The World They Imagine

Until 1857, it was legal for British husbands to sell their wives.
The going rate was £3,000 .. About £223,000 in today’s money.

People in Victorian Britain who couldn’t afford chimney sweeps dropped live geese down their chimneys instead.

In 1811, nearly a quarter of all the women in Britain were named Mary.

King Herod’s first wife was called Doris.

Victorian guidebooks advised women to put pins in their mouths to avoid being kissed in the dark when trains went through tunnels.

When Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, he ordered all Monopoly sets to be destroyed.

The first commercial chewing gum appeared in 1871, after Thomas Adams had failed to make car tyres from the same ingredients.

Chess, ludo and snakes and ladders were all invented in ancient India.

When Lord Byron left England for the last time in 1816, his creditors entered his home and repossessed everything he owned, right down to his tame squirrel.

In his first year at Harrow, Winston Churchill was bottom of the whole school.

Beer was the first trademarked product – British beer Bass Pale Ale received its trademark in 1876.

Great Britain was the first country to issue postage stamps, on 1 May 1840.
Hence, UK stamps are the only stamps in the world not to bear the name of the country of origin.

The World They Imagine.
Biochemist and head of nuclear medicine at Singapore General Hospital, Dr Aw says it is becoming even more difficult to believe that the first cell was produced by evolution.
There have been many such evolutionary theories, from the early days down to the present period.
But the difficulties have not decreased, they have increased, because the more we know about the cell, the more difficult it is to imagine that such an intricate thing could have just evolved by sheer random process over time without any directive force.

I suspect that many secular evolutionists have realised the futility of thinking in purely chemical evolutionary terms.
But as you know they are reluctant to change their point of view, at least in public because of the religious nature of the opinions held.
For many of them it is the anchor with which they keep to the reality of the world they imagine they are in.
And to let go, that is awfully painful.
I think they are intelligent enough to realise that there are only two views of the world.
Either it came about in the way it has been advertised, that is through chance acting on matter over long periods of time, or the alternative is the special creation told by the Scripture.

Many theistic evolutionists I know of will not even allow God to at least create the first cell.
They hold to chemical ‘chance’ evolution theories, but still somehow involve God.
I think it is because for them to admit that God directly created the first cell, they might as well admit that God created everything directly.
The more you know the cell the more you marvel at the intricacies, the regulatory mechanisms, the self-preservation of the cell which is inbuilt in addition to its complexity.

This concept of the ‘protocell,’ it’s sheer nonsense because a cell by definition must have enormous metabolic complexity or it will not survive.
It’s not just a bag of protoplasm with just fluid and a few salts and bits of furniture floating around, but it’s built to control itself and propagate itself and for that there must be a minimum complexity which is the problem for ‘chemical evolution.’
If you look at the ‘simplest’ known cell, say a bacterium, it is acknowledged by the best microbiologists and biochemists that such cells are extremely complex, with self-diagnosis and repair systems, and incredibly complex mechanisms which are still not fully understood.

People can spend their lifetime just studying the cell membrane.
Entire departments in universities study just the chemical ‘pumps’ that keep the integrity of the membrane.
I don’t see how anybody can say there is such a thing as a protocell, there just isn’t such an animal and could never have been.
The cell is made of more than just amino acids – also fats, carbohydrates, DNA, RNA and so on.
The scientists who work on origin of life problems know very well that experiments designed to produce amino acids don’t produce sugars.
And those that produce sugars don’t produce anything else, and so on.

And there is of course a problem of preservation of the molecules.
They just undergo random destruction unless they are protected, like in a cell.
The presence of building materials is one thing, the requirement of the plan to put these building materials in the proper places and get them working together is another thing.
That’s why a cell is so beautiful, so intricate.
Because of that, even non-Christian scientists marvel at that.
Even to get one single functional protein molecule to form by chance is a mathematical absurdity.
( Dr Aw Swee-Eng, M.B., B.S., Ph.D.(Lond.), FRC Path., MI Biol. (Lond.) )

The first parachute jump from an airplane was made by Captain Berry at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1912.

Accounts from Holland and Spain suggest that during the 1500s and 1600s urine was commonly used as a tooth-cleaning agent.

In 1701, Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius devised the centigrade temperature scale.

In 1709, Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano.

In 1707, the Act of Union between Scotland and England, creating Great Britain.

The Ancient Egyptians were the first people to divide a circle into 360 degrees – one degree for each day in the Egyptian year.

Widespread Forgery Of Britain’s First Banknotes.
The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to raise money for King William III to fight a war against France.
It stored cash for clients in return for a receipt that promised to pay back the money.
These notes could be openly traded as a cash substitute.
Forgery was widespread in the early years when notes were little more than written promises to pay the bearer.
To tackle the crime, the courts deemed it a capital offence.
Between 1697 and 1832 more than 600 counterfeiters were hanged.

Innocent Man Hanged For Murder.
During the 20th Century, 865 people were executed in the UK.
In 1950, 25-year-old Welshman Timothy Evans was found guilty of murdering his wife and child.
He was executed at Pentonville.
Three years later, Timothy’s neighbour John Christie admitted the crime.

Mary Richards, 59, was jailed for five years in 1880 for stealing 130 oysters.

Dorcas Mary Snell, 45, was jailed for five years with hard labour in 1883 for stealing a single slice of bacon.
She was released after serving two years of her sentence.

Elizabeth Murphy, 19, was jailed for five years with hard labour in 1884 for stealing an umbrella.
She served three years of her sentence before getting parole in 1887.

The Black Death arrived in the UK in the summer of 1348 via ships landing at Bristol.
By May 1349, more than a third of the population, about 1.5 million, are dead.

A cholera epidemic in 1849 killed about 20,000 people in the UK.

Britain is hit by a flu pandemic in March, 1918. About 225,000 died.

The Great Plague killed more than ten thousand Londoners in 1665, and is followed the next year by the Great Fire of London.

More than 8,000 people died in the great storm between 24th November and 2nd December, 1703.

In 1740, the River Thames freezes over and icebergs appear in the English Channel.
Many die of cold and the famine and drought which follow.

Between 7th September 1940 and 10th May 1941, an estimated 18,800 tons of bombs were dropped on London.
About 43,000 people died.

Ludwig Van Beethoven, who was profoundly deaf, died in 1827, aged 57.
A post-mortem immediately after his death showed significant liver damage, probably caused by too much alcohol.
He had been very ill for some time beforehand.
Beethoven died during a violent thunderstorm and his last words were reputedly:
“I shall hear in Heaven”.

Sweden was a military superpower in the 1600’s, conquering large chunks of Europe.

Ghana was called The Gold Coast until independence in 1957.

In December 1960, the SS Oriana crossed from Southampton, UK to Sydney, Australia in three weeks and was awarded the “Golden Cockerel” for the fastest passenger boat.

North Korean tanks and troops swept south on the 25th June 1950, starting a three-year conflict that claimed as many as 4 million lives.

The Basis Of All Life On Earth.
We all know what we mean by ‘information’ but if we were asked to define it – still less measure it – we’d probably struggle.
And how on earth would we come up with a unit of measurement for it?
Well, in 1948 someone did.
It is called the ‘Bit’ (a contraction of ‘binary digit’) and it’s the tiniest particle out of which information is made, the irreducible unit.
A Bit is something that has only two possibilities – yes or no, nought or one, heads or tails.
Working up from that simple unit, you can accurately measure how much information is contained in any message in the universe.

Not only is information, in the form of DNA, the basis of all life on Earth, it underpins everything else as well.
Matter and energy themselves are created by the way tiny particles are organised, and organisation equals information.
It was Claude Shannon, a mathematician, who came up with the idea of the Bit.
Shannon founded the field of information theory, making modern computing possible.
He made profound improvements in electronic engineering and telecommunications, designed the first chess computer and worked on computers that could reproduce themselves.
( Fred O. Wilson )