Here we see another complex molecular machine, composed of nearly 150 coordinated parts, that operates with skill and precision.  “Spliceosomes undergo multiple assembly stages and conformational changes during the splicing reaction,” say the authors, indicating that these machines have many moving parts.  They conclude with an acknowledgement that the cell is a veritable factory of complex machinery:

The observation that the spliceosome is associated with numerous proteins that function in coupling splicing to other steps in gene expression provides compelling evidence for the emerging concept of an extensively coupled network of gene expression machines.

Here again we notice in this paper, that the more that biological complexity is described, the less speculation one can find about how all this complexity evolved.  Nobody seems to want to touch that question with a ten-foot polypeptide.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next amazing story.

By implication, this means philosophies opposed to creation devalue human life.  But what about Islamic extremists, who believe Allah created man, and yet showed utter disregard for human life in the terrorist attacks?  The difference is that the God of Scripture is both righteous and loving.  He teaches us to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, and do good to all men.  Jesus set the example of laying down His life for mankind.  He also taught that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.  Islam, by contrast, has sought to conquer by the sword, and its extreme adherents chant death to all who will not submit to their dogma.  It also generates selfishness like that of hijacker Mohammed Atta, who according to WorldNetDaily appeared to be lusting after his promised 70 virgins as he packed his suitcase for the plane he was to fly into the World Trade Center.  Christianity teaches us to deny our selfish lusts and work for the good of others.  So it is not just belief in a Creator per se that makes the difference in valuing human life; it is knowing the true Creator, who is holy and righteous, loving and merciful, and who created us in His image.  To discern the followers of the true Creator, Jesus made it clear, “You shall know them by their fruits.”  The fruit of terrorism, produced by an evil tree, is forever etched in our minds.
Other differences between the God of Islam and the God of the Bible were pointed out Sept. 6 on Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint.
As for atheists and materialists, it goes almost without saying that denial of creation provides no foundation for valuing human life; if no purpose or direction produced humankind, we are no more worthy than snail darters or mosquitos.  The fruit of that tree produced communism and Naziism and the slaughter of 100 million human lives.  We applaud President Bush for making the point that creation is the foundation for human dignity, and also for supplying Biblical allusions throughout his speech, ending with, “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it” (John 1:5).
Next headline on: Politics. • Next headline on: Bible.

How the Peacock Got Its Tail: A Tormented Just So Story   09/10/2002
“How did the peacock get his tail?  It sounds like a Just So story, but it’s a question that has tormented zoologists for more than a century.”  Thus begins Sanjida O’Connell writing in The Independent (London), echoed also on National Geographic News.  After reviewing the history of tormented zoologists’ stories since Darwin, she zeroes in on the recent theory of French ornithologist Anders Moller, who explains the tail thus: peacocks are “walking billboards advertising their health and status.”  Moller related tail ornamentation to production of immune cells.  Presumably, the peahen knows how to read the billboard that the better the tail, the better the male’s immune system, and the better the chance her chicks will survive.  “Although there are still many unanswered questions,” concludes O’Connell, “scientists are moving closer to finding out how the peacock got his tail.”
Note: “Just-So story” is a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for children, in which he tells comical tales about how the camel got his hump, how the leopard got his spots, and other fabricated answers to common kids’ questions, based on imagination, not fact. 

We thought up some of these “unanswered questions”: why doesn’t the male evaluate the female’s immune system – doesn’t he care as much about passing on his genes as the hen does?  Does a peabrained peahen know what an immune system is?  Why should more immune cells correlate with a bigger, more colorful tail?  Why don’t all birds evolve more ornamentation?  Why haven’t evolutionists figured this out after 150 years?  If this isn’t a Just-So story, what is it?  What is the best way to end the torment?
Next headline on: Birds. • Next dumb story.

Here is another paper trying to defend Darwinism; does it succeed?  If Darwinian evolution were totally wrong, these data could still be explained by some other theory, but no other theory is even on the table for discussion.  Only evolutionary explanations are considered, whether neutral selection or directional selection.  What’s most interesting, however, are the damaging admissions in their opening paragraph about the lack of evidence for evolution in both living and fossil organisms (emphasis added):

It is often lamented that studies of present-day populations provide only the briefest snapshot of evolution and tell us little about the evolutionary forces that have shaped a particular trait or organism in the past.  Although ancestral phenotypes can be reconstructed with phylogenetic methods or directly determined from fossils, neither approach reveals the evolutionary processes that created these phenotypes.  Even if these historical data could help, there is considerable uncertainty associated with the reconstruction of ancestral character states, and a fossil record is missing for most taxa and incomplete for others.  As a result, a direct link between the action of microevolutionary forces detected in studies of contemporary populations and patterns of speciation and macroevolution has been difficult to make, yet this is a central problem in evolutionary biology. 

They proceed to make their case for directional evolution, but their results conflict with those of other evolutionists.  For instance, developmental traits (the latest Big Hope for rapid evolutionary change) show very weak selection by this QTL method.  Selection for life history traits show up strongest, but for morphology (outward appearance), only moderately.  Their results conflict with currently popular theories of neutral selection (that divergence is random, not necessarily adaptive); isn’t natural selection supposed to be directionless by definition?  They acknowledge several possible flaws or weaknesses in the method, such as not gauging the magnitude of an individual QTL, and possible bias in the choice of traits to measure.  At best, their results are only implied, and have no explanatory value regarding how adaptive traits would arise in the first place.  Despite the confident-sounding title of their paper, “Directional selection is the primary cause of phenotypic diversification,” their concluding sentence seems more like a statement of faith than scientific proof:“These latter considerations reinforce our earlier conclusions that Darwinian selection largely accounts for the astonishing diversity of phenotypes we see.”  This could be translated, “We think we have found statistics to prop up our a priori assumptions that the wonders of creation, from eagle’s eye to baby’s cry, are explainable by impersonal natural forces.”
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Fat chance.  Try self-control: just say “no” to the refrigerator, and to evolutionary storytelling.  (Self-denial and discernment are two very unDarwinian traits.)
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

The storytelling of evolutionists is quite entertaining: “A billion years ago the Earth was undergoing a series of cataclysmic changes.  The composition of the atmosphere was fluctuating wildly.  Climatic conditions went from extreme to extreme.  Primitive life had already taken hold on the Earth and consisted of single-celled organisms like bacteria and was confined to the vast seas that even then covered most of the globe...”  Is this the BBC eyewitness news, or did we get Monty Python by mistake?
Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Fossils.

Linde is the cosmologist who gave us chaotic inflation, with alternate universes bubbling off in all directions forever.  How convenient that he cannot see them, or will not be around to see if his big crunch prophecy will be fulfilled.  It seems dark matter was not enough fun for the cosmologists; now they have dark energy to play with, too.  Since matter and energy are equivalent according to E=mc², this means you can transform one ghost into another.
Next headline on: Cosmology. • Next dumb story.

...mistakes, which are eliminated by dogmatic quality control. ... mRNA molecules are like messengers in a factory, taking a blueprint and then heading to the floor and gathering a team to get the job done.  Sometimes, though, the mRNA doesn’t quite get the message right.  One common error happens when an mRNA molecule harbors a “stop” or “nonsense” signal before a protein has been completely made.   Enter the body’s quality-control system. ... nonsense-mediated decay targets what scientists call a “pioneer round of translation,” during which the body actually produces a kind of rough draft of a protein before giving the go-ahead to the mRNA molecule to begin mass production. ... mRNA puts together an extensive tool kit of molecular machinery to evaluate whether it should pass muster as a legitimate template for proteins. ...
The identification of such “tool kits,” groups of molecules working together to achieve a task, keeps hundreds of lab groups like Maquat’s around the world constantly busy.  Far from the simple and bland “DNA to RNA to protein” sequence of events that many people learn in high school, nearly every cell in the body embodies an incredibly complex construction site where tens of thousands of proteins work in tandem, snipping and cleaving molecules, removing “introns” and splicing together “exons” in various combinations, recruiting molecules to the site, and ferrying molecules over to ribosomes for assembly into proteins. ... “There’s an incredible amount of activity in a small space,” says Maquat, who is secretary/treasurer of the RNA Society and who organized a meeting this summer on the topic of mRNA decay for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.   “A single gene can result in many different proteins depending on how its encoded precursor mRNA is processed; we now know that more than half of human genes can make more than one protein.  But with this wonderful flexibility often comes mistakes.  The situation is turning out to be more complex than anyone ever dreamed.  The degree of RNA processing that the cell undertakes is truly amazing.”  The idea of trying to bypass the body’s mRNA surveillance system is formidable.  Maquat notes that the system is necessary for survival, and that without it, bad mRNA would create even more instances of disease. 

The statements above speak for themselves.  How did this tightly-integrated error-correcting system originate?  Surely any thinking person would have cold shudders trying to believe that undirected, purposeless natural causes could produce “dogmatic quality control” and coordinated function of tens of thousands of complex parts.  Trying to imagine tiny molecules holding an inspection to determine whether a rough draft will pass muster, or sending a protein to the recycling plant if it has just one typo, is astonishing.  It’s hard to conceive of such things even being possible: molecules have no eyes or brains, and work most often in the dark.  Yet here we are, reaping the benefits moment by moment of the cell’s quality control superheroes.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next amazing story.

Fairness demands a full discussion of both sides.  Scientific American allowed no rebuttal, and U.S. News had just a biased acknowledgement that critics of Darwinism exist.  We encourage readers to be familiar with the arguments on both sides; that’s why we always provide the links to the original sources.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Peering Into a Tiny Machine on Which the World Depends   09/06/2002
Sometimes it’s the little things that count.  World food supply, ecology, biodiversity are big things, but they depend heavily on a tiny molecular machine called nitrogenase.  This machine is worth its weight in gold and is the envy of chemical and structural engineers, but it makes its home in the lowliest of organisms, little bacteria that live around the roots of plants.  Its job?  To break apart the triple bonds of atmospheric nitrogen molecules and make them available as ammonia to plants, which use this valuable fertilizer to produce proteins for the entire food chain.  Molecular nitrogen (N₂), though plentiful in the atmosphere (78%) is useless until “fixed” by breaking it apart and combining it with hydrogen as ammonia (NH₃).  Given plenty of water, nitrogen is the usually the limiting factor in agricultural food production.  About half the world’s ammonia is produced by these tiny machines.  A little is fixed naturally by lightning, indicating the high energy required.  The rest, manufactured by man in the expensive Haber-Bosch process, consumes an estimated 1% of the world’s annual energy output.  Those triple bonds are tough nuts to crack!  How do the nitrogen-fixing bacteria do it so efficiently, at ambient temperature and pressure?  Whoever figures this out and imitates the process will enrich the world’s food supply and save trillions of dollars.
Scientists have been sharpening the focus more and more on this tiny protein machine, nitrogenase.  They knew that precisely placed metal ions (iron, molybdenum) form a critical structure in the heart of the enzyme.  They knew other proteins spend ATP to donate electrons to the nitrogen.  Now, writing in the Sept. 6 issue of Science, a team of American scientists has sharpened the focus down to 1.16 angstrom resolution.  One surprise was that they detected another atom, possibly atomic nitrogen, deep in the heart of the active site.  How it gets there, and what role it plays, is still a mystery, but this is another important piece of the puzzle.  In the same issue of Science, Barry Smith summarizes the work and concludes, “Once again, nitrogenase has surprised us.”

Nitrogenase is a large and complex enzyme, composed of several subunits, whose function depends on the precise placement of specific metal atoms and electron donors.  It’s exciting to see a biological secret nearing solution, but amazing to ponder how a simple bacterium, living underground by the roots of plants, figured out how to do what man with all his technology cannot do without great cost and difficulty.  Next time you down a salad or burger or steak, realize that it was made possible by a sophisticated molecular machine operating humbly in one of nature’s “simplest” organisms.  See also David Demick’s engaging look at this “molecular sledgehammer” in the March-May issue of Creation magazine.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next headline on: Plants. • Next amazing story.

The remarkable optimizations of these channels for permitting rapid and selective ion flow across the hostile barrier of the cell membrane are now mostly apparent, as is the basic repertoire of conformational changes used to gate this flow.  We now see the outlines of two general approaches used by intracellular sensor domains to manipulate the channel gates, and some tantalizing details of the transmembrane voltage sensor itself.

As usual, the higher the praise of the intricate designs in the cell, the less talk about evolution.  There is no mention anywhere in this paper about how this “intricate machinery” might have evolved without intelligent design.  See also our earlier reports about the potassium channel, the sodium channels and the water channels.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.

It is difficult to understand how preferred spin vector obliquities and rotation rates could exist in the context of formation by catastrophic fragmentation and disruption of a parent body, followed by at least 10⁹ yr of collisional evolution in the main belt.  Current models of family formation predict that the memory of spin of the original unshattered parent body is lost, and existing models of spin angular momentum suggest that collisional evolution randomizes asteroid spin vectors regardless of their initial orientations, although the absolute timescale is uncertain.

Perhaps a logical explanation will be found, but it does seem far-fetched to believe these small bodies would maintain their spin rates and obliquities for billions of years in a pinball field of gravitational influences.  Again we see that the age is the untouchable parameter.  It’s better to leave a mystery unsolved than to question tradition.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

I want hard figures on birth patterns before and after Calvin, and I want to know who had kids and who did not.  I want these figures correlated with religious practice and belief. Then and only then will I start to feel comfortable.

But let me not end on a negative note, because I feel a bit mean criticizing an evolutionary biologist for going outside his own field to matters of church history.  So let me repeat that I applaud the approach taken by Wilson, and I urge you to read Darwin’s Cathedral.  I think Wilson’s answers are wrong, but much more important is the fact that his questions are right.

All non-atheists should take note.  The evolutionists want to explain everything in human society in terms of natural selection, even religion.  That is not news, but several noteworthy observations can be made from this book review.  The major one is that there is no accepted evolutionary explanation for altruism; the fact that there are two warring camps across a wide rift that has been continuing for decades demonstrates that.  Another is that Darwinians tread lightly when criticizing “the brethren.”  Ruse sounds like he secretly thinks Wilson’s explanation is ridiculous, but dare not publicly call him a fool for fear of providing ammunition to the creationists.  Finally, notice the patronizing disdain for religion that underlies even Ruse’s call for respect for it (emphasis added):

... a distinctive and admirable feature of the book is that Wilson does not (as so many evolutionary biologists are wont to do) prejudge the worth of religion before he starts.  He finds it a notable feature of human societies and, as such, demanding respect if not agreement or support.

That’s respect looking down from an ivory tower, no more reverent than admiring an ant colony.  There is no respect for the ideas contained in John Calvin’s Institutes or for the teachings of Jesus Christ; instead, the Darwinists, like disembodied aliens spying mankind from suspended platforms, seek to interpret the organisms below in terms of natural selection – whether men or ants, whether wasps or WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants).  The hypocrisy here is that they never do that to themselves!  They never interpret their own controversies in terms of selection, because that would undermine the very credibility of Darwinism itself.  If evolutionary theory is the product of natural selection, they have no way of knowing that natural selection – or theories, debates, or ideas – even exist.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

This is intelligent design, not evolution.  The programmers supplied all the information and guidance necessary.  “Treating each switch as analogous to a gene allowed new circuits to evolve.  Those that oscillated best were allowed to survive to a next generation.  These ‘fittest’ candidates were then mated by mixing their genes together, or mutated by making random changes to them.”  So success at oscillation was the criterion to define fitness.  No such programmer or criterion is permissible in evolutionary theory, which is supposed to be unguided, impersonal, aimless, and pointless.  You can steer outcomes through a maze of random mutations if you have a goal and reward success.  This experiment has nothing to do with biological evolution, and everything to do with intelligent design.  But the design here was not very intelligent: the reputed radio only blindly picked up signals from elsewhere and ferried them as output.  Garbage in, garbage out.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.