Today we buy information, we sell it, we regard it as a commodity, we value it, we send it down wires and bounce it off satellites— and we know it invariably comes from intelligent agents.  So what do we make of the fact that there’s information in life?  What do we make of the fact that DNA stores far more information in a smaller space than the most advanced supercomputer on the planet?
—Stephen C. Meyer, quoted in The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel (Zondervan, 2004), p. 244.

The interesting thing is that the history we have measured completely disagrees with some of the most recent models.

We like the pictures, and we like the data, but if the model is going in the wrong direction, we’d rather use a different mode of transportation more likely to arrive at the destination.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology

The ongoing discoveries of extrasolar planets, unheard of a decade ago, are providing storytellers wonderful new challenges to practice their art.  No matter the difficulty, as long as there is an audience, the show must go on.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Solar System

Scientific advance is the art of poking holes in neat, easy stories: see “First Law of Scientific Progress” in right column, below.
    Interesting that Pfefferkorn, in his brief history of geological thought, redefines the old Lyell doctrine of uniformitarianism for the postmodern era.  Lyell would hardly recognize the new definition:

Today, uniformitarianism is defined as the constancy of physical and chemical laws over time, while the rates and areal extent of any given process can be variable.  In addition, there are processes that happen so rarely that humans have never observed them during the exceedingly short span of written history.  Thus, catastrophes are now part of our uniformitarian understanding of Earth processes.

Now, everybody wins, and everybody gets a prize.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Fossils • Geology

Put on your thinking cap.  Could this evidence (or lack of it) be interpreted another way?  Does Darwinian theory provide any usefulness to story, other than to patch up an unmet expectation?
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics and DNA • Mammals • Fossils

While adult stem cells continue to rack up successes, can anyone point to a clear case of embryonic stem cells doing any good?  If a promising technology without ethical concerns trumps a questionable one with huge ethical concerns, why is there a contest?
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

We appreciate the continuing efforts of the Darwin Party to undercut their own beliefs.  It saves us a lot of work.  Queller tries to claim that the case under consideration, a study of bacteria by Griffin et al., does not mean we should discard kin selection theory.  He claims it has support from studies of social insects.  But on what basis?  He claims that both kin selection theory and group selection theory are both good for each other, to “rein in” each other’s excesses: “Once, group selectionists saw cooperation everywhere but were brought down to earth by individual selectionists.  Now group selection is being used, not to show the ubiquity of cooperation but to rein in theories on an important form of cooperation envisaged by individual selectionists.”  Pardon me, David, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This was a positive story of discovery and adventure.  Discovery and evolution-talk can be mutually exclusive.  This report needed Darwinese like a fish needs a bicycle.  Good work.
Next headline on:  Fish and Marine Life

It becomes less an issue with these observations to consider how a blind man, miraculously healed, could have picked up his mat and walked, and made sense of the new world around him, as skeptics might complain.  Of course, any Miracle Worker capable of healing the blind could also heal the complete neural sensory and interpretive apparatus along with it.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Bible and Theology

The sound of motorized freeway traffic inside the cell: fascinating.  Blobs of jello don’t purr.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Thank you, Dr. Gerwitz, for your charming entry.  Keep up the great comedy act, and good luck on the real science, too.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

My personal belief is that the best way of criticizing atheist Darwinism is to focus on the scientific evidence, and ask whether it demands that we abandon faith in God.  It clearly does not. I’m very interested in this question, as I will publish a work later this year entitled Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life which argues that the noted atheist zoologist Richard Dawkins—author of books such as The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene—is actually unable to justify his atheism on the basis of the scientific evidence he offers.

Let me mention one point here.  For a Christian, there is an obvious and important connection between the doctrine of creation and scientific inquiry.  As John Calvin pointed out, to study God’s creation is to appreciate the wisdom of God in greater depth.  It’s no accident, I believe, that the natural sciences became especially significant in Christian Europe, as there was a natural religious motivation to study nature as God’s creation.  This doesn’t mean for one moment that people regarded nature as God.  They saw it as the work of God, which was to be honored and appreciated for that reason.

It’s good to see Christian thinkers with the caliber of C.S. Lewis still roaming the halls of Oxford.  McGrath explores the history of atheism and suggests it flourished in France (1780s) and Germany (1840s) largely as a liberation movement against a corrupt and oppressive institutionalized church.  But it ended up being just as oppressive as what it sought to overthrow, as the 20th century illustrated.  Now, it is in retreat, he claims.  What is on the rise, however, is Islam, and the Christian response will be very different.  Christians will need to befriend Muslims, correct misunderstandings about the gospel, and show the power of the gospel to liberate them.
    Lest anyone suspect that atheism is no longer an issue, it’s “Reign of Terror Week” on The History Channel.  No fictional horror film could match what this series is revealing.  The episode Inside North Korea is a must see about the unbelievably horrible atrocities going on now in one atheist regime under the world’s worst living dictator, Kim Jong Il.  Global Prayer Digest says, “Being a Christian is illegal in North Korea, punishable by death or years of hard labor.”  If you thought routine, systematic evil went out with Hitler or Stalin, wake up!  It is happening, right now – evils just as bad or worse than anything from the 1930s and 40s – in communist countries that have not heard, or don’t care, that the foundations of their philosophical and political systems have collapsed.  It is doubtful any church or inquisition ever came close to the brutality and utter lack of conscience of the perpetrators of Nazi and communist genocides.  The episode Inside Pol Pot’s Secret Prison is a withering account of atrocities committed within the living memory of many of us: a systematic genocide rooted squarely in Darwinian principles.  These films are worth purchasing and sharing with pastors who are focused on their building programs or entertainers instead of the battle for truth.
    Bizarre footnote: the mastermind of Pol Pot’s systematic executions, that ran like a conveyor-belt gas chamber, claims to have become a born-again Christian, and is awaiting trial in Cambodia.  Pol Pot died peacefully in 1998, and no Khmer Rouge member has ever been convicted of crimes against humanity.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Mvoies & Media • Politics and Ethics

The finding disputes evolution, but the article claims that mutations are the raw material for evolution.  It also repeats the myth that the genome is mostly filled with “apparently meaningless nonsense.”  Any evidence?  Nope.  Any assumptions?  Yep.  Junk DNA?  See 06/03/2004 headline.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA

The research suggests that an asteroid the size of the one blamed for killing off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago could have struck Earth relatively recently.
    Early humans would have been living in Africa and other parts of the Old World at the time of the strikes.

For an ad hoc just-so story to explain away evidence against a popular theory, this one takes the cake.  These theorists seem to have been hit with a rock on the head.
Next headline on:  Geology

For believers contemplating the rise of the looters, lines from the Revelation of Saint John the Divine may come to mind: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen.”  For archeologists, for the faithful, for all of us, the loss of this past impoverishes the future.  Ripping artifacts from their contexts takes away the last chance we have to know those civilizations—from the world of Abraham to that of Nebuchadnezzar—that gave us our own.

Where is Indiana Jones when we need him?  This article raises awareness of a very real problem that demands action.  But who is at fault?  The political bias of the writers is hardly veiled.  “In Israel, much care is taken to preserve the slightest trace that might reveal literal truths about the mystical teachings of scripture,” they say; much care is taken by whom?  Why not identify the good guys?  It is not the Palestinians who cast precious artifacts down the Kidron Valley and try to destroy evidences that might support Israel’s history in the land (see this Jerusalem Post article, for instance).  What “mystical” teachings of Scripture do they have in mind, as contrasted with “literal truths” that an archaeologist might discover?  An artifact is literal, but its interpretation requires a philosophy of history that can have many political, moral and theological components.  They seem unaware that their philosophy colors their own interpretation of the Genesis account: thus they call the Temptation and the Fall “myths”.
    The authors fail to mention the atrocious acts of the former Iraqi dictator, and only speak of “the fall of Hussein” without mentioning who made him fall, as if he fell over by himself.  If it weren’t for the American coalition toppling him, Hussein would still be in power, flooding dozens of important sites with the Tigris River (see 03/22/2002 headline).  It also gives negative press to coalition forces, saying “coalition forces sometimes make matters worse,” selectively reporting one incident.  They allege an American military base moved earth “potentially rich in relics” at the Babylon site while building protective walls, without giving the officer in charge a chance to respond about what exactly he was doing and why.  The authors say nothing about the many extraordinary efforts the American soldiers have taken to preserve antiquities despite being shot at by anti-democratic Muslim terrorists and Saddam loyalists.
    The authors also fail to point the finger at the real problem in Israel.  Look at this biased sentence: “In Israel, a rising tide of funds for Bible-related projects is flowing into Jerusalem and its environs [from whom?], but archeology is an overlooked casualty of the intifada: the violence has cut down the number of active digs.”  Who is causing the violence but Muslim terrorists?  What is the intifada but Palestinian Arabs intent on the destruction of Israel, the only democratic government in the region that supports archaeology?  Who, on the constructive side, is giving money and promoting the scientific exploration of archaeological sites, but Israeli, British and American archaeologists?  The authors write as if “the violence” is just a fact of life, like rainfall.  If you cannot identify the problem, you cannot begin to identify a solution.
    The authors could have focused on solutions rather than wailing Biblical words out of context.  Why not promote the peace and prosperity of the new democratic government in Iraq, so that the poor have good jobs that can reduce the desperation that makes getting a quick buck in looting attractive?  Why not make sure that programs like “oil for food” actually get to the poor, instead of lining the pockets of dictators and U.N. officials?  Why not promote the free and open access of scientific archaeological teams to the sites that Hussein long kept off limits?  Why not severely punish convicted looters and dealers to set an example?  Blaming the freedom-loving governments who have sacrificed the most blood, given the most money, and taken the most positive action to bring a peaceful environment for archaeologists is not helping find the solution to a very real problem.  We have a suggestion.  Send Newsweek reporters to Iraq to perform an archaeological dig on the mass graves.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

Do you remember movies or TV shows on dinosaurs showing triceratops and velociraptors running around with clams and fish?  The context of these bones is just as important as the bones.  The depth of these layers, and the diverse contents, spread over multiple states, cannot be explained by some local flood or slow, gradual process.  The catastrophe that buried these animals ripped the flesh off the bones and ground plant material into them.  Why don’t you hear about these things from the major media?  Is it because the findings don’t fit their favorite just-so story?  If you don’t agree with Joe Taylor’s interpretation, get out there and dig.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Dating Methods

Yes, it is time to ask difficult questions.  They just admitted that these fossils appear suddenly, then disappear, with no clear relationship to the Cambrian fossils that followed.  As such, they are no help to explaining the Cambrian explosion.  They already had complexity, forming leaf-like fronds with three levels of fractal patterning.  Yes, we agree; they appear to be “uniquely fashioned groups.”  One sentence demands another look: “We need quantitative studies of fossil populations, with analysis of morphological gradients in the same geological successions and bedding planes, as well as detailed analyses of growth programs (morphospace), life history (ontogeny), and evolutionary history (phylogeny).”  In plain English, this means: we can’t tell an evolutionary story if we have no transitional forms to connect the dots.
    Now for some difficult questions of our own.  Does anyone see an evolutionary picture in the Ediacaran biota?  Is anyone convinced by the dates attached to the strata, which have been stitched together from four continents?  Is anyone impressed by giving a just-so story a fancy name like heterochrony?  The conclusion of their article teases, “If this sequence of evolutionary development (heterochrony) is correct, then perhaps we are about to break the code to the evolution of the Ediacara biota, the earliest animals.  Watch this space.”
    Interesting ending: “Watch this space.”  This implies that there nothing to watch except space: i.e., emptiness, a void, a vacuum.  If, after 58 years of speculation about the Ediacaran biota, the evolutionary story has left nothing but a space, asking us to watch it as if something important is about to happen sounds like an empty promise from a used Darwinmobile salesman.  Last question (an easy, not difficult one): any takers?
Next headline on:  Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

In the past, many thought that Newton pursued religion only in his spare time, or that the majority of his religious work had been copied from others.  But [Robert] Iliffe [science historian at Oxford] claims that these writings show his theological work was carefully planned and often related to his work in mathematics and physics.  For example, he sets up his text on the Apocalypse with mathematical formalism, outlining rules, definitions and a proof of his beliefs.
    Ultimately, Newton’s religion and science may have been tied together by belief in absolute truth.  Newton used testable hypotheses to find truth in nature, and believed that his religious writings revealed the truth about God, says Iliffe.

Newton was not always the most exemplary Christian, and some of his theological beliefs bordered on the fringes of orthodoxy.  Nevertheless, no one can question that his worldview treated science and theology as highest priorities in the search for truth.  Unlike a majority of moderns, Newton believed in the existence of absolutes.  Specifically, he believed that the true and living God revealed Himself in the holy Scriptures even more clearly than in His works in nature, and therefore the Scriptures are more worthy of serious and systematic investigation than anything in nature.  This is clear from the volume of systematic study he gave the Bible compared to science, as this article affirms (contrary to previous speculations that tried to minimize the emphasis this eminent scientist and thinker gave to his religious writings.)  Can anyone claim that such a worldview is “scary stuff” in its implications for science (see yesterday’s headline), when you have the greatest scientist in history steadfastly affirming his belief in the Biblical account of creation?
Next headline on:  Politics, Ethics, and History • Bible and Theology

Never any indication that cave people were dumb.  Always an indication that humans had a human nature.  The dates and phylogenies are modern myths woven around scattered, silent artifacts.  When the observations continue to defy the expectations, the mythmakers ought to seriously reconsider their assumptions; either that, or get out of science, and try matching the the skills of their ancestors.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

1. Germs and Aging:  Science Now reported that germs may prolong life.  A study on fruit flies showed that flies whose embryos were exposed to bacteria lived longer than those grown under sterile conditions.  Apparently the germs provide services in regulating genes that affect longevity.  Title: “Live Clean, Die Young.”
2. Snake Venom:  Australia has many venomous snakes.  These are a boon to medical researchers who are combing the outback for potential medicines, reports National Geographic News.  Title: “Could Australia’s Deadly Snakes Put Bite on Cancer?”
3. Spider Venom:  Also from National Geographic comes word of “Venom Venture,” a project from Cornell going “bioprospecting” for medical uses of spider venom.

These stories indicate that biological compounds and organisms are not evil in themselves, but cause either suffering or healing depending on context.  They raise the possibility that, under different conditions, the toxins in nature might have had beneficial applications.  Even cells have built-in poisons called caspases that are part of the natural process of recycling.  Since most of us operate in the context of predation and defense in this era, watch your step anyway.
Next headline on:  Health

I feel that there’s a dictatorship on academic freedom in our public schools now.  I refer to evolution education as a tyranny .... You can’t challenge it in our schools.  Kids have been thrown out of class for challenging it.... Some of the students who support me are afraid to speak out, especially because they saw how the science department reacted.

What are they afraid of?  If evolution is so obvious, so well supported by the facts, why not let both sides present their evidence and teach the students how to evaluate claims with critical thinking skills?  Why did one teacher call intelligent design “scary stuff”?  These are all signs of a weak position.  What’s scary stuff is terrorism, not open examination of the facts.  A few more brave students like Samuel Chen, willing to stand in the path of the tanks, may demonstrate to the world that a dogmatic view that relies on intimidation is not worth believing.
Next headline on:  Schools • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

• 100 Meter Sprint:  Cheetah wins the gold at 3 seconds.  Silver goes to Ostrich, bronze to Greyhound.  Elephant and Hippo beat Human, far back in the pack at 10 seconds.  If birds were allowed, Swift could go 102 mph, and Peregrine Falcon at 185 mph, or Mach 0.25.
• Long Jump:  Grey Kangaroo wins at 12 meters, Impala wins silver at 10 meters, Human might win bronze at just under 9.
• 100 Meter Freestyle:  Swordfish, at 78 mph, wins the gold; Sailfish at 66 is not far behind.  Killer Whale and Squid put in good shows.  Human, at 5 mph, is dead last.

This otherwise fun article is marred by several uninformed, ridiculous Darwinian assumptions.  Dr. Noever should know ever so painfully that every one of his evolutionary pronouncements is questionable at best, outright false at worst; yet he spouts them with the glibness of a politician.  Here are quotes numbered for comments afterwards.

1. With over 10,000 human competitors taking part in more than 20 sports, the Olympic battle of better physiques leaves out the other millions of species with specialized survival skills.  These animals have evolved their success from repeated failures, as matters of life and death....
   Darwinian selection has been announced through history with the same life-and-death struggle that is the Olympic hallmark: Let the Games Begin.
2. Fortunately the memory of having a tail (and gills) is not too distant.  As one principle of embryology maintains, stages of evolution from water to land are played out in our mother’s womb.  All humans have to lose their gills and tail, in order eventually to master the land.
3. To an evolutionary theorist, the only event that matters is the game of survival, which is a complex function of reproductive rates, maturation, resource limits and lifespan.
4. All winners, whether animal or human, are likely temporary champions.  The animal Olympics is far from the top of the evolved food chain.

Got your baloney detector handy?  Let’s examine his evolutionary assertions.

1. The struggle for existence metaphor, the original Malthus/Darwin picture of nature red in tooth and claw with only the strongest surviving, is now known to be simplistic and often simply wrong, even to Darwinians.  After the atrocities of social Darwinism, the Darwin Party is now trying to project a kindler, gentler picture of evolution: cooperation, altruism, symbiosis.  Noever assumes that struggle will produce Olympic champions, like cheetahs from flatworms, given enough time.  Evidence, please?
       Notice also how he incorrectly associates animal fitness with human physique.  Fitness has nothing necessarily to do with strength or vitality, as we usually think of it (“fitness centers” with brawny weightlifters, etc.).  Fitness in evolutionary terms means anything a Darwinist wants, as long as it results in fertile offspring.  To a Darwinist, who is more “fit”: a bodybuilder who intimidates women, or a beer-belly couch potato who has a way with girls?  As long as the latter produces lots of gene carriers (i.e., kids) before he dies of a heart attack, he is Charlie’s champion.
2. The “principle of embryology” he references, the old Recapitulation Theory, is as defunct as the tooth fairy.  How many times do creationists and knowledgeable evolutionists have to remind the purveyors of this myth that it is utterly false and illogical?  Human embryos never have gills nor structures that develop into gills, and they never have slits.  Conclusion: they never have gill slits.  Similarly, human embryos never have tails.  No animal is obliged to play some mythical recording of its evolutionary past on the way to becoming an adult.  Why should it, when any “memory” or use for those genes is gone, and every structure in the embryo has a function?  It’s all hogwash, but look at the power of myth: once propounded to impressionable minds, once it gains a following, it is easier to embellish the myth than to dislodge it.
3. If you define fitness in terms of survival, you fall into the tautology trap.  This has been explained so many times in such detail by so many theorists on both sides of the origins debate, it needs no elaboration here (see 06/25/2002 commentary, for instance).  If he wants to claim selection is a complex function, let’s see the math.  Let’s watch him assign observable values and error bars to the factors and coefficients.  Otherwise, this assertion is a handwaving dodge.
4. This statement, again, assumes evolution instead of demonstrating it.  Getting the Darwin Party to repent of this cardinal sin is like asking a leopard to change its spots or a cheetah to stop cheating.  Noever just assumes that the struggle for survival will produce innovation, new function, new complex and interrelated structures, and engineering expertise.  He assumes that natural selection (a conservative process) is up to the task.  Evolutionists neither demonstrate that selection has such powers, nor show that it ever did in the past: the fossil record shows sudden appearance, stasis and extinction, with large and systematic gaps.  (Exercise: name all the transitional forms for: kangaroos, swordfish, squid, cheetahs, peregrine falcons, and all the others in this article.  Can’t be done.)  There is no basis, therefore, for him to extrapolate selection into the future, to presume evolution will add new, improved athletes to the Olympic line-up over millions of years to come.

So the gold medal in the Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week competition goes to: David Noever, for his line: “As one principle of embryology maintains, stages of evolution from water to land are played out in our mother’s womb.  All humans have to lose their gills and tail, in order eventually to master the land.”  Didn’t Mom teach him not to tell fibs?
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mammals • Birds • Fish and Ocean Life • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

We’ve begun to understand the story of its surface evolution largely due to the Magellan mission in the 1990s.  The biggest surprise of Magellan was that the surface seems like it’s all the same age.  That’s what I’m calling the second great transition [the first being the loss of its water].  Something changed on Venus 600 or 700 million years ago to make the surface all the same age.
    If you use the word catastrophic it rubs some people the wrong way, but something dramatic happened on Venus which wiped out almost all signs of an older surface.  The planet got re-paved, basically, 600 or 700 million years ago.

We’ve been taking a look at the models that have been done of the runaway greenhouse and the moist greenhouse to try to understand the time scale for the loss of the oceans.  The first thing you realize when you look at these models is that it has not been done in a very sophisticated way.  Not because the people that have done it are unsophisticated — Jim Kasting is the best in the business, and his models are state of the art.  But the state of the art is not that good.
    If you read Kasting’s paper, there are these huge uncertainties in the time scale.  He’s had to make many simplifying assumptions to try and solve the problem of the loss of oceans on a planet like Venus.  When you include all these assumptions, the real range of uncertainty in his model is longer than the age of the solar system.  In other words, Venus could have lost its oceans in 10 million years, or retained them for longer than the age of the solar system.  The time constraints are not that good.

Whenever you listen to the just-so stories of the evolutionists (planetary or biological), always watch for the data.  Watch for something that was observed or measured in some way.  The radar scans from Magellan revealed a terrain remarkably uniform around the entire globe, with lava flows everywhere and few craters.  Its paucity of terrestrial diversity is very unlike the Earth, with its rich array of mountains, oceans, moving continents, rivers, weather systems, canyons and dynamic landscapes.
    On Venus, based on crater counts alone, the surface appears to be the same age, with nothing much having happened since some global resurfacing episode.  That is about all that can be said with any certainty.  Deducing what that age is from crater counts is a risky business based on assumptions of cratering rates which cannot be observed in the present.  The models and suggestions about water loss, early plate tectonics on Venus, periodic burps and so forth is just handwaving in the dark, assuming that the planet had a 4.5-billion year history.
    That number, the Sacred Parameter of Planetary Evolution, 4.5 billion years, is the assumed Age of the Solar System (acronym omitted for the sake of propriety).  What kind of a model has error bars as large as those he just admitted?  Is there any evidence for any of the model prior to the current observation of a uniformly cratered, resurfaced globe?  Is there any evidence of a missing 3.9 billion years?  No.  Science is supposed to be about what you can see, not what you can’t see.  When you need to visualize the unseen to keep your worldview from collapsing, it isn’t planetary science yet, just planetary mythmaking.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

The suspected plant material under about 10,400 feet of ice indicates the Greenland Ice Sheet “formed very fast,” said NGRIP project leader Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute.  “There is a big possibility that this material is several million years old — from a time when trees covered Greenland,” she said.

The plant remains held in the researcher’s fingers are the scientific facts.  The deduction that trees covered Greenland sometime in the past is logical.  The millions-of-years scenario is storytelling.  But what amazing facts: how did pine trees grow in a place now seen as one of the biggest deep freezers on Earth?  How did the remains survive decay if the climate change was not extremely rapid?  This is one of many indicators of a past temperate climate in northern latitudes that changed suddenly; remember the redwoods under the Arctic? (see 03/22/2002 headline).
Next headline on:  Fossils • Plants

1. Too Soon to Tell.  Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, writing in the September cover story of Astronomy Magazine, isn’t ready to call it a failure.  He gives the standard SETI response that we’re unsuccessful so far because the search has only just begun.  Considering the number of stars to search, it may take centuries to cover the sky adequately.  Sagan, Drake and others knew this and have been saying it all along.  But new technologies are rapidly accelerating the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and could give us an answer within 20 years.  So remain optimistic, he says, and stay tuned to the stellar radio dial.
2. Narrow Window.  Frank Drake, SETI pioneer and author of the Drake Equation, surmises that the parameter L (lifetime of an intelligent civilization) may be the most telling factor, but it needs to be qualified by our recent human experience, according to an article on New Scientist August 4.  Detectability was predicated on an assumption that radio “leakage” from earth would be visible to aliens, and vice versa.  Our own leakage has dropped significantly, however, since cable TV and direct-broadcast satellites became popular.  This means that when the last “I Love Lucy” broadcasts reach the aliens watching from a distant star, the earth may appear to go silent.  The bad news is that maybe advanced civilizations only have a narrow window of time during which they would broadcast radio toward us, either on purpose or inadvertently through broadcast leakage.  The good news is that SETI researchers don’t necessarily have to be discouraged at the silence.  Perhaps a switch to optical SETI (searching for laser beacons) can fill in the gaps.
3. Look Up, Look Down.  Aussie astrobiologist Paul Davies, never shy about proposing ideas “at the extreme end of the spectrum of speculation,” has a new detection strategy.  If aliens were trying to send us a message, radio would be a wasteful method, he claims in an August 10 piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Why would aliens keep radio beacons going for centuries with little hope of them being detected?  Leaving artifacts like plaques or big chunks of metal, on the other hand, would incur horrendous shipping costs, with no guarantee they would survive millions of years of erosion or burial.  Get ready for his surprise solution, as he role-plays the alien messengers in council:

   The ideal solution would be to encode the message inside a large number of self-replicating, self-repairing microscopic machines programmed to multiply and adapt to changing conditions.
       Fortunately such machines already exist: they are called living cells.

   Although this sounds uncannily like an argument used by Intelligent Design scientists,* Davies means something very different.  That he’s not talking about evidence for a Creator God is clear from his next sentence: “The cells in our bodies, for example, contain genetic messages written by Mother Nature billions of years ago.”  Like any good Darwinist, he believes cells and their genomes evolved in the usual Darwinian way.  But, he speculates, aliens might have left messages in the so-called “junk DNA.”  (See 06/03/2004 headline).  He proposes, therefore, that SETI researchers should turn their attention to hidden messages in the large, non-coding regions of our own genomes: “There is plenty of room there for ET to etch a molecular message without damaging any vital genetic functions,” he claims, particularly because “scientists in the United States have discovered whole chunks of human and mouse junk DNA that seem to have remained virtually unchanged for tens of millions of years.”  (See 05/27/2004 headline.)  Those regions would be good places to store messages, he thinks, kind of like how we encoded messages in radio beams and on the Voyager record.  What about the shipping cost?  His tale gets curioser and curioser.  Since viruses can insert genes into a host cell, “An alien civilisation could, for negligible cost, dispatch tiny packages across the galaxy, loaded with customised viral DNA.”  We might just find that “The truth is inside us.”

Welcome to the SETI Bizarre (intentional spelling), where a rainbow of imaginative speculations is colorfully displayed and dished out on the cheap.  The Bizarre is popular because of all the free advertising provided by the gullible media.  Isn’t science thrilling?  Too bad those church-going fundamentalist types operate only on faith.
    Remember an old childhood prank?  A smart aleck walks up to a gullible kid and gets him to follow his hand: “Look up.  Look down.  Look at my thumb.  Gee, you’re dumb.”  Try it on the next astrobiologist you meet, except with the following interpretive expansion: Look up (at the heavens, the anthropic universe, and the cosmic order).  Look down (at the earth, the lithology, the biosphere, and the improbable convergence of parameters that makes life possible).  Look at my thumb (biology, anatomy, physiology, and all the molecular machines, organs and integrated systems that make muscular motion and vision function nearly instantaneously, and the consciousness that gives sense to the observations).  Astoundingly, you appear philosophically challenged and willfully ignorant (if you think this all just happened by chance).  Which leads to a suggested revision of the Davies proverb: not, “the truth is inside us,” but rather: “the thumbprint of the Truth is inside us.”
Next headline on:  SETI • Intelligent Design

The simplest, ordinary things in the garden or out on a nature walk are really extraordinary when you look at them in detail.  No one respects nature’s abilities more than a human engineer who has tried to figure it out and reverse engineer them.  When our brightest designers can barely keep up with the observed specifications in the insect world, are we to honestly believe that blind, undirected natural laws achieved these natural abilities without a Designing intelligence?
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Mars • Amazing Facts

This is cartoon material and calls for a contest.  Send in your joke or caption to CEH Feedback.*  Should we have titled this The Evolution of Drunkenness, or the other way around?  Dar-wine must be popular in the Berserkeley faculty lounges.  So what would Charlie say about drinking, then?  Probably, “Nobody knows how dry I am.”  If these “scientists” want to test their hypothesis, undoubtedly they will find plenty of willing experimental subjects in the campus zoo, otherwise known as the dormitory.
*Join the fun: add your joke to our reader’s entries:

• If a man can get so drunk that he makes a monkey of himself, then what the problem with a monkey getting so drunk that he makes a man of himself?
• How much proof do you need for evolution?  Apparently 80 proof will do.
• [from Austria]: I am not dry, I am a darwinist, drunken by my ability to tell you and me “just so” stories.  It’s a selective advantage for me in the present day’s biosciences.
• Your entry here.

Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Jupi-Tar?   08/11/2004
Among the incomprehensible titles of most papers in the Astrophysical Journal, this one stood out: “Jupiter Formed with More Tar than Ice.”¹  Looking at Galileo spacecraft data for oxygen abundance and other things, Katharina Lodders was led to propose the following model:

Carbonaceous matter, which has high sticking probabilities, was the agent that sped up accumulation of solid matter of proto-Jupiter.  This led to runaway accretion of the planet.  Major consequences of this scenario are that the water ice condensation front (the snow line) typically placed near 5.2 AU in solar nebula models must be replaced by a carbonaceous condensation/evaporation front (the “tar line”) and that the snow line is located farther out in the solar nebula.

This sounds like a pretty drastic revision to textbook models of planet formation and dating, so we’ll have to wait and see if she garners support for the idea that Brer Jupiter is a giant tar-baby.  The textbook artists already are reduced to drawing toys (see 08/06/2004 headline).  Now do they need to draw Uncle Remus folk tales?  If so, the results will be no less plausible than today’s naturalistic just-so stories of planetary evolution.
Next headline on:  Solar System

T. Rex: I Was a Teenage Monster   08/11/2004
The news media quickly latched onto a report in Nature¹ that Tyrannosaurus rex had a growth spurt in adolescence.  Dr. Gregory Erickson of Florida State measured growth lines in leg bones and found faster growth between age 14 and 18 on the famous Rex specimen named Sue, says EurekAlert based on info from Florida State and the Field Museum.  (See also National Geographic News, BBC News etc. that figured out this means Sue gained 5 pounds a day as a teen.)
    “T. rex is notable for its great size, which is at least 15-fold greater than the largest living terrestrial carnivorous animals today and second only to Giganotosaurus among theropod dinosaurs,” the paper in Nature begins.  “How did it attain such great proportions within the Tyrannosauridae?” Because the growth rates of dinosaurs is “a topic of considerable interest in evolutionary biology,” Erickson’s team tried to fit the growth rate to “two competing phylogenetic hypotheses for the Tyrannosauridae,” but no clear winning hypothesis seemed to emerge; T. rex’s “method of attaining gigantism contrasts with that in the largest crocodilians and lizards, where ancestral growth rates were retained and the exponential stages lengthened,” the paper says.  Fast growth rate seems to be diagnostic of the Tyrannosauridae, but not its ancestors, according the paper.  Also, “A second substantial increase in growth rate optimizes as a physiological autapomorphy of Tyrannosaurus irrespective of phylogenetic hypothesis and optimization criterion.”  [Autapomorphy: “a character state that is seen in a single sequence and no other.  Sometimes called a uniquely-derived character state.” Source: Molecular Systematics and Evolution glossary.]

From the two competing hypotheses of tyrannosaurid phylogeny it is most parsimonious to conclude that T. rex acquired the majority of its giant proportions after diverging from the common ancestor of itself and D. torosus, a species with an optimized body mass of about 1,800 kg.  Direct comparison between the tyrannosaurid growth curves shows that the transition to the exponential and stationary phases of development occurred about 2-4 years later in T. rex (Fig. 2).  However, such temporal post-displacement had little to do with the evolution of its gigantism because the exponential stage, during which most body size is accrued, was not extended beyond the ancestral, 4-year condition observed in other tyrannosaurids.  Rather, the key developmental modification that propelled T. rex to giant proportions was primarily through evolutionary acceleration in the exponential stage growth rate and the transition zones bounding it.  This is reflected in the regions of maximal slope on the growth curves depicted in Fig. 2 and holds true regardless of which evolutionary hypothesis is correct and how the maximum growth rates are optimized....
The actual magnitude of the growth rate change reconstructed at ancestral nodes differs with topology and more drastically with the optimization method.  Linear parsimony yields a punctuated pattern with higher changes at individual nodes, whereas squared-changes parsimony forces a ‘smoother’ distribution on the data but also incurs some counterintuitive deceleration in growth for the slower-growing basal taxa.

We’ll leave the teenage monster jokes to the imagination of our readers.  Notice in passing how the popular-level reports of this paper all talk about how these studies are going to help us understand dinosaur evolution: such as, “With the life history parameters, we can better understand T. rex evolution, biology, biomechanics and population dynamics.”  Three out of four, maybe, but what evolution?  The paper looked for it and didn’t find it.  Give us some evidence, not empty promises.  We’re getting frustrated with the ubiquitous unresolved plots in the endless soap opera, Charlie’s Angles.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This discovery reveals a deeper level of design even more difficult to explain by evolution.  (As expected, these authors make no reference to evolution in their paper.)  A simple, easy-to-fathom machine would use the integer ratio; 3 protons yields one ATP.  The 10:3 ratio, puzzling at first, actually shows superior engineering.  It enables two disparate components with different operational requirements to be coupled together for the maximum efficiency of each.  In software, it would be like the driver that allows a device to work with any operating system.  In hardware, it would be like a tractor with a power-takeoff adapter that allows the engine to operate an attachment running at a different RPM.
      ATP synthase is made up of two finely tuned domains, F0 and F1, that operate under their own stringent requirements for function, but are useless without one another.  Why would the F0 c-ring carousel evolve by itself, if it had no function vital to the cell?  And how could the F1 system of six lobes, exquisitely-crafted for the synthesis of ATP, operate without an electrical motor to turn the camshaft?  The camshaft itself is a perfectly-designed component, with just the right amount of elastic flexibility, to couple the two very different domains.  Add to that the a subunit that feeds the protons at just the right rate and matches them to the appropriate active site on each c subunit, and the epsilon subunit that anchors the motor to the membrane, and you have an irreducibly complex system of irreducibly complex systems.  The fact that this whole composite machine works at near 100% efficiency is proof of product, a contrivance that virtually shouts “made by intelligent design.”
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design

Give it up, David.  There are more honest ways to get funding for new NASA missions than hyping the meagerest of circumstantial evidence while ignoring the problems.  “Mars has all the conditions for life: water, energy, and organic substances, McKay pointed out.”  One thing thou lackest: information.  From whence cometh information, if not from intelligent design?  That doth make all the difference between mat – and Matt.
Next headline on:  Mars • Origin of Life

Was this optimum found by trial and error?  Did all the individuals below optimum die until perfection was reached?  Imagine a sound engineer designing the perfectly sensitive receiver electronically.  Now imagine him making it work throughout a double-flipping dive into an Olympic pool without an interruption of response or sensitivity.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Facts

We have not been able to identify any dynamical reason for why, in some cases, Neptune sometimes reverses direction.  Thus, we believe it is a matter of chance.  If so, this whole effect may be the result of the fact that our simulations contain a relatively small number of massive bodies compared to the real early Solar System.  Perhaps an ideal system with a nearly infinite number of planetesimals with infinitesimal mass would behave differently.  We will address this issue again in future work....

So far in this paper, we have focused on the evolution of Neptune.  Unfortunately, we find that we have a significant problem with Uranus.  In all simulations starting from a compact planetary configuration where Neptune is initially inside 20 AU, Uranus always stopped well before its current location at ~19 AU.  This is because in these cases the planetesimals scattered by Neptune interact with Saturn almost at the same time as they interact with Uranus, so that Uranus effectively ‘sees’ only a small portion of the total disk’s mass.  This may indicate that Uranus and Neptune formed at 17-18 and 23-25 AU, respectively (see Hahn and Malhotra, 1999), despite of the apparent difficulty of accreting planets at large heliocentric distances (Levison and Stewart, 2001 and Thommes et al., 2003).  Alternatively, it may indicate that the migration process was triggered by some instability in the originally compact planetary system, something similar to what was proposed by Thommes et al. (1999).  This will be the subject of future investigations.

The word planet is from the Greek root for “wanderer” because, to the ancients, the planets in their orbits appeared to wander against the fixed stars in mysterious ways.  Kepler’s and Newton’s laws only temporarily removed the mystery: once again, the planets wander in mysterious ways.  At least now we know the lyrics to the music of the spheres: The Happy Wanderer.  I love to go a-wandering along the radial track / And as I go, I love to fling the KBOs out back.
    Hal is fun because he is so brutally honest and able to laugh at himself.  (He looks like a biker or cowboy on the Science Channel Planets series, not your typical white-lab-coat science geek.)  Keeping a sense of humor is one way to keep your sanity: another is to keep working on the details and don’t let the big picture get you down.  Whether these strategies lead one to the truth is a different question.  For anyone having delusions about planetary scientists being able to explain the origin of our solar system through natural processes alone, papers like this should provide a reality check.  Everyone, sing!  Valderi, valdera, valderi, valdera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha / Valderi, valdera / Beneath God’s clear blue sky.
Next headline on:  Solar System

Each nucleus in a eukaryotic cell consists of a double lipid-based membrane punctuated by thousands of sophisticated protein complexes called nuclear pores, which control molecular traffic in and out of the organelle.  Inside, polymerases and other specialized enzymes transfer DNA’s protein-coding message to RNA.  Other proteins modify the strands of RNA to ensure that they bring an accurate message to the ribosomes outside the nucleus.  The nucleus also contains a nucleolus, a tightly packed jumble of RNA and proteins that are modified and shipped out of the nucleus to build ribosomes.
(For more on the nuclear pore complex, see 06/17/2002 and 01/18/2002 headlines.)