Just as I can’t believe that there was a Creator, I can’t believe that this all happened by chance, which implies there was a Creator.  So you see I’m in a completely hopeless bind, and I’ve stayed there.
—Robert Jastrow, lifelong scientist and author of God and the Astronomers, in an interview for the Q&A portion of the new film The Privileged Planet.

Atheists would rather get drunk than face the prospect that they live in a finely-tuned universe, created on purpose by an all-wise, caring, intelligent Creator.  Fear not, Dr. Krauss; the sober life brings more ultimate satisfaction.
Next headline on:  Cosmology

Has the universe always existed?  How did it become a place that could harbor life?  What was the birth of our planet like?  Are we alone, or are there alien worlds waiting to be discovered?  NOVA presents some startling new answers in “Origins,” a groundbreaking four-part NOVA miniseries hosted by dynamic astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.  Tyson leads viewers on a cosmic journey to the beginning of time and into the distant reaches of the universe, searching for life’s first stirrings and its traces on other worlds.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

1. Earth Is Born.  This episode describes the assumed first billion years of our planet.  “Bombarded by meteors and comets, rocked by massive volcanic eruptions, and scoured by hot acid rain, the early Earth seems a highly improbable place for life to have taken root.  Despite such violent beginnings, scientists have found new clues that life-giving water and oxygen appeared on our planet much earlier than previously thought.”

   What this series lacks in evidence it makes up for in animation.  The visuals of the first two episodes consisted primarily of computer animations and interviews with Darwinian storytelling scientists, interspersed with irrelevant shots of them appearing to do some real lab work.  Episode One is just a higher-tech version of Disney’s old Fantasia myth (not the dancing hippos, but the early earth).  Notable in “Earth Is Born” was a repeating theme that new discoveries have recently overturned long-held ideas, especially uniformitarianism.  That’s a good lesson, if they would just apply it to the current tale-telling and plan ahead.

2. How Life Began.  This episode describes organisms living currently in extreme environments, and claims “The survival of these tough microorganisms suggests they may be related to the planet’s first primitive life forms.”

   As expected, this episode was an illustrated liturgy of the usual astrobiological mystery religion, carefully shielded from critical scrutiny.  The novitiates are instructed in the tenets of the faith: comets brought our oceans and the building blocks of life, the first life “emerged” in extreme environments, bacteria invented photosynthesis, the “great liberator,” which gave us our oxygen atmosphere and made complex life possible, leading to “immense colonies of green slime which would take over the world.”  They even gave prominent press to the old Miller experiment, the “useful lie” that gave naturalistic abiogenesis a shot in the arm (see 05/02/2003 headline).  This is so retro.  The dramatic footage of sparks and bubbling chemicals was no match for the quick disclaimer that scientists debate the “recipe” for life and when it occurred.  Big Lie of the Episode: “When you get the recipe right, it goes, and it goes quickly.”  (How quickly?  Read our book).  Over and over, the Darwinists repeated their surprise at how quickly life “emerged” and evolved on the early earth despite all the meteor bombs, and the “hellish” conditions under which it arrived and thrived.
       The pretentious air of this series borders on goofy, with its 1960-era sci-fi sound effects, hushed undertones and gimmicky cartoons.  Tyson’s phony dramatic delivery gets tedious real fast, especially with lines like “the building blocks of life arrived special delivery – from outer space!” and “photosynthesis: a clever invention; once it started, it was a runaway success.”  One can only hope this childishness will backfire on today’s precocious youngsters (especially home schoolers).  Maybe this series will be useful some day, to demonstrate what certain mad scientists believed in the early 21st century.  Young minds who don’t know better (especially some public schoolers) should be inoculated against raw propaganda and non-sequiturs like since life is found today in extreme environments, it must have evolved there.  Best give them a chance to learn basic logic first.
       Any scientific evidence presented in this series was irrelevant to the story line; every bit of it has been contested by other evolutionary scientists, as reported right here in these pages for four years now (follow the “origin of life” chain links to get a higher education than you will get by watching Origins).  Evolutionary theory, from earth science to abiogenesis to human evolution, is a string of just-so mythoids glued together with irrelevant factoids.  Once in awhile you catch them admitting it: yes, the deuterium to hydrogen ratio in comets differs from that in the oceans, so maybe Earth’s water was not delivered by comets (sure makes a good animation, though).  Yes, the origin of life is an “astonishing mystery that we don’t understand,” and the “leap from non-living chemicals to a living cell is staggeringly complex” (but that Miller experiment looks so cool, so Frankenstein).
       The myth, concocted in Fantasyland, thrives in Tomorrowland.  It’s not finding the answer, it’s wishing upon a star that matters.  Evolutionists, like Coronado on his quest for the seven gold cities, want to keep the dream alive, always out there around the next bend.  They rationalize their government-funded research as an adventurous quest to answer the great questions, to discover the secrets to our origins: which, being interpreted, means, they haven’t got a clue.  No matter; it’s not a product, it’s a process.  The goal, explaining everything without a Creator, must remain forever out of reach.  So Origins gives us process, becoming, futureware, unfulfilled promises, bluffing and dreams.  At every turn are the faith words: maybe, may have, perhaps, likely, controversial, debated, appears to, think, believe, seems like, could be, coulda, woulda, mighta.... Science?  No; mystery religion.  Its worship services are arrayed in glittering generalities, icons, reveries, and beatific visions of personified molecules lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps and wishing their way to manhood.
       If you watch reputable design-centric presentations like the Illustra Media films, you will see a fair and balanced presentation of both sides.  Creationists have debated the world’s leading evolutionists toe to toe on college campuses, and even against the home field advantage have usually won because they know more about the opposing view than its advocates do themselves.  But to its gross dishonor, nowhere does Origins even hint at a suggestion that any serious scientist or philosopher ever doubted naturalism or seriously considered that the orderliness of creation pointed to a all-wise Creator.  Tyson whimsically dismisses the straw man of Van Helmont’s 17th-century “recipe for life” (spontaneous generation of mice from wheat), totally ignoring millennia of the world’s greatest thinkers and scientists who have defended the view, with detailed logic, scientific evidence and refutation of counter-arguments, that life was designed.  This omission is so glaring, it is utterly inexcusable in a supposed educational “science” program.  Van Helmont’s spontaneous generation is more akin to today’s origin-of-life theories than to any credible design position.  It was Darwin and his disciples, not the creationists, were disappointed when Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation.
       Moreover, the first two episodes seemed to go out of their way to portray a world opposite the view of Bible-believing Christians and Jews, showing animation after animation of hellish lava and meteor impacts, stating emphatically, “early Earth was not a garden of Eden.”  Ignoring and dismissing any hint of a good or purposeful creation, it presented irrational beliefs dogmatically as fact: “life did arise from nonliving chemicals,” and “for over a hundred years, scientists have known that life is the result of chemistry.”  Nowhere was there any doubt about the alleged millions and billions of years, each date quoted as if they had a stopwatch running the whole time.  The whole series in fact, is built on the metaphor of a clock, on which all of earth history has been compressed into 24 hours.  Humankind, of course, appears late in the last few seconds of the day, uncaused, uncared for, a mere happenstance of a long and brutal cosmic arcade.  Science is supposed to be about observation.  Where’s the instant replay of this hypothesis so we can validate it?
       This one episode was so shoddy, so baloney-ridden, so unbalanced, so quirky, it should anger knowledgeable viewers enough to write PBS, NOVA, and the sponsors to complain that such mythology-as-fact was presented as if the only “scientific” approach to origins.  Let’s have a debate.  Let’s have the counter-evidence get a fair hearing.  Let’s watch The Privileged Planet and Icons of Evolution.  Let’s get some leading Design PhDs in the ring with Tyson and see who’s left standing when fair, unbiased judges call foul at cheap shots and enforce the rules of evidence.
       The credits show this program was funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation – your tax dollars at work.  It can only be hoped that this series, like Evolution before it, will flop as another wimpy hurrah of a dying religion on the verge of being tossed onto the dust-bin of discredited ideas.  Evolutionary theory, like a black-light poster, only glows in a dark room shielded from all but carefully selected, artificially-generated wavelengths.  It looks very different when the windows are opened and natural sunlight shines in.

3. Where Are the Aliens?  This episode imagines what life on other worlds might be like.

   Typical SETI sales pitch, with the usual suspects (Drake equation by Drake himself), and the usual mythoids spouted as fact: life is as simple as just add water, lots of planets means lots of life, asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs but gave mammals a chance, etc. – Tyson says without the asteroid extinction, a dinosaur might be hosting the show, and the animation cartoonists help our poor imaginations.  More “it’s true because I say so” posturing: “we know we got to this [scene of crowd in shopping mall with cell phones by their ears] from this [bacteria] by evolution.”
       You might learn tidbits about extrasolar planets and cephalopod camouflage here and there, and hearing Peter Ward of Rare Earth fame explain why he thinks advanced life is uncommon is a partial treat.  Other than that, the entire premise of this episode is a stack of evolutionary assumptions, held together with hope, stacked on the foundational assumption of naturalism, presented dogmatically and without rebuttal, with artwork substituting for evidence.  Can’t the Darwin Party change their tactics, now that we’ve blown their cover?  The sight of a naked emperor strutting around as if nobody notices his little secret is not pretty.
       More personification fallacy: “if carbon makes life happen....” [stop right there].  “If those other planets have caught the spark of life also....” [stop, I said].  The illogic gets so tiring: “Scientists haven’t figured out how that spark of life happened, but since it happened early on, maybe it’s not so hard.”  No hint that the most essential ingredient in life is information.  Watch this episode alongside The Privileged Planet and Unlocking the Mystery of Life.  No contest.  The silliness of the Origins series has one benefit: it makes a perfect foil for these two films, making their relevance and superior logic shine even more brightly.

4. Back to the Beginning.  This episode examines current thinking about the Big Bang theory.

   Yes, tell us all about the 97% of invisible stuff, the force that binds the universe together.  If it only has a dark side, how do evolutionists explain the origin of good?  Will Tyson be able to solve the Great Equation of Evolution, E = N_t x N_b?  (Nothing times nobody equals everything.)
       No luck.  Tyson spends most of the hour describing the historical search for the cosmic background radiation and slight irregularities within it.  As expected, the interpretations of the final data set from WMAP are hyped beyond all recognition (see 09/20/2004 headline).  A chef gives Tyson an intelligently designed stew, at which Tyson remarks that it is entirely analogous to what the stars cook up.  As Sagan 2004, Tyson really knows how to put the b in big, bang, and billion. 
       The episode provides some interesting historical and personal stories of scientists at work, but does little to answer the big questions the episode promised to address.  Instead, we are forced to listen to worn-out, personified cliches like “the baby picture of the universe” and “the birth pangs of the cosmos” and “we are all stardust.”  The animation team did a lot of work on this Fantasia, but we’d rather hear it put to music.  John Cage would be apropos.  How about 4'33", repeated endlessly?

Maybe PBS learned its lesson from October 2001 that the E word is a lightning rod.  Concepts are not mitigated by avoidance of loaded words and euphemisms.  Maybe Origins is gentler word, but this was nothing less than “PBS Evolution 2004” (See 09/28/2001 headline), and evolution was the last word Tyson uttered, with feeling.
    The series so far exhibits the perpetual sins of the Darwin Party: (1) just-so storytelling, (2) glittering generalities, (3) selective evidence, (4) bluffing (e.g., “How life began” when they haven’t a clue), and (5) empty promises (futureware).  The hype keeps Charlie’s disciples hoping for success in the snipe hunt for a naturalistic explanation for a universe that appears designed for a purpose.
    One aspect about Origins was predictable: the series only vaguely, when at all, hinted that the majority of the earth’s population believes, and always has believed, that the universe was designed for a purpose by an intelligent Creator.  Instead, it presented as fact the naturalistic philosophy believed by only 10-15% of the population that everything came from nothing.  Moreover, glossed over many serious flaws in the naturalistic scenario, and failed to give a fair hearing to competent scientists who could present valid alternatives.  We commented on this series in some depth, but it is really no different from the standard Darwinian propaganda pouring forth from PBS, the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, week after week, year after year.  The rules are: assume evolution, ignore alternatives, prohibit rebuttals, ridicule believers in God, tell stories, worship scientism, and fill in the evidential gaps (canyons) with artwork.  Sagan taught them well.
    The final lines in the final episode are the key to interpreting this series and the other Darwinian commercials.  It’s not about scientific evidence, because the closing lines are a classic case of stretching an inch of data into a light-year of interpretation.  No, it’s about religion: evolutionists are out to replace belief in intelligent design with naturalism, particularly the Biblical account of creation.  A lady astronomer makes it clear: we now have “a new version of Genesis, a new version of the great cosmic myth, only this time it is scientifically based.”  Other astronomers agree, stating that finally, within our enlightened grasp, a universe that was once seen as the domain of the gods is now explainable by an unbroken sequence of natural law acting on undirected particles, producing a great chain of being (welcome to the 18th century).  Tyson, staring into the camera, morphs into Carl Sagan claiming that this vast and wonderful universe, with all its life, is the result of “14 billion years of cosmic evolution.”  At least we’re getting younger; Sagan claimed it was 15 billion.
    If this kind of religious advocacy in the guise of science bothers you, why not do something about it?  Write letters and call your local PBS station.  Tell them you want to see a fair and balanced presentation of the evidence.  Be constructive; ask them to air The Privileged Planet and Unlocking the Mystery of Life alongside the Darwin Party’s propaganda.  We don’t want to muzzle the opposition like the Darwinists do, we want people to hear both sides, like Charlie advised, and think about the evidence.  Ask PBS to stage a debate; suggest that Tyson’s team face a matching team of qualified spokespersons for the intelligent design position.  Let them ask the right questions and put all the evidence on the table fairly, without stacking the deck.  Tell them the magic words that make any station manager light up: it will help ratings.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Origin of Life • Movies & Media

This is a small but important piece in a large puzzle of archaeological evidence that supports the historicity of the Pentateuch (the books of Moses).  Liberal scholars and skeptics have claimed that Moses could not have written such books; they assumed the books were compiled much later, after the Babylonian exile.  Artifacts like this show that quotations from the Pentateuch were in common knowledge and circulation centuries earlier.
Next headline on:  Bible • Dating Methods

Given the remaining uncertainties about migration rates and real-world mating patterns, the date of the MRCA [most recent common ancestor] for everyone living today cannot be identified with great precision.  Nevertheless, our results suggest that the most recent common ancestor for the world’s current population lived in the relatively recent past–perhaps within the last few thousand years.  And a few thousand years before that, although we have received genetic material in markedly different proportions from the people alive at the time, the ancestors of everyone on the Earth today were exactly the same.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Further work is needed to determine the effect of this common ancestry on patterns of genetic variation in structured populations.  But to the extent that ancestry is considered in genealogical rather than genetic terms, our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Notice the model converges on a few thousand years ago, not millions.  Such a date is closer to Noah than Lucy.  Care should be exercised interpreting what this means, because it is somewhat of a counterintuitive artifact of a mathematical model that makes certain assumptions.  Another counterintuitive result, Hein claims, is that “not many generations ago (about six), members of our pedigree existed that did not contribute to us genetically.”  The authors are not claiming that humankind popped into existence a few thousand years ago, but only that everyone alive today had the same ancestors.  Can the same models be applied to guppies, tigers and oak trees?  Hein points to additional interesting questions that will require further refinement of models and the combining of pedigree and genetic ancestry information.  One question he asks is, “In the idealized models, how far back would one have to go to find a single couple who are the lone ancestors of everybody?” to which we might add, “and did their names start with A and E?”
    We can’t judge how valid is Professor Rohdes’ computer model, but it is interesting that this was not published by Answers in Genesis, but by Nature and by researchers from MIT and Yale – not institutions particularly interested in validating Biblical chronology.  It calls into question evolutionary assumptions about human pedigrees stretching back tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.  It also means that all those “racial” differences between people are superficial and must be of recent origin.  Like AIG has emphasized in its Biblical creationist answer to racism, we truly are of “one blood,” just as Paul told the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill (Acts 17).
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods • Bible

Astrobiologists are filled with vibrant faith that life emerged from the bowels of hellish conditions, on Earth and on Mars both.  It was a constant theme on the PBS Origins program (see 09/13/2004 headline).  No evidence is required for this religion, just lots of maybes.  That’s why we need these spacecraft and rovers to keep patiently, silently gathering data.  Data have a way of putting dampers on wild speculations.
    The lesson from ASPERA-3 is that the solar wind is a destructive process.  It’s hard to say how long it would have taken to erode Mars’ atmosphere, because nobody was there to see how thick it was at the beginning, and when or if it had a global magnetic field.  Suffice it to say Earth would be similarly in danger if it were not for our global magnetic field protecting us.  That’s one of many factors that should make us consider the meaning of our existence on a very privileged planet.
Next headline on:  Mars • Physics

This story goes to show that even observable, measurable, present-day processes can be complex and can give rise to counterintuitive interpretations.  How, then, can Darwinists write so glibly about prehistoric events and processes?  Conventional wisdom would say the more trees the better.  Maybe not; maybe it depends on the tree.  The article states that certain species, like sweet gum and fast-growing pines, give off more VOCs than others, and suggest that old-growth forests are not as polluting.  Many other factors could be involved: temperature, parasites, ground cover, sunlight, geography, fire history, or even the presence or absence of animals and fungi or other ecological relationships.  Los Angeles was described as hazy long before the automobile arrived.  No one can say for sure at this point how much humans are to blame for influencing the complex factors that contribute to VOCs, Nox, ozone production and air pollution.  Beware the either-or fallacy: i.e., trees are all good, humans are all bad.  Recall the proverb that complex problems can have easy-to-understand, common-sense, simple, wrong answers.  We still have much to learn.  Maybe VOCs are not all that bad for health.  There must be a reason why the sweet smell of a forest makes us want to breathe in slow and deep, close our eyes, and say “Aahhhhh.”
Next headline on:  Plants • Politics and Ethics

• A Nature editorial¹ urged Germany to get over its hangups about its Nazi past and move forward.  Referring to a recent position paper by the National Ethics Council, the editorial states, “Its cautious tone illustrates how slow has been the evolution of attitudes towards the sanctity of life, which have been so deeply influenced by the Nazi abuse of genetics.  In no other Western country is the spectrum of attitudes towards cloning so narrow, and so skewed towards conservatism.”  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
• Michael Gross, editorializing in Current Biology,² similarly urged Germany to follow the UK’s lead in liberalizing stem-cell research policy, even though two-thirds of the public oppose doing so.  He regrets that “those who believe that Christian morality rules out any research with human embryos insist that the current restrictive legislation should not be touched or even debated at all,” because “The trouble is that any further delay will contribute to the brain drain and help to slow down German biotech.”
• Gretchen Vogel in Science has reported twice recently on the controversy.  In the Sept. 10 issue,³ she analyzed California’s Proposition 71, which seeks $3 billion in state bonds to fund embryonic stem cell research.  The qualms about cost and morals are set against economic benefits and predicted treatments for disease.  She quotes promoters who “argue that tax revenues and royalties from companies spun off from new discoveries will help offset the $6 billion it will cost to pay off the bonds over 30 years.  ‘You could think of it as an intellectual stimulus package,’ [Fred] Gage [Salk Institute] says.”  In the Sept. 24 issue,⁴ Vogel discussed the arguments in Europe over who gets to patent stem cell discoveries.
• Giuseppe Testa and John Harris discuss ethical questions of using embryonic stem cells (ES) for reproductive therapies in the Sep. 17 issue of Science.⁵  Pragmatics include benefits for same-sex couples and infertile couples being able to have genetically-derived children: “We suggest that from an ethical and legal perspective, this procedure is most appropriately framed as a therapeutic intervention to treat infertility.  It replaces in vitro the physiologic function normally responsible for reprogramming the germline genome, analogously to the well-established medical technologies that replace other deficient bodily functions,” (not that social parenthood should lose preeminence, they are quick to add).  This is not human “cloning” – it’s more like modified in-vitro fertilization.  The social implications are important, however: “The possibility of an all-male or all-female couple’s being able to have a child sharing the genetic make-up of both parents in virtually the same way as for heterosexual couples is thought-provoking and can be used as a lens through which to discern our attitudes toward parenting and family, as well as our notions of what is ‘natural.’”  As long as safety is preserved, such techniques are no less natural than medical practice itself, they argue. 
• David Baltimore (Caltech president), in an editorial in Science Sept. 24,⁶ targeted the Bush administration for what he feels have been politically-motivated, anti-science policies.  These included positions on HIV/AIDS (not enough support for condoms; see 07/15/2004 headline) and global warming (not enough support for the international policy), as well as ES stem cell research (Bush’s “arbitrary decision” to restrict research to existing cell lines).  He suggests two motivations that, in his opinion, have been preventing the administration from letting “policies track the science” – i.e.,“either religious conservatism or economically based political caution.”
• The team that cloned Dolly the sheep is now seeking to clone a human embryo, reports the BBC News.  Does this represent crossing the ethical line of no return?  A representative of the Church of Scotland lauded the intent to find a cure for motor neuron disease, but said that cloning a human embryo to the blastocyst stage and then destroying it “raises big ethical issues.”

The advice of the politically-savvy voter holds true here: follow the money trail.  The advocates of ES research are straining to find moral rationalizations for creating human beings for the purpose of destroying them, while the underlying drumbeat is always money, priority and prestige.  Big Science is concerned about who will be first, not who will be right.  Individual scientists who promote it have Nobel Prize dollars in their sights.
    Adult stem cells already have many successes, with no ethical problems, while ES stem cells have none, and many practical and ethical problems.  On empty promises of wonder cures, Californians are being asked to dole out $6 billion of tax money in an already-overtaxed state, climbing out of a severe deficit, to feed the Big Science appetite for glory.  If this is such a good investment, why not ask Bill Gates for a few tens of billions?  Why should taxpayers be forced to fund what might many of them find morally reprehensible?
    Baltimore’s anti-Bush article (see also 08/24/2003 headline) and all the others are liberal down the line, reinforcing our assertion that Big Darwinian Science is indistinguishable from political liberalism (see 08/05/2004 commentary).  He merely assumes that the liberal positions on AIDS, global warming and stem cells are the “scientific” ones, and that opponents are motivated only by “religious conservatism.”  Proposition: Big Darwinian Science is motivated by political liberalism.  Why let them get away with the opposite statement?
    Notice also the openly liberal gay agenda advanced by Testa and Harris, and their willingness to redefine what is natural by letting two gay men clone their genes to have a kid (a female womb is just a commodity they have to borrow for the procedure).  This is a “therapeutic intervention to treat infertility”?  What kind of doubletalk is this?  Two men can’t have babies; that is the law of nature; that is not “infertility.”  In this brave new world, where words mean anything you want, why not redefine cannibalism as natural while we’re at it?  After all, you are what you eat, and with a little help from medical science, the procedure could be made both safe and wholesome (see 08/28/2003 commentary).
    To liberals, “Christian morality” is the evil.  It’s the meddling obstacle in the way of scientific progress.  As the ghost of Mengele vanishes in the fog of political rhetoric (see 04/22/2004 headline), maybe the world would be better off if we followed the progressive lead of North Korea.  After all, their little god Kim Jong Il has no such Christian morals standing in his way of experimenting on humans, embryonic or adult (see this BBC News story).  The “evolution” of his “attitudes towards the sanctity of life” has been rapid, and the brain drain very effective.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

• William R. Fouts (Nevada State) was not amused by the Kipling reference, because he viewed their paper as “an important example of natural selection in the wild” and thought the title was a poor choice of words.  He thought they should have examined the possibility of preadaptation: i.e., maybe the horns grew out of a nub that once upon a time appeared on the back of the lizard’s neck.
• John H. Christy (Smithsonian) thinks the authors did not prove that the longer horns function in defense against shrike predation.  In his opinion, therefore, the authors’ explanation for the adaptive function of the horns is still a just-so story.
• R. Yosef described how shrikes actually kill their prey, and then whimsically remarked, “I suggest that the parietal horns developed as a defense against shrike attacks to the nape region and not against their being impaled after they are dead,”  because clearly, “it does not make evolutionary sense for a trait to be incorporated into a prey species, as a result of a predator’s behavior, that results in all cases in its death (i.e., the impaling stage).”

Here was a rare, valiant attempt at providing just one clear, unambiguous association between a trait and a survival advantage, and even their fellow evolutionists were not convinced.  So what are the rest of us supposed to think about the validity of adaptive stories in the Darwinian tradition?
    The critics’ points were pointless as far as helping Darwin.  A nub turns into a horn, right.  Silly.  For support of the “preadaption” or “exaptation” hypothesis, Fouts refers to the panda’s thumb and tetrapod limbs (see 04/05/2004 headline).  How does said nub get into the genome and developmental pathways, and become established in the population before it functions in defense?  Darwinism allows no foresight, yet Fouts argues:

Perhaps the role of preadaptation in evolution is of great importance and is deserving of more widespread appreciation.  Given the possibility of a preadaptation scenario in the evolution of crown horns in horned lizards, I find it ironic that Young et al. commented on the weakness of “just-so stories” and also chose a title that reads remarkably like the titles of Kipling’s stories.  Until presented with evidence suggesting that the horns were mere nubs until the onset of shrike predation, I will remain convinced that “How the horned lizard got its horns” is a poor choice for what is presumably meant to be an informative title.

Sheesh, think the authors; can’t a guy take a joke?  Their response undermines the hope of proving a trait arose by evolution:

The question of whether any horns on the head of horned lizards existed before shrike predation drove them to elongated states (i.e., were “preadapted”) is an interesting one, but one that is only answerable through comparative analyses with full phylogenetic information and ancestral environmental conditions.  Although we have not performed such an analysis and could probably never reconstruct the ancestral predation conditions, it is worth noting that of the 13 species of horned lizards currently extant, P. mcalli has the longest relative horn lengths and belong to the most derived species group, while some other species in the genus (e.g., P. douglassi) have virtually no parietal or squamosal horns (i.e., the nubs mentioned by Fouts).

So how did the nub-challenged lizards get along?  If nubs are cool, every lizard would want some, especially when the shrikes are dive-bombing down on their necks.  Yikes!  Shrikes!  Man your nub stations!  (Or do they say, “lizard your nub stations”?)  It’s survival of the nubbiest.  May the best nubs win!
    The authors agreed with Christy’s comments, but in so doing, again undermined any hope of providing a Darwinian explanation for anything:

Christy correctly points out the two primary shortcomings of any covariance analysis of selection: It is impossible to rule out every unknown unmeasured character that could drive the observed selection, and covariance analyses usually cannot assign a mechanism of selection because they are not manipulative studies.

Yosef didn’t get it, either.  Of course they didn’t mean that selection acted after the lizard was impaled on the tree; they merely assumed that longer horns prevented attacks in the first place.  Obviously, they couldn’t ask the shrikes how they feel about the effectiveness of the horns, so they relied on personal experience.  Visualize the scientist at work: “When attacked or grasped, flat-tailed horned lizards stab their spines into the offending object.  In the case of human fingers, this behavior often results in bleeding and immediate release of the lizard.”  Ha!  This obviously means they evolved to ward off junior-age kids.
    So yes, as entertainment, the original article and the criticisms are “clearly over the top.”  Why do you think the Darwin Party is so sensitive to the charge of storytelling?  Guilty conscience?  We feel honored to be included among those who, in the spirit of promoting good science, often use the phrase “just-so stories” as a “shorthand criticism for unsubstantiated adaptive arguments.”  Grab your baloney detector and join the fun.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Terrestrial Zoology

In research published in the Sept. 27 edition of the Journal of Cell Biology, Longo proposes that aging is programmed so that the majority of a population dies prematurely to provide nutrients for the sake of a few individuals who have acquired the genetic mutations that increase their chances of reproduction.

Longo said he realizes that this theory goes against the fundamental theories of evolution, which is why he took 10 years to publish, combing through scientific papers dating back to the 1870s to learn about the genesis of the theory of natural selection and speaking with prominent evolutionary biologists about his ideas.
    “I wanted them to tell me, ‘No, you’re wrong and here’s why.’  I never got that,” he said....
    “We’re not saying Darwin was wrong.  We’re just saying that there appear to be some big missing pieces in his theory,” Longo said.

Sargent Williams, discipline Private Longo; he has stepped out of line (see 05/31/2004.  No disrespect for General Charlie is permitted.
    Longo’s story is the plot calling the prattle black, because his own hypothesis lacks genetic or developmental basis for tying an outward benefit to inheritance.  Like individual selection, it fails to explain how new information is added to the genome, and worse, it leaves hanging how a aging population would inform its young that wish to sacrifice themselves for the good of the species.  Haven’t they heard that grandparents provide an evolutionary benefit? (see 07/23/2004 headline).  So how can the grandparents transfer their wisdom if they commit hara kiri?
    This tall tale would be funny if its implications weren’t so dreadful: i.e., that evolution has programmed the elderly to drop dead so the young can have food enough to reproduce.  Anyway, it’s refreshing to see someone doubting Charlie, even if it took him a decade to work up the nerve.  In the end, however, it signifies little else than two storytellers accusing each other of not telling the whole story.  Little do they know how right they are on that point.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

1. Coping:  EurekAlert tells about a University of Washington study that concluded, “Americans had strong need for spiritual support following 9/11 attacks.”  Strangely, Christians and Jews, who believed in forgiveness, seemed to do better than Muslims who believed in retaliation.  Bosnian refugees prayed, but asked that their enemies “pay for what they’ve done.”  The report concludes, “Those who relied on positive religious coping prayer had higher levels of optimism while those who used negative religious coping had reduced levels of hope.”
2. Happiness:  Another story on EurekAlert was entitled, “Wealth does not create individual happiness and it doesn’t build a strong country, either.”  The study by the American Psychological Society found that Maasai tribespeople in Africa, living in mud huts, seemed happier than many affluent Americans.  The article quotes the authors: “While wealth has trebled over the past 50 years... well-being has been flat, mental illness has increased at an even more rapid rate, and data, not just nostalgic reminiscences, indicate that the social fabric is more frayed than it was in leaner times.”  It continues, “Prosperity is neither the answer nor the cause of satisfaction.”

The only value in the “science” of psychology seems to be the gathering of statistics, but even those can be biased.  These researchers could have saved a lot of time by just reading the Bible.  The good book teaches us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek, and warns against vindictiveness.  It stresses the need for forgiveness and looking to the Lord for hope.  Jesus said that our life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions.  None of these things requires a scientific research program, but it is unlikely they would have received grant money for looking up Scripture passages.  Anyone who thinks a psychologist will provide better therapy than time spent with the Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace should get his head examined.
Next headline on:  Theology

This is a good chance to study both sides of an issue and do some baloney detecting.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design

More than 100 scholars packed the academy’s opulent, wood-paneled Grande Salle to witness the first face-to-face gathering of the discoverers of the three oldest putative hominids.  In talks and a panel discussion, the researchers discussed whether Orrorin and other contenders for the title of earliest human ancestor walked upright and in what manner.  Bipedalism is a traditional hallmark of membership in the human family rather than being an ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas, or quadrupedal apes.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

White accepts that Orrorin walked upright and so is one of the first members of the hominid family.  But he says Senut has offered little evidence as to Orrorin’s gait.  “Was it human, an Australopithecus pattern, or something different?” he asked.  Even standard x-rays would help answer that question.  As the discussion grew more heated, White called Senut’s displacement of australopithecines “une position créationniste,” because it suggests that Orrorin’s femur was quite modern 6 million years ago, rather than evolving in stages.
    Senut declared indignantly that she is not a creationist—and then asked White to provide his own evidence about the mysterious Ardipithecus ramidus.

Thank you, Ann, for this amusing account of the turf wars in Paris and the demise of evolutionary paleoanthropology.  Do you realize how funny this is?  It is hilarious partly because they take themselves so seriously.  They are fighting over whose fragments of vanity win the prize for best tall tale, and to have it climax in one of them calling the other the C word, well, that’s too much.  For more whoppers, just follow the chain links on Early Man for the last four years.
    Remember, it was Ann Gibbons who told us 02/15/2002 about yo-yo evolution, the burning branching bush and that the definition of a hominid going into the trash.  They’re apparently still digging through trash for evidence to prop up Chairman Charlie’s story.  Instead, they find evidence that suggests to them the dreaded C word.    Q.E.D.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Stand back: it won’t be a pretty sight when their heads explode.  Their whole tale hangs on the belief that natural selection can perform miracles of engineering design on demand, whenever and wherever needed.  Wait till they find out it is blind, deaf, dumb, and has no track record (see 08/03/2004 editorial, and the 07/23/2004, 06/09/2004 and 04/15/2004 headlines, for instance).  Stand back and turn around.  The Engineer is in the opposite direction.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Most biologists would scoff at the idea that their subject is simply applied quantum mechanics.  But for some enzymes – the catalysts of biology – quantum effects may be an important part of the way they work [see 09/16/2004 headline].  This revelation has left chemists and biologists arguing about whether enzymes have evolved to do this, or whether the effect would happen regardless of the enzymes’ activity.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

It’s a sign someone is so drunk on his worldview that he has lost touch with reality when he incorporates the lingo of his opponents and fails to see the contradiction.  Ball cannot use the word design, nor the word ingenuity.  He is a naturalist, a materialist, and the realm of ideas cannot be circumscribed by material substances and remain ideas.
    Like Ball, the astronomer Robert Jastrow is also a materialist.  Jastrow defined materialism in the Q&A section of the new film The Privileged Planet (see 09/01/2004 headline) as follows: “I believe the world consists entirely of material substances, and when you specify those substances, the atoms and molecules, and the laws by which they interact, you’ve done it all; there isn’t anything more to be said or to enter into your model of the universe.”
    A materialist is forced to explain the illusion of ideas in terms of atoms and forces, like trying to explain love in terms of the photons that reach a man’s retina when he sees a woman, and the neural responses and biochemical reactions that result.  But this approach commits the self-referential fallacy.  C. S. Lewis pointed out that if love can be explained via brain biochemistry, so can explanations.  Therefore, one has no way to judge whether his explanation is true, because the idea of truth is merely a complex interaction of molecules (see 06/16/2004 and 06/03/2004 headlines).
    Evolutionists commit this fallacy all the time.  They shift seamlessly between strict materialism and pantheism.  Pantheism is merely a cloak for materialism; it allows a materialist to personify nature and equivocate with terms like design and ingenuity, when such terms fall within the realm of ideas.  Evolutionists cannot see that they are assigning the attributes of deity to material substances: intelligent design, wisdom, and autonomous self-existence.  To be consistent, they could never assume that natural selection designs anything with uncanny ingenuity.  When they do, they illogically make nature into a god.
    Jastrow saw this.  He began with the quote shown on the top right of this page, then said “I’m what’s called in philosophy a materialist” and defined it as quoted above.  Then he continued: “That’s what my science tells me, and I’ve been a scientist all my life, but I find it unsatisfactory; in fact, it makes me uneasy.  I feel that I’m missing something.”  Jastrow, author of God and the Astronomers, a book that illustrated the discomfort other materialist astronomers felt when confronted with evidence for a beginning to the universe, is now an elderly man.  Sadly, having rejected the only answer that fits the evidence – supernaturalism – he ended his comments, “but I will not find out what I’m missing within my lifetime.”  Would that he had followed C. S. Lewis’s logic, that a longing for meaning that cannot be satisfied by anything in this world must have an object beyond it.  At least Jastrow feels the hangover.  Ball is apparently too drunk on materialism to feel anything.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Children are too complex for experiments like this to be completely trustworthy, with so many variables to consider, but any parent should instinctively know this makes sense.  Stop depriving kids by confining them to zoos of smog, concrete, electronic gadgets and traffic noise, and then punishing them with drugs if they get rowdy.  For their health, give them space in the environment they were made for: in touch with the wonders of nature, with time to see beautiful things and reflect on their Creator’s wisdom.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  Here’s another thousand for a bonus, and some teacher/parent tips for places to go and things to do.  What a healthy idea: Creation Safaris for kids.
Next headline on:  Health

And for that groaner, Deborah is a nominee for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  Evolution does not optimize anything.  It only can eliminate things that are not already optimized.  For an example of how optimized chloroplasts are for photosynthesis, read about how they make use of quantum mechanics to squeeze every bit of energy out of light in the 09/16/2004 entry.  No wonder human engineers would like to borrow such intelligent design rather than try to produce it from scratch.
    The industrial revolution proceeded by trying to do things from scratch.  Men took iron and copper and oil out of the ground, learned the laws of steam and thermodynamics and electricity, and built heavy, clunky inefficient machines that got the job done only with a huge expenditure of entropy.  An incandescent light bulb, for instance, is horrendously wasteful compared to the cold light produced by bioluminescent bacteria.  How humbling to see that the optimal solutions to light, flight, lubrication, energy, materials, propulsion, signalling and many other technologies have surrounded us all this time.  If intelligent designers are now trying to imitate the designs in nature, how can anyone claim that nature arrived at such fully optimized designs without purpose, guidance or intelligence?  The 21st century may see such illogical beliefs tossed onto the intellectual junkyard, as The Design Revolution gathers momentum.
Next headline on:  Plants • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

This is all going to sound so silly some day, if not evil, much the way we view the phrenological and racist views of Haeckel and the social Darwinists.  Why does Bruce Bower give these guys two pages of good press in Science News?  Thank goodness for a few halfway clear heads like Smith.  Are we supposed to be impressed that Wynn and Coolidge “remain unfazed” by their critics?  These mythmakers need a change of faze.  Their “speculative” silly tale would make a reasonable person blush.
    Notice again that everything you were taught about Neandertals is wrong.  No longer is there any clear identity between them and their supposed superior out-of-Africa brethren, any more than there is between Eskimo hunters and lazy professors wasting government grant money.  Since the story is “up for grabs,” Bowers should publish our alternative view: Darwinites evolved from ancient Homo sapiens when a mutation turned them into storytellers.  This is at least as sensible as any other fable going around in the halls of anthropological academia.  We think it makes much better sense, too: instead of doing real work like respectable Neandertals, the pre-Darwinites just sat around the campfire telling racist jokes and inventing tales about how superior they were to their skilled, smart, fit, hard-working brethren who had no time for such nonsense.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Maybe the termites in your walls are trying to tell you something: “This is no way to build a house!  Watch us.”  We humans tend to build rectangular things.  The free-form design of termite mounds strikes us as sloppy or makeshift, when really there is a deeper design that provides more efficiency, if we would only shake off our miter-box chauvinism.
    Some “cave men” have lived in structures that look remarkably like termite mounds and possess some of the same benefits.  In Cappadocia in the land of Turkey, people have lived in natural cone-shaped caves for thousands of years (click here for pictures and history).  The dwellings are “naturally air-conditioned; cool in hot summers and warm and easy to heat in harsh winters,” according to the Hidden Turkey travel site.  (For wonderful photos of these dwellings, order the Turkey CD-Rom from Bible Places.)  If the trend in biomimetics (engineering that imitates nature) continues, wouldn’t it be an interesting skyline to see New York as a cluster of buildings resembling termite mounds.
    This otherwise interesting story is marred by Darwinite hot air that adds nothing but halitosis:

• “Mounds built by highly-evolved African termites could inspire new types of building that are self-sufficient, environmentally friendly and cheap to run.”
• “Furthermore, the termites have evolved in such a way that they out source some biological functions, for example, digestive functions to a fungus that they farm inside the mound.”
• “In fact, in physiological terms, the termites have evolved to outsource many of their homeostatic functions, such as thermo-regulation, respiration, moisture regulation, and even digestion, into the mound structure itself.”

As usual, the Darwinites fail to tell us how these termites came up with their efficient and intelligent designs by chance, but just assume they did so, somehow out there on the hot plains of Africa.  Apparently necessity is the mother of emergence (see 02/25/2003 commentary).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Now I’m worried.  What are all those little details that don’t make it into the literature?  You can count on it: the “picking and choosing” that Kerr admitted is only the tip of the iceberg.  To be fair, the U-Pb differences between the teams only amount to a small percent.  But to arrive at the millions-of-years dates at all, dates that justify the modern consensus for the geologic column (see 05/21/2004 headline), they have to toss out many other dating methods that produce far younger dates by orders of magnitude.  Those dates are not interesting because they do not support the Darwinian evolutionary timescale; therefore they are “obviously wrong.”  Obviously.  That’s why they must pick and choose.
    Radioactive dating was supposed to be as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, a highly constrained, well understood physical mechanism for dating old things.  That’s what we learned in high school and on the Discovery Channel.  Now they tell us they have been picking and choosing the samples they want and tossing out over half the rest?  Even if Mundil threw out only 3 of his 79 samples, we want to know if those three had a story to tell: on what basis did he assume they were “obviously too old”?  How can we know the 79 he used were not also obviously too old, at least to someone without Darwin glasses on?  Sometimes the most interesting science is in the data the conventional wisdom tosses out.  The stone that the builders rejected sometimes becomes the cornerstone of a new paradigm.  Instead, the subjective practices of researchers, secretly trying to turn lead into the “gold standard of geochronology,” appear more like a modern form of alchemy than modern science.
    When they don’t get what they want, they turn up the heat.  What did two days of red-hot heating, pressure and treatment with hydrofluoric acid do to the samples?  How can we be convinced this was “the big breakthrough” if an admirer admits he has no idea how it works? (which, being translated, means “I have no idea if it works”).  Remember, they are talking about “vanishingly small” bits of radioactive material to begin with, and then heating and acid-washing some of it away.  What can samples tell you under this kind of torture?  Here’s what we suggest they are saying: “Stop!  (Gasp!  Ouch!)  I give up!  I’ll give you any date you want!”
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Physics • Geology

This illustrates the damage that can be done by pre-announcing a discovery before any facts are gathered.  The satellite photo McGivern had was much too vague.  Whether his guide is a man of integrity or not could have been moot if he indeed was able to lead them to a ship on the mountain.  Lacking proof, one has no science, just hypothesis and suggestive leads.  When the promised evidence doesn’t arrive after the media fanfare, the opponents can have a field day.  This fiasco could hurt future attempts to explore the mountain.
    It’s not McGivern’s fault that the Turkish government refused his request for a permit, but every would-be explorer can learn a lesson from this episode.  In a rare show of wisdom, wicked old King Ahab warned his enemy, “Let not the one who puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off” (I Kings 20:11).  Next time, keep away from the press until you’ve got the goods in hand.  That goes for you, too, National Geographic (see 03/18/2003 headline).
    For a wealth of material, photos and news on the search for Noah’s Ark, see NoahsArkSearch.com.
Next headline on:  Bible

We find the WMAP data to have maxima that are significantly colder and minima that are significantly warmer than predicted by Monte Carlo simulation.  For almost all simulations, we have 95% confidence that the mean of the WMAP hot spots or cold spots is in a 5% tail of the Monte Carlo distribution.  In one case, we are 99% confident that the maxima statistic is in a 1% tail.  Since we find the same lack of extreme temperature when we use the directly measured WMAP power spectrum, we are not simply restating that the WMAP power spectrum has a lack of power at large angular scales.  The effect is independent of the galactic mask or power spectrum used....
    Our results may not be a detection of primordial non-Gaussianity.  They could still be an effect of the WMAP instrument or data pipeline not modeled in our simulations or an as yet undiscovered foreground.  Our result is still highly significant.  We have detected something, whether it is primordial non-Gaussianity or some other effect in the data.  Having anomalous mean temperature values for the maxima and minima in both the north and the south ecliptic hemispheres is unlikely to occur if the WMAP data were consistent with theoretical expectations.
  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Always read the fine print after the bluffing whirlwind of hot air has subsided.  Evolutionary theories, both biological and cosmological, are like dust devils.  They attract attention for awhile, but perceptive readers examine what material was weighty enough afterwards to remain on solid ground.
Next headline on:  Cosmology

This means also that future missions such as the Space Interferometry Mission and Terrestrial Planet Finder may not be able to assume that the detection of methane is an indicator of the presence of life on a distant planet.  Nor could Cassini scientists assume that methane at Titan was a precursor to biology.
Next headline on:  Mars • Geology • Physics