“The success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity. ... To establish the continuity required by the theory, historical arguments are invoked even though historical evidence is lacking.  Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion ... where deficiencies of the data were patched up with hypotheses, and the reader is left with the feeling that if the data do not support the theory they really ought to.”
– Dr. W. R. Thompson, Canadian entomologist, in the introduction to the 1956 reprint of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

This website is nicely designed and easy to use.  It was probably written in response to what Darwin Party defenders like Eugenie Scott lamented about the anti-evolution websites that some teachers are using (see 02/27/2004 entry).  The typical arguments and just-so stories are all here, simplified and easily digested without much thought, along with preventive medicine to anesthetize uncooperative students.  Some of the answers are really lame (see origin of life, for instance; it sidesteps the issue, tells big lies with glittering generalities and illustrates it with cartoon humor).  This website won’t teach students much about evolution, but it could provide a good practice pad for baloney detecting.
    The Darwin Party does not want students to know the best arguments for intelligent design or best evidences for creation.  They want to construct a straw man to quell the opposition, and via selective evidence, present a sanitized, non-threatening version of evolution.  The opposition wants students to thoroughly understand both sides.  Like Phillip Johnson often remarks, he wants students to learn more evolution than the schools are teaching them.  That includes the many deep and serious problems and controversies involved in all aspects of the belief system.
    The best proposal would be to allow students to compare and contrast this site with some of the best anti-evolution websites (see 02/13/2004 entry, for instance, and take your pick from creationism connection).  It may be too late, however.  A leading creationist professor (with a PhD from Harvard who studied under Stephen Jay Gould) recently remarked that, in his experience, today’s students are so clueless about history and science that teaching either view would be unlikely to produce any effect other than a glazed stare.  Young people have no knowledge of the issues involved in the Scopes Trial or any number of other subjects related to creation vs. evolution.  He said the only topic they can speak on with any interest is the latest movie.  Perhaps the dumbing down of America has made the “Understanding Evolution” website an exercise in futility for the masses.  We hope any students reading Creation-Evolution Headlines are glorious exceptions.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Education

A naturalistic explanation for the mind, soul and spirit does not seem to be forthcoming, does it?  (By “explanation” we do not mean a just-so story; those are always in plentiful supply.)
Next headline on:  Human Body • Genetics and DNA

“Probably all of the organic beings which have ever lived on this Earth have descended from some one primordial form,” Darwin wrote in his Origin of Species, published in 1859.  Darwin had no way to peer that far back in time.  But genome sequencing has given researchers hope that they can finally learn something about the ancestor of all life.  In 1999, they even gave it a name, LUCA, for the last universal common ancestor.

Yet despite the wealth of genomic data, LUCA has proven elusive.  In theory, remnants of the organism from which all life evolved should be scattered around modern genomes.  But so far, efforts to reconstruct LUCA's genes by building family trees from modern sequences have ended in frustration.  Basic questions about LUCA’s nature remain unanswered.  Did it live in a hot-water environment, such as a hydrothermal vent at the bottom of the ocean, or in cooler conditions at the ocean surface?  Was LUCA simple, like a bacterium, or more complex?

From all this work, one of the more surprising theories to emerge may also help to explain why LUCA has been so hard to find.  Perhaps it wasn’t a single organism at all.  Instead, most researchers now believe we should think of LUCA as a pool of genes shared among a host of primitive organisms.
    “The naive picture that a group of organisms got all their genes from a simple last common ancestor is breaking down,” says microbiologist Gary Olsen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  In its place, the image of a sophisticated, global community is emerging, he says.  “In the past two years, it feels like it’s fallen together into a coherent picture.”  Rather than a last common ancestor, LUCA may have been a last common community.

According to some evolutionary biologists, the implications for LUCA are strange indeed.  If a single LUCA laid the foundations for the modern diversity in membranes, metabolism and so on, it must have had several different versions of many important genes, in addition to the universal 60.  Later lineages would each have pruned all but one from this set, giving rise to the current diversity in basic biochemical pathways.  The idea that organisms become more complex rather than less as you get closer to the root of the tree of life is impossible to swallow, says [David] Saul [U. of Auckland, NZ].  A single LUCA “would have to have had the most bizarre biochemistry imaginable”.

Ultimately, around 3.5 billion years ago, the modern domains of life would have emerged from the gene-swapping mêlée with many of the genes from the last common community riding on their coat-tails.  Inheritance and mutation would then have replaced gene transfer as the most important source of biological novelty as cells became more complex and their functions became less interchangeable.  This point, says Woese, was the true origin of species, and so he has christened it the darwinian threshold.

...Patrick Forterre of the Paris-Sud University in Orsay and the Pasteur Institute in Paris, ... says the communal LUCA notion doesn’t fit with the way evolution works.  “To think of LUCA in terms of a community is to remove the idea of darwinism from early evolution,” he says.  Although LUCA undoubtedly swapped genes with its neighbours, Forterre argues that it would also have competed with them and ultimately triumphed through some key innovation.

Of course, finding LUCA would not solve the puzzle of how life began.  The idea of a last common community, with a communally sophisticated biochemistry, raises another question: how did all this evolve?  This is for someone else to answer, says Woese.  “We don’t understand how to create novelty from scratch – that’s a question for biologists of the future.”

Welcome to the biology of the future.  It is called Intelligent Design.  It uses well-understood principles of design detection and information theory.  It can be summarized, “the essence of life is information (see 12/30/2003, 08/21/2003, 06/12/2003, and 12/30/2002 entries).  If the essence of life is information, the essence of information is intelligent design.”
    We quoted extensively from Whitfield’s article to let you watch the Civil War going on in the Darwin Party.  Both sides know they have problems, but their hypotheses each falsify one another, and neither fits the data.
    If LUCA is unknowable, it is not science, it is religion (see 12/27/2003 entry).  Belief in a LUCD (Living Universal Common Designer) has far fewer intellectual difficulties and fits the data like a hand in a glove.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Genomic and evolutionary analyses show us that we are not the single “individuals” that we think we are.  Instead, we and other complex organisms are composed of an interconnected ecosystem of eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells whose interactions can best be understood in the context of community ecology.

The historical emphasis on pathogenic bacteria and their diseases has led to an assumption that genes encoding virulence factors are specific to those relationships.  However, several of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie interactions between an animal and its beneficial microbiota are remarkably similar to those first found in pathogens.  Svanborg described how molecules that enhance persistence at a site where a given microbe is a member of the normal microbiota can be the very factors that promote disease when these bacteria emigrate to other sites of the body.... Thus, the presence of these genes may indicate the potential for host interactions, which may be pathogenic or benign according to how these genes are regulated or the sensitivity of the tissue in which they are expressed.

As the depth of host-microbe interactions and the mechanisms underlying them continue to be unraveled, fundamental paradigms of pathogenic microbiology, developmental biology, and immunology will need to be reevaluated.  For this reason, a specific recommendation arising from the workshop is that biology be taught in a new way, incorporating our growing knowledge about the importance of beneficial microbial interactions and their evolutionary, ecological, and biochemical impact on both animals and plants.

One of the most frequent and hard-to-answer criticisms of creation science has been the presence of pathogens.  Bacteria and viruses, if designed, would seem to be the nefarious products of a malevolent genius rather than of a compassionate Creator.  This was one of the main reasons for Darwin’s slide to agnosticism, from youthful admiration of Paley to middle-aged rejection of Christianity, revelation and purpose in nature.  While most people can appreciate the abundant evidences of design in nature, creationists have been hard pressed to explain disease-causing bacteria and viruses.
    But what if they were beneficial living machines running wild, out of bounds and out of control?  The Type III secretion system looks like a weapon, designed to inject poison into a hapless victim.  But could it have originally been like a compassionate doctor’s hypodermic needle, intended for good?  Instead of weapons, were pathogens originally regulatory devices, meant to act as governors on our engines?  Do our metaphors mislead us?  After all, too much of a good thing can be bad.  We need accelerators, but we need brakes, too.
    These authors seem open to the possibility that harmful pathogens may be the exception rather than the rule.  They point out that beneficial interactions probably vastly outnumber harmful ones, and at least some of the harmful ones may be beneficial interactions out of kilter.  Their chosen belief is that these interactions “coevolved” on the long Darwinian road from bacteria to man, but this fails to explain the intricate design of even the one-celled organisms.  There is an alternative explanation that should not be arbitrarily dismissed, because it explains good design gone bad: the curse because of sin.
    See also 03/14/2003 and 02/21/2002 entries on this subject, and also the next headline, below.
Next headline on:  Human Body

Enemies clearly matter, and that’s especially true in the old country.  When the researchers grew knapweed in French soil, it fared better in soil that had been previously planted with bunchgrass than with knapweed--presumably because the bunchgrass soil had not accumulated knapweed-specific pathogens.  But it appears that enemies aren’t the whole story.  Montana soil showed the opposite pattern: Knapweed planted in soil that had grown knapweed did better there than in once-grassy soil, the team reports in the 19 February issue of Nature.  They think that invasive knapweed has not only escaped its natural pathogens in Montana but is modifying the soil to its own advantage, perhaps by cultivating helpful mycorrhizal fungi.
“This suggests that the contribution of soil organisms in invasiveness is two-fold: [Invasives] escape from the bad guys and [get] help from the good guys,” notes Wim Van der Putten of the Centre for Terrestrial Ecology in Heteren, The Netherlands.

The article starts with the language of warfare, but is it misleading?

It may not make great action footage for nature documentaries, but plants are in constant battle with each other--for space, light, water--and with soil pathogens that threaten to kill or stunt them.  Now it’s becoming clear just how important this subterranean struggle can be.  Plants that escape their natural soil-borne enemies, and strike up alliances with friendly microbes, can become aggressive invaders.

This Malthusian, dog-eat-dog imagery may be opposite the truth (see 07/04/2003 entry.)  If the plants and their soil organisms are in a balance of growth and regulation, that can be a picture a peaceful homeostasis just as much as the regulation that goes on inside a single cell: agonist and antagonist, on-switch and off-switch, accelerator and brake.
    Imagine instead a post-Fall and post-Flood world.  After a worldwide flood and ice age, the ecology was radically changed with continents having drifted apart and land bridges vanished under rising seas.  New groups of organisms, now isolated from one another, settled into new levels of mutual regulation suitable for their climate.  The more isolated the environments became, the more “damage” an invasive species could cause.  Increasing human migrations accelerated the upsets to ecologies that had become established over thousands of years (e.g., the importation of tumbleweeds to the western United States by Russian immigrants, Dutch elm disease, etc.).  An original worldwide balance in nature was replaced by islands, each balanced internally, but out of balance with each other.
    All human investigators have the same data available for study.  Darwinian struggle, Biblical paradise lost – your metaphor will affect how you look at the data, and what questions you will find interesting.
Next headline on:  Plants

Theories, like Olympic records, are made to be broken.  Let facts be true, and every theory a liar.
    The news item on the next page, “Getting to Know Our Stellar Neighbors,” reports results of a survey of all the stars within 10 parsecs (about 32.6 light-years) of our sun.  Surprisingly, small red dwarfs rule, nearly 12 times more numerous than stars like our sun.  This provides more evidence against the belief that Earth orbits an ordinary star.  Also, the habitable zone around a red dwarf is much narrower, lowering the probability life could exist around such a star.  The astronomer doing the survey, Todd Henry, believes the constraint is balanced by the sheer numbers of red dwarfs, but what is the chance an earthlike planet would be found in a circular orbit within such a narrow ring, when even around our sun the habitable zone represents a small fraction of the radius of our solar system?  One might almost suspect our location, at just the right distance around the right kind of star, was intelligently designed (see next headline).
Next headline on:  Astronomy

Here we see the Elephant in the Living Room phenomenon.  Design in nature is the elephant, and the cosmologists are the investigators explaining why the elephant is not really there.  The elephant, however, continues to make its presence known, denials notwithstanding.
    Find the contradiction in the statements above.  Gross criticizes religion because it cannot be disproved, but can multiple universes be disproved?  There is no way to observe or test the existence of multiple universes; the whole notion was invented to get around the obvious evidence for design in our universe.  It is our universe that is subject to observation and testing, not some hypothetical multiverse.  That makes the multiverse explanation essentially a religious notion.
    And cannot a religion be disproved?  Some can, if they make statements about the world or the universe that can be tested.  If a religion teaches that the earth sits on top of a turtle or is held up by Atlas, you can check from a spacecraft.  If Mormonism teaches that American Indians are descendants of Israelites, you can compare their DNA (see DNA vs. the Book of Mormon).  Why doesn’t Gross get on Andre Linde’s case?  He is a Hindu.  Doesn’t an infinite series of multiple universes play into the hands of his religious beliefs?
    Gross might reply that no amount of evidence will convince a believer.  OK, let’s apply that standard to the Darwinians.  No hypocrisy here; the Darwin Party always goes where the evidence leads (see 02/27/2004 entry, for example).  If evidence for design is staring them in the face, they will go to the lengths of proposing hypothetical infinite universes, which can never be observed, to maintain their faith in Pope Darwin (see 02/13/2004 entry).  Spergel seems to be thinking of theistic evolutionists when he says, “Some people invoke miracles to explain the underlying processes in evolution.”  Yet that is exactly what fundamentalist Darwinians do, when they incessantly trust in the mythical powers of “emergence” (see 02/25/2003 commentary).  This is intellectual surrender as much as any easy-believism in religion.  On the contrary, the Design perspective has a track record as a driving force for discovery in the history of science (see online book).
    The Gross fear that the anthropic principle plays into the hands of Intelligent Design supporters betrays naked atheistic bias.  He will not allow non-skeptics into the room to declare, “There is an elephant in here!”  No, that is intellectual surrender.  We must find a different explanation for this pain on my foot.  Those are the rules.  No elephants allowed.  That is how science must be done.  Keep looking.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Intelligent Design

• Georgia school officials took a big step back from opening the door to creationism last week.  They provisionally restored evolution and some other key scientific concepts to the state’s proposed curriculum standards, after dropping them from earlier drafts.  But although science educators see it as a victory, the Georgia dispute is just one of several ongoing battles over the teaching of evolution in the nation’s schools. ...
      On 19 February, the Georgia Board of Education approved proposed curriculum standards consistent with support of evolution after initially proposing standards that not only left out the word “evolution” but omitted major concepts in both physical and biological sciences.  The ensuing uproar (Science, 6 February, p. 759) drove State Superintendent Kathy Cox to restore the “e” word.  Scientists continued to press for restoration of key features such as plate tectonics and the age of Earth, however, and last week the board approved a version that contains most of the omitted material.  A final vote is set for June.
  [see 01/30/2004 entry.]
• In Ohio, where ID promoters were beaten back 2 years ago, the state Board of Education this month voted 13-4 to approve a chapter called “Critical Analysis of Evolution” in the model teaching guide for 10th grade biology.  Critics have complained that the chapter relies heavily on a popular ID text, Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution, and refers students to Web sites that promote the concept.  A final vote is scheduled for next month.
• The issue has also raised its head in neighboring Michigan, where Grand Blanc school officials are weighing proposals that would add both creationism and Bible study to the curriculum.  A petition asking for equal time for creationism and evolution was presented to the school board by a high school student who is also the daughter of a board member.
• In Darby, Montana, a nasty dispute has broken out over a proposal by a local minister, Curtiss Brickley, to encourage teachers to look at evidence for and against various scientific theories, evolutionary theory in particular.  “We’ve been told that fights have actually broken out on the school grounds,” says Skip Evans of NCSE, which monitors the issue.
• Missouri Representative Wayne Cooper has introduced a bill, HB911, that would require “equal treatment” for ID and evolution, starting in 2006, and would sack teachers who refuse.
• An Alabama bill, SB336, would protect teachers from getting into trouble for teaching creationism.  “I think there is a tremendous ill balance in the classroom,” says the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Senator Wendell Mitchell.
• In Minnesota ... the latest state science teaching standards may be weakened if the legislature chooses to include a minority report authored by ID supporters.  The current commissioner of education, Cheri Yecke, believes the decision on whether to teach creationism should be left up to local school districts.
  [see 01/22/2004 entry.]
• And in Texas, a citizens’ group this week alleged that antievolution members of the state board of education have been ordering textbook publishers to correct “errors”, quotes in original] identified by creationist groups.  [See Constance Holden’s account of the Texas controversy, 11/15/2003 entry; also see 11/05/2003 entry.)

• The flurry of fights at both local and state levels reflects the pervasiveness of resistance to evolutionary theory, says biologist Randy Moore of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.  “It’s relentless.  It comes up just about everywhere.  And it’s not going away,” he says.
• Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in El Cerrito, California, believes that the timing is not a coincidence.  “It’s an election year,” she says, meaning that there is a heightened awareness of hot-button issues among both politicians and the public. ...
  There’s a lot of support out there for this view, says Scott: “The ‘Teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution’ language appeals to the spirit of ‘fairness’ in American culture.”
• Scientists should not underestimate the threat to science from such grassroots efforts, says Moore: “In every survey that I’ve seen data for, 15% to 20% of high school biology teachers teach creationism.  University faculty have no idea what is happening in high school classrooms across the country.”

It’s always interesting to watch the spin the Darwin Party Defenders put on this issue.  This article is not as bad as some, but the imagery is still not subtle.  Here are the tricks of their trade:

• Portray creationists as religious zealots.  (Name Calling.)
• Portray them as sneaky.  (Fear Mongering.)  All ID and creation material is readily available and out in the open in the marketplace of ideas.
• Portray them as radical fringe groups with an agenda.  (Darwin Party members, of course, are always “mainstream” and have no agenda.)
• Always put “ism” on “creation-ism” but use “evolution” without the suffix.  (Loaded Words.)
• Conflate “evolution” with “science”; lump in age of the earth for good measure.  (Association.)
• Use quotes to indicate doubt: intelligent design, fairness, equal treatment, errors.  ID proponents don’t want to present scientific criticisms; they want to present “scientific” criticisms.  (Suggestion.)
• If all else fails, lie.  (See Big Lie and Half Truth).  Example: “The current battle lines are the result of a 1987 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that creationism is religion and can’t be taught in science class.”  False.  The decision banned equal-time laws; it explicitly stated that teachers had the freedom to present any scientific approach to origins, including creation.  (See Discovery Institute’s response to Darwinist claims in Ohio that teaching ID is illegal.)  “Since then, the antievolution movement has gathered adherents under the rubric of “intelligent design” (ID) [quotes in original].  Instead of going to court, ID supporters are trying to build grassroots support.”  Is that so bad?  Is persuasion based on evidence and logic no longer worthy activity?  Are courts supposed to be the referees in the marketplace of ideas about origins?  The perception is that this is a devious group of zealots trying to lay siege to the peace-loving inhabitants of scientific utopia.  “And their success, says Moore, is premised on the perception that, ‘on its face, ID is not linked with religion.’”  (Notice the hidden assumptions that religion and science are mutually exclusive, and that evolutionism is not religious.  These assumptions would make for lively debate.)

You cannot understand these kinds of reports without being alert to the gimmicks of misdirection and obfuscation used.  To Science and other Darwin Party organs, evolutionists are the citizens fighting off the intellectual barbarians.  They should read the account of how Darwin and his Four Musketeers (see 01/06/2004 entry) waged a subversive coup of the scientific institutions between 1859 and 1870 (see 01/15/2004 entry), letting in the Starving Storytellers (see 12/22/2003 entry).  With that history, a revolutionary war is overdue.  It’s time to kick the rascals out of their cushy ivory towers and put science back on a search for the Truth.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Education

Since there are many perspectives and no consensus, language evolution is one of the subjects Darwinists love.  They can brag about how much they don’t know and weave tall tales with reckless abandon, like the one in Nature yesterday (see 02/25/2004 entry).
    These articles are a treasure chest of embarrassing quotes.  Some examples:

• “Whatever the traits that separate humans from our ape ancestors, complex language is clearly among them.”  Thank you, Culotta and Hanson,¹ for pointing this out.  The gist of their article is that Darwinists don’t understand the evolution of language, and all the old theories are obsolete.
• Elizabeth Pennisi explores the new Just-So Story that language evolved from click-speech, like that performed by some modern African hunters: “Although the idea is far from proven, ‘it seems plausible that the population that was ancestral to all living humans lived in the savanna and used clicks,’ says vertebrate systematist Alec Knight of Stanford University.”
      Tsk, tsk.  Here is the plausibility criterion at work (see 12/23/2003 entry), trumping empirical proof.
• Pennisi also explores the research of Joseph Greenberg (Stanford, d. 2003) who tried to build a Darwinian tree of languages.  “But all these analyses continue to draw fire from researchers who say the data simply can’t support peering so far back in time.  ‘Languages have been evolving for so long that too much has been lost,’ says [Donald] Ringe [U. of Pennsylvania].  Many of the similarities Greenberg noted, such as similar first letters, are so subtle that they may be circumstantial, says Ringe.”
      Circumstantial evidence can be misleading, especially when too much of the sought-for data have been lost, so far back in time.
• Michael Balter goes on a “Search for the Indo-Europeans” and describes researchers who try to apply Darwin tree-building methods to language evolution: “Although the contribution of genetics to the debate has so far been disappointing, that has not stopped evolutionary biologists from jumping into the fray.”  Later, “However, many linguists remain unconvinced by such analyses, questioning the relevance of evolutionary biology techniques to linguistic problems (Science, 28 November 2003, p. 1490).  ‘There is no reason whatsoever to assume that vocabulary would behave the same way that organisms do,’ says Alexander Lehrman, a linguist at the University of Delaware in Newark.”
      How can language, a faculty of intelligence, evolve by Darwinian naturalism?
• Carstairs-McCarthy² states the confusion of tongues in an interesting way: “The evolutionary origins of language should intrigue anyone interested in the relationship of humans to other species.  For them, Language Evolution will provide a useful starting point.  But the volume is not a summary of mainstream views, because no such mainstream exists.”
      He lists 20 questions researchers into the evolution of language are asking, but the answers are all futureware: “Contradictory answers to all of these questions can be found in the volume.  But do not let that put you off.  This may well be, as the editors put it, ‘the hardest problem in science.’  Nonetheless, with so many diverse specialists now talking to one another, a good start has been made.”  It’s not really all that hard when you believe the documentation.

It’s interesting that two of the authors employ Biblical metaphors.  The metaphors, however, turn around and bite their Darwinian assumptions:

• Pennisi entitles one of her articles “Speaking in Tongues”.  The metaphor points back to a miraculous event (see Acts 2) that teaches intelligent design.  God supernaturally endowed the minds of the early church to speak languages they had not known.  Can Pennisi prove that early humans evolved the ability to speak in tongues?  Bdbdbdbdbdb (rub finger rapidly up and down over lips).
• Scott Montgomery refers back to the Tower of Babel in his article, “Of Towers, Walls, and Fields: Perspectives on Language in Science.”  He thinks science has nearly realized Nimrod’s dream, but waves two hands:

  Science, it appears, has come to a historical crossroads.  On the one hand, it would seem to have completed the Tower of Babel, its knowledge now reaching far beyond the heavens and, through the global spread of English, recovering the ancient dream of a single language for the wisdom of the nations.  Yet, from another vantage, the very opposite is suggested: this great tower of unanimity broken and rebuilt into a thousand walls by the power of jargon, dividing the disciplines by the arcanity of specialist speech.

  Is scientific language diverging or converging, creating unity or a new diaspora?  Yes, he says: “many [barriers] have become increasingly porous, allowing flow in both directions. Such will undoubtedly continue—science is today the most active area of language creation.”  Well, that is certainly creation by intelligent design, not evolution.

From earliest times, human beings have communicated with language.  It is much more than the animal communication of birdsong or the howling of monkeys: human language has syntax, grammar and semantics.  It requires specialized organs for transmission and reception.  It implies the ability to understand abstract concepts.  The earliest evidences of written language in the Fertile Crescent describe commercial transactions and legal matters, presupposing an already-developed culture involving complex verbal skills and capacity for abstract reasoning.
    According to the creation account in Genesis 1-2, God endowed the first man and woman, but not the animals, with the gift of language from the very beginning, because only humans were created in His image.  After the Flood, according to the Tower of Babel account in Genesis 11, God supernaturally created language groups on one day by intelligent design.
    Languages have diversified significantly (and become amalgamated and corrupted) since then, but did not evolve from grunts (in fact, some so-called primitive languages have more complex grammar and more expressiveness than Greek).  The ongoing “evolution” of language is not by mutation and natural selection, but by the applied effort of human intelligence (i.e., creating new terms to express scientific concepts).  In the early church, God provided the ability to speak languages not previously learned.  All these Biblical accounts present an approach to understanding language by intelligent design instead of evolution.  Which approach better fits the facts of science and history?  Which has more documentation?  Speak now, or forever hold your tongue.
    Recommended reading:  C.S. Lewis applied the Tower of Babel imagery to modernism in his novel, That Hideous Strength (see review by Phillip E. Johnson).

---

¹Elizabeth Culotta and Brooks Hanson, “First Words,” Science Volume 303, Number 5662, Issue of 27 Feb 2004, p. 1315.
²Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, “Language: Many Perspectives, No Consensus” (a review of Language Evolution, ed. Christiansen and Kirby, ed., Oxford, 2003), Science.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Human Body • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Bible and Theology

Get a real job, Matt.
Next headline on:  Media • Dumb Ideas

Seniors interested in pumping up their brains and maintaining an attentive edge might consider taking this inexpensive prescription: Go for a walk every 2 or 3 days.  Don’t sweat it, but make an effort.  Limit each walk to between 10 and 45 minutes.
    That’s the conclusion, at any rate, of two new studies that demonstrate for the first time in people that physical fitness, whether achieved on one’s own or through a brief aerobic-training course, induces brain changes associated with improved performance on an attention-taxing task.

Those legs were made for walking.  “Use it or lose it” makes sense for limbs as well as talents.  Not mentioned in the article is the spiritual benefit you will find from taking walks: thankfulness for the beauty of creation.  Get out where the trees are; look at the sky, listen to a bird, and breathe in the fresh air.  Go with a friend and get the added benefit of quality time with someone you love.  Here’s a picture to inspire you.  (More in our Photo Gallery.)
Next headline on:  Human Body • Health

Let’s hope the Charlie’s boat doesn’t become a religious shrine (see 02/13/2004 entry).
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Mars

Dinosaur finds are always exciting news, but we don’t need the storytelling that usually goes with it.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs

I found the themes of the book, broadly speaking, congenial, and the account well informed and authoritative, as one might expect from a neuroscientist and science popularist of Calvin’s stature.  However, there are aspects of this particular book that I found less satisfying.  Calvin’s insistence on the importance of a gesturally based phase to language evolution does not, I think, make sense.  Language is a parsing skill, and, even though parsing is a hierarchical process, it seems to me to be a very different kind of skill from that used in coordinated throwing.  Manipulating concepts is not the same kind of activity as manipulating muscle masses.  Nor does the timing really work.  The evidence, as Calvin himself notes, points to a period about 500,000 years ago as the likely timing for the origin of speech, if not full-blown language.  But the archaeological record is very clear that real projectile-based hunting did not become widespread until the Upper Palaeolithic revolution, which kicked in around 50,000 years ago (perhaps a little earlier in Africa).  The evolution of speech, then, pre-dates the fine muscle control of aimed throwing by a very wide margin.

Dunbar is way too polite with his criticism.  Why?  Darwin Party members are loathe to call each other stupid.  It might provide fodder for those darned creationists.
    In support of evolution, all Calvin provides is a just-so story that spear throwing evolved our brains into speech machines.  How can that be?  It violates the principle learned by every child: “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  One would think that words, the later weapon, would be more effective in the struggle for survival.
    What Calvin lacks in evidence for evolution he makes up for in evidence against it.  Dunbar states:

Notwithstanding the enthusiasm in the 1970s and 1980s for the similarities between humans and our primate cousins, both in popular culture and among academics, the fact is that humans are very different from even our ape sister species.  William Calvin’s latest book looks at how different we really are.
    The essence of Calvin’s argument is that the difference between humans and other animals comes down to what he calls “structured stuff” (that is, coordinated, structured task processing).  One of the most obvious examples is the way we deconstruct sentences to expose their meaning.

Apes, of course, have no such abilities, nor are there any transitional forms between us (see 01/20/2004 entry).  From this clear statement declaring the gulf between apes and man, he launches into the JSS (just-so story):

We can do this, he argues, because we evolved the capacity to coordinate fine-tuned movements in the context of throwing.  The great revolution in human evolutionary history stems from the shift from the older forms of heavy-duty hunting, mostly by dint of thrusting spears, to projectile hunting (throwing spears or using bows), which required careful aiming and much finer coordination.
    Practice at these activities fine-tuned the neural machinery that allowed the delicate motor control required for speech and language.  Much is made, in this respect, of the growing evidence for the brain’s ability to coopt neural circuits.  For example, the neural substrates for reading have different location in the brain in different individuals, as one might expect of a skill that does not have a long evolutionary history.  This ’softwiring’, as Calvin calls it, is clearly of major importance in human cognition.

Convinced?  This is so lame.  So Lamarckian.  Even if practice stretched a hunter’s brain, it would not help his kids any more than a giraffe stretching its neck would promote the inheritance of that acquired characteristic.  The trait has to get into the gametes.
    No problem, we’ll just modify the JSS a little.  Presumably, a chance mutation gave a hunter a more complex brain, granting him better aim at spear-throwing.  He brought more meat back to the cave, which made him more attractive to the females.  So he had more kids bearing the same mutation, who survived to reproductive age while all the others starved.  Isn’t evolutionary storytelling fun?  You never have to prove your JSS.  As long as it keeps the Darwin Party in power, it is such a dreamy, endless pastime.
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If this article doesn’t make you mad, it should.  It means nothing less than the demise of personal responsibility and the downfall of civilization.  If suicide bombing is merely an evolutionary behavior, then it is not morally wrong, just unfortunate for the victims.  Pastors and believers everywhere had better wake up and get angry that the ultimate altruism, depicted in The Passion, is being presented by mad scientists as the result of evolution from monkey antics.  This is not only disingenuous (see 12/18/2002 entry) and blasphemous to a large segment of the population, but a self-defeating claim.  A Golden Rule that evolves is neither golden, nor a rule.  It’s fool’s gold.  These charlatans use humans as lab rats (see 06/25/2002 entry), but exclude their own intellects as relics of rat behavior.  Let’s turn the game on them and ask about the The Evolution of Evolutionary Nonsense.  Short circuit!
    Darwinists have a sick habit of talking about “the evolution of” this and that and whatever, even the teachings of Jesus.  Darwinists treat their little catch-phrase the same way some superstitious people talk about “the demon of” this or that, like the demon of alcohol or the demon of bad breath.  “The evolution of” is a mere mantra, an intellectual plaything or hook on which to build any plot (see “The Evolution of Presbyterians,” 09/03/2002, “The Evolution of Rape” 07/18/2003, “The Evolution of Monogamy” 07/03/2003, “The Evolution of Fairness” 09/17/2003, and “The Evolution of War” 09/16/2003).  It is their hammer that sees everything as a nail.  It doesn’t bother them that they can never figure it out (see “Human Kindness,” 10/23/2003, and 06/23/2003).  It’s OK.  They don’t have to figure it out.  They just get kicks out of arguing about it.  They have the audacity to become our preachers (see “User’s Guide to Life” 04/25/2003), and they think creationists are the doctrinaires, beholden to their dogmas (doctrinaire, n., “one who attempts to put into effect an abstract doctrine or theory with little or no regard for practical difficulties”).
    Such nonsense and amorality deserves the severest reproach any respectable human being can muster.  Tough love, after all, is a corollary of the Golden Rule.  If you were spouting a foolish or dangerous teaching, wouldn’t you want someone to correct you?  Then take some advice from the Apostle Paul: “For there are many insubordinate, both idle talkers and deceivers ... whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole households, teaching things which they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain” (Titus 1:10-11).  Each generation has its deceivers.  It is an abdication of social responsibility to let their lies go unchallenged.
    Watch where you deposit your intellectual and moral treasures.  The Darwin Party Credit Union is going bankrupt.  Jesus said, “Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this it the Law and the Prophets” (Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:12).  Now there’s genuine Gold you can bank on, with real interest, compounded daily.
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Without the belief in Darwinian evolution, one wonders how much motivation SETI would have.  Would believers in God expect to find life all over the universe trying to contact us?  If so, would they work this hard looking?  The Darwin Party seems to think a discovery of alien life would disprove the Bible, but is that necessarily true?  Why would it not just as clearly indicate creation?  What if the aliens tell us they evolved, but are lying?  What if they turn out to be storytellers as incorrigible as members of the Darwin Party here on earth?
    It’s fun, but maybe not useful, to speculate about things we cannot know.  Take your pick on this one.  Not even all secularists, though, agree SETI is worthwhile.  Michael Crichton used it as an example of policy-driven pseudoscience, essentially a religion (see 12/27/2003).  The only data point we have so far is that the local neighborhood is not teeming with alien broadcasters on the channels we are checking.  Maybe that means something.
    If nothing else, the SETI researchers are making a great case for intelligent design (see 07/29/2002).  Their core assumption is that a nonrandom, coded message would be convincing evidence of intelligence, even if they knew nothing about the sender.
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