Cute theory, but let’s think this through.  Obviously the microbes are not consciously playing war games.  The only way “game theory” applies is by coincidence of effects.  If kids playing games in the playground generate the same sound waveform as a flock of ducks, then you could claim the two causes are analogous in some way; but if you really believe the ducks are playing dodgeball you’re carrying it too far.  The authors observe that many microorganisms give off toxins, and that biodiversity among microorganisms is high, and yet populations are dynamically stable.  So they invent a computer “game” model that produces the same effects between K (killers) R (resistant strains) and S (sensitive strains with high birth rates).  They tweak how fast new toxins arise, how much species can share their immunity genes, how resistant the enemy is, and all kinds of parameters: “Depending on the rates of the evolution of novel toxin, resistance systems, and of their transmission between strains relative to the rates of genetic diversification in other traits and of speciation, different interpretations of the model strains are possible.”  It sounds kind of like a game of Calvinball.  Putting in generous evolutionary assumptions and preventing any one group from declaring Winner take all!, of course they get their model to work.  They wouldn’t publish in PNAS if it were a dismal failure.  Does it indicate anything about real life?  Does it advance the theory of evolution?   You decide.
Next headline on: The Cell.

This paper is an example of why you cannot just accept the conclusions without studying how they arrived at them.  In the paper, they assume evolution, and employ their assumptions of how long ago different lineages separated as part of their calculations.  They also make judgment calls about which genes are best to compare and which are not.  They arrive at conclusions that differ with their other evolutionary colleagues.  Looking at the size of the tweak space, it’s hard to feel satisfied that anything real has been discovered in their analysis
Next headline on: Darwinism. • Next headline on: Mammals.

Evolution Advocacy Group Targets Churches   01/14/2002
In an effort to help churches understand that evolution isn’t such a bad thing, the National Center for Science Education, an organization whose sole purpose is to “to keep evolution in the science classroom and ‘scientific creationism’ out,” has prepared a Congregational Study Guide for Evolution, based on the PBS TV series Evolution which aired last September across the country.  The study guide tries to help pastors and congregations think about each episode with questions like, “Consider some of your favorite hymns and prayers that speak of creation.  How might they better reflect an understanding that is informed by, not opposed to, evolution?”

It’s not enough that NCSE has to fight creation science tooth and nail alongside the ACLU in every public school where criticism of Darwin raises its meek head, now they have to send their smart bombs right into the church doors in a pre-emptive strike.  The quote above is from Episode Five, the infamous Why Sex? episode that basically taught that any and every sexual escapade you want to commit is justified by evolution.  The misnamed National Center for Science Education is not a scientific organization, nor does it care about the quality of science education; it is an advocacy group committed to fighting its declared enemy– Bible believers.  (Other “religious” people are no threat to their power base; see Episode Seven What About God?).  NCSE has all the trappings of a political action committee.
Here at Creation-Evolution Headlines we scour the top scientific journals for the best possible sources, searching in vain for real evidence for evolution, and reporting their anomalies in their own words, with links to the original papers so you can check the facts for yourself.  NCSE and PBS, however, were very selective about their spokesmen on the TV series.  They generously quoted Kenneth Miller, who has no problem compartmentalizing his brain into mutually exclusive halves, with mindless, purposeless evolution on one side and divine design on the other, but would not allow one word from critics of evolution, many of whom are not even Christians or religious at all.  On top of that, they put happy faces on some of the worst Christian-bashers and creation-bashers, making sure they did not say what they really believe on camera.  They ignored the worst criticisms of evolution and the weakest areas of the theory, focusing instead on tales woven out of miniscule data, glued together with computer graphics.  Phillip Johnson, speaking of similar “deliberate deception” on the part of the National Academy of Sciences about the real impact of evolution on religion, explains the strategy:

The National Academy’s way of dealing with the religious implications of evolution is akin to the two-platoon system in American football.  When the leading figures of evolutionary science feel free to say what they really believe, writers such as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and others state the “God is dead” thesis aggressively, invoking the authority of science to silence any theistic protest.  That is the offensive platoon, and the National Academy never raises any objection to its promoting this worldview.
At other times, however, the scientific elite has to protect the teaching of the “fact of evolution” from objections by religious conservatives who know what the offensive platoon is saying and who argue that the science educators are insinuating a worldview that goes far beyond the data.  When the objectors are too numerous or influential to be ignored, the defensive platoon takes the field.  That is when we read those spin-doctored reassurances saying that many scientists are religious (in some sense), that science does not claim to have proved that God does not exist (but merely that he does not affect the natural world), and that science and religion are separate realms which should never be mixed (unless it is the materialists who are doing the mixing).  Once the defensive platoon has done its job it leaves the field, and the offensive platoon goes right back to telling the public that science has shown that “God” is permanently out of business. (The Wedge of Truth, IVP 2000, pp. 88-89).

So don’t believe for a minute this slick hype put out with the blessing of an avowed atheist, NCSE head Eugenie Scott, that evolution has a “wonderful consistency” with Christianity.  Listen instead one of her spokesmen on Evolution, Daniel Dennett, who described the theory of evolution as a “universal acid” that eats through all traditional beliefs.  Pastors, be on your guard!  You are being handed a corrosive potion with a sweet smile and instructions, “Here, drink this...it’s good for you.”  Did Paul warn the churches in Acts 20 and I Timothy 4 for naught?
Next headline on: Darwinism.

So eager are astrobiologists to prove we are not alone, that they will go to great lengths to draw hope out of the meagerest data.  Remember when all it took to start speculation that Venus had dinosaurs was the presence of a dense cloud cover (hence tropical climate, hence swamps, hence dinosaurs)?  Deja vu.  Try a little harder to be skeptical.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Most people think of evolution as a process that takes millions of years, said evolutionary biologist Alexander Badyaev of Auburn University in Alabama, who led the study.  But here is an example of real-time evolution in which two populations of finches developed characteristics to match their new environments in just a few decades, he added.

This classic case of equivocation tries to associate variation (which evolutionists and creationists both accept) with evolution (which only Darwinists accept).  Everybody knows there is a lot of variation built into living things: just look at dogs!  Finch body size, beak size, egg size etc. are not evolution in the usual Darwinian sense of molecules to man.  These are still the same species of finch.  When we watch them evolve into mammals, then we will be impressed.  Actually, the speed of this adaptation should alarm evolutionists; if “evolution” takes place this quickly (decades instead of millions of years), then where are the billions of transitional forms that we should see in the fossil record?
The authors state, “Thus, the proximate mechanisms that allowed house finch populations to become established in two distinct environments and to respond so rapidly to local selection are not known.”  They theorize that females might be able to control hatching order and egg size, but they aren’t sure about that either, and how could a dumb bird care?  All this crowing about evolution in the headlines is hardly a feeble chirp in the text of the paper.
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Darwinism.

The evolutionary anthropologists’ timeline stretches credibility.  If anatomically modern humans have existed for 100,000 years or more, fifteen times longer than all recorded history, why did they not develop language and art, cultivate crops, ride horses and build cities in all that time?  Instead, human civilization just bursts on the scene fully formed in the Fertile Crescent, with commerce and language and mathematics already established from the beginning.  And why didn’t the population bomb hit 90,000 years ago?  Something is drastically wrong with the dating methods.  Throughout history there have been recluses who lived in caves and made markings; there are some today (hippies).  All these findings could be dated more recently using different assumptions.  It is only the Darwinist mentality that has to force observations into a primitive-to-complex sequence; the actual evidence suggests the abrupt appearance of human abstract thought and culture.  Whether the universe, stars, planets, life, plants, animals, or humans, we see abrupt appearance everywhere.  This is not evolution.
Next headline on: Early Man.

The most important thing about the Education bill that President Bush recently signed may be something the newspapers aren’t telling you.  The Committee Report on the bill contains the substance of an amendment introduced Senator Rick Santorum and passed in the Senate by a bipartisan 91 to 8 majority.  The Report says that where controversial subjects such as biological evolution are taught, “the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.”  Despite the panicky efforts of Darwinist science educators to remove this language, the full Congress has said that students should learn both sides of the controversy.  The Congress and the President have done their part, so it is up to us to make sure that this new freedom to “teach the controversy” becomes a reality in the classroom.

Galaxies Continue to Puzzle Theorists   01/11/2002
Writing in the Jan 11 Science, Italian astronomer Francesco Bertola gives the current State of the Universe Address, based on a discussions at a recent workshop by the European Space Agency.    There are still tensions between dark matter theory and observed distribution of unseen material inferred from the motions of galaxies.  Another ongoing “lively debate” among cosmologists is whether galaxies formed in a “monolithic collapse” soon after the big bang, and have been aging peacefully ever since, or whether they formed from “hierarchical merging” of smaller galaxies throughout the lifetime of the universe (i.e., top-down vs bottom-up).  A third controversy concerns the Tully-Fisher relation, which relates galaxy brightness to maximum velocity of rotation.  Plots for distant and nearby galaxies have different slopes, and intersect for the most massive galaxies.  According to Bertola, “This observation may indicate that the most massive galaxies evolved little during the past 10 billion years.  In contrast, the less massive ones seem to have undergone a remarkable loss of luminosity during the same period.  Explaining this result constitutes a challenge for different models of galaxy evolution.”

When Edwin Hubble made his famous tuning-fork diagram of galaxies in the 1920’s, astronomers disagreed about which direction on the fork galaxies evolved.  Now, 75 years later, with the Hubble Space Telescope and a golden age of instruments, they are still asking the same question.  The recent claim by NASA (see the January 8 headline) of a gigantic burst of starbirth and galaxy formation in the early universe lends credibility to the model that they were fully formed at the start, and have been aging ever since, with a few collisions and mergers along the way.
We have been reporting stories that dispute the concept of dark matter, but cosmologists depend on the unknown, invisible stuff, whatever it is.  For evolutionists, dark matter plays the role of Skinner’s Constant – that quantity which, when added to, subtracted from, multiplied or divided by the answer you got, gives you the answer you should have gotten.
Next headline on: Stars. • Next headline on: Cosmology.

• Estimates of erosion rates in some Idaho mountains were 17 times higher than expected (see our June 26 headline) implying that catastrophic events occasionally swamp uniformitarian observations.
• An ice sheet in Kentucky arrived 700,000 years earlier than previously thought.
• Climate appears to have no effect on erosion rates, which is odd, because the process is called “weathering.”
• Cultivation of land appears to increase erosion up to 100-fold.

Like every other method of dating the unobservable past, this one requires faith in untestable assumptions.  You can measure how deep an average cosmic ray can penetrate today, and you can measure the radioactive decay rate of a radionuclide today, and you can measure the amounts of these nuclides in selected sample sites: that’s it – the rest is all inference.  No one knows if the cosmic ray flux is constant (see yesterday’s headline about supernovas, which suggests periods of intense bombardment).  No one knows the rate of catastrophic events.  Even the selection of sites depends on assumptions about which sites are better than others.  When they get differences of 1700% between theory and observation, and other surprises, it’s hard to have any confidence at all in any of the other claims.
Next headline on: Dating Methods.

Once upon a time, a large army found itself surrounded by enemies with machine guns.  The machine gunners mounted a sustained and relentless attack, killing off 99% of the hapless victims.  But just by chance, one soldier was hit in a one in a million spot that jolted his genes just so, that when he got married, his wife gave birth to Superbaby.  Send us your vote on which tale you like better.
Next headline on: Darwinism and evolutionary theory. • Next dumb story.
Incidentally, what would a nearby supernova do to all the radiometric clocks?

Stealth creationist – how’s that for loaded words and fear mongering?  Are you shocked at this?  Teachers in Russia have more freedom to criticize Darwinism now than they do in America.  LeVake did not want to bring religion into the science class; he just wanted to present scientific facts that don’t support Darwinism.  Such evidence is being published in science journals all the time; read about it here on these pages.  Besides, the Congress just passed an education bill that encourages schools to present a diversity of views on controversial subjects like evolution, and LeVake is trying to be obedient.  But so paranoid are the Darwinists, they cannot allow a calm discussion of the evidence, they have to invoke scare tactics and use raw power to force indoctrination of their view of origins, even when the evidence is against it.  “Stealth creationist” – good grief, as if he snuck in from Afghanistan.  Sooner or later people are going to realize that if evolution has to be force-fed to students it must be bad medicine.  We can only hope Phillip Johnson is right: “If the situation is as I have described it, the intellectual bankruptcy of Darwinism cannot be concealed for very much longer.  The Darwinists may delay the day of reckoning for a while by wielding the weapons of power, but more and more people are learning to press the right questions and to refuse to take bluff or evasion for an answer.” (The Wedge of Truth, Inter-Varsity Press 2000, p. 150).
Next headline on: Schools. See also our Aug. 19 headline on this story.

Another article in the same issue discusses the ongoing investigation of how myosin, a molecular motor, moves.  Full text of original paper.

The summary uses the word machine 17 times, yet ascribes all this engineering to evolution.  How much longer must we be subjected to an outworn paradigm that is insufficient to produce the effects?  Machines do not arise from randomness, especially thousands of them in a brainless yeast cell.  Evolutionary theory extrapolates minor observed changes into major engineering feats it is profoundly ill equipped to handle.  Some of the most advanced molecular machines are found in the simplest, supposedly most primitive, one-celled organisms.  When you ask them how a cell could invent machines without intelligent design, they give evasive answers that they hope to figure it out some day.  If they were to be held as accountable as your financial adviser, you would fire them for such lame answers.
For a fascinating yet frustrating look at the “new biology” of molecular machines, read Bruce Alberts“ 1998 paper in Cell, “The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists,” in which he stands in awe of the complexity of protein machines but then ascribes it all to chance (evolution).  Alberts, the President of the National Academy of Sciences, begins by saying, “We have always underestimated cells,” and talks about how simple the cell seemed when he was a naive graduate student.  Now, he says:

But, as it turns out, we can walk and we can talk because the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered.  Proteins make up most of the dry mass of a cell.  But instead of a cell dominated by randomly colliding individual protein molecules, we now know that nearly every major process in a cell is carried out by assemblies of 10 or more protein molecules.  And, as it carries out its biological functions, each of these protein assemblies interacts with several other large complexes of proteins.  Indeed, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.

He describes proteins that act like motors, assemblers, proofreaders and clocks, and waxes eloquent about the elegance and efficiency of these vanishingly tiny machines: “We have also come to realize that protein assemblies can be enormously complex. ... [describing one example, the spliceosome] As the example of the spliceosome should make clear, the cartoons thus far used to depict protein machines (e.g., Figure 1) vastly underestimate the sophistication of many of these remarkable devices.” Then he proceeds to speculate on how they might have evolved, thinking DNA transcription seems to be more primitive than replication, but refers to evidence that undercuts his speculation: “However, the argument has certainly been weakened by the unexpected complexity of DNA transcription processes in eukaryotes, which I would have predicted to mimic DNA replication in their elegance and their simplicity.”  Alberts concludes that we have a lot to learn and that the future of biology rests in understanding proteins as molecular machines. 
So if you want to be on the cutting edge, you need to know this: no longer is the cell to be considered a squishy soup of funny-looking stuff.  It is the most complex, efficient, organized automated factory we have ever seen, composed of systems and subsystems and interchangeable parts, working at lightning speed, rarely making an error, its cargo zip-coded and transported on bullet trains, building and recycling thousands of structures continually, powered by proton generators, mastered by a central blueprint library, more complex than a city – yet all this in a package so small, it is invisible to the human eye.  Stand amazed and wonder.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next amazing story.

Biomimetics Looks to the Crayfish for Robot Ideas   01/09/2002
The science of biomimetics, or the imitation of nature’s designs, has some University of Melbourne scientists studying an Australian crayfish for ideas for new Martian robot rovers.  Though impressed with the motion and sensing capabilities of the little animals, especially their “parsimony, that ability to control complex behaviours with an amazingly small amount of brain power.”  Biomimetic engineers hope to reverse-engineer some of these capabilities, such as the crayfish’s “feedback system for controlling complex movements that would delight any engineer.”  But he attributes these engineering feats to time and chance:

Evolution doesn’t always come up with the best solution from an engineer’s perspective. ... Evolution does not necessarily produce an engineer’s solution to an animal’s problem.  It simply produces one that works, one that is selected because its features give the individual an edge - even a slight one - over its competitors in the game of survival.  Biomimetic researchers also need to be aware that animals carry design features that reflect their evolutionary history as well as responses to their present situation.  When we dissect them we may find features and solutions that appear inefficient or counter intuitive.  The human appendix is one example of this.

Hey now, let’s think this through.  You are impressed enough with this technology to reverse engineer it, yet you attribute it to blind, impersonal, unintelligent forces?  Then why not use blind, intelligent forces in your engineering and see if you can improve on it, or come up with something so compact, lightweight, efficient and functional from scratch?  And how can you use the phrase “design features” when evolutionists reject the inclusion of intelligent design as a cause?  Stick to your own vocabulary: purposeless, undirected, random, pointless.  See our Aug. 8 2001 headline for a response to whether the human appendix is an inefficient or counter intuitive device.
Next headline on: Bugs and Arthropods.

Photo 01/09/2002: The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the X-ray counterpart of the Hubble Space Telescope, released a colorful composite image of the center of the Milky Way in X-rays.  For the full image, click here.  The false colors indicate energy levels.  Also mentioned on Jan 10 Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Next headline on: Stars.

Take a Deep Breath: Early Atmosphere Had Abundant Oxygen   01/09/2002
Three geologists claim to have found evidence for the presence of atmospheric oxygen in rocks 2.7 to 3.5 billion years old, claims the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation of Australia.  They have found pisoliths and sulphates that could not have formed without an oxygen-rich atmosphere.  If true, this pushes the appearance of oxygen back to the very beginning of earth’s atmosphere; “Their theory challenges long-held ideas about when the Earth’s atmosphere became enriched with oxygen, and pushes the likely date for formation of an atmosphere resembling today’s far back into the early history of the planet.  It may also revolutionise [sic] the worldwide search for gold and other minerals, and raises new questions about when and how life could have arisen.”  Their paper is published by the Society for Economic Geology.

They claim that the primordial air may have been ’breathable.”  Note that this is before life evolved, contrary to conventional wisdom that it was life that gave rise to atmospheric oxygen.  If this new claim hold up, it’s all over for chemical evolution.  Oxygen is poison to the alleged “building blocks of life.”  We do not accept the dates, but just point out that claims made within the evolutionary paradigm are self-incriminating.  If the earth always had atmospheric oxygen, as more and more geologists admit, then all the Miller-experiment pictures and primordial soup scenarios you’ve seen in textbooks have been falsified. 
Parents: print the news story out, hold it side by side with your child’s science textbook next to the diagram of the Miller experiment, and demand that this kind of contrary evidence gets mentioned.
Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Universe Began with Fireworks Grand Finale   01/08/2002
At a NASA press conference January 8, a bombshell announcement was made that could have numerous ramifications across all of astronomy: “the grand finale came first.”  A huge burst of starbirth occurred early in the universe, just a few hundred million years after the big bang.  From the very beginning, things were faster and brighter, judging from infrared studies of the deepest galaxies studied by the Hubble Space Telescope.  Lead astronomer Ken Lanzetta of State University of New York deduced the early starburst by inferring a 3D map of the Hubble Deep Field, the famous 1996 image of the farthest and faintest galaxies.  He inferred distances from the color, assuming redshifts as distance indicators and taking into account absorption by intergalactic hydrogen, the expansion of space-time and other factors.  Lanzetta concludes that 90% of the light from the early universe (mostly ultraviolet) is missing.  The idea that “the fireworks ran backwards,” according to Dr. Bruce Margon of the Space Telescope Science Institute, “is not at all intuitively what one would have predicted.”

Although they are still married to the big bang theory and its attendant timescales, their announcement has to be grievous for naturalistic cosmology.  It seems to compound the lumpiness problem many-fold.  They are pushing the formation of stars and galaxies into the first 5-8% of the assumed age of the universe, and saying everything was fully formed as far back as it was possible to imagine, and that there were 10 times as many stars forming in the distant early universe as there are today.  Compounding the problem is that all known stars have heavy elements, implying they are second- or third-generation stars.  This announcement is bound to have a ripple effect on theories of dark matter, galaxy formation, star formation, planet formation – practically everything else in astronomy. 
Of course it must be remembered that their measurements are at the bleeding edge of the possible, and built on many questionable assumptions.  The point of this story is that here, again, is a major upset to conventional wisdom about cosmology.  Even within their own community, things are in turmoil as a result of this announcement.  Is it reasonable to expect that our knowledge is improving, or instead, needs a major paradigm turnover?  How long must we trust the people who keep coming to us and saying, “Everything you know is wrong”?  Is this progress, or are we being led down the primrose path from mirage to mirage, like Coronado, whose Indian guide kept telling him the Seven Cities of Cibola are just over the next hill, then the next, ad infinitum?
Dr. Margon admitted emphatically that the Holy Grail of astronomy, finding pure hydrogen-helium stars, has still not been found, even though they have been saying for a century that the solution is just 3 to 4 years away.  There are “no good candidates” “and maybe there aren’t any.”  It is a theory without evidence.  The only explanation they could suggest was that all the first stars were high-mass and went supernova quickly, seeding the second generation of stars with elements heavier than the hydrogen and helium produced by the big bang.  Or, Dr. Margon jokingly admitted, if one wanted to be a “mischief maker” he could just claim our whole theory is wrong.  Stand up for your right to be a mischief maker and “not take bluff or evasion for an answer” (as Phillip Johnson encouraged).
Also, Dr. Lanzetta admitted that star formation is so poorly understood, it is always an ad hoc assumption that has to be adjusted in any model of cosmology.  (Whoa!  We used to be told that star formation was the best-understood thing in astronomy!)
They claim that this finding shows there was no slow, gradual, childhood-through-adolescence evolution of stars and galaxies, but that the universe looked mature as far back as we can see.  That sounds remarkably like what creationists believe; God formed a fully-functioning, mature universe in the beginning.  With news of this type, however, don’t be surprised if other astronomers argue that Lanzetta’s findings are all wet.  Or, they can just re-tweak all their variables and claim it’s not a problem, or invoke Finagle’s Second Law.  And even these astronomers hedge their bets with the idea that the only we can know for sure is with bigger and better telescopes ($$$).  If nothing else, we learn from this announcement to have a healthy skepticism about the ability of naturalistic astronomers really know what is going on out there, and to take popular TV documentaries and their computer animations with a grain of salt.  One of the panelists recalled a popular university joke, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
Next headline on: Stars. • Next headline on: Cosmology.

Ancient Cells Proofread Better   01/08/2002
Four biochemists from Stratagene in California, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have identified a complex “proofreading” enzyme that improves DNA copying accuracy up to 100-fold.  The enzyme is composed of multiple protein chains and can survive high temperatures (around 200^oF).  Although with this proofreading enzyme copying is slowed down (550 nucleotides per minute instead of 2,800 without the proofreading), the fidelity is greatly increased.  It apparently works by breaking down a product called dUTP produced by other construction pathways.  dUTP can poison a replicating DNA chain by substituting uracil.  All living things contain a suite of proofreading enzymes, including members of this family of enzymes (dUTPases) that “read ahead” and find dUTP to cut it out of the growing DNA strand.  But this one is not only highly effective, it works at high temperatures.  The surprise is that this bulky, complex enzyme was found in a single-celled organism of the kingdom Archaea (“ancient ones”) which includes bacteria that thrive in hot springs. 

This paper demonstrates that it is a serious injustice to label one-celled organisms primitive.  They may be small and unicellular, but they are not primitive.  In fact, they appear to have superior engineering in many ways (notice that this enzyme works a lot faster than a human typist!).  Astrobiologists frequently talk about extremophiles (organisms that can tolerate extreme environments like hot springs, high salt, cold Antarctic ice and deep sea vents), as if they demonstrate that life is easy to evolve on other planets.  Their name Archaea imply that they are ancient, primitive organisms.  A better paradigm is to view these organisms as over-engineered so that they can adapt to special situations, similar to how a race car engine, designed to “push the envelope” at higher speeds and temperatures, is superior to your sedan.
Just think for a moment about the amazing fact (discovered in our lifetime) that living things have editors and proofreaders!  Many word processors today include automatic spell checkers; would anyone believe for a moment that Microsoft Word XP was a result of impersonal trial and error?  Now that we observe superior hardware and software engineering in the living cell, the time is come for scientists to abandon their allegiance to the untenable philosophy of naturalism, and face the music: intelligence is an indispensable causative factor in the life sciences.
Note: Several other papers on DNA proofreading can be found in the January 8 preprints of PNAS, each equally interesting and amazing, such as this paper by biochemists at the University of Washington on nucleotide excision repair (NER), the ability of enzymes to repair breaks in DNA caused by ultraviolet light damage.  (They studied this in yeast; how did yeast hire linemen?)
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry.

The Lion Shall Lay Down With the Oryx   01/07/2002
This cat played with its food but didn’t eat it: the BBC News reports that a lioness in Kenya apparently adopted a baby oryx, a kind of antelope normally worn on the inside, and protected it for two weeks before a male lion snuck in while she slept and did what comes naturally.  The lioness was very angry when she woke up.  A local observer said, “This is either an extraordinary case of maternal instinct or simply the eighth wonder of the world.”

We won’t draw any forced interpretations based on Isaiah’s prophecies, but this is certainly unusual and interesting.  Maybe it wouldn’t take much of a tweak for the Designer to change vicious beasts into cute and cuddly pets.  Why, after a little psychotherapy, a lion would look nice in the backyard with the kids.
Next headline on: Mammals.

Jawless Fish Not Evolving Teeth   01/07/2002
A UK paleontologist has examined the mouths of ancient jawless fish called heterostracans, and found they were filter-feeders.  According to Science Now, this “takes a bite out of a widespread idea” that jawless fish had primitive teeth and were in the process of developing jaws.

Whether you look at living animals or extinct ones in the fossil record, you find animals adapted to their environment and doing just fine, not evolving into something else.  Evolutionary stories come from the imaginations of scientists, not from the data.
Next headline on: Fish.

Op-Ed Article 01/06/2002:  John West, writing in World Net Daily, claims Darwinists are learning the art of spin control.  He describes how Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education (an organization devoted “to keep evolution in the science classroom and ‘scientific creationism’ out”– their words; also deeply involved with the September PBS TV series Evolution) did an about face after Congress passed a resolution on science education policy.  The resolution, which called on schools to allow a diversity of viewpoints on controversial issues like evolution, was first strenuously opposed by the NCSE when the Senate passed the Santorum Resolution last June.  But now that the full house overwhelmingly passed similar language in December, Scott is proclaiming it as a victory for their side.  West, a fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute think tank, says, “While they claim devotion to the scientific method, their defense of evolution has all the trappings of a political campaign.”
In another World Net Daily commentary, Dr. Duane Schmidt, author of an upcoming book, First They Want Our Children: How Darwinism Seeks to Rule Our Schools, discusses the improbability of Darwinian origin-of-life scenarios.
Next headline on: Politics.

DNA Damage Response Team to the Rescue   01/04/2002
Americans proudly hail the firefighters and cops that go to work when terror strikes, but did you know your body has an even more heroic team that flies into action when DNA gets damaged?  It’s called the DDR - DNA Damage Response team.  The hearty band of specialized enzymes can handle any contingency: broken strands, loose ends, typos, kinks, twists and numerous other emergencies.  During complex operations like duplication and translation, the DDR team has its P&P (policies and procedures) down pat, including checkpoints and feedback mechanisms to ensure repairs are made quickly, or that irreparable damage triggers the appropriate salvage and disposal operations.  Writing in the Jan 4 issue of Science, a team of seven geneticists, biochemists and biologists have determined that no less than 23 separate genes code for the DDR (and there are probably more).  In addition, they noted an “extraordinary level of conservation of molecular mechanisms in DDR pathways” in all living things, from the worms they studied to man.  Many kinds of cancer can be traced to defects or mutations in these genes, that leave the cell like a city without a fire department.

You have to feel sorry for poor evolutionists having to deal with of discoveries like this day after day.  Dr. Lee Spetner described the DNA repair mechanisms as so effective, they can reduce the error rate to one in 100 billion, the equivalent of one typo in 50 million pages of text, the lifetime output of 100 professional typists! (Lee Spetner, Not By Chance!, p. 39).
Don’t let the Discovery Channel, PBS, or any other slick Darwin agent pull the wool over your eyes about the origin of life from nonliving chemicals, when evolutionary theory has to deal with such monstrous leaps of faith.  Instead, be surprised and thankful that your DDR works so well, so much of the time.  These systems, so vital and proficient, eventually cease when we return to the dust from which we came.  But dust without intelligent design is insufficient to produce such marvels.  If you are an evolutionist, won’t you consider Creation?
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next amazing story.

Visualize Martian Seas   01/04/2002
Dutch artist Kees Veenenbos has taken images from the Mars Global Surveyor and rendered them with rivers and crater-shaped lakes, according to Space.Com, (see the website’s slide show of the renderings).  In some of the pictures he adds colors suggestive of life.  Of course no one yet knows whether liquid water ever existed on the surface (these days it would freeze or vaporize), but the article postulates that “Mars, if wet, was probably also rather violent.  Scientists have suggested that floods likely came in chaotic episodes separated by thousands of years of relative quietude.”
In a related story, the venerable Griffith Observatory of Los Angeles, closing Jan 7 for a three-year renovation, gave its closing planetarium show to record crowds Sunday on the subject “The Oceans of Mars.”  While the show presented both sides of the debate on whether water ever flowed on the Martian surface, it included picturesque artists’ renditions of balmy, beachfront property on the now dry, windswept planet, and described astronomers’ search for water around the rest of the solar system and around other stars with the teaser that if water is found, life might not be far behind.

Fantasy works overtime in the absence of proof.  Let’s wait and see what the newly-arrived Mars Odyssey discovers; but water or not, life is a giant leap for landkind.
Next headline on: Mars.

First Star I See Tonight   01/04/2002
In the Jan 4 issue of Science, Tom Abel and colleagues try to model “The Formation of the First Star in the Universe.”  Since the Big Bang could not produce the higher elements (called “metals” by astronomers), it would have had to be a nearly pure hydrogen star; however, no hydrogen stars have been observed.  The authors begin:

Chemical elements heavier than lithium are synthesized in stars.  Such "metals" are observed at times when the Universe was only ~ <10% of its current age in the intergalactic medium (IGM) as absorption lines in quasar spectra. ... Hence, these heavy elements not only had to be synthesized but also released and distributed in the IGM within the first billion years.  Only supernovae of sufficiently short-lived massive stars are known to provide such an enrichment mechanism. This leads to the prediction that the first generation of cosmic structures formed massive stars (although not necessarily only massive stars).

In the past 30 years, it has been argued that the first cosmological objects formed globular clusters, supermassive black holes, or even low-mass stars.  This disagreement of theoretical studies might at first seem surprising. However, the first objects formed via the gravitational collapse of a thermally unstable reactive medium, which inhibits conclusive analytical calculations. The problem is particularly acute because the evolution of all other cosmological objects (and in particular the larger galaxies that follow) depends on the evolution of the first stars.

Lacking observational evidence, the authors turn to their computers.  Although previous simulations show gas clouds fragmenting too quickly to allow collapse into stars, these authors simulate conditions (assuming a flat cold dark matter cosmology) that produce a massive stars in isolation fairly rapidly (within 10,000 years), starting 100 million years after the Big Bang.  They discuss a number of problems and unknowns regarding such parameters as magnetic fields, accretion rates, and angular momentum. In their simulation, only one atom in a thousand makes it into the first stars.  In the same issue, Martin Rees gives his perspective on the problem and proposed solution.

The first stars are a problem for cosmologists, comparable to the first life for biologists: according to currently-accepted theories of the origin of life, life emerged quickly – too quickly for comfort.  A similar problem exists for the first stars and galaxies, called the “lumpiness problem” – too much structure too soon.  In a universe of particles flying apart, how could they combine into a dense object like a star?  Readers may find this model more or less believable, but it should be apparent that with enough parameters to tweak, you can weave any story.  Necessity is the mother of simulation.
Next headline on: Stars. • Next headline on: Cosmology.

How Butterfly Wings Shine   01/04/2002
Three scientists writing for the Jan 7 Biological Proceedings B of the Royal Society have studied the way butterflies can flash a lot of color with just a little flick of the wing.  Their abstract has pictures that reveal how “this and other optical effects are produced from remarkable nano-scale architecture on the wing scales of the butterfly, affording colour through a combination of interference and diffraction; mechanisms responsible for colour in soap films and on compact disks.  As a result the butterfly signals with remarkably strong colour flicker using very minimal wing movement.”

The same property exists in pheasant and peacock feathers.  How did these creatures figure out the optics, let alone the aesthetics, of their brilliant colors?  Remember, for natural selection to explain it, every member of the population that did not have the optical engineering would have to die (cost of selection).  Yet coloration is not vital to the organism’s fitness; after all, some butterflies are dull in color.  Design is a more viable alternative.
Next headline on: Bugs.   Next amazing story.

Eagle Nebula Pillars Unveiled   01/04/2002
Astronomy Picture of the Day for Jan 3 and Jan 4 features two images from the European Space Agency’s VLT-8.2m-Antu Telescope in Chile.  The Very Large Telescope (VLT), equipped with an Infrared Spectrometer and Array Camera ISAAC, re-imaged the M16 Eagle Nebula “Pillars of Creation” made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.  Now, viewing the pillars at longer wavelengths, astronomers were able to look deeper into the small dark stems of gas which were dubbed Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs), assumed to birthplaces of stars.  Of the 73 EGGs, ESO found only 11 of them contained stars in this survey, but more may lie undetected in dense gas impenetrable by the near-infrared wavelength used by the instrument.  It is also not clear which came first, the stars or the EGGs.  If stars are truly being born in the gas pillars, the ultraviolet pressure from bright stars in nearby cluster NGC 6611 is eroding and evaporating the gas, depriving the stars (and any emerging planetary systems) of material.
Note: the Jan 4 issue of Science is devoted to theories of star formation; it contains a web supplement.

As interesting and beautiful as these images are, it is important to distinguish between the observations and the interpretations.  Astronomers and newscasters frequently use phrases like stellar nursery, newborn stars, a star is born and the like, when all they are really seeing is existing stars and gas being eroded in a destructive process.  They admit that they are not sure the stars were already present or formed because of compression of the gas by the cluster.  And despite their optimism, (“The new VLT infrared image shows that there is now firm evidence for the recent birth of stars in the Eagle Nebula and that at least some of the Eagle’s EGGs are fertile, not sterile!” - emphasis theirs), the ESO astronomers seemed a little disappointed that only one in seven EGGs had an embedded star (so far).  We might also ask, what about all the other stars in the image that have no gas nursery near them, and how do bright stars form near each other if they blow each other’s gas envelopes away?  The NASA Astrobiology Institute, nevertheless, calls these “Young Stars in the ‘Pillars of creation’” in support of their quest to explain the origin of stars and planets.  There is just too much we don’t know to be so overconfident.  Whether stars are being born is theory, but that stars are dying (e.g., novas, supernovas, erosion and depletion of material) is observable fact.
Next headline on: Stars.

Stark Black Clouds Stand Out in New Hubble Image   01/03/2002
A new Hubble Space Telescope image released today shows mysterious dark clouds standing out in bold relief against a red starry background.  Known as Thackeray’s Globules in the nebula IC 2944, “astronomers still know very little about their origin and nature” except that they are associated with dense clouds of doubly ionized hydrogen, assumed to be active star-forming regions.
In another Hubble teaser, the press has been alerted to an upcoming announcement for Monday: “New findings about starbirth in the early universe – findings that could overturn current theories if verified – will be presented in a Space Science Update at 2:00 p.m. EST Tuesday, Jan. 8.”

No comment yet; not enough info.
Next headline on: Stars.

Astrobiology: The Next Generation    01/03/2002
A new report Signs of Life produced by a multidisciplinary group of scientists has been released, according to Space.Com.  The report is a compendium of findings and conclusions by the Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life of the National Research Council.  At a kickoff workshop in Washington DC in April 2000, the group of astrobiologists had a vigorous discussion about tools for detecting life, policies for protecting from contamination, and models for planetary environments that might harbor life.  Committee Chair Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona at Tucson feels it is a whole new ball game from that of the Viking missions to Mars in 1976; new findings of life in extreme environments are encouraging scientists that life might be more adaptable than previously imagined (although the search is still focused on life based on carbon and water).  Additionally, the technologies to detect life have improved greatly since the Viking era.
Ames Research Center will be hosting a big Astrobiology Conference in April with Lunine and other principal players.  But in an article Jan 4 on Science Daily, Andrew Lawler describes how other planetary scientists are upset at all the attention astrobiology is getting:

But astrobiology gets little respect from many traditional planetary scientists, who see it more as a creation of Washington politicians than as a legitimate research area. ... The complaint against astrobiology is that the field is heavy on hype and light on results.  “Are we selling packaging or content?" asks Sykes.  Briefings to lawmakers about the Europa mission, he says, “leave them with the impression that [the spacecraft] will capture caribou walking across the ice.” He warns that overselling astrobiology could be disastrous.

Nevertheless, astrobiology seems to be NASA’s shining star.  Space.Com describes Lunine as feeling that “the key to success in life detection in the field is to try a range of techniques that vary in their specificity and need for prior assumptions about the nature of life.”

Thus they guarantee job security for years.  In their optimistic discussions, one thing is sadly lacking: a serious attempt to explain the origin of information.  Instead, they pounce on the logical fallacy that life in extreme environments is evidence that life can evolve anywhere.  On the contrary, extremophiles possess superior engineering compared to other forms of life, that allow them to live where they do.  Until and unless astrobiologists can explain how the high degree of order and information in living systems could arise without intelligent design, they are just chasing mirages.
Next headline on: Mars. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Evolution Has a Speed Limit   01/03/2002
James W. Kirchner, geologist at Berkeley, thinks he has found a speed limit to evolutionary diversification after extinction events.  In a letter to Nature (03 Jan 2002), “Evolutionary speed limits inferred from the fossil record,” he applied Fourier analysis to timelines of extinction and speciation based on the fossil record of marine invertebrates.  Although extinction appeared random, the ability of ecosystems to recover and diversify appeared to be constrained over short time scales (25Myr or less).  “These results imply that evolutionary responses to extinction events are constrained by intrinsic speed limits,” says Kirchner.  “It has been shown previously that evolutionary responses to extinction events are delayed in time; the current analysis shows that they are also strongly damped in amplitude.”  He feels his results indicate that human-caused extinctions could be long-lasting: “If the continuing anthropogenic extinction episode turns out to be comparable to those in the fossil record (which is not yet clear), my analysis shows that diversification rates are unlikely to accelerate enough to keep pace with it.  Thus, widespread depletion of biodiversity would probably be permanent on multimillion-year timescales.”
Science Now reported the thesis favorably, but gave the last word to Smithsonian curator Douglas Erwin, who says, “I’m not sure that the analysis is sufficiently robust to support the conclusions.”

This is absurd.  Kirchner is applying physics to the history of life, as if biodiversity has a wavelength or the fossil record has a spectrum.  His whole approach assumes evolution is true and assumes the geologic timescale is reliable.  But the geologic timescale is a classic case of circular reasoning, pieced together and calibrated on the assumption of evolution.  All the jargon (Lomb-Scargle Fourier transform, Nyquist frequency, etc.) is sheer bluff if his starting assumptions are wrong.  This is as crazy as finding patterns in the snow on a disconnected TV.  He partially admits it (at least for extinctions), saying, “Whereas the power spectra of extinction rates generally lie within the confidence limits for random white noise, the power spectra of origination rates generally lie well outside those confidence limits at wavelengths [sic!] shorter than about 25 Myr.”  But there is no confidence in his confidence limits if the calibration of dating is off and the assumption of evolution is wrong.  It is amazing this kind of thinking gets published.  It is no more valid than the detailed horoscopes of astrologers (who, incidentally, have better source data).
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

Liar, Liar, Face on Fire   01/02/2002
In a brief communication to Nature 03 Jan 2002, scientists from the Mayo Clinic have developed a new non-invasive tool to fight terrorism at airports.  They developed a heat-sensing machine that distinguishes deceit in facial heat patterns.  “The new high definition technology involves the measurement of the heat patterns created by the face; these heat patterns change dramatically with lying,” especially around the eyes.  For a summary, see this entry on EurekAlert.

Mark Twain used to quip that “Man is the only animal that blushes.  Or needs to.”  Blushing is the external manifestation of conscience, a spiritual aspect of man, who is more than an animal by virtue of this and other attributes.  Those who ignore their conscience long enough, however, lose all sensitivity to it.  The scientists claim their device works on 80% of liars tested.  The other 20% must be so far gone, they don’t even know how to blush.
Next headline on: Human Body.

What to Watch For in 2002   01/02/2002
Science Now posted its “crystal ball” list of research areas to keep an eye on in 2002.  Stem cell research, with its political and ethical overtones, heads the list.  Also hot is research into the human proteome, the protein counterpart to the genome.  New giant telescopes on the ground should see as well as the Hubble, and a networked data avalanche is coming.  The editors also expect more precision tests of the constants of nature using new optical clocks.  Finally, better imaging technologies may allow biologists to watch cellular processes and signaling in real time.
One didn’t have to wait long for the Wonders of Creation show to begin.  The same day, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences contained several papers highlighting the near-miracles occurring in the cell:

• Biophysicists armed with new techniques watched an enzyme named cytochrome c fold into its complex shape in three distinct stages, all within 16 thousandths of a second.  (Read our May 3 headline to get an idea of what a trick that is.) 
• Another paper in the same issue found that the organization of the retina of the eye depends heavily on a complex nuclear receptor enzyme; mutations in this molecule can cause blindness.  It begins with the statement, “Normal human retinal development involves orderly generation of rods and cones by complex mechanisms.”
• Two cellular biologists found that dendritic cells regulate the body’s powerful T cells (soldiers in the immune system), preventing them from action until they learn to recognize the enemy.  Thus they prevent “friendly fire” accidents (autoimmune disorders), but sound the charge when an invasion begins.

As the cell continues to reveal its machinery, watch for more evolutionists straining to fathom how all this complexity could have evolved.  The article mentions that there are at least 35,000 genes, but “there might be millions of proteins” – each a finely-crafted, intricate tool in a symphony of coordinated interactions that make even the simplest life possible.  Creationists can expect to see continued reasons to stand in awe of God for the new wonders just now coming into view.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.