After the knowledge of, and obedience to, the will of God, the next aim must be to know something of His attributes of wisdom, power and goodness as evidenced by His handiwork.... It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.
– James Prescott Joule, discoverer of the law of conservation of energy, in notes for a presidential address to the British Association (1873).

Intelligent Design Documentary Scores High in PBS Ratings   05/30/2003
When the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life was shown in Oklahoma last week during the prime time 8:00 hour, it rated higher than Nova for that slot (4 over Nova’s usual 3), in spite of competing with American Idol.  The show generated a lot of responses.  About 55% were favorable and 45% unfavorable, with some of the unfavorable ones very hostile.  Nevertheless, tens of thousands watched the program, and PBS affiliates in more states have it on their schedule.  (See the previous April 28 headline about PBS and the film.)  A Russian translation was just completed for distribution in the former Soviet Union.  Several other countries are expected to air it on their national networks.

The statistics about viewer responses should be tempered with the understanding that unhappy customers are more likely to call in than those who are pleased.  If your local PBS station has not put Unlocking on the schedule, call them and let them know you are interested.  For southern California (KCET), the number is (323) 666-6500.
Next headline on: Movies.  • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Anybody see any evolution here?  Anybody see 200 million years here?  Charlie, where are you?
    Ginkgo trees are living fossils.  Like Wollemi pines and dawn redwoods, they were long assumed to have gone extinct millions of years ago, from the time of the dinosaurs.  We have fossils supposedly going back 200 million years!  What do they look like?  Just like the ones lining many city streets in America today.  But according to the major story that must be taught in all public school biology classes without competition, during all these multiplied millions of years, tiny mammals turned into horses and bears and lions, four-legged dog-sized animals turned into blue whales, bumbling feathered dinosaurs turned into bald eagles that could snatch a fish out of water during flight, and mice became men.  In this time also, their story goes, the continents underwent major rearrangements, a meteor wiped out up to two thirds of living things including the dinosaurs, the climate underwent repeated upheavals of warming and cooling, and the Grand Canyon was carved.  During all this time, the all-encompassing, all powerful current of natural selection somehow left Ginkgo trees and horseshoe crabs and dozens of other living fossils, even down to the detail of stomates on leaves, virtually untouched.  Is something wrong with this story?
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

The Beagle has become the antithetical icon to Noah’s Ark.  It was a centerpiece of the opening episode of the PBS Evolution series in 2001.  Much of the story, however, has become mythical under revisionist writers.  Darwin was still a creationist on the Beagle and attended shipboard prayer meetings regularly and willingly.  Captain Fitzroy, his Christian friend, was an honorable and godly man.  Darwin did not think much of the Galápagos finches at the time he collected them and was not having doubts about the Bible till later.
    None of this may matter, anyway.  Darwin’s ship appears to moving off the radar screen (see the May 22 headline).  Charlie is still the darling of the evolutionists, but more as an aging patriarch than a trendy guy.  They like him because he liberated science from the straitjacket of observation and opened the door to storytellers.  This gave professional evolutionists job security so they can wander through biology labs as if they belong there.  But if Darwin-Lyell gradualism is falling out of vogue among adult entertainers, the old Beagle may just become a fable in children’s storybooks much like Noah’s Ark is today.  The new ship on the radar screen is the battleship H.M.S. Asteroid.  Incoming terror cannonballs from space have all the impact among today’s evolutionary storytellers.  They provide a wealth of new plot lines (and great special effects) for explaining biodiversity, complexity, and love.
Next headline on: Darwinism.

Where does this one fit on the neat stellar evolution charts?  Stay tuned; too early to tell, but not very well yet.  Good thing there are still surprises out there.
    Another puzzle under intense scrutiny by astronomers, also reported on Space.Com, is the mystery of the gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic explosions in the universe.
Next headline on: Stars and Astronomy.

What are the data?  Just a surprising diversity of fish in a lake.  Evolutionists do not know how they diverged, when they diverged, what they diverged from, or why they diverge any more than any other group.  Kocher admits that it is hard to relate divergent genes to existing populations (emphasis added):

The very recent origin of the Lake Victoria flock poses two challenges for those wishing to reconstruct the historical relationships among species.  First, there has been little time for mutation to alter the DNA sequence of each species.  This means that there are precious few sequence characters on which to apply phylogenetic analysis.  Second, there has not been enough time for new variant genes to become fixed between instances of speciation, a problem known as 'incomplete lineage sorting'.  This means that although phylogenetic trees derived from DNA sequences accurately represent the history of genes, they do not necessarily reflect the history of the populations in which the variants are found.

The bottom line is, these fish are still fish, they are still bony fish, and they are still cichlid bony fish.  A certain level of variation is accepted by creationists and evolutionists, so these observations provide no support for the belief that fish evolved from something else.  It just shows that you can get fairly rapid variation within a certain kind of organism (remember dogs?).
    Factoid from the article: “More than half of all living species of vertebrates are 'bony' fishes.”  (That depends to a certain extent on who does the classifying, but it is notable, nonetheless.)  We take this opportunity to coin a new word: “mythoid.”  A mythoid is a succinctly-stated, plausible-sounding storyette that requires no evidence, but can be propounded confidently by a scientist and is sure to be readily accepted because a scientist said so (see Thumb’s Second Postulate).  It is usually accompanied by a little bluffing jargon to make it sound highfalutin.  Kocher inserted the following mythoid into his article:
“But in fact the capacity for rapid and extensive radiation lay already in a Haplochromis species that lived at least a million years ago, because that species was the common ancestor of both the Lake Victoria flock and the spectacular parallel radiation of Lake Malawi cichlids in the southern Rift Valley.”  Oo, aa.
Next headline on: Fish. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

It’s not just these bones that could have been contaminated.  Whole genome databases on which evolutionary speculations are built might also be full of errors, if you recall the February 19 headline.  Combine this with Tim White’s cautions in March about interpreting variability in bones, and you have way too many variables in the plot.  It is only evolutionary faith that motivates certain anthropologists to find ancestral trees that don’t exist.  Notice that the techniques involved are also used by other groups.  What other evolutionary conclusions are being based on flawed samples?
    The world press was quick to parrot Bertorelle’s claim as evidence for human evolution.  How many are willing to bet they will print a retraction, or any caveats about the data on which the conclusions were drawn?  If it was bad science to sort people by skull shape in the 1800s based on racist assumptions, it is similarly bad science to sort them today by DNA comparisons based on evolutionary assumptions.  It is inhumane to portray Brother Neanderthal as inhuman.
Next headline on: Early Man.

It seems quite unlikely that the extremely effective UV-quenching by all major nitrogenous bases is just incidental.  We can assume that these bases were selected to perform the UV-protecting function before they became involved in the maintenance and transfer of genetic information.  In this (primordial) world the nitrogenous bases served just as protecting units.  Accordingly these units were replaceable and variable.  Exactly this variability could have paved the way to the variability of the future genomes.

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” say the Navy Seals and bumper stickers, and that is correct, if you have will power and determination.  But what will power and determination do chemicals have?  It is a fallacy to attribute any such character attributes to chemicals.  Erase from your thinking any such notions, and start with a mind free of Darwinian assumptions, and this whole hypothesis falls apart just like a polypeptide hit by a UV photon.
    Notice how these dreamers admit in their waking moments that the formation of even the building blocks is thermodynamically unfavorable, and would never happen unless there were some perceived “selective advantage” to their formation.  Here they commit a cardinal sin: one cannot apply natural selection to chemicals.  How many times do we have to repeat this?  Every chemical evolutionist is supposed to learn this lesson in Astrobiology 101.  Natural selection requires reproduction, accurate reproduction.  This throws the case out of court before we even get to all the other problems with the RNA World hypothesis in which they place their faith.
    So again we see the Phoenix myth at work.  In the pantheistic world view of the evolutionist, the fires of destruction are the wombs of life.  Radiation, asteroids, collisions, and other devastating agents are our friends: they gave us the beautiful web of life we have today.  Wonder how they feel about terrorism.
Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next dumb story.

The evolution of wings is widely regarded as a major contributing factor in the evolutionary success of the insects [sic], providing abundant new possibilities for dispersal, prey capture and predator avoidance.  Insect wings (like eyes) are an example of the complex structures whose evolution so troubled Darwin, and which remain important foci for work on the evolution of development.  A major question for these structural adaptations -- and for other complex traits, such as sexual reproduction -- is whether lineages that lose them can ever regain them.  The prevailing view is that such re-evolution is unlikely because, after their loss, the genes required for their development should be free to accumulate mutations and so become non-functional.

Even with a shared toolkit, a problem remains, however, in explaining how the wing can be re-evolved after being lost.  Genes, including those encoding developmental tools, have independent enhancers driving their expression in different contexts, under different transcription factor control.  Shared genes will indeed remain exposed to selection in relation to their other functions, but surely their wing-specific enhancers would decay, preventing a direct return to former roles in wing development.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the phenomenon of credulity among intelligent people.  If you thought that only simpletons were credulous, you have just witnessed PhDs in biology believing in miracles despite their abhorrence of the miraculous.  You have just seen them trap themselves between a rock and a hard place of their own making, steadfastly refusing to consider the only alternative that makes sense in light of the evidence, that wings were designed, and that wing loss is evidence of the general trend toward decay and loss, not a trend toward increasing complexity.
    Both alternatives these biologists toy with are bad news to Darwinism.  If the phylogenetic tree for stick insects is wrong, it casts severe doubt on the assumption of parsimony which is central to their favorite hopeless game, trying to build imaginary ancestral trees between diverse creatures.  But if the tree cannot be questioned, then they are faced with imagining how something as complex as a wing could evolve four times in that one insect order alone.  This inserts miracles into Darwinian theory.  Remember, even if you get the miracle of a fully-formed wing to re-evolve, it is useless unless accompanied by muscles, brain software and the supporting systems to operate it (digestive tract, respiratory system, etc.).  So Darwinian theory becomes a senseless muddle of miracle upon miracle, for which there is no evidence save the assumption that Darwinian evolution must be true.  Actually, the miracle of multiple wing evolutions is not a new problem; they were already faced with four separate cases of having to explain the origin of wings in four very different groups: insects, birds, extinct reptiles (pterosaurs), and mammals (bats).  (The only observed case of wing development, human powered flight, is explained by intelligent design.)
    Stories like this and the next demonstrate how the Darwin Party is imploding.  The tension between the complexity they have to explain and the explanatory power of natural selection is either going to lead to a catastrophic collapse and repudiation of Darwinian theory, with statues of Darwin being dragged through the streets while pummeled by children’s sandals, or else Darwinism will be reinvented as a new pantheistic religion, in which the miraculous, like mortar, is freely applied to keep the tottering wall appearing impregnable.  (A moat of scientific inscrutability is usually sufficient to keep the prisoners from pushing on it to test its strength.)
Next headline on: Bugs, Insects and Arthropods. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

When studying the visual system of primates, one cannot avoid being awed by the beauty, complexity and shear [sic] power of this product of evolution [sic].  At the same time, the primate visual system as we know it today is a compromise between several conflicting interests and selection pressures.  At first sight the task for evolution [sic] seems to be simply to design a visual system that provides an organism with the most accurate and complete picture of its environment.  While some performance parameters of human vision -- such as its peak spatial resolution, low luminance threshold or enormous dynamic range -- demonstrate how far evolution seems to have come [sic], a second look reveals that evolution has achieved [sic] these impressive abilities only in a very selective way.  Most notably, the high spatial resolution is confined to a small fraction of the retina, the fovea.  This makes sense, as implementing the foveal resolution abilities across the whole retina would not only have been very difficult, but the resulting flood of information reaching the brain would have been impossible to accommodate in a reasonably sized skull.

    Instead, evolution has created [sic] a retinal periphery that covers a large portion of the visual environment and can monitor it for high contrast, low spatial frequency, fast changing or otherwise salient events.  Once such events have been identified, the organism can either reflexively or voluntarily foveate them for a detailed analysis.  For this purpose, a dedicated motor system has been developed.  But it is activated only when a worthwhile target for an eye movement has been identified.  Clearly this process is aimed at achieving an optimal balance between a covert searching process which is energetically inexpensive but limited in its analytical power, and an overt oculomotor process that requires the expenditure of muscle energy, briefly blinds the organism during the rapid shift in eye position and is computationally expensive, as it requires a remapping of the visual field across the image shift on the retina caused by any large eye movements.

    Nevertheless, the amount of relevant information is so small, and the corresponding need for suppressing most of the signals arriving from the eyes so large, that an elaborate and powerful attentional system has developed [sic].

It would be hard to surpass their first sentence for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week, so we will take a risk and award it to Treue and Martinez-Trujillo in advance.  But then again, one cannot avoid being awed by the credulity, simplicity and sheer creativity of the evolutionists to attribute optimal engineering design to chance.
Next headline on: The Human Body. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Yes, stand in awe of monarch butterflies, not because they could have engineered navigation systems superior to GPS that baffle our scientists, but because these awesome capabilities were put there by an awesome God.
    This entry is an enhancement on last July’s amazing story about the Monarch Butterfly Flight Simulator.  Give your kid a butterfly net and a GPS, and make it a teachable moment.
Next headline on: Bugs and Arthropods. • Next amazing story.

Although catchy, the term “junk DNA” for many years repelled mainstream researchers from studying noncoding DNA. Who, except a small number of genomic clochards, would like to dig through genomic garbage?  However, in science as in normal life, there are some clochards who, at the risk of being ridiculed, explore unpopular territories.  Because of them, the view of junk DNA, especially repetitive elements, began to change in the early 1990s.  Now, more and more biologists regard repetitive elements as a genomic treasure.

It is even more tricky to maintain the delicate balance of signals that cause an exon to be spliced alternatively--you make one mistake (a point mutation) and either a splicing signal becomes too strong and an exon is spliced constitutively, or the signal becomes too weak and an exon is skipped.

Unfortunately, most mutations will lead to abnormal proteins and are likely to result in disease.  Yet a small number may create an evolutionary novelty, and nature’s “alternative splicing approach” guarantees that such a novelty may be tested while the original protein stays intact.
    Another way to exploit an evolutionary novelty without disturbing the function of the original protein is gene duplication (see the figure).  Gene duplication is one of the major ways in which organisms can generate new genes.  After a gene duplication, one copy maintains its original function whereas the other is free to evolve and can be used for “nature’s experiments.”

These two papers demonstrate that repetitive elements are not useless junk DNA but rather are important, integral components of eukaryotic genomes. Risking personification of biological processes, we can say that evolution is too wise [sic] to waste this valuable information.  Therefore, repetitive DNA should be called not junk DNA but a genomic scrap yard, because it is a reservoir of ready-to-use segments for nature’s evolutionary experiments.

Makalowski took the risk and lost.  He personified nature.  Foul.  That is not permitted in naturalistic philosophy.  If Nature is doing experiments, tinkering with a finely-tuned apparatus, and wise enough not to waste valuable information, she is a person, no longer just natural law and chance.  Without an intelligence to guide it, tinkering with something as complex as a genome factory will just muck up the works and bring the machinery to a grinding halt.  A materialist cannot personify the organisms, either.  Animals do not “want” to evolve, nor do they care who wins the competition.
    Notice how Ohno’s catchy “junk DNA” slogan stifled research.  Like Makalowski says, it gave a bad garbage odor to a gold mine of investigation that is now proving rich and productive, once a few brave clochards risked ridicule (Darwin’s junkyard dog) to explore the unpopular territory.
    Repetitive elements, introns, retrotransposons, and other former junk are today’s gems under the microscope.  Despite his change of heart, Makalowski still has some prejudice to overcome.  He should not keep insulting these gems as constituting a “genomic scrap yard” of “valuable information” used by a personified Nature, a bumbling goddess who only occasionally gets it right.  A better imagery is modular programming.  The exons and introns are like software modules and remote procedure calls, that can be dynamically reconfigured to respond to a dynamic environment.  This requires an even higher order of complexity at the level of epigenetic control of gene expression.
    Can we learn a lesson from Ohno’s blunder?  Give the intelligent design approach a chance at the data.  Instead of looking for the scraps left by the tinkering of a dumb idol, let’s look for purpose in the finely-tuned, delicate operations of these molecular machines, a purpose put there by intelligence.  If history is a guide, such a strategy will be much more productive in this treasure hunt called science.
    See also the May 1 headline on pseudogenes.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

My one criticism of his [Benton’s] account is that he accepts too readily the assumption that Lyell and Darwin marginalized all support for discontinuity in the Earth’s history.  There were few outright catastrophists left by around 1900, but many still believed that the history of life had been punctuated by environmental transitions far more rapid than anything observed in the recent past.

The real triumph of gradualism came with the modern darwinian synthesis of the mid-twentieth century, and even then it was confined to the English-speaking world.  Benton notes that British and US palaeontologists of the 1950s ignored the catastrophism of Otto Schindewolf.  But we need to recognize that German palaeontologists such as Schindewolf were continuing a long-standing tradition that had proved far more robust than our modern, Darwin-centred histories acknowledge.  The fact that modern catastrophists do not see a link back to that tradition tells us about the effectiveness of the neo-lyellian interlude of the mid-twentieth century.

Don’t tell this to Richard Dawkins.  Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Darwin’s popularity, that Nature would print this?  Is Lyell’s adage “the present is the key to the past” now a passé cliché?  To be cool, do you have to wear a catastrophist T-shirt?  You would get that impression.
    So what fad takes its place?  It’s neo, it’s retro; it’s the old Phoenix myth.  Out of the fires of violent catastrophes, new life springs up and diversifies quickly (we don’t quite know how).  Today’s popular Permian extinction theory, if you accept the dates and stratigraphical correlations, built on evolutionary assumptions, would have us believe that 90% of living things suddenly went extinct (we don’t quite know how -- asteroids are popular, but volcanism or intestinal gas might do).  Out of the carnage, evolution just took off by leaps and bounds (we don’t quite know how) to repopulate the earth until the Cretaceous extinction obliterated 50% of life again.  Those poor dicynodonts survived the first catastrophe only to be wiped out by the second.  (The third wave of mass extinction is upon us; now it’s man’s fault.)
    Notice that this is not science, but fashion.  Certain beliefs are trendy.  The pendulum has swung, and catastrophism, along with goatees and big cars, is “in” again.   Bowler’s commentary belongs in the Fashion section.  He says, “Many early catastrophists postulated the involvement of extraterrestrial agents — a comet was sometimes invoked as the cause of Noah's flood.  But such ideas went out of fashion in the mid-nineteenth century...” (emphasis added).
    If it isn’t jarring enough to realize gradualism was a passing fad, look what Benton does: his book apparently blames Darwin and Lyell for marginalizing the more robust approach.  That portrays the two Charlies not as just unfashionable nerds, but outright usurpers.  They seized power and set up a gradualist republic, making the catastrophists go into hiding and wear burqas until Operation Enduring Phoenix.
    So while the scientific journals are getting bold and feeling liberated from the stifling orthodoxy of the Charlie regime, the only remaining enclaves of gradualist fundamentalism are the public schools.  There, the drab Charlie uniforms must be worn, no matter what Nature Fashion thinks.  Eugenie Scott, the Vice Principal with the horn-rimmed glasses, will make sure of that.  Home schoolers are the most liberated bunch.  They get to wear the hottest, most avant-garde neo/retro line of all: Noah.
Next headline on: Darwinism. • Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Fossils.

Eye Does Image Processing   05/22/2003
Before the image gets to the brain, your eyes’ retinas perform sophisticated image processing automatically, explains Richard Masland in the May 22 issue of Nature.  Reporting on a Harvard team’s paper in the same issue, he says (emphasis added), “The vertebrate eye is far more than a passive receptor for visual information.  The microcircuitry in the retina can, for instance, carry out the job of distinguishing object motion from background motion.”  He explains the task the eye needs to perform (emphasis added):

When the first light-sensitive amoeba drifted down a stream, it encountered one of the fundamental problems of vision, which is that the world doesn’t sit still.  Trees move in the breeze, grass rustles, the sun and stars drift across the sky.  The most basic use of an organism’s light-sensitivity is to orient itself to (or from) a light source.  But how, with so much moving clutter, could the amoeba have charted its position?

Fast-forward in evolutionary time [sic] to vertebrates, and things become worse yet.  The image of even a peaceful world dances in great whoops and swirls when the eye moves.  And it moves whether we command it to or not: the eyes make incessant, unconscious drifts, even when we stare fixedly at a single point.  Given this visual dance, how can we see anything except a blur?  As described on page 401 of this issue, an experiment carried out by Ölveczky et al. reveals one of the ways that the visual system does it.  The process involves a clever piece of image processing ... - remarkably, that processing occurs in the neural microcircuits of the retina.

Where does this take us?  Among other things, it encourages a search for even more sophistication in the retina’s computations.  Other amacrine cells provide feedback signals for retinal gain control - a crucial function that adjusts the retina’s sensitivity to match the ambient illumination and contrast.  A single amacrine cell, the starburst cell, appears to compute the fundamental asymmetry that enables some ganglion cells to report the direction of a moving stimulus.  Another mechanism compensates for the ballistic eye movements that hurl the eyes from object to object.  There are now hints that not just movement but also the spatial pattern of the moving target affect the retina’s responses.  The great turn-of-the-century anatomists recognized the retina as one of evolution’s masterpieces [sic].  Our understanding of its signalling repertoire is finally beginning to catch up.

The proper bodily response to hearing the oxymoron “evolution’s masterpieces” is (a) gag, (b) choke, (c) guffaw, (d) spin right index finger around right ear, (e) all of the above sequentially, (f) all of the above simultaneously.  Instead of the customary [sic = thus in the original] designation, maybe we should use: [sick].
    Let’s ask Corel, Microsoft, and Adobe if their image-processing software was written by time and chance.  Let us also inquire from Sony, Canon, and Nikon if they threw various metallic ores and silicates into a volcano to manufacture high-resolution optics and microcircuitry for their digital cameras.  This is your brain.  This is your brain on Darwinism.  Any questions?
    Now that we have ruled out a category of explanation (time and chance) and strengthened the case for an alternative cause (intelligence) capable of producing sophisticated image processing hardware and software, let us stand in awe of what is happening in the rear of your eyeballs right now as you read this.  The reactions are so efficient, they are almost instantaneous.  Think of how rapidly you can process each letter in each word of a sentence while your eyes are scanning across the screen.  Think of how quickly you can scan and recognize faces in a crowd.  You can pick out a moving target against a background only because the pre-processing engine aborts repetitive, irrelevant details so that your brain can concentrate on what matters.  All the while, the image processing is automatically compensating for motion, adjusting the gain via feedback loops, enhancing the brightness and contrast, and improving overall image quality in a data set that otherwise would present to the brain a muddled blur, a torrent of unprocessed and useless detail.
    So now we find that the brain is just the post-processor.  It doesn’t have to harvest and cook the food, just digest it.  It doesn’t have to develop the film and retouch it, or toss out the bad cuts, but just enjoy the finished motion picture.  It doesn’t have to gather and graph the data, but just watch the PowerPoint presentation and make management decisions based on it.  Who would have thought that a complete set of image processing tools massages the signals coming from the rods and cones even before the optic nerve receives them?
    If Darwin got cold shudders just from contemplating what they knew about the eye in 1859, evolutionists should be in deep freeze by now.  For decades we have seen biological complexity increasing in exponential proportion to the resolution of our instruments.  It’s long overdue to end the Darwin Party filibuster and call for a vote.  Resolved: Darwinian evolution is wholly inadequate to account for biological complexity, and is effectively falsified.  All in favor say, “eye.”  All opposed, neigh.
Next headline on: Human Body. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design. • Next amazing story.

Unfortunately, this may save the memories, but not the gene pools, of these plants and animals from the flood of human greed and exploitation.  And who are the exploiters?  Not the free world primarily, but the dictatorships (remember what Hussein did?).  The June issue of National Geographic reports that Somalia is turning its pristine forests into deserts because of the demand for charcoal.  Historically, the famed cedars of Lebanon (and the biodiversity they contained) were decimated by warring monarchies who used the timber for siege machines or crosses on which to execute prisoners.  By contrast, it’s free societies like America that are developing non-polluting hydrogen fuel cells and finding ways to turn toxic waste and garbage into oil.  The environmental records of democracies vs dictatorships would make for an interesting research project.

Note: Before characterizing the rate of species extinction, we need to remember that the definition of species often differs from one taxonomist to another.  There are lumpers and splitters – taxonomists who want to classify multiple varieties under one species name, and those who want to give every variety its own.  It’s not always clear which varieties or species are interfertile.  These facts need to be taken into consideration when sounding the alarm that “thousands of species are going extinct.”  The creation view is that the “created kind” is generally a larger category than species; but in any taxonomic scheme there will be exceptions and special cases. 

    Ending totalitarianism might be a much more productive way to save biodiversity, than relying on the UN (the United Nebuchadnezzars).  How about this for a new Earth Day slogan: “Give me liberty, or give the environment death.”  But freedom itself is no guarantee, if free peoples have no conscience and are driven only by selfish interest.  Some aborigines burned down vast forests to make it easier to hunt, and some native American tribes stampeded herds of buffalo off cliffs.  Even some evolutionists suspect that early humans drove mammoths and much of the rich Pleistocene fauna extinct.
    Along with freedom, humans need a conscience recognizing that “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24).  We are sojourners on a land that does not belong to us.  It is fair to make a living off the land, but not to obliterate living things made by Someone else, when He gave us the responsibility to be stewards.  Free people having a creation ethos might stem the tide of extinction, so that one day we don’t have to remember many of earth’s magnificent plants and animals only with nostalgic pictures on the Internet.
    The Creator loves animals and plants.  Look how many He made before bringing the first man and woman along to take care of them.  It’s interesting that so many people including evolutionary biologists keep harking back to the Biblical images of the Garden of Eden (see Eden Project and Eden Again) and Noah’s Ark.  Usually they avoid the uncomfortable details about the God who made the world and then judged it because of sin.  They like the peaceful imagery, but not the Prince of Peace who alone can bring peace on earth, good will toward men (and animals).
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

Pennings is not saying Elvis understands calculus, but that this was “an example of the uncanny way in which nature often finds optimal solutions.”  Nature does not find optimal solutions.  Nature is not a person.  If the intelligence were not put in from the outside by Someone, nature would follow the laws of thermodynamics, and the dog would decay into dust on the shore of the lake.  That Elvis does not, and happily jumps into the water, swimming straight to the ball in spite of the current, is a tribute to the Designer who made cells, DNA, brains, muscles, nerves, and complex interconnected systems that make such tricks possible in a world that, of itself, gravitates toward equilibrium.
Note: Owls excel at math, too, and so do tennis players.
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next amazing story.

We should not insult the apes this way.
All the news media are picking up on this weird-science story (it’s really about politics and animal rights activism, not science).  They all seem to feed from the same sources and use this as an opportunity to push Darwin and the “Inherit the Wind” stereotype of the Scopes Trial.  Some are allowing critics to respond, though, such as evolutionary anthropologist Richard Sherwood of U. of Wisconsin, and even creationist Dr. Walt Brown of the Center for Scientific Creation: see MSNBC News, CNN and others that are basically parroting the same AP story line.  National Geographic, however, spins only a politically-correct story out of it, saturated with evolutionary assumptions, as expected.  What’s next, ape suffrage?  Bonzo for president, right.  You can’t compromise on government with apes, because they are monarchists.  Remember King Kong?
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Politics. • Next dumb story.

Finally, the issue of whether birds evolved flight in trees or on the ground is effectively dead, because it isn't testable.  We re not likely to find a fossilized bird in its fossilized tree, about to jump off a fossilized limb.  The central problem of the evolution of flight is how the flight stroke evolved, because without it, flapping is not effective.  (Also needed are an effective airfoil, a sophisticated neuromuscular apparatus, and an active metabolism for sustained flight.)

It’s kind of fun to watch storytellers argue with each other’s plots.  Padian thinks it is incredible that feathered hind limbs would provide any flight benefit to an animal if it were jumping out of trees to learn how to fly, but is it any more credible to claim, without any fossil evidence, that forelimbs used to trap prey would evolve into eagle’s wings?  There is much more involved than just limb shape, as he reminds us.  There are muscles, nerves, brain software, hollow bones, a different respiratory system, and much more.  In fact, just about every biological system would need redesign for a reptile to evolve powered flight.  This would require hundreds of Darwin’s “successive, slight modifications,” each of which would have had to provide a functional advantage enough to make the lucky mutant survive and all the others die.  Great story, if you have enough faith.
    Did you catch Padian’s admission that there is no fossil evidence whatsoever for the origin of the flight stroke in powered flight?  Did you notice Padian’s reservations about whether the hind legs had feathers at all, and his suggestion that the fossil might have been distorted?  Best of all is his rejoinder about the arboreal origin-of-flight story being untestable, because one cannot see a fossilized bird jumping out of a fossilized tree.  But the same criticism can be leveled against Padian’s own preferred story, because one cannot see a fossilized theropod using fossilized forelimbs to catch fossilized prey.  The storytelling is reminiscent of old mountain man Moses Harris, who used to amuse easterners with his tales from the far west.  Although petrified forests do exist and had been seen, Moses embellished the account to the point where he described having seen “petrified birds perched on petrified branches of petrified trees, singing petrified songs.”
    Given the highly-emotional agenda of some fossil hunters to find missing links, and the known problem of composites coming out of China, it is certainly premature to believe any claims about this fossil.  A wait-and-see attitude has proved wise in previous cases.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs. • Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Fossils.

Voyager 2 discovered also that Neptune had the strongest winds of any planet, stronger even than those at larger Jupiter and Saturn that receive more solar energy and give off more internal heat.  As we reported a year ago, Uranus and Neptune do not fall neatly into theories of the origin of the solar system, nor do they appear to be as old as claimed.
Next headline on: Solar System.

Understanding the process of planet formation in nascent solar systems is a long-standing goal of astrophysical theory.  The traditional picture is an orderly one in which planets slowly build up their mass, first by accreting rocky planetesimals and then (if sufficiently massive) gas from the surrounding protostellar disk.  The recent multiple detections of extrasolar planets close to the central star, a configuration once thought to be highly improbable, pose a stern challenge to this relatively simple picture of planet formation.  In the wake of these discoveries, contemporary theories emphasize the importance of the dynamical interaction between a developing planet and the ambient gaseous disk.

We didn’t even mention yet the problem that most dust disks are being rapidly blown away by nearby supergiant stars.  Even if a planet survives the chaos in these new naturalistic models, they show it does not require long periods of time.  These new papers are speaking of process that operate in thousands of years, not millions or billions.  That raises additional questions.  After such a quick formation, do we need billions of years?  What about all the other phenomena throughout the solar system that appear young?
Laplace claimed he did not need the god hypothesis when he formulated his famous nebular hypothesis for the origin of the solar system.  He would have choked on today’s more complicated data.  None of the current models work; just when they tie together some loose ends, it comes apart in the middle.  Remember what Nature said last month?  Don’t believe the simple illustrations any more.  The images of calm dust disks neatly condensing into planets over millions of years are out.  Now, its peas in a whirlpool.
    Since astrophysicists are having trouble getting their own models to condense out of the fog of speculation, we propose a new name for the materialistic Laplace approach: the nebulous hypothesis.
Next headline on: Solar System.

The reason that physicists have been so reluctant to consider the anthropic principle seriously is that it goes against the grain.  Most physicists have hoped that an ultimate physical explanation of reality would explain why the Universe must look precisely the way it does, rather than why it more often than not would not.

Thus Bjorken provides only a suggestion, a “just-so story,” around the problem.  Not only is this stabbing in the dark, it really is not a solution at all.  Even if the constants of physics scale to the de Sitter horizon, why is that true, so that complex life is possible?  Why is there a universe at all?  You cannot get a treasure map by chance.  If you have a naturally-produced treasure map that leads you to X marks the spot, you have to ask the follow-up question: what treasure map further up the chain provided the information the first map used?
    There appears to be no simplistic way out of the anthropic principle.  It’s a cop-out to say, “Well, if the universe were not this way, we would not be here arguing about whether its existence were possible.”  Since we are here, it demands an explanation.  Not even a fundamental theory can answer that.  Some nuisance will just come right back with, “So who designed the fundamental theory such that all these lucky constants were determined, so that life could exist?”  Warning: too much contemplation on this causes headaches, unless you can tolerate the taste of the antidote.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

• Uranus’ Miranda: Of the classical moons, only Miranda and Ariel show any large areas that are obviously young.  Miranda in particular appears to be, in places, fairly young. ... The large gap in apparent ages between Elsinore and the cratered terrain, on the one hand, and [adjacent] Arden and Inverness [the famous chevron-shaped feature], on the other, is a bit puzzling if one imagines that all of Miranda's oddities are tied to a single event.
• Neptune’s Triton: As we have discussed in detail elsewhere, one of the puzzles of the outer Solar System is how poorly we find the predicted apex-antapex asymmetry expressed on real synchronous satellites.  Triton's exaggerated apex-antapex asymmetry only makes this disagreeable state look worse.  Perhaps the meridional terrains (mostly cantaloupe) are truly younger than the rest of Triton; or impact craters may have been missed there (a possibility, as the cantaloupe terrane seems almost to have been designed as camouflage for degraded craters); or the impactors may have been mostly planetocentric bodies in prograde orbits, striking retrograde Triton more or less head on.
• Neptune's inner satellites like those of Uranus, appear to be subject to collisional disruption on time scales shorter than the age of the Solar System. ... the innermost satellites would seem to be destined to vanish in the near future. ... [the hypothesis of] a truly collisional Kuiper Belt population--makes Naiad's prospects even worse.
• Small moons: The more nearly collisional comet-size distributions (Case B and Case C) imply that the smaller moons have much shorter collisional lifetimes than do the larger moons.  Moreover, these lifetimes are quite short, typically much less than 1 Gyr.  The implication is that the smaller moons are vanishing to the benefit of their larger neighbors; it becomes a puzzle that so many should exist now.
• Jupiter’s Ganymede: These ages are very uncertain; they also have a small element of circular reasoning in them, since we assumed that T_BD = 1 Gyr to set one of the constraints on the jovian cratering rate.

Only a tiny fraction of the population would ever read a technical paper like this, with all its uncertainties.  TV producers and planetarium lecturers assume that the peasants want nice, tidy, dogmatic answers to things – glittering generalities spoken by authoritative-sounding announcers, saying, “Four and a half billion years ago, the Solar System evolved out of a swirling cloud of gas,” with glitzy artwork providing a convenient substitute for uncooperative data.  Here at Creation-Evolution Headlines, we know from feedback that our readers are smarter.  They realize that the interesting revelations usually come from the puzzles.
    Much of the puzzlement seems to come from the insistence on maintaining that seldom-questioned 4.6-billion year age for the Solar System.  In fact, the authors treat that as a given, and calibrate their cratering rates to it (another case of circular reasoning).  Yet even when they do this, there are a surprising number of surfaces they admit are clearly much younger than that, so they have to devise just-so stories for how the moon or planet was resurfaced relatively recently.

Note: They may speak of 'recent' as 10 or 100 million years ago, but even the latter is only 2% the assumed age of the Solar System – very 'young' when calibrated to that scale.  Even something claimed to be 1 Gyr [1 billion years] old represents only about one-fifth – 22% – of the assumed age of the Solar System.  What happened during the other 78%?  Did it even exist?  On Venus, for instance, some planetary scientists are puzzled that the first 90% of the planet’s history has apparently been obliterated by recent resurfacing events.  That means 90% of the planet’s unseen history is inferred by faith, to maintain their prior commitment to a 4.6 billion year age.

Curiously, while planetary scientists will readily admit this or that feature is young, none of them ever dreams of asking whether the Solar System itself could be young, even though some of them claimed recently that gas giants could form in just a few hundred years.  One possible reason is their bias toward radioactive dating methods as opposed to other methods that yield much lower ages.  A more likely reason is the need for those billions of years to accommodate Darwinian evolution.  (That’s a false hope in itself; read the Darwinism chain links and see.)
    Most of the outer planets have features that look old and young, side by side.  At Uranus, for instance, Miranda looks very young, and “Ariel and Titania also may have relatively youthful provinces, while nothing young was seen on Umbriel or Oberon.”  The designations of old or young depend on unproveable assumptions about the unobservable past, with very little in the way of present processes to provide any calibration.  If they don’t know the number of impactors, or whether their influx rate is constant, then any estimates are pure guesswork.  How do they know there was not one or a few brief episodes of bombardment?  They assume bright means young and dark means old, but if they cannot calibrate the darkening rate, those estimates are also guesswork.  For the real curve ball, what can they do when 'old' and 'young' features are sitting right next to each other, on the same moon?
    As we have stated before, it’s not that materialistic scientists are unable to concoct a story to fit the data (they are a very imaginative lot, after all).  It’s that the data require a story to fit a belief.  They might retort that a Bible believer does the same thing, because he or she must fit the data to a belief, also.  But there are two advantages with a Biblical viewpoint: (1) The observation to assumption ratio is much higher, since they are not obligated to extrapolate observed processes billions of years into the unseen past, and (2) There is credible Eyewitness testimony available, at least for the big picture.  A scientist of Christian or Jewish persuasion can also be more open to question the conventional wisdom and provide a sanity check against materialistic dogmatism.
    Keep in mind that today’s headline mentions only a few of many problems with materialistic cosmogonies – search back through the chain links on Solar System for many more problems, some much worse (try just the next three, for example).  Surely a materialist cannot claim the rational high ground in the face of this many unknowns, anomalies, and puzzles, propped up by ad hoc just-so stories rigged to maintain a belief in 4.6 billion years of undirected natural processes, a lot of matter in motion that just happened to result in our lucky planet.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

Unborn Knows Mother’s Voice   05/13/2003
A study from Queens University found that an unborn baby can distinguish its mother’s voice from other females, and “the fetus heart races when mom reads poetry,” even when played on tape.  This indicates that the foundations for language and speech recognition are laid before birth.

Yet the law still treats these most vulnerable of human beings as dispensable objects of parental convenience.  While we shudder at Hussein’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his own people after the Gulf War, what are we to think of the ongoing slaughter within our borders?  For years, getting a ban on just the most brutal method of murder, partial-birth abortion, in which the head is punctured and the brain sucked out, has been blocked, vetoed, or pushed to the back burner as a low priority issue.
    A child’s interaction with its environment is a continuous, ongoing experience for a baby.  Birth is merely a change in environment.  It is not a change in personhood, or in human rights.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

The self-esteem wave may have crested.  For the last couple of decades it’s been an article of faith among experts of many stripes that high self-esteem is the font from which all human goodness springs.  The movement reached a fever pitch in the 1980s when California funded a state task force on self-esteem, claiming that “many, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in ... low self-esteem.”

A power point here.  Notice how self-esteem has been a pervasive truism, a concept that everyone just intuitively knows.  But it was a compelling illusion, a fad.  People were attracted to it because we relate; we already love ourselves, and the self-esteem doctrine reinforces our own selfish tendencies.  How many expensive programs have been funded because of this flawed theory, and how many criminals were let off the hook because of tearful stories that their failures were due to low self-esteem?
    Sadly, some Christians jumped on the bandwagon, in spite of the clear Biblical teaching that we are all vile sinners in need of redemption, not poor victims of low self-esteem.  They rationalized it with Scriptures like, “Love thy neighbor as thyself means you cannot love your neighbor unless you love yourself.”  But the command is not to love ourselves; that we already do, and that is our problem!  We need to repent, and forget ourselves and learn to love God and others.
    Although we must avoid the either-or fallacy and think the opposite (criticism*) is healthy, the pendulum has gone way out of bounds to suggest that positive self-esteem is all that kids need.  Some entire Christian psychological ministries have been built on this pop-psych illusion that is now going out of style.  Why is it that secular psychologists have to bring some sense to this fiasco?  “Self-esteem is a result, not a cause, of doing well.”  Amen.  “Forget about self-esteem — concentrate on self-control.”  Preach it, brother.

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*The opposite of self-esteem is not self-criticism; it is other-esteem, following the example of Jesus Christ, who sacrificed his self-interest for the good of others.  Christian author Dave Hunt uses a pointed illustration to rebut the claims that we must coddle those who have “low self-esteem.”  Think of a generic teen-ager saying, “I’m so ugly – I hate myself!”  Hunt reasons, “If you really hated yourself, you would be glad you are ugly.  Your problem is that you love yourself!”  Low self-esteem is pride masquerading as humility.  It says, “I am so important, I deserve to be treated better.”  If we taught young people to get their eyes off themselves, and onto serving others and exercising self-control and doing their best as to the Lord, would not a sense of worth and satisfaction and happiness be the inevitable, yet serendipitous, result?
Next headline on: Health. • Next headline on: Education.

Once again, experiment trumps speculation.  Huxley’s analogy is still invoked sometimes to evade the truth that a chance origin of life faces impossible odds.*  But it is not just the odds; there are other problems.  A monkey is not likely to continue typing on a keyboard it has just relieved itself on (please pardon the grossness of this illustration, because we need to make a point, and this is in fact what these monkeys did in the experiment).  In a soup of chemicals acted on by chance, similarly, there are destructive cross-reactions that interfere with “prebiotic” synthesis, essentially guaranteeing nothing interesting will happen.  But that’s not all that is wrong with this foolish analogy.
    In Huxley’s story, the typewritten letters remain on the page.  But in a soup of chemicals, the reactions are reversible; any lucky combinations would fall apart faster than they form.  Give the monkeys typewriters where the letters fall off as soon as they are typed**, and you could have a quintillion monkeys typing in a quintillion universes for a quintillion years, and one line of Shakespeare would never spontaneously form by chance.  Long before then, the typewriters would have rusted from all the urine, and the monkeys would all have gotten bored, grown old, and died.
    Wilberforce should have challenged Huxley right there on the spot to get a group of monkeys and try the experiment, just like these researchers did.  After the audience was sufficiently grossed out, Wilberforce should have argued that the analogy was irrelevant to evolution anyway, because the destruction rates vastly exceed production rates.  Because Wilberforce had no answer, the debate became a cause celebre among evolutionists, and another ridiculous evolutionary thought experiment that contradicts lab experiments became embedded in the popular culture.

---

*For convincing details on the impossibility of the odds, see our online book Evolution: Possible or Impossible? and the more recent technical books by William Dembski, The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.  Even the most ardent evolutionists like Richard Dawkins do not believe that chance alone could produce complex life, but they forget that their magic wand, Natural Selection, cannot act until complex life (sufficiently complex to reproduce itself accurately) already exists.
**This point was emphasized forcefully by the late Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, organic chemist, in his lectures and books.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

1. Magnetic Field:  U. of Rochester scientists are studying crystals to try to determine the strength of the earth’s magnetic field.  “The study is also of general interest, as we seek to learn more about the present-day field, which is dropping rapidly in strength at an alarming rate.”

   How can the magnetic field be that old, if it is dropping at an alarming rate? 

2. Another Impact Extinction Theory:  Dr. Kath Grey and an Australian team think an asteroid hitting their continent, not glaciers, led to the rapid diversification of complex life 500 million years ago.  The hypothetical Sydney-sized asteroid “played a pivotal role in this evolutionary jump.”

   Asteroids are the convenient new smart bombs to target evolutionary conundrums.

3. Cambrian Explosion:  A petroleum geologist in the Sultanate of Oman thinks that an extinction event preceded the Cambrian explosion.  His paper “fuels the old model that flattening of ecosystems during times of stress creates opportunities for new adaptive strategies, expressed in this case as the Cambrian radiation.”

   Death brings transfiguration.  The Phoenix myth lives on.

4. Arctic Redwoods:  Exquisitely-preserved fossilized Metasequoia tree stumps near 80 degrees N latitude indicate that a rain forest once grew here.  Two geologists hypothesize that the Eocene Arctic atmosphere must have had twice the water found in the region today, and maybe ”This water vapor contributed to a greenhouse effect that insulated the polar region during dark polar winters.”  (See also Science News 5/17/03 (163:20), p. 317.

   How did a rain forest get in the Arctic?  How could large redwoods grow with six months of arctic night per year?  How did a local greenhouse effect protect redwoods up there without affecting climate worldwide?

5. Sedimentary Diamonds:  Let these Chinese geologists explain the problem and their solution:

   One of the most remarkable geological discoveries in recent years was the presence of diamonds in metasedimentary rocks in old mountain belts.  Because the rocks are metasedimentary we know they formed at the surface of Earth; because they contain diamonds we know that they have been taken to depths in excess of 100 km, to produce the enormous pressures required to create diamonds; and now we find these rocks back at the surface of Earth.  This geological yo-yo defies the predictions of the conventional plate tectonic cycle, which provides an easy mechanism for deep burial of the rocks ("subduction") to produce the diamonds, but lacks a simple explanation of the subsequent uplift.  These ultrahigh-pressure rocks are best known from a region of eastern China.  Our paper describes new geophysical data from this region that provide a convincing image of the subsurface, and show a narrow channel beneath the center of the old mountain belt through which the ultrahigh-pressure rocks must have returned to the surface.

   Welcome to the yo-yo theory of diamond placement.  Nothing ad hoc about this.  Too bad nobody shot a time-lapse video of it.

It should be clear that geology is often a storytelling art, tasked to work its way around evidence while preserving the geologic time scale, indispensable to Darwinism, at all cost.
Next headline on: Geology.

So earth-like and yet so very different, Mars is sure to provide surprises for years to come.  Most of the old conventional wisdom is already obsolete.  Get ready for more textbook truths to be swept away under the flood of new data that is coming in faster than geologists can analyze it.
    The Odyssey team quickly posts all their new images on the Mars 2001 Odyssey website.  If that’s not enough, you can browse the 123,800 visible-light images the Mars Global Surveyor has taken over the last six years.  Percival Lowell would have died to get images like these in 1908, and now they are ours.  (He also probably would have died to learn that the fabled Martian canals were non-existent.)
Next headline on: Mars.

Cell membranes in tissues such as skin, gut and muscle are routinely exposed to mechanical damage, which can produce holes in them.  When that damage is not repaired, the consequences can be severe - often resulting in cell death - and may contribute to the development of the muscle degenerative diseases termed muscular dystrophies.  From a combination of observations on human muscular dystrophy patients and experiments with mice, Bansal et al. (page 168 of this issue) now report that a protein called dysferlin is a component of the mechanism for resealing the holes, and thus healing the muscle membrane.

Membrane resealing is generally carried out by a mechanism that resembles the calcium-regulated release of vesicles from a cell (exocytosis).  The repair pathway is initiated by an influx of calcium through a wound, resulting in an increase in calcium levels at the site of injury.  This, in turn, triggers the accumulation of vesicles, which fuse with one another and then with the plasma membrane, within the injury.  A 'patch' is thereby added across the wounded area, resealing the plasma membrane.  The entire process - which remains largely mysterious - takes between ten and thirty seconds.

Since most of this process “remains largely mysterious,” you can be sure it is even more sophisticated than described.  Ellis concludes, “Evidently, there may be yet more pathways to be discovered that, when disrupted in some way, ultimately lead to sarcolemma fragility” (i.e., muscle plasma membrane vulnerability).  When you work out, your body is doing most of the body building.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Human Body. • Next amazing story.

What?  Can you believe this?  No mutation has ever been shown to be truly beneficial, yet he thinks a movie that shows humans gaining supernatural, godlike powers instantly by mistake as “flowery but accurate” and loosely based on science fact!  Incredible.  Here was a golden opportunity for a scientist to correct misleading impressions and bring some scientific reality to the public, but look what he does!
    This leads to a new hypothesis that should be tested, the addiction of evolutionists to comic books and science fiction movies.  Let the control group keep their Spider-Man and X-Men comics and go to the movies, but forbid these to the test group, and force them instead to work on real lab experiments with real mutations.  Then check after a year to see which group still believes in punctuated equilibria.
Next headline on: Movies. • Next dumb story.

This is not evolution in the Darwinian sense, nor do the authors claim it is.  What they have described is a loss of information.  Lee Spetner explains this point in his book Not By Chance.  Just like a man who has lost his arms becomes resistant to handcuffs, these enzymes lost a sensitivity they once had.  The pesticide used to fit like a key in a lock in the enzyme; a small change in the tumblers, and now the key no longer fits.  Has any new information been gained, or any new functionality that leads to higher levels of complexity?  Not at all.  Other studies on resistance show similar loss of information, and furthermore, show that the resistant strains are less able to survive when having to compete with the wild type.  For examples, see the film and the book Icons of Evolution.  Even the PBS Evolution series conceded that HIV strains resistant to medicines revert to wild type after the medical pressure is removed.
Next headline on: Bugs. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Here they go again.  This is so disconnected from the real world, why does Nature print it?  It belongs in the Playstation Journal, not Nature.  Of course they are going to get Darwinism to look good, because they programmed success into their code.  They defined this nebulous quantity called “fitness” (equivalent to Skinner’s Constant) as success at reproducing.  So whatever reproduces is fit, and whatever is fit, reproduces.  They say some of the organisms generated logic functions, but they rewarded those that did.  As such, they played the role of Mother Nature, the smiling goddess looking down and encouraging the little digital children that meet her expectations.  This was an experiment in intelligent design, not Darwinian evolution.  In Darwinian evolution, one cannot sneak information in the back door.
   Listen to how they begin their paper by whining about the lack of biological evidence for evolution, that supposedly justifies their silly SimDarwin computer game.  If you are a regular reader, you should be skilled now in detecting where the contraband information was snuck in (emphasis added):

A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features.  We examined this issue using digital organisms — computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve.  Populations of digital organisms often evolved the ability to perform complex logic functions requiring the coordinated execution of many genomic instructions.  Complex functions evolved by building on simpler functions that had evolved earlier, provided that these were also selectively favoured.  However, no particular intermediate stage was essential for evolving complex functions.  The first genotypes able to perform complex functions differed from their non-performing parents by only one or two mutations, but differed from the ancestor by many mutations that were also crucial to the new functions.  In some cases, mutations that were deleterious when they appeared served as stepping-stones in the evolution of complex features.  These findings show how complex functions can originate by random mutation and natural selection.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, including its intertwined hypotheses of descent with modification and adaptation by natural selection, is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time.  From the outset, Darwin realized that "organs of extreme perfection and complication", such as the eye, posed a difficulty for his theory.  Such features are much too complex to appear de novo, and he reasoned that they must evolve by incremental transitions through many intermediate states, sometimes undergoing changes in function.  There now exists substantial evidence concerning the evolution of complex features that supports Darwin’s general model (2-16).  Nonetheless, it is difficult to provide a complete account of the origin of any complex feature owing to the extinction of intermediate forms, imperfection of the fossil record, and incomplete knowledge of the genetic and developmental mechanisms that produce such features.

So presumably they overcome these difficulties in their computer games.  First off, notice two blatant cases of bluffing:

1. “Darwin’s theory is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time.”  This is pure subjective opinion.  Other secular scientists have called it the biggest myth of all time, and a fairy tale for grownups.  The authors’ opinion about Darwin’s idea carries no weight; it is pure bandwagon.
2. After their bluff that “there now exists substantial evidence concerning the evolution of complex features” they supply 15 references, which looks impressive, because few are likely to read them.  But scan the list, and you find highly biased books like Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, atheist Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker.  Various other papers are listed that make a stab at explaining eyes, proteins and other biological functions.  We have a pretty good track record here at Creation-Evolution Headlines at finding the baloney in such claims.  If the evolution of complexity is so clear, why do the authors admit up front that it is difficult to detect?  And why do we need their computer game?

Now onto their main thesis.  To understand the problems, you must think in consistent evolutionary terms.  That means ridding your mind of all purpose, all hope, all wishing, all direction, all success, and caring not one whit whether anything happens or not.  They start with a population of organisms, so fine; let’s start with a sea of one species of “primitive” bacteria (a major concession), and see if it will evolve enough complexity to warrant faith that in a few hundred million years you will get giraffes and orchids and people by the same process.  Ready?  Compare their algorithm with the real world.  We’re going to hit the buzzer [BUZZ] whenever they cheat or commit a logical fallacy.
    According to Dennett, all you need is “replication [BUZZ], variation (mutation), and differential fitness (competition) [BUZZ].”  Foul!  First, if you have a replicating organism, you already have intelligent design on a high level.  Unless you can explain how random non-living molecules achieved accurate self-replication without the help of natural selection, it is cheating to start there.  Second, if you define success as “differential fitness (competition)” you have committed two logical fallacies: equivocation and tautology.  Since we have explained this elsewhere, see our Oct 29, 2002 headline about what a nebulous, meaningless term fitness is, and why it is a tautology if you define fitness in terms of reproductive success.  That is exactly what Lenski, Adami and this team has done here.  Our editor recently asked Adami point-blank after a demo of his computer program why it was not a tautology for him to define fitness in terms of reproductive success.  He bluffed for awhile, but when that was not effective, he got mad, saying (paraphrasing as close as possible from recollection), “That’s a claim only a creationist would make!  It’s b***s****!” and he stormed away.  In this paper here, you will look in vain for proof their definition of fitness is not a tautology.
    They elaborate.  They claim “fitness” has two components, “replication efficiency [BUZZ] and computational merit [BUZZ].”  The latter is invalid because it imposes the authors’ values on the subject: what is “merit” if a human being is not doing the grading?  The former is the tautology.  They arbitrarily define “replication efficiency“ as “the ratio of an organism’s genome length to the SIPs [single instruction processing units] used during its life cycle,”  which means how good it is at leaving offspring given the resources available.  Computational merit is defined as “the total reward [BUZZ] obtained over an organism’s lifetime for performing logic [BUZZ] functions.”  What is reward if a human being is not doing the rewarding?  What is logic if a human being has not defined what is logical?  The digital organism surely doesn’t care about math.  Like the horse at the circus that can answer math problems, it just follows the cues provided by its trainer so that it gets a carrot.  Grownups do not assume that because the horse can paw out the answer to 7 + 5 that it really understands arithmetic.  Now look at their bottom line definition of fitness: “Each genotype’s expected replication rate, or fitness, [BUZZ] equals the product of these quantities (emphasis added).”  There you have it – they have defined fitness in terms of reproductive success, which is a tautology, and have arbitrarily graded computational merit based on their own human value system.  “Fitness,” therefore, is a meaningless term irrelevant to the real world.  This undermines their entire thesis.  For instance, they claim that “Most mutations in Avida are deleterious or neutral, but a small fraction increases fitness” [BUZZ].  If fitness has already been defined in tautological terms based on human arbitrary values, they have no independent criterion for judging which mutation is deleterious or beneficial.
    The team insists that their little digital organisms developed all kinds of logical skills and complexity on their own.  They just set them loose, and let them evolve without help.  But the game was rigged: if an organism satisfies a pre-established criterion of success (a preselected fitness function), it is rewarded with more energy [BUZZ].  Outside reward or guidance is prohibited in Darwinian evolution.  They must close all the back doors and dumbwaiters where stage hands are sneaking in the information.  Make them get their organisms to evolve without outside intelligence, and everything will randomize and decay.  The No Free Lunch algorithms explained in Dembski’s book of the same name prove mathematically that no fitness function from a non-intelligent source is superior to blind search.  Therefore, this team must use blind search, really blind search, to simulate the real world.  An analogy would be a blind man working a Rubik’s cube without external help.  An even better analogy is to have him care nothing whether he succeeds or not, because “success” is a meaningless term.  Only a human thinks a solved cube is beautiful; to random processes, any arrangement of the cube is as valid as any other.  Nature might subject the cube to wind, an earthquake, rain or fire, but the cube will eventually decay and nobody would be there to care.
    They claim their computer game confirms Darwin’s hypothesis that “complex features generally evolve by modifying existing structures and functions,”  but then they try to pre-dispose of an objection (guilty conscience?): “Some readers might suggest that we 'stacked the deck' by studying the evolution of a complex feature that could be built on simpler functions that were also useful.  However, that is precisely what evolutionary theory requires, and indeed, our experiments showed that the complex feature never evolved when simpler functions were not rewarded.  [BUZZ]  Well, so there!  Thanks for making the point.
    Their concluding paragraph states, “Of course, digital organisms differ from organic life in their genetic constitution, metabolic activities and physical environments.  However, digital organisms undergo the same processes [BUZZ] of reproduction, mutation, inheritance, and competition that allow evolution and adaptation by natural selection in organic forms” [BUZZ]  They admit these digital organisms are not real-world.  They mistakenly assume the processes are the same.  To understand why they are not, see Steven Benner’s comment about digital organisms in our January 9 headline.
    Now notice the last sentence and its damaging admission: “In closing, digital organisms provide opportunities to address important issues in evolutionary biology [BUZZ].  They are particularly well suited [BUZZ] to problems that are difficult to study with organic forms owing to incomplete information, insufficient time and the impracticality of experiments” (emphasis added).
    Conclusions: (1) Their experiments are irrelevant to Darwinian evolution.  They are mere computer games, imaginary simulations of fantasyland, rigged to produce outcomes that give them warm fuzzies about their beliefs.  Get real.  (2) But they cannot get real because of the difficulties they just stated.  That means Darwinian evolutionary theory relies on incomplete information, cannot be observed due to insufficient time, and cannot be tested because of the impracticality of experiments.  And this is one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time?  God help us.
    For a more realistic computer simulation, read our Aug. 23 headline about Weasel.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

The list of improbable similarities between vertebrate hair cells and Drosophila mechanoreceptors continues to expand.  In addition to several developmental paradigms and physiological properties that hint at a conserved [i.e., unevolved] relationship, a nonlinear active process to amplify incoming sound as well as spontaneous acoustic emissions are now characteristics that appear to be intrinsic to the process of sensing a mechanical stimulus like sound.  As scientists, we should not necessarily be shocked by the similarities in the hearing of such disparate creatures as dipterans and mammals, but we should certainly be awed.

Fruit flies are like specks in the air, yet they possess muscles, wings, circulatory systems, legs, mouths, digestive systems, and ears.  How did a tiny fly learn how to evolve non-linear acoustic response?  When you ask them for details, the silence of the evolutionists is deafening.
Next headline on: Bugs. • Next amazing story.

One cannot “appreciate the accomplishments” of the impersonal.  This article illustrates again that evolutionists are pantheists.  They personify Mother Nature as a good witch, waving her wand named Natural Selection to accomplish any miracle required to explain the phenomenon under investigation.  If Mother Nature would have taken 78 million years just to have one chance to create the building blocks of RNA (which is one of the “absolutely essential” steps in the evolution of life, and without which there is no hope at all of using the Magic Wand of Natural Selection), how could she get by without cell signaling for another trillion years?  There are thousands of enzymes, made by DNA, many of which are essential for DNA to make enzymes.  The reaction rates for all these without enzymatic help are similarly slower and more at risk than a snail crossing a gravel freeway in rush hour.  It is an impossible, foolish hope to expect Mother Nature to build even a fraction of a working cell in the time available with the tools available to “her,” even if “she” wanted to.  We are in the strange position of categorizing this story as both Amazing and Dumb; amazing for what enzymes do, dumb for the evolutionary comment about natural selection’s accomplishments.
    And yet consider the unmitigated gall some evolutionists have to hold themselves up as paragons of scientific objectivity.  Read this editorial at Arizona State with its angry tirade about the evils of those sneaky, rabid creationists (just look at the cartoons for a flavor of Caitlin Hall’s rhetoric; anyone who has met Dr. Gish knows he is the friendliest, most unselfish gentleman one could ever hope to meet; the cartoon gives him a face like Jaws).  See if you can find any actual evidence for evolution mentioned anywhere in the thicket of bluffing and ridicule.  Then, read the next two headlines, below.  Continue clicking through the Chain Links on Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory for over 200 similar recent examples from scientific journals.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Darwinism. • Next amazing story. • Next dumb story.

We’ll just let the evolutionists assume the posture of Rodin’s Thinker and mull on this one for awhile.
Next headline on: Bugs. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

The authors use the word striking or strikingly three times, and interesting or interestingly four times.  This really is interesting and striking information.  Here you have a sophisticated, secure electronic shelter with power doors where a fragile, delicate polypeptide chain can safely fold into a molecular actor, ready to play its part in the cellular production.  The power doors, if operated in tandem with ATP synthase, are cooler than any prop in a Star Trek movie.
    If you have seen the movie Unlocking the Mystery of Life, you saw a very simplified computer animation of the chaperone, which looked like it was floating in mid-air.  Actually, all the machinery of protein synthesis is safely tethered together in a factory-like assembly line, so that the protein is never left unprotected from its initial assembly deep within the safety of the ribosome to its final destination, which might require shipping down the intracellular railroad clear across the cellular city.  The scientists do not mention the speed at which this all happens, but most likely it is all very fast, since some proteins can fold in microseconds.  This only underscores the point of the film, that such complexity is the signature of intelligent design.  What a great show!  Give a standing ovation to the Designer!
    Of course, some think the props got together and created their own show without help.  The authors provide no scenario how this might happen.  They just say it did, somehow.  Here are the two obligatory references to evolution (emphasis added):

1. “Understanding the distinct mechanisms governing eukaryotic and bacterial chaperonin function may reveal how TRiC [one of the eukaryotic chaperones] has evolved to fold specific eukaryotic proteins.” 
2. “Notably, folding of several eukaryotic proteins, such as actin, exhibits a strict requirement for TRiC/CCT, which cannot be substituted by the bacterial chaperonin [references provided].  This suggests that TRiC/CCT has distinct features that allowed the evolution of novel eukaryotic proteins.” 

Let’s translate that into our theater analogy.  David Copperfield needs special stage lighting, trap doors and electrical power requirements for his show, so he can’t do it at the smaller theater on 2nd Street.  Conclusion: if we study these requirements, we will figure out how no planning was required to put the production together.  If we continue our reasoning, we hope to explain how Copperfield, the white tiger, the stage hands and technicians and props and the theater itself all arose spontaneously out of slime.
    Now you tell me who really believes in magic.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.

Regarding the Physical Review Letters papers, someone needs to check whether there is circularity in the argument: i.e., would changing constants also change the tools they are using to measure the effects?
    Michael Turner’s review has some choice comments about science.  You may want to skip this if you are a positivist or member of the L.A. Skeptics Society, or at least take some aspirin.  Here are some excerpts (emphasis added):

But then, crazy new ideas – and iconoclastic individuals – are needed when confronting the toughest puzzles in science. ... The leaders of the field are, more often than not, too skeptical, having seen so many ideas fail, while newcomers are blinded by their own enthusiasm.  Even mathematical beauty often invoked as a guide, is faulty: The rubbish heap of ideas is piled high with beautiful theories killed by ugly facts (take, for example, Fred Hoyle’s steady-state cosmology).
    The motivation behind the theory is to find an alternative to inflation for why we live in such an orderly universe. ... just as striking and more puzzling is the CMB’s [cosmic microwave background’s] remarkable evenness – it is uniform to 99.9999 percent.  That’s like finding a pebble smooth to ball-bearing curvature, and it raises a deep question – why is our universe so uniform? ...
    In theoretical physics, as in other realms, risk and reward are related – to solve big problems you need bold ideas.

Turner describes how inflation theory was invented to circumvent this difficulty (the horizon problem).  He claims inflation also makes predictions that VSL does not.  But he does grant a small piece of evidence that the fine structure constant might have been smaller in the past.  If true, this might be a smoking gun for VSL theory, because “If the speed of light varies with time, it is likely that some of nature’s constants do, too.”
    It seems like the jury is still out on varying constants.  Some creationists have postulated that a faster speed of light in the past may explain how light from distant galaxies arrived on earth in a much shorter time.  Notice they are not the only ones proposing VSL to solve a problem.  Whatever the merits or faults of the idea, it cannot be considered any crazier than inflation, which was invented by materialists purely out of the need to explain the smoothness of the universe from a random, chaotic explosion.  A ball bearing on the beach by chance; yeah, right.  Crack it open and find an encyclopedia inside; tell me about it.
Next headline on: Cosmology. • Next headline on: Physics.

Telescopes have been trained on it since Galileo’s day, and dozens of spacecraft have flown by it, orbited around it, and landed on it.  And a dozen humans--including one geologist--have walked on the surface and brought back soil and rocks. So the moon must be the best understood of all places beyond Earth, right?

Wrong.  "That's an illusion," says Carlé Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.  "We're doing lunar exploration backwards--we have a wonderful set of samples, but a poor foundation for a global assessment."  Despite a wealth of data, critical questions remain about the moon's formation, the massive early impacts on its surface, and its chemical composition.  "Thirty-five years after Apollo, our knowledge about the moon is still surprisingly incomplete," adds Bernard Foing, project scientist for the European Space Agency's SMART-1 mission to be launched this summer.

And yet, the moon matters.  Understanding its geology is critical for understanding the formation of the terrestrial planets and the solar system--as well as the Earth-moon system.

We think readers should be aware from time to time of how little data supports the grand pronouncements of scientists who try to explain the origins of things.
Next headline on: Solar System.

We’ve all seen magicians do something natural and claim it is magic.  That’s entertainment.  But what do you call a scientist claiming to be able to do something natural, that if true, would require real magic?  That’s entertainment, too.  Despite their disclaimer, there is magic here: it’s getting information out of chemicals.  Since we have dealt with this subject numerous times before, we refer the reader to the chain links on Origin of Life for detailed reasons why this cannot happen, rocky cubicles or not.  Start here, or if short of time, read this headline and especially this definition of life.  On to another lesson from today’s articles.
    Jeffrey Bada, an advocate of chemical evolution with the passion of an evangelist, reveals an embarrassing fact about the Miller scenario: it’s not true, but it’s useful.  Nobody in the know believes the Miller myth any more, not even Bada.  Earth’s atmosphere was not reducing, Miller ignored the destructive cross-reactions and harmful salts, and the oceans would have been far too dilute for any hope of corralling the highly improbable ingredients together so they could interact.  It doesn’t matter that any of the other scenarios have similar problems, or that recent findings have made origin-of-life speculations extremely more difficult today than they were in 1953 (now that we know much more about the complexity of DNA and proteins).  What matters is that the Miller experiment made chemical Darwinism “a respectable field of inquiry.”  A chemical evolutionist no longer has to sheepishly apologize when asked at the party what he does for a living; he can hold up a diagram of the Miller spark-discharge glassware and say, “Why thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Refined-Society, I am involved in research on synthesis of organic compounds relevant to life’s origin,” and he will get a polite nod and friendly conversation, instead of being looked at as if he were a crackpot.  Dr. Frankenstein is a respectable scientist now; he can put his Jacob’s Ladder right up alongside Pasteur’s swan-necked flask in the chemistry lab.
    The Useful Lie Strategy is the way Darwinists gain membership in scientific societies.  It’s identity theft.  The demons of Darwinism come alongside scientists with the proper credentials, and tell the guard, “I’m with them.”  If an alert guard asks, “Where’s your badge?”, the demon just holds up a picture of the icon and bamboozles him with jargon, so the flummoxed guard lets him pass, thinking “He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.”  It just takes a little adroit misdirection, a little faked evidence, a little extrapolation (finch beaks, peppered moths, etc.) and pretty soon the demons are mixing with scientific society, and there will no one checking their ID, because the guards are in cahoots with the scam.
    Astrobiology was born out of a Useful Lie, the Martian meteorite.  Hardly anybody still believes that rock ever had fossils in it, but it served its purpose, because now Astrobiology has gained the status of respectable science (almost).  Astrobiology conferences are held around the world, there is a journal of astrobiology, there are Congressional hearings, there are graduate programs in astrobiology, there are astrobiology websites, and NASA artists can again be gainfully employed drawing DNA spiraling out of spiral galaxies.
   Thumb’s Second Postulate states, “An easily-understood, workable falsehood is more useful than a complex, incomprehensible truth.”  The follow-up question is, “Useful to whom?”
Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Remember this story the next time you watch so-called educational TV showing a big bang illustration, with all the fragments neatly falling into spiral galaxies and brilliant stars.  Cosmologists have been proposing the ad hoc, counterintuitive, bizarre belief in inflation for two decades to get around the evidence of the flatness problem.  Were you told there were hundreds of competing models?  That’s like having hundreds of versions of Alice in Wonderland.  Now the WMAP survey, hyped to the public as dramatic confirmation of big bang theory, is undermining this “bulwark of modern cosmology” by showing the universe is more scale invariant than inflation demands.  Then there is the problem of early star formation (the lumpiness problem).  Cosmologists are gulping cupfuls of metaphysical Pepto-Bismol to get relief for those lumps in their gastrophysical tracts.
    Certain Christians think the big bang is the scientific explanation for the Creation Event.  They seem to feel that embracing big bang theory will earn them the respect of unbelieving cosmologists (i.e., the Alice in Wonderland Storytellers Guild).  Based on today’s report in Science, we prescribe preventive medicine for avoiding gastrophysical discomfort: “Don’t obsess on this.”  Suggested dosage: 3 servings.

    Click here for a new critique of Big Bang theory by Bert Thompson and Brad Harrub.  Also, did you know that the co-discoverer of the cosmic background radiation, Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, believes in a divine creation of the universe instead of the big bang singularity?  Learn about it an article by Jerry Bergman at the American Scientific Affiliation website.  Chuck Colson highlighted this in a recent BreakPoint commentary.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

Remember also that Saddam Hussein set fire to hundreds of oil wells in and around Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, and at the time, that was considered one of the worst environmental disasters in history.  In spite of this and all his other crimes against humanity, many opposed the recent Iraq war for liberation.  Should such crimes have been allowed to go unpunished, and without remedy?  Where was the outcry about this, from those who thought a few weapons inspectors were all that was needed?  Totalitarian regimes have a horrendous environmental track record.  Because of evil leaders and sinful nations, “the earth mourns and languishes” (Isaiah 33).
    Today is the National Day of Prayer.  Its theme is: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”  Need an illustration?  Look at Iraq.  Sin has made this cradle of civilization the reproach of the world.  The converse is that righteousness (not the UN) will be the key to restoring the vitality of Iraq and its people.  God loves wetlands, and righteousness brings them back: Isaiah continues, “But there the majestic LORD will be for us a place of broad rivers and streams, ... for the LORD is our Judge, the LORD is our Lawgiver, the LORD is our king.”  Unfortunately, that spirit is far from the heart of many in free societies, who, though appalled by Hussein’s atrocities, rely on themselves, their governments, their science, or some other god or king.  President George Bush has called on Americans not to be smug, but to pray lest a worse fate come upon us.  For those who humble themselves and pray, God can heal their land (I Chronicles 14:14).
    While relief efforts are vital in this catastrophe, man will never bring back “Eden again.”  That paradise was lost forever in this era of earth history because of sin, which led to a world God judged because it became filled with violence.  And no human effort will forestall the final judgment, which will come suddenly, as it did in the days of Noah.  As before, there is an ark of safety, this time in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Those who call on Him in repentance and faith will inherit the new heavens and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
    Incidentally, the original Garden of Eden cannot be located in the present Tigris-Euphrates valley.  It inhabited a different world before the Flood.  All traces are buried beneath miles of sediment.  Any similarity in place names given in the Genesis account were probably carried by oral tradition into the postdiluvian world by Noah’s descendants.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: The Bible.

Not All Pseudogenes are Pseudo Genes   05/01/2003
At least one pseudogene has a function, claims a team scientists from Japan and UC San Diego (see UCSD Health Science News).  Long assumed to be dead copies of true genes that are devolving into useless relics, pseudogenes, which are common in eukaryotic DNA, may not be so useless after all.  The team found a pseudogene that, while not coding for a protein, affects the expression of the true gene.  The pseudogene apparently stabilizes the expression of a similar protein-coding gene on another chromosome.  Without the pseudogene, lab mice developed abnormal kidneys and bones.  The team discovered the function of the pseudogene by accident, reports SciNews, as they were preparing the mice for a different experiment.  They suspect similar mechanisms may be at work in most other pseudogenes, and “hope to show that pseudogene-gene interaction is a general mechanism taking place in many cellular interactions.”  Their technical paper is published in the May 1 issue of Nature.  Science Now explains that pseudogenes may help keep normal copies functioning.

This is one more step in debunking the “junk DNA” myth.  Evolution gave us the concept of vestigial organs; now, most of them are known to be vital.  Evolution gave us the notion that glia cells in the brain were just space-filling junk; now we know that they may be just as important as the neurons, or even more so.  Evolution gave us the concept of pseudogenes.  Is there a pattern here?
    Evolutionists criticize creationists for just “giving up” investigation by claiming “God did it,” but the Darwinian mindset has actually hindered investigation in these three cases, sometimes to the detriment of human health, by assuming parts we don’t understand are just useless relics of evolution.
    Never rule out design just because you can’t see it yet.  Think about those 3-D artworks that were popular a few years ago.  Sometimes you have to stare long and hard before the design becomes apparent.  Some never see it, no matter how hard they try, and just give up.  But when it registers, the viewer typically expresses amazement and satisfaction at the thrill of discovering something that before looked random and purposeless, but now makes perfect sense.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

This raises some interesting questions about the origin of disease germs, and puzzles on both sides of the creation-evolution debate.  It is not even clear if there is a gene for virulence, or if virulence is a result of good genes run amok in the way they are expressed.  Perhaps in a soil environment the genes would be beneficial, but are harmful once inside a mammalian body.  No one knows, but the data so far seem consistent with a Biblical view that there was an original good creation that has gone awry, either directly from God as judgment from the curse because of sin, or indirectly from mutations mucking up the regulation of otherwise beneficial functions.  An evolutionist can claim anthrax got its virulence genes by horizontal transfer, but then where did those come from?  It’s too early to understand what these genomes are revealing, and there are some things science can never tell us.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

It’s nice when other reporters do the thinking for us.  No evolution, just intelligent design that flabbergasts the investigators.  But like the obligatory pinch of incense to the emperor, evolution is mentioned in passing.  The article states that “voltage-dependent potassium channels are extremely similar throughout every branch of the evolutionary tree.”  Uh, pardon me... what tree?  I thought we were at an art show.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.