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 irred