Snowflakes - Spontaneous Complexity and Order?

Creationists just love to point at examples of biological information (quaternary proteins, DNA, enzymes, etc.) and ask evolutionists how information could have formed spontaneously in an uncontrolled, hazardous environment? After all, primeval earth was a dangerous place for amino acids and other delicate constructs – volcanoes, fierce UV rays, a harsh atmosphere, and the like. Evolutionists respond by pointing out that information and beauty forms on its own all around us all the time, all over the globe. When asked what they could possibly mean, the evolutionists point at – a humble snowflake. They ask, how can you explain that? Spontaneous information, beautiful patterns (insert more lyrical praise here), all found in every sub-zero area on the planet. And each one is unique, they cry, no two are truly alike! If this is not information, then what is?

Before we go into the importance of this point, I feel like I need to provide you with a deeper understanding of what a snowflake really is. A snowflake, in brief, is a freezing water molecule that's latched onto a pollen or dust particle high up in the atmosphere. They are always hexagonal, due to the shape of the water that makes them. They are not, contrary to popular belief, completely symmetrical - your average snowflake will have specks of dust marring one side, or hairline cracks on another. Nonetheless, the six "legs" of the snowflake, as seen above, are pretty similar to each other. This is due to the fact that when a snowflake is influenced by temperature, humidity and pressure, every leg is affected equally and so, every leg changes. Snowflake formation is a dynamic process, and every variable that a snowflake encounters could potentially change its shape. It's this unpredictable aspect of snowflake formation that has led to the well-known fact that snowflakes are unique.

The six sided symmetrical form of snowflakes is due entirely to the unique form of the water molecule - if the oxygen didn't form a 109.5° bond with it's two hydrogen components, snowflakes wouldn't form hexagonally, and would be entirely random. The formation of a snowflake is somewhat analogous to a a speck of dust, or a rock rolling down a hill - the dust speck is certainly unique, as is the rock. You'll never find another rock with the same chips and bumps the rock has, nor a dust speck with the same dips and curls. The only important difference between a snowflake and the rock/dust speck is the hydrogen bonds in the water molecule that allow the symmetry that's admired so frequently. They're both just random processes, one of which is (by intelligent design in the water molecule) able to replicate the same changes on six sides, creating the illusion of information.

Darwin's Finches - Not Going Anywhere

Darwin's Finches. We've all heard of the birds of subfamily Geospinozae, renowned for being the catalysts that galvanized Darwin's brilliant mind into connecting the dots and formulating the Theory of Evolution. But were these birds worthy examples of evolution? While it remains uncontested that the fifteen-odd types of finches found by Darwin have different shapes of beaks (and are incidentally not related to true finches), a 30-plus year study seems to show that evolution is not really taking place on the Galapagos Islands.

Large ground finch, Medium ground finch, Small tree finch, Green warbler-finch

Peter and Rosemary Grant are a persistent and dedicated couple who've been regularly visiting the Galapagos Islands for six months every year to check on the weight of the birds, their diet, their locations, their beak size, and the weather (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Rosemary_Grant). They discovered a frankly fascinating thing - the beak shape of the birds wasn't a continuous evolutionary progression, like it should have been for true Evolution to take place. However, what we've seen is, frankly speaking, a circle. The PBS paper on the couple says, "The Grants found that the offspring of the birds that survived the 1977 drought tended to be larger, with bigger beaks. So the adaptation to a changed environment led to a larger-beaked finch population in the following generation...as the Grants later found, unusually rainy weather in 1984-85 resulted in more small, soft seeds on the menu and fewer of the large, tough ones. Sure enough, the birds best adapted to eat those seeds because of their smaller beaks were the ones that survived and produced the most offspring." (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/l_016_01.html)

The graph fails to show the 1984-85 shift of beak depth that occurred later, bringing the beak size back to the median

Does this seem rather odd to anyone? I mean, evolution is all about going forward, changing from a shrew to a higher mammal and such, and here we have an article in PBS saying proudly in the conclusion that "evolution has reversed itself". And that too, in regard to Darwin's finches - one of the most widely accepted Icons of Evolution to be found! What we've seen instead is behavior uncannily similar to that predicted by creationists - that kind reproduces with kind, and that those kinds stay distinct from one another.