Robert Koch, Creation, and the Specificity of Germs

Microbiology is dominated by evolution today. Just look at any text, journal article, or the topics presented at professional scientific meetings. Darwin is dominant. Microbiology is dominated by evolution today. Just look at any text, journal article, or the topics presented at professional scientific meetings. Darwin is dominant. Many argue that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky 1973). But it was not always this way. In fact, a review of the major founders of microbiology has shown that they were creationists.1 We would argue that a better idea thanevolution and one of much more practical importance is the germ theory of disease, originally put forth primarily by non-Darwinian biologists (Gillen and Oliver 2009). In our previous article (Gillen and Oliver 2009), we documented these and many other creation and Christian contributions to germ theory. But only recently has it become known that another important microbiology founder, Robert Koch (Fig. 1) and his co-workers were Linnaean creationists in their classification.2 This is due, in part, to additional works of Robert Koch that were translated from German to English. The year 2010 marks the 100thanniversary of his death (died: May 27, 1910). Although Koch and other German microbiologists were fairly secular in their thinking, their acceptance of Darwinian evolution was minimal

The Design of Giardia and the Genesis of Giardiasis

Giardia is a genus of protozoa discovered in 1681. Six morphologically distinct species are recognized. It mainly attaches in the upper GI tract of a wide variety of vertebrates (including zebrafish), often with beaver and muskrat as reservoirs/carriers but exhibiting minimal—if any—disease in some animals. Giardia is usually non-pathogenic in the human population, even in children if exposed early in life. Although Giardia can be pathogenic, some strains colonize the gut with no malady. This parasite is not invasive and only serious infections depress the small intestine. Giardia are pear-shaped, have an adhesive disc for attaching to enterocyte cells in the small intestine villus, and move with eight designed flagella. In the post-Fallen world, Giardia infection occasionally has resulted in digestive dysfunction. However, Giardia may function in non-parasitic, possibly mutualistic, ways. For example, it may have been designed to aid digestion having a role as a “primer.” The presence of Giardia muris causes a fundamental change in the microbiome in mice and Giardia may have other influences on the microbiome such as enhancing digestion in certain animals and possibly shifting ratios of bacteria from anaerobic to aerobic. Giardia may play a role in host metabolism and provide nutritional enhancement via its association with enteric bacteria, like E. coli. The function of Giardia may parallel with non-parasitic tasks found in Trypanosoma lewisi, and also termite systems that contain protozoa and bacteria for plant digestion. Giardiahas two “faces” even in today\u27s world: a harmless commensal in wildlife and a pathogenic parasite in humans

The Design of the Mosquito and Its Dangers

Mosquitoes (Family Culicidae) have been the scourge of mankind since the Fall. Although seemingly designed to inflict suffering and pain via rapid reproduction and formidable mouthparts, evidence mounts that this creature was not always the deadly vector it is today. Mosquitoes are currently and have always been pollinators. The majority of their lives they feed on plants, nectar, pollen, and microbes even in today\u27s world. The Zika virus is but the latest of a significant list of pathogens spread by “the world’s most dangerous animal.” In the past, Christians have been involved in key discoveries linking mosquitoes to diseases

The Origin of Bubonic Plague

Although some forms of the bacterium Yersinia are harmless, other forms have devastated human populations, causing a plague of biblical proportions (Psalm 91:3-7, Psalm 91:9-10,). Bubonic plague, also known as the ‘Black Death’ that killed one fourth of Europe’s population in the 1300s, appeared as a great pestilence several times in the Old Testament, including in Psalm 91 and in 2 Samuel 24:14-25. Perhaps the clearest example of such a plague is recorded in 1 Samuel 6:4-19, where there is a specific reference to the tumors on people (bubos = the tumors of lymph glands) and to rats (the animal vector that carried the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis.) The biblical time frame for the plagues described in 1 Samuel was about 3,000 years ago.1 Interestingly, experts on plague ‘evolution’ estimate the emergence of Y. pestis at about 1,500-20,000 years ago (within an evolutionary timeframe, of course).

The Genesis of Malaria: The Origin of Mosquitoes and Their Protistan Cargo, Plasmodium falciparum

Malaria is caused by the parasite belonging to the genus Plasmodium; however, creation biologists maintain this organism was not always parasitic. Plasmodium is probably a degenerate form of algae. Mosquitoes, the vector of Plasmodium, were probably designed to be pollinators, not parasite vectors. In this article, we present both the evolutionary and creation explanation for the origin of malaria with a mention to its vector, the mosquito. The purpose of this article is to provide a reasonable explanation for the genesis of malaria. Microbiology and parasitology research based on the creation paradigm appears to provide some answers to these puzzling questions regarding the Plasmodium “kind” (Family Haemosporidae). Although we cannot be dogmatic (beyond the biblical text) regarding details of Plasmodium’s origin during Creation Week, we believe that a reasonable extrapolation from Scripture and biological data can be made about the nature of protozoans in a fully mature creation

SEM Studies on Vessels in Ferns. 18. Montane Cheilanthoid Ferns (Pteridaceae) of North America

Xylem of roots and rhizomes of five species of four genera of tribe Cheilantheae (Pteridaceae; recently recognized by some as a segregate family, Cheilanthaceae) has been studied by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM). All of these species occur in habitats (cliffs, talus) of mountains of North America that are seasonally dry in summer and cold in winter. The vessels prove diverse, indicating that different perforation plate modifications are represented in the cheilanthoid ferns of these habitats, rather than different degrees of the same kind of modification. The modifications include wide perforations alternating with narrow perforations (especially prominent in Bommeria); discontinuous perforation plates (Cheilanthes, Pellaea); and narrow, slitlike perforations (Cheilanthes). The discontinuous perforation plates are newly reported for ferns. The exceptionally prominent perforations of Bommeria vessels may be correlated with greater laminar surface and higher transpiration during wet periods in that genus; the other genera have small laminae with probable low transpiration rates even during moist periods

Voltage-controlled wavelength conversion by terahertz electro-optic modulation in double quantum wells

An undoped double quantum well (DQW) was driven with a terahertz (THz) electric field of frequency \omega_{THz} polarized in the growth direction, while simultaneously illuminated with a near-infrared (NIR) laser at frequency \omega_{NIR}. The intensity of NIR upconverted sidebands \omega_{sideband}=\omega_{NIR} + \omega_{THz} was maximized when a dc voltage applied in the growth direction tuned the excitonic states into resonance with both the THz and NIR fields. There was no detectable upconversion far from resonance. The results demonstrate the possibility of using gated DQW devices for all-optical wavelength shifting between optical communication channels separated by up to a few THz.Comment: 3 pages, 6 figures. Figures 5 and 6 are JPEG files, figures/fig5.jpg and fig6.jp

Distributed Data Mining: The JAM system architecture

This paper describes the system architecture of JAM (Java Agents for Meta-learning), a distributed data mining system that scales up to large and physically separated data sets. An earlyversion of the JAM system was described in Stolfo-et-al-97-KDD-JAM. Since then, JAM has evolved both architecturally and functionally and here we present the final design and implementation details of this system architecture. JAM is an extensible agent-based distributed data mining system that supports the remote dispatch and exchange of agents among participating datasites and employs meta-learning techniques to combine the multiple models that are learned. One of JAM's target applications is fraud and intrusion detection in financial information systems. A brief description of this learning task and JAM's applicability and summary results are also discussed