Take evolutionary biology, for example.  A few decades after the Golden Age, evolutionary biologists started to tackle (ultimately with considerable success) questions where the Darwinian answer is far from obvious.  Why do we age?  Why are there sterile insect castes?  At first it does not seem to make much sense to argue that your death or sterility increases your fitness.  But evolutionary theory can provide satisfactory resolutions of these conundrums.  In some cases even the question itself cannot be formulated well enough without some modelling: the problem of the evolutionary maintenance of sex is a case in point.  Whole sub-disciplines, like evolutionary game theory, have been set up to meet such challenges.
(For more on evolutionary game theory, see 02/10/2004 entry.)

The problems become a lot harder when we come to the large-scale dynamics of evolution.  Imagine, say, a thousand Earth-like planets with exactly the same initial conditions of planetary development.  After one, two, three billion years (and so on), how many of them would still have living creatures?  And would they be like the eukaryotes?  We have simply no knowledge about the time evolution of this distribution, and ‘educated’ guesses differ widely.

Still, when contemplating life’s origins, the gap between Miller’s world and the DNA world is discouragingly enormous.  How do you get from the primordial soup to the genetic code?  The snag is that, in contemporary biological systems, there is a division of labour between nucleic acids and proteins: the former store genetic information and the latter exert function.  Genetic information is expressed with the help of proteins, which are encoded by nucleic acids.  We seemed to be at an impasse: no genes without proteins and no proteins without genes – the classic ‘chicken and egg’ problem.

The chemoton is an abstract model of a minimal biological system comprising three sub-systems: a metabolic cycle producing the materials for all three sub-systems at the expense of nutrients; a replicating template; and a boundary membrane.  All three systems are autocatalytic, and the system as a whole can also divide in space within a certain parameter range.

Important advances often come from appropriate abstraction and idealisation, neglecting unnecessary detail.  This neglect cannot, unfortunately, be automated: science remains the art of the soluble.

The simplest autonomous living systems today are prokaryotes, the results of billions of years of evolution.  There is just no way that a prokaryote with its genetic code could have self-assembled in the primordial soup.  There must have been a long phase of evolution by natural selection from the first living entities to bacteria, as Gánti recognized in 1971.  But how can one think of these earliest systems?  Chemoton theory offers such a conceptual breakthrough.

When your opponent is shooting himself in the foot, there is really no need to return fire, but rather to sit back and enjoy the entertainment.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

I heard about a ‘frozen accident’…
One of the first proposals, in 1968, for the origin of the code, was Francis Crick’s ‘frozen accident’ model.  But the discovery of alternative codes showed that the code is not frozen.  And similar codons are assigned to similar amino acids, indicating that the code is not an accident.

So, how did the code evolve?
There are several theories that try to explain the origin of the code.  Most can be classified in one of three major groups.

Chemical: posits that direct chemical interactions between amino acids and their cognate codons/anticodons influenced codon assignment.  Studies of binding of RNA aptamers to amino acids showed that, for at least some amino acids – arginine, tyrosine and isoleucine – such chemical interactions do exist.  These theories fail to explain the assignment of codons that do not show direct interactions to their cognate amino acids.

Historical: proposes that an initially smaller code grew by incorporation of new amino acids. For example, new amino acids may have captured codons from their metabolic precursors, contributing to the assignment of similar amino acids to similar codons.

Selection: suggests that the code was selected to minimize the phenotypic effects of point mutations.  The code’s organization supports this: nonsynonymous substitutions often lead to replacement of an amino acid by one chemically similar, causing little disruption in the protein.

Accumulating evidence for these models suggests that they are not mutually exclusive.  Rather, the code probably evolved by an interplay among some or all of them.  Direct interactions of short RNA molecules and amino acids may have fixed the assignment of certain codons, while subsequent assignments may have been driven by history and selection.

They just violated Occam’s razor.  They also violated the rule that three wrongs don’t make a right. 

The “Chemical” theory is the old biological predestination idea that Dean Kenyon abandoned.  If RNA happens to bind to three amino acids better than the 17 others, that does not explain how they subsequently linked via peptide bonds to form a polypeptide with any catalytic activity.  Amino acids do not have the ability to link up by themselves.  Getting just one element of the complex protein machinery that can translate DNA and construct a protein is astronomically improbable, to put it mildly (see our online book).

The “Historical” theory is hysterical, because it personifies amino acids.  One cannot ascribe purposeful processes to chemicals.  No cheating with natural selection, either; it cannot even begin to a player unless an accurate system of self-replication is already working.

The “Selection” Theory also personifies the chemicals: the code was selected to minimize ... point mutations”  Enough of this passive-voice nonsense.  Who selected it, and why would he/she/it want to, if not to optimize the system?  The sentence makes perfect sense in intelligent design theory, but is bizarre otherwise.  No cheating with natural selection here, either.
    The authors committed one more foul: card stacking.  All their theories assume naturalistic evolution.  They left out the only theory that explains the observations without violating Occam’s razor: intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Genetics and DNA • Intelligent Design

This is a revealing article that basically says, “everything you know is wrong, and we hope we can figure out the truth some day by starting over.”  Like so often reported here, it is more admission of ignorance and promises of futureware.  Quote-hunters might find a bonanza in this article.
    Not only that, Hlusko points out the tremendous complexity of genetic and developmental mechanisms.  She mentions that more than 250 genes are known to be involved in the development of dentition.  Are we being asked to believe that those genes all evolved by chance, and that they must mutate together to keep an animal having a proper bite?  What if a tooth on the upper jaw mutates, but the one on the lower jaw doesn’t?  Teeth need to match.
    Remember how much propaganda the Darwinists got out of one tooth in the case of Nebraska man?  (It turned out to be a pig’s tooth.)  Even today, a debater for evolution claimed that a good anatomist can tell a lot about a creature from a tooth.  But if all you have is a tooth, even if it is the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth, would it convince a jury?  Not if they read this article first.
    Things are not looking good for the pseudoscience of human evolution.  Digging up bones in Africa may be a sport, but interpreting what they mean is often a function of the storytelling ability of the discoverer.  Does hominid dentition tell us anything about human ancestry?  Don’t bite on it.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Genetics and DNA

Giant conches are seldom treated with the respect they deserve.  Their impressive shells are prized as holiday souvenirs, but size and aesthetics are only half the story.  At the microscopic scale, they are one of nature’s greatest engineering masterpieces: a stunningly intricate hierarchical architecture of inorganic crystals, interwoven with organic molecules.

This could be a teachable moment on your family’s next trip to the beach.  Tell the kids that this construction project the conch performs is the envy of materials scientists.  Teach them that complex processes that build things do not just happen.  DNA, genes, enzymes, signalling, feedback and quality control all contribute to the work of art that is a seashell.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Amazing Facts

Charlie Darwin said a fair evaluation of any question can only be made when both sides are heard.  Strange that many of his disciples don’t want you to hear the opposition.  They think their sound bites tell you all you need to know about any controversy surrounding their idol.  Numbers is an apostate Christian who accepts many of the Darwinian myths, but thankfully he seems to not be as viciously dogmatic as the rest of the Darwin Party against intelligent design.  It is notable that SpaceDaily.com printed this partially open-minded article.  Too bad they didn’t allow a qualified ID spokesman to make the case.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design

The claim that tough times create design is like the Phoenix myth, that a living bird arises from the flames of catastrophe.  No. Fire burns, and stress kills.  Making stress a creative genius is no explanation at all, yet it remains a favorite plot in Darwin stories.  Didn’t an asteroid blast give rise to the zoo of complex and diverse mammals, according to the going myth?  We can enjoy the marvels of birds without the insipid, useless, wasteful, distracting, unsupportable, pseudoscientific bad habit of trying to find evolutionary origins for everything.  Remember that.
    Next time in Yellowstone, Yosemite or other western national parks, don’t be annoyed by the squawking of the nutcrackers and jays.  Pay them a little respect.  They’ve got a better memory than you in that little brain of theirs.  Milius began her article by reprimanding, “Should humanity get a little too full of itself and its intellectual prowess, there’s always Clark’s nutcracker to think about.”
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

Evolutionary biologists had their hands full explaining the origin of the DNA-protein language, and now this.  As usual, there is no description in the article about how this code might have “emerged” through an evolutionary process.  There is only the following quip, that not only fails to explain the code’s origin, it adds another problem: apparently the code has not evolved at all: “From species to species, he [C. David Allis, U. of Virginia] notes, these tails are nearly identical, implying that they are important to the cell.  ‘Nature has held these things constant for a reason,’ says Allis.”  Certainly.  Give me a working histone code in the beginning, or give me death.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Regeneration and replication involve transforming molecules and energy from the environment into cellular aggregations, and evolution requires heritable variation in cellular processes.  The current consensus is that the simplest way to achieve these characteristics is to house informational polymers (such as DNA and RNA) and a metabolic system that chemically regulates and regenerates cellular components within a physical container (such as a lipid vesicle).

...acting as both an information molecule and as an electron-relay chain.  This is the first explicit proposal that integrates genetics, metabolism, and containment in one chemical system.  Metabolism in this system has been shown to produce lipids, but experimental realization of the rest of the integrated system has not yet been achieved.

They described how nonliving chemical reactions, driven by thermodynamics, explore the state of space in an ergodical fashion, and thus tend to conduct a random exhaustive search of all possibilities; in contrast, living systems explore a combinatorially large space of possibilities through an evolutionary process.  This echoed a central workshop theme: how and when information becomes a dominant factor in the evolution of life, that is, how and when selection plays a greater role than thermodynamics in the observed distribution of phenotypes.

• “Peter Stadler (Univ. Leipzig) reviewed selection using replicator network dynamics, a theoretical framework describing population growth produced by different kinetic conditions.”
• “Smith and Morowitz further described how the citric acid cycle of living cells might be a thermodynamic attractor for all possible metabolic networks, thus explaining its appearance at the core of all living systems.”
• “Universal scaling in biological systems was discussed by Geoff West (SFI) and Woody Woodruff (LANL), who explained why regular patterns can be found, for example, between an organism’s weight and metabolic rate, regardless of whether the organism is a bacterium or an elephant.”
• “Shelly Copley (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) explained how catalysts operate in living systems today and how these were likely to have evolved from less efficient precursors.”
• “Andrew Shreve (LANL) presented a rich variety of self-assembled nanomaterials that display specific emergent properties of a mechanical, photonic, or fluidic nature.”
• “Yi Jiang (LANL) reviewed the state of the art for molecular multiscale simulations in which the challenge is to connect realistic but slow molecular dynamic simulations with less accurate but fast higher level simulations.”
• “Andy Pohorille (NASA Ames Research Center, California) used simulations to argue that nongenomic early organisms could undergo evolution before the origin of organisms with genes.”
• “Takashi Ikegami (Univ. of Tokyo) presented simulations of a simple and abstract model of metabolic chemistry that demonstrates the spontaneous formation and reproduction of cell-like structures.”

(i) What is the boundary between physical and biological phenomena?  (ii) What are key hurdles to integrating genes and energetics within a container?  (iii) How can theory and simulation better inform artificial cell experiment?  (iv) What are the most likely early technological applications of artificial cell research?
    In time, research on these forms of artificial life will illuminate the perennial questions “What is life?” and “Where do we come from?”

We almost titled this entry “Mad Scientists Threaten World With Destruction!” but didn’t want to scare the adults.  Here you have it, folks: Frankenscience alive and well in the labs that gave us atomic bombs.  Our next fear may be artificial cells too small to see that will wreak havoc on us, brought about by some out-of-control prize seeker with courage but not enough caution.
    Actually, that is not the intriguing thing about this story.  It is that evolutionary biologists have no sense of smell.  We quoted extensively from this article to give readers the chance to sharpen their noses and do some serious baloney detecting, because this article stinks of rotten baloney left and right, up and down, through and through.  If you need practice in thinking straight, this article is a good one to practice on.
    It’s not that the questions are bad: they are vital: What is life?  Where do we come from?  People have asked these questions since antiquity, and are not human if they don’t wonder about them.  The baloney begins with the assumption that evolution permeates all of reality, even defines life, and emerges as a victor over thermodynamics – all by itself.  That is the pervasive myth in this story.  They don’t phrase their questions the way most people do: Is there a God? a Designer? an all-wise, all-knowing Creator? (i.e., a source of information).  No!  Every scientist at these conferences assumed from the get-go that elephants and bacteria and human beings “emerged” out of some unknown, fortuitous concourse of atoms that crossed that divide between nonlife and life without help.  That is the only approach permitted under their Darwinian “rules of science.”  It leaves them in a hopeless muddle that becomes almost comic, like a group of blindfolded cave explorers, stumbling around because their rules forbid flashlights and require the wearing of blindfolds.
    Let’s start by unraveling the distinction made by Morowitz between living and nonliving chemistry.  He characterized nonliving chemical reactions as being “driven by thermodynamics.”  This means that nonliving chemicals follow the laws of nature obediently.  The first law of TD says that no new matter and energy will emerge out of nothing.  The second law of TD, more important for our analysis, dictates that chemicals will seek equilibrium and gravitate toward a state of maximum disorder (notice that information is the polar opposite of disorder).  Scientists like to use big words, not just to show off, but in an attempt to be precise.  But here, Morowitz confused the issue by subtly personifying nonliving chemicals, claiming that they “explore the state of space in an ergodical fashion.”  (Ergodic means each member is representative of the whole; for instance, the way one sodium chloride molecule reacts can be considered the way all do; the word also is used in statistics regarding the probability a state will recur.)  Thus, as he describes them, nonliving chemicals “tend to conduct a random, exhaustive search of all possibilities.”  Can a nonliving entity search?  Obviously not.
    Surely what he intended to say is that nonliving chemicals, merely bouncing around at random, will eventually hit on any possible interactions.  Depending on the energy states between them, some interactions will be endothermic, using energy; others will be exothermic, releasing energy.  But whatever is possible, nonliving chemicals will randomly “explore” that space and then do what comes naturally.  Water trickling down a rocky slope appears to be searching for a way down, but is really just responding to the laws of thermodynamics.  Sometimes water will jet up into the air, as in a seaside blowhole or Yellowstone geyser, but only with the input of energy, and even then, not because of a code or special combination of molecules.  Any and all water molecules will react the same under the circumstances, because each is a representative of the set of all water molecules.
    What about life?  “In contrast,” he points out, “living systems explore a combinatorially large space of possibilities through an evolutionary process.”  The key word here is combinatorially.  DNA combines bases into a genetic code, and proteins combine amino acids into functional machines.  The combinations, when meaningful and useful, open up seemingly limitless possibilities that (when energized by metabolism in a container), can allow an organism to beat thermodynamics in the short term.  Locally and temporarily, it can achieve a state of low entropy.  A seed can grow into a gravity-defying plant, and an egg can grow into a bird, flying through the air, with feathers, bones, lungs and a host of richly functional parts.  Eventually, of course, TD wins; the plant withers, and the bird weakens and dies.  Both decay into particles with high entropy.
    This distinction cannot be overemphasized.  Nonliving chemicals do not “explore” combination space because they lack a genetic code to do so: i.e., they lack information.  You will notice that this article tosses around the word information as if it will just magically appear if an appropriate “informational polymer” can be found, whether DNA, RNA or PNA.  Stop right there.  That is equivalent to claiming that the availability of ink, paper and type will form books without an author.  Foul; out; game over.  It is not even worth considering this argument further, but we shall, just for the fun of it.
    Morowitz sneaks in a Darwinian assumption into the second half of his description of living chemicals: he claims that living systems explore a combinatorially large space of possibilities through an evolutionary process.  If we can ever get a Darwinian to prove this instead of assuming it, the intellectual debate over origins will come out of a dense fog.  Yes, organisms can vary through mutation, and yes, traits from pre-existing information can sort into distinct populations, but can a Darwinist name one instance of new information for a new function coming out of an evolutionary process?  Richard Dawkins, the king of Darwin dogmatists, was stumped on this question, and in 3.5 years of reporting from the premiere Darwinist journals, we have yet to run across a clear example.  We can, however, provide many cases of Darwinians moaning about the lack of examples (see 11/01/2002, for instance).
    Evolutionists are sneaky at embedding their philosophy into their terms.  They define life as something that evolves, and they define science as materialism.  It’s impossible to carry on a rational discussion with someone who controls the dictionary.
    In past commentaries, we characterized the gap between life and nonlife as a canyon, and described the ways evolutionists try to imagine nonliving chemicals spontaneously bridging the canyon.  This would be good time to review the 05/22/2002 entry about the ways evolutionists try to help life bridge the gap from both sides.  The important thing to remember is that the top-down approach and the bottom-up approach both cheat by using information from the evolutionist’s brain.  If you keep the cheater out of the process, the chemicals are simply not going to do what the evolutionist wants without his help.
    All the talk about “artificial life,” furthermore, is intelligent design, not evolution, so it is irrelevant to the question of the origin of life.  With these principles in mind, it is easy to detect the baloney in the various proposals in the article:

• So-called self-organizing nanostructures require intelligent design of the components and the environment.  Mass-produced, magnetized Lego blocks might be coaxed to link up, for example, but only in an ergodic fashion and only if they are put into a conducive container.  Even so, the structures contain no real information in the sense of coding; they consist of repetitive patterns.
• The word selection is often misused as a personification; who is doing the selecting?  Remember, chemicals don’t care.  Example: “how and when selection plays a greater role than thermodynamics in the observed distribution of phenotypes.”  Subtle, isn’t it?  Only actors play roles.  He embeds Darwinian assumptions into the sentence.  It suggests a goddess called Evolution that is like a stage director, gradually promoting the actor “selection” over the actor “thermodynamics.”  Sorry.  Thermodynamics always gets “lead role” unless information is directing metabolism within a container to locally and temporarily counteract it.  This requires preprogrammed instructions.  Those are the rules in the theater of physics.
• Theoretical frameworks are intelligently designed, so they have no relevance to a materialistic origin of life.  No theory or model can trump a realistic lab experiment.  So PNA might hold information, huh?  And lipids might form a container, huh?  And the PNA might double as a metabolic engine, huh?  OK: put the raw ingredients into a realistic environment, keep your informational hands off, don’t prevent the harmful cross-reactions, wait a few million years, and watch what happens.  Entropy.
• What life already does is irrelevant to what nonliving chemicals might do.  If metabolism scales with body size between bacteria and elephants, that’s nice.  What does that have to do with the origin of life?
• A container without active transport is a death trap (see 01/17/2002), or would leak out the vital ingredients just as readily as the toxins.  Now analyze the article’s bluffing, overconfident caption to a picture of one of these death traps: “Short RNA oligonucleotides (red) are adsorbed to a particle of montmorillonite (clay) and encapsulated within a fatty acid vesicle (green).  The assembly of RNA within the vesicle is coordinated by the clay particle.”  Come on, now.  You can’t get information out of clay.  You can’t concentrate metabolic ingredients into the vesicle or expel wastes out of it except by diffusion, in which the action will be opposite what is needed.  You can’t have natural selection without replication (see online book).  Thus, the picture and the caption and the big words are utterly irrelevant to the origin of life.
      A thing that looks like a cell is no more a cell than a bronze statue of Teddy Roosevelt is the living man.  This should be obvious.  The normally good-natured organic chemist, Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, used to get pretty heated up about similar claims by Sidney Fox years ago.  Fox gained fame by showcasing his contrived “cell-like proteinoid microspheres.”  Wilder-Smith called the claim “rubbish.”  Nothing has changed in 2004; the rubbish has just been reshuffled.
• The current consensus smokescreen fails on two points.  If it’s consensus, it isn’t science (see 12/23/2003).  And how could it be a consensus anyway, when the opposition has been denied a hearing?  Claiming a consensus with only Darwin Party members participating is like claiming the opinion of a majority of Senate Democrats represents American opinion.  (This is not just to pick on Democrats.  Charlie Darwin described his political persuasion as “liberal or radical” [Browne, p. 399], as did most of his ardent disciples.)
• State of the art and simulation: here are two more terms that imply intelligent design, not evolution.
• Debug this code: “the challenge is to connect realistic but slow molecular dynamic simulations with less accurate but fast higher level simulations.”  Pick your disappointment: slow realism or fast fantasy?  (See 02/10/2004 entry on misuse of mathematics in biology.)
• Saying something doesn’t make it so: Copley “explained how catalysts operate in living systems today and how these were likely to have evolved from less efficient precursors.”  Instead of the cute just-so story, can you please perform a stage demonstration of less-efficient precursors evolving into a highly-efficient enzyme?  If not, don’t call it science (see 01/12/2004).
• Debug another line of code: “the citric acid cycle of living cells might be a thermodynamic attractor for all possible metabolic networks, thus explaining its appearance at the core of all living systems.”  Ever heard of the post-hoc fallacy? 

Charles Darwin was privately interested in the origin of life, but publicly reticent to make statements about it.  Out of a desire not to appear impious, he had inserted into the ending of The Origin of Species a suggestion that a Creator might have breathed life into a few forms, or into one, which since had evolved.  His real agenda, however, was all-encompassing: he wanted a materialistic universe with God out of the picture.  But he was cautious.  Charlie was keenly aware of the trap Pouchet had fallen into with Pasteur over spontaneous generation.  He watched cautiously from a distance as Huxley and Haeckel made fools of themselves claiming to have found primordial protoplasm in the seabed.  He dreamed about a “warm little pond” in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, but “he remained silent” publicly, writes Janet Browne in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002).  His caution was admirable, but inwardly, he desired this philosopher’s stone, because it would make his denial of God complete:

His own theory of evolution would stand to gain if spontaneous generation was shown to be possible—it would acquire its necessary starting point.  Yet it was easy to make rash mistakes....
    To onlookers, the interconnections between these ideas and the people who proposed them appeared close—evolutionary theory and the physical basis of life seemed part and parcel of the same sprawling intellectual enigma of scepticism, agnosticism, and materialism. ...it looked as if naturalists were asserting the sole sufficiency of science [i.e., materialism] as a means of comprehending the entire universe....
    .... Wallace suggested that these rapid transformations of simple matter could quicken evolution to the point where Thomson’s warnings about the shortened age of the earth could safely be ignored.  Darwin saw the value in this.  He would like to see spontaneous generation proved true, he told Wallace, “for it would be a discovery of transcendent importance.”  For the rest of his life he watched and pondered.
(Browne, pp. 394-395.)

It could hardly be denied that the same “enigma of skepticism, agnosticism and materialism” permeated the thoughts of most participants at these two international workshops.  What would really have been interesting at the proceedings, more than the self-absorbed fluff about theoretical frameworks and models, would have been a lively debate about the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life.  If you haven’t seen it yet, by all means do.  And for additional humor, follow the chain links below on Origin of Life.  They might be termed the comic section of Creation-Evolution Headlines.  If you enjoy the just-so storytelling ability of the Darwinians, you might also enjoy the Meatball Theory for the Origin of Music (08/26/2003).
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

Darwin Day--what a great idea.  It would be a perfect occasion to teach people important concepts.  Let’s start now thinking up activities that could become favorite family traditions.  Darwinians could wear Selfish Jeans, light Cambrian explosions, have asteroid fights and go extinct.  Here is a proposed list of Top 10 Darwin Day Activities:

1. Have battles with slime and play King of the Hill.
2. Blindfold monkeys and watch them type Shakespeare.
3. Have a Darwin beard contest with lady judges to test sexual selection.
4. Decorate lizards with feathers and drop them from trees.
5. Vote on community Darwin Awards.
6. Sponsor a Just-So Storytelling Contest.
7. Hold a Planet of the Apes and Survivor movie festival.
8. Play “glue the peppered moth on the tree.”
9. Sing Evolution Songs around a campfire fueled with creationist books.
10. Test survival of the fittest: debate a creationist.

Send in your suggestions: write here.  One reader has sent in this prize-winner: “a scavenger hunt.  Item #1: a true, transitional fossil.  WARNING!  Photos of the participants of this activity may end up on the back of a milk carton.”
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

The Darwin Party totalitarians are so protective of Charlie, their bearded buddha,* that they do not want anyone asking questions about his deity while they worship, let alone handing out tracts for another faith.  Perhaps the only way to get open debate back into science will be to get the government to stop funding the state religion.

---

*Janet Browne, in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002, ch. 10), describes the veneration of Darwin going on in 1871 British media with example after example of illustrators portraying him as a little god.  For instance, “Linley Sambourne ... portrayed a great spiral from ‘Chaos’ to God’s throne in heaven, on which Darwin casually sprawled” (p. 378).  The caricatures and cartoons of Darwin, ubiquitous in the media, had far more impact on the popularity of his theories than any claimed scientific evidence.  Browne writes (p. 381):

Such powerful visual statements propelled the idea of evolution out of the arcane realms of learned societies and literary magazines into the ordinary world of humour, newspapers, and demotic literature.  Without Mr. Punch’s monkeys and gorillas, Figaro’s mirror of nature, and Holyoake’s cloud of protoplasm, the transformation in nineteenth-century thought would probably have remained predominantly an elite phenomenon.  The full implications of human descent would have taken much longer to sink in.  These caricatures were not just a transparent medium of illustration but an actual shaper of contemporary thought, as representative in their own way as any of the fine arts or literary texts of the period.  The themes of Darwin’s Descent of Man were graphically repackaged in a versatile cultural form enjoying wide distribution and popular appeal.  The cartoons might appear on the tables of any middle-class home in the country.

(See Baloney Detector entry on visualization as a propaganda tactic and smokescreen.)
No wonder Charlie retains such a devoted group of hardline loyalists.  He was not a mere founder of a scientific idea; he is the Holy Father of the materialists.  Visitors to his house acted as if they were making a religious pilgrimage.  “Mischievously, Huxley sent a sketch of someone paying his devotions at the shrine of ‘Pope Darwin’” (p. 384).  Some worshippers during their pilgrimages to Down House became breathless, so overcome with awe they could hardly speak in the exalted master’s presence.  “Grown men could crumble in the presence of the god,” Brown writes (p. 383).  Even his appearance was part of the act.  The long unkempt beard made him look like an Old Testament prophet or patriarch.
    Charlie shamelessly played along with this celebrity worship, and with the aid of family members and friends like Huxley and Hooker, used it to his advantage.  He developed “a shrewd management of personal publicity”; for example, he “unashamedly manipulated his reputation for poor health” to control the timing and length of visits (p. 383).  She describes how “Darwin’s entourage worked as if they were a family firm, protecting and supporting their figurehead.... Darwin’s household was an integrated corporate enterprise” (p. 384).  They played along with Charlie’s “selfish” escape mechanisms, like cutting visits short due to alleged illness, the need for a nap, or the need to get back to his pretended scientific work in the lab.
    All this manipulation just added to the mystique, and made visitors even more grateful for having had even a brief opportunity to kiss the feet of their pope.  Some of these young pilgrims, filled with the spirit, returning to their homes, labs, and schools with a “cherished memory” of “the great man” and their “near-religious experience” having had a moment to “sit at Darwin’s feet and venerate him,” understandably treated his books of just-so stories like inspired scriptures.  They “turned Darwin into a secular saint and Darwinism into a religion” (p. 383).  You may now throw up.
    Think times have changed?  The editor of Current Biology, Geoffrey North, lets us know where his adoration lies: “Charles Darwin is – quite rightly – a hero for many in biology.  He is undoubtedly the greatest biologist of all time; I think many may also envy the way he was able to work at home, with a lifestyle rather similar to that of a country parson, surrounded by his family.  What continues to astonish is the way that he has turned out to be right on so many fundamental issues” (Feb. 17 issue).  Follow the Chain Links on “Darwin” for some data points you need to make an informed vote.  Greatest biologist of all time?  Right on so many fundamental issues?  We vote for Louis Pasteur.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Education

Biochemists and nanotechnologists are rightly fascinated by these nanoscopic machines, but strangely silent about where they came from.  They want to know what they can do with them, but where did they come from?  They hope they can borrow them for all kinds of nanodevices, but where did they come from?
    Suppose we were members of a Star Trek crew from a distant galaxy, and had just landed on Mars.  We find this little rover with solar panels and wheels and instruments, and all we can think about is how we can play with it.  Wouldn’t some sentient being on the crew be thinking, Where did it come from?
Exercise: if aliens found Spirit or Opportunity on Mars, would they be justified in inferring intelligent design for its origin, even if they knew nothing about the designers?  Why or why not?  If scientists found an ATP synthase motor in the desert, but instead of being nanoscopic it was the size of a cement mixer, would they be justified in thinking it had evolved from the sand?  Support your answers.
    We’ve had many previous headlines on ATP Synthase.  You can start at the 09/18/2003 article and work back through the links for more information.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

How does a blind molecule do this?  Notice how specific the contacts are: some parts first allow the enzyme to contact the specific error-bound pair, and if and only if a match is found, other parts of this machine are designed to bend the DNA strand so that the bad base can be cut out.  (He didn’t go into this, but other machines are on hand to ferry in and insert the correct base.)  All these extensive and precise contacts exist because another section of DNA that codes for this enzyme contains bases that are also extensive and precise.  This underscores the principle that enzymes, to work, are not indiscriminately mutatable.  They have to be precise to work.
    It also underscores the evolutionary conundrum that DNA needs repair enzymes to prevent catastrophic errors, but the repair enzymes themselves are coded by DNA.  How could a DNA strand without the error-correction mechanisms survive beyond a few copies?  Evolutionists know that accurate copying is essential to prevent “error catastrophe” yet they expect us to believe that these marvelous high-precision error-correction systems (and there are many, many parts of the DNA Damage Repair team), somehow came into being via accidents.  Give me a break.  (On second thought, don’t--broken DNA is deadly.)  Not surprising that there is no mention at all of evolution in this article.
    For more on the wonder of enzymes and their precision, see our online book, Evolution: Possible or Impossible?  Though written years ago, the book’s thesis that chance is utterly incapable of producing such incredible precision of function is only amplified by discoveries like this.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics and DNA • Amazing Facts

Planetary magnetic fields are astounding in their diversity.  Mercury has a small global field (but should not); Venus, our twin, has essentially none; the gas giants all have fields but those of Uranus and Neptune are extremely tilted and off center, while Saturn’s is almost perfectly aligned with its pole axis.  According to theory, this cannot be.  Earth, fortuitously, has a perfect field to shield its inhabitants from cosmic rays and solar flares, but its strength is dropping rapidly.
    In this “golden age of planetary discovery,” we should soon be gathering more data to explain these mysterious phenomena.  If trends continue, however, each solution will breed new problems.  At this point, it does seem quite incredible that tiny Mercury should retain any global field at all, if it were really 4.5 billion years old.  Note the surprise in Lincoln’s writing over this mystery: “against expectations...would have...should have...a rethink was needed.”
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics

Anybody see evolution here?  The first bugs are already bugs.  The authors make a valiant attempt to fit these into some kind of evolving lineage, but the discussion is all inference based on guesswork.  A set of disconnected links does not comprise a chain.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils

Many challenges lie ahead.  Evolutionary game theory is formulated in terms of phenotypes, thereby ignoring the complexity of the genotype-phenotype mapping.  More work is needed on the interaction of strategies encoded in genomic sequences.  Most evolutionary game dynamics have been studied in the context of infinitely large populations.  We expect that finite population size effects will lead to surprising outcomes and might question the importance of traditional evolutionary stability.  Cultural interpretations of replicator dynamics often assume that successful strategies spread by imitation or learning, but the learning of complicated strategies from behavioral observations is a nontrivial task that needs specific investigation.  Similarly, studying human language requires a connection between the mathematics of game theory, learning theory, and computational linguistics.

The applications of evolutionary game theory pervade by now all areas of biology.  Interactions among genes, viruses, cells, and humans are often instances of evolutionary games that are amenable to empirical and theoretical investigation.  Game theory is the appropriate tool whenever the success of an individual depends on others.

Children love games.  Children also love fairy tales.  Children are suckers for logical fallacies.  Grow up, Martin.
    These guys should read the piece by Robert M. May in the same issue of Science³ on “Uses and Abuses of Mathematics in Biology.”  Though not targeting game theory or evolution specifically, May shows how mathematics can confuse, not clarify, issues, and lead to false conclusions if the assumptions or inputs are wrong or imprecise.  He does mention how Darwin might have avoided the now-discredited view of blending inheritance had he known a little math (Charlie said, “I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”)  If Darwin had grasped the significance of Mendel’s results, Robert May claims, he might have made better progress against critics.  (Or perhaps more accurately, would have gasped and moaned.)
    May points out differences between mathematical uses in physics and biology.  Tycho collected planetary data, Kepler described patterns that made the observations coherent, and Newton provided fundamental laws to explain the patterns.  Mathematical biology is partly in each stage, but “every stage in this caricature is usually vastly more complex than in the early days of physics,” May warns.  He provides examples of abuses, and some good uses, such as in immunology.  But he ends on a word of caution that Darwinian game theorists should read and heed:

Mathematics, however, does not have the long-standing relation to the life sciences that it does to the physical sciences and engineering.  It is therefore not surprising to find occasional abuses. ... Perhaps most common among abuses, and not always easy to recognize, are situations where mathematical models are constructed with an excruciating abundance of detail in some aspects, whilst other important facets of the problem are misty or a vital parameter is uncertain to within, at best, an order of magnitude.  It makes no sense to convey a beguiling sense of “reality” with irrelevant detail, when other equally important factors can only be guessed at.  Above all, remember Einstein’s dictum: “models should be as simple as possible, but not more so.”

Exercise:  Re-read this quote, and then read Nowak’s quote above about the challenges facing game theory.  How likely are evolutionary game theorists to be duped by a beguiling sense of reality?  (A phrase which, being interpreted, means, fantasy.)
Extra credit:  Apply the same analysis to Antonelli’s claim (see 01/12/2004) and to computerized models of evolution (see 08/20/2003 and 12/19/2002s).

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¹Martin A. Nowak, “Prisoners of the dilemma,” Nature 427, 491 (05 February 2004); doi:10.1038/427491a.
²Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund, “Evolutionary Dynamics of Biological Games,” Science Volume 303, Number 5659, Issue of 6 Feb 2004, pp. 793-799, 10.1126/science.1093411.
³Robert M. May, “Uses and Abuses of Mathematics in Biology,” Science Volume 303, Number 5659, Issue of 6 Feb 2004, pp. 790-793, 10.1126/science.1094442.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Wickramasinghe, former colleague of the late Fred Hoyle (see 08/22/01), is a useful idiot-genius who has helped demolish arguments for a chance origin of life, but replaced it by a tall tale even more incredible.  Since storytelling has become part and parcel of science, anything goes if you have a PhD, the whoppier the better, and the science news outlets will publish it with nary a guffaw.  (Unless you are a creationist.)
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Dark energy is the big fad these days.  Leading cosmologists are certain they have proved its existence in this era of “precision cosmology” (see 06/20/03).  A model that doesn’t rely on 96% unknown entities would seem to have a built-in advantage.  Let’s watch to see who eats crow a few years from now.
Next headline on:  Cosmology

But it is difficult not to at least consider another explanation: that scientists on the assembly or in other positions of influence could not abide Damadian’s staunch support for “creationist science.”  Damadian is a firm believer in a literal translation of the Bible: he has no doubt that the earth was created by God during a six-day stretch about 6,000 years ago.  Damadian has also served as a technical adviser to the Institute for Creation Research, which rejects the standard model of evolution. ...     .... It is tempting to speculate that some assembly members might have weighed the additional legitimacy a Nobel imprimatur would have conferred upon groups whose views are so diametrically opposed to so much of modern science.

The views of creationists are not diametrically opposed to so much of modern science, for crying out loud.  They are diametrically opposed to the totalitarian elitism of the Darwin Party.  Like so many great creation scientists before him, Damadian performed exemplary scientific research that has had phenomenal, world-wide impact for good.  That is what a prize should go for, not for allegiance to any “standard” mythology.
    We cannot know exactly how much this factor weighed in on the Nobel committee’s secret deliberations, but it would not be surprising, given the Darwin Party’s history of smear tactics going back to Huxley.  Rather than have open debate about the evidence, they present themselves as the noble couriers of science and everyone who disagrees with them as crackpots.  The Smithsonian, whose museum houses Damadian’s first working MRI scanner, could have done a better job defending his case, but at least this article is one of the few that have dared to suggest the creation factor.  Notice how Weiss talked about the “Nobel imprimatur,” and portrays the committee as if it were a council of bishops declaring the official interpretation of their scripture, The Origin of Species.  What’s next, the secular inquisition?
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

This is a disturbing book, especially given the stature of its primary author, Vincent Sarich, as one of the founding pioneers of molecular anthropology.  In 1967, in a paper with Allan Wilson, Sarich, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, used a simple protein-molecular clock to show that humans share a common ancestor with the great apes from as recently as 5 million years ago – overturning previous estimates of more 20 million years.

The authors’ ‘case for race’ draws heavily on contentious claims by raciologists such as Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, notorious for having postulated natural racial hierarchies in intelligence, criminality, athletic performance, sexual endowment and the capacity to accumulate wealth.  This is a shame, because there are good reasons to believe that certain aspects of race are very real, and that important questions of human origins, prehistoric migrations and medical therapeutics can be fruitfully addressed by properly re-examining human biovariation.
Here, though, we have an exercise in bombast and overstatement....
Flaws in this book are so numerous that it would be difficult to list them all.

The authors scoff at the idea of race as a social construct, but the historical account they present is full of idealized white-and-black polarities.  The authors side with Ernst Haeckel over Rudolf Virchow, Madison Grant over Franz Boas, and Carleton Coon over Ashley Montagu.  There is little effort to explore which of the myriad historical ‘realities’ postulated for race might have alternative explanations.
    I suspect that the impact of this book could be the opposite of the authors’ intentions.  There is much to be said for studying human genetic variability to explore questions of prehistoric ancestry and migration, and to investigate how different human populations respond to medical interventions.  But the leap from these to immoderate speculations about the permanence of present-day inequalities is likely to give sceptics even more reason to question racial ‘realities’.
    Anthropology has a mixed history of dealings with human racial injustice (think of Carleton Coon’s view that Africans became human some 200,000 years after white Europeans).  The present book, so full of flim-flam and loose speculations, is more likely to re-arm than to deflate sceptics.

Mixed history, indeed.  Evolutionists cannot whitewash the atrocities and genocide committed in the name of Darwinian survival of the fittest.  Charlie himself, and many of his followers, were confirmed racists, although some were more ardent than others.  Darwin maintained, at least outwardly, a deep concern for social justice, but Huxley and Haeckel flaunted their European chauvinism.  Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and admirer, was the father of eugenics.  (Virchow, by contrast, was a vigorous anti-Darwinist, so Proctor cannot place him in any evolutionary pantheon.)  For more on the racism of the Victorian-era Darwinians, see ch. 8-9 in Janet Browne’s Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002).  She describes Darwin’s racist beliefs as expressed in his second-most influential book, The Descent of Man (1871):

He ventured onto thorny ground....  His naturalism explicitly cast the notion of race into evolutionary and biological terms, reinforcing contemporary ideas of a racial hierarchy that replicated the ranking of animals.  And he had no scruple in using the cultural inequalities between populations to substantiate his evolutionary hypotheses.  Darwin certainly believed that the moral and cultural principles of his own people, and of his own day, were by far the highest that had emerged in evolutionary history.  (p. 345).

Darwinian apologists can, and do, point to misguided Christians who used Bible verses to support racism and slavery.  But judging from the quote above, which belief system – evolutionary naturalism or Christianity – leads directly from its core doctrines and founding statements to racism?  Darwin used evolution to explain and rationalize racial differences; the subtitle of his initial revolutionary book was The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  Yet the Bible teaches that we all descended from one human pair, Adam and Eve.  Paul reinforced this core doctrine of both Christians and Jews when he taught the Athenians that God had made all mankind of one blood (Acts 17:26).  The teachings of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere are the antithesis of racism.  Jesus continually exalted the outcast, the poor, the underprivileged, and the weak as better than the mighty (the fittest).  So does the rest of Scripture when each passage is understood in context.  Faith, not race, is always the criterion for fellowship in God’s family, whether Rahab, Ruth, the Ethiopian eunuch, Cornelius, or countless others of any nationality, ethnicity, sex, or social standing.  Between Darwinism and Christianity, the core doctrines and teachings of chief spokesmen lead in opposite directions regarding race.
    Creationists might have some agreement with Proctor, in that there is some room for analyzing slight variations between people that resulted from their histories (to be able to provide appropriate medical care, for instance), but these variations are not due to differences in human origins or to prehistoric migrations, because the historic migrations of mankind are documented in the Bible.  Biblical creationists explain the skin colors, eye slants, susceptibility to certain genetic diseases and other identifiable characteristics of ethnic groups as resulting from the separation of peoples after the Tower of Babel.  But they would claim these very minor and superficial changes all occurred within just a few thousand years, and in no way reflect on the truth that we are all created equal, and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Proctor’s belief, on the other extreme, would put these “racial” differences far back, millions of years, into our alleged evolutionary ascent from ape-like ancestors.  That could easily provide scientific justification to modern racism.  The Bible, by contrast, teaches that for all who come to the foot of the cross, “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” ( Colossians 3:11).  A direct line can be drawn from orthodox Darwinism to racism, but not from the cross of Christ.  (Note also that theistic evolutionism has no advantage over naturalistic Darwinism in this regard.)
    Answers in Genesis has taken a lead role in revitalizing the concept that a Genesis understanding of human origins is the solution to racial tensions in the world today.  So Vincent Sarich, the anti-creationist, sowed his core beliefs, and now they have sprouted.  By their fruits you shall know them.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Politics and Ethics • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

• What is it about, anyway?  The book seems to omit a rather important part of phylogenetic systematics:

  What I found most surprising about the book is that it is not at all about systematics.  Readers will find no coverage of many basic concepts in phylogenetic systematics--such as synapomorphy, symplesiomorphy, sistergroups, outgroups, and monophyly.

  While Felsenstein covers many subjects like “techniques for statistical testing of evolutionary trees,” uses of phylogenies, and “nearly every quantitative approach to tree-building that has been tried,” Ronquist is most surprised there is no coverage of these important terms and concepts in a 684-page definitive treatise by an expert in the field.

• No help on classification.

  Another topic that many phylogenetic systematists consider important but the book glosses over is how one should convert phylogenetic trees into classifications of organisms.  According to Felsenstein, “The delimitation of higher taxa is no longer a major task of systematics, as the availability of estimates of the phylogeny removes the need to use these classifications.”  Even a cursory look at the literature would prove that many active systematists disagree; indeed, the discussion of classification and naming principles seems to be as vigorous as ever.  This neglect of the classification issue is all the more remarkable because Felsenstein devotes an entire chapter--one of the more original and important contributions in the book--to the drawing of trees (specifically, to algorithms for drawing diagrams of trees).  After all, drawing trees is just another way of communicating the results of a phylogenetic analysis.  Often a diagram is better, but sometimes a name is necessary.  I do not think we will ever see papers with titles like “The biology of <insert tree drawing here>.”

• Controversy is bitter.

  In a field that has been plagued by outrageously bitter controversy, the book is remarkably balanced on the whole.  For example, consider Felsenstein’s summary of the debates on statistical inconsistency.  It reveals when parsimony is inconsistent and suffers from “long-branch attraction,” but it makes no secret of the fact that likelihood methods can also be misled by similar phenomena when the model used for inference is incorrect.  The attempt to provide balanced coverage probably will not stop ardent parsimony advocates from being disappointed.

  This is because Ronquist feels Fenselstein was unfair in his choice of algorithms to exalt, and ones to ignore.

• The Bayesian Funky Chicken.  “The book’s coverage of Bayesian inference of phylogenies is surprisingly short and critical,” Ronquist complains.  Bayesian inference is a fancy mathematical form of educated guessing by applying values to likely causes, but it suffers from GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.  Ronquist disagrees with the author’s criticisms, and is not amused by the joking description Fenselstein gives to this technique as applied to evolutionary tree-building:

  I find the author’s complaints about prior distributions partly misdirected.  For instance, Mau and Newton’s prior on clocklike trees is described as “technically inadmissible” and “an impossible distribution” because it is an improper probability distribution.  But improper priors are often unproblematic in Bayesian inference, and there is an entire school of “objective Bayesians” who routinely use them.  The comment on the choice of proposal distributions is more funny than helpful: “At the moment the choice of a good proposal distribution involves the burning of incense, casting of chicken bones, use of magical incantations, and invoking the opinions of more prestigious colleagues.”

Although it is easy to criticize a book that tries to cover so much, in this case doing so is like throwing stones in a glass house.  Every phylogeneticist can probably find some points they understand better than Felsenstein, but I can think of no one who could provide a better and more comprehensive summary of the current methods for building evolutionary trees.  It will be a long time before there will be a comparable book; perhaps the field is now growing too fast for there to ever be one.  The publication of Inferring Phylogenies is a milestone for evolutionary biology in general and phylogenetics in particular.

Sometimes you have to just stand back and let the Darwin Party members do it to each other.  Does anyone have confidence in evolutionary tree-building after this indecent exposure?  When an expert in the field omits significant parts of the story (why? because he feels they are invalid?), characterizes it as a battle over the most prestigious authorities, and describes one of the chief methodologies to be as mystical as casting chicken bones and using magical incantations, what are we supposed to conclude?  Don’t they realize it’s confusing to the peasants when the shamans are exorcising one another?

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For more on phylogenetic tree-building, see 11/26/2002 and 06/13/2003 entries, and follow the Chain Links on “Genes and DNA.”
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Comrade – dialectic – materialism – homage to the Leader – the parallels are too striking to be coincidental.  Is that why Marx found Darwin’s views so supportive of his economic philosophy?  (Incidentally, though the story about Marx dedicating Das Kapital to Darwin may be apocryphal, Marx did send him a signed copy in 1873, writing “Mr. Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer Karl Marx.”  Darwin, in reply, wrote, “ I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge & that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of mankind.”  100 years and 100 million dead bodies later...
    And then you have the prophetic, exalted master, and a mystical force with two sides in eternal competition, permeating the universe.  Darwin himself looked for humans with pointy ears.  He thought they might be ativisms, i.e., evolutionary throwbacks.  Interesting.  The word Vandermeer chooses to speak of Darwin sounds best when uttered in a deep, breathy voice, like Mossstuh.  Lewontin seems to be saying, “I was once the Learnuh, but now I am the Mosstuh.”
    If you thought dialectical materialism went out of style when the Berlin wall fell, you can find it alive and well in modern evolutionary biology.  The constructivists assume that evolution proceeds by the interplay of adaptation and feedback from the environment in a Hegelian way, but Vandermeer has unwittingly hit on a troubling fact.  What if the vectors of thesis and antithesis, or adaptation and environmental constraint, are collinear and opposite?  Nothing happens.  There is no evolution.  Vandermeer has pointed out an “internally generated stop on the general evolutionary process.”  His example is telling.  Natural selection adapts an animal toward utilizing a food source.  The animal gets so good at it that the food source runs out.  Now what?  (For a similar discussion of this often unnoticed “slippage on the evolutionary treadmill,” see the important 03/17/2003 entry.)
    For another headline related to Vandermeer’s criticism of the propriety of investigating the evolution of rape, see 07/18/2003.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Has it come to this, that common sense needs legal defense?
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Education • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

1. The target must have low compressive strength relative to shear strength and tensile strength.
2. Impact velocity must be 0.4% the speed of sound of the medium.
3. The bodies must be made of materials that allow the “restoration of damage” effect.  This is an automatic “repair” mechanism that occurs if a ruptured material can rebound such that interatomic forces can partially heal the breach, as if little magnets in the pieces pull them back together.

1. Temperature.  Soft, wet snowballs are more likely to stick than hard, icy ones.
2. Density.  Low-density snowballs are more likely to stick than packed ones.  The compressive strength of snowballs can vary by a factor of 1000, Sirono says: “As the density of an aggregate goes lower, the strength becomes lower and vice versa.  For example, the strength range due to density variations is more than three orders of magnitude for a bed of snow.”  So if our astronauts tightly pack their snowballs, they well be less likely to stick, but also more subject to disruption.
3. Relative size.  A small snowball might stick more readily to a large one, than would two of equal size.  Sirono’s simulations suggest that the threshold ratio for optimum chance of sticking is 3/10 or lower.
4. Glancing angle.  A small impactor is more likely to stick to a target in a direct bulls-eye hit rather than a glancing blow.
5. Differentiation.  Let’s say Chuck and Tom throw rocks coated with snow.  They might accrete if the relative velocity is low and the snow coating absorbs some of the energy.
6. Glue.  If our astronauts have access to some kind of adhesive with which to saturate their weapons, the snowballs might glue themselves together.  Sirono thinks interstellar organic molecules might just do the trick.  He cites earlier work that suggests organics might comprise a significant fraction of the material (silicate:ice:organic mass ratio of 1:1:1.6), and that the organics might form a viscoelastic fluid between the particles.  “It may be possible that the organic materials play a role of glue which connects grains and fragments,” he suggests.

There are voids and cracks inside a large aggregate that significantly lowers the strength of an aggregate.  Tensile stress concentrates in regions around the cracks, and fracturing starts from contacts between such grains.  An aggregate will be broken by much smaller stresses than those expected by direct extrapolation from interaction forces between grains.

Observation 1: planets around a star, with a little dust.  Observation 2: a lot of dust around a star, with no planets.  What are appropriate conclusions based on this data?
    There are two possibilities.  One is that the second star is a young star with a dust disk that is on the way to becoming a new solar system, and the first is an old star with mature planets.  But there’s another possibility.  Maybe the first star has widely spaced, mature planets with stable orbits and few collisions, and the second star started out with mature planets in erratic orbits, which since collided and ground each other to dust.  The conclusion you reach has a lot to say about your world view and your respect for observation.
    While no one can rule out all possibility of dust and ice grains sticking together, the probability seems rather low.  Sirono invokes several ad hoc conditions to increase the odds.  Maybe if they are as soft as silly putty and infused with some sort of organic glue, with the right angle of attack, slow enough collision speed and the right temperature, they just might stick instead of bouncing off each other.  But the organic glue cannot get too warm, because Sirono says, “It has been found that the shear modulus of the organics decreases by five orders of magnitude as temperature increases from 200 to 300 K.”  This means the glue loses its elasticity real fast as the temperature rises: “The consequence of decrease in elasticity by a factor of 10 is severe fragmentation,” he says.  For particles in the warmer parts of the nebula, this seems to be a problem, yet we observe Mercury in our solar system baking in the heat of the sun, and gas giants bigger than Jupiter in even closer orbits around other stars.  Also, even if the conditions are lucky enough for the particles to start sticking to each other, they become even more subject to disruption as the aggregate grows.
    Perhaps Sinoro’s constraints don’t seem too outlandish, and one can envision scenarios in which all the right conditions might be met.  It could be argued that out of uncounted myriads of particles, some might reach the threshold of runaway gravitational accretion.  All it takes is a few to get a planetary system, right?  (Actually, our solar system is filled with many thousands of gravitationally accreting bodies, like asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects, comets, and small moons, in addition to the planets and larger moons.  Some of them appear to have been busted apart by collisions.)
    Regardless, the fact remains that no one has observed grains accrete into a planetesimal, but astronomers have abundantly observed the opposite: bodies fragmenting into smaller bodies and dust.  Small bodies show abundant evidence of cratering and erosion, even the recently-photographed comet Wild-2 (see 01/02/2004), a fact that surprised scientists because this was supposed to be a pristine object from the quiet deep freeze of the outer solar system.  We observe ongoing processes of fragmentation, catastrophic collision, erosion to dust and de-evolution, but accretion exists only in the minds of theorists.  Which principle is more in accord with the second law of thermodynamics?
    One would think that scientists would err on the side of conservatism, and not make claims beyond the evidence.  But the disruption view implies starting conditions that are philosophically repugnant to a naturalist: if the planets were already there, they must have been created.  So strong is the urge to have a universe that evolves upward from a bang to galaxies to planets to life, that philosophical naturalists will sneak glue and fudge and whatever else is needed to fill in the gaps.  You can believe that the dust around Vega is a young solar system in the making, but be sure your model particles obey the laws of physics.  After all, a naturalist should respect the laws of nature, by definition.  Better yet, perform realistic lab experiments.  We’ll wait till you get particles that stick before worrying you with all the other problems, such as the Kuiper capers (10/05/2003), small moon mysteries (09/29/2003), turbulent stress in planetesimals and in scientist minds (09/22/2003), the rarity of sunlike solar systems (07/21/2003), declining popularity of the planetesimal hypothesis (06/03/2003), migration woes (05/16/2003), the war of the worlds (04/17/2003), the tweak Olympics (11/22/2002), etc., and so forth, and so on.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics

It is a truism that the plausibility of an evolutionary inference increases with the amount of data on which it is based, and the ever-quickening provision of full genome sequences is providing a huge amount of grist for the evolutionary biologist’s mill.

Vertebrates, lophotrochozoans and anthozoans are a good choice for such comparative evolutionary research, because they appear to share a surprisingly large part of the ancestral gene inventory that has been lost in other groups.  In a certain sense, therefore, these animals, like some of those on Orwell’s Animal Farm, are more equal than others, and thus should be most revealing about our complex past.

We beg to differ with their opening truism.  Based on our empirical research, reading hundreds of papers on evolution, the amount of actual data available for study is inversely proportional to the amount and credibility of Darwinian storytelling (see 11/16/2002 entry and the following story, for instance).  Their truism is a mythoid.
    These authors seem to feel that if the data don’t fit, they really ought to (see quote, top right box).  One thing we have learned about this Animal Farm.  The pigs are the members of the Darwin Party.  They rewrote the constitution of science (see 12/22/03 commentary) to keep themselves in power, because some beliefs about origins are more equal than others.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The research suggests an answer to another long-debated question: why snakes lost their limbs.  Their land-based lifestyle, including burrowing underground at least some of the time, may be the reason.  “Having limbs is a real problem if you need to fit through small openings underground, as anybody who has tried exploring in caves knows,” Hedges says.  “Your body could fit through much smaller openings if you did not have the wide shoulders and pelvis that support your limbs.”  The researchers note that the burrowing lifestyle of many other species, including legless lizards, is correlated with the complete loss of limbs or the evolution of very small limbs.

Better not explore caves if you want your kids to have legs.  Why do some lizards still crawl into tight places tighter than a big snake could pass?  Why do gophers and weasels have legs?  Is limb loss really evolution?  The quote of the month (see top right box on this page) says it all.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

• Condition:  The whale skeletons are “preserved in pristine condition (bones articulated [i.e., still assembled] or at least closely associated), in some cases including preserved baleen.”
• Fine details:  “The most complete whale (WCBa 20) was fully articulated; the microscopic detail of its baleen was preserved ... and there is black, heavy-mineral replacement of the spinal cord and some intervertebral disks.  There were no similar minerals in the surrounding sediment.  These nonbony tissues were still present when the whale was completely buried.”  Other instances of baleen, the delicate straining structure of the whale’s mouth, were also found.
• Vertical extent:  “The 346 whales within ~1.5 km² of surveyed surface were not buried as an event, but were distributed uninterrupted through an 80-m-thick sedimentary section.”  Since they were found uniformly distributed from bottom to top of the formation, the conditions in which they were buried must have also been uniform.
• Unlaminated strata:  “The diatomaceous sediment lacks repeating primary laminations, but instead is mostly massive, with irregular laminations and speckles.”  In other words, it was not due to a cyclic process, like the annual climate change that produces tree rings.
• Lack of bioturbation:  Small organisms have not altered the deposit.  “There is no evidence for bioturbation by invertebrates in the whale-bearing sediment.”  Apparently they didn’t have the chance, it happened so fast.
• Intact diatoms:  “If most diatoms dissolve before preservation in the sediment, one would find frustules in all stages of dissolution.  Diatoms in the Pisco diatomaceous sediment are often broken, but SEM study indicated fine preservation, with no significant evidence of dissolution. ... In the shallow-water Pisco Formation, the diatoms were probably buried too quickly for much dissolution to occur.”  The authors point out that in contemporary diatom deposits, only 2-3% of the frustules (glass shells) usually remain undissolved, up to 24% in special cases in Antarctica.
• Stormy waters:  Something violent was going on when these were buried.  “Indicators of storm deposits, such as hummocky cross-bedding, indicate that the sediments were deposited above storm wave base.” 
• Single event:  There are no indicators that the burial occurred over years of time.  “There are no varves or other cyclical laminations, but randomly located individual white laminations and speckles consist primarily of diatoms (5%–10% clay), whereas the surrounding massive grayish diatomite ... has a higher clay content.”
• Numbers:  “The whales occur in large numbers, 30–300 individuals per square kilometer of surface exposure ... and are fully articulated ... to disarticulated but with skeletal elements still closely associated.”  This hints there are probably many more than the 346 whales they found in their study area.
• Other species:  “Vertebrate fossils in the Pisco Formation include sharks, fish, turtles, seals, porpoises, ground sloths, penguins, and whales,” but the study area primarily included whales and shark teeth.

In modern oceans, whale carcasses on the ocean floor are rapidly colonized by large numbers of invertebrate scavengers that remove the flesh and begin to degrade the bone. ... They also bioturbate the adjoining sediment in search of organic compounds leached from the whale.  This process strips a whale skeleton within a maximum of a few years.  Sediment accumulating at a few centimeters per thousand years would deposit at maximum a few millimeters of diatomite during the time available to preserve even a reasonably complete whale skeleton.  Preservation of nonmineralized tissue would not be a realistic possibility at this slow burial rate, and even bones are unlikely to be well preserved.

The Two-Charlie Party (Lyell+Darwin) does not own empirical geology.  This is fine work by creationists and catastrophists, including Arthur V. Chadwick and some from Loma Linda’s Geoscience Research Institute who are accustomed to exemplary field work and publishing, as here, in reputable journals.  We should not be surprised.  Even the publisher of this paper, the Geological Society of America, which launched a crusade last month against a creationist geology book being sold in the Grand Canyon bookstore (see 01/08/2004), honors a “rock star” in this month’s issue of GSA Today, Clarence King (1842-1901) – a catastrophist.  And this “pioneering geologist of the West” was not alone in his views:

King was convinced that Lyellian uniformitarianism, a theory of gradualism and constancy of processes, could not explain the geologic evolution of the region surveyed, especially late Cenozoic effusive volcanism and the magnitude of glacial drainages.  These views led King to be classed as a catastrophist.  However, he was in good company with most late nineteenth century geologists in calling for greater variations of both rates and intensities of processes than Charles Lyell preached.  King also believed that evolution did not proceed at a steady pace.  Blending catastrophe and “adaptivity,” he proposed that the former was an integral part of the cause of change.  Destruction of biological equilibrium engendered by catastrophic change contributed to rapid morphological change among what he termed “plastic species” ... King in essence proposed a blending of Darwin’s ideas on natural selection with the variable rate of change of geological processes.  Employing data on rock fusion gathered at the USGS Physical Laboratory, King (1893) attempted to advance to new precision Kelvin’s estimate of Earth’s age deduced from terrestrial refrigeration, determining a maximum age of 24 Ma.  Given this young age, insufficient time remained to construct a Lyellian geologic record of the Fortieth Parallel area.

King made his conclusions based on work in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  So even though Clarence King accepted some form of evolution, he was certainly no uniformitarian, and his young age determination must have only contributed to the fits that Lord Kelvin was giving to Charlie and his musketeers.  (Darwin called Kelvin’s limit on the age of the earth an “odious spectre” and one of his “sorest troubles” because it did not allow enough time for evolution.)  The point is, the authors of this paper are not the first to point out geological features that disprove uniformitarianism.  Why does anyone even hang on to that falsified idea?
    If the Peru whales were an isolated instance, it would be enough to give uniformitarians fits.  But other similar finds have been found.  A notable one is the world’s largest diatomite bed near Lompoc, north of Santa Barbara, California.  Dozens of whales, and billions of herring fish have been buried in DE there, too, with indications of rapid burial and volcanic ash.  Could these beds, on different continents, be related?  If so, what would that mean?  Connect the dots, but it doesn’t spell uniformitarianism, that’s for sure.
    Diatoms (see also 02/19/2003 and 03/19/2002 entries) are amazing studies of beauty, elegance, strength and design in themselves.  Trying to imagine the countless myriads of these little jewels involved in such fossil beds is an exercise in mind bogglemania.
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When biodiversity is examined in the context of species richness, a consistent feature emerges: Most taxonomic groups are species-poor, relatively few are species-rich, and the frequency distribution has the shape of a so-called "hollow curve".

We suggest that the explanation for the lack of fit between hollow curves from real data and the SBT model [their model of a "simultaneous broken tree" as opposed to the SBS, "simultaneous broken stick" model] is taxonomic, not evolutionary.  Although there are no objective criteria for recognizing higher taxa, taxonomists are averse to studying genera that are either too large or too small.  (Large genera are cumbersome and can be nonmonophyletic, whereas monotypic genera contain no information about relationships.)  Observed hollow curves reflect a shortening of the tails of the SBT distribution.  Our taxonomic explanation contrasts with evolutionary explanations, which depend on the premise that in real data sets there are too many monotypic taxa and species-rich groups that are too large.  Evidence does exist for differences in speciation and extinction rates but it does not come from hollow curves.

This is like finding the oscillating signal in the radio receiver is not from ETI but from a communications satellite.  Presumably the claimed evidence for differences in speciation and extinction rates will be forthcoming in a futureware issue.
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