The message is that evolution, in one way or another, must be the answer.  In this sense, evolution can be anything—anything, that is, except divine creation.  This is why evolution is not tied to natural selection or any other specific mechanism.  It is simply anything but creation.  It is any naturalistic explanation for the origin of species.  This is why evolutionists speak of fact and theory.  It is a theory in the sense that we don’t know how it occurred; it is a fact because nonnaturalistic explanations (i.e., divine creation) have been ruled out.
– Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s Proof, (Brazos Press, 2003) p. 145.

Editorial  09/30/2003
In Jewish World Review, a rabbi asks if the ancient Hebrew creation account in Genesis can stand up to modern cosmology.  Maybe the cosmologists are right, says Rabbi Yonason Goldson.  “On the other hand, increasingly complex and convoluted theories begin to look like the frantic flailings of scientists drowning in the mysteries of human existence.  Indeed, one noted physicist confessed that, if he’d been presented with these theories not long ago, ‘I’d either ask what you’ve been smoking or tell you to stop telling fairy tales’”  The strain new discoveries are bringing are “almost enough to make one contemplate -- dare we say it? -- Divine Creation,” he says, reminding the reader of the challenge God gave to Job thousands of years ago, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
Next headline on: Cosmology. • Next headline on: The Bible.

Dog Genome Shows Human Similarities   09/29/2003
People like their dogs because they’re like their dogs, according to National Geographic News.  At least, man and dog share many of the same genetic disorders.  Early results are out from a newly-sequenced genome of a poodle.  According to the BBC News, “75% of the genes we think are in humans also appear to be in dogs.”
    In another dog story, it appears that Australia’s dingos descended from one pregnant female brought over from Indonesia about 5000 years ago, according to the BBC News.

They have just a “rough sketch” of the canine genome at this point.  They haven’t identified the gene that makes a dog drink out of the toilet or eat its own barf.  Compared to its strong, handsome wolf-like ancestor, the poodle is a genetic disaster.  What would they expect?
    Humans and their pets walk the same sidewalks and breathe the same polluted air.  It is not surprising to find similar functional genes and similar diseases.  But the evolutionary fluff is unsupportable.  “The sequencing indicates that dog and human genomes are more similar to each other than either is to the mouse, though it appears the dog lineage diverged first from the common ancestor,”  claims National Geographic.  How can they possibly know that?  Molecular phylogeny is an art based on mental constructs, not a science.  (See also 11/22/02 headline).
    If they can study dog genes to help understand diseases, that’s great.  If they can discern what millennia of selective breeding has wrought, fine.  But to say dogs, mice, and humans are all products of slime plus time is a mystery religion.
    Dogs are wonderful, but notice that not one has been found at work decoding the genome of its master.  Exercise your mind, man, while you walk your dog.
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next dumb story.

This is not the only system with small moons.  Every giant planet has a swarm of rocks.  Gravitational influences on these small bodies should eject them over time.  Planetary scientists admit it’s puzzling that so many should exist today (see May 14 headline).
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

Don’t give this to the spammers and hackers.  That’s all we need is more DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks on the net.  'Net users suffering under daily loads of Nigeria scams, porn sites and deceptive ads, to say nothing of worms and viruses generated for no other purpose than to cause anonymous pain, are getting an education on the reality of human wickedness.  Should SETI researchers assume the aliens are innocent, compassionate friends?
Next headline on: SETI.

Let’s try to get this reasoning straight.  They use analogies such as the Internet, electronic circuits and electric power grids as networks.  So studying the Internet (built by intelligent design), circuitry (built by intelligent design) and the electric power grid (built by intelligent design, more or less) can help us understand how ant colonies, brains, metabolic pathways, cell cycle regulation, gene expression, protein complexes and human behavior all “emerged” by time and chance.
    Sounds like evolutionists are admitting that natural selection is just too weak to explain what they see.  There’s more and more talk about natural selection being just one facet of evolution.  Some point to gene duplication and other genetic mechanisms as being significant – maybe even more so – but self-organization seems to be the leading fad now (see a new kind of science, 08/18/2003.)  Is Charlie becoming a has-been?
    While evolutionists rush to jump on the new bandwagon of self-organization, they fail to notice it has flat tires and no driver.  The existence of biological networks presupposes design, just as much as the Internet presupposes skillfully designed computers and routers and infrastructure.  Once designed, network components can become adaptive and interact in many complex ways their designers may not have even anticipated.  Rocks, by contrast, do not form networks.  They fail to even get off the ground.
Next headline on: Bugs, Insects, Crawlers etc. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Francois Jacob pictured evolution as a tinkerer, not an engineer [Science 196:1161 (1977)].  Engineers and tinkerers arrive at their solutions by very different routes.  Rather than planning structures in advance and drawing up blueprints (as an engineer would), evolution as a tinkerer works with odds and ends, assembling interactions until they are good enough to work.  It is therefore wondrous that the solutions found by evolution have much in common with good engineering design.  This Viewpoint comments on recent advances in understanding biological networks using concepts from engineering.

This has to be one of the worst examples of evolutionary idolatry in recent months.  Many evolutionists have used the “tinkerer” concept to personify evolution, but Alon takes the cake.  And in the land of Israel, no less.  Could Baal worship have been any worse?  Stop playing word games with us, Darwinists: either make little idols of Mother Nature and sell them, or quit the illogical, misleading, nonsensical, blasphemous verbiage.  It makes you sound like you are already stoned.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

Plant it next to your Dawn Redwood and Ginkgo trees, similar living fossils.  Why no evolution in 100 million years?  Who needs the millions of years?  Imagine the fossil ones living just a few thousand years ago, and it all begins to make more sense.
    Impress your friends with a living fossil garden.  What an interesting conversation starter that could be.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Fossils.

Too bad W. D. Hamilton’s 1964 tall tale, kin selection, is dead (see 05/07/2002 headline), or this might have provided some characters for the plot.  Notice how all evolutionists seem to be able to do is suggest that some variation on their tale might provide an explanation for whatever is being investigated.  Notice also how more study is always required.
    This story supports a hunch we’ve proposed before: Darwinists like evolutionary theory because it is so plastic, so malleable, it gives them job security.  Scientific proof is no longer required.  There will always be enough hints, suggestions, possibilities and conundrums to keep the tall tale going perpetually, no matter what the problems, no matter what the unexpected twists of the plot.  But when Colin Patterson asked his colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History if they could mention one thing they knew about evolution, they all responded with blank stares.  Finally, one responded, “I know one thing.  It ought not to be taught in high school.”
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

This makes the final episode of Walking With Dinosaurs obsolete.  Wonder what the BBC animators think?  It was a fun story, while it lasted.
    The article claims that foraminifera evolve rapidly through geologic times and “constitute a timeline by which surrounding geologic features can be dated.”  They would know better if they had read our Sept 22 headline.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs.

Critics will undoubtedly complain that these creationists have an ulterior motive for questioning the old age of the earth, but doesn’t that criticism cut both ways?  Are the motives of Darwinians pure as the wind-driven snow?  Can we not brush aside the motive-bashing and just look at the facts?  It’s the quality of the research that matters.
    These scientists, each with PhDs from recognized institutions, took samples from the U.S. Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank maintained at Pennsylvania State University.  They had the samples radiocarbon dated at “one of the foremost AMS laboratories in the world.”  It was the laboratory, not ICR, that returned the measurements that carbon-14 was still ticking in the samples.  Further, the ICR scientists are not the only ones who have found this to be the case.  Baumgardner states that this is a well-known anomaly among geophysicists:

Routinely finding ¹⁴C/¹²C ratios on the order of 0.1-0.5% of the modern value—a hundred times or more above the AMS detection threshold—in samples supposedly tens to hundreds of millions of years old is therefore a huge anomaly for the uniformitarian framework.
    This earnest effort to understand this “contamination problem” therefore generated scores of peer-reviewed papers in the standard radiocarbon literature during the last 20 years.  Most of these papers acknowledge that most of the ¹⁴C in the samples studied appear to be intrinsic to the samples themselves, and they usually offer no explanation for its origin.  The reality of significant levels of ¹⁴C in a wide variety of fossil sources from throughout the geological record has thus been established in the secular scientific literature by scientists who assume the standard geological time scale is valid and have no special desire for this result!

Unless evolutionists can come up with an explanation for how carbon-14 got into so many samples from so many locations, that all show similar amounts despite their position in the geologic column, the clear implications are: (1) the samples are not as old as claimed, and (2) the geologic periods, assumed to be successive, were more or less contemporaneous.
    Dr. Baumgardner’s report is one of eight presented at the Fifth International Conference on Creationism in August by the ICR team named RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth).  The other seven papers presented additional evidences that call evolutionary long ages into question.  For a summary of these, see: ICR Acts and Facts #364, October 2003.
    For an example of anomalous radiocarbon dates in the secular literature, see: Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences Vol 29 (May 2001), pp. 256-294, posted online 04/22/2003.  It shows that dating of modern deltas by radiocarbon yields mostly unexpected results.  How much more coal beds that are assumed to be millions of years old?  A glimpse of articles discussing anomalous radiocarbon dates in a cursory Internet search shows that evolutionists have a few just-so stories available for explaining them: shellfish that exclude or ingest carbon-14 from their shells, etc. (see, for example, Quaternary Chronology and Dating by James S. Aber).  But none of these appear valid for coal beds, which should have no radiocarbon at all if they were many millions of years old, as evolutionary geology assumes them to be.  Again, we see that evolutionists can be very creative in their storytelling.  It’s not that they are unable to concoct a story to fit the data, but that the data require a story to fit a belief.  The dates were not expected nor predicted.  In the hands of a skilled masseur, sometimes they can be made to fit the theory.  Other times, the evolutionists chalk them up as a mystery and leave it for future workers to figure out, never questioning their assumptions.
    When various dating methods yield old and young ages, which results should be preferred?  Results in the millions and billions of years require extrapolating, by many orders of magnitude, rates that have only been measured for a hundred years, while assuming no processes have intervened for vast periods of time not open to human observation.  Young-age results, therefore have a much better observation to assumption ratio.  Regardless of the implications, reason and scientific caution advise that we take a conservative approach, and place more credence in the methods that yield young ages.  The Darwin Party will scream “but we need more time!”  Sorry.
Next headline on: Dating Methods. • Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Physics.

Microevolution, microevolution, all they ever show us is microevolution.  The fly paper admits that there is no morphological difference between the two varieties.  There’s more morphological difference between a poodle and a beagle, yet both are Canis familiaris, one species.  Big deal.  The bee keepers did not find anything remotely similar to the complex waggle dance honeybees do.  They just found a very minor variation on the odor-trail strategy.  Big deal.
    We want a bigger deal.  Show us some really, really big example of evolution.  Show us a bacterium evolving into a giraffe, then we’ll be impressed.  Do lots of examples of teeny changes add up to a demonstration of macroevolution?  Of course not.  Do lots of card shuffles add up to an encyclopedia?
    The fact that evolutionists have to scour the jungles to look for examples, and never come up with anything bigger than this, shows how weak is Darwinian theory in terms of observable evidence.  The rest is imagination, speculation, gesticulation.  And when they have to commit heresy on top of it (see Jan. 15 headline), that’s desperation.
Next headline on: Bugs and Crawlers. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Evolutionists want to keep Neanderthals separate from modern humans, because it makes their storytelling plot more interesting: you can have the two breeds fighting each other, or competing for resources in the struggle for existence.  Suppose they found human bones in France similar to Andre the Giant, and in Italy similar to Tom Thumb.  Can you imagine the fun their storytelling contest would have with these?  Yet both would be Homo sapiens sapiens, fully human, fully modern.  This latest find has nothing to do with human evolution, but it has a lot to do with the evolution of Darwinian storytelling.
Next headline on: Early Man.

Here is a research project for someone.  What is the political leaning among science faculty?  Horowitz’ survey focused primarily on the political and social science departments.  It would be interesting to tally the political party affiliations (Democrat/Republican/other) or ideology (liberal/conservative) of evolutionists in the science departments.
    College science faculty are usually the ones publishing in the scientific journals.  If such a huge bias exists among political science and sociology faculty, how does the political spectrum look in the physics, chemistry and biology departments?  We don’t know.  Often the science departments are unrelated to the socio-political ones.  They are often located in different parts of the campus, and out of touch except via administration.  Some engineering departments might tend toward political conservatism, and the spectrum might vary markedly between biologists, physicists and astronomers.  It seems unlikely, however, that a 10-to-1 or 30-to-1 bias would be tilted toward the opposite extreme among scientists in academia.
    We have a hunch that evolutionists tend to be Democrats and liberals.  The flavor of much of the editorial writing in the journals, at least, seems in tune with the political liberalism of the left.  On issues with cultural overlap, for instance, such as embryonic stem cell research or abortion, journal editorials almost never take a right-to-life position.  As we show in Creation-Evolution Headlines regularly, evolutionary just-so storytelling gets free rein, no matter how unsound the raw data, while anything hinting of creationism, or even criticism of Darwinism, is subjected to scathing ridicule or neglect, no matter how good the raw data.  Then there’s the ACLU, one of the most politically leftist organizations in the country, that is always in the forefront of defending evolution-only teaching in the schools.  Coincidence?
    It would seem that evolutionists in academia would be most at home with a politics more “fluid” and evolving than one insisting on standards, such as a Constitution founded on belief in a Creator.  Scientists tend to be cosmopolitan because of their relationships with international colleagues.  Polls have shown other elitist groups, such as journalists and Hollywood entertainers, are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats.  Similarly, scientific societies occasionally rise up to support liberal causes, such as United Nations treaties, or support liberal politicians most likely to fund their research projects.  It must be granted that such positions do not necessarily reflect the rank and file – the researchers in the laboratories.  But it’s the journalists who report the pro-Darwin news, and the entertainers who produce the pro-Darwin TV shows.  Is this a smoking gun?  Does the Darwin Party overlap with the Democratic Party?
    Certainly there would be exceptions, both individually and by campus.  But would it be all that surprising if a large majority of the doctrinaire evolutionists turn out to be predominantly registered Democrats, and liberal in political ideology?  (Carl Sagan comes to mind; see also the recent Watson - Baltimore interview.)  Someone should check this hunch out.
    You can already hear the objections: “Science is politically neutral, and a scientist’s political beliefs have nothing to do with the quality of his or her scientific work.”  That is true in principle, but often not in practice when dealing with origins, to which a great deal of philosophical and political baggage is yoked.  Otherwise, Dembski and Behe and Kenyon would not be so vehemently denounced by the Big Science establishment, and leftist evolutionists would be roundly criticized for their political or religious involvements to a similar degree, instead of being given a platform at best, and soft gloves at worst.  Why have many prominent Darwinists been Marxists, and why did communism justify its politically ideology with evolution?  Measuring the melting point of a substance might be apolitical, but what about the evolution of war, or claims about man’s emergence from ape-like ancestors, or the evolution of rape?
    To a large extent, the anti-creationist strategy is to maintain that it is religiously or politically motivated.  Eugenie Scott has stated that she does not know of a single critic of Darwinism that does not have a religious motivation.  Does that argument cut both ways?  What if the comeback were, “The vast majority of Darwinians are Democrats and liberals”?  (Surveys have already revealed their predominant religion: atheism.)  Then why not work to achieve balance and parity, if the situation were so lopsided in favor of one political party?
    It’s indisputable that there are “religious” Darwinists, like Ken Miller, who are practicing Catholics or whatever, but what is the political and ideological tilt of even these?  Are a majority of them Democrats?  Did they typically vote for Clinton and oppose Bush?  Are they most at home with liberal viewpoints on social and political issues?  If religious and political persuasion is justification for dismissing a creationist (even when he sticks strictly to scientific evidences like thermodynamics and the fossil record), why should these factors be irrelevant when assessing the “scientific” claims (read: just-so storytelling) of an evolutionist?
    Regular readers of Creation-Evolution Headlines know that our focus is on evaluating the empirical evidence behind scientific claims about origins, not on the political motivations (when any) of the source.  But it is naive not to be aware of where a claimant is coming from.  Journalism is also supposed to be politically neutral, but do you think it irrelevant that TV news anchors, editors and managers are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats?  If it is true, as seems probable, that the vast majority of evolutionists are social and political liberals, it’s a background to be aware of when examining their science claims.  Observers might well dispute what it means.  But let’s first establish whether it is true.  And since most anti-creationists seem so obsessed with the political and religious ideology of their opponents, you might say raising this issue is just about fairness.
    If you have any information on this subject, especially results of scientifically-conducted polls, or even anecdotal information about the politic views of evolutionists on your campus (especially non-religious institutions like state universities and ivy-league colleges), please write in and share it.  If no such poll has been conducted, this would be an interesting project for someone.  No hard claims can be made without sufficient data, but various clues point to a connection that should be explored and documented.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

Once again, no clear pattern of evolution, just hand-waving and JSS (just-so storytelling).  Evolution is supposed to be so slow and gradual, but here is a story morphological radiation running prestissimo: i.e., multiple miracles at a rapid tempo occurring independently and simultaneously with no clear ancestral tree between forms.  It’s the lawn or forest picture again, instead of the single tree.  If the rapid evolution were true, why don’t we see it happening in the present?  They use personal verbs like exploit to make it seem like these little critters are consciously planning and designing new things they can do with accidental inventions.
    The authors build their tree on the molecular clock, which is broken (see 10/01/2001 headline).  Does anyone really see a tree here?  There are leaves, but all the branches are inferred based on evolutionary assumptions, as usual.  They invoke lots of maybe, what-if, perhaps, and other speculative words in their story, and according to established Darwin Party custom, call this just a first step in understanding the evolutionary picture of this group.  How long have they been studying these organisms that have an “excellent fossil record”?  Time’s up.
Next headline on: Ocean Creatures. • Next headline on: Fossils. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Results of modeling like this are always dependent on assumptions and starting conditions; for instance, Ishitsu and Sekiya neglect the self-gravity of the dust layer, which is probably reasonable if the mass is low and distributed.  Undoubtedly other papers will find a way around these problems.  It goes to show, however, that initial hopes can be dashed by new considerations.
    The June 3 headline said that core accretion is effectively dead.  This is because dust particles do not stick together, to start with, and observations of other stars show that their dust disks are blown away too rapidly for accretion to occur, even if it could.  But now we see that the disk instability model needs hundreds of times more dust than evident from solar abundances.  What’s more, the viscosity of so much disk tends to pull any growing planets rapidly into the star.  If disk instability models are this problematic, it leaves advocates of naturalistic models for the solar system without any viable theory.  The design model, of course, suffers from none of these problems.  Its main drawback is that it does not provide evolutionary scientists with open-ended, unverifiable storytelling opportunities.  Instead, it leans on the tried and true methods of design detection.  For these reasons, it must be disqualified.
Next headline on: Solar System.

It’s probably a wise move, in this eventuality: if Galileo germs were found on Europa some future day, how would scientists be sure of the source?  Evolutionists might argue for years that they evolved in situ and use it as propaganda for chemical evolution.  Better to keep Europa pristine till a new mission can end all speculation.
    As to whether life would be found at Europa, fat chance.  Evolutionists cannot begin to explain how life formed on earth under ideal conditions.  How much more so miles under an icy crust, in salt water (which is death to membranes), under extreme conditions?  It’s important to be reminded again that just because life is found in extreme environments on earth does not mean it evolved there; it means that extremophiles are finely tuned to survive.
    We bid a fond farewell to Galileo.  Its mission was a story of triumph over tragedy, perseverance that paid off, despite seven years of launch delays, budget cuts and engineering redesigns (some of them caused by the Challenger disaster), and a fair amount of luck that allowed it to continue functioning beyond its design limits.  Congratulations to the team that brought to earth all these breathtaking views of the system that had so fascinated Galileo Galilei in 1610.  Both Galileos are now important subjects in the history of science.
    We trust the reader did not think the title of this headline meant that Galileo the astronomer sacrificed himself for the Europeans.  Wrong place, wrong time, and one important missing letter – a lesson on the importance of specificity in the communication of information.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

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¹JPL’s Galileo End of Mission Celebration brochure listed the Top 10 Science Results from the mission as follows:

1. The descent probe made measurements that furthered our understanding of how Jupiter has evolved and of atmospheric markers including carbon, neon, argon, xenon, and others.  Most were enhanced 3 times the solar abundance.  The exception was neon, which was depleted.
2. Galileo made a first observation of ammonia clouds in another planet’s atmosphere.  The atmosphere seems to create ammonia ice particles of material from lower depths, but only in “fresh” clouds.
3. Io’s extensive volcanic activity may be 100 times greater than that found on Earth’s.  The heat and frequency of eruptions are reminiscent of early Earth.
4. Io’s complex plasma interactions in Io’s atmosphere include support for currents and coupling to Jupiter’s atmosphere.
5. Evidence supports a theory that liquid oceans exist under Europa’s icy surface.
6. Ganymede is the first satellite known to possess a magnetic field.
7. Galileo magnetic data provide evidence that Europa, Ganymede and Callisto have a liquid-saltwater layer.
8. Europa, Ganymede and Callisto all provide evidence of a thin atmospheric layer known as a ‘surface-bound exosphere.’
9. Jupiter’s ring system is formed by dust kicked up as interplanetary meteoroids smash into the planet’s four small inner moons.  The outermost ring is actually two rings, one embedded within the other.
10. Galileo was the first spacecraft to dwell in a giant planet magnetosphere long enough to identify its global structure and to investigate its dynamics.

Some of these are difficult to explain within evolutionary models of planetary accretion over long ages, particularly #1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and possibly 9.  Certainly they were unexpected and would not have been predicted by naturalistic models.
    At the press conference, Dr. Andrew Ingersoll of Caltech misled the audience by saying that Jupiter was like taking a piece of the sun out to that distance, wrongly implying that its gases match the solar abundances (see #1 above).  He also stated that comets brought the water in earth’s oceans, a claim that is disputed among planetary scientists (see 03/26/2003 headline).  He failed to point out that Jupiter’s dryness is problematic.  Should a planetary scientist gloss over problems like these when on camera?  Why not tell the truth, and say that scientists don’t know these things?  Why give the impression of consensus on things that are highly questionable?  Read Creation-Evolution Headlines where we think the problems are often more revealing than the Glittering Generalities you get on the news.

This is one of our favorite cell toys, because it is so exquisite, so small, so efficient, and so essential to all life, even the simplest single-celled organisms.  As each new fact comes to light, it looks even more wondrous.  Your car roars at 4,000 RPM; imagine these little motors, embedded in the mitochondrial membranes of all the cells in your body, humming along at up to 12,000 RPM.  The efficiency of these motors nears 100%, because they are able to harness the random bumps of Brownian motion into ratchet-like boosts, so that no energy is wasted generating power for your body’s needs (see Feb. 5 headline about your body’s electrical power plant).  Each day your body recycles at least half your body weight in ATP through these splendid molecular machines.
    A picture is worth a thousand words; download Wolfgang Junge’s cool animation rotary ATP synthase and watch a model of how it works in slo-mo.  After years of intense research, there is still much to learn.  The structure and mechanism of the lower F₀ subunit, which turns like a waterwheel under proton flow and activates the camshaft, remains to be understood.  Running constantly day and night, 24 x 7, these machines perform an absolutely essential function.  The exquisite shapes of the numerous protein components of this molecular motor defy a naturalistic explanation; where is the plausible sequence of intermediates that could lead to such perfection?  ATP synthase is a marvelous example of irreducible complexity, prima facie evidence for intelligent design.  As usual, the authors make no mention of evolution in their paper.  Who would dare?
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Human Body. • Next amazing story.

Let’s call dark matter what it really is: fudge.  The only ones who need fudge in their diet (see the June 20 headline about the Science bake sale) are the cosmologists who aren’t satisfied with the meat and potatoes of hard data, but want a dessert of naturalistic explanations for everything.  Like mother warned, too much fudge ruins your appetite for a healthy diet.
Next headline on: Stars and Astronomy. • Next headline on: Cosmology.

The reports on this fossil are filled with speculative Darwinspeak.  But what’s evolution got to do with it?  A big rodent once lived, and it went extinct.  You would think we are on the verge of vindicating Darwin from all the hype.  Listen to the AAAS spin release on EurekAlert (emphasis added):

• Roughly the size of a buffalo, a giant rodent that roamed the banks of an ancient Venezuelan river some 8 million years ago, dining on sea grass and dodging crocodiles, was an evolutionary sibling to modern-day guinea pigs.
• “The northern region of Venezuela holds the key to many mysteries of paleontology and animal evolution,” said Sanchez-Villagra.  “Yet, we have known very little about this area because regions covered with vegetation are not the best place to look for fossils.”
• “The giant rodent fossil raises wonderful questions about the constraints of evolution on size,” Alexander said.
• Andrew Sugden, an evolutionary biology expert and Science International’s Managing Editor, described the research as a milestone within the field: “At a stroke, this giant rodent more than doubles the size range of this remarkable family of animals and provides fascinating new insights into life some 8 million years ago,” he said.
• South America had been an island for tens of millions of years [sic], Sugden explained [sic].  South American animals thus managed [sic] to evolve in relative isolation, and the continent became home to giant representatives of a number of mammalian groups....

(Interestingly, the actual Science article is listed under the topic “Evolution,” but the body of the paper says nothing about evolution, except the comparative survival advantages of being large or being small.)  OK, so they found the bones of a big rodent.  That’s all.  The rest of the spin is evolutionary fluff.  It can never be checked or proved or dated, but it gives the storytellers something to do.

They’re like a traveling companion named Doug who made up a fun way to pass the time in the car on the way to camp trips: the Speculation Game.  He would ask the passengers to mention any subject, and he would speculate about it.  He was good; no matter what the item, his fertile imagination could always weave an elaborate, entertaining story.  One time he was asked to explain the origin of a particular cave we had seen, so he spun a tale involving the entire cosmos, ending with, “So you see, the cave was eternal; it always there; the universe and the earth formed around it.”

Like Doug, evolutionists love stories.  The Speculation Game is right down their alley.  There are some rules; one must adhere to the accepted general framework (millions of years of blind, purposeless evolution), but other than that, the rules are very loose.  A storyteller can even contradict another storyteller as long as they both stay in the Framework and never mention the C word, which is absolutely forbidden (see quote at top right of this page; evolution is defined more by what it is not, than by what it is; simply put, it’s un-Creation).
    It’s also important never to end the story, but to leave open enough subplots and surprises to keep the next storyteller employed.  Facts, like a bone here or there, are just incidental props; the goal is to contribute a good speculation, within the Framework, that impresses the media and provides work for animators.  “Once upon a time, children, millions and millions of years ago, South America was an island.  Working in her isolated laboratory on this island, Evolution generated all kinds of large and exotic animals.  Small guinea pigs were easy catch for the crocodiles, so Evolution made them bigger and harder to swallow.  But we can all swallow my story, can’t we?  Isn’t this a fun game?  Why, you can play it, too.”
    Reality check time.  Fact: Many extinct animals were larger than their living counterparts.  Logical conclusion: This is not evolution; it’s devolution.  Evolutionary spin: “This raises all kinds of wonderful questions about the evolutionary constraints on size, and fascinating insights into life some 8 million years ago.”  C'mon, everyone, and join the fun.  Speculate!
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Fossils. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

My, weren’t these critters smart to figure out all the nifty optics and cool sun visors.  The article is strangely silent about any transitional forms that might have led up to these high-tech innovations.  The pictures of this weird animal are stunning, if you have access.  The preservation of fine details in such an “old” fossil is remarkable.
Next headline on: Fossils. • Next amazing story.

Whenever a claim is made about how things were billions of years ago, be a good baloney detector and hunt for what was measured.  Brush off the interpretation and the dates, which are based on evolutionary assumptions, and find that one little thing that was actually subjected to experimental lab methods.  Here it is from the NSF press release (emphasis added):

One of the ocean-dwelling organisms producing oxygen during the later Proterozoic period [ignore the interpretation here] was Dictyosphaera delicata, a microscopic plant not much bigger than the dot in the letter i.  To estimate the ancient levels of atmospheric CO₂, Kaufman and Xiao measured ratios of two different forms, or isotopes, of carbon present in individual microfossils of this plant.
    “It was a painstaking process to get individual organisms,” Kaufman said.  The scientists “were able to take a camel hair brush and, using one hair of the brush, pick up one of these microfossils, which had been removed from its substrate [rock] using hydrofluoric acid, which dissolves the inorganic minerals but not organic matter.”
    Numerous microscopic samples of fossilized cellular material were knocked out of each organism using high-energy beams of ions from an ion probe.  The sample material was analyzed with a mass spectrometer to come up with the results reported.

Now decide whether carbon ratios in tiny specks of material subjected to hydrofluoric acid and high-energy beams and contamination by camel hair, can tell anyone anything about the state of the whole world over a billion years ago.  Their resulting CO₂ calculation depended also on models, averaging values, throwing out anomalous readings, and making assumptions about how these plants metabolized with carbon dioxide.  They admit the sensitivity of their measurements depends critically on surface temperature and volume-to-surface ratio.  How convenient for evolutionists there are no time machines for them to go back and make in situ observations from points all over the globe.  Yet on the basis of tiny specks of questionable data, Kaufman states authoritatively, like an eyewitness,

The sun was not as luminous then so it did not provide as much light and heat as it does now .... Our new findings confirm models of how much greenhouse gas was required to keep Earth’s temperature warm enough so the oceans didn’t freeze during this time.

In response, the science news outlets, like the green vending-machine aliens in Toy Story, all join in unison and hum reverently, “Oooo, aaaaa, science.”  Your NSF tax dollars at work.
Next headline on: Dating Methods. • Next headline on: Geology.

We’re not going to dignify this claim with a serious analysis, other than to wonder why New Scientist would give it the time of day.  But we will contribute our own theory: the Lava Lamp theory for the origin of life.  Lava lamps are not just a kitsch conversation piece for nerds; they are an emerging life-form.  Notice how the blobs replicate and communicate, exchange energy, and rise and fall in non-repetitive ways.  Clearly there is more self-organization going on than meets the casual eye.  If volcanoes under the sea created similar conditions, then perhaps the first life-form evolved from such a phenomenon.  Hook up your Lava Lamp to a Jacob’s Ladder, and talk to it.  You might find yourself shrieking, “It’s allll-iiii-vvvv-eeee!”  (Wonder if Sanduloviciu is from Transylvania?)
Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next dumb story.

    If you expect equal pay for equal work, you’re not the only species to have a sense of fair play.  Blame evolution.
    Researchers studying brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) have found that the highly social, cooperative species native to South America show a sense of fairness, the first time such behavior has been documented in a species other than humans.
    The question of whether human aversion to unfair treatment—now shown by other primates—is an evolved behavior or the result of the cultural influence of large social institutions like religion, governments, and schools, in the case of humans, has intrigued scientists in recent years.
    The new finding [sic] suggests evolution may have something to do with it.  It also highlights questions about the economic and evolutionary nature of cooperation and its relationship to a species’ sense of fairness, while adding yet another chapter to our understanding [sic] of primates.

We didn’t learn fairness from monkeys.  They learned how to sulk, pout, and throw tantrums by watching humans.  Monkey see, monkey do.  Actually, humans evolved altruism from dogs, especially those of us who grew up watching reruns of Lassie.
    A revelation one gets from reading enough Darwinian papers is that evolutionists are funny.  They take themselves so seriously.  This paper is particularly comical.  The authors are undoubtedly sensitive to being laughed at, and we must remain polite, but sometimes it’s hard.  They hold these truths to be self-evident, that all capuchin monkeys are evolved equal, that they are endowed by natural selection with certain inalienable rights, including equal portions of grapes and cucumbers.  The write-up provides lots of pertinent details, like the shutter speed of the video camera they used, as if that matters, and other information that tries to make this junior-high experiment look scientific (emphasis added):

The experimenter ... stood before the monkey with the left hand outstretched in a palm-up begging gesture [a Kodak moment] approximately 5 cm [metric, now that’s really scientific] above the floor of the test chamber [i.e., cage] and 2 cm from the mesh, and with the right hand in the laboratory coat pocket [gotta have those white lab coats on if you’re a scientist].  The monkey had 60 s [that’s one minute, for us peons] to place the token [a pebble] into the palm of the experimenter’s outstretched hand.  Throwing the token at the experimenter or out of the test chamber did not count as an exchange.

[Yeeeee-HAW!]  Can you believe this?  Stupid pet tricks gone awry in the world’s most prestigious science journal?  One could only hope the editors of Nature were howling like monkeys while reading this, and printing it for comic relief from the usual boring scientific paper.
    All the science news outlets don’t seem to get the joke, though.  They are treating this very seriously, seemingly awestruck at this wonderful demonstration of the evolution of social justice.  Here’s how it came across as an MSNBC news brief on a Motorola pager: MONKEYS EXHIBIT A SENSE OF FAIR PLAY: [chuckle], Monkeys throw a fit [snortle] if they get a bum deal [guffaw], hinting [mmmmfff] that a sense of fairness may [heh heh] predate the rise of humans” [har har snort ye-he-he-he waaaaa-HO!]
    Sorry.  We’ll try to restrain ourselves and get serious.  It’s just hard sometimes.  Question: how would fairness genes evolve, including the developmental pathways, such that the trait could be inherited?  What mutations in gametic cells were required to lead one monkey to throw a tantrum when it saw another one getting a grape?  What mutations were required in the other monkey’s gametes to cause it to give a darn about how its neighbor felt?  How does one define justice or fairness without moral content?  Why are so many judges men, if all they care about is sex?  How can a male care about sex when he is hungry?  In this experiment, how do we distinguish the experimenter from the subject?  Call Dave Letterman, maybe he will know.
    Science Now has some fun with the story, even though they think the findings are legitimate and conclude that the sense of fairness is “deeply evolutionarily rooted.”  Their title is, “Working Monkeys Unite!” [uh oh, call the Internal Security Subcommittee], and the picture caption says, “Slave wages.  All day I hand back their stupid tokens, and for what—a lousy piece of apple?”  [... You have nothing to lose but your cages... you have a grape to win...]  The write-up in New Scientist states, “Monkeys can spot a raw deal when they see one, and if they are not treated fairly they throw a tantrum.”  Omygoodness—Don’t tell the ACLU.  The Ape Civil Liberties Union, that is [Splat!] -- the sound of another cucumber slice hitting the evolutionist’s face [yuck wheeze WAHOO! sniff].  Sorry.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

The conclusions being drawn from this archaeological study is “political” science in the Marxist tradition.  Hunter-gatherers of the world, unite!  Throw off the bourgeoisie with their clay pots and fired-brick dwellings.  Science?  Worthless.
    Empirically, all these scientists found was evidence for sin, the same old selfishness and pride that is with us today.  Building on Darwin’s foundation of evolution, some reporters are spinning the story to fit a political ideology.  The liberal “political” scientists in today’s universities, assuming evolution as the foundation for all of reality, (and usually warmer to Marxist ideology than capitalism) want to pin the blame for war on externals.  It’s the disparity between the rich and the poor that is the root of conflict, they say.  They organize people into oppressors and oppressed, usurpers and victims.  Affluence is the root of social injustice.  Now that we can take control of our own evolution, we can overcome the territoriality of our reptilian past.  But first we must overthrow the oppressors by revolution, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.  Once we learn to share our resources like good communists, we will achieve social justice in a classless society – utopia.
    Don’t believe it.  The moment Joe finds something in utopia that Moe wants, whether a leaf, a sparkling rock, or a fruit hanging from a tree, the world will be on the brink of war all over again.  The twentieth century should have seen the death of 19th-century utopian dreams of innocence.  Wasn’t that the lesson of Golding’s 1954 classic, Lord of the Flies?
    War did not evolve.  It is innate.  It stems from a human characteristic formed not by natural selection, but by design: the choice to disobey the Creator (i.e., sin).  “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies,” said Jesus Christ in Matthew 15:15-20.  James echoed the idea that war begins internally: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?  Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?  You desire and do not have, so you murder.  You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.  You do not have, because you do not ask.  You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” (James 4:1-3, ESV).  Enmity started with the first man and woman, and manifested itself in the first generation, when Cain murdered his brother.  War must be cured from the inside out by a heart transplant, through reconciliation with the Creator, the Author of justice and the Prince of peace.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: Early Man. • Next dumb story.

Grand Canyon Sand Hails from Back East   09/15/2003
Sands from the Appalachians have found a tourist mecca in the arid Southwest, it seems.  Two weeks ago it was reported that Utah’s Navajo sandstones came from the Appalachians (see Sept. 2 headline), and now a geologist from Univ. of Arizona thinks the same for Grand Canyon sandstones, reports Nature Science Update.  He bases his conclusion on radiometric dates of zircons in the sand which match those in Appalachia.  This would require huge rivers bearing sand thousands of miles westward to Wyoming, “from whence winds blew it south into the dune fields” of Arizona.  The resulting sand pile covered an area the size of the Kalahari desert.  “I was very surprised by what we found,” said one of the geologists.

If the present is key to the past, is there anything like this happening today?  Add a hawk flying around this hypothesis and you have a picturesque, ad hoc scenario.
Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

This opens up exciting possibilities for understanding new functions of these widespread regions of so-called “junk DNA.”  The splicing may provide handles for a variety of molecular assistants to speed up the workflow.  Undoubtedly other benefits that ensue from the work of the spliceosome machinery (see 09/12/2002 headline) remain to be discovered.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

1. Asteroid Spin:  Koronis asteroids have preferred spin rates and orientations, as reported last year (see 09/05/2002 headline).  When Stephen Slivan reported this fact, everyone was baffled, because collisions should have randomized the orientations.  Richard P. Binzel, writing in Nature this week¹, says, “the alignments defied belief — how could a collisionally dominated family have aligned spin vectors?”  Theorists have been working on the problem; he says; “Theory often drives observations, but this time observations led the way” toward explaining the findings.
       In the same issue of Nature², three astronomers came up with a possible explanation.  They employed a special case of the Yarkovsky effect (a slight force caused by thermal re-radiation of sunlight hitting a surface) to suggest that sunlight can spin up and orient an asteroid over time.  If so, this effect may be more important than collisions in determining spin for asteroids less than 40 km in diameter.  Every solution breeds new problems, however, and they admit this could have “far-reaching implications for the physical history of many small asteroids.”  It might make them shed mass or even split.  Binzel, though intrigued by the suggestion, thinks more observations will be needed to see if it holds up.
       A popular account of this story can be found on Space.com, and another at Southwest Research Institute, which says of this “big surprise,” that “we have only scratched the surface of this interesting problem.”

   ---

   ¹Richard P. Binzel, “Planetary science: Spin control for asteroids,” Nature 425, 131 - 132 (11 September 2003); doi:10.1038/425131a.
   ²Vokrouhlicky, Nesvorny, and Bottke, “The vector alignments of asteroid spins by thermal torques,” Nature 425, 147 - 151 (11 September 2003); doi:10.1038/nature01948.

   Sounds like an ad hoc way to fix the problem after a discovery.  And if theory usually drives observations, what observations might be missed if the theory is wrong?  One would think that in science, observation is king.

2. Comet Nitrogen:  Anomalous amounts of Nitrogen-15 have been found in four comets.  They have more N15 than the earth, which was unexpected.  Comets were supposed to be the most pristine remnants of the early solar nebula, but now it seems “the early solar system may have been more heterogeneous and more chemically complex than previously assumed,” states the summary of the paper in today’s Science.¹.  A press release on this finding and what it means was published by the European Southern Observatory, which states that understanding the makeup of comets is important because of “the probable role of comets in bringing to the young Earth materials essential for the subsequent formation of life on our planet.”

   ---

   ¹Arpigny et al., “Anomalous Nitrogen Isotope Ratio in Comets,” Science 12 May 2003; 10.1126/science.1086711.

   They always have to insert part of the evolutionary tall tale into the story.  Nitrogen-15 in a comet has nothing to do with life.  Anyway, this finding shows that one cannot always assume the initial conditions of a theory have anything to do with reality.  Theories of the origin of the solar system often assume uniform, homogeneous disks of dust and gas.  The realities of our real solar system are much, much more complex than the simplistic stories told in textbooks.

   Next headline on: Solar System.

Cells Fight Mutations   09/12/2003
A team of cancer researchers identified 33 genes in yeast “potentially associated with the suppression of the accumulation of mutations.”  Their paper was published online Sept. 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹, where they begin by stating,

Maintaining the stability of the genome is critical to cell survival and normal cell growth.  Inherited or acquired deficiencies in genome maintenance systems contribute significantly to the onset of cancer as evidenced by the observation that a number of the DNA-repair and checkpoint genes are mutated in cancer susceptibility syndromes and sporadic cancers.  This raises the possibility that other genetic defects causing genome instability and mutator phenotypes could contribute to carcinogenesis.

Of the confirmed genes, five encode components of the oxidative-stress response, and six are genes of unknown function.  We believe the data presented here define a nearly complete collection of nonessential genes involved in suppression of mutations in the CAN1 forward-mutation assay [a sample gene used for evaluating effects of mutations] and define several previously unappreciated mutation-suppression pathways.

Scientists need to get rid of these genes, because they are hindering the progress of evolution.  Haven’t we all been taught that mutations provide the raw material for change?  If these pathways are fixing all the damage, how can evolution ever make any progress?  These scientists were negligent.  They didn’t mention evolution or praise Darwin anywhere in their paper.
    Notice how there are at least 33 different genes identified here (which might be the tip of the iceberg), and that they are called nonessential; i.e., the cell can get by without them, just like a city might survive for generations without a fire department.  Evolution is supposed to produce all its wonders because they are essential for survival.  How could evolution produce so many elaborate pathways, if they are not essential, but nice to have in an emergency?  Each pathway involves multiple components, working together on a common function, with feedback loops and regulatory processes.
    Humans have many similar pathways to control damage and prevent cancer, but notice that this study was done on yeast.  Remember those cute diagrams in biology textbooks of yeast cells budding off baby yeast cells?  Nothing looked simpler.  Who would have thought those simple cells have an army of rescue workers and repairmen, all highly skilled and well trained, ready to heal the damage from the random, senseless terrorist attacks of mutations?  We must never forget.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.

Texas law requires students to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.  Should the state board of education apply this standard to how evolution is presented in textbooks?

Messenger: The peasants are revolting!
King Richard: They certainly are.
Next headline on: Schools. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Has it come to this?  Imputing human marital feelings to birds?  I suppose the lesson is, “If you want to stay married, the more drab the better; don’t wear designer clothes, and don’t be well groomed.”  As if birds care a tweet.  Question: how did they measure the divorce rates of fossil birds?
    The other paper claims that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection leads to opposite, contradictory effects: species diversity and extinction.  But how can they prove that, without assuming evolution to start with?  They invoke a strange hand-waving plot element: “post-mating sexual selection” which they measure by “testis size.”  Picture these poor suckers measuring bird balls and then claiming they know anything about what the female likes, and how her choice is going to affect future generations’ risk of extinction.  The weakness of the empirical evidence for all this storytelling can be seen by their discussion section at the end, in which they basically say the results are so ambiguous, that it might be due to three possibilities: maybe this, maybe that, or maybe something totally different.  Look at this sample sentence:

Clearly, the question of how sexual selection relates to extinction risk needs closer attention from both theoreticians and empiricists, but considering all the available evidence, a cautious conclusion is that sexual selection may have a double-edged effect upon patterns of species – encouraging both the conception and termination of species.  This balancing effect could explain why some recent comparative studies have failed to find any relationship between species richness and the intensity of sexual selection, despite having large sample sizes and using powerful comparative methodologies....