12 died. It was a mystery as well as a sad ending to 12 lives.

In 2004 an explanation emerged which seemed to finally matched the evidence: the sky had come down and suffocated the climbers.

There were in all 26 climbers on the mountain at the time, and the weather was calm. Towards the end of the day a storm gathered, and according to physicist Kent Moore of the University of Toronto in Canada, the stratosphere sank down and clipped the mountain's summit. Usually Everest is just below the stratosphere ? about 500 metres below, but during this storm, on the 10th of May, there were two streams of very fast-flowing air called jet streaks, moving down the mountain. As these very low pressure air streams reached the climbers they would have caused the pressure to drop and the oxygen levels to drop too. (The same thing happened in 1998, in which the weather changed and a dramatic drop of 16 millibars was recorded.) The climbers who died in 1996 probably experienced a reduction in oxygen of about 14%.

As you read this article, you probably don't notice the fact that you are also breathing. The steady operation of . . .