For I, that had much rather have men not philosophers than not Christians, should be better content to see you ignore the mysteries of nature, than deny the author of it.
– Robert Boyle, father of chemistry, in Tome 1 of treatise, Of the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, 1663.

Not only is our biography of Robert Boyle complete, we just added a page of his writings so you can read Boyle in his own words.  Check it out!

This is why the Teach the Controversy approach would be good for science.  Popular magazines like NG have free rein to distort the evidence to fit their beliefs.  Why don’t they report what you have read here, that the origin of sex is the “queen of evolutionary problems”, and that results are equivocal?  Sexual selection is a collection of just-so stories that can be spun to explain any observation, and prominent evolutionists are announcing that it has no effect on speciation, or that sexual selection is plain wrong.  Even the classic example of the peacock tail, the thought of which made Charlie sick, is a tormented just-so story according to NG's own news division, with many unanswered questions that have not been answered satisfactorily to this day.  So why does NG sanitize this controversy for the eyes of impressionable students in their flagship magazine?  It’s their show, but it’s your choice.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

What is the quartz arenite problem?  Foremost is the extreme compositional maturity of sandstones composed of more than 95% quartz.  Furthermore, the quartz consists almost exclusively of grains of unstrained, single-crystal units.  Very rare lithic [rock] fragments consist only of durable polycrystalline quartz types such as chert or vein quartz.  In addition, the extremely rare accessory mineral suite (generally <0.05% by weight) is dominated by durable zircon, tourmaline, ilmenite, and leucoxene.  Where present, associated conglomerates also consist only of durable clasts of vein quartz, quartzite, or chert.  How can we explain the complete disposal of at least 75% of any ultimate parent igneous or metamorphic rock to yield a residue that is at least 95% quartz sand?

Extreme textural maturity is also characteristic of many, but not all, examples.  A high degree of sorting has always been emphasized, with high rounding being common but not universal.  Both properties imply much abrasion by one or more of nature’s most physically vigorous processes, such as surf and strong eolian [wind] or aqueous currents.

1. Thin, tabular geometry: layers tens or hundreds of meters thick, very flat over vast regions, yet Paleozoic in age – i.e., prior to the emergence of land plants.
2. A paucity of associated shale, in contrast to other sandstones.
3. Interstratified with shallow marine carbonate strata.
4. A lack of volumetrically significant analogues forming today (i.e., nothing on that scale can be seen forming now).  This implies weathering processes orders of magnitude greater in the past.
5. Very rare body fossils, and some burrows.
6. Frosting of the grains, making the rough on microscopic scales.
7. Underlying mature shale high in kaolinite (clay) or illite.
8. Even more pure quartz arenites, even thousands of meters thick, in Precambrian strata.
9. Many of them underlain by paleosols (ancient soils) that show a high degree of chemical maturation.

This was an interesting paper about an interesting puzzle that some readers may wish to investigate further.  Does his explanation satisfy you?  Notice how these formations are huge, and exist on every continent.  Notice how thick and flat they are.  Notice how they are interspersed with clays and soils, yet are exceptionally pure, “nature’s finest distillate.”  Notice how they give evidence of being deposited via nature’s most vigorous and energetic forces.  Doesn’t this sound like global cataclysm?  Since catastrophism is back in vogue, should we not follow the evidence where it leads?
Next headline on: Geology.

Let’s clear the air in that sentence: if machinery is evolutionarily conserved, it is not evolutionary at all.  Conservation is not evolution.  Such doubletalk that injects evolution into the phraseology contradicts these observations.  Nothing has evolved.  The cleanup crew has been around since it first appeared, fully functional, in the lowly roundworm.  (Undoubtedly, similar mechanisms go back even further; scientists just happened to study this mechanism in a favorite lab worm, C. elegans.)  There are at least seven genes involved in corpse clearance, he says.
    So the Creator thought of everything.  Nothing is wasted; when the cell has hit its threescore and ten, the parts are recycled, and the tissues are kept clear of debris.  The author’s diagrams show cells with happy faces wearing the “Don’t eat me” tag and sad faces advertising “Eat me.”  This is not just a cute trick that animals do; he says, “Accumulating evidence suggests that failure to clear apoptotic [dying] cells promptly has serious consequences for inflammation and autoimmunity.”
    In the same issue of Cell, 25 scientists published a paper entitled, “A Panoramic View of Yeast Noncoding RNA Processing” in which they describe the huge number of noncoding RNA that is “functionally conserved over evolution [there they go again] and plays a role in basic cellular processes.”  But this RNA is not going to help their RNA World hypothesis for the evolution of life, because these RNAs depend on proteins to manufacture them: “Predictive analysis using publicly available yeast functional genomics and proteomics data suggests that many more proteins may be involved in biogenesis of ribonucleoproteins than are currently known” (emphasis added).  It just keeps getting harder to hang on to the Darwinian story line.  Let go and let God.
Next headline on: The Cell.

• The study of comparative anatomy is one of the great traditions of biology.  The intellectual challenge of inferring hidden relationships and devising consistent schemes for placing seemingly disparate morphological types into a logical [sic] order has always attracted biologists, but also other great thinkers. ... Probably the most fascinating aspect of comparative anatomy is that it has remained impossible to propose a grand scheme that places the phyla into an undisputed evolutionary context.
• It is usually assumed that the evolutionary advance [sic] of centralizing the nervous system has occurred only once, implying a direct relationship between the central nervous system of arthropods and chordates.  However, the nerve chord is dorsal in chordates and ventral in arthropods.  Thus, if there was only a single origin of the central nervous system, one has to propose an axis inversion during evolution ....
• The alternative, namely at least two independent events leading to the evolution of a central nervous system from an ancestor with a diffuse system, has seldom been discussed, mainly because the traditionally assumed phylogenetic relationships among phyla would have made this unlikely.

• Despite considerable paleontological work and molecular analysis, mystery still surrounds the origin of our own phylum, the Chordata.
• Early deuterostomes [chordates + hemichordates + echinoderms] were clearly established by the Lower Cambrian, as documented in recent excavations.
• Identifying morphological homologies among these phyla has been fraught with difficulties, as their adult body plans appear so divergent.
• However, the homologies [chordates with hemichordates] are easily controverted and hemichordates were reclassified into their own phylum by the 1940s.
• Three hypotheses currently account for the origin of the chordate nervous system, all consistent with recent molecular phylogenies, yet all mutually incompatible.
• A more classical perspective of nervous system evolution that has not enjoyed much support from recent molecular analyses is the proposal that the bilaterian ancestor had a diffuse nervous system that was centralized independently in different bilaterian lineages. ... Since there has been no molecular evidence for an extant group of animals with such a well-patterned but diffuse nervous system, it was not clear such an organism could exist.
• The nervous systems of hemichordates and chordates are so different morphologically that it has been difficult to make valid comparisons.  This study provides a rational basis for investigating the possibility of structural homologies between the two groups by restricting direct morphological comparisons to regions that develop from the same expression domains of the two maps, as shown in Figure 7. 
• At this stage in our analysis, we do not suggest any structural homologies of the respective nervous systems of the two groups but do call attention to corresponding parts that evolved [sic] from the same domains of the deuterostome ancestor.
• Although we raise the possibility of a diffuse nerve net in the deuterostome ancestor, evidence is still equivocal.
• The deuterostome ancestor we propose, with its complex anteroposterior organization but diffuse nervous system, may already have had some other differentiated characteristics of the chordate lineage, ... In general though, the conserved domain map appears very weakly linked to the particular morphologies of different evolutionary lines.
• Although the ancestor of bilateral animals probably had complex anteroposterior organization based on many of these domains, this organization set few limits on morphology and cytodifferentiation in subsequent evolution.  The existence of a modern hemichordate with a highly patterned but diffuse nerve net suggests that the nervous system may be very plastic in its evolutionary possibilities and that its exact neuroanatomy may tell us little about the early branching of metazoan phyla.

One participant not invited in this discussion is the one who says there is no evolutionary relationship, that this is all force-fitting data into a belief system, and that highly conserved and complex mechanisms that are well adapted to each organism’s needs imply intelligent design.
    So after all this time as the official soothsayers of biology, all that evolutionists can describe are widely divergent groups with no clear common ancestor; “conserved” (unevolved) genes and development patterns (see previous headline commentary); and complex, highly adapted systems that were already fully formed in the lower Cambrian, i.e., the first fossil layers.  All they can propose are suggestions (i.e., stories; here’s another, different one) that are open to more than one interpretation and fraught with difficulties.  To adapt a favorite political slogan, are you better off than you were 144 years ago when the Darwin Party came to power?
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Here another phenomenon has been discovered that contributes to the life and health of earth’s inhabitants.  That something this large could go unnoticed for so long hints that there is more design in our environment than we know.  Welcome to Earth: the electric planet.
Next headline on: Physics. • Next amazing story.

I can think of no other botanical theory that has engendered more incredulity among physical scientists and animal physiologists than the C–T theory, because it requires us to suppose that water is transported in a metastable state.  If an air-bubble or vapourvoid of sufficient diameter were to arise in a xylem conduit under negative pressure, the water column would cavitate and the void would expand to displace the water, making the conduit dysfunctional.

This story would be so much more enjoyable without the useless Darwinspeak.  Tyree’s article starts out,

Like their animal counterparts, large multicellular plants need to supply all their cells with fuel and water.  For animals, the solution was the evolution [sic] of a vascular system, with a pump to circulate an isotonic blood plasma that prevented cell rupture through the osmotic inflow of water.  Plants took a different route to solve the problem [sic] of osmoregulation, encasing each cell in a rigid exoskeleton, the cell wall.  But this rigidity brought with it a lack of mobility — for whole organisms and also for tissues and cells.  Plant tissues were too rigid to evolve a pump mechanism for long-distance transport.

So plants found another solution and invented high-efficiency pumps that could transport water hundreds of feet into the air without cavitation loss, etc. and so on.  Is this kind of personification of plants and animals enlightening?  How did a plant, without a brain, figure out this trick: “Plants seem to retain and transport water in conduits while under pressures as negative as -1 to -10 megapascals (MPa) — that is, pressures 10 to 100 times more negative relative to atmospheric pressure than a perfect vacuum.”
    Evolutionary gibberish about plants inventing pumps that solve the cavitation problem and animals that invent vascular systems is devoid of logic.  Nature should abhor a vacuum.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next amazing story.

For a materials scientist, cross-sectional images of the complex microstructures of naturally occurring hard materials such as bones and sea shells are awe-inspiring.  Over many millions of years [sic], nature has devised schemes [sic] to combine seemingly incompatible building-blocks — ‘soft’ organic proteins and ‘hard’ inorganic particles of calcium carbonate — in a manner that produces composite materials with the unusual combination of high strength, hardness and toughness.

To be strong, hard and tough, a material must be able to absorb a large amount of energy during mechanical deformation and also maintain high stiffness.  In bone or shell, this desirable combination of properties is made possible by one key attribute — a bricks-and-mortar-like structure, made up of strongly interacting, nanometre-size building-blocks.  The 'hard' bricks and 'soft' mortar are complementary in their response to stress and strain.

If you took the childish Mother Nature talk out of science journals, evolutionary theory would gasp for hot air.  So Nature devised this over millions of years?  Nature has nanoengineers better than our PhDs?  Such nonsense isn’t worth two clams.
    On the beach this summer, go shell collecting with your kids.  Make it a teachable moment about the wisdom of God.
Next headline on: Ocean Life, Fish etc. • Next amazing story.

What can anyone say in response to such awesomeness?  Write your own commentary on this one.
Next headline on: Stars. • Next amazing story.

See our January 13 commentary on this subject.  The statistics above are quite revealing.  A third of deans of medical schools don’t believe evolution is relevant to their curriculum, and 5% do not have confidence that evolution is science.  11% are afraid it will embroil them in political controversy.  One wonders whether the other reasons were just polite cloaks for their lack of confidence in Darwinians.  There does not seem to be a lot of interest in teaching evolution.  If it were that important and that relevant, would they not make time for it in the curriculum, rather than 87% of them saying they couldn’t give it the time of day?  How can it be that after a century of indoctrination, less than half of medical school faculty feel qualified to teach it?  The “lack of funding” reason almost implies a sarcastic smirk: “You want us to teach more evolution?  Send me a check.”
    How essential is it for doctors to know evolutionary theory?  It depends on what you mean by evolution.  Change happens: everybody accepts that.  These authors undoubtedly mean the whole worldview of Darwinian evolution, that human patients in hospitals have evolved from slime over time.
   Each of the 16 “core concepts” that medical schools are presumably lax about teaching are either irrelevant to medicine, or irrelevant to Darwinian evolution.  Table 1 of the paper lists these concepts and the degree of coverage in medical schools according to the deans that responded.  Here they are:

1. Antibiotic resistance: 94%.  Yes, it is important for doctors to understand that certain populations of pathogens are resistant to antibiotics, but this is microevolution at best.  Since the pathogens are most likely losing information, this is irrelevant to Darwinian evolution: i.e., the de novo emergence of new functional information.
2. Virulence evolution: 83%.  Since virulence genes appear to move about by horizontal gene transfer, it is equivocal whether evolution had anything to do with it.  A doctor needs to know how to treat a pathogen, not its assumed family history.
3. Population genetics: 79%.  A knowledge of how traits shift within populations may be interesting, but probably not helpful to a medic.  This subject can be treated without reference to common ancestry.
4. Selection for disease genes: 72%.  Understanding how artificially imposed environments might exacerbate the prevalence of pathogens is important for doctors and hospitals to know, but again, what does common ancestry really have to do with it?
5. Mutation selection balance: 55%.  The relevance of this triple-noun jargon is questionable.  Mutations: yes, they occur.  These result in devolution.  Selection: natural selection operates as a conservative force.  Balance: we all need balance.  Who made up this phrase and appraised it one of evolution’s “core concepts”?
6. Levels of selection: 51%.  Not all selection pressures have the same effect.  Big deal.  Your doctor probably does not know or care about this one.
7. Host-pathogen arms races: 43%.  This is one of evolutionists’ many personification fallacies.  Germs don’t care if they win or lose a war.  If existing strains already have resistance, they will proliferate, and hosts having resistance to those will also proliferate.  Proving a trail of tit-for-tat evolution becomes questionable after a generation.
8. Novel environment causing disease: 30%.  A med student should be expected to know that there are risks going into a strange environment, but claiming this causes disease is a non-sequitur.  It might just awaken what was already present.
9. Tradeoffs: 26%.  Another personification fallacy.  Intelligent designers often make tradeoffs between competing requirements to achieve optimum design, so what does evolution have to do with it?  See the May 2002 example about the eye.
10. Comparative anatomy: 21%.  This subject was alive and well long before Darwin, but when usurped by the evolutionists, it became the argument from homology.  Jonathan Wells in Icons of Evolution has demonstrated this to be a circular argument when used to argue evolution.
11. Defense regulation: 20%.  Humans and animals have highly functional defense mechanisms that are regulated.  Does anybody have a clue why this is a “core concept” of evolution, rather than evidence for intelligent design?  This is like saying, “Tax relief is a core concept of the Democratic Party.”
12. Life history evolution: 19%.  Dr. Average Dean was probably scratching his head on this one.
13. Design flaws from path dependence: 17%.  Ah, now they want to impugn God.  Evolutionists think that presumed suboptimal design shows that our ancestors took opportunistic paths to obtain functional traits.  Favorite examples include the panda’s thumb and presumed inverted wiring of the mammalian retina.  Both work as excellent adaptations for their users; calling them “flaws” is subjective, and “path dependence” is just-so storytelling.  Doctors need observations, not stories.
14. Primate phylogeny: 9%.  Totally useless, and 91% of medical schools agree.  Nobody, not even young-earth creationists, disputes that humans and apes have physical similarities.  Perhaps it would be useful to doctors to be able to tell one from the other when their patients walk into the office.  A circus vet might need to know how to treat the chimpanzee differently than its trainer.  But does any doctor care about the ape-to-man story line?
15. Kin selection: 9%.  Aha!  These authors are “group selectionists.”  Michael Ruse, get on their case.  Does a doctor need to know what evolutionists are arguing about?  He’s got better things to do.
16. Proximate/ultimate distinction: 5%.  Another head scratcher.  What does this have to do with evolution, medicine, or the price of tea in China?

The authors apparently feel that listing these assumed “core concepts” will cause Marcus Welby to think, “Hmmm, I never learned about that; maybe I should go back to Darwin school to improve my career.”  But look at each one, and they are either not the sole property of the Darwin Party, or have nothing to do with macroevolution, or have nothing to do with medicine.  We repeat: medical schools do not waste valuable time teaching evolution, because it is useless.
    Next time you go to the hospital, you had better hope your doctor knows more about intelligent design than evolution, or he might yank something out and say, “You don’t need this; it’s just a useless vestige of a tree shrew in your ancestry.” Or s/he might let you die, believing that (1) the pathogen has just as much a right to a living as you do, or (2) natural selection needs to let the fittest survive, and the germs are clearly the fittest in the evolutionary arms race going on in your body.  Wait till these evolutionists wind up on a hospital bed themselves.  Chances are they won’t care much about the evolutionary qualifications of the surgeon.  Rather, they will be praying earnestly for the likes of a Louis Pasteur instead of a Dr. Mengele.
Next headline on: Schools. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Other stars are known to be violent and sometimes explosive.  How our own can be so gentle and benign despite a violently churning, pulsating, complex interior and surface (photosphere) is due to a large number of “lucky” accidents, including our protective storm windows here at earth.  These detailed images will provide insight for solar astronomers seeking to explain many mysterious features of the sun.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Stars. • Next amazing story.

The sea floor was not supposed to be undisturbed for so long.  The tooth is evidence that the creature did not die millions of years ago.
    Unheard-of wonders remain to be discovered on this living planet.  Ugly as they are to our sensibilities, these creatures are all remarkably adapted to their extreme environment.  Many of them have features not seen in other members of their orders and families.  And they represent arthropods, bony fish, cartilaginous fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, echinoderms and more – totally different groups of animals, all with adaptations to high pressure and darkness.
    The writer of Psalm 104 didn’t know a thousandth of the amazing details in the sea when he exclaimed, “O LORD, how manifold are Your works!  In wisdom You have made them all.  The earth is full of Your possessions-- this great and wide sea, in which are innumerable teeming things, living things both small and great.  There the ships sail about; there is that Leviathan which You have made to play there.”
Next headline on: Fish. • Next headline on: Bugs and Creeping Things. • Next headline on: Fossils. • Next amazing story.

Two hundred years ago, our fledgling nation chose to send Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery on one of the greatest overland expeditions in history, and within a generation the discoveries they made reaped benefits for the entire country.  Today, we send robotic explorers to the planet Mars as a bold step forward in our quest for understanding the prospects for life elsewhere in our solar system and to lay the groundwork for future human voyages to the Red Planet.

Significant difference: Lewis and Clark were not trying to discover primordial soup.  This was 56 years before Darwin’s book, when most scientists still believed life had been created.  Part of their mission was to examine new varieties of life they already knew existed on the Blue Planet.
    This essay, so typical of Darwinian daydreaming, makes it seem the Darwinists are lonely.  Since they have cast out belief in a God and an afterlife, maybe they want to share their despair with some other despairing beings in this interlude between a bang and a heat death.  Misery craves company.
    Ever notice how evidence for evolution is always in the future tense?  If we find life on Mars, then we can really bash those creationists.  If not, we’ll just move the battlefield farther out, ad infinitum.  But why should finding life elsewhere prove evolution?  Isn’t God omnipresent and omnipotent?
Next headline on: Mars. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Too bad they didn’t read the PNAS paper May 2002 by Oxford scientists.  It would have saved them a lot of needless energy.
    Those who think Darwinian evolution is a coherent theory, embraced by all scientists unquestioningly, fail to recognize the deep divisions within the Darwin Party.  This is one of them: the individual selectionists vs. the group selectionists.  The blind are only fighting the blind, however, because neither of them seem able to explain the strange, altruistic behavior of Presbyterians.
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

• “Welcome to the Dark Side: Delighted to See You” by Linda Rowen and Robert Coontz introduces the dark subject:

  Dark stars, the dark age, dark matter, and dark energy are the major components of the dark side of the universe: 96% of the universe consists of mass and energy we can’t see and don’t really understand.

• ”“The Warped Side of Dark Matter” by Robert Irion examines whether dark matter can be detected through weak gravitational lensing.  Astronomers are lining up to survey the sky looking for the effect, but have not detected it yet.

• “Dark Energy Tiptoes Toward the Spotlight” by Charles Seife introduces the new and radical concept of dark energy.  Astronomers studying Type 1a supernovae first postulated in 1997 an antigravity force causing the universal expansion to accelerate.  “On the face of it, this was an absurd conclusion,” he admits, but formerly timid astronomers are now boldly charging into this dark region:

  These are baby steps into a new realm of physics that was entirely obscure until a few years ago--and scientists are just beginning to figure out its properties.  “I’d love to be able to take a lump of dark energy and see what happens when you knock it about, squish it, drop it on the floor,” says Campbell [sic; Caldwell? the article mentions Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth].  But short of that, observations of supernovae and eventually the evolution of distant galaxy clusters and galaxies will begin to pull back the veil over dark energy.  Until then, dark energy will likely be the darkest mystery in a very dark universe.

• “Evidence for Black Holes” by Mitchell C. Begelman explores the “overwhelming circumstantial evidence for black holes,” though “the measurements discussed so far do not establish that the dark masses and compact objects we detect are the black holes whose properties are predicted so precisely by general relativity.”  Begelman does not make it clear what the connection is between black holes and dark matter or dark energy.

• “New Light on Dark Matter” by Jeremiah Ostriker and Paul Steinhardt discusses what the mystery material might be.  WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are a leading contender, CCDM (cold collisionless dark matter) is a runner-up, but there are seven alternatives invented to explain problems with the front runners.  Where did the Dark Matter and Dark Energy concepts come from?  They explain:

  After the introduction of inflationary theory, many cosmologists became convinced that the universe must be flat and that the total energy density must equal the value (termed the critical value) that distinguishes a positively curved, closed universe from a negatively curved, open universe.  Cosmologists became attracted to the beguiling simplicity of a universe in which virtually all of the energy density consists of some form of matter, about 4% being ordinary matter and 96% dark matter.  In fact, observational studies were never really compliant with this vision.  Although there was a wide dispersion in total mass density estimates, there never developed any convincing evidence that there was sufficient matter to reach the critical value.  The discrepancy between observation and the favored theoretical model became increasingly sharp.
      Dark energy came to the rescue when it was realized that there was not sufficient matter to explain the structure and nature of the universe.  The only thing dark energy has in common with dark matter is that both components neither emit nor absorb light.

• “Throwing Light on Dark Energy” by Robert Kirshner attempts

  ...to learn whether the dark energy is a modern version of Einstein’s cosmological constant or another form of dark energy that changes with time.  Either conclusion is an enigma that points to gaps in our fundamental understanding of gravity.

  Is it justified, though, to posit invisible entities?

  In the self-proclaimed age of “precision cosmology,” we know the amount of each component to a few percent, but in the spirit of “honest cosmology” we also have to admit we do not know precisely what either of them is.  But we are not helpless.  We can observe light emitted by supernova explosions to trace the history of cosmic expansion to learn more about the invisible forces that shape the universe.

  Kirshner reviews the evidences for cosmic expansion and acceleration, but more and better observations are needed.  Nevertheless, he ends on an optimistic note:

  Theorists may be wary of the coincidence between the present and the onset of cosmic acceleration.  Observers are delighted by this coincidence and by the coincidence between our own brief lives and the instant when technology has made these measurements possible.  We are incredibly lucky to be working just at the moment when the pieces of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle are falling into place, locking together, and revealing the outline of the pieces yet to come.  Dark energy is the biggest missing piece and a place where astronomical observations point to a gaping hole in present knowledge of fundamental physics.

Attractive models are not reality, and hopes are not done deals.  Since we are not impressed by such things here, we always sweep it away look for any kernels of hard evidence behind the fluff of words and abstruse math.  Consider several things from the above quotes:

• The holes in our knowledge involve fundamental things, not details.  There are, as stated, “gaping” holes.
• Dark matter made its debut because of the attractiveness of the inflationary big bang cosmology.
• Dark energy made its debut to rescue dark matter from observations that conflicted with inflationary theory.
• Nobody knows what either of these entities are.  The proportions between them are due not to observational evidence, but what is needed to sustain the most popular inflationary models.
• Evidence is always in the future tense.
• Observational studies were never compliant with the “vision.”
• The conclusions are absurd.
• We need more funding.
• More funding and “honest cosmology” do not necessarily go hand in hand.

It appears that cold dark matter was invented as a cosmic fudge factor to make the models work, but when the most popular model got too convoluted to expect CDM to do it all, they needed a bigger, better fudge factor; thus was invented dark energy.  So now there are two ghosts, the big ghost and the little ghost.  When the little ghost can’t take the heat, the big brother ghost comes to bat.
    If this dark stuff comprises 96% of reality, then it should be right here: right on earth, all around us, even passing through our bodies without interacting with ordinary matter.  Yes, Mr. Peabody, you are surrounded by WIMPs you cannot see, but they control the origin and destiny of the universe.  Is this dorky, or what?  It’s as weird as Star Wars, with some invisible spiritual entity permeating space and explaining everything.  “Trust your feelings, Luke!  I can feel the hate [against creationism] rising within you.  Let go, give in, yield to the dark side!  You will become more powerful, and a part of ... The Empire.”
    Science is supposed to be about observable, repeatable, measurable phenomena, not invoking dark, dark, dark entities to explain things that don’t fit one’s favorite model.  Science says, if the model doesn’t work, chuck it.  If the assumptions are unjustified, scuttle them.  If the philosophy behind the assumptions is unsupportable, change it; but that takes courage and can incur the wrath of The Empire.  If a metaphysical cosmology is wrong, don’t become seduced by the dark side of the farce, no matter how big the Empire that supports it.  Don’t trust your feelings, Luke.  Do the right thing.  Join the rebellion: come to the light.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

We’re going to stick our neck out and offer a hypothesis.  First of all, it is apparent from the speed and processivity (ability to process lots of letters without failure) that RecBCD is very well designed.  It doesn’t seem to slow RecD down to have the slower RecBC motor on the other track, but why don’t they both run at the same speed?  There must be a reason, and maybe the loop that RecBC forms is the clue.  In a fast winding device, like a tape drive, engineers often design a slack-uptake mechanism to prevent breakage if there is a sudden stop.  In older computer tape drives, for instance, a vacuum column maintained a loop of tape that could act as a buffer when the motors stopped or reversed direction.  Because RecBCD is so fast, maybe it was designed with a similar slack-adjusting loop on one side.
    We’ll have to wait and see whether this hunch has any merit.  Suffice it to say that we have again watched scientists uncover a superbly-efficient, highly-accurate biological machine, made up of multi-component parts, that does just what the cell needs doing.  For security reasons, DNA is tightly wrapped and hard to get to.  Once the helicase machinery is authenticated and allowed in, it needs to do its job fast, and that it does, exceptionally well.  1,000 base pairs a second: imagine!  It has to “melt” the chemical bonds between DNA letters at that high rate without causing collateral damage for its 20 to 30 second roller-coaster ride down the DNA tracks.  A good typist works about 70 words per minute; with an average word length of 5, that’s 350 letters per minute, or just under 6 letters per second.  A speed reader can go faster, but can anyone claim to read 200 words per second?  Behold RecBCD, the champ.  It’s busy at work inside your every cell, right now.  And oh, by the way, these scientists did their studies on those simple, primitive, lower forms of life: bacteria.  As you might expect, neither paper dares mention how these little machines could have evolved.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next amazing story.

How can anyone possibly know that?  You can’t go back and ask Constantine what he saw, and you can’t date an asteroid impact precisely to the very day his army was crossing the Tiber.  Why didn’t the enemy see the same sign and convert?  Constantine may well have had ulterior motives other than visions for what he did.  There are limitations to what science can tell us.  Stories like this are idle speculations, essentially worthless.
Next dumb story.

A good lesson in not jumping to conclusions.  We advised cautious optimism with both these finds, and the caution appears to have trumped the optimism in at least one case, maybe both.  Perhaps the ossuary may still prove genuine, but we should assume it is not till proven otherwise.
    We also reminded readers that the authenticity of the Bible does not depend on relics.  National Geographic makes this absurd statement: “If the 2,000-year-old ossuary were genuine, it would be the first archaeological proof that Jesus existed.  Up until now, all references to the three men [i.e., Jesus, James, Joash] have been found only in manuscripts.”  Why are not manuscripts considered evidence potentially as solid as etchings in rock?  Is the only evidence for American presidents the engravings of four of them on Mt. Rushmore?  Don’t presidential libraries and manuscripts provide even better evidence?  Come on.  Manuscripts, when adjudged to be genuine, were written by contemporaries just as surely as a stonemason with a chisel – and they can provide a much greater wealth of detail.  Evaluate the Biblical manuscripts with good historical-grammatical technique, and you do not need to find the name Jesus etched in a bone box to provide proof he existed.
    Meanwhile, there is much more to dig and discover out there, but it is not always easy to find.  Consider that only one wall remains of Herod’s huge temple, but no one doubts the rest of it existed.  There is plenty of “hard” archaeological evidence already to confirm the genuineness and historical accuracy of the Biblical manuscripts.  Don’t expect to find a stone inscription of Jesus under every tree in Israel.  The more valuable a relic, the more eagerly sought by thieves or destroyed by enemies.  If we have seen as much destruction and looting as took place in Iraq in one month, how much has been lost in thousands of years of major wars and occupations?  Read the manuscripts.
Next headline on: The Bible.

• The standard model is less a solid edifice than a scaffolding with many gaps, resting on uncertain foundations.
• The story has become familiar, but consider its foundations.  Is there really a beginning to the Universe?  What events led to the onset of inflation?  And does the Universe even contain the ingredients necessary for inflation (in particular, the ‘inflaton field’ that purportedly drives inflation and then decays into hot matter and radiation)?  Without answers to these questions, the model is incomplete.  Most cosmologists have set these questions aside, assuming that advances in fundamental physics (such as string theory) will address them.
  They give some details why eternal universe or eternal oscillation models do not work; so “the question of what happened before inflation seems hard to avoid.” 
• The Hartle-Hawking 'no boundary proposal' [proffered in Stephen Hawking’s best seller A Brief History of Time] deals with the transition from quantum to classical cosmology, and many have hoped that this would naturally lead directly to a description of inflation on the classical side.  Unfortunately, instead it leads typically to an almost empty universe in which little or no inflation occurred.

The work of Borde* et al. combined with these other attempts, forces us to realize that the inflationary story is still incomplete.  And this is not the only unresolved issue.  The model predicts the total energy density in the Universe correctly, but the nature of 96% of that energy is unknown.  Furthermore, despite two decades of studies, the fields responsible for driving inflation have not been identified, and there is no accepted explanation for the finely tuned interactions that the fields must possess for inflation to end smoothly.  So, there are good reasons to cheer [sic] the recent breakthroughs, but there are also many fundamental issues that remain to be explored.  And there is perhaps even room for radical alternatives.

“We’re lost!” the wife laments as a couple roams down a country road in the rain at night.
“Don’t worry, honey.  I know right where we are,” the husband replies cheerfully.
“Why are you so stubborn?  Why don’t you ever want to stop and ask for directions?” she whines.
“Real men don’t need directions.  Everything is under control.  We’ll be there in no time at all, you just wait.”
“But we’ve never been there before!  We have been driving on this road for hours now, we can’t see a thing ahead, it doesn’t look anything like we thought it would, and the directions we were given were vague and don’t match what we are seeing, which is precious little at the moment.  And you claim we aren’t lost.  Can we please ask someone from around here who knows the way?
“Trust me, honey, we’ll get there eventually.  Look on the bright side.  At least we’re ahead of schedule!”
    Ponder the seriousness of the issues Gratton and Steinhardt raise, and ask yourself whether this joke fits the current situation in cosmology.  “Perhaps there is even room for radical alternatives,” they say, but which cosmology is “radical” is in the eye of the beholder.  Some consider it radical to ask for directions.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

These palindromes house many genes - which means that there is a copy at each end of the palindromic sequence.  These provide back-ups should harmful mutations arise.  The mirror-image structure also allows the arms to swap position when DNA divides.  Genes are shuffled and bad copies are purged.

For this system to work, the decoding and translation mechanisms, and the epigenetic controls, also have to know the trick.  This is a remarkable and unexpected finding.  The article states, “The male-defining chromosome was previously thought of as a wasteland where genes go to die.”  To that idea we say, hasta la vista, baby.
    You will see design or chance in this story depending on your philosophy.  Huntington Willard commented, “No one had contemplated that there would be this level of gene conversion in our own genome.  It gives us a glimpse of how the Y has protected itself.”  [How can a string of DNA protect itself if a Programmer did not design the function?]  On the other hand, the article states, “Other researchers see swapping as an evolutionary accident, not a safeguard.”  Only an evolutionist could see a self-defense mechanism and call it an accident.  One of the palindromes is nearly 3 million letters long.  Experiment: try writing your own original palindrome with just one thousandth of that: 300 letters.  Follow up experiment: now try getting a palindrome of similar length by shuffling random Scrabble letters on a table.
Next headline on: Human Body. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design. • Next amazing story.

• Hearing:  Max Planck scientists have discovered the elusive channel that converts mechanical energy into electrical signals in sensory hair cells, such as those in the cochlea of the human inner ear.  They found this in zebrafish, but worms and fruit flies have similar mechanisms.  This means, they claim, “It is very likely that this particular sensory system evolved in an ancestor common to both arthropods and chordates.”
• Intelligent Design:  William Dembski has a forthcoming book The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design.  For the outline and preface, see Access Research Network.
• Insect Flight:  Flies fly on automatic pilot.  An article from the New York Times 6/10/03 is reproduced on Access Research Network.
• Genetics:  A comparison of human and mouse genomes shows that differences do not appear at random breakpoints around the chromosomes, but only at certain “fragile sites”   in only 5% of the genome.  This overturns a thirty year old hypothesis.  Story on SciNews; original paper on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• Disease:  The complete genome of a liver carcinogen Helicobacter hepaticus shows that the disease-producing agent inhabits a “pathogenicity island” that is missing in non-virulent strains of the bacterium.  The authors of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences feel this 71-kb island may have entered the genome by horizontal gene transfer from another organism.
• Brain:  Glia cells in the brain are more than just the side-kick of the celebrities, the neurons.  “Neuroscientists are now catching up and discovering that glia not only support a number of essential neuronal functions, but also actively communicate with neurons and with one another.  By doing so, glia influence nervous system functions that have long been thought to be strictly under neuronal control,” writes Beth Stevens in the June 17 issue of Current Biology.  “Neuroscientists should have known better,” she quips, because over a century ago, Roman y Cajal had predicted that they would be important due to their sheer numbers (they outnumber neurons by a factor of 10).  But his work was largely ignored, and glia were considered to be space-filling junk, or mere scaffolding for the glitzier neurons.
• Dolphin Sonar:  Dolphins perform automatic gain control on their sonar pulses, but unlike bats, they do it on the transmitter, not the receiver.  See News and Views by Amanda Tromans in the June 19 Nature, reporting on the research paper by Whitlow Au and Kelly Benoit-Bird in the same issue.  See also Science Now, “Why Dolphins Aren’ Deaf” (because without gain control, return pulses from their clicking sounds would be deafening).

Bacteria More Orderly Than Previously Known   06/17/2003
Bacteria are not simple bags of protoplasm.  Since they lack the organelles and nuclei that eukaryotic cells possess, scientists used to think their contents were fairly unstructured and homogeneous.  That view is changing, say Zemer Gitai and Lucy Shapiro in the June 16 online preprints of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “Historically,” they agree, “perhaps because of their general lack of compartmentalized organelles, bacteria were viewed as relatively uniform at the subcellular level.”  New microscopic techniques are unveiling highly ordered structures, like protein spirals and rings that oscillate between the poles and allow the cell to locate the midpoint for cell division.  “Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the work by Shih et al,” (who imaged the spiral proteins) “is that the more closely we look, the more order we see within bacterial cells.  The fact that the phrase ‘bacteria are not just small bags of enzymes’ has become cliché is a sign that bacterial cell biology is coming of age.”
    For a related story, see our Jan 16 headline about spiral action of the bacterial cytoskeleton that repairs the inner cell wall.

Hmmm, wonder why there is no mention of the word evolution in this paper.  Maybe we need to return to the view of Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the first man to see bacteria.  Even in 1702 he realized, “From all these observations, we discern most plainly the incomprehensible perfection, the exact order, and the inscrutable providential care with which the most wise Creator and Lord of the Universe had formed the bodies of these animalcules, which are so minute as to escape our sight, to the end that different species of them may be preserved in existence.”  His exemplary observational scientific work led him to wholeheartedly reject and refute the doctrine of spontaneous generation.
    By the way, do bacteria really lack organelles?  This scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported today that he found one, and that it is challenging commonly-accepted evolutionary ideas.  Dr. Roberto Docampo said, “It appears that this organelle has been conserved in evolution from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, since it is present in both.  This argues against the belief that all eukaryotic organelles were formed when early eukaryotes swallowed prokaryotes.”  This also means that prokaryotes are not more primitive, and that the complexity of organelles goes way back into the smallest, allegedly simplest, forms of life.
Next headline on: The Cell.

Picture of Protein Evolution Emerging?   06/16/2003
“Most proteins have been formed by gene duplication, recombination, and divergence,” declare scientists from Cambridge and Stanford in the June 13 issue of Science.  “Proteins of known structure can be matched to about 50% of genome sequences, and these data provide a quantitative description and can suggest hypotheses about the origins of these processes.”  With growing numbers of genomes decoded, they feel we are well on the way to answering fundamental questions about how the huge assortment of proteins arose (emphasis added in quotes):

During the course of evolution, forms of life with increasing complexity have arisen.  What are the mechanisms that have produced the increases in protein repertoires that underlie the evolution of more complex forms of life?  How are proteins organized to form pathways?  Answers to such questions at the molecular level began to appear 40 years ago, but it is only with the advent of complete genome sequences that we have begun to get a comprehensive view.

It is now clear that the dominant mechanisms that produce increases in protein repertoires are (i) duplication of sequences that code for one or more domains; (ii) divergence of the duplicated sequences by mutations, deletions, and insertions to produce modified structures that may have useful new properties and be selected; and, in some cases, (iii) recombination of genes that results in novel arrangements of domains.

The comparison of enzymes in the same pathway in different organisms also shows that proteins responsible for the particular functions can belong to unrelated protein families.  This phenomenon is called “nonorthologous displacement”.  Variations come not just from changes in specific enzymes.  In some organisms, sections of the standard pathway are not found and the gaps are bypassed through the use of alternative pathways.  Together, these variations produce widespread plasticity in the pathways that are found in different organisms....

The earliest evolution of the protein repertoire must have involved the ab initio [Lat., from the beginning] invention of new proteins.  At a very low level, this may still take place.  But it is clear that the dominant mechanisms for expansion of the protein repertoire, in biology as we now know it, are gene duplication, divergence, and recombination.  Why have these mechanisms replaced ab initio invention?  Two plausible causes, which complement each other, can be put forward.  First, once a set of domains whose functions are varied enough to support a basic form of life had been created, it was much faster to produce new proteins with different functions by duplication, divergence, and recombination.  Second, once the error-correction procedures now present in DNA replication and protein synthesis were developed, they made the ab initio invention of proteins a process that is too difficult to be useful.

We quote extensively from this article to let them dig their own trap.  Read again and look specifically for the origin of information tied to function that has actually been observed to occur, anywhere.  Is it not all inference and deduction based on a prior acceptance of evolution?  Similarities are used to prove common ancestry, and common ancestry is used to prove similarities.  Round and round we go.
    Protein domains may behave in a certain sense like Lego parts, although this is a grossly unfair oversimplification.  The evolutionists are looking only for the Lego blocks that look similar, and assuming the similarities (homologies) derive from common ancestry.  What about the differences?  They choose to focus on similarities for philosophical reasons, but perhaps the differences raise the more fundamental questions.  Furthermore, they steadfastly refuse to consider that the similarities might be due to an intelligent cause.  After all, we all inhabit the same planet, whether bacteria, birds or people.  It would only be expected that design would produce similar metabolic pathways, requiring similar proteins (with some differences due to differing needs, or from mutation or recombination, which are not sources of new genetic information).  For a discussion on whether duplication and recombination can produce function, see the 07/09/02 headline on this subject.
    The fact is, functional proteins “appear” fully formed from the simplest organism on, and many are “highly conserved” – a phenomenon that led some Harvard scientists last year to announce the protein big bang theory.
    In today’s article, notice how these believers in protein evolution use a semantic trick to sidestep around the problem of the origin of functional information.  That trick is to use passive voice verbs, infinitives and subjunctives that contain no subject, so that it remains nebulous “who” did the action.  For example, from the last paragraph quoted above,

1. The earliest invention must have involved the ab initio invention of new proteins.  [Who, or what, was involved?]
2. Once a set of domains whose functions are varied enough to support a basic form of life had been created... [by whom?  God?  If that is what they meant, the creationists would shout “Amen!”, but clearly they mean the naturalistic magic trick of emergence, in which the miracle-worker is an unnamed combination of impersonal natural laws and chance, using unspecified mechanisms.]
3. Once the error-correction procedures now present in DNA replication and protein synthesis were developed... [Who did the developing?]

Suggestion for tough-minded thinkers: do not let them get away with this dodgeball game.  Stop them in mid-sentence and ask them to name the Subject.  Who did the creating?  Who did the developing?  Who was involved?  It will push them against the wall of chance, from which there is no escape.  If you are a consistent, doctrinaire evolutionist, there is no Who.  The “ab initio invention” of proteins has no Inventor.  To get even to a minimalist “basic form of life” you will need at least 239 proteins to “emerge” or the Ruse is over.  Good luck.  You’ll need it..
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

• In the lead story “Charting the Tree of Life”, the editors begin, “We are part of a tree of life that germinated at the dawn of evolutionary history [sic] and encompasses a vast diversity that we are only beginning to understand [sic].”  It’s a daunting task to reconstruct the tree, especially for eukaryotes, but finishing the job will have practical applications, they claim, such as helping formulate conservation policies by providing insight into the history of extinctions.
• Elizabeth Pennisi begins with three articles.  In “Modernizing the Tree of Life,” she discusses new techniques taxonomists are using to create phylogenetic trees.
• In “Drafting a Tree”, Pennisi portrays the tree-builders’ world as confidence mixed with frustration: “Systematists often say the tree of life is in good shape.  But ask them to illustrate this notion with a single diagram, and most throw up their hands in frustration.”  She unveils Science magazine’s latest consensus tree, based on input from a dozen systematists, which (though she admits “specialists may take issue with parts of the tree”), gives a sketchy picture of a “work in progress.”  A larger version of the tree is provided as a web feature. About half the lines are shaded with a color indicating controversy.
• In “Plants Find Their Places in the Tree of Life”, Elizabeth Pennisi claims the botanists are way ahead of the zoologists in building their phylogenetic trees: “Researchers trying to piece together the tree of animal life are hacking through dense foliage, barely able to see the top branches, never mind the distant twigs (see main text).  But their colleagues studying plants have many of their phylogenetic trees neatly pruned and manicured,” she says.
• In “Dating the Tree of Life”, Michael Benton and Francisco Ayala admit that morphologists and molecular phylogenists have differed in placement of groups by a factor of two, but claim the discrepant groups are converging toward consensus.
• In “The Deep Roots of Eukaryotes”, S.L. Baldauf examines the recent revolutionary view that eukaryotes branched off much earlier than thought.  The article talks about “radically revising this picture again” and “fundamental rethinking of the position of the root.  Together these data suggest major gaps in our understanding simply of what eukaryotes are or, when it comes to the tree, even which end is up.”  Sections are entitled: “Eukaryotic Diversity: To (Nearly) Every Rule There Is an Exception” and “What We Thought We Knew But Didn’t.”  Here is an excerpt from the section “The Root of All Roots”, about the radical new idea of placing the root of the eukaryote tree between opisthokonts (animals, fungi, and their allies, including people) and nearly all the other major eukaryote taxa (emphasis added in all quotes):

  Essentially, it turns the tree on its head, rooting it within the former “crown radiation.”  This is a radical reinterpretation and would mean that opisthokonts branched off very early from the main line of eukaryote descent.  The LCA [last common ancestor] of all extant eukaryotes would then have been a far more complex organism than previously envisioned, and any any similarities between, e.g., animals and plants would simply be universal eukaryote traits.  It also suggests that opisthokonts may be older than previously thought, consistent with the diversity of single-celled protists now thought to be closely allied to animals and/or fungi.

  Before this, they said “The most important point in a phylogenetic tree is its root.  The root is the oldest point in the tree and corresponds to the theoretical last common ancestor (LCA) of everything in the tree.”
• In “Phylogenomics: Intersection of Evolution and Genomics”, Jonathan Eisen and Claire Fraser of Rockville, Maryland’s Institute of Genomics claim that evolution is helping us understand genomics: “Although it is generally accepted that genome sequences are excellent tools for studying evolution, it is perhaps less well accepted that evolutionary analysis is a powerful tool in studies of genome sequences.  In particular, evolutionary analysis helps to place comparative genomic studies in perspective.”
• In “Preserving the Tree of Life”, Macy, Gittleman and Purvis discuss how the emerging tree of life is informing policy on conservation.
• In “View from a Twig” Jennifer Graves summarizes the grand sweep of Darwin’s picture:

  More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin systematically charted relationships of organisms in space and time.  What emerged was the concept of the Tree of Life, a cornerstone in evolutionary theory that, as well as classifying organisms, has the potential to make sense of all biology.

  She thinks this big picture, despite the confusion in the details, needs to be inculcated in the schools early on:

  The concept of the unity of life--the most simple and general rules of molecular structure, chemistry, and genetics that apply to all organisms--should be introduced in grade school.  These rules can be linked firmly to an understanding [sic] of the way in which the genome has gradually changed over the more than 3 billion years that life has been unfolding [sic].  The fascinating descriptive biology of diverse organisms that my generation grew up on can come later, once there is a framework to hang it on.  That way, future generations will be able to appreciate the beauty of the Tree of Life without its form being obscured by the tangle of twigs and leaves.

There is so much verbiage in these articles, and so many revealing quotes, that it would be impossible to deal with it fairly in a Headlines service trying to encapsulate it.  The bottom line impression these authors present is, We know the Big Picture is right, but the details are confusing and contradictory.  This is a recipe for self-deception.  When the deceived hold the power, and want to force their belief on the children, it is a recipe for self-perpetuating deception.  Since we are not impressed by bluffing and glittering generalities here, we took a look at three sample papers from the most recent issue of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (28:1, July 2003).  In each case, the authors were having difficulty resolving the roots of their trees, found groups they could not resolve, and found contradictions between morphology and genes.  This has been the pattern, not the exception, in every molecular phylogeny story we have reported over the last two years.
    One would think, if the Big Picture were so clear, one could see it in the details, but the opposite is true.  Never do they ever consider alternative explanations for similarities found.  And throughout, complex features abruptly appear, fully formed, without ancestors, earlier than thought possible.  Recall that last July, scientists portrayed tree-building as an impossible task, and we deduced that it was only possible by assuming what needed to be proved (Darwinian evolution), a clear case of circular reasoning.  In short, molecular phylogeny appears to be a deductive approach, based on the prior belief that Darwinian evolution is true, therefore these confusing details must fit together somehow.  If so, it is not science; it is faith.
    In the Biblical story, an angel guarded the way back to the Tree of Life after Adam and Eve sinned.  A new way beyond death to the Tree of Life was made available by Christ through his death on the cross.  Now, the evolutionary establishment is guarding the way out of the fallen world with the sword of political and educational power.  They are saying to the children, “The tree of life is not over there; that was just a myth.  The tree of life is behind you.  You don’t want to pass through the Brandenburg Gate to freedom.  You already live in the freest land of all, right here.  Stay with us.  Our tree of life will give you wisdom, wholeness, and hope.  We are evolving.  Someday, we will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: The Bible.

• Fossilization (Taphonomy):  What conditions are required to make a fossil?  Derek E.G. Briggs of Yale reviews minerals, microbial activity, types of organisms and other factors required to preserve soft tissues.  He focuses on the remarkable extent of detail preserved in fossils of certain soft-bodied animals.  In the paper, “The Role of Decay and Mineralization in the Preservation of Soft-Bodied Fossils,” the stem rapid appears 11 times.
• Ancient Oxygen: In “Phanerozoic Atmosphere Oxygen,” five geologists examine whether atmospheric oxygen has fluctuated in the past, possibly reaching levels as high as 35% in Carboniferous times.  The subject of oxygen level variation has been “essentially ignored or assumed to be held to an almost constant level” till now.  They believe higher oxygen levels might explain the giant insects found fossilized in Permo-Carboniferous strata.  But they wonder whether it would also have led to catastrophic wildfires.
• Io Volcanoes: Paul Geissler of Lunar and Planetary Lab, University of Arizona, Tucson surveys the main Voyager and Galileo findings into a “state of the moon address,” examining evidence for high-temperature ultramafic lavas, mass loss to the Io torus surrounding Jupiter, rapid resurfacing rates, uniform global heat output and the characteristics of specific volcanic features.  Many basic questions and puzzles remain.
• Black Sea Flood:  William Ryan and colleagues attempt to defend the Black Sea Flood hypothesis against criticisms.

• Meteorites:  In the June 12 issue of Nature, Conel Alexander puzzles over “A Question of Timing,” how to get the contents of meteorites in sync.  The chondules have CAIs (calcium-aluminum inclusions) containing short-lived radionuclides and show evidence of melting at temperatures up to 2000K.

Honing the Concept of Biological Information   06/12/2003
“Well established” is how Jack W. Szostak (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) describes the concept of biological information in the June 12 issue of Nature.  “We are all familiar with the idea that it is the sequence of the nucleotides or amino acids that make up DNA, RNA or protein molecules that determine their structure and function,” he says, and this constitutes a type of molecularly coded information.  But how do we define information in proteins, when we find numerous examples of different sequences that perform the same biological function?  And how do we measure the amount of information in a biological molecule?  A new concept of information is needed to deal with the special case of biological complexity.  He examines the old approaches before suggesting an alternative:

1. Information content “is usually thought of in terms of the amount of information required to specify a unique sequence or structure.  This viewpoint derives from classical information theory, which does not consider the meaning of a message, defining the information content of a string of symbols as simply that required to specify, store or transmit the string.  Thus, the unannotated human genome sequence can be encoded in a 750-megabyte file, but this could be greatly reduced in size by the application of standard data-compression techniques to account for internal repetitions.”
2. Algorithmic complexity approaches “further define the amount of information needed to specify sequences with internal order or structure,” but these also fail to account for redundancy due to related sequences that are structurally and functionally equivalent.
3. Physical complexity addresses this objection.  It is “a rigorously defined measure of the information content of such degenerate sequences, which is based on functional criteria and is measured by comparing alignable sequences that encode functionally equivalent structures.”  But “different molecular structures may be functionally equivalent,” he says, pointing out another shortcoming of the above approaches.
       Szostak suggests this alternative:
4. “A new measure of information - functional information - is required to account for all possible sequences that could potentially carry out an equivalent biochemical function, independent of the structure or mechanism used.”

A central claim of intelligent design theory is that complex specified information is a reliable indicator of an intelligent cause.  It’s good that Szostak has brought the concept of biological information to the attention of Nature readers, and has offered some insight into what it is and how it is measured, even if he had little to say about where it came from (his views on this are not apparent in the article).
    Notice that he considers the idea of biological information well established.  There is no question that biomolecules are carriers of information, and that this information is not just meaningless (Shannon information, named after pioneer information theorist Claude Shannon), but tied to function.  Szostak’s cone diagram can be expanded to a landscape with hills and valleys, with hills representing energy barriers and high levels of functional information.  The steepness of the hill can represent the amount of specificity, and the height the level of functional activity.  The probability that a random walk may reach a hilltop may be higher somewhat if there are several routes to get there (a concept called degeneracy), but the steeper the peak, the fewer the options and the more improbable a random walk will arrive at the summit, or at a specified level where the plane intersects the cone: i.e., where a desired level of function is achieved.
    With this in mind, consider real biomolecules.  There are protein machines featured in previous headlines that perform very precise, multiple functions with low tolerance for error (see last week’s headline on tRNA synthetase), or exhibit irreducible complexity in that they are composed of multiple parts working together, each necessary for function (for example, see ATP synthase).  This challenges the belief that functional information could arrive by chance.  To exacerbate the challenge, consider that most enzymes are involved in protein complexes that perform coordinated functions.  So we observe highly specified assemblages of highly specified components.  For example, the whole process of DNA translation and protein synthesis is a veritable factory assembly line of protein machines, with built in error correction and feedback regulation.  It strains credibility beyond the breaking point to think such high, narrow probability peaks could ever be scaled by chance.  Richard Dawkins agrees that chance is out of the question to create the highly-adaptive structures in living things, but he believes Mount Improbable can be scaled incrementally by natural selection.  Unfortunately for his belief, natural selection is disallowed before a complex self-replicating system is available.  If intelligent design is excluded from consideration, all that remain as sources for functional information are chance and natural law.
    In our online book, Evolution: Possible or Impossible?, author Dr. James F. Coppedge calculated the chances to get just one protein, let alone a self-replicating factory of hundreds of proteins.  He allowed for multiple substitutions, and gave 14 generous concessions to make it easier for chance to succeed in constructing a typical-length, functional protein.  Even with extreme allowances for degeneracy and ridiculously favorable conditions, such as assuming all amino acids are already left-handed, and assuming a million billion random chains were tried per second, chance failed miserably.
    That example was an elaborate thought experiment using mathematical laws of probability.  Szostak recommends a radically different, empirical approach.  Using advanced techniques, look for function in collections of random sequences.  You’re on.  Better be willing to wait, though; in Coppedge’s vivid analogy, in the time required to expect one usable protein by chance, an ameba crawling across the universe one inch per year, carrying one atom per round trip, could haul the entire universe across — not just once, but 10⁶⁴ times.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Sanity check.  First of all, realize that all the evidence Noor cites offers nothing to explain Darwinian evolution in the macroevolutionary sense, but only horizontal variations among Drosophila fruit flies that might diverge enough to prevent interbreeding.  Notice also that Noor presents no proofs, but only tentative hunches, that scientists might be on the track of understanding this topic.
    That being understood, recall that we have all been told all our lives that Darwin discovered how species originate (wasn’t that the title of his book?).  We have been told Darwin had the best idea anyone ever had, and have been led to believe that evolution is all about the origin of new species through mutation and natural selection.  Natural selection is the insight that made Darwin famous and gave us our modern world of genomics, eugenics, cutthroat capitalism, Marxism and Pol Pot.  A lot of political and economic and moral baggage has been riding on the assumption that scientists proved natural selection is the law, and we’d better just get used to it, churches, politicians and all.  Now, read these quotes from Noor’s pro-evolutionary, optimistic article (emphasis added) and get ready for a shock.  Have we been sold a bill of goods?

• For some 70 years, researchers have been crossing different fruitfly species in an attempt to answer one of the most fundamental questions in evolutionary biology: what are the genetic changes that cause one species to split into two?
• But the identity of such genes, their normal functions and the forces that shaped their evolution are largely unknown.
• [He lists two difficulties in tracking down these genes.]  So, even in species for which complete genome sequences are available, identifying the genes that cause speciation has proved difficult.
• On page 715 of this issue, however, Presgraves and colleagues describe how they mapped, identified and analysed one such gene.
• [Of the two other possible speciation genes reported recently], no functional tests have been reported that support its role in hybrid sterility...
• So [because they satisfied a functional test criterion] ... Presgraves and colleagues’ demonstration of the effect of the Nup96 gene on hybrid fitness is more compelling.
• One reason why evolutionary biologists seek specific genes associated with speciation is that, since Darwin’s time, considerable debate has surrounded the exact role that natural selection plays in species formation.
• In today’s era of genomics, many researchers have identified ‘rapidly evolving’ genes that appear to be targets of natural selection, and have suggested that these may be important in species formation.  Until recently, however, there has been little evidence that genes involved in speciation are necessarily direct targets of natural selection, or are evolving rapidly.  Presgraves et al. also address this issue....
• These findings accord with other data suggesting that the characteristics that define species are often the products of natural selection.
• A decade ago, the joke was that spell-checkers regularly attempted to substitute the word 'speciation' with 'speculation'.  Now, the availability of numerous whole-genome sequences, the ability to survey patterns of expression for all genes in a genome simultaneously, and tremendous improvements in computational efficiency are bringing some of the most concrete advances in our understanding of the genetic changes that cause speciation.  Speculation in this area will soon be a thing of the past. 

Gasp!  Now they tell us!  All this time they were bluffing?  100 million people have been slaughtered on the premise that Darwinian survival of the fittest was an ironclad law of nature, and evolutionary scientists are just now hoping they might have begun to get the initial glimpse of the possibility of the belief that they may be on the verge of starting to get ready to understand how it works, or if it works at all?
    Smirkers of the world, unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Design — what biologists call 'adaptation' — is an obvious feature of life.  People have probably been thinking about it for as long as they have been thinking about anything.  Classically, it provided the basis of the 'argument from design', one of five arguments put forward for the existence of God.  Darwin undermined that argument, but it has enjoyed something of a revival in the latest version of creationism, known as 'intelligent design creationism'.

There is no central argument to unify the book, but Ruse holds a consistently darwinian position against all its critics.  Adaptation exists, he says; it matters; it is not explained by God; it is explained, and with exemplary scientific propriety, by natural selection; and it is a legitimate topic for scientific research.  The various people who have argued otherwise are making various kinds of mistake.

Michael Ruse is a paradoxical character worth watching.  Based on this and previous headlines (Mar 7: Is evolution a secular religion?, Feb 18: debate against William Dembski, Sept 3: Can selection explain the Presbyterians?), you would almost get the impression he is outwardly bombastic and inwardly conflicted.  Outwardly, he’s acting like Saddam’s press correspondent screaming “The Americans are defeated!  We are victorious!” just as the tanks are entering Baghdad, but then he spends a lot of thought examining the argument from design and asking if evolution is a secular religion.  “Of course it isn’t!” he reassures himself as he straps on his armor for another bout against the enemy with renewed self-generated vigor, but what is his heart telling him after so much exposure to thoughtful philosophers and great scientists through the ages who believed and taught the design argument with wisdom and composure?
    On the one hand, his bluffing anti-I.D. sparring is almost comical, but on the other hand he frequently reprimands his fellow evolutionists who stray from Pharisaic Darwinism.  To his credit, he debates I.D. scientists, and rounds up the strays among his own who get out of line; one of his books* chastised, and even exposed with McCarthyesque vigilance, any evolutionist brethren who showed the slightest hint of teleology or “progressive evolution”, as if he wanted to avoid any charges of hypocrisy from creationists.  But one looks for substance in his arguments for how it is possible to dichotomize evolutionary science from its philosophical implications, or why zeal for the strictest sect of Darwinism should bring wisdom, peace and brotherhood, and gets this empty feeling.  Having heard so many of Stephen’s speeches and seen so many creationists get unfairly stoned, maybe he is a candidate for a Damascus experience.  Dembski, Meyer et al can smooth the way by letting him know they love their enemies, and always extend a warm hand to the penitent.  Brother Ruse, receive thy sight.
______
*See review by David L. Hull (philosophy, Northwestern Univ) in Nature 6 Feb 1997 of Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology by Michael Ruse (Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).
Hull says of Ruse (emphasis added): “By the time we get to the present, Ruse has made a strong case for the role of beliefs about progress in evolutionary biology.  He detracts from his very strong general thesis by pushing too hard to make too many present-day evolutionary biologists progressivists.  Certainly some do believe in evolutionary progress, but many do not.  As I read excerpts from his interviews with present-day biologists, my pity for his subjects grew apace.  He kept after them relentlessly to confess: ‘Were you or have you ever been a progressivist?’  Finally, Niles Eldredge exploded, ‘I don’t care!  I really don’t care!’”
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Tim White was the same guy that cautioned his fellow paleoanthropologists in March not to overinterpret diversity in fossils.  Since these fossils were found before then, and he must have been working on his Nature paper at the time, was he trying to protect his upcoming day in the media limelight?
    This kind of story is so predictable, it is downright pathetic to see the news media jump all over it.  When are they going to learn the game?  The bones change, but the story line is the same:

1. This spectacular new find is the most important in history. 
2. This find sets a new age record, rendering previous finds obsolete. 
3. This new find undermines the work of my competitors. 
4. This new find supports my pet theory. 
5. Not everybody agrees.  A rival team likes its pet theory better. 
6. This find shakes the family tree.
7. This new find raises more questions than it answers. 
8. The data are confusing, contradictory and unexpected.
9. This new find has nothing to do with human evolution.
10. We need more funding. 

We get the joke, because we have heard it so many times before.  When are the BBC and National Geographic and the major news networks going to catch on?  They’re being used.  The soothsayers of paleoanthropology use the media to beat their chests before their rivals and stay in the ring.  National Geographic hasn’t wised up still, after all the decades they’ve been reporting the now-obsolete claims of their favorite cover-story experts, Louis and Mary Leakey.
    It’s legitimate to take a bone to a lab, measure it, weight it, report its location, compare it to others, and run the usual observable, repeatable scientific techniques.  But inferring relationships is highly dependent on one’s assumptions.  There are enough fully human bones and enough extinct ape bones lying around to tell any story they want.  Within human species and within ape species there is enough diversity to massage the data into any pet theory.  This is about team rivalry and job security, not science.  White found two adults and a kid that left some bones.  They were fully human.  They lived in Africa.  That’s the extent of it.  Big deal.  The dating depends on evolutionary assumptions, and the storytelling is artistic license imposed on the data, not derived from them.
    In evolutionary news reporting, there is a sucker born every minute — wherever the baloney detectors have been switched off.  Now that you know the context, here’s how the story came across as the lead MSNBC news bite sent to a Motorola pager (emphasis added):

OLDEST HUMAN FOSSILS DISCOVERED:  Homo sapiens fossils found in Ethiopia are the oldest known found [sic], making them a key link between pre-humans and modern humans.

*Sigh.*  Sad.
Next headline on: Early Man. • Next dumb story.

Whenever we see a paper in PNAS on the topic “Evolution,” we get all excited because we think that now, finally, we are going to get some real evidence for this monumental philosophy that has taken over the world since 1859.  Now that we can look into the genes, the trail of evolution should be plainly evident.  But what have we here?  All they found were complex genes that go clear back to single-celled organisms, and have been extremely conserved all the way up to humans.  And 30% of them are found in plants!  Is this what evolution teaches, that for over nearly two billion years there has been little or no change?
    Their timeline shows “possible origin of NS-related genes” at 1700 MYA (million years ago), and “basic genes for common ancestral CNS” at 540 million years ago at the time of some imaginary common ancestor of chordates (including us), arthropods, roundworms and flatworms, with little change since then except for gene loss (devolution), gene recruitment, gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer or mutation, none of which are mechanisms for increasing the complexity of something as marvelously coordinated as a nervous system.  But there can’t have been much of any of that if humans share all 116 CNS genes with flatworms for hundreds of millions of years.  This would be falsifying evidence against evolution if these scientists were not already convinced they had to fit their data into an evolutionary story no matter what.
    Let’s think out of the box for a moment.  Look at the same data from a top-down (creation) approach, instead of a bottom-up (evolution) mindset.  Complex organisms are fully designed to do what they do.  As you work down the scale of complexity, simpler organisms still need many of the same genes and proteins and developmental pathways, cell signalling, etc.  But there is more they can do without.  So you expect to find many of the same genes, or simplified homologues, all the way back to single-celled organisms.  But there will be differences, too; some from mutations or duplications that have accumulated since the creation (especially if there were genetic bottlenecks along the way).  Other differences could be due to factors controlling gene expression for different needs and environments.  If the designer is the Judeo-Christian God, the Genesis account says He introduced living things in a progression over six days, starting with plants, then fish and small animals to large land animals.  Again, one would expect to see baseline genes conserved all the way up.  None of these similarities would imply common ancestry, but they would imply common design.
    There is nothing in the data set from this paper that would contradict such an interpretation, but there is plenty that argues against the evolutionary interpretation.  These authors give no hint of an explanation for the “emergence” (evolutionists’ favorite hand-waving synonym for miracle) of complex genes for a nervous system in single-celled organisms long before the alleged Cambrian explosion, or how they become “recruited” (a subtle personification fallacy) for use by higher animals that needed a central nervous system.  On the contrary, they just assume all this, because they are obsessed with viewing the world through Darwinian glasses.  Notice how they admit in passing that, “Although there are some contradictions between the molecular and morphological data,” (a common theme in these kinds of genome comparisons), this is never allowed to shake their faith in Darwin: “there is no doubt that planarians are among the descendants of early bilateral animals.”  But watch how along the way, they are surprised, flummoxed, puzzled and astounded at the data.
    A hint that something is dreadfully wrong with the story can be seen in their use of the word “interestingly” three times over unexpected results, (1) interestingly, plants have nervous system genes; (2) interestingly, humans and flatworms share all the 116 nervous system genes they examined; and (3) interestingly, flatworms contain a gene important for CNS development in chordates.  What must go through an evolutionist CNS when its user looks at such results, scratches its chin and mumbles, “Intedesting... veddy intedesting....”
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Evolutionists have a story for everything, but they were not there to know what happened.  Maybe it was this, and maybe it was that, they say, but the Biblical story of the creation of man and woman “naked and not ashamed” before sin cannot be considered, because that is “religious” and not “scientific.”  Since when is telling just-so stories scientific?  There is a strong reason for favoring the Genesis account over this buggy new story: it fits the design we observe.  If you ever get to see the illustrated lecture “Beauty is Skin Deep” by Dr. David Menton, you would see wonders on a microscopic scale that could never have evolved.
    Human skin is a fantastic invention.  It regulates heat, keeps body fluids in but allows selective absorption, protects against infection, is self-healing and self-regenerating, and is lined with thousands of advanced sensors for touch, heat, pain, and cold.  It is our largest single organ, providing us a wetsuit with feeling.  It is a key component of the God-given pleasure of sex.  Skin is a living, breathing, dynamic, regenerating, and beautiful design, and points out one of the most intriguing differences between humans and apes.  We are not really hairless; even the slickest parts of our skin, including the palms of our hands, are covered with tiny transparent hairs that are essential to the sense of touch.  The way hair shafts grow to a certain prescribed length from the base while safely anchored inside their follicles is another amazing facet of the wonder of human skin.
    Adaptation is evidence of design, not evolution.  Every creature is suited to its environment.  The unique attributes of human posture, skin, speech, brains, aesthetics and our innate sense of morality are suited to our created role as beings made in the image of God, placed here on an ideal planet to enjoy and obey our all-wise Designer.  Things haven’t been as beautiful, unfortunately, since the rebellion.  Have you been reconciled?
Next headline on: Darwinian Evolution. • Next headline on: Early Man. • Next headline on: Human Body.

OK, we have to tell the obligatory three-legged chicken joke.  A city slicker driving through Arkansas noticed a Three-Legged Chicken Ranch.  Out of curiosity, he stopped in and asked the rancher about it.  “Do you really raise three-legged chickens?”  “Yep,” said the ranch owner.  “I got into the bidness ’cause Ah lahk drumsticks, muh wahf lahks drumsticks, and cousin Joe over dar, hey lahks drumsticks, too.  Theh was never ’nuf to go ’round.”  “So how do they taste?” the tourist asked.  “Dunno,” he replied.  “Hain’t been able to ketch one yet.”
    Dumb, now dumber: this is progress.  This is the driving force of evolution.  Heeeeeee HAW!
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Darwinian Evolution. • Next dumb story.

How to Tweak a Translator   06/09/2003
As discussed here several times before (April 29, Nov. 1), DNA translation depends on a family of 20 specialized proteins that act as language interpreters.  They are called the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), and their unique property of being able to precisely match an amino acid to the transfer RNA that codes for it means they understand two codes: the nucleotide code of DNA, and the amino-acid code of proteins.  How could such an interpreter evolve?
    In the June 9 online preprints of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, three French biochemists claim to have fused parts together to create an “artificial” tRNA synthetase.  Each aaRS molecule has four functional parts: a domain that binds AMP to the amino acid, a domain that acylates the amino acid, a domain that edits the tRNA attachment, and a domain that joins the two together.  The ability of each of these functions to work depends on the precise order of the amino acids in the synthetase (for alanine’s synthetase, 876 of them).  These scientists took out the normal part of amino acids #368-461, the part involved in aminoacylation, and fused in some of their own polypeptides they had selected for their ability to acylate the amino acid alanine.  Out of seven mutants, some did better than others, and none showed any significant energy penalty in the other end’s ability to bind RNA.
    They also tried substituting other amino acids in the active site of their “artificial” synthetase.  Each substitution reduced the ability to acylate alanine, some 2-fold, some 5-fold and with three changes, 10-fold.  Each mutant also lost ability to act specifically on alanine.  There did not seem to be much tolerance, therefore, for changes in a 10-peptide sequence located in the heart of the active site.
    What do they make of this?  In the discussion, they feel they have demonstrated that fusing a replacement string into part of the synthetase did not destroy its ability to do its other functions.  “Importantly,” they say,

the two components, adenylate synthesis and specific RNA binding, were generated independently. ... Thus, the results are consistent with the idea that early tRNA synthetases arose from small, idiosyncratic RNA-binding elements being fused to domains for adenylate synthesis.  These RNA-binding elements might have developed originally to bind and protect ribozymes (to give early ribonucleopeptides or ribonucleoproteins; refs 44-47).  The fusions of RNA-binding peptides to domains for adenylate synthesis may have been the first step in developing protein-based synthetases that overcame the ribozyme-based system of aminoacylation.

Pardon the jargon above, but there is a reason.  Here at Creation-Evolution Headlines, we don’t give you watered-down, warmed-over, spin-doctored versions of evolutionary research.  We charge right into the dark rooms where the wizards are speaking in their cryptic mumbo-jumbo, thinking their secret language insulates them from the public, and shields them from charges of propagating baloney.  Sorry, the gig is up; it is exposè time.  There are so many problems with this paper, if it is expected to prop up belief in a naturalistic origin of life, that you deserve to know what their mumbo-jumbo means when translated into plain English.
    The aaRS family of enzymes poses a severe challenge to evolution, because it is a prime example of information transfer that could only have come from an intelligent cause.  There is no known case where an information-bearing message can be translated into another coding system apart from intelligence.  In the aaRS family, we find prima facie evidence for intelligence, and these scientists do nothing to change that.  If anything, they only underscore how hopeless the attempts are to explain it by natural causes.
    If you can wade through a little jargon, the force of the argument against chemical evolution is in the details.  The scenario these scientists think they are advancing, a chance origin of life, is based on improbabilities chained together with impossibilities.  They cheated from the start by using only left-handed amino acids.  Nature would never bring such a highly improbable set together.  When they built their polypeptides to insert into their so-called artificial synthetase, they used repeated rounds of artificial selection (caused by their intelligent design) to find ones most likely to work.  Their argument hinges on the independence of the two functions of the enzyme: its ability to specify one amino acid and mate it to a specific tRNA.  So what?  That explains nothing of how the two specific parts became related.
    Suppose a two-person team is needed to translate Chinese into French.  A woman in China is found who knows Chinese fluently.  A woman in France speaks fluent French.  Does that accomplish the job of translation?  Of course not, not unless they can come together and learn to communicate the meaning of their words with each other.  If one part of a primordial synthetase can bind to a specific RNA, without interfering with the other part’s ability to bind to a specific amino acid by chance, that tells you nothing about the functional connection between the two.  If the French woman says, “deux,” it will be gibberish to the Chinese woman unless the meaning of the word is conveyed.  DNA translation is all about meaning.  DNA has four synonyms for alanine: GCA, GCC, GCG, and GCU.  None of these codons, or their tRNA counterparts, looks or smells like alanine.  But they tell the translation system, “We need an alanine here!”  The correct molecular machine (synthetase) for alanine is summoned.  It authenticates the tRNA, and simultaneously activates the alanine and acylates it.  Then it snaps the acylated alanine to the tRNA (which would never join by themselves), and finally, remarkably, proofreads the result, achieving 99.97% accuracy (most of the remaining 0.03% error is fixed down the line in the ribosome).  This is absolutely astonishing to have this precision of function at this level of size – and your life depends on it.  Without accurate translation, the genome, and function, would quickly fall apart.
    These scientists also cheated by invoking natural selection where it is not appropriate.  Without accurate replication, there is no natural selection.  Chance and natural law are the only hopes left, if you can call trusting in vanishing improbabilities hope.  (This is why they use the word serendipitous, i.e., lucky chances that just happened to work.)  If these scientists were right, highly unlikely left-handed amino acids would have to accidentally mate with the right tRNA so often, they could lead to a self-replicating system with high accuracy.  This had to happen for 20 different aaRS enzymes, so 20 already-hopeless improbabilities would have to multiplied together.  Every part of the story is so improbable, it is a a veritable fairy tale.  What if the lucky RNA-binding domain forms by chance in the Indian Ocean, and the lucky alanine-binding domain forms by chance in the Pacific?  Too bad.  They would not have time to swim to each other before a UV photon blasts one and the other hydrolyzes.  Even if they formed together, it’s the end of the story unless and until they could pass on their legacy to lots of offspring that could somehow be naturally selected; but that requires the whole DNA-protein system to be working.  But DNA and ribosomes are required to manufacture the synthetases!  It is a losing story no matter where you turn.
    What else is wrong here?  They build their story on the RNA World hypothesis which is fraught with other impossibilities (see the detailed July 11, 2002 headline listing some of the serious problems there).  And they personify these molecules as if they want to evolve; the ribozyme just hands over its function to the more capable synthetase system, etc.  Picture yourself standing on a San Diego beach needing to walk to Hawaii.  Standing out of the shark-infested waters every 500 miles or so are 6x6" stepping stones.  Would you be a realist to say, “If I can make it to the first stepping stone, then the second, I am making great progress”, even if you have no credible plan on how you expect to jump to each one?  Evolutionary researchers testing their origin of life scenarios are manufacturing artificial stepping stones in the middle of the story, ignoring the difficulties of getting off the beach.  Now picture instead of your intelligent self trying to get to Hawaii, there are a thousand blind, deaf, drunkards who don’t want to go there, they just want to lie down and die.  They only jump in random directions when someone bumps into them or a lightning bolt zaps them.  Would you bet your life that one of them will one day successfully hop all the stepping stones and arrive at Hawaii, not caring or knowing how they got there?  This is why papers like this contribute nothing to the theory of evolution.  A stepping stone in mid-ocean is not a stepping stone at all if no blind drunkard cares to go that way, has nothing to gain by standing on a 6" square surrounded by shark-infested waters, and could not get to the stone even if he wanted to.  The term first step implies direction, purpose, and planning – teleology – which are inacceptable concepts for evolutionists to apply to chemicals.
    Much of the public evolution debate consists of generalized rhetoric replete with emotion and imagination.  Presumably, in a laboratory somewhere, the story is being checked out by actual experiments.  That’s why we like to bypass the hot air of the salesmen and get down into the engine room where intelligent researchers with PhDs are testing the assumed evidences for evolution with rigorous, experiments and reporting it in peer-reviewed journals where it’s harder to bluff your way around.  In Fantasyland, you can wish upon a star, and all your dreams come true.  But in Chemistryland, there is no gently-smiling, benevolent fairy godmother with a magic wand.  Real scientists have to work with real chemicals subject to valences and laws of thermodynamics, that don’t cooperate with the scientist unless he forces them to.  In every case, molecules do not self-organize into message-bearing, information-rich systems without cheating, without the chemist playing fairy godmother and applying external information like pixie dust.
    How important is this headline?  In reality, the whole of evolutionary theory is built on it.  Without a plausible premise, nothing else in a story is sound.  How many show-stoppers does it take to stop a show?  Just one.  How many impossibilities in an alibi makes the judge throw the book at you?  Just one.  If the implausibility of a naturalistic origin of life is a show-stopper, then molecules-to-man Darwinian evolution, the Greatest Show on Earth, stops before the curtain even rises.  Suppose a scientific paper began, “Assuming butterflies build cities out of giant Sequoias,... ” and then had an elaborate theory with differential equations and charts and erudite logic.  Would the impressive end of the paper validate the weird beginning?  Evolutionists just “know” that evolution is true, so they think telling a fairy tale about chemicals developing language translation is justified, because here we are.  But that is superstition, not science.  Evolutionists shield the public from the inner workings of chemical evolution theory, because if the public knew how incredibly implausible it was, they would demand accountability.  Chemical evolutionists would lose their scientific credentials and have to become priests in the Church of Materialist Metaphysics.  The tax deduction for non-profit status would be a pittance compared to the NSF funding that supports chemical evolution research, so the truth must be hidden in secret mumbo-jumbo.  They must hate it when a reporter knows how to translate it into the common tongue and leaks it to the world wide web.  You’re right, Dr. Kenneth Miller: this is an argument from personal incredulity.  It is inconceivable how anybody could be as credulous as a chemical evolutionist.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

• Large areas of bedrock are exposed that “scientists did not expect to find.”  Principal investigator for the THEMIS infrared camera, Phil Christensen, said, “If those rocks had been made a billion years ago, they’d be covered with dust.”
• “Elsewhere, loose rocks were found to be common on hillsides, suggesting recent weathering,” the article states.
• Olivine, a mineral that degrades rapidly in water, has been found coating the floors of large canyons like Ganges Chasma.  “This gives us an interesting perspective of water on Mars,” Christensen said.  “There can’t have been much water – ever – in this place.”  Despite the frequent hypotheses of liquid water on Mars, Odyssey is pointing to a large areas in “utter drought.”  On the other hand, ice, and even snow, has been found to be common and may be what contributes to the gullies on the slopes of craters.

Unexpected youth, active surfaces, processes that defy equilibrium over billions of years – this is the norm, not the exception, in planetary science.  Need proof?  Get a copy of The New Solar System (4th ed.), the definitive textbook on the solar system written by the world’s leading planetary scientists.  You find an oft-repeated theme in chapter after chapter: We expected to find such and such, but we found the opposite.  Young-looking phenomena are everywhere, from comets, moons and asteroids to rings to whole planet surfaces.  Mysteries and unexplained phenomena abound.  (Actually, the book is already out of date since its last revision in 1999.  Even more youthful phenomena have been discovered since then, such as Titan’s icy bedrock, and the rapid depletion rate of comets, and the anomalous heat output from Io.)  The only things that look old are young phenomena interpreted as ancient by passing through philosophically-tainted glasses that are pre-filtered to see billions of years, because old man Darwin needs the time.  But if Darwinian gradualism is old hat these days and catastrophism is in vogue, who really needs the billions of years any more?  Things can happen pretty fast when catastrophes are allowed back in the dating game.
    Meanwhile, feast your eyes on the daily images coming back from Odyssey.  Oh, how earlier generations would have yearned to be able explore Mars like we can with just a few clicks of a button.  No novel or comic book could ever match the excitement of really seeing Mars as it is.  Watch for news of the upcoming Mars Exploration Launch scheduled for Sunday (weather permitting).  If these rovers succeed, we are going to have a lot of exciting news come January, if the Europeans don’t steal all the thunder in December.  That’s not likely.  Mars is a big place.
Next headline on: Mars. • Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

The first new solid grains formed from the gas and dust cloud called the Solar Nebula some 4567 million years ago.  Within 100,000 years, the first embryos of the terrestrial planets had formed.  Some grew more rapidly than others, and within 10 million years, ~64% of Earth had formed; by that time, proto-Earth must have been the dominant planet at 1 astronomical unit (the distance between Earth and the Sun). Accretion was effectively complete at 30 million years, when a Mars-sized impactor led to the formation of the Moon.

Precise measurements of W [tungsten] isotopes are among the most difficult measurements ever attempted by geo- and cosmochemists.  As shown above, these studies are extremely worthwhile, even if some results turn out to be incorrect.  It is important that several groups continue to perform such measurements and challenge each other’s results.  A few precise and well-substantiated measurements are more informative than a large body of data with lower precision and accuracy.

So much rides on this date of 4.6 billion years.  The entire biological evolution story and most of modern geology depend on it.  It is quoted in the literature without question as if it came from a religious revelation.  So we looked at the Amelin et al paper for data etched in stone, and found a house of cards.  Though the data tables look impressive, over and over the authors build one assumption on another, judge some isotopic ratios to be more valid than others, and assume the very thing they are trying to prove – that the planets evolved out of a dust disk, which took a lot of time.  How can they arrive at a number with four significant figures when nobody was there watching, and the methods depend on processes no one could ever know?  If multiple supernovas were needed to seed the solar nebula, what effect did that have?  What about Shu’s X-wind model, and proposed X-ray solar flares 100,000 times more powerful than those observed today, and multiple hypothesized episodes of melting and refreezing?  They admit the meteorites were open systems, but how can they rule out processes unknown to us that could mess up the ratios?  There is enough tweak space to concoct any story.
    Jacobsen’s paper represents a common formula in evolutionary literature.  A just-so story is told with all the authority of an eyewitness news reporter, and then the conclusion says, “more studies are needed.”  This can be construed as, “We already know we are right, but we need more funding to find data that fit our preconceived notions.”  This is a good time to recall Maier’s Law.
    Nothing else in the solar system leads one to conclude such a huge date of 4.6 billion years.  Here is a short list of phenomena, reported in previous headlines from papers in the secular scientific journals, that set upper limits much younger than that:

• Mercury should be stone dead but has a global magnetic field.
• If Venus’ surface had a 4.6 billion year history, the first 90% has been obliterated.
• Earth’s magnetic field is decreasing at an alarming rate.
• The Grand Canyon could have been carved in just the last few thousand years.
• The moon and meteorites contain short-lived radionuclides.
• The moon should be stone dead, but shows evidence of activity today (transient lunar phenomena).
• Comets are burning up too fast (all the ones we know would be gone in 5000 years), and the hordes of spent bodies that should exist after 4 billion years cannot be found.  Furthermore, the hypothetical Oort Cloud of comets could only contain 10% of earlier estimates.
• Meteorites are young, based on cosmic ray exposure.
• Some groups of asteroids have preferential spin orientations, that should have been randomized by now.
• Many asteroids are binary, but gravitational forces would tend to disrupt them in short order.
• Assumed cratering rates on Mars could be way off the mark, casting into doubt a widely relied on method of estimating ages.
• Large areas of Martian bedrock are exposed, but should have been buried deep in dust by now.
• Io has far more volcanic activity than can be explained by tidal heating.
• Io and Europa are losing a ton of their mass every second.
• Europa might have active geyser activity even today.
• Ganymede has a global magnetic field and evidence of recent resurfacing.
• Callisto shows signs of ongoing erosion, and has far fewer small craters than expected.
• Every planetary scientist agrees planetary rings are young, because they erode rapidly.
• Titan’s atmosphere is eroding quickly and cannot be billions of years old.
• Titan’s surface should be blanketed with half a mile of hydrocarbons by now, but large patches of bedrock ice are found.
• Enceladus, Tethys, Miranda, Ariel etc. are freezing cold, but show evidence of recent surface activity of unknown origin.
• Triton has a complex surface and active geysers, but inhabits a circular orbit (retrograde) without tidal stress.
• Triton and Pluto show evidence of a tenuous atmosphere.
• Neptune is the farthest large planet but has the strongest winds, and shows evidence of seasonal activity.
• Neptune’s rings have unexpected clumps of material.
• The orbit of Pluto’s large moon Charon is not tidally locked.
• Small moons are subject to short collisional lifetimes, yet each gas giant has many of them.
• The Poynting-Robertson effect would tend to sweep the solar system of dust quickly, but the solar system still has a lot of dust.
• Dust disks around other stars are seen to erode quickly.

This is just a partial list (details for most can be found by following the chain links on Solar System and Dating Methods).  Each of these, if examined impartially without the prior belief that the solar system is billions of years old, would lead one to estimate much lower ages.  To fit the 4.6 billion year timeline, all these observed phenomena have to be str-r-r-r-r-etched by many orders of magnitude.  Why must that one figure of 4.6 billion years, arrived at by multiple levels of assumptions and tweaks, be the sacred cow to which all must bow?
    So here we have a remarkable situation.  At the early end of this 4.6 billion year timeline, everything happens rapidly; gas giants can form in just a few hundred or thousand years.  At the near end, we see evidence of youth everywhere.  There is a huge middle where astronomers need to keep short-lived phenomena going, like trying to drive around the world on a gallon of gas.  Is there somebody out there, anybody, who will have the courage to question this bizarre figure of 4.6 billion years?  If you do, be careful.  It will be like tickling the bottom guy on a five-level human pyramid, with Charlie D. juggling on the top.
Next headline on: Dating Methods.   Next headline on: Solar System.

It’s not just animals that benefit from the diversity of microbial workers.  Like we reported Sept. 6, plants (and therefore animals, too) depend on a little microbe that has a secret tool called nitrogenase that can untie the Gordian knot of triple-bonded nitrogen, making it available for proteins.  There is growing evidence that bacteria and viruses are, for the most part, cooperative team players with other living things in the web of life.
    Gordon provides no evidence in this article that bacteria “coevolved with us” or that they developed any of their amazing skills through time and chance.  Au contraire, what is observed is devolution.  For instance, in yesterday’s online preprints of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team analyzed the newly-decoded genome of bovine tuberculosis, and did not find any new genes.  Like anthrax, the pathogenicity of this plague appears to come from loss of information and changes in gene expression.  This supports the idea stated in the March 14 headline that pathogens are devolved mutants of originally-beneficial microbes.
Next headline on: Health. • Next amazing story.

These articles are more cheerful than they should be.  A look at previous headlines on this subject shows that even under ideal conditions, dust and gas do not collapse into planets.  In our real solar system, there are numerous phenomena that cause serious problems both for origin models and for dating methods.  Secular astronomers are not pessimistic enough (e.g., realistic), about the ability of natural processes alone to produce our privileged planet.
Next headline on: Solar System.

Step Aside, Webshooter: Make Way for Geckoman   06/02/2003
They’ve done it: physicists in England have succeeded in making gecko tape, inspired by the sticky feet of the lizards that walk upside down on rough and smooth surfaces.  Kids may one day be able to imitate spiderman by walking up walls and scampering up ceilings, says National Geographic News.  (Actually, the scientists only made a tiny amount of the tape, and it cost a lot of money.)  More on this story can be found on Nature Science Update and the BBC News.

See the August 27 headline on the phenomenal feet of geckos.
Next headline on: Bugs and Crawling Critters. • Next amazing story.

Acid rain from the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary impact event should have caused significant damage to freshwater life, but only minor extinctions of freshwater species are actually observed.  We proposed a mechanism to neutralize the acid using larnite (beta-Ca₂SiO₄), produced as a result of the specific lithology at the Chicxulub impact site.  The vapor plume must have been enriched in calcium from the carbonate-rich target, leading to the crystallization of larnite.  The acid-neutralizing capacity of the larnite grains would have been high enough to consume acid produced by the K-T event within several hours, reducing it to a level at which freshwater life would not have been affected, even if all the acid had precipitated instantaneously after the K-T impact.  This scenario can explain some of the extinction selectivity at the K-T boundary.

The EPA had better round up delinquent meteors for polluting the environment.  Or maybe these geologists should patent their process to seed clouds to with larnite crystals to neutralize acid rain.
    The reason for this ad-hoc, hand-waving theory is that observations do not fit the popular impact scenario that claims a big meteor wiped out over half the living species 60 million years ago.  Either the meteor was selective about what it killed, which would imply intelligent malevolence, or scientists have to fine-tune the impact’s chemistry to keep the story plausible.  Fish and even plankton in the area were apparently unaffected by this cannonball, but dinosaurs on the other side of the world choked and croaked.  Somehow cute little furry mammals made it through all the dust and acid rain and became opportunists in the cleared landscape, evolving into pandas and aardvarks and bats and dolphins, sloths and mammoths and horses and saber-tooth cats and australopithecines.  Isn’t that what Walking With Dinosaurs proved to us, in living color, right on the TV screen?  Somehow the ginkgo trees and horseshoe crabs went right along as if nothing happened.
Next headline on: Geology.