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

This article illustrates many of the persistent sins of the Darwin Party when faced with uncooperative data.

• Stretch the rates of evolution to fit the data to the preconceived belief.
• Change the nomenclature as needed.
• Invent terms like convergent evolution to whitewash weaknesses in the story.
• Assume complexity arose even farther back in time, and say it just emerged somehow.
• Conjure up imaginative ancestors for which there is no fossil record.
• Speak of evolution in matter-of-fact, eyewitness news terms.
• Spin each new damaging piece of evidence positively: say it provides new insight into evolution.
• Use the phrase must have as glue to hold the story together.
• Claim that future evidence will make the picture clearer (apparently 160 years was not enough).
• Assume evolution no matter what the evidence says.  Allow no negotiation about the “fact” of evolution.

Reread the article above with this list in mind, and decide with your own eyes, guilty or not guilty?
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Such a large number of interactions that the cell has to deal with can be regulated within the supraspliceosome.  Having the native spliceosomes as the building blocks of this large macromolecular assembly, this large number of interactions can be compartmentalized into each intron that is being processed.  At the same time, the whole supraspliceosome enables the communication between the native spliceosomes, which is needed for regulated splicing.  The organization of the supraspliceosome, like other macromolecular assemblies that exist as preformed entities, avoids the necessity to recruit the multitude of splicing components each time the spliceosome turns over.  In that sense, the overall coordination of the cellular interactions is reduced from the hard work of repeatedly placing each piece in the correct position of the puzzle to the relatively simpler work of coordinating the preformed puzzle.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Can’t get enough of these molecular machines.  And can’t repeat often enough that the more detail a scientific paper reveals about the complex workings inside the cell, the less they have to say about evolution.  Quiz: how many times was evolution mentioned in this paper?  Answer: zilch, zero, nada.  They didn’t even say, “watch this space.” (see 09/08/2004 commentary).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

I struggled with basic QM at the university.  Don’t tell me a bacterium figured out graduate-level quantum mechanical engineering on its own.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts

This story forms a good example of how the intelligent design approach is good for science.  Notice, first of all, how the wrong approach was to consider the soluble RNA as “junk.”  An ID scientist would think instead that these molecules are there for a purpose and have some role to play.  It took a pursuit based on belief in design to find the truth.  For Hoagland, the pursuit was empirical: observing what actually happened.  For Crick, it was theoretical: investigating how things should happen inside the black box, given the DNA template in the nucleus and the protein chain in the ribosome.  The adaptor hypothesis was a “brilliant imaginative leap,” Hoagland calls it, because it reasoned that an underlying design was required to produce an ordered result.
    The personal beliefs of the scientists about evolution or creation did not enter into the picture as long as they used the logic of intelligent design in their approach: effects must have a cause, and design is empirically detectable apart from one’s religious beliefs.  The key to Crick’s insight was the realization that nucleotides and amino acids, having no chemical affinities, must become recognizable to one another during the process of translation.  Notice how that word recognizable implies design, in the same sense a programmer designs a printer driver to enable the computer to recognize it.  Without the driver interface, the computer and the printer would have no natural affinity.  Transfer RNA and its synthetases form a complex suite of adaptors or translators that, like interpreters, understand two languages, the language of nucleotides and the language of proteins (see 06/09/2003 and 04/29/2003 headlines).  Although it is unknown Crick reasoned this way at the time, the logical inference based on uniform experience is that anything that can translate one code into another must have had an intelligent cause.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons Crick later became a proponent of the panspermia hypothesis.  Since life appears too complex to have formed by chance, it must have been put here by intelligent designers.  One would only wish Crick, who died in July, had reasoned further that they, too, must have been designed, and continued his reasoning back to an uncaused First Cause.
    The discovery of transfer RNA gives us two lessons in the value of intelligent design in science.  First (despite his personal evolutionary philosophy), Crick’s “adaptor hypothesis” presupposed an inherent design in the process of DNA translation, and Hoagland’s experiments presupposed a function for what others were calling junk.  Second, the tRNA and the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase families provide prima facie evidence of intelligent design by their ability to translate one coded information storage system into another, resulting in information-rich functional machinery.  A picture is worth a thousand words.  Watch tRNA at work in the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life.  The animation of DNA translation and protein synthesis provides a five-minute, permanent cure for hallucinations caused by tripping out on Charlie’s Angle Dust (see 09/12/2004 commentary).
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Intelligent Design

Peering Into Paley’s Black Box: The Gears of the Biological Clock    09/15/2004
William Paley’s famous “watchmaker argument” for the existence of a Designer, though intuitively logical to many, has been criticized by naturalists on the grounds that one cannot compare mechanical devices to biological ones.  Biological “contrivances” might operate on totally different principles than mechanical ones made by humans we know.
    Michael Behe’s 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box was built on the theme that, until recently, the living cell was a “black box” to biologists: i.e., a system whose inner workings lay hidden from us.  But now with the rapid advances in molecular biology, we are finding the cell to be a complex factory of molecular machines.
    These themes of Paley and Behe seemingly converge in a commentary by Susan S. Golden (Texas A&M) in PNAS about biological clocks.¹  Golden works at the Center for Research on Biological Clocks in the Texas A&M Biology Department, and was struck by recent findings in two other papers in PNAS on the circadian rhythms of “primitive” blue-green algae (cyanobacteria).  To her, they suggested we are opening the black box of biological clocks, and finding treasures that look remarkably familiar to the clocks we know:

A physiological black box is to a biologist what an ornately decorated package is to a small child: a mysterious treasure that promises delightful toys within. With fitting elan, a small community of scientists has ripped open the packaging of the cyanobacterial circadian clock, compiled the parts list, examined the gears, and begun to piece together the mechanism.  Over the past 2 years, the 3D molecular structures have been solved for the core components of the cyanobacterial circadian clock: KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC.  In a surprisingly literal analogy to mechanical timepieces, the protein that seems to be at the heart of the clock mechanism, KaiC, forms a hexameric ring that even looks like a cog: the escape wheel, perhaps.  Previous work has shown that KaiC has an autophosphorylation activity, and that the presence of KaiA and KaiB modulates the extent to which KaiC is phosphorylated. In this issue of PNAS, Nishiwaki et al. biochemically identify two amino acid residues on KaiC to which phosphoryl groups covalently attach, and show the necessity in vivo of a phosphorylation-competent residue at these positions.  By searching the crystal structure for evidence of phosphorylated sites, Xu et al. pinpoint a third residue that may “borrow” the phosphoryl group dynamically.  Together, their work contributes richly to our understanding of what makes the gears mesh and turn to crank out a 24-h timing circuit....
    Because each of these components (at minimum) is a dimer [composite of two molecular chains], KaiC is known to be a hexamer [composite of six chains], and other proteins may be present as well, the cyanobacterial clock can be thought of as an organelle unto itself: a “periodosome” that assembles and disassembles during the course of a day, defining the circadian period.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Identification of other potential components of the periodosome, intracellular localization of the clock parts, and elucidation of other potential modifications all may yield gears that are required to smoothly tick away the time and ensure that daughter cells do not run fast or slow.
    The cyanobacterial clock box, no longer black, is a chest filled with bioluminescence and attractive toys.  Putting together the pieces to design a clock is a tedious task, but S. elongatus is a gracious host, and the guests at the party are hard at work.

Green makes no mention of evolution in this commentary, and has no need of that hypothesis.  Even granting her some poetic license in her use of the clock metaphors of gears, cogs and escape wheels ticking away, who could deny that Paley, after so many years of ridicule, has been vindicated?  Yes, Dick Dawkins, a watch indeed demands a Watchmaker, and if anyone is blind, it is the one ascribing blindness to the Artificer.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

It’s instructive that the promised land into which God led the Israelites, a country He called a good land, the holy land, is a land of hills and valleys.  To get anywhere in Israel in Bible times you had to go up and down a lot.  We can assume the Manufacturer knew that vigorous, aerobic activity is a necessary ingredient for health and happiness.  It’s still true today.  The difference is that now, with all our cushy travel conveniences, we have to make an effort to get out and walk.  Vigorous outdoor walking will do wonders not only for your heart, but for your spirit, attitude and sense of well-being.  Let our photo gallery inspire you to start today.  Click on the “meditations” set for a sample: put yourself in the picture and think of how it would bless your heart in more ways than one.
Next headline on:  Health

This would make a fun home project or science project for the kids.  The young are not so easily grossed out, and they would learn an important lesson as they fertilize the garden with the processed watermelon rinds they tossed into the bin, that everything in creation has a purpose in nature’s ongoing recycling program.  Another lesson is that we can all contribute to that recycling program in partnership with our other creatures, no matter how humble.  (We all will someday, anyway, but that’s another story.)
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Facts

Biologists take for granted that the limbs and branches of the tree of life – painstakingly constructed since Linnaeus started classifying organisms 270 years ago – are basically correct.  New genetic studies, the thinking goes, will only prune the twigs, perhaps shuffling around a few species here and there.
    Hence the surprise when a new University of California, Berkeley, study of the largest family of salamanders produced a genetic family tree totally inconsistent with the accepted classification, which is based primarily on physical features.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Salamanders formerly classified together because of similar characteristics, such as a tail that breaks at only one spot as opposed to anywhere when stressed, now appear not to be close relatives at all.  And salamanders that go through an aquatic larval stage are scattered about on different branches instead of grouped on one limb of the tree: Apparently some salamander lineages lost the larval stage and then reacquired it again.

The new family tree shows, however, that some terrestrial salamanders regained their larval stage after moving back to the water.  This may have happened in three separate lineages of Plethodontids [the largest family of salamanders], which is surprising for a seemingly complex feature biologists have assumed arose just once, very early in the history of salamanders.

Some of Hanken’s colleagues question his interpretation, noting that the common wisdom holds that once a trait disappears from a group of organisms, it rarely resurfaces.  Hanken’s conclusion is “something that’s hard to defend,” says Ann Huysseune of Ghent University in Belgium.  But Hanken argues that these small vertebrates must have had a lot of evolutionary tricks up their sleeves in order to survive tough times.  He points to the success that small animals in general have had after mass extinctions and attributes that to their ability to rapidly change and adapt.
    Thorius species, he thinks, may have retained the capability of making upper teeth, even if their tooth-building program became short-circuited.  The reappearance of upper teeth in the four salamander species, says Hanken, “offers an example of latent developmental potentialities that reside within living species but which may not be manifest or expressed until far into the future.”

How long must we hold onto an outmoded hypothesis when it continually forces its adherents to believe absurd things?  To get a larval stage or a ballistic tongue once is astronomically improbable.  How can anyone believe it happened multiple times?  And to believe that something as complex as the suite of developmental genes for a set of teeth can just wait inert in a genome for the right time far into the future, without being eliminated by natural selection, violates Darwin’s own principles.  Salamanders don’t have sleeves.  How can they hide tricks up them?  If any problem in evolution can be explained away by magic tricks, it is not science.  The genetic data are not proving Darwin right, so Chuck his theory.  Wake up; it was only a bad trip (see 09/12/2004 commentary).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics and DNA

If, as returning host, I reflect on this whole pilgrimage, my overwhelming reaction is one of amazement.  Amazement at the extravaganza of detail that we have seen; amazement, too, at the very fact that there are any such details to be had at all, on any planet.  The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple – just physics and chemistry, the scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth to time and space.  The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.  Even that is not the end of the matter.  Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process, and even of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it.
    This pilgrimage has been a trip, not just in the literal sense but in the counter-cultural sense I met when a young man in California in the 1960s.  The most potent hallucinogen on sale in Haight or Ashbury or Telegraph Avenue would be tame by comparison.  If it’s amazement you want, the real world has it all.  Not only is life on this planet amazing, and deeply satisfying, to all whose senses have not become dulled by familiarity.  The very fact that we have evolved the brain power to understand our evolutionary genesis redoubles the amazement and compounds the satisfaction.

Wasn’t that a good, juicy entry?  This should make SEQ of the month, or year.  We share one sentiment with Dawkins: we are amazed, and enjoy great satisfaction, at contemplating the complexity and wonder of life.  We also agree that we should never let our senses be dulled by familiarity with the amazing world we live in and its living things.  Wonder is a gift of God, intended to lead us toward Him, not toward foolish speculations (Romans 1:16-23).
    This quote reveals that Dawkins has more in common with a spaced-out hippie on drugs than a scientist.  Maybe that is what Darwinism is all about: it’s a trip, a hallucination, for those who don’t like homework.  Deducing the complete cause and effect chain from “literally nothing” to a human brain that can comprehend the process by which it comprehends the original nothingness from which it and these wonders of nature sprung is too hard.  Do your own thing.  Tune in; turn on; drop out.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Orthodoxy, party line– was this the liberalism that the original Darwinian X-club had in mind when they rallied against what they viewed as the Anglican orthodoxy of the 19th century?  Would they be gratified to see their views turned into a dogma that cannot be questioned?  Did not Father Charlie himself say, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question”?  Is it not ironic to see the Darwinists as the inquisitors, and the intelligent design scientists and teachers the ones wanting to take Darwin at his word to allow students to hear a balanced and full statement of the arguments on both sides of this important question?
Next headline on:  Education

Thank you, Dr. Levin, for your well-aimed rebuke to the Darwin Party.  So you see, it is not only creationists who accuse the Darwinists of laziness in concocting just-so stories whenever a phenomenon presents itself.  One might almost think Levin is a secret reader of Creation-Evolution Headlines.  We agree; if you want just-so stories, read Kipling, not Science.
    It might be noted that perversity is in the eye of the beholder.  Levin says that “bacteria do some seemingly perverse things that are not easy to account for by simple stories of adaptive evolution.”  To the bacteria, it might be that the Darwinians are the perverse ones.  They might be complaining, “these lazy storytellers dishonor us by claiming to be our descendants.”
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Why the name Genesis?  Mission designers must surely have been keenly aware of the Biblical connotation when they selected the name.  Either to stave off speculations or to answer concerns, the mission FAQ page addressed the concern as follows:

Since this mission is named Genesis and will tell us about the beginning of the solar system, will it try to prove or disprove the Bible?
The Genesis mission will collect samples of the solar wind, material flowing outward from the Sun, and return these samples to Earth.  Scientists will be able to compare the compositions of these samples with known compositions of the planets and help in the effort to understand how our solar system and its planets formed.  It is not NASA’s role to address theological questions or interpretations, and Genesis’ investigation will be studied as a scientific question, not a theological one.

Yet to suggest that the formation of earth can be approached strictly through natural science without reference to a Creator is not a theologically neutral position.  It is clearly an alternative philosophy to the famous declaration of Genesis 1:1, “in the beginning God.”  To NASA, the religious text is, “in the beginning were the particles.”
    Please understand that we are all in favor of collecting data.  We love data.  We love solar wind particles and eagerly await what they might tell us about what the sun is doing now.  But to suggest that a mission like this can speak to origins is to embrace a theological or philosophical position.  The “origins” spin on this and other missions assumes an either-or dichotomy, the belief that there are strictly theological positions as opposed to scientific ones, as if these are non-overlapping, watertight classes of explanation, with the clear implication that scientific explanations are better: they are more objective, neutral, unbiased and true.  But it is naive to assume that science has no philosophical baggage, or that a “theological” explanation like Genesis 1 could never have any observable effects accessible to natural science.
    Some scientists treat words like Genesis flippantly because, to them, the Biblical texts are ancient myths no different than those of Greek accounts of warring gods and goddesses.  They ignore or don’t care that millions of Jews and Christians still believe the Bible and the Creator of which it speaks.  Dodging this concern with statements that the Genesis investigation “will be studied as a scientific question, not a theological one,” does nothing to assuage the insensitivity of usurping the Biblical name: first, because (as just stated) treating the Biblical account as a myth is a slap in the face to the sincerely-held beliefs of many people (including many scientists), and secondly, they suggest that “science” can offer a strictly naturalistic, unguided, purposeless explanation in the place of the teleological, purposeful, personal explanation in the Biblical account.
    Imagine the furor if NASA absconded with a name from some other religious persuasion – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, native American – with the implication that their goal was to investigate a scientific alternative to those beliefs.  Such an act would be denounced for its insensitivity.  The ACLU and other groups would demand an apology, and the NASA director would be called before a Congressional hearing to explain.  Would those groups be appeased by a response like “we’re only looking for scientific explanations, not theological ones”?  This is another example of how the sensitivity and tolerance of “political correctness” (an oxymoron) is asymmetrically applied when it comes to Jews and Christians.
    Despite all that, we offer best wishes to the mission and science teams.  Exploration and discovery are important values of the Judeo-Christian worldview.  We hope many solar wind particles survived intact.  They might shed light on many current solar and interplanetary processes, and that is very worthwhile.  Incidentally, many Jews, Christians and creationists work on missions such as Genesis, some of them in high places.  Most of them do their work quietly with excellence, professionalism and teamwork.  The hype in the press releases is written by a politically-correct few who don’t have to actually build and fly these amazing spacecraft.
Next headline on:  Solar System

Penguins look funny waddling on the land in their tuxedos, but underwater they are more graceful than ballerinas.  Next time a nature program shows underwater footage of Antarctic penguins, watch it for awhile in wonder.  Then laugh as the camera shifts to land position and films them launching their fat but sleek bodies into the air, only to bellyflop on the ice.  Penguins are cool.  This article barely touches on just one of many wonders of these aquatic birds and their lifestyles in some of the harshest environments on earth.
    An important part of the penguin’s flipper design is a pulley-like tendon that threads the needle of a shoulder bone.  How could that evolve?  Every detail in the anatomy of a penguin flipper is superbly adapted to their habitat, but a flipper alone would be useless without the brain software, sensory organs, digestive, respiratory, circulatory and other systems that work together to make all this exquisite ballet possible.  The systems, in turn, depend for their function on tens of thousands of molecular machines in each cell, coded by gigabytes of programmed information.
    Congratulations to Carrie Lock for sparing us unnecessary Darwinspeak in this interesting story (except in the references, where a paper has a convoluted title, “Convergent evolution in mechanical design of lamnid sharks and tunas”).  Yes, ask the beasts, and thou mightest learn something.  (To Darwinists, another reference is apropos: go to the ant, thou sluggard.)
Next headline on:  Birds • Mammals • Marine Life • Amazing Facts

“At least 2 billion years ago, ancestors of these two diverse prokaryotic groups fused their genomes to form the first eukaryote, and in the processes two different branches of the tree of life were fused to form the ring of life,” Lake said.  “A major unsolved question in biology has been where eukaryotes came from, where we came from.  The answer is that we have two parents, and we now know who those parents were.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Unknown to Darwin, microbes use two mechanisms of natural variation that disobey the rules of tree-like evolution: lateral gene transfer and endosymbiosis.  Lateral gene transfer involves the passage of genes among distantly related groups, causing branches in the tree of life to exchange bits of their fabric.  Endosymbiosis – one cell living within another – gave rise to the double-membrane-bounded organelles of eukaryotic cells: mitochondria (the powerhouses of the cell) and chloroplasts (of no further importance here).  At the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria, a free-living proteobacterium came to reside within an archaebacterially related host....  This event involved the genetic union of two highly divergent cell lineages, causing two deep branches in the tree of life to merge outright.  To this day, biologists cannot agree on how often lateral gene transfer and endosymbiosis have occurred in life’s history; how significant either is for genome evolution; or how to deal with them mathematically in the process of reconstructing evolutionary trees.  The report by Rivera and Lake bears on all three issues.  And instead of a tree linking life’s three deepest branches (eubacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryotes), they uncover a ring.

Well, this ought to be testable.  Put some photosynthetic prokaryotes together with archaebacteria in a hot spring, and see if they merge.  Are we supposed to believe that this happened only in the unobservable past but is impossible today?  It should be going on all the time, and should be common knowledge to microbiologists.  It should not be a mystic story imagined by Darwinists alone.
    Did Lake or Rivera observe anything like this happen?  No.  Did they explain how genome fusion could have overcome the barriers and defenses cells use today to protect their information?  No.  Did they do any real scientific, empirical, lab work?  No.  Did they just play with their favorite phylogenetic computer games?  Yes.  Did they find major problems with the standard evolutionary trees?  Yes.  Did they get tired of the old worn-out metaphor?  Maybe.  In the end, they do not have a scientific theory, only a metaphor, and metaphors bewitch you, Saruman.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

These dinosaurs might have shown parental care for their hatchlings.  This and other possible nesting sites at other locales tend to support the idea.  It seems a reasonable one, given observation of nurturing behavior among many living species.  But how did this family get buried so suddenly?  A find as rare as this really is astonishing, unless many individuals over a wide area were trapped by the same event, and it was a big one.  Whether it was a regional or global catastrophe, one can decide from the preponderance of evidence.  One thing seems clear; it was not uniformitarianism.  The hatchlings probably did not hold their poses while sediments built up slowly around them over many years.
    Here we go again with the homology storytelling; so now we are to believe that parental loving care was an evolutionary adaptation going all the way back to the presumed common ancestor of crocodiles, dinosaurs, birds, Nelsons and Cleavers.  This really does get so tiring.  Maybe if they were grounded for a week every time they said such nonsense, the little Darwin Club members would learn some manners.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

If you thought the missing link was somewhere between Java Man and us, behold The Missing Chain.  Either way, the Darwin Party is stuck in Story Book Land.  Either evolution was so rapid it happened without a trace, or it was slow and gradual, but the later organisms replaced the earlier ones, who disappeared without a trace.  This is reminiscent of another paper last month that left us readers staring at nothing with the advice, “watch this space” (see 08/19/2004 commentary).  Sometimes no comment is the best comment.  Let the Darwinists admit to themselves they have no evidence for their belief system.  We suggest that the phrase “watch this space” would be the perfect theme for the Darwin Party Curriculum.  It could be the title of their next textbook on evidence for evolution.  Every page could contain the caption, “This page unintentionally left blank.”
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The variety of sounds birds can make is remarkable..  Some calls, like the dove’s, are soothing and sweet; others, like those of the crow or scrub jay, are raucous and irritating.  How their skill is passed from parent to chick over hundreds of generations is also amazing.  Isn’t it sweet to know that the birds are out there evolving better and faster muscles, figuring out all the developmental pathways and modulations, understanding nonlinear dynamics, devising and meeting extreme requirements and gearing all the molecular machines, genetic programs and control mechanisms to transform seeds and worms into music?  Evolution is such an amazing goddess.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

    Giles uses several tricks to downplay the paper.  (1) It was published in a “low-impact” journal [but it is published at the Smithsonian].  (2) The editor of the journal has ties to a creationist organization.  (3) It has been thoroughly refuted already on an evolutionist website.  (4) Peer review isn’t a guarantee of accuracy.  Sounds like he doesn’t want you to read it.  Then he uses the scare tactic to portray evil creationists plotting to use this success to push their views in US school curricula.
    Giles sounds downright worried.  No worries, mate.  Design publishing has a long history, way back to the beginning of scientific observation (see online book).
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design

Food for thought (salad, at least).  Do ice cores show a history going back over a hundred thousand years?  Learn about the slippery assumptions used for identifying “annual” layers in an article by Michael Oard.
Next headline on:  Geology

In a series of experiments, the researchers showed that the fish do not learn this by remembering which combinations of spatial configurations and the corresponding images were rewarding in the past.  Rather, the fish extracted the underlying law that connects spatial configuration and apparent size.  This remarkable cognitive ability allows the fish to readily judge a target’s objective size from underwater views they have never encountered before.

Moreover, the strong viewpoint dependency can even cause changes in the size relations among the disks.  For instance, if the fish makes its selection while close to a large disk, the apparent size of a more-distant small disk can be larger than that of the close large disk.  In principle, the fish could overcome these problems by scanning the targets and taking a view of each target from the same horizontal distance.  However, this is clearly not what the fish did; as soon as the objects were shown, the fish swam straight to their shooting position and fired.

In learning the objective size of their targets, the archer fish thus had not simply learned combinations that were rewarded in the past but went beyond to acquire a concept of objective size that they later could readily apply to the novel views.  This ability is remarkable in several respects.  First, the optical effects require rather precise knowledge of spatial configuration....  The question of how the fish’s visual system is able to provide this information is presently wide open.  When fish aim their shots, for which precise distance information is also required, monocular cues suffice and binocular distance cues are not required.  Whether stereo vision is also unnecessary for size constant vision cannot, however, be said at present.  Second, the fish apparently is able to combine such spatial knowledge in a yet-unknown way with apparent size (or apparent locomotion-induced image transformations) to deduce a concept of objective size.  Whatever sensory representation it uses, the fish evidently is able to form a concept of size that is tailored to the complex optics at the water-air interface.  Because this situation poses particularly rigorous requirements on the relation the animal must make between target localization and the apparent image, the fish is an attractive model to explore how animals learn to form concepts to bring order into their sensory experiences.

Stories like this are such wonderful relief from the incessant storytelling of Darwinists.  There was no mention of evolution in this article, and if there had been, it wouldn’t be worth a spit.  Here evolutionists cannot even find a clear beneficial mutation (see next headline), and they want us to believe this and thousands of other wonders of creation are the result of accidents?  Shoot.
Next headline on:  Fish and Marine Life • Amazing Facts

Natural selection is an important factor influencing variation in the human genome, but most genetic studies of natural selection have focused on variants with unknown phenotypic associations.  This trend is changing.  New studies are rapidly revealing the effects of natural selection on genetic variants of known or likely functional importance....
These [studies on] variants [on genes with known phenotypic effects] are particularly interesting from an evolutionary standpoint because they are where the phenotypic rubber meets the road of natural selection – variants upon which natural selection could be having particularly direct effects.

Remember the old moron jokes?  “How do you keep a moron busy for an hour?  Put him in a round room and tell him there’s a penny in the corner.”  It doesn’t take much to amuse Darwinists.  Tell them there’s a hint of natural selection in the human genome, and it is incredible the amount of work they will do to find it.  You can bet any claims will be ambiguous, hazy, uncertain, questionable and open to different interpretations, but if they can be offered in homage to buddha Charlie, it’s worth it to them to run in logical circles and keep up the candles of hope burning.  (For another example, look at this story on EurekAlert, about Penn State scientists “hunting illusive signs of natural selection” between Europeans and Africans, and finding only ambiguous signs of differing susceptibility to disease or milk intolerance.)
    What did these guys find, really?  One single-nucleotide polymorphism in just one gene out of hundreds that regulate heart health.  Sure, tweaking the regulation of this gene might put a person at risk for hardening of the arteries, but is Darwinian evolution the only explanation?  The Europeans could have descended from a clan whose grandpappy had the mutation at the Tower of Babel, for that matter; how could they prove otherwise?  The monkeys they studied had very different polymorphisms of these genes, and you don’t see them all keeling over from heart attacks.  If natural selection acted on this gene, why didn’t it act on Siberians or Eskimos or Australians or others at similar latitudes?  Did this mutation lead to a new organ or function or add to the genetic information?  No, it only tweaked the existing information.  And some evolution!  Pick your poison: increased risk of atherosclerosis, or increased risk of myocardial infarction.  Is this one of the finest examples they can find of the miracle-working mechanism of natural selection, the discovery that made Chairman Charlie famous, so powerful that during the same period of time it turned monkeys swinging from trees into humans writing books?
    The line about Ice Age men benefiting from the mutation because of their mammal-fat diet is comical.  How could that help the population genetics, if the individuals most likely got their heart attacks after having children?  The error bars on their dates are huge, even if one were to swallow the highly questionable phylogenetic techniques they used, and the evolution-based assumptions about mutation rates.  A chain of reasoning is only as strong as its weakest link: e.g., “if there was water on Mars, there might have been life, therefore there might have been intelligent life, therefore there might have been lawyers.”  Evolutionists get away with stacked assumptions only because they have ruled out anything other than naturalistic explanations.  Since the only contender is something akin to Darwinism, it’s the best they can offer (see Best-in-Field Fallacy).
    Why are we the only ones questioning the Darwinist spin on this paper, and asking the hard questions while the other science outlets mindlessly inherit the wind and parrot the spin with lines like “Heart gene yields insights into evolution”?  Why not consider the obvious, that a functioning circulatory system is a tremendous example of interrelated, functional design?  The diagnosis is simple.  It is that ancient human malady, hardness of heart.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Genetics and DNA • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

What magnificent returns in storytelling emerge from such a trifling investment of fact.  A tiny ratio difference in thickness on one bone from one specimen, based on CT scans of questionable accuracy, assuming no modifications by the fossilization process (see 03/28/2003 headline), dated with evolutionary assumptions, and they can convert a chimpanzee fossil into an upright walking human ancestor.  Six million years later, its descendants are designing spacecraft and deciphering the human genome.  How ever did the noble enterprise of science stoop to such pitiful grandstanding?  Don’t think Johanson’s group, or any of the other rival teams, is going to take this upset without a challenge.
Next headline on:  Early Man

The findings are really no help to evolutionary theory.  Neither of these studies account for the origin of BMP4 and the many other complex proteins that interact with it; they just show you can get freaks by tweaking the beaks.  We already knew that with humans.  Failures in the complex developmental pathways of any embryo can produce grotesque or useless deformities.  These studies only tinkered with expression of existing genes, not with the origin of new genes or their “improvement.”  The studies were not tied to adaptation, which is what Darwinism purports to explain.
    Picture the highly specialized beaks of hummingbirds, spoonbills, pelicans, owls, hornbills, woodpeckers, eagles, ducks, and the other thousands of species of birds.  To explain these, an evolutionist is going to need a lot more than just differences in the local expression of BMP4.  He or she is going to need millions of transitional forms, and proof of heritable adaptive changes in all the developmental pathways that affect beak morphology.  Even if the Grants can tie finch beak changes to this molecule, and show that beak changes are adaptive for various ecological niches on the islands, they have not explained the origin of BMP4, the beak, or the finch itself.
    Creationists and evolutionists both are comfortable with slight morphological changes in existing species.  It is very probable that a tougher beak will aid a finch in a drought, so that it can crack the nuts and get to the seeds better than a cousin with a thinner beak.  But when the rains return, and seeds are plentiful, the change is no longer adaptive and the populations can revert back.  Over time, no one has shown that these slight changes to Darwin’s finches have led to any long-term morphological change.  Certainly they have not shown that they came from, or are leading to, anything other than finches.
    If the Grants want to spend their lives measuring beaks to fractions of a millimeter, and weighing the little birds to fractions of a gram, and studying the ways their eggs grow and what genes and proteins are expressed, that’s fine and wonderful and praiseworthy.  But if anyone claims their work has defended Chairman Charlie’s wild speculation that humans had bacteria ancestors, beak airful.
Next headline on:  Birds • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

We suggest that the phenomenon of osmotically driven, competitive vesicle growth could have played an important role in the emergence of Darwinian evolution during the origin of cellular life (supporting online text).  The present results suggest that simple physical principles may allow a direct connection between genome and membrane.  RNA replicating within vesicles could confer a substantial growth advantage to the membrane by creating internal osmotic pressure.  The faster replication of a superior replicase would therefore lead to faster vesicle growth, at the expense of cells lacking RNA or containing less efficient replicases.  A faster replicase genotype would thus produce the higher-level phenotype of faster cellular growth, a prerequisite of cellular replication (supporting online text).  Darwinian evolution at the organismal level might therefore have emerged earlier than previously thought—at the level of a one-gene cell.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

One of the problems with peer review is that if a few reviewers let nonsense pass, it can get published in a prestigious journal, and snuggle into the corpus of scientific literature, without opportunity for immediate refutation.  Then science reporters, like eager guppies at the base of a waterfall waiting for crud to wash over, swallow it whole and regurgitate for the peasants who respect science but don’t know any better.  This is soooooo stupid, it makes you wonder how Big Science can print such silliness without making the Darwin Party blush.  The answer is: they have to.  Their materialism pushes them to silly storytelling because they have already rejected the alternative, intelligent design.  Choosing beforehand to ignore the obvious, silly storytelling is all they have available, so they dress it up in enough scientific glitter to distract attention from the pitiful plot.  Computer programmers know this game.  A bug is a bug, but if you dress it in a handsome suit, it is transformed into a “feature.”
    One hole is sufficient to make a bubble pop, but this story has more than a wiffle ball.  Wise readers, get out your baloney detectors.

• Personification: It’s bad enough when evolutionists personify birds and flowers, but now they expect us to believe that bubbles compete in the evolutionary fitness game?  Bubbles couldn’t care if they win or pop.
• Begging the question: They assume what they need to prove, by having us believe that RNA replicating enzymes (extremely sophisticated molecular machines, called replicases) already existed.  Their experiments seeded the bubbles with man-made functional RNA machinery.  This is like Olympic judges ignoring a sprinter competing on a motorcycle.
• Word games: The Darwin Party’s favorite euphemism for miracle, “emergence” is all over the place.
• Prisoner’s Dilemma:  A fatbubble with RNA inside is a prison, not a factory.  Once the RNA inside uses up all its food (nucleotides), it cannot evolve any further.  Cells have elaborate ways to control entry and exit of materials from the external environment, but fatbubbles do not.  As such, they are death traps (see 01/17/2002 commentary). 
• More Begging the Question:  They consider a more primitive genetic material (PNA), then just assume that the more complex and difficult RNA and DNA molecules will “emerge” by Darwinian evolution, the very thing they need to prove.  They say, “In contrast, a neutral polymer such as PNA (peptide nucleic acid), having no associated counterions, would be a much less effective osmolyte, a difference that may have influenced the natural selection of the genetic material itself.”  Did you catch that?  That’s like saying, “A Piper Cub is difficult to evolve, so maybe the difference between a Piper Cub and a 757 influenced the evolution of the jumbo jet itself.”  Come again?
• Card Stacking:  To sneak Darwinian natural selection into the plot, they play the replication card but leave out the accuracy card.  Faster or more efficient replication is useless unless it is accurate.  Without accurate copying, any gains will be quickly lost due to the phenomenon of “error catastrophe” – an accumulation of errors that makes the house of cards fall flat.
• Non-sequitur:  They assume that bigger is better.  A bigger dead bubble is still dead.  It’s not evolving into a living cell.  They think that since fast growth is a prerequisite for life, getting some bubbles to grow faster is a step in the right direction.  It does not follow.
• Yet more begging the question:  They presume that one gene, a replicase, is all that is necessary.  They expect sensible adults to believe that a machine that can replicate an RNA molecule (how that “emerged,” they conveniently omit) was sufficient to produce translators, transporters, energy conversion systems, and factories of molecular machines working together in harmony.  If that is not a myth, what is?
• Glittering Generalities:  Do they really expect us to believe that bubbles that grow to a certain size in a laboratory flask can tell us anything about the origin of life?  Only if the audience enjoys bedtime stories like Gullible’s Drivels.
• Suggestion:  By associating these irrelevant fatbubbles to the Grand Myth of Evolution, they create a mystique about them that lead us to envision marvelous bubbles evolving into fantastic living things.  Disney would love to animate this, right next to the ballerina hippos.

OK, that’s enough.  Time would fail us to discuss the extrapolation fallacy, the post-hoc fallacy, the misuse of circumstantial evidence, the difficulty that lipid membranes fall apart in the presence of salt (see 09/17/2002 headline), etc.  One hole is sufficient.  The only worthwhile observation about this story is that the authors realize that the popular “RNA World” scenario (see 07/11/2002 headline) is too complex to be credible, so they offer this putative transitional plot that is simpler, in hopes of extending the magic wand of natural selection further back into the story, as if that would help.  Did it help?
    It’s high time we stop letting “scientists” dazzle us with bugs in suits and bubbles that come to life.  This is juvenile imagination, not science.  Only intelligent design could make a fatbubble do other than what comes naturally.  For those who like crossword puzzles, what’s a three-letter word for “a phenomenon incurred by exceeding the maximum sustainable membrane tension of vesicles under osmotic stress”?
Accounting for a viable cell
Gets Darwinists in trouble;
Without design the growth to compel,
Pop goes the bubble.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Never underestimate the power of a well-written, cogently argued letter.  Have you tried it?  Be polite, but take a stand boldly and confidently.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

A Reason for Everything is a well-written and carefully researched account of some of the main British players in the world of evolution.  Every evolutionist should read it – as a warning against personality cults, if nothing else.  Kohn makes it clear that giants walked the Earth in those days.  Those days are gone, but after perusing his chapter on the Oxford school of evolutionary biology in the 1950s and 1960s – some geniuses, no doubt, but also a fair sprinkling of prima donnas and right-wing zealots – one can only mutter, through gently clenched teeth, “Thank God!”

And, Mr. Jones, to which God are you giving thanks?  If we wanted to be really judgmental, we could rant about Jones’s hate speech and advocacy of violence.  Picture a man kicking another man in the teeth.  Now look how Jones spoke with delight, figuratively, at this being done to Creationists by Dawkins’ being honored.  Nothing in the American political conventions came this close to hate speech; words much milder have been excoriated as mean-spirited attacks.  And who is he to chide Hamilton’s eugenical Utopian dreams, when he himself chooses to work at Galton Laboratory, founded in 1901 as a eugenics institute by Chairman Charlie’s cousin Francis Galton, the father of eugenics?
    Where’s Huxley?  Maybe he was promoted to Doberman.  None of these bulldogs appears like a nice pet to have around.  Which of these bearded bigots, prima donnas, self-congratulators, dandies, verbal tricksters, promoters of nasty social agendas, silly men, disciples obsessed with details but far from sure what their begetters meant, desultory researchers, blind devotees of Great Leaders, gullible interpreters of the world of man but lacking common sense, sweeping generalizers, reckless experimenters, friendless martyrs with Gollum-like resentments, right-wing zealots or doctrinaire communists would you like to invite to tea?  Yes, we must stick to the facts of biology and avoid personality cults, especially with personalities like these.  When evolutionists shoot their own giants, it saves us a lot of work.  Thank God.
Next headline on:  Darwinism

Unless the messages are short or the extraterrestrials are nearby, this ‘write’ strategy requires less energy per bit of transmitted information than the ‘radiate’ strategy does.  Cone-shaped beams of radiation necessarily grow in size as they travel outwards, meaning that the great majority of the energy is wasted, even if some of it hits the intended target.  A package, on the other hand, is not ‘diluted’ as it travels across space..., presuming that it’s correctly aimed at its desired destination.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

In addition, Rose says, when waves pass a particular point, they’ve passed it for good.  Potential recipients at that point might be unable to snag a passing message for any one of many reasons.  They might not be listening.  They might be extinct.  So someone sending such a message would have to send it over and over to increase the chance of its being received.  The energy budget goes up accordingly.  A physical message, however, stays where it lands.

So how should these results influence today’s SETI strategy?  Short “we are here” messages would still seem to be most efficiently sent by electromagnetic waves, and we should continue looking for the same.  But perhaps some attention should be paid to the possibility of one day finding in our Solar System an information-drenched artefact, sent by an extremely advanced extraterrestrial civilization interested only in one-way communication.  This intruder might be orbiting the Sun or a planet, or resting somewhere on a planet, moon or asteroid.... If astroarchaeologists were to find such an object, it would hardly be the first time that science fiction had become science fact.

Rose speculates that “messages” might be anything from actual text in a real language to (more likely) organic material embedded in an asteroid – or in the crater made by such an asteroid upon striking Earth.  Messages – and Rose suggests there might be many of them, perhaps millions – might literally be at our feet.  They might be awaiting our discovery on the moon, or on one of Jupiter’s moons.  They might be dramatic or mundane.  A bottle floating in the ocean is just a bottle floating in the ocean – unless, upon closer inspection, it turns out to have a message in it.

Hmmmm; information-drenched artifact.  A possible real message in an actual language.  A lot to say.  Millions of copies at our grasp.  Contents dramatic or mundane (or both).  A medium not limited to a fortunate few living in a particular century or country.  A sender outside of time, whose intelligence, identity, and intentions we cannot presume to fathom.   Receivers who might not be listening.  A package that might not be recognized or opened.  Sounds a lot like Hebrews 1:1-3, II Timothy 3:15-17, II Peter 1:16-21, John 5:38-47, and John 1:10-12.  Maybe a good place to search for an intelligent message is in the hotel room drawer.
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