God has created man in his own intellectual image, and graciously permitted him to study His modes of operation, and rewards his industry in this line by giving him powers and instruments which affect in the highest degree his material welfare.
—Joseph Henry, first President of the Smithsonian; Remarks at the Laying of the Cornerstone of the American Museum of Natural History (New York), June 2, 1874, in Arthur P. Molella, et al., eds., A Scientist in American Life: Essays and Lectures of Joseph Henry (Washington, D.C., 1980), p. 115, found on the Smithsonian website.

Logic, logic gates, regulation: this is the language of intelligent design.  Each of the contacts formed during the “radical” conformational changes of this complicated enzyme is finely tuned to its substrates, and finely tuned to the concentration of ingredients in the cell.  And these finely tuned contacts are determined by the specificity of the sequence of amino acids in this protein, each coded in another language—the language of DNA.  At every step, this system only makes sense in the context of intelligent design.
    There is no suggestion in this paper how vinculin’s specificity in adhesive junctions might have evolved.  But in the latest ICR Impact article #374 (August 2004), organic chemist Dr. Charles McCombs provides very good reasons why unguided chemistry will never produce such functional complexity and specificity.  Unguided chemicals will always follow the laws of (1) chemical stability; i.e., whether the components will react at all, (2) chemical reactivity, or how fast reactants will react, and (3) chemical selectivity, or where the components react.  Working through these principles, he shows that amino acids will not join together without help, and even if they did, far more random, useless, nonfunctional polymers with damaging cross-reactions would result.  The resulting chain would always form blindly according to the relative binding energies of the amino acids.
    It takes an organic chemist careful guidance at each step to produce a functional enzyme.  “Evolutionists say that nature is blind, has no goal, and no purpose, and yet precise selection at each step is necessary,” McCombs says.  Chemicals cannot think, plan or organize themselves, he reminds us, yet Darwinians invoke a false logic that unguided processes yielded logical living systems, like this example with vinculin.  The chemist remarks, “Evolutionists just hope you don’t know chemistry!”
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design.

Speciation convincingly presents evidence for several once-unpopular theories that have returned to dominate current thinking.  Most important among these is the primacy of natural and sexual selection over drift in driving speciation.  Signatures of positive selection on genes involved in postzygotic isolation and reproductive proteins as well as experimental evidence from both the lab and field connect adaptation and sexual selection to reproductive isolation.  Another major finding is the congruence of the Dobzhansky-Muller model for the evolution of postzygotic isolation with the genetics of hybrid incompatibilities in many natural systems. In contrast, classical models of chromosomal speciation remain unpopular.  Instead, chromosomal rearrangements are now cast as facilitators, rather than causal agents, of reproductive isolation because reduced recombination within these regions restricts gene flow, thereby enabling the accumulation of selected differences and hybrid incompatibilities.

So is this the book to supersede Charlie’s, and to answer the question of how bacteria turn into humans over time?  Not likely.  Every mechanism mentioned, controversial or not, appears aimed at explaining slight variations, sometimes misleadingly called “microevolution.”  Horizontal variation is not controversial even among staunch creationists.  If evolutionists expect people to believe we evolved from slime, they need to do better than extrapolate low-level trends, and they need to show that is indeed what happened by providing the intermediates and fossils.  Talk about the origin of species if you please, but what about the origin of phyla?  (See 07/28/2004 headline).
    Phillip Johnson, a Berkeley law professor and expert in baloney detecting, put Darwin on Trial in 1991.  His book of that title put the real issue on the table:

Whether selection has ever accomplished speciation (i.e., the production of a new species) is not the point.  A biological species is simply a group capable of interbreeding.  Success at dividing a fruitfly population into two or more separate populations that cannot interbreed would not constitute evidence that a similar process could in time produce a fruitfly from a bacterium.  If breeders one day did succeed in producing a group of dogs that can reproduce with each other but not with other dogs, they would still have made only the tiniest step towards proving Darwinism’s important claims. (pp. 19-20)

As Johnson stresses in the book, it is not sufficient to base the major claims of evolution on extrapolating small changes or drawing analogies to artificial breeding.  Nor is it adequate to infer that macroevolution must have occurred because one’s philosophical preference requires it.  If the origin of species (speciation) is to be logically connected to the emergence of all living things, with all their complex organs and functions, then evolutionists must make the case that their mechanism is creative enough to add massive amounts of functional information to genes, and that the fossil record actually shows that this occurred.  Neo-Darwinism (mutation plus natural selection) fails miserably on both requirements.
    The hype in this book review is no more to be trusted than the word of the party faithful evaluating the nominee’s speech at a political convention.  Instead, the book needs an investigative reporter who understands the real controversies and can ask the hard questions.  Noticeably absent in all this backslapping was any mention of the severe weaknesses in conventional Darwinian theory that drove Stephen Jay Gould and others to propose punctuated equilibria, or the recently-deceased Francis Crick to propose directed panspermia, another group to propose niche construction (see 06/09/2004 headline), and others as recently as last week to propose other non-Darwinian mechanisms (see 07/20/2004 headline and others like 09/29/2003).  Nor was there an admission that the very fruitflies that Coyne and Orr make their life work fail to exhibit neo-Darwinian evolution (see 05/18/2004 headline).  Nor was their any mention of Coyne’s embarrassing flip flop on the peppered moth story that he long assumed was one of the best examples of speciation ever documented (see 06/25/2004), or the weakness of other examples put up in its place (see 04/18/2003 and 04/01/2004 headlines).  The only way some Darwinists can stay sane with all this controversy is to go postmodern (see 08/19/2003 headline).
    Some evolutionists have admitted evidence is lacking that numerous, successive, slight modifications can add up to big ones (see 01/15/2004, 10/14/2003 and 08/20/2003 headlines).  Coyne and Orr may dazzle some readers with case after case of reproductive isolation and microevolution, with the assumption that this bolsters the case for slime evolving into ostriches, maple trees, squid, platypus and biologists over time.  This is as unjustified as observing a cell bobbing around with Brownian motion and deciding the mechanism is capable of propelling it through the Olympic marathon.  But that’s putting it too mildly; to make the comparison more realistic (considering all the champions in the living world), better add the decathlon, weight lifting, gymnastics, archery, rowing, steeplechase, high dive, synchronized swimming, soccer, basketball, cycling....
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

These results illustrate a direct correlation between cell firing rates and the equations of motion, as applied to movement in a gravitational environment and the physics of the external world.  A neural basis for an internal model representation of the relationship between the physical environment and either the sensory detectors or the motor apparatus has only recently begun to be explored.  Here we have shown evidence that, in support of theoretical predictions, subcortical neural populations might provide a distributed solution to the inertial motion detection problem.

As expected, this paper makes no attempt to explain how such a system could have evolved.  The more detail provided in a research paper about the workings of a biological system, the less apt are the authors to attribute it to time and chance.
    One of the defining marks of life is awareness of the surroundings and ability to respond to the environment.  Think about all the components required to make this work: you need sensors, they need to be able to communicate to the central processor, and the central processor has to be able to interpret all the multiple inputs that provide sometimes contradictory information.  So not only are the cells themselves irreducibly complex, the organs and processors are also irreducibly complex, or else no equations of motion can be solved.  In fact, look at each irreducibly complex component of this system, and you will find additional irreducibly complex parts within them, every one vital to the success of the whole project.  Who taught your neurons the equations of physical motion and the techniques of vector calculus?  Playing a game of tennis requires rapidly solving a continuous stream of computational problems (see 01/05/2001 headline).  Don’t get cocky about this skill; owls excel at math, too (see 04/13/2001 headline), and even your dog knows calculus (see 05/20/2003 headline).
Next headline on:  Human Body • Physics • Amazing Facts

The fact that Taylor raises these questions means that the typical rote answers given simplistically in textbooks are wrong.  He sounds like astronomers are at square one explaining the planets, despite 208 years since Laplace famously remarked, when asked where God fit into his model, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”  Well, put up or shut up.  We’re still waiting.  We know a lot of things now that Laplace did not, and the trend of recent discoveries has been contrary to the expectations of nebular and planetesimal theorists, so much so that Hal Levison called his own theory a fairy tale, and others crazy (see 05/30/2002 headline).  His subsequent suggestion was the only wise thing he said: “We have to start thinking of alternatives.  Probably there’s a method for their formation that no one has even thought of yet.”  Well, some have, but their views are categorically disallowed by the reigning naturalistic paradigm.
    We hate to break it to Taylor, but the stellar astronomers don’t have everything so neatly tied up as he supposes, either (see 07/08/2004 headline).  In fact, does any naturalist have anything neatly tied up? (See next two headlines.)
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Solar System

Defining a body plan isn’t easy, however.  Valentine’s definition, for example, is dangerously circular: “an assemblage of morphological features shared among members of a phylum-level group”.  What does that mean, except that when we define a phylum we also define its body plan, or vice versa?  Valentine proposes to define the origin of a phylum by the acquisition of a key apomorphy – a unique derived trait.  This may be more subjective and less convenient than letting the total (stem and crown) group or the crown group define the phylum, but it gives due priority to biological significance over methodological convenience.  After all, we want to know how different kinds of organism evolve by natural selection, and how they interact with each other and with the environment.  They do that with their phenotypes, not their pedigrees.

The pattern of diminishing evolutionary novelty subsequent to this event, he says, may have been due less to developmental constraints than to a saturation effect (candidates for new adaptive radiations were already available among existing body plans).  He also believes that the Cambrian explosion produced a lot more homoplasies (similar characters with independent origins) than most phylogenetic analyses suggest – in my view an extremely important point that calls for much more careful character evaluation than is commonly done.  He is clearly not impressed, then, by some recent attempts to use fossils to bridge gaps between phyla.

Valentine seems most happy with intrinsic biological mechanisms for the rapid appearance of phyla.  Large parts of the book deal with developmental prerequisites (such as cell-type numbers and gene regulation) for the event.  Ecological interactions, such as predation, are given more cursory treatment.  As for the physical environment, he merely concludes, somewhat apologetically, that although physical environmental factors were “supremely important”, he does not see any evidence that extraordinary environmental events were causally connected with the Cambrian explosion.  Given that extraordinary environmental events did indeed occur shortly before the explosion, I would give the jury just a little more time to ponder the question.  But first I would make sure they had read this magnificent book.

The question of when and how higher taxonomic groups like phyla evolved differs markedly from the one Darwin addressed 145 years ago in The Origin of Species.  It is not simply different in scale but also in quality.  Although it is somewhat easier to see how changes in single genes can lead to differences among species that render some more capable of surviving in particular environments, it is more difficult to account for the many changes that lead to entirely different bodyplans as a simple accumulation of single-gene effects.  For example, marine stickleback fishes possess bony plates and spines that presumably prevent predation, while their freshwater relatives show a loss of this armor through changes that can be attributed to a single gene [see 06/18/2004 headline].  However, entire organ systems or embryonic germ layers, features that distinguish higher taxa, can be explained in terms of the gene regulatory networks whose architecture is hardwired into the genome.

Satisfied?  Apparently in 600 pages, Valentine did not answer the most basic and fundamental question, how did all this biological complexity emerge in a short time?  Pounding the earth with meteors and tidal waves and volcanoes won’t do it.  Invoking a new predator won’t create an elaborate escape mechanism in the prey; it might just mean the predator will eat everything and then starve.  Cameron’s folklore is simplistic: a regulatory gene mutates and presto!  A new body part!  Can duplicating some protuberance generate an eye?  Come on.
    Let’s parse Cameron’s carefully-worded closing lines.  He said, “In view of the volatility of the ideas and the controversy that still exist in this particular area of evolutionary biology, one might argue that it is too early to explain the causes of the origin of phyla.”  Cameron, like Valentine is well aware of the pounding the Darwin Party is getting from the Intelligent Design Movement with the Cambrian Explosion hammer (see The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang by Meyer, Ross, Nelson and Chien (12/01/2003) available online at the Discovery Institute).  The Cambrian Explosion is only controversial because the Darwinians have no answer, and the creationists and ID proponents know it.  So he’s worried that Valentine’s new book is going to provide even more ammo to the enemy.  His coded message to the Darwin Party can be translated, “What do you think you are doing, Jim, letting the creationists know we’re up a creek?  Better to say nothing than to advertise our weaknesses!”
    Does anyone see in either of these reviews any real, logical explanation for the explosive appearance of trilobites, worms, jellyfish, corals, and vertebrates, with any evidence to back it up?  Each of these organisms is composed of irreducibly complex cells, and organs made up of irreducibly complex parts.  When they first appear in the fossil record, they are already fully formed and operating.  If the world’s expert can’t explain this after 30 years of thinking about it, then maybe there isn’t an explanation – from a Darwinian viewpoint.  This requires some fresh blood from thinkers not wedded to a dying, outmoded, falsified model that is on the verge of extinction.  Any takers?
Next headline on:  Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The views we are getting of a cell since the invention of the microscope can be likened to those from a UFO descending from earth orbit to ground level.  From orbit, a city like Boston seems to have a lot of structure and organization.  As we descend into this alien world, more and more organization becomes apparent, till from airline height, we see complex transportation arteries and machinery apparently all coordinated and purposeful.  From helicopter height, individual workers begin to come into focus.  We are now approaching ground level, and able to watch factory workers and figure out what it is they are doing.  Just imagine what Leeuwenhoek would think, considering he only got the orbital view.
    It’s not getting any easier for the Darwin Party.  If the mental picture of 10,000 miles of spaghetti in a basketball didn’t grab you, considering it is efficiently packaged with each inch of pasta accessible and reproducible, then maybe you just hate Italian food or sports and need a more suitable analogy.  Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my Creator’s hand?  Yes, sadly, there is; read next headline.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Next headline on: Genes and DNA • Amazing Facts

Ernst Mayr, the renowned evolutionary biologist and champion of Darwin, celebrated his 100th birthday earlier this month by leading a scathing attack on creationism.  The evolutionary biologist, acclaimed as one of the most prolific researchers, has no intention of retiring and is shortly to publish new research that dismantles the fashionable creationist doctrine of ‘intelligent design’.

I hit upon a German version of Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ at the tender age of twelve.  I cannot possibly have understood much of it, but was immediately fascinated, first by a photo of old Darwin, whose piercing eyes haunted me, and then by the idea of having apes among my forebears: it explained why I felt so happy in the tree-tops.  Besides, I liked the fact that not a few of my elder family members – catholics all – were distressed to see the book in my hands.  Much later, I noticed that a thoughtful editor had removed the parts on sexual selection.  What would my relatives have said to that!

I forgot all about biology and became a professor of mathematics before I came across ‘The Selfish Gene’.  That was a turning point for me.  [Richard] Dawkins’ very first sentence thrilled me: “This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction.”  There were not just facts in biology; there was a place for the ‘what if’ a basic question for any mathematician.

One way for Karl Sigmund to feel foolish real fast is to read Creation-Evolution Headlines regularly and other publications outside the Darwin Party propaganda machine (here’s a list for starters).  An easier way is to flip a few pages in the same issue of Current Biology to the articles on histones and condensins (see headline above).  That’s if Sigmund is even interested in truth over “science fiction”.  He said it himself: he was drawn to evolution not by a studied analysis of the facts, but by (1) the haunting eyes of Charlie, the materialist’s buddha, (2) a fallacious, childish non-sequitur that apes in the family tree made him feel at home climbing trees, and (3) childish rebellion.  Parents, beware.  If your kid can’t think straight or exercise self-control by the age of 12, it may be too late.  The kid will be a sucker for the Darwin Party storytelling circus.
    Ernst Mayr is on his last crusade before becoming a creationist.  (For those at the Darwin National Convention, that means meeting your Maker.)  Solomon said, in a paradoxical quatrain, to “answer not a fool according to his folly,” but rather, to “answer a fool according to his folly” (Proverbs 26:4-5*).  This is not a contradiction.  Answer not a fool according to his folly, “lest you be like him,”; i.e., don’t imitate his style of argument and get into a vituperative shouting match with irrelevant and useless trivia.  Rather, answer a fool according to his folly “lest he be wise in his own eyes”; i.e., don’t let him get away with baloney, or let others who hear him be swayed by it.  For instance, in biology class, your fellow students should not hear the evolutionary mythmaking of the teacher go uncontested.  Suggested response: keep holding up the facts and asking logical questions.  Teach Mayr and Sigmund about histones and condensins and diatoms and plant seeds and motorized sunscreens and migrating sparrows and cellular roller coasters and spider superpowers and underground pioneers and whale aeronautics and antennas built with motorized trucks and 300 million neurons required to see a picture and a million other things.  Ask them, “How could such things evolve without plan or purpose?  No, I mean really—not just a story, but really now.  And if it happened, where is the evidence?” (see 07/22/2004 headline)  Keep up the pressure, gently and persistently.  These things take time.  After sufficient exposure to the observations, if they continue to sputter nonsense, there is nothing more you can do except to try to prevent folly from becoming established as the official, uncontested curriculum for young, impressionable minds not yet able to discern their right hand from their left. 
Next headline on:  Education • Intelligent Design • Darwinism

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*Solomon did not define fool as an unintelligent person, but as a rebel: someone lacking respect, reverence, good sense, and self-control.

Interpreting this wealth of data from these exotic places will take years, but the new observations are certain to help answer old questions while stimulating new ones.  Meanwhile, we need to keep the Darwin Party in line.  Help your local Darwinist break his or her bad habit of equating water with life, a non-sequitur if there ever was one (e.g., from New Scientist, “The actual time span has not been estimated, but it reveals enough time to strengthen the possibilities that life could have evolved on Mars.”)  A worse habit is thinking the discovery of life in space means the death of God.  Apparently, they do not understand just how big God is; some creationists think life might be found on Mars or beyond.  And who knows?  Maybe the first incoming SETI message will be John 3:16 in Vulcan.  For now, don’t let the Darwinese hype bother you.  Raw data belongs to everyone.  Just because a fat spectator is belching hot air and making himself a nuisance doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the game.
Next headline on:  Mars • Solar System

Seife’s paragraph subtitles are twists on explicit religious phrases: Reasons to believe, You’ll never walk alone, Worlds without end.  (Question: why do you think he used the name of Hugh Ross’s organization here?)  Seife gives air to critics of the Many Worlds hypothesis, but he does not attack the idea as stupid.  Instead, he gives pretty good press to its advocates.  Undoubtedly if Richard Dawkins were reading this issue sitting on his prehensile tail, he would nod approvingly, while calling creationism ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
    If even in your wildest dreams you granted a nanometer of credibility to such claims, you would still have to ask what caused a universe of universes to have the properties such that the laws of quantum mechanics would give rise to a world like ours.  Anything that begins to exist must have a cause.  The universe began to exist, therefore the universe had a cause.  Q.E.D.
    Fantasyland was fun, but time to escape to reality and enjoy Adventureland.  There’s no boredom in the real world, and the equations have a way of working out in practical ways.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Dumb Ideas

The abilities to design and construct inorganic materials with specified atomic structure, size, shape, orientation, and number of defects and to integrate these architectures into functioning devices form the foundation for advances in technologies that rely on the devices’ electrical, optical, magnetic, and chemical outputs.  However, assembly methods that allow simultaneous control of these features at lengths from the nanometer scale to the macroscale continue to elude scientists and engineers....
    What if there were constructors that could sequester inorganic ions from water, accumulate and concentrate them to produce architectures controlled over length scales from nanometers to tens of centimeters, and do all of this in a matter of hours at ambient temperatures?  Such constructors are not inventions of science fiction novels but rather single-cell plants called diatoms.... Biomineralization processes can form structures that are the envy of all of us who strive to understand molecular mechanisms of the assembly of inorganic materials.

Nacre, the mother-of-pearl layer found on the inner surface of shells, has a fracture toughness approximately 3000 times that of the synthetic analogue aragonite (calcium carbonate).  Nacre is composed of thin (circa 30 nm) layers of a protein-polysaccharide intercalated between 0.5 micrometer-thick layers of aragonite tablets.  The weak interface between the organic and inorganic layers is thought to dissipate the energy of crack propagation and thus strengthen the composite structure. This sophisticated architecture provides clues as to how man-made structures could be improved.

These two articles illustrate the disparity between hard science and soft, mushy, slippery Darwinian scientism.  It goes like this: (1) The organism excels at an engineering feat.  (2) It must have evolved, but we don’t know how.  To the extent the organism elicits admiration, the Darwinian explanation elicits disgust. 
  The PNAS article is a useless hodgepodge of storytelling, attempting to force uncooperative facts into a predetermined plot.  In one place, they “calibrate” their Darwinian tree based on Darwinian assumptions.  When that produces anomalous results in another part of the tree, they simply adjust the rate of evolution on that branch.  When another branch has trouble, they rearrange the branches and invoke the magic trick of “convergent evolution” to explain similarities that did not appear to have a common ancestor.  All through, there are wiggle words like must have, might have, quite possible, suggests, possible, co-opted, although there is no direct fossil evidence to date... may not have, probably, assumed to etc.  The data are only secondary props in this tweakfest to keep Charlie as the national idol.  Do they ever explain how multiple genes produced multiple proteins by accident that work biomineralization wonders?  No; it is all an exercise in reassuring the reader that the Darwin Party is not really lost.  For baloney detectors who are not intimidated by the bluffing of technical jargon or prestigious journals, it makes no sense.  Try this howler for fun:

Together these facts make it likely that the developmental mechanism of mammalian tissue mineralization was elaborated during bony fish evolution in actinopterygians or sarcopterygians.  Although the genetic tools of tissue mineralization are totally unknown for chondrichthyans, it is quite possible that they have developed their own tools through independent gene duplications and functional selection histories.

What a total whitewash; do you see what they did?  They just swept a huge problem under the rug.  When the data were missing or contrary, they ascribed it to evolution anyway.  They personified fish, turning them into materials engineers and tool inventors.  And that ending phrase, “independent ... functional selection histories,” should be framed as a classic euphemism for Darwinian dogma. 
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Marine Biology • Mammals • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

PI is a widespread phenomenon that is emerging as a potential unifying concept in fields that involve decision-making processes in which individuals can extract information from others to assess resource quality.  The use of PI can enrich evolutionary models and can have marked effects on evolutionary predictions.  Future research should explore the extent to which evolutionary scenarios are affected by the use of PI.

Even though it is amusing to watch the Darwin Party argue over which mechanism they like best, it is all beside the point.  As Phillip Johnson pointed out over a decade ago in Darwin on Trial, none of these mechanisms establish the very thing that Darwin set out to explain in the first place: that unguided natural processes unaided by any intelligent design had creative power to generate eyes, ears, wings, intelligence or any other complex feature; nor did Darwin or his followers find any historical evidence that a long chain of intermediates actually ever existed.
    Physical similarity is not enough as evidence for evolution.  Even creationists like Linnaeus were intimately acquainted with similarities between organisms.  The ability to classify organisms according to similarities is insufficient to establish the claim that humans had bacteria ancestors; it might establish just as well that all organisms had a common Designer.  The two proposals above fail again on both counts.  Neither demonstrates any creative power, and neither points to any plausible chain of intermediates.  To expect transposons are somehow creative and can generate complexity is to endow them with angelic powers.  To expect that public information in a herd of theropods could help them sprout wings seems ridiculous.  Where is the evidence any creative innovation was produced by these or any other proposed mechanisms?  It is not only missing; the evidence we do have points in the opposite direction: (1) the Cambrian explosion shows a sudden appearance of complexity without precursors, and (2) the law of entropy demands that information (public or not) degenerates through transmission rather than improves.
    Evolutionary theory is like a smorgasbord of rotten food.  The cooks keep thinking if they add one more dish, customers will find something they like.  Instead, it has turned into a food fight.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This calls for a monkey riddle.
Q: If humans evolved from apes, why do we still have apes?
A: Some of them had a choice.
    Paleoanthropologists make a big deal out of finding alleged ancestors that walked upright.  Big deal; chimps can walk upright sometimes.  Some people can walk on all fours.  It only takes a chiropractic trick to make an ape-man walk upright; didn’t they see Ringo Starr, John Matuczak and Shelley Long in “Cave Man”?  Maybe Natasha will stimulate a new theory that walking upright is a result of brain damage.  Find a monkey that can type Shakespeare and we’ll pay attention (see 05/12/2003 headline).
Next headline on:  Early Man • Mammals • Dumb Ideas

Ever have a thought in your mind but couldn’t express it in words?  Maybe that’s the frustration a baby feels.  She is thinking, “Action-oriented orchestration of innovative inputs generated by the escalation of meaningful indigenous decision-making dialogue can maximize the vital thrust toward a non-alienated viable urban infrastructure contingent upon third-generation time-phase conceptualization,” but all that comes out is “goo goo gah.”  Mothers seem to understand all this on their internal Babynet wavelength, but dads should learn to pay better attention.
Next headline on:  Human Body

The authors don’t mention previous estimates for the age of these gorges.  MSNBC News claims it is twice the previous estimate, but with more water the erosion could have been even more rapid.  Science News, on the other hand, says “These erosion rates are tens to hundreds of times faster than scientists had suspected.”
    One can imagine Charlie and Charlie (Lyell and Darwin, respectively) standing on the banks and thinking, “My, my, my; that must have taken millions of years.”  Not necessarily.  Even if the current estimate (37,000 years) is still off by an order of magnitude, compare that with the problem the uniformitarians face: things are happening too fast.  How can animals evolve when the ground is disappearing under their feet?  At least geologists are making regress on their inflated dating methods.  The climate is changing; floods of evidence are rapidly eroding Charlie L.’s fluffy bedrock on which Charlie D. built his house of cards.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

Evolutionary presuppositions have once again stood in the way of scientific progress.  A design model would have looked at the phenomenon as there for a reason, and sought to determine what it was.  These scientists had to ignore Darwinism to get at the truth.  And we’re supposed to believe that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution?  The new version should be, “nothing in Darwinism makes sense in the light of biology.”
Next headline on:  Plants • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

There is now direct fossil evidence that all of the major deuterostome groups were established by about 520 million years ago.  Fossil vertebrates (yunnanozoans), tunicates (Shankouclava) and both asymmetric and radiate echinoderms (homalozoans, helicoplacoids) have all now been discovered in early Cambrian deposits.  Phlogites, a tentacle-bearing early Cambrian fossil of uncertain affinity, might even be a hemichordate or part of the common ancestral lineage of echinoderms and hemichordates.  So, if deuterostome divergence occurred around 575 million years ago, as recent molecular-clock studies suggest, there is a 50-million-year gap in the fossil record between the origin of deuterostomes and their appearance in the fossil record.  In the jigsaw of deuterostome evolution, vetulocystids represent another piece to be fitted into a puzzle where many of the pieces are still missing.

The spinmeisters of the Darwin Party, like this book reviewer, sound for all the world like a Stalinist explaining the benefits of the new Five-Year Plan.  Smith seems to be saying “not so fast” as he owns up to the mystery of the Cambrian explosion: all the major groups of animals, including vertebrates, appear suddenly in the early Cambrian without ancestors.  Think of all the changes that must take place to turn an organism with bilateral symmetry into one with pentaradiate symmetry like a starfish.  The first uncontested fossil echinoderm is already a full-fledged echinoderm.  Why is this so puzzling?  It’s only a puzzle if you’re trying to draw a mythical tree between the dots that is only a figment of philosophical imagination.
For an excellent overview of the Cambrian explosion and the challenge it poses to Darwinian evolution, see The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang by Meyer, Ross, Nelson and Chien (12/01/2003) available online at the Discovery Institute.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Biology

No inbreeding of thought there, huh?  How about using the assumptions of the ID community?  Speculation is fun but impractical.  He knows few will check back in 2024 to see if he was right, so it serves to get notoriety in the news and maybe additional public support (or funding).
    Seth Shostak appears briefly in the new film about to be released, The Privileged Planet.  He should watch it.
Next headline on:  Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

• Ecology:  Scientists have long prized diatoms... because they remove large amounts of a greenhouse gas—carbon dioxide—from the atmosphere.
• Glass:  The cell wall of this unicellular organism is made entirely of glass.  More precisely, diatom shells consist of silica, or silicon dioxide, the primary constituent of glass.
• Art:  Many shells are ornately patterned with features just tens of nanometers in size.
• Efficiency:  Joanna Aizenberg of Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., says, “We can think of diatoms as living silicon chips.”  Semiconductor-chip manufacturers carve micro- and nanoscale features out of blocks of electronic and optical materials—a costly and time-consuming endeavor.  Diatoms build structures out of silicon much more efficiently.
• Throughput:  Once researchers figure out how to engineer useful devices out of diatom shells, they could enlist the reproductive capabilities of diatoms to generate trillions of silica structures in a matter of weeks.  Some species of diatoms can replicate up to eight times a day.  Sandhage says, “For a fairly small number of reproductions, you could get incredibly large numbers of the exact-same three-dimensional structure.”
• Flexibility:  Diatoms can make just about any structure you can imagine.
• Technique:  It begins when the algal cell divides, forcing it to split its shell into two halves.  The new cells, each now bearing only half a shell, begin to reconstruct their missing halves by taking up silicic acid—a simple compound of silicon, oxygen, and hydrogen—from the surrounding water.  Each new organism deposits the silicic acid in a compartment called the silica-deposition vesicle.  There, the chemical is converted into silica particles, each measuring about 50 nm in diameter.  These then aggregate to form larger blocks of material.  Researchers speculate that a set of special proteins guides the formation of the silica particles and their subsequent assembly into larger structures.  Hildebrand says that other cellular proteins outside of the vesicle stretch and mold the compartment to shape the silica inside.  Once the half shell is complete, the vesicle merges into the cell’s membrane, exposing the newly created structure.
• Genome:  Scientists are searching for the protein-coding genes among the diatom’s approximately 11,000 genes....
• Programming:  Diatoms of the same species consistently form shells with exactly the same pattern, suggesting that the designs are genetically programmed.
• Catalysis:  Nils Kröger, a diatom biologist at the University of Regensberg in Germany, was the first to identify the silica-forming proteins in diatoms.  The molecules of this class, which he calls silaffins, are unusual among proteins in that many of them have long side chains of organic molecules known as polyamines.  The proteins are also decked out with an assortment of other molecules, including sugars and phosphates.
      When Kröger and his colleagues added silaffins to a test tube containing silicic acid, tiny silica spheres formed in a matter of minutes.  In contrast, a solution of silicic acid without any proteins “can take hours or even days to form hard silica,” says Kröger.... “we don’t completely understand how it works.”
• Individuality:  Each protein does something different: One produces spheres, one makes porous shapes, and the third forms platelike structures.
      Moving beyond these simple shapes will require a greater understanding of the diatom’s molecular machinery.  What’s more, dozens or even hundreds of proteins may govern the shell-formation process.  Mapping the myriad interactions among all the components could be a daunting task.
• Green and Clean:  Fabrication of silicon chips and other electronic devices currently requires harsh chemicals and generates much waste.  Diatoms and sponges [see 08/20/2003 headline] know how to produce materials under ambient conditions without these harsh chemicals,” says Aizenberg.  “And yet the end result is the same.”

“It will be impossible to reproduce this process in a test tube because it’s such a complicated cellular process,” says [Mark] Hildebrand [of Scripps Institute].
    [Joanna] Aizenberg [of Bell Labs] adds, “The question is, ‘Will we be able to bridge the gap between what goes on in nature and what we can do in the lab?’”

Gag!  Choke!  This is like watching a spectacular stage show then being expected to bow to a fat Charlie image at the end.  We were all set to applaud and praise this well-written glimpse into another wonder of nature, a wonder that shouts intelligent design, and then Goho has the gall to say evolution over millions of years produced “glass-sculpture artists” with 11,000 genes, hundreds of which work together in coordinated fashion to build unique, exquisite, precision structures out of glass without pollution or waste of energy.  Unbelievable.  Did any of the scientists present any evidence that evolution could do such a thing?*  No; in line with the stinking habit of the Darwin Party, they merely assumed evolution did it, because they have committed their lives, their fortunes, and their sacrilegious honor to the philosophical belief that there is no God, no Creator, no intelligent Designer.  Their faith forces them to believe the absurd, in spite of the evidence.  This one example should be enough to make any clear-thinking scientist toss Charlie’s figurehead overboard, but thumb through a few more “Amazing” Chain Links below and ask yourself how many other wonders of nature we are asked to believe happened by mindless, chance processes.  Phooey; a wonderful science story was ruined by the last sentence.  So instead of praising this article unequivocally to the tune of This Is My Father’s World, it saddens us to have to sound the Bronx cheer as we hand out another Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week award.
    Enough of that.  Just marvel for a minute at the manufacturing skill of these tiny robotic factories.  God could have made the earth so boring.  He could have provided just enough design to permit survival.  There could be brown sky, brown scum, brown water, and we could all subsist on mud.  He could have fashioned little amorphous sponges to soak up the carbon dioxide and keep Earth from overheating.  Instead, He gave us a superabundance of “useless beauty,” exquisite crystal jewelry filling the seas, a wonder to silently lay undiscovered till the invention of the microscope.  Considering the thickness of diatomaceous earth beds (see 02/02/2004 headline), trying to count the number of intricate glass sculptures that have reproduced themselves by the elaborate preprogrammed process described above would be like trying to count the snowflakes or the stars.  As the Moody Science Classic film Hidden Treasures teaches, diatoms are miniature marvels that should remind us God cares for each one of us.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genes and DNA • Media • Amazing Facts

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*For an example of how Darwinists gloss over the difficulties in explaining how glass-crystal factories could evolve, look at the article by Falkowski et al. in the July 16 issue of Science.  Even though their paper is entitled, “The Evolution of Modern Eukaryotic Plankton,” and discusses diatoms explicitly, they provide not even a hint of a suggestion about how the critters “evolved” the ability to make reproducible glass artwork.  Instead, the article is filled with glittering generalities about alleged diatom phylogeny.  They moan that “the origin of diatoms is more obscure” than the obscure evolution of other phytoplankton.  They groan that “the fossil record is inevitably incomplete.”  In spite of the lack of evidence, they merely assume that diatoms figured out their abilities by themselves: e.g., “diatoms have evolved a nutrient storage vacuole.”  How did they do that?  As usual, they don’t say (see 05/18/2004 headline).  The only weird-science suggestion they can come up with is that the rise of diatoms (in their evolutionary timeline) seems to have coincided with the invasion of land by grasses, and that grasses are more effective at leaching silica from the soil so that it erodes into the sea, where the diatoms need it.  Satisfied?

A wonderful film that reveals the hidden world of seed dispersal is the award-winning Moody science classic Journey of Life.  This is a must-see nature film.  Follow delicate packages of life as they travel through the air, across oceans and continents, down rivers, through fires, ride on birds and monkeys and cows, roll through the West, explode across the field and even crawl across the soil and drill themselves in the ground.  The time-lapse and slow-motion photography is stunning.  This “sermons from science” film ends with an analogy to another seed spoken of by the Lord Jesus in one of his parables: the word of God.  The film would make a great introduction or conclusion to a local nature hike.
Next headline on:  Plants • Movies • Amazing Facts

Cosmologists have been chewing on their two fudge factors, dark matter and dark energy, for years now.  Too much fudge causes truth decay.  The only wise crack in this article is that we don’t get to pick the universe we live in.  If it appears coincidental that our universe is special, deal with it.
Next headline on:  Cosmology

Richard Owen was a strident opponent of Charles Darwin, and had more credibility than Darwin in 1859.  Same could be said of Adam Sedgwick, the man who taught Darwin geology.  Darwin was deeply hurt that these two eminent scientists rejected his theory, but his four musketeers (see 01/06/2004 headline) saw to it that their bearded buddha got elevated to the pantheon anyway (see 02/13/2004 commentary).
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs

Building on their previous work showing that specific proteins in eye cells are redistributed in response to bright light, the Johns Hopkins team now reports how a key protein called arrestin is shuttled from a “holding area” where it binds and calms a light-detecting protein.  Writing in the July 7 issue of Neuron, the team says arrestin is moved around by a tiny molecular motor, called myosin, which travels along the “train tracks” of the cell’s internal skeleton.

Wonder how many lucky accidents it took to put this system together.  Biology is beautiful when you take the Darwin dark glasses off.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Facts

Do you see society becoming more selfish and irresponsible?  Do you see people giving themselves over to lust and passion with utter disregard for the consequences?  Do you see more mindless drivel in the arts and entertainment, less nobility of character and more immediate gratification?  Do you see the downfall of a once noble cultural heritage?  Blame evolution.
    Isn’t this just like the Darwin Party to blame everything but their own theory on our animal past.  Terrorism is caused by a surplus of males, right.  Give me a break.  There were male surpluses in the gold rush and Alaska without it forcing men to fly planes into buildings.  Darwinians never focus on the lies and bad teachings that cause men to do evil things; they want to reduce male behavior to hormonal pressures controlled by instincts inherited from ape ancestry.  This self-refuting approach would undermine their own theorizing if they really applied it consistently.
    Darwinian evolution, called by Michael Denton the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century, is another excuse men use to act like louts and brutes.  You would think feminists would rise up and fight this myth, but they reinforce it by swallowing the Darwin Party line themselves (see 03/31/2004 headline).  The news media, gutless and senseless, chirp it out like cuckoo clocks.  Darwinism isn’t science; it is just another subterfuge men use to shirk responsibility.  Instead of the devil made me do it, or the stars made me do it, it’s Charlie made me do it: blame evolution.  Wives, fight back.  Tell him he didn’t evolve, he was created to be holy and faithful.
    Just as it is a non-sequitur to watch animals and claim we evolved from them, it is a non-sequitur to observe animal sexual behaviors and claim we should imitate them.  You can find any pattern you want in the animal kingdom, from profligate promiscuity to monogamous faithfulness, from sexes that are indistinguishable to extreme sexual dimorphism, from nurturing male seahorses and emperor penguins to rams that bang their heads together to impress the ewes.  So what?  We are humans.
    The Creator made animals and plants as He pleased, with extremes of variety and color in both physiology and behavior.  But He made man in His own image* to bear a special relationship to Him and to reflect His holiness.  He endowed men and women with physical bodies sharing most animal characteristics, including glands, hormones, and reproductive organs for the purpose and blessing of bearing children and experiencing intimate love and pleasure.  Viewed in this way, it should not be surprising that men and women have different attributes, roles, strengths, and weaknesses.  What use is testosterone without a body to respond to it?  Pour it on a rock and nothing happens.  It cannot be understood in isolation; it’s part of a system; it signals the male physiology to be ready for a man to be all God created him to be.  It’s not the problem; it is a gift, to be channeled and used for good.
    If you accept the Darwin Party line, then abandon hope of putting any restraints on male sexuality, even criminal activity, because the perpetrator can turn around and say “Blame evolution.”  The consequences of unbridled lust sanctioned by Darwinism, including the victimization of women and children, has only to be imagined to be abhorred.**  But human sexuality, viewed as designed by a loving and wise God, becomes a beautiful thing.  It gives nobility and purpose to masculinity and femininity.  In a sin-cursed world, coordinating these roles gets sometimes challenging, sometimes entertaining, but human sexuality in the creation worldview is fundamentally respectable and honorable, imbued simultaneously with pleasure and responsibility.  Blame evolution?  No; praise God.
    Evolution rationalizes the basest of instincts; Christianity stimulates the noblest of endeavors.  Men, get out there and use that God-given testosterone to work out, build bridges, fight evil, rescue the perishing, lead the family, teach, work, think, create, and love.  If you fall into the trap of selfish lust, you have no one to blame but yourself.

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*Before godly masculinity or femininity can be exercised, the image of God must be regenerated.  Read Titus 3:3-8.
**Abhorrence of evil is a signal of conscience – a trademark of the image of God – and a feature inexplicable by evolution.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

How on earth can these researchers consider 1400 essential genes a small number?  How can they still believe evolution produced these genes, when mutations in any one of them cause death?  A dead fish larva cannot evolve, because it cannot reproduce.  1400 genes!  Think of it.  Just getting one of them by chance is astronomically improbable, to say nothing of getting the second or third to match the first (see online book, p. 110).  Forget it; it will never happen in this or any other universe.
    By attributing the “special status” of these genes to Evolution, and by claiming that the personified tinkering goddess named Evolution “may have required that the number of genetically essential genes be small,” they are easy winners of Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.
Next headline on:  Genes and DNA • Marine Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This wonderful story speaks for itself.  We need to be reminded of how many things have to work exactly right for us to do something as simple as taking a walk in the woods.  Things are not getting any easier for those who believe a long series of mistakes produced the human body, to say nothing of bears and forests.
Next headline on:  Human Body

This approach was widely castigated in Bangkok, where 17,000 scientists, activists and officials have gathered for the AIDS meeting.  Activists and some researchers are particularly critical of a congressional stipulation that requires one-third of the money allocated to prevention programmes under the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to be used for projects in abstinence and monogamy.
    “You’re not doing what countries want or what people with AIDS want,” Gregg Gonsalves of the US activists’ group Gay Men’s Health Crisis told a US official at a panel on 12 July.  “You’re trying to please George Bush’s conservative base.”

What part about d-e-a-t-h don’t you understand?  Listen to what the gay activist said: “You’re not doing what ... people with AIDS want.”  What they want is: unlimited sin without consequences.  They want to engage in promiscuous relationships, knowing ahead of time the wages of sin is death, but make healthy people pay to find a cure that will allow them to do whatever they want sexually, whenever they want to.  An old cartoon stated it well: a character walks right past the danger sign and falls off a cliff.  On the way down, he is shouting, “free unlimited health care!”
    The liberal nurse is making a racist statement.  She thinks people in Botswana are too backward to understand the meaning of: “If you engage in this behavior, you risk getting this disease; if you get this disease, you will die.”  We think anyone can understand that certain actions can have deadly consequences.  Liberals deny that humans have a moral sense and the ability to make choices.  They think that people, like animals, are just going to engage in whatever sex they want, and there is no way to stop it, so containment and avoidance is futile. 
    With any other incurable, communicable disease, the medical community would certainly put the highest priority on containment and avoidance (consider SARS, mad cow disease, West Nile virus).  But since AIDS overlaps the sexual preferences of some who value their selfish pleasure over safety, and have enough decibels to drown out those with common sense, administrations are threatened to be booted out of office if they don’t throw more money at the problem when containment and avoidance would provide immediate relief.  Let’s apply this reasoning to other risky behaviors:

• I like to hold skunks and squeeze them, but I don’t like the smell.  Why doesn’t the World Health Organization recognize the pain of my suffering and provide funds for research on treating my nose and clothes?
• I’m going to drink and drive.  The government should spend money to keep victims out of my way.
• I demand the right to eat poison mushrooms.  I will march on Washington for more federal spending on antidotes.
• I like to play in snake pits.  I demand free government health insurance to cover snakebite and cosmetic surgery.
• I demand the freedom to jump off cliffs.  It’s the government’s responsibility to provide fluffy feather pillows for my landing.
• I want to drink lots of brown bubbly sugar water.  I demand that Health Insurance agencies support my poor nutritional preferences.*
• I want to eat processed fats and oils.  I want Doctors to find a cure for damaged arteries, premature aging and neurological problems.*
• I have smallpox, and demand the right to cough in public, and I will sue anyone who warns the shopping mall that I’m coming.  Instead, the government needs to provide more hospital beds and pain relievers for them.
  *Sent in by a reader.

If you have other examples, write here.  Consider this: in California real estate law, realtors are required to divulge to buyers whether a death occurred in the house, or any other incident took place that might render the house “haunted” (believe it or not).  There is one exception to this rule.  Realtors are forbidden to mention whether a death occurred in the house due to AIDS, unless the buyer asks that specific question point blank.
    Many AIDS victims are truly victims, and HIV is a global health problem that deserves high priority medical research on the treatment side as well.  The plight of millions of orphans left behind demands swift and immediate relief.  But surely, much of the global epidemic could be drastically reduced by a strategy of containment and avoidance.  This should be obvious whether or not one acknowledges that this strategy just happens to coincide with a Judeo-Christian ethic.
    This news story is one of many evidences that Big Science and political liberalism are bosom buddies.  Any news item or editorial in Nature or Science that has occasion to refer to Bush or other conservatives will predictably cast them in a negative light, and will espouse political or ethical positions that are synonymous with those of liberal politicians; see 09/22/2003 commentary.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Asked whether the academy would advocate the teaching of creationism, which has been taught alongside scientific explanations of how the world came into being at other academies sponsored by Christian organisations, he said: “No.  We will develop an open and honest curriculum and we will not impose our views on anyone.
    “My personal belief is that... those who wish to read into Genesis chapter one that God made the world in six days... are not being honest and scholarly.  It won’t be taught in the school because I think it’s rubbish.  It’s a bizarre thing to claim the Bible suggests that.  Genesis is saying that behind creation is a good God.”

Here is where some separation of church and state would do some good.  Wonder what the “reverend” Mr. Chalke does with the tablets of stone written with the finger of God that stated, For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. (Exodus 20:11).  Anyone who calls that rubbish had better be prepared to take up the issue with the Author.
    This story illustrates that often the most vehement enemies of the Biblical account of creation are not the atheists and Darwinists, but liberal church leaders.  Loving the praise of men, and craving acceptance by the elitist academics, they would sooner call the Word of God “rubbish” than criticize just-so stories of the Darwin Party.  Keep your distance.  He did not send them, but they ran; He has not spoken to them, but they prophesied.  Read Jeremiah’s warning about what the Lord thinks of those who mock His word yet pretend to speak in His name.
    Anyone surprised that this state-church academy values being “inclusive” over being faithful, and disparages evangelism?  The hypocrisy of their not “imposing their view of the world on anyone” is glaring.  You had better believe they are going to impose these views on their students: (1) Tolerate everyone except creationists, (2) Never ridicule anyone except those who believe the Bible at its word; those you can call “bizarre”, (3) Keep people from hearing the good news of the gospel, (4) Treat the word of God as rubbish, (5) Never impose your values on anyone, especially the belief that anything is right or wrong, true or false.  These values will be crammed down their impressionable little throats.
    Ken Ham reports in his July newsletter (watch here for reprint) that while British churches are lamenting apathy and low attendance, creation ministries in the UK are on a roll, attracting enthusiastic crowds of people with lots of questions.
Next headline on:  The Bible

In the new book The Case for a Creator, Lee Strobel said that if you represented the entire evolutionary history of life by 24 hours, the Cambrian explosion would last one second.  We are asked to believe that during that one second, most if not all of the major body plans appeared suddenly, without ancestors.  So if these alleged fossils are 55 million years earlier, it adds 11 seconds at most; how much does that help?  Bilateral symmetry is not a simple thing; it requires complex developmental processes from the zygote to the adult.  If all the alleged internal organs were present in this organism, it pushes the origin of a tremendous amount of complexity even farther back in their own time scale.  It does little more than resolve the Cambrian explosion into two explosions separated by only 11 seconds out of 24 hours.  Jonathan Wells has compared the assumed geologic history of earth to a football field, and says the Cambrian explosion represents one step on the 60-yard line.
    It is not clear these incrustations are fossils.  But even if they are, where are all the intermediates linking them to trilobites, sponges, worms and all the other complex animals that appear abruptly in the fossil record?  J.Y. Chen appeared in the film documentary Icons of Evolution.  He said that the history of life represented an “inverted cone” shape, not a branching tree, as Darwin’s theory predicted.  It means that biodiversity was wide at the base and narrow at the top, the very opposite of the expected tree of life.  That is the second major problem with the Cambrian explosion.  To muffle the explosion, Darwinians need to find thousands of transitional forms, not one questionable entry.  They need hours, not 11 seconds.  To score a touchdown from the one yard line, they need a full-field run, not one footstep. 
Next headline on:  Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This is not what Luther had in mind when he went to the Diet of Worms.  As gross at it sounds, this story leads to some food for thought.  Are parasites inherently evil?  Worms can surely lead to some very severe and deadly conditions, with morbid consequences.  This story should never minimize the suffering of those afflicted.  But maybe the problem is not the original concept, but things out of control and run amok.  Maybe in a perfect world some of these things had a function.  It’s when things get out of balance they can get ugly.  For more on this possibility, see the 10/24/2003 headline on maggot therapy, the 06/04/2003 story on bacteria, and the 02/12/2003 headline on toxins in small amounts.
Next headline on:  Health

The important thing in these stories is not the long-age claims, which are not subject to calibration without long-age assumptions, but the fact that an objectively measured physical parameter shows a steep and steady decline over 150 years.  This challenges the belief that it has been around for billions of years (see 03/04/2003 headline).
    Scientists do not understand how planets generate magnetic fields.  Why is Earth the only rocky planet with a strong field?  Why are those of Uranus and Neptune so erratic?  Saturn explodes the most popular dynamo models by possessing a strong field without an angle between the rotation axis and the magnetic field axis (the divergence is only 0.2%).  The new measurements of Saturn’s magnetosphere by the Cassini spacecraft should prove interesting.
    Another important thing to know is that life depends on the protective bubble provided by Earth’s magnetic field (see 05/10/2002 headline).  Better hope the collapse doesn’t occur during your beach vacation.
Next headline on:  Physics

Some of us, like truck drivers and students, might get more done if we had bird brains.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

1. Economy:  “If cargoes always carry motors for both directions, net transport can easily be adjusted or even reversed by simply tweaking the relative activity of the two motors.  This is likely to be much quicker than assembling a new set of motors on a cargo, and also allows transport to be abruptly altered depending on cellular needs.  It even makes it possible to tune the overall speed of transport by altering the relative contribution of trips in the non-dominant direction.”
2. Setting Up Polarized Distributions:  “Sometimes it is necessary to set up a distribution rather than to confine the organelles to a single point .... Even if cargoes accumulate at a certain point (e.g. near plus-ends when motion is biased in the plus-end direction), trips in the non-dominant direction will tend to spread the cargoes out along the tracks, away from the point of accumulation.  Modeling shows that by altering the relative contributions of plus- and minus-end trips, a wide range of steep to flat steady-state distributions can be achieved.”
3. Avoiding Obstacles and Exploring Space:  “As cytoplasmic dynein often steps sidewise to adjacent proto-filaments, a bidirectional cargo could find itself on the opposite side of the microtubule even after a short minus-end excursion.  If it now switches back to kinesin I, it can pass the obstacle.  Bidirectionally moving cargoes should, therefore, be less likely to contribute to disastrous traffic jams .... The random walk of bidirectional cargoes allows a single cargo to explore a large region of cellular space, especially if tracks are disordered.”
4. Error Correction:  “During unidirectional transport, the critical event that determines directionality of motion is the attachment to either a plus- or minus-end motor.  A wrong attachment will cause misdelivery of the cargo.  During bidirectional transport, the net direction of transport is determined by the balance of plus- and minus-end trips and can, therefore, be continually evaluated and even altered if physiological conditions change.  Thus, bidirectional transport may facilitate error correction.

Think of a 12-year-old kid on motorized rollerblades, one foot going forward, the other reverse.  Imagine the tricks he could accomplish (with a little practice) switching from one foot to the other (or the bloody knees as he experiments the first time).  Now make the wheels run on monorails.  Imagine a complex tangle of rails, some blue, some red, going off in all directions, more dizzying than an amusement park roller coaster.  The kid is supposed to put the left foot on the red rails and the right foot on the blue rails (one foot at a time, of course).  Now hand him a package to deliver, and put a thousand other kids on the system going in all directions with packages of their own.  The rails are also in constant motion, some growing and some shrinking.  If the mental picture is becoming too complicated to dwell on further, just realize that something like this is happening in every cell of your body right now.  This intracellular transport system is only a small part of a miniaturized city with many other vital tasks being performed flawlessly.  The transportation system alone has a large infrastructure of support services.  There are linemen for the monorails, pit crewmen for motor repair, traffic cops, construction crews, shippers, receivers and much more, without even considering what the cargoes are and what they do when they arrive.
    The interior of a cell is a whirlwind of constant activity, all necessary just to sustain life.  Rocks do not do this.  Evolutionists may jawbone about these systems emerging from chance and natural selection over millions of years of purposeless motion, but the more we can exhibit the details of cellular perfection, the less plausible their story is going to seem to any rational observer.  This system is crying out for visualization.  The wonder of intracellular transport would come alive if magnified a million times.²
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

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²One such animation is available on DVD from Access Research Network.  Its depiction of intracellular transport is incomplete and in some cases inaccurate, but some of the other amazing activities of the cell, including endocytosis, gene duplication and cell division, are good and visually dazzling.

Now I’m getting hungry for pizza and watermelon.  Geological fads are like panaceas that cure all the symptoms until the MRI arrives.  Data have a way of spoiling the fun of storytelling.  Some unscrupulous theorists like Charles Lyell fudged data to make it fit their mental pictures of how the world should work.
    When plate tectonics theory became popular in the 1960s, some holdouts complained it was being foisted on them like a new religion.  For example, even as late as 1983, in a popular geology book sold in western National Parks, Donald L. Baars had asked whether the theory was “Geophysics or Metaphysics?”—

The concept of the New Global Tectonics may be liked to a new religion; since hard facts are lacking, if one is not a “believer” one is considered an “atheist” with regard to the many theories and interpretations of the “clergy”—the oceanographers and geophysicists.  Many of the concepts are plausible and exciting, and sometimes they fit the hard geologic facts.  Many times, however, they are contradictory and totally incongruent with known geologic facts, at which time the facts are ignored.  With enough “faith,” every known earth event is compatible with the religion, especially with respect to oceanography.  On land, however, where outcrops and fossils abound, it is often extremely difficult to be a “follower.”  The entire doctrine may in time be proven true, it may be completely disproven by geologists, or a compromise may be reached.  I prefer to think the last possibility is likely. ... [He describes some examples of contradictions.]
    It would require another book to argue fully the pros and cons of plate tectonics theory.  It is obvious at this point that I have not been totally converted to the religion.  That is a matter for individual preference.  You are free to believe as you wish, but please, don’t send missionaries! 
—Donald L. Baars, The Colorado Plateau: A Geologic History (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1972, 1983, pp. 217-218, p. 219).

No one doubts that various fluids and solids are moving various whichaways down under our feet, at various speeds and in various directions.  But as with many things in science, the phenomena are too complex to reduce to simple models.  What explains one province may not explain another.  A neat global diagram of rigid plates floating on convecting mantle currents makes a nice flannelgraph in Monday School, but what was the Historical Geophysics?  We’ll have to wait and see what happens to this religion.  The lesson is: don’t take the national park diagrams on blind faith.
Next headline on:  Geology

For years archaeologists have clung to the idea that only truly modern humans were artists, and that our Neanderthal cousins spent their entire evolutionary lifetime as boorish philistines.  But fresh analysis of a prized set of human bones has dealt a body blow to this cherished theory.

The Holocene age of the human skeletal remains from Vogelherd places the question of who made the earliest Aurignacian in Europe in doubt.  At present the hypothesis that the Neanderthals gave rise to the early Aurignacian, as has been argued by some colleagues including Richter, cannot be refuted.  Additionally, the Danube Corridor model for the early colonization of central Europe by modern humans, although still plausible, can no longer be demonstrated on the basis of associations between modern humans and the early Aurignacian at Vogelherd.  With the new dates from Vogelherd one of the most widely held assumptions of paleoanthropology—that the Aurignacian is uniquely associated with modern humans—seems more uncertain than ever.  These results also create the possibility that the figurative art found at Vogelherd was produced by Neanderthals.  New excavations providing unequivocal associations between human skeletal remains and the early Aurignacian will be necessary to address these issues.

The finding does not claim that Neanderthals made the artwork, but it removes a prejudice that they could not have because they were too dumb.  Where did that prejudice come from?  It dates way back to Darwin and Huxley, who used Neanderthal man as a prop for the evolution of man.  This one measurement strikes down “one of the most widely held assumptions of paleoanthropology.”  That’s the problem with assumptions: they are assumed, not proved.  They are not scientific results, but rather hunches that stimulate a scientist to pursue a certain line of investigation.  Repeated mismatches of assumptions to measurements should lead an investigator to consider the possibility that he is on the wrong track.  The thing that keeps making paleoanthropologists stumble over each new discovery is the assumption of evolution.  The second stumblingblock is reliance on shaky dating methods.  The measure of persistence in spite of repeated stumblings is a function of the will to believe something regardless of the evidence.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

Back to the eyepiece; less interpretation, more observation.  If you can’t explain the origin of galaxies or the stars they contain, and if observations are in conflict with the best models, don’t expect anyone to believe the bluff that “astrophysicists have been spectacularly successful in explaining the early evolution of the universe.”  The student doesn’t get to grade his own paper.  (Remember Bob?  see 03/06/2003 headline.)
    See also:  Starbirth “shaky foundation” in the 03/31/2004 headline (“We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form”); “time for theorists to panic?” in the 01/23/2004 headline, and “instant galaxies” and 01/02/2004 headline.  Remember the rabbi’s description of “convoluted theories” and “frantic flailings” in the 09/30/2003 editorial?  It’s premature to declare success (see 06/18/2003 headline) when swallowing the theory du jour produces gastrophysics attacks (see 05/02/2003 headline).  Maybe the missing ingredient in current models is information (see 08/14/2003 headline). 
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Astronomy

For a cell to be able to proofread at all is a profound morsel of food for thought.  How proofreading could emerge by chance is challenge for Darwinian evolution to explain, but for it to have arisen twice by different means is vastly more improbable (see online book).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology

• No glint of large liquid regions was found (see 10/16/2003 headline).
• The dark and light areas have opposite compositions than expected.  The light areas, thought to be ice, may be hydrocarbons, and the dark areas, thought to be hydrocarbons, may be the ices. 
• A huge cloud of neutral hydrogen, bigger than Saturn and its rings, follows Titan around.  The magnetospheric imaging instrument (MIMI) imaged this cloud which consists of molecules stripped away from Titan’s upper atmosphere.

These findings are consistent with prior observations that are making it difficult to believe Titan has been in its current state for 4.5 billion years.  The atmosphere is eroding quickly and leaving traces of its erosion in the huge cloud that is leaking away.  No large lakes or deposits of hydrocarbons are yet visible.  These preliminary interpretations will await further elucidation from the high resolution data in the flight plan.  Stay tuned.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Evolution: always assumed, never demonstrated.  Dinosaur extinction via impact: a media mythoid that persists despite falsifying evidence (see 12/03/2003 and 06/02/2003 headlines).
    Tau Ceti was the darling of astrobiologists who assumed its dust disk was evidence of an evolving solar system similar to ours.  Now chalk up another tally for the Privileged Planet hypothesis (see 06/24/2004 headline).  Even so, these measurements are too indirect to know for sure what it’s like out there at the Whale, without Han Solo to drive us through Asteroid Alley.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Solar System • Origin of Life

In experiments with evolving digital organisms and populations of fixed size, maximum species richness emerges at intermediate productivity, even in a spatially homogeneous environment, owing to frequency-dependent selection to exploit an influx of mixed resources.  A diverse pool of limiting resources is sufficient to cause adaptive radiation, which is manifest by the origin and maintenance of phenotypically and phylogenetically distinct groups of organisms.

Same fallacies (see 05/08/2003 and 05/24/2004 headlines), same irrelevancies, same verdict: dumb (repeat 5x to the tune of Dragnet).  This is not Darwinian evolution, it is (marginally) intelligent design.  Talk about dysteleology; a Panda’s thumb is more sensible than these arbitrary “adaptations”.  They need to read the Dec 4 issue of Nature (see 12/03/2003 headline) before assuming adaptive radiation is real, otherwise their project was nothing more than a rigged demonstration of a fantasy.
    As with most unsolved riddles, the answer is often obvious, but where you least expect it.  Any guesses?
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas
— For a new, detailed critique of “digital Darwinism,” see this series by Royal Truman.

New alleged human ancestor overturns previous ideas, adds to the confusion, leads to controversy, spoils the Darwin Party’s story — there is nothing new under the sun.  (See 02/27/2003 and 10/20/2003 headlines for more on Homo erectus.)
Next headline on:  Early Man

Did you know that believers in natural selection were in the minority in the 1920s, and that many evolutionists believed in rapid, saltational change instead of gradualism?  You heard one of the living legends of Darwinism, Ernst Mayr, say it himself.  Notice how nothing has changed.  Early 20th century evolutionists disagreed on the mechanism of evolution (natural selection, Lamarckism or other) on the pace of evolution (gradual vs. saltational), and on mechanism of speciation.  Those seem like pretty major issues.  How can Darwin’s hunch rise above the status of hypothesis without answers to these questions?  The only things they agreed on were: (1) evolution is a fact, and (2) things change.  The same controversies go on today.  Evolutionists fight over how species split into two, how fast things happen, and the role of natural selection, and other major issues, but they still dogmatically claim that (1) evolution is a fact, and (2) things change.  The first is belief, not science, and the second is too vague to be called science; even creationists acknowledge that things change.  It does not follow that humans had bacteria ancestors.
    Mayr’s account sounds less like a scientific law emerging from the evidence, and more like a victory of two major factions of storytellers over rivals, until they agreed to give a little and meet in the middle (thesis vs. antithesis -> Synthesis).  The antagonists came to a compromise, and hashed out new talking points for the students: “Father Charlie was right about gradualism and natural selection, but Mendel has helped forge an even better story: mutations provide the raw material for variation, then natural selection preserves the fittest.  We will call this neo-Darwinism.”  Students, attracted to anything that is Neo, thought this was cool.  The official sound bite for reporters became, “We may have some disagreements about the mechanism of evolution, but all scientists agree evolution is a fact.”  These short, glittering mythoids sufficed to keep most peasants compliant.
    Those interested in the relation of Mendel to Darwin will find this paragraph interesting:

When Mendel’s laws were rediscovered in 1900, there was widespread hope that they would lead to a unification of the conflicting theories on speciation.  Unfortunately, it turned out that the three geneticists most interested in evolution--Bateson, DeVries, and Johannsen--were typologists and opted for a mutational origin (by saltation) of new species.  Worse, they rejected gradual evolution through the natural selection of small variants.  For their part, the naturalists erroneously thought that the geneticists had achieved a consensus based on saltational speciation, and this led to a long-lasting controversy between the naturalists and the early Mendelians.

Long-lasting, all right; it was about 47 years after this “rediscovery” of a 33-year old paper (70 years total) before the Darwinians found a way to incorporate Mendel’s inconvenient laws of discrete inheritance into their story.
    Textbooks present Darwin as if his ideas were so intuitively obvious that late 19th century scientists instantly saw the light and embraced it, and lived happily ever after.  As we know from frequent reports on Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory in these pages, controversies still rage about the mechanisms of evolution, the pace of evolution, the mechanism of speciation and the origin of complex structures.  Nothing has advanced except the power of the Darwin Party to enforce their views.
    How tragic to hear that the Reformation was dead in Germany by the time Mayr went to school.  The country where Martin Luther had taken his brave stand on the Word of God had cast off its heritage for a radical revolutionary, Ernst Haeckel, who replaced it with the Word of Charlie.  The early Protestant reformers had the will to withstand the Catholic counter-reformation, but their heirs, asleep at the switch, let the Darwinian revolution take over with hardly a word of protest.  So now the revolution has become the mainstream, controlling the propaganda outlets, the universities, the schools and the official creation myths of the culture.  The rallying cry for the Darwinian revolution is “just-so storytelling by faith, not by lab work.”  Instead of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, the official anthem is (to the tune of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow), “We all take Charlie for granted (3x), which nobody can deny.”  Try to deny it and face the wrath of the counter-reformation (see 08/19/2003 headline).
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This discovery adds to others that have led most ring scientists to conclude that planetary rings must be young.  A hundred million years sounds like a long time, but is a mere blink of an eye compared to the assumed age of the solar system (about one fiftieth of 4.5 billion years).  Notice that they did not say the ring is 100 million years old, but that it could not be older than that.  To believe it is much younger is reasonable in light of the evidence; it would seem a stretch to imagine an E ring many orders of magnitude thicker millions of years ago.  Today the E ring is tenuous and mostly composed of fine particles.  A much more massive E ring would seem to correspond to an epoch with more impactors flying around, resulting in exponentially faster erosion.
    This age limit is not a problem for those who believe the solar system was created recently.  It is only a difficulty, an anomaly, a surprise, a puzzle for those locked into a mindset that the earth, and life, evolved slowly over vast periods of time.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Nanotechnology is perfectly realized in biological systems.  Cells are essentially biological assemblers that build thousands of custom-designed molecules and construct new assemblers.  In Bionanotechnology, structural biologist David Goodsell describes what biology can teach us about engineering and manufacturing at the nanometre scale.

• the machinery of DNA transcription and translation
• biomolecular motors
• the information-driven synthesis of biological molecules
• the energetics and regulation of biological processes
• the traffic across membranes and signal transduction along them
• the interplay of myosin and actin filaments within the muscle sarcomere

Here is a book that had no need for the E word, but plenty of occasion for the word design.  The only evolutionary reference was to directed evolution, a misnomer referring to intelligently-guided sorting and artificial selection of mutants (see 06/16/2004 headline.)
    Any Darwinite who would be called on to explain how nanotechnology was “perfectly realized” in a cell that can assemble “thousands of custom-designed molecules” including “new assemblers” would probably rather call in sick (see 06/14/2004 commentary.)
    The review accidentally mistyped the author“s name as “Godsell.”  God doesn’t sell His technology; he gives it to you for free.  That’s the lesson from nature.  Good sell.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design

• The C ring was the most featureless of the rings, as expected.  (Note: horizontal lines are artifacts of noise not yet removed from the raw images.)
• The B ring was the most opaque, also as expected, but showed vivid bands and fine ringlets.
• The Cassini Division is filled with material, not an empty gap as seen in amateur telescopes.  Infrared measurements showed this material to contain more dirt than the main rings, which are composed almost completely of water ice; a press release states that the dirt resembles material seen on Phoebe.
• The A ring had many classic examples of waves.  Density waves are longitudinal waves caused by orbital resonances with moons; they showed damping away from Saturn.  Spiral bending waves are transverse waves generated by interactions with the inclined moon Mimas; these showed damping toward Saturn.  One image showed both wave types in the same frame.  Another image showed fine structure that Porco described as “straw” in appearance; as yet, she could offer no explanation for what must be fine-scale clumping.
• The Encke gap revealed the previously-imaged scalloped edge in beautiful detail.  The scalloping is a wake induced by the embedded moonlet Pan.  The image was so surreal that Dr. Porco thought at first her team must have been tricking her with a simulation.  Ringmaster Jeff Cuzzi also was stunned and taken by the beauty and clarity of this image, and how it so perfectly demonstrated the wave processes theorists had predicted.
• The F ring showed several strands, and streaks of material being pulled toward the shepherd moon Prometheus.  The sunlit side of the F ring showed several bright strands with diffuse material between them.
• Contrary to expectations, no ring “spokes” were yet seen by Cassini like the Voyagers saw 23 years ago.  JPL scientists are speculating the spokes are a seasonal phenomenon that appear when the sunlight hits the rings at a steeper angle.  The cosmic dust analyzer instrument did detect dust particles coming from the rings, however, which might be related to the spoke phenomenon.
• Ultraviolet measurements showed that the Cassini Division and Encke Gap both have dirtier material than the main rings (see Space.Com).  This unknown material resembles the spectral characteristics of Phoebe.  The UV images were color-coded in dazzling patterns of maroon and turquoise like black-light posters.

Brahic also stated that most ring scientists accept the notion that the rings are far younger than the solar system (assuming the rarely-challenged date of 4.5 billion years).  He said he preferred not to believe that for personal, not scientific, reasons.  He finds it hard to believe that the rings just appeared in time for humans to observe them.  Most of his energetic, humorous and informative talk concerned how resonances, collisions and interactions could induce the structures seen – which is fine, because those are all ongoing effects of present-tense, observable processes.  But how can these delicate features remain stable for long ages?  A shepherd can keep the sheep in line only so long if wolves are routinely picking them off and no new sheep are being added.  Brahic did not dwell on how ring material could be replenished during billions of years of gas drag, light pressure, collisional spreading, micrometeorites and ionic sputtering, though he acknowledged these destructive processes are at work in the rings.  This is a clear case of wanting to believe something without evidence, even in spite of the evidence.  Enjoy the rings in the age of man, because they are going, going, gone.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics • Dating Methods