A philosopher [i.e., scientist] should be a man willing to listen to every suggestion but determined to judge for himself.  He should not be biased by appearances, have no favourite hypothesis, be of no school and in doctrine have no master.  He should not be a respecter of persons, but of things.  Truth should be his primary object.  If to these qualities be added industry, he may indeed hope to walk within the veil of the temple of nature.
— Michael Faraday, cited by John Meurig Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution, Institute of Physics Publishing (1991), p. 121.

We hope to be able to bring you findings and analyses that the media will miss or misinterpret.  For instance, the media will always interpret phenomena in terms of the Sacred Parameter A, the “age of the solar system” (4.5 billion years), a figure invariably assumed without question, even when apparently young phenomena are being observed.
    Of special interest will be the rings, not only because of their beauty, but because of their apparent youth.  Most ring scientists believe that the rings had to form relatively recently.  Even if 100 million years were allowed, that would only be 1/50 of the Sacred Parameter.  To hold onto A, they have to invoke ad hoc theories of a comet wandering into the Roche Limit of Saturn and disrupting.  Even so, the forces of plasma drag, sputtering, micrometeorite bombardment, light pressure and collisions would dissipate the rings in short order.  Will embedded moons be found to feed new material into the rings?  Stay tuned.
    Also, we will provide balance to the claims about Titan having “prebiotic chemistry” that might be like the “building blocks of life” or like the “early earth in deep freeze.”  One scientist was even heard suggesting that Titan’s atmosphere may be a natural laboratory for the Miller Experiment (see 05/02/2003 headline).  Such statements assume evolution in spite of the evidence.  Also, it will be interesting to see if long-age believers can rescue Titan’s atmosphere from the evidence it is depleting rapidly (see 10/16/2003 headline).
    Cassini is poised to make major contributions to our understanding of the solar system and its age.  For now, enjoy the ride; it will be high adventure tonight at Saturn!
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics

To think that these cute, innocent, vulnerable human beings, with all their emotions and capabilities, are subject to the most brutal executions is heart-rending.  Would not a being able to smile be capable of feeling pain?  This technology may be a powerful method to reduce abortions if we can just get people to watch.  A plain picture is worth a thousand loaded words.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Politics and Ethics

Put this one in the basket of quasi-erudite papers that will be laughed at some day when the Darwinian idol collapses.  Despite the equations, it is a collage of elitist, ivory-tower, pseudoscientific speculation with a sprinkling of magic to hold it all together.  Somehow, somewhere, random mutations appeared on cue to provide symbolic memory, reentrant signaling, a mechanism for categorizing behavior and a strong link between the cortical and limbic systems to allow an ape to express approval to its baby.  Maybe a lucky cosmic ray hit Bonzo and the lights went on.  He mated and learned to shriek disapproval at his offspring.  Simultaneously, the kid got hit with another cosmic ray and understood what disapproval meant.  And so a few million years later, Shakespeare emerged.
    Darwinism will fall as soon as enough bright students, armed with baloney detectors, overcome the fear of big words, abstruse-looking equations and the prestige of big-name journals.  This Darwin-saturated hypothesis is utterly foolish on the face of it.  Its only reason for existence is that Darwinians need something to explain their own brains and desires.  They have sold their souls to Charlie, and since all of reality must fit within his unguided, naturalistic world, they need some explanation – no matter how foolish – for the evolution of everything: even ethics, morals and taste in music.  Like Richard Lewontin candidly admitted, “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.”  Don’t ever submit to the initiation rites of the Temple of Darwin, because they cause brain damage.
    Since Darwin Party PhDs usually have skill with language and math, they are especially dangerous, because they have perfected the art of couching balderdash in nearly impenetrable jargon that serves to intimidate science reporters and other dupes.  Let’s remember a basic math lesson: equations are only as good as their assumptions and variables.  Suppose we write: “Let a be natural selection and a' be population genetics.  Now let b represent Marxist economic policy, and b' represent the degree of collectivization, and c the hominization rate.  Then letting the population p remain constant for one Milankovitch cycle t, we suggest that the expression
ab^c - (a'b - cab')^-ekt / p
yields a stable economy over the lifetime of a hominid species.”  That was all just made up out of thin air.  Does this confabulation of irrelevancies deserve more respect when dressed up in math symbols?  Then why should anyone give a spit when these authors write nonsense like this:

A simple model of cultural transmission that can be applied to assessor hominids ancestors can illuminate previous ideas better.  Let us define the probability that an individual without capacity of imitation acquires behavior i as h_iB_i, where h_i is the probability that an individual discovers the behavior i, and B_i is the probability that the behavior will be included in his repertoire.  If the individual already knows an alternative (behavior j) to behavior i, the probability that behavior i will be included in his repertoire will be equal to h_iB_ij, where B_ij is the probability that he chooses i instead of alternative behavior j.  However, if the individual also has the imitation capacity and there are cultural models in the population, the probability of his including i in his repertoire will be h*_i B_ij, where h*_i is the probability that an individual learns either by individual learning or by imitation behavior i, and equals h*_i = h_i + (1 - h_i)a, where a represents the efficacy of the process of imitation, and (1 - h_i)a measures the net effect of this process.  Therefore, an increase in the imitation capacity is expressed as an increase in the value of a.

No amount of skill at manipulating math symbols can rescue bad assumptions.  The whole premise of this simplistic hypothesis (that an accidental ability to express favor/disfavor helped hominids evolve culture, ethics and language, resulting eventually in the Bush-Kerry campaign) is that complex, coordinated skills like the capacity for categorizing and symbolic memory “emerged” from random mutation and natural selection.  When, oh when, will we ever get some Darwinist to prove this instead of assuming it?  The null hypothesis of intelligent design should always be favored before yielding an ounce of credence to such a product of cosmic improbabilities.  A corollary of this premise is that all intangibles, including ethics, arts and language, are mere artifacts of biological determinism.  That is not science: that’s philosophy.
    And now, the bottom line.  Why should we care about what a couple of pseudo-intellectual, ivory-tower professors in Spain write in a technical journal only pointy-headed members of a geek subculture would care to read?  You need look no further than their last sentences: “we have proposed that conceptual classification of behavior in terms of positive/negative (good/bad) involves, according to its natural origin, a feeling of duty toward those positive behaviors, and this behavioral categorization and the feeling of “must” are the developmental roots of the ethical capacity....”  They have just used their weird-science fable to preach moral relativism.  Dressed in pseudoscientific garb, it appears more authoritative than sending a nihilist dressed in a red devil costume into the college classroom hissing, “Do what you want!  There is no God!”
    It wouldn’t matter if these pseudo-intellectuals only spouted their philosophy to other members of the Darwin Party, but they have the audacity to call this science.  (Note that this paper was edited by the anticreationist Francisco Ayala of UC Irvine.)  And they have the power, with all the usurped authority and dignity of science, to stand in college classrooms and declare that God is dead, that Darwinism has displaced religion, and that since morals and ethics evolve like everything else in the universe, any sense of right, duty, principle, honor and integrity your parents taught you are just downstream artifacts of mutations that caused some ape in your past to suddenly be able to express “approval” to its offspring.  Don’t tell this to the Marines.  If duty, honor, country are as arbitrary and meaningless as the Darwin Party would have us believe, then terrorists and mass murdering dictators are not doing anything inherently evil, and we have no duty to stop them.
    Connect the dots.  Darwinism has its primordial-slimy fingers all over politics, foreign policy, and what you should teach your kid.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

Since this is a work in progress, any judgments on tentative interpretations would be premature.  It’s good to discern, however, attempts to force uncooperative data into preconceived notions about time scales and evolutionary theories.  That fault is endemic in the biological sciences.
Next headline on:  Stars and Astronomy • Dating Methods

We hate to have to award these clever inventors the Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week prize, but listen to what they said.  They just called themselves blind, deaf and dumb.  Here they used intelligence, ingenuity, know-how, knowledge, and supervision to design a working enzyme, then said it was equivalent to “convergent evolution,” a blind, purposeless process that has none of those things.  Their work has nothing to do with evolution, convergent, divergent, invergent, subvergent or otherwise.  It was an exercise in reverse engineering.  By emphasizing the specificity of contact points in a simple enzyme that leads to efficient catalysis, their work underscores the necessity of rational design.  How come Charlie keeps getting credit for intelligent design work?  Unfair.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

It’s a talent Majerus hopes to put to good use in defending the reputation of Kettlewell and the peppered moth in a road show, which he aims to take around Britain--and possibly the United States--later this year.  He is motivated by growing concern over attacks on Kettlewell’s character, most notably writer Judith Hooper’s scathing account of the men behind the peppered moth story in her 2002 book Of Moths and Men: The Untold Story of Science and the Peppered Moth, which helped fuel an anti-evolutionist campaign to remove Biston from school textbooks.  “A lot of [the campaign] is pointed at the peppered moth as being the example that Darwinism is debunked,” says Majerus, who wants to make a public stand against teaching creationism and “intelligent design” in biology classes.  “To have people believe the biology of the planet is controlled by a Creator, I think that’s dangerous.”

Darwinists, for your own good, give it up.  Peppered moths are not going to help you.  Yes, it was funny when Coyne described hearing the truth about Kettlewell’s experiments was like finding out that Santa Claus was really his dad.  Yes, it was damaging to learn that Kettlewell’s coworkers glued peppered moths to the trunks of trees for some of the famous photographs.  It was Far Side comic book material to find out this most famous example of evolution was based on flawed experiments.  All that aside, even if all the experiments had been done perfectly by scientific saints, and even if bird predation actually did shift the populations of moths according to the rise and fall of industrial soot on tree trunks, so what?  What does it prove?  Both varieties of moths already existed.  Both are members of one species, Biston betularia.  The only change was in relative numbers of pre-existing dark and light moths.  Kettlewell’s blunders are amusing in hindsight, but they have little to do with the real issue: Nothing evolved.  No new structures, organs or abilities emerged.  No genetic information was added.  Evolutionists need far better evidence than this to convince high schoolers that humans have bacteria ancestors.
    More significant is what this episode reveals about the lack of solid evidence for Darwinian evolution.  For decades, evolutionists pointed to Kettlewell’s moths as one of the best, if not the best, examples of natural selection ever found.  One 60s high school biology text called it “one of the best examples of the impact on a species of a change in the environment,” and “a classic example of evolution in action” (Otto and Towle, Modern Biology 1969, pp. 193-194); “Industrial melanism is a demonstration of the importance of natural selection in the process of evolution.”  Despite the recent uproar over Kettlewell, the spiel goes on.  The same spin doctoring, and the same photos, can still be found in today’s high school textbooks, along with other debunked examples like Haeckel’s embryos (see 07/25/2003 and 10/30/2003 headlines).  Not only is it past time for Darwinists to clean up their act, it is incumbent upon them to find better evidence than shifting populations of existing subspecies if they expect anyone to become convinced that natural selection can produce giraffes from slime.
    Advice to the Darwin Party: let the peppered myth have a solemn funeral, admit you made a big mistake, document the lessons learned, and move on to real empirical evidence.  Prove your theory, don’t expect people to just believe it.  Find an animal developing a new organ, like a wing or an eye.  Enumerate all the links in an actual chain of evolution from one organism lacking a complex structure to another having it, including the genetic and developmental pathways and the mutations involved.  Without resorting to just-so stories, provide an example of complex specified information or irreducible complexity arising purely from a purely naturalistic Darwinian mechanism.  Peppered moths are not up to the challenge.  While it is admirable that Majerus is attempting to accumulate definitive data on the little insects and their behaviors, and prove once and for all whether or not birds eat more of them on contrasting backgrounds, peppered moths are a dead issue to evolution.  Like the Sioux proverb advises, the best strategy when riding a dead horse is to dismount.
    Now to an even more serious aspect of this story.  Majerus correctly connects the dots; he knows that the peppered moth tale symbolizes a battle over the soul of science.  Why do the Darwinists cling so tenaciously to any minuscule piece of evidence, no matter how inconsequential, that might be used to bolster the idea that natural selection can account for all of biology?  Why the initial confident rejoicing over Kettlewell, and the anguish over his downfall?  Listen to what Majerus said: “To have people believe the biology of the planet is controlled by a Creator, I think that’s dangerous.”
    Phillip Johnson hit the nail on the head.  He has written repeatedly that the problem in the creation-evolution issue is not over evidence, but rather that evolutionists are committed to a materialist philosophy before the evidence has a chance to speak.  Science, to them, is no longer a search for the truth, a commitment to follow the evidence wherever it leads; it is a naturalistic philosophy that cannot stomach the thought of a Creator.  The issue is not whether this or that flimsy just-so story really supports Darwin’s theory or not.  It is that it must support it, because the alternative, that there really is a God who made the world and the things in it, is philosophically repugnant to them.  Their atheism demands a philosophy of science that can describe an unbroken chain of natural causes in a closed system.  To suggest otherwise is “dangerous” to them because it threatens their chosen world view.
    Thus it is necessary to go to great lengths to prove Kettlewell right.  It is necessary to go on the road and oppose the dangerous creationists.  It is necessary to keep the peppered moths in the textbooks and prevent the students from hearing the problems with the moth myth.  It is necessary to “make a public stand against teaching creationism and ‘intelligent design’ in biology classes.”  The end justifies the means, because to have people believe that the biology of the planet is controlled by a Creator is “dangerous.”
    Is it, really? It would seem that what is dangerous to science is dishonesty, cover-up, lack of scientific rigor, just-so storytelling, extrapolation, and obscurantism.  Is belief that the world is controlled by a Creator detrimental to scientific investigation?  Let’s ask Bacon, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, Pasteur, Carver, von Braun and a few other minor players in the history of science for their opinions.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

So far, Earth is the only planet we know that has the privilege of bearing life that searches for signs of other intelligence – whether in the form of other technological beings transmitting evidence of their existence or through patterns indicating underlying design.  It may be some time, however, before we can accurately judge whether our blue dot is – as planets go – commonplace, unique or somewhere in between.

It’s refreshing to see a dispassionate, balanced treatment of a book so outside the Darwinian mainstream.  The credentials of the authors cannot be denied, but that has not stopped some reviewers from unleashing venom at anyone daring to publish a science book without the Darwin Party imprimatur guaranteeing absolute and unconditional naturalism (see what Science did to theistic evolutionist Simon Conway Morris, for instance, in the 12/07/2003 headline).  Whether more scientists are beginning to acknowledge the merits of ID arguments or not, it’s too early to tell.  (It should be noted that most anthropic arguments have come from secular scientists without any Christian or creationist proclivities whatsoever, such as Brandon Carter, Paul Dirac, and Stephen Hawking.)
    Gonzalez and Richards build a convincing case for design, but they tend to accept uncritically current scientific models as facts.  Too much trust in today’s conventional wisdom can render books obsolete when paradigm shifts occur.  Also, when some props of “accepted scientific theory” eventually get kicked out from under an argument, it can appear to undermine the whole thesis and diminish the authors’ credibility.  Much is made, for instance, of plate tectonics, stellar evolution, galactic evolution, nucleosynthesis and planetary evolution.  Solid as these theories appear to the establishment today, there have been indications of doubt that could lead to overhaul later (see, for instance, the 04/02/2004, 03/05/2004, 11/25/2003, and 11/04/2003 headlines on geology, and 01/23/2004, 01/01/2004, 10/05/2003, 09/03/2003, and 06/18/2003 headlines on astronomy).  Also, the authors rely without qualification on age estimates that are built on unverifiable assumptions about the unobservable past.
    Nonetheless, Gonzalez and Richards’ collection of evidences may contribute to a worldview shift of major proportions that could already be underway: a reversal of the Copernican Principle.  Richards has argued from history, and Gonzalez from science, that Sagan’s extrapolation of the Copernican Principle (i.e., that the earth has no privileged status) is unwarranted.  In the first place, ancients never believed the earth was the center of the cosmos.  In the second place, the more we study the heavens and the earth, the more we see conditions favorable to our existence that cannot be all due to chance.  That cosmologists are again willing to discuss these things (see 02/28/2004 headline) hints at a sea change just 23 years after Sagan’s Cosmos symbolized the triumph of secularism over theism.
    Christians should not entertain any illusions that such trends will fill their churches with new seekers.  For instance, Peter Ward, co-author of Rare Earth, knows all these things yet remains a staunch, hostile, anti-Christian atheist.  Evidence of design is not enough to save a soul, but it removes a major stumbling block to faith.  That is, however, an important – often indispensable – prerequisite.
Next headline on:  Cosmology. • Intelligent Design. • SETI.

• Jump 50 times your body length.  That would be like a man jumping 300 feet (the world record is 29 feet, 4.5 inches).
• Walk upside down on smooth surfaces, with 170 people hanging on.  Spiders do this with microscopic hairs that create atomic attraction forces.  Geckos have this ability, too (see 08/27/2002 headline), but spiders are not related to geckos.  One scientist remarked, “From a biological point of view, that was pretty astonishing.”
• Weave webs out of material like flexible steel, with seven different kinds of thickness and adhesive strength.
• Create beautiful works of art.  Some garden spiders incorporate spirals and crosses into their wagon-wheel shaped webs.

Spiders deserve more respect than we give them.  We usually can’t step on them fast enough.  OK, so you don’t want them in the house.  At least live and let live outside, where they do you a lot of good (if you also despise flies).  And once in awhile, from a safe distance, take a good, long look at that miniature package of superpowers.  Nature is usually more entertaining and thought-provoking than a blockbuster movie.  That’s a good thing for a kid to learn.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Media • Amazing Facts

Personifying a phenomenon with an analogy does not explain its origin.  Neither game theory nor market theory provide adequate explanations in Darwinian terms for these interesting behaviors.  Fish are not capable of rational thought and market strategy.  If not designed, this behavior must be reducible to genetic and developmental factors.  If the predators always took advantage of the cleaners, there would be none left, and the phenomenon would disappear.  But the present is not the key to the past.  “Obviously, cleaning symbiosis has survival value for both types of species involved,” elaborated Gary Parker, a former evolutionist, in What Is Creation Science? (Master Books, p. 37).  “But does survival value explain the origin of this special relationship?” he asked.  “Of course not.  It makes sense to talk about survival only after a trait or relationship is already in existence.”
    In additional articles by Gary Parker, who used to teach evolution as fact, the conundrum posed by cleaning symbioses is acknowledged by Darwinians to be a problem for their theory.  Parker tells how Garrett Hardin, an evolutionist, once presented some startling questions in a Scientific American publication entitled, “Nature’s Challenges to Evolutionary Theory.”  He asked, “Is the evolutionary framework wrong?”  Taking note of the implication of design in such biological phenomena, he further suggested, “Was Paley right?”  Then, with a preconflict management strategy of his own, he proposed a fair deal that could provide a win-win situation for both sides.  He said, “Think about it.”
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The origin of homochirality [one-handedness] has intrigued scientists ever since the biological importance of L-amino acids and D-sugars was first recognized.  Although a theoretical basis for the evolution of high optical activity [purity of one hand rotates polarized light, thus optical activity] from a minute initial imbalance of enantiomers [each hand is an enantiomer of the other hand] was suggested more than half a century ago, experimental proof of such a concept eluded scientists until a remarkable report by Soai and co-workers in 1995.  The Soai reaction offered the first, and to date the only, example of an asymmetric autocatalytic reaction employing a catalyst with a very low enantiomeric excess and ultimately yielding the catalyst with a very high enantiomeric excess catalyst as product.  While the Soai reaction serves as a mechanistic model for the evolution of homochirality, the dialkylzinc chemistry involved in the reaction is unlikely to have been of importance in an aqueous prebiotic environment.  Therefore speculation has continued concerning the types of transformations that might have been directly responsible for the development of high optical activity in biological systems.  The area of amino acid catalysis may hold significant clues to the evolution of prebiotic chemistry.

We report herein a proline-mediated reaction exhibiting an accelerating reaction rate and an amplified, temporally increasing enantiomeric excess of the product.  Thus, catalysis with amino acids is implicated in an autoinductive, selectivity-enhancing process, providing the first general chemical strategy for the evolution of biological homochirality from a purely organic origin.

The experimental observation of an unexpectedly high, accelerating reaction rate and an amplified, temporally increasing enantiomeric excess of product in the proline-mediated aminoxylation of aldehydes is consistent with a mechanistic model for a selectivity-enhancing autoinductive process as given in Schemes 1-3.  This represents the first example of a purely organic reaction exhibiting characteristics that are key to a chemical rationalization of the evolution of biological homochirality.

Since evolutionists tend to take an inch and boast a mile, we need to bring out the tape measure to keep speculation in check.  In short, under very controlled, hypothetical conditions, one unique amino acid seemed to undergo chemical amplification of one hand.  Does this explain the 100% purity of biological proteins?  You decide.

1. Only one amino acid was tested, and a unique one at that—proline.
2. They did not state the value of their best enantiomeric excess.
3. It is unrealistic to minimize the damaging effects of cross reactions.  Nature would not exclude products that would destroy any “progress.”
4. It is also unrealistic to depend on open systems.  All real systems, both open and closed, are subject to the laws of thermodynamics.  All real systems, in time, tend toward equilibrium.
5. The reaction required specialized ingredients and conditions.  For a feeling of this, the following paragraph from their paper is included—not that you need to understand it, but just for a look at the special care they had to take with ingredients and lab conditions.  Ask yourself how much of these special conditions tailored to proline could be generalized to the set of all amino acids, including those with polar and hydrophilic side chains.

   The key to the effectiveness of this system lies in the fact that the reaction product 3 is multifunctional; it is both an aldehyde and an amine.  Scheme 2 suggests that proline 4 may attack the carbonyl group of the reaction product 3 to form the new catalyst 5.  This reaction is virtually irreversible on the reaction timescale, since product racemization was not observed.  This species 5 is a special amine bearing an alpha-oxygen atom with lone pairs of electrons.  The alpha effect describes the unexpectedly high activity of such a nitrogen nucleophile, thought to be due in part to stabilization of the transition state by the lone pair on the oxygen alpha to the nucleophilic atom.  Thus 5 may be a highly efficient competitor to proline for nucleophilic attack on propionaldehyde, forming a new enamine, 6.  This enamine may be competent to attack PhNO, forming a transition state such as 7 by interaction with the carboxylic acid proton as a Brønsted acid cocatalyst.  This leads to the formation of product 3 and regeneration of the improved catalyst 5.

6. The authors make no attempt to describe a plausible environment in which such specialized conditions would exist on a prebiotic earth.
7. Any relaxation of the special conditions, and the enantiomeric excess reverses to equilibrium.
8. The hypothesis is glued together with wiggle words like might, could, may, perhaps, and clues.
9. Proteins require 100% pure one-handed amino acids.  Close enough is not good enough; the enantiomeric excess has to be 100%.  The addition of one wrong-handed link in a protein can destroy its function.
10. What about sugars?  Even if a mechanism were found to amplify one amino acid, the sugars in nucleic acids are 100% right-handed.  No plausible naturalistic mechanism for creating nucleotides has been found, let alone purifying them to all one hand.
11. Natural selection cannot be invoked unless a system can replicate itself with high fidelity.
12. Remember, chemicals have no desire to evolve.  They are subject to the laws of mass action, thermodynamics, valency, and all the vagaries of their environment.  In a naturalistic world, with no chemist to care, the chemicals are no “better off” in one state or another.  To merely assume chemicals evolved into a living organism is an argument a posteriori based on naturalistic presuppositions.  Without a plausible demonstration of the entire sequence, it is illogical to assume, “We’re here, therefore it happened” (without a designer).

These are just a few of the problems with this story.  What’s more revealing in the paper than the bombast and hype are the damaging admissions.  They admit this has been a problem for over a hundred years, and that only a theoretical approach was suggested half a century ago.  Then, not until 1995 was there any experimental evidence for slight excess of one hand, but even then, the Soai reaction invoked unrealistic conditions for abiogenesis.  So now these authors claim theirs is the first experimental model to show any hope, subject to all the caveats listed above.  Are you impressed?
    Origin of life by the inch is a cinch; by the yard it’s hard (especially to get a yard full of trees, eventually).  We should go the extra mile for someone out of mercy, but not yield the extra inch for illogical and unsupportable claims.  Unwarranted extrapolation is undeserving of mercy.  Chemical evolution must be prosecuted to the full extent of the natural law.
Next headline on:  Physics and Chemistry • Origin of Life

Sometimes we have to provide enough detail to prove we are not making this stuff up.  If we just summarized this story with an opinion like Evolutionists base their belief in macroevolution on oscillatory changes within one species, someone might question that conclusion.  But here it is, mostly in their own words.  You just read it yourself.  We just highlighted their model organism for evolutionary studies, the one they are proud of and excited about.  They are calling all evolutionists to jump on the bandwagon because of the fantastic evidence it provides that humans came from amoebas.  And the evidence is?  They have demonstrated that some fish lost a few spines and armor plates, and got them right back again when they interbred with their marine relatives.  No speciation occurred.  Most of the evolution was due not to a genetic change, but a change in the expression of a gene.  The genes for loss always mutated the same way in widely-distributed populations.  This is not what neo-Darwinism hoped for.  Random mutation was supposed to provide the raw material for novelty and innovation, not the same mutation over and over in the same gene.  Despite all the hoopla, no novel, innovative feature emerged from all this so-called evolution.
    Surely if there were better evidence for evolution than this, it would be showcased by Science magazine.  The hype in the opening paragraphs attracted our attention, because it seemed that now, finally, we were going to get some solid evidence for real evolutionary change.  But look how trivial the results; all the populations are not only still fish, but three-spine stickleback fish.  They are all still interfertile, indicating no speciation occurred.  How is this story much different from what we already know about blind cave fish?  They are adapted to the darkness, because eyes are not of much use in the dark.  Similarly, the lake sticklebacks might be adapted to their habitat (if their just-so story holds up that armor and spines are less helpful when there are more places to hide).  On the other hand, the difference might only be a non-adaptive effect of lower concentrations of calcium, as in nutrient deficiency diseases in humans.  “Whatever the cause,” pre-existing information was either lost or unexpressed in both cases.  No new structure or function was gained.  How can this possibly be of any good news to someone who wants to explain the whole of biology by evolution?
    The article is enthusiastic about how “powerful” selection must have been, yet sprinkled with wiggle words expressing doubt: probably, maybe, might etc.  As usual, the ignorance is profound and more funding is needed, so that the evolutionary storytelling fest can go on and on and on.  But the actual evidence should make it clear that this evolutionary tale makes no more sense than claiming that a new human species is emerging from a population of scurvy sailors deprived of vitamin C.  It doesn’t take much to get an evolutionist excited.  To a prisoner, even the breeze-blown dust dancing on the floor is entertainment.  Maybe it will evolve into a tornado, and from there, a 747 can’t be far behind.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Comet Surface Wild and Crazy    06/18/2004
“Completely unexpected,” was the reaction of Donald Brownlee, principal investigator of the Stardust mission, to the photos revealed by the spacecraft that flew into the tail of Comet Wild-2 last January (see 01/02/2004 headline), reports a University of Washington press release.  The comet mission is the cover story in the June 18 issue of Science, with four scientific papers and two reviews.  Photos and information have also been released at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Stardust website.
    Scientists expected to find a dirty, fluffy snowball of loose material, but found instead a surface unlike anything else in the solar system.  Deep flat-floored pits, craters with steep walls and pinnacles more than three hundred feet high indicate that the comet material is rigid and cohesive enough, despite the low gravity, to hold together under impacts.  Planetary scientists thought that most comets were like rubble piles loosely held together by gravity, easily torn apart by gravitational perturbations.  Maybe some are, but the sharp edges, angular shapes and steep cliffs on Wild-2 make it look brittle and very unlike an asteroid, and different than the previously-visited comets Halley and Borrelly.  Perhaps there is more variety among comets than expected.
    The comet jets on Wild-2 (pronounced vilt-2), also unexpectedly, emerge at high velocity from numerous places around the roughly circular body, rather than being sublimated off the outer surface volatiles.  Some of them appear to be collimated like the jets from a fire hose, suggesting that they emerge from pits deep in the interior.  Stardust was hit with two wallops as high-velocity dust particles from particularly strong jets pummeled its shields at hundreds of kilometers per hour on the way through the dust tail.  The spacecraft succeeded admirably, despite the hazards, in taking pictures and collecting dust particles in its aerogel collector for return to earth.
    Delighted, but perplexed, describes the mood of scientists over the mission so far.  “New in situ observations of a comet are demonstrating once again how little we understand about these dark and mysterious planetesimals,” remarked Harold Weaver in Science.¹  Brownlee et al.² claim that the surface reveals a “juxtaposition of features that are young and old” on an object thought to be a primordial relic of the formation of the solar system.  Hinting that these findings are putting theories in turmoil, an editorial in the same issue³ hopes that the return of the particles in January 2006 will “clear up any nightmares about the origin of the solar system and the dynamics of comets.”

Everyone should be thrilled at the success of this mission of discovery, but it does point out a lesson about scientists.  Since scientists know so little about things they can observe, and since they often find contradictions to their expectations, why should we trust any confident-sounding pronouncements about things they can’t observe?  When they talk about this comet having formed billions of years ago, how can they possibly know that?
    Brownlee’s paper says, “Pinnacles were not anticipated land forms on primitive bodies, and their origin on Wild 2 is a mystery.”  He thinks the jets, pinnacles and impact craters are young, but the rest of the comet is old, only because current theories require the solar system to be 4.6 billion years old, and comets had to form near the beginning.  But then how does he keep the comet from dissipating away completely long ago?  (See 03/27/2003 headline.)  He tells an ad hoc story to get the theory to fit the observations.  He claims Wild-2 may have repeatedly come inside Jupiter’s orbit and back out again.  But then how did the comet escape complete break-up by a collision in the planetary shooting gallery, or avoid getting ejected out of the solar system entirely, during one of those excursions?
    The nightmares may not go away entirely in January 2006.  If history is any guide, the comet dust samples will answer some questions but raise many others.  For a sweet dream, however, imagine yourself standing on the surface of the three-mile wide comet.  The gravity is so low, you could jump and launch yourself into orbit.  Cool.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

The old Darwinian/Malthusian picture of a dog-eat-dog world, nature red in tooth and claw, each species fighting over limited resources for survival of the fittest, just took a beating with this story.  This complex web of beneficial interactions looks mighty friendly.  You can almost picture the scouts exploring the new territory, the carpenters following behind to build the town and string the telegraph lines and railroad tracks, the sheriff and firefighters setting up headquarters and the settlers moving in to form a thriving, interactive, responsive community — all in the silent world of plants.  Where Darwinists used to see selfish, harmful microorganisms trying to steal from the land plants, they now see pioneers, providers and protectors.
    So how does evolutionary theory deal with these new realizations?  There are only three references to evolution in this paper:

1. Once upon a time: “Four hundred million years ago, ’when the first plants colonized land, mycorrhizal fungi were there,’ helping newcomers survive in a harsh, dry landscape, [John] Klironomos explains.  Since then, the support system has grown, says Katarzyna Turnau, an ecologist at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.  ‘Mycorrhizae [gave] the plants the ability to use different areas and to explore new niches,’ making possible the incredible diversity of modern flora.”
       This statement has no explanatory power; it merely assumes evolution.  It fails to answer how the mycorrhizae survived in sterile dirt without the sugars that land plants provide.  It assumes that resources are sufficient to create diversity, which begs the question of how that might occur.
2. Fictitious force:  One ecologist who studied the relationships between orchids and truffles remarked that the truffles “appear to be evolution drivers.”  Sorry, truffles don’t qualify for a driver’s license.
3. Job prospecting:  Klironomos says in conclusion, “when it comes to ecology and evolutionary biology, the [mycorrhizal] field is cracking wide open.”  I.e., here is an opening for unemployed storytellers (see 12/22/2003 headline).

In short, evolutionary theory adds nothing to these findings.  On the contrary; evolutionists appear surprised by them, because they ran counter to their expectations.  In light of the sophistication of the observed underground pipeline, its many specialized functions, and its many beneficial effects, it appears instead that the mycorrhizal field is cracking wide open for the intelligent design movement.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts

Let’s get this straight.  Barrett just admitted that Marcus “doesn’t show us exactly how a tiny number of genes builds such a complex brain, only that they can” – i.e., Marcus bluffed his way around a problem by making a bald, unsupported claim.  Barrett lets him off the hook for this by saying we have a long way to go before anyone understands brain development.  But in the very next sentence, he praises Marcus for making a “sophisticated exposition” of the case that “plain old natural processes” are sufficient to “account for the brain’s complexity.”  I.e., nature built a brain, how we don’t know, but my friend Marcus said so.
    Can evolutionists solve their problems by appealing to “compressed files” and modular genetic algorithms?  No; they make them worse.  In the history of computers, modular programming was a quantum leap in intelligent design over the older “spaghetti code.”  File compression was a quantum leap in intelligent design over uncompressed code.  Any junior high kid can write a text file on a computer, but if she can write software that can compress or decompress it, she’s a prodigy.
    One module may suffice to build 60 legs on a centipede, but more is going on, because those legs don’t all grow at the same spot.  Something tells these legs where to form, and coordinates their movements.  The point is, it displays even more intelligent design to use modular programming and compression, to say nothing of “ingenious devices” like “gradients and switches that allow its operations to be context-sensitive, feedback loops, and self-generated ‘test patterns’ that allow the system to tune itself.”  The layers of complexity in the brain have only increased with ongoing discoveries.  These complexities cannot be dismissed by hand-waving appeals to natural selection.  Why Science would print a simplistic explanation from an anthropologist who accuses others of engaging in simple-minded debates is another issue.
    The analogies to computers are irrelevant to evolution.  Computers were built by intelligent design, and the intelligence came from minds that beg the question of their origin.  Barrett and Marcus cannot appeal to intelligent design in computers to establish a naturalistic origin of a much more “fantastically complex, yet fantastically well-coordinated” mind.  They leave us only with a glittering generality, a just-so story, in essence claiming that natural selection acting on developmental processes solely directed at evolving survivable reproducing organisms just happened to produce, serendipitously, entities able to create and execute Rachmaninoff piano concertos and build spacecraft and navigate them to Saturn.  For us to believe that, they are going to have to provide better reasons than mere bluffing.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Human Body

Since this is a work in progress, it is premature to draw conclusions; it’s a time to enjoy the postcards from this vicarious adventure.
Next headline on:  Mars

“The AI software examined millions of potential antenna designs before settling on a final one,” said project lead Jason Lohn, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, located in California’s Silicon Valley.  “Through a process patterned after Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest,’ the strongest designs survive and the less capable do not.”
    The software started with random antenna designs and through the evolutionary process, refined them.  The computer system took about 10 hours to complete the initial antenna design process.  “We told the computer program what performance the antenna should have, and the computer simulated evolution, keeping the best antenna designs that approached what we asked for.  Eventually, it zeroed in on something that met the desired specifications for the mission,” Lohn said.

“The software also may invent designs that no human designer would ever think of,” Lohn asserted.  In addition, the software also can plan devices that are smaller, lighter, consume less power, are stronger and more robust among many other things – characteristics that spaceflight requires, according to Lohn.

Here is a teachable moment.  This story is full of logical flaws; can your kid find them?  Giving Charlie credit for this accomplishment is like giving bin Laden credit for winning the war on terrorism.  Charlie is the problem, not the solution; the success of this project was due not to evolution, but to intelligent design.
    Mr. Lohn and the author of this press release don’t even have a high school C student understanding of evolutionary theory.  Natural selection has no purpose, goal or direction.  There are no requirements.  This antenna project had requirements: “We told the computer program what performance the antenna should have,” the designer said.  The result “met the desired specifications for the mission.”  And this project employed algorithms, which are also hallmarks of intelligent guidance.  So forget the references to an evolutionary process; this was an exercise in artificial selection, not natural selection.  Artificial selection is a manifestation of intelligent design.  Phillip Johnson explained the contrast:

Plant and animal breeders employ intelligence and specialized knowledge to select breeding stock and to protect their charges from natural dangers.  The point of Darwin’s theory, however, was to establish that purposeless natural processes can substitute for intelligent design.  That he made that point by citing the accomplishments of intelligent designers proves only that the receptive audience for his theory was highly uncritical.
    Artificial selection is not basically the same sort of thing as natural selection, but rather is something fundamentally different.  Human breeders produce variations among sheep or pigeons for purposes absent in nature, including sheer delight in seeing how much variation can be achieved.  If the breeders were interested only in having animals capable of surviving in the wild, the extremes of variation would not exist.  When domestic animals return to the wild state, the most highly specialized breeds quickly perish and the survivors revert to the original wild type.  Natural selection is a conservative force that prevents the appearance of the extremes of variation that human breeders like to encourage.
(Darwin on Trial, pp. 17-18).

Johnson’s legal and logical expertise is brought to bear skillfully in his chapter on Natural Selection.  He examines the charge that natural selection is a tautology, a vacuous phrase that conveys no information.  In the case of the antenna, Jason Lohn defined “fitness” with words like strong and robust (see “Fitness for Dummies,” 10/29/2002 headline), but those are human-centric evaluations; does the antenna care whether it is strong or robust?  Real biologists understand that fitness has nothing to do with muscles or speed or anything else that we humans value.  It is only a mechanical measure of success in passing on genes.  Whenever natural selection is described in terms of success at reproduction, however, it reduces to a tautology, which by definition has no explanatory value: an organism is successful because it succeeds; a fit individual is fitter than the unfit; those who leave the most offspring leave the most offspring.  Phillip Johnson deals with the evolutionists’ comebacks to this charge, and demonstrates that, “in practice natural selection continues to be employed in its tautological formulation.”  He provides examples from leading evolutionists.
    So here were two glaring logical flaws in this story: fitness was defined in terms of value to human engineers, and intelligently-supervised results were ascribed to undirected processes.  It takes intelligence to design software that can sift through an enormous number of possibilities and detect the ones that best match the specifications.  Specification is a hallmark of intelligent design.  This story was not “patterned after Darwin’s survival of the fittest” the fact that it was patterned at all shows that it was designed.
    Not only is it illogical, it is plagiaristic to attribute what these engineers accomplished to Darwinian evolution.  The Intelligent Design Movement should get the credit.  If this were the only case, evolutionists might take offense at holding up this article as a bad example, but as we have shown in these pages, prominent evolutionists publishing in reputable journals frequently make this same logical error (see 12/30/2002, 12/13/2001, 12/19/2002, and 08/26/2003 headlines, for instance).  If evolutionists don’t understand their own theory, then the intelligent design scientists are going to have to continue to teach them all about it.
    Now ABC News got into the act.  They claim British scientists are using evolutionary theory to build fitter racing cars.  *Sigh*
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Dumb Ideas