Evolution's Response: Britax Car Seats

Humans are the only the species in the entire animal kingdom with the capacity for rearing children. Other animals do not usually care for their young in the same capacity and extent as we do. Usually, like the shark, mothers would eat their young as soon as they are born. Lucky for us, our mothers were not like that. Scientists have been baffled for years as to the extent human mothers and fathers would care for their offspring as compared to animals like lions or gorillas that would leave their offspring to fend for themselves upon reaching physical maturity. Where is the nurture, where is the care, and lastly, where is the love? What does this have to do with Britax car seats? We'll get to that shortly.

Science has given a short explanation as to why humans are so adamant about caring for their children. Like all things concerning anything remotely human, the answer lies in our larger-than-average brains. Unlike other animals, the human brain is not yet fully developed once a child is born. Further development occurs during a child's formative years. This relatively slow pace of cognitive development leaves human children quite vulnerable to the rigors of everyday life. Not all functions the human brain is capable of doing are available to human children. Humans are, therefore, by virtue of their evolutionary path, predisposed into having a significant level of concern for the safety and well-being of their genetic offspring. Looking at the larger picture, this is a very efficient and simple design of our very human-ness. This significant amount of care and concern assures the continuance of future generations. That is why we do not see children fending for themselves in the wild -- parents are there to provide for all their needs.

Again, is this in any way important to the discussion on Britax car seats? The answer is a resounding "YES!" Car seats are designed with the safety and well-being of your children in mind. The capacity to care is the evolutionary response to the glaring needs of our underdeveloped and vulnerable children. Britax car seats are evolution's next step towards ultimate and efficient child safety.

Choosing the right car seat can be quite a daunting prospect for most parents. Lucky for you, this article is here to help you choose which one is best for your child. The number of types of Britax Car Seats might at first glance make the choice complicated, but it is actually very simple. Know this before choosing: your child's age and weight, the type of car you'll be installing the car seat in, and whether you plan on carrying the seat around or putting up a stroller. Simply have a set of criteria you can follow. It's that simple, really. For example, if your child is still an infant, perhaps an infant car seat with adjustable carrying handle would prove best. Know your child's need and the choice for the correct car seat will simply "sit itself down."

Britax car seats are highly rated for safety, durability, and ease of use. Parents consistently rate the Britax Boulevard convertible car seat and the Britax Marathon as their best investments for traveling with their precious cargo.

Longevity, Diet and Lifestyle - How Humanity Squandered Evolution's Advantages

At the start of the Agricultural Revolution our species was so well adapted to its environment that it could hardly be improved upon. Through more than 2 million years of evolution Homo sapiens' body chemistry adapted to the plants, animals and insects among which they lived. Still a part of the food chain - and not necessarily at the top of it - humans that populated the planet 40,000 years ago were biologically successful.

All through their existence humans were just as robust, just as healthy and just as reproductively successful as any species of animal. The Agricultural Revolution that began about 12,000 years ago changed everything. The achievement that was a cultural triumph was a biological disaster. Before the Agricultural Revolution, Homo sapiens could draw nourishment from any of a hundred plants, from scores of small animal species and from hundreds of bird types and their eggs. The relative ease of harvesting plants from a small area instead of wandering for miles to gather them was a pivotal discovery. Raising animals in pens removed the unpredictability and danger of hunting them in the open. Unfortunately, not all plants and animals cooperate for domestication so diversity gave way to convenience. Modern population groups subsist almost entirely on fewer than a dozen types of cereal grains and a handful of animal species. Today's supermarket sells meat from only three animals, cattle, swine and sheep. Chicken and turkey alone represent nearly 100 percent of the fowl that we use for food.

Farmers have to stay put and in doing so they make themselves vulnerable. Permanent as well as seasonal settlements introduce health hazards that small widely-separated bands of hunter-gatherers never have to face: pollution, epidemics and famine.

A settlement, no matter how small, requires drinkable water. When formerly wandering groups stayed in one place their waste began to accumulate and it contaminated their water supply. Instead of being carried off by rain and diluted by large lakes and flowing streams, parasites and other microbes reached high concentrations that inevitably infected the humans who previously were able to avoid them. As villages grew into towns and cities, germs proliferated too and the first epidemics appeared. If a small band of hunter-gatherers encountered a bacterium such as the plague bacillus from a visiting rodent, the entire band might die but the infection would spread no farther. When the same bacterium entered a city, thousands would perish. That number rose to millions during the centuries that followed the rise of kingdoms and empires.

Modern advances have not eliminated epidemics. On the contrary, they have facilitated them. Air travel allowed the SARS virus to spread from Asia to North America within hours. West Nile virus has affected increasing numbers of Americans every year since its introduction from Africa less than a generation ago. Neither SARS nor the West Nile virus would have gotten very far during the Stone Age.

The primitive vocabulary of Stone Age humans probably didn't include the term famine. They likely couldn't imagine a time when food nearly disappeared. In Africa and the Middle East and later in what are now modern Europe and the Americas their generational wisdom led them to food sources even in a prolonged drought. Australian Aborigines have survived quite well in the parched desert-like bush while European explorers, relying on familiar-looking plants and animals, starved there.

Famines only occur when the populace depends on a single crop. Reliance on potatoes in Ireland, rice in Asia and grains in other parts of the world made famine inevitable when disaster struck in the form of blight, drought or flood and the crop that the population depended on vanished.

More subtle than famine, nutritional deficiency marked man's transition from hunting and gathering to farming. In every population group that scientists have studied the agricultural lifestyle brought shortened lifespan, higher infant mortality, smaller stature and chronic anemia.

We continue to squander our evolutionary heritage. In the last 100 years milled flour, refined sugar, harmful fats and salt-laden prepared foods have become the slow, silent killers of the Baby Boomers and their heirs. Barring near-miraculous new breakthroughs in medicine, the present generation of young persons will have a lower life expectancy than their parents while enduring decades of diabetic complications, the aftermath of strokes, the debility of osteoporosis and the pervasive fog of dementia.

It isn't necessary to revert to the Stone Age in order to turn back the major chronic diseases of the First World. A Mediterranean-type diet, high in plant foods, whole grains and fish, low in red meat, dairy products and all forms of sugar will do. Moderately intense physical activity throughout life would nearly eliminate type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and dementia, as it has done for the aged of Okinawa, who in their tenth decade can reel off the names of their great-grandchildren.

Only 600 generations have passed since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution. Perhaps we can get back on track during the next 600.

Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. is known as The Stone Age Doc, author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005 and scores of articles that show why the so-called diseases of aging, including osteoporosis, are avoidable with a few lifestyle changes that anyone can make without special potions or programs. Archived articles from his weekly newspaper column, The Stone Age Doc, cover topics that range from asthma to omega-fats and are available at http://www.stoneagedoc.com A Press Room provides author bio and show prep information.

Evolution's Embarrassing Moments

Austin H. Clark (1880-1954) was a respected Darwinian evolutionist on staff at the Smithsonian Institution. He was the Carl Sagan of his generation, arguably the most respected evolutionist of his time. He was a prolific writer who wrote articles and books in five languages. He was a staunch and articulate defender of evolution yet concealed the fact that he could not find evidence for the theory that truly convinced him. Finally in 1930 He published his book "The New Evolution: Zoogenesis" in which he attacked Darwinism and demolished the theory, citing fact after fact from the fossil record.

He proposed a new theory of life origins called "Zoogenesis" which claimed that plants and animals emerged fully formed from dirt and water! The theory was absurd on its face and roundly rejected by embarrassed evolutionists.

Quickly following this bizarre episode entered a prominent man of science in the budding field of genetics. His name was Richard Goldschmidt (1878 - 1958). He proposed the now familiar theory that the mechanism of evolutionary change was genetic mutations.

He then embarked on a series of cruel experiments on gypsy moths that today's animal rights people would find gruesomely objectionable. For 25 years he kept hordes of gypsy moths and bred them over thousands of generations to shower them with x-rays and mutagenic chemicals.

Goldschmidt expected to cause mutations to form new species but instead got only deformities. Apparently he wisely concluded that genetic mutations were no mechanism for evolution. This, by the way, has been confirmed by recent advances in genetics that show that mutations are virtually always destructive errors that scramble or delete genetic information.
He viciously attacked Darwinian gradualism in his 1940 book "The Material Basis for Evolution." He proposed a new mechanism called the "Hopeful Monster Mechanism" which alleges that evolution occurred in great leaps such as a lizard lays an egg and out hatches a bird! This too was an embarrassment to the evolutionists.

The next thirty years were a time of turmoil in evolution circles. The discovery of DNA in the early fifties by Crick and Watson showed the almost unfathomable complexity and precision of the chemical blueprints of life. Each life form is locked into its own DNA coding pattern in which even a small mutation can bring a deformity or even fatal results. Evolution should have died right there and been banished from our textbooks.

We often regard Ph. D. scientists as unbiased, cerebral, methodical seekers of truth who go where the facts take them but they too have their presuppositions and prejudices. Men of science clung to Darwinism which by then was institutionalized and unquestioned.

It should be apparent to any unbiased observer that evolution is not science in the pure sense because it deals with non repeatable events that occurred in the distant past. Evolution is a theory of the outworking of biology over vast ages of history. Biology is science but evolution is a theory of natural history. We all know that history is art, not science. History is the art of the storyteller. For generations evolutionists have told stories based on the limited evidence of fragments of bone.

In recent years genetics and microbiology have discovered the unfathomable complexity of life and the impossibility of it forming by randomness. Genetics in particular has shown that evolution has no mechanism.

The next major evolution storyteller was Harvard professor Stephen J. Gould (1941-2002) of our own time and recent memory. He was perhaps the greatest champion of evolution of the twentieth century. He was an affable and friendly sort of guy who wrote books promoting evolution to the masses.

He was a smiley faced propagandist for atheistic materialistic evolution. He also had the honesty to face the flaws of Darwinian gradualism. He, like Clark and Goldschmidt before him, attacked Darwinism and even went so far as to say that evolutionists lost every debate they ever had with creationists.

Gould's frank admission that the fossil record lacks transitional forms caused him to reject gradualism. His attacks on evolution were so articulate that creationists frequently quote him. Gould went on to revisit Goldschmidt's Hopeful Monster theory and dress it up with new insights.

His new theory was called "Punctuated Equilibrium" which claimed, like Goldschmidt, that evolution occurred in leaps rather than Darwinian gradualism. However, Punctuated Equilibrium still does nothing to surmount the hyper-improbability that just the right mutations would add just the right thousands of base pairs all properly sequenced to make the evolutionary leaps required. Gould's work underscored the fact that evolution with its storytelling and speculation is art and not science.

Gould, like Carl Sagan, died of cancer before reaching three score and ten years. I can only hope that in their final lucid moments Gould and Sagan reflected on the errors of atheistic materialism and turned to Christ to receive forgiveness of sins.

Bill Nugent, a defender of the Christian faith, has written many articles on Christianity, philosophy and science. He has also written books that give Bible based teaching on sanctification and that caution against the error of legalism.

His books are available at his ministry website www.gracelawandsonship.com.