So there’s a beginning; there’s a point in time from which it all started, and that’s a remarkable thing, because it has a very strong theological flavor to it.  And that intrigued me, because I am an agnostic.  And if there was a beginning – a moment of creation of the universe – then there was a Creator.  And a Creator is not compatible with agnosticism.
—Robert Jastrow, from the Q&A portion of the film The Privileged Planet.

One of the study’s major surprises is the relatively large number of genes that have contributed to human brain evolution.  “For a long time, people have debated about the genetic underpinning of human brain evolution,” said [Bruce] Lahn [HHMI}.  “Is it a few mutations in a few genes, a lot of mutations in a few genes, or a lot of mutations in a lot of genes?  The answer appears to be a lot of mutations in a lot of genes.  We’ve done a rough calculation that the evolution of the human brain probably involves hundreds if not thousands of mutations in perhaps hundreds or thousands of genes — and even that is a conservative estimate.”
    It is nothing short of spectacular that so many mutations in so many genes were acquired during the mere 20-25 million years of time in the evolutionary lineage leading to humans, according to Lahn.  This means that selection has worked “extra-hard” during human evolution to create the powerful brain that exists in humans.

We are glad to be able to announce the downfall of Saddam Darwin to end this eventful year, 2004.  Now there are just a few Darwin Party insurgents to mop up, and the public will be free of this deadly totalitarian regime.  (Would that it were so easy; it would be like Bush’s premature victory speech.)
    The science outlets are spinning this story without letting go of Darwinism.  They are throwing around phrases like strong selection, intensified selection and other nonsense as if random mutations conspired to sculpt the most complex piece of matter in the known universe.  They know better.  Orthogenesis (straight-line evolution) is out.  Teleology is out.  Personifying natural selection is out, so all they have to work with are thousands of random, undirected changes over thousands of different genes that have no ability to conspire with one another.  (In fact, they counteract one another; see 11/29/2004 and 10/19/2004 headlines).  But if even one beneficial mutation is hard to find (see 03/19/2002 headline), how is any rational person to believe that thousands – “and that is a conservative estimate” – accomplished such a feat?  The gig is up, Darwin Party: surrender.  It’s over.  Throw down your arms.
    The award for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week goes to Bruce Lahn for his one-liner that “selection has worked ‘extra-hard’ during human evolution to create the powerful brain that exists in humans.”  This can serve as USO entertainment for the liberation troops as they begin their clean-up operations.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionists accuse the intelligent design movement of never publishing anything, and then cry foul when they do (see 09/08/2004 and 12/28/2004 headlines).  Actually, there are thousands of ID papers, and they are published regularly, not in obscure outlets, but in the major, high-impact journals.  They may not mention the buzzword “intelligent design” explicitly, but they do everything the ID movement advocates: explore the design of a phenomenon as if it has a purpose, follow the evidence where it leads, and leave the philosophical or religious implications to the reader.  We regularly highlight such articles right here (see 11/10/2004, 10/27/2004, 10/27/2004, and 09/22/2004 headlines for a few recent examples).  Notice how these authors used the phrase “design principle” but had no use for the evolutionary hypothesis.  Very few papers try to explain in any detail how a complex feature evolved.  Most, if they mention evolution at all, merely assume it in passing, as if fulfilling the obligatory pinch of incense to Father Charlie (see 11/18/2004 and 11/04/2004 and 10/01/2004 recent examples).  If the criteria were rearranged with these considerations in mind, the ID movement could claim the vast majority of scientific papers as their own, and the Darwin Party would be left with a handful of just-so stories.  Demand a recount.
Next headline on:   Physics • Cell Biology • Intelligent Design

Richerson and Boyd’s position, in a nutshell, is that culture is as good a candidate for darwinian treatment as behaviour and morphology.  Genetic processes and individual learning provide mechanisms whereby successful phenotypes can be passed on from one generation to the next.  In humans, and possibly in other species, including apes and cetaceans [whales], culture provides another such mechanism for behavioural phenotypes.  It is true that, in humans, cultural inheritance has been raised to an art form.  But all this means is that the evolutionary dynamics that arise from both its intrinsically different modes of inheritance (sideways as well as vertically) and its complex interactions with more conventional genetic mechanisms make human behaviour a more challenging – and therefore more interesting – field for evolutionary biologists to explore.

Their position is founded on an evolved psychology that predisposes humans to use imitation as a quick and inelegant way of cutting through the costs of obtaining information about the world first-hand.  This is useful whenever environments change slowly but the information available about the change is poor or costly to obtain.  Culture may be maladaptive on occasion, but that is not an evolutionary issue – something that non-evolutionists invariably fail to understand.  Evolutionary explanations are statistical by their nature, and depend on the balance of the costs and benefits.

In many ways, this book is really addressed to social scientists, who, as Richerson and Boyd remark, learned their evolutionary biology from the mischievous writings of Steven Jay Gould, but failed to realize that his seductive polemics have little empirical support.  Functional explanations for natural phenomena are, they remind us, often difficult to see without a great deal of hard empirical work.  Gouldian arguments of ‘spandrels as non-adaptation’ are, they remind us, usually at least as much ‘just so stories’ as adaptationist explanations – if not more so, as they are rarely backed by anything resembling empirical evidence.  And it is evidence, they insist, that is the core to good evolutionary biology.  No amount of armchair theorizing can substitute for hard-earned natural-history knowledge, as the seminal examples of Aristotle (whose biology, incidentally, was outstanding, however bad his physics might have been) and Darwin remind us.
    In many ways, this book is a plea to the social sciences to take seriously what evolutionary biology has to offer – to see it not as a threat intent on cannibalizing the social-science niche, but rather as a source of useful techniques and conceptual devices that can be applied within a conventional social-sciences framework, asking conventional social-science questions.

Dunbar just preached to us about the need for empirical evidence instead of storytelling.  Now read his summary of the darwinian explanation for heroic altruism:

Conventional evolutionary explanations, such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism, work well [see 06/30/2003 and 03/17/2003 headlines] for small-scale societies, like those found among monkeys and apes.  But they do not work quite as well on the larger scale of human tribal societies, where kinship and interaction frequencies are too dilute to sustain indiscriminate altruism.  When individuals’ ecological and reproductive success depend on the success with which they can cooperatively solve the problems of survival, something is needed to prevent the age-old tension between self- and group-level interests tearing the fabric of groups apart.  Something is needed to enforce commitment to the group, and that something, Richerson and Boyd argue, is culture, creating a sufficiently strong sense of group identity and conformity to enable groups to do their job for the individual.

We want the equations back.  How could they ever quantify this, empirically measure it, and raise it above the status of a just-so story?  Culture is such a vague concept, it could include anything, including contradictory subcultures.  This is just another silly-putty theory of evolution (see 12/14/2004 headline) guaranteed to provide job security for fat, lazy, Darwin Party storytellers (see 12/22/2003 headline).  The conclusions do not come from the data.  They come from the a priori necessity of cramming all of reality into their chosen philosophy: materialism.  But a house divided against itself cannot stand.  The Dunbar tribe of the Darwinites is going to make the Gould tribe angry at these war cries, while Dunbar is afraid his ultra-adaptationist position is going to scare away the Darwinite-social-science tribe, who fear the adaptationists are a bunch of niche-hunting cannibals.  They don’t realize they are all cooking in the same stew of naturalistic philosophy.
    To any naturalistic Darwinist, all cultures are equally valid and equally meaningless, because they are only evolutionary relics, devoid of actual, objective truth or moral value: they only exist to propagate phenotypes that will succeed in the struggle for existence.  There is no such thing as honesty, integrity, dependability, responsibility, or unselfishness.  When you think of the great acts of self-sacrifice throughout human history, it is sheer ugliness to ascribe them to undirected, amoral mechanisms of darwinian evolution.  Dunbar and his accomplices would reduce to all that is noble and inspiring in human history to evolved ape antics.  This would include the Marine throwing himself on a grenade to save his comrades, a missionary risking disease and death to bring good news to natives enslaved by the lies of witch doctors,* the esprit de corps of an elite disciplined military force fighting terrorism, volunteers at a rescue mission providing hot food to the homeless, the work of Red Cross and World Vision volunteers helping victims they don’t even know on the other side of the globe in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and even the teachings and self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
    If Dunbar continues to be surprised by the number of educated people who deny that human behavior can be reduced to the just-so storytelling methods of darwinian theory, and if he thinks non-evolutionists just fail to understand all this, and that we are the ones needing enlightenment, then he is beyond hope, and should be put out to pasture at the funny farm.  Better yet, let’s commit him and the mischievous disciples of Gould into a pro-wrestling iron cage where they can experiment on culture without hurting the rest of us normal human beings.  There, they can body-slam each other with seductive polemics and cannibalize each other’s niches while the rest of us watch the entertainment, knowing the false bravado is all an act.
Next headline on:   Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

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*In the documentary film Ee-taow!, missionaries found that the men of the Mouk tribe in New Guinea held the women in a state of virtual slavery.  They threatened them with death if they ever saw a secret mask used only for a ritual dance that was supposed to represent the appearance of a spirit.  The men forced the women to travel far and wide collecting food for the spirit, which the men consumed in their own quarters, throwing the leftovers on a heap outside, while the women were not allowed to eat any of it.  When the truth came out, after the tribespeople were rescued from this heart of darkness into the joy of receiving Christ, they confessed these things and admitted their conscience had bothered them.  The men said they had felt guilty about lying to the women and mistreating them.  The women said they knew all along that the mask dancer was not a spirit but just one of the men, but kept silence for fear of being killed.  The good news that Christ had come to save them from their sins by offering himself as the perfect sacrifice, and that they could be forgiven and freed from their bondage to sin by trusting in Him, caused spontaneous rejoicing in the whole village.  They wanted to take this good news to the other tribes, putting their own lives at risk.  Explain that, Darwin Party.

Svetlov describes the Proceedings as a journal that “enjoyed much-deserved obscurity”.  This characterization is not accurate.  A cursory review of authorship in the Proceedings throughout its 122-year history reveals a list of everyone who’s anyone among systematic biologists, including scores of notable past and current scientists from the Smithsonian Institution.

It’s fun to see the Darwin Party lament a little.  They have been so arrogant about their political power over the journals, it’s time for them to shed some tears.  It’s hard, after so many years, having to learn manners, like how to share the table with scientists who believe we should follow the evidence where it leads (Meyer does, after all, have a Ph.D. from Cambridge, and his paper was reviewed by three scientists and approved by Rick Sternberg, a scientist with two doctorates).  Do the crybabies actually try to address any of the points made by Meyer?  No.  They just whine about having to share the sandbox with political rivals who believe in playing fair.  And the little elitists whine about the less-enlightened school board members and public who might be influenced by Meyer’s paper – you know, all those people out there who have no brains and cannot think, like “scientists” can.  Yes, go ahead and lament.  It’s about time.
Next headline on:   Intelligent Design

Thus another deeper level of complexity becomes apparent.  A collection of parts is not enough; they must coordinate their actions.  No wonder Antony Flew considered Darwin’s Black Box an “amazing book” and has become a theist (see 12/09/2004 entry).
Next headline on:   Cell Biology

• Titan’s atmosphere was shown to be composed of multiple layers.
• Saturn’s atmosphere was shown to have multiple cyclonic storms similar to those on Jupiter, one resembling the Great Red Spot.
• Titan’s clouds have been observed to change, indicating there is active weather in the atmosphere.  News@Nature also reported this item.
• The highest resolution pictures ever of icy moon Dione solved a 23-year old mystery.  Voyager had photographed wispy streaks that were thought to be frost.  It was just an optical illusion.  The photographs show, instead, a series of grooves and trenches with steep, bright walls that reflect sunlight in a way that had produced the illusion of surface frost.  Some of the surprise reaction can be found on The Planetary Society website and News@Nature, where the lead imaging scientist called it the “one of the most surprising results so far... It just wasn’t what we expected.”  Dione’s black-and-white dullness stands out sharply against Saturn’s color in another Cassini image.
• More information was shared about erosion in Saturn’s E Ring (see 07/02/2004 headline), indicating the ring is being destroyed rapidly and cannot be as old as the solar system.
• Saturn has lightning a million times stronger than the bolts on earth; see story on Astrobiology.com; the principal investigator at U of Iowa said the find is “astonishing”.
• The varying rotation rate since Voyager is also difficult to explain, said the RPWS team from U of Iowa.  It may mean that Saturn’s magnetic field does not rotate as a rigid body.

Watch for exciting news from Titan on January 14-15.  There are not many “first time ever” adventures left in the solar system, and this should be one of the best in our lifetime.  Congratulations to the many team members, some of whom have been working for 20 years for this moment.  What will Huygens see as it samples, measures and photographs the atmosphere and surface of this bizarre, frozen world that is bigger than Mercury and Pluto?  The world may soon know.
Next headline on:   Solar System

Debates will continue about the ossuary, the Jehoash inscription and some other artifacts, but many objects and sites mentioned in the Bible are corroborated by the archaeologist’s spade.  Unlike holy books of man-made religions, the Bible speaks of real places, events, and people.  As such, it is open to historical investigation: in fact, it encourages the honest seeking for the truth.
Next headline on:   The Bible

Wait a minute; they said before that most of the star birth occurred in the first epoch of the universe (see 01/08/2002 headline), and that galaxies got mature fast (see 03/03/2003 and 12/16/2002 headlines).  They also told us they found “young” stars in an “old” galaxy (see 07/08/2002 headline).  If they don’t even have a handle on the age of globular clusters (see 10/05/2003 headline), which are part of our own Milky Way, how can we believe them when they tell us what is old and young?  This many anomalies should cause a serious reconsideration of basic assumptions, but these days in science, the model is the constant, and the data are the variables.  Biologists pull the same shenanigans when telling us about earth-bound living fossils (see 10/13/2004 headline).
Next headline on:   Cosmology • Stars and Astronomy • Dating Methods

How many paleoanthropologists does it take to locate a molar on the correct side of a fossil jawbone?  The short answer to this joke, which was has been winging around the Internet this month, is 28.  That’s the number of paleoanthropologists who, in the current issue of the South African Journal of Science, declare that a fossilized wisdom tooth belonged in the right rather than the left lower jaw of a famous fossil of a putative human ancestor from Chad.

This is boring stuff; what would really be news would be if the human-evolution crowd actually behaved like civilized people and agreed on something.  How many paleoanthropologists does it take to screw in a light bulb?  The answer is irrelevant, because they never get that far; since they can never agree on the socket type, the wattage, the voltage, the location, or how long the old bulb has been there, they just keep arguing in the dark.
Next headline on:   Early Man • Dumb Ideas

This would be a good time to review the information storage capacity of DNA, as described here 08/16/2002.
Next headline on:   Genes and DNA • Amazing Facts

Most machines don’t improve with use.  Old pickup trucks don’t gradually become Ferraris just by driving them fast, and a pocket calculator won’t change into a supercomputer by crunching lots of numbers.  The human body is different.  As weightlifters know, the more that people use their muscles, the stronger they become.  And unused muscles do not remain preserved; neglect causes them to waste away, or atrophy.
    It’s a remarkable response, one that scientists don’t fully understand.  Somehow, muscle cells “sense” how they’re being used and then remodel themselves to better fit the task. How does this happen?  And what exactly is it about exercise that triggers the changes?

Muscles respond to stress by growing stronger because of programming.  Our genes have billions of lines of code, and each cell is equipped with exquisite environmental sensors and molecular machines that carry out the instructions for repair and growth (read about just one example, among thousands, on EurekAlert).
    In addition, the genetic code is programmed to regulate itself and produce more (or less) machinery and construction material depending on the signals received from the environment: the food and oxygen coming in, the temperature, the stress and much more.  Pumping that bicep with a dumbbell sets off a cascade of signals and cellular activity that each respond to internal instructions, resulting in a better-prepared muscle for next time.  The fact that this doesn’t happen with pickup trucks, pocket calculators and rocks should remind us all of the power of intelligent design to overcome the otherwise degenerative nature of the second law of thermodynamics, at least locally and temporarily.  Why not illustrate this comparison by driving to the gym or a hiking trail today?  Have a good workout, and remember, “no pain, no gain” applies to your body, not your car.
Next headline on:   Human Body • Health • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Life does not just “originate” any more than a castle will “originate” on an outcrop of marble.  So Mars may have had intermittent, briny, acidic pools of water that stunk.  Sounds like a graveyard for organic chemicals, not a Garden of Eden.
Next headline on:   Mars • Origin of Life

National Geographic is hardly a pro-Biblical source, so if they say the novel is based essentially on historical hogwash, why should anyone else trust it?
Update 12/19/2004: The TV show, unfortunately, gave a lot of time to Brown’s theory and other supporters of it, and ended on an ambiguous note, suggesting that at least some of it might be true.  This is grossly unscholarly.  Suppose a few years from now, someone started legends about a former President, say Franklin Roosevelt, and made up all kinds of conspiracy theories using obscure sources and vague inferences, and made it into a best-selling novel.  Should it be regarded with more credence than first-hand accounts and credible sources?  Then why not give the most credibility to the clear words of Peter and Paul and other eyewitnesses to the facts, who knew Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the whole group of disciples, and make no such claims, but by contrast, emphasis the deity, sinless character and purity of Jesus Christ?  Their focus is not on double-entendres trying to find lurid angles, and searching for obscure relics, but on the words of truth.  Their words were written within the generation of eyewitness, unlike the gnostic gospels that date from a century or two later and are filled with clearly mythical elements, like dime novels.  Read the New Testament without the “help” of deconstructionist postmodernists who try to find something to feed their politically-correct feminist biases.
    It’s a shame to see so many people at airports and shopping malls with a copy of Dan Brown’s book in hand.  One can only hope many of them have learned to separate fiction from fact and baloney from reality.  They should read the testimony of eyewitnesses like John, who said, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (I John 1.
    Such eyewitness testimony is vastly superior to the secret suggestions and imaginary inferences from “discredited sources and flimsy connections” made by Dan Brown, a novelist without claim to authority or reliable testimony, who must be laughing his way to the bank.  Look also at the words of Peter who, like the other apostles, made no financial gain from his preaching, but – on the contrary – suffered persecution and death for proclaiming what he knew to be true.  He said forthrightly: “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.  For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain” II Peter 1).
    Like a juror under instructions from the court, be a good judge of evidence and apply standard rules of evaluating eyewitness testimony (see book by Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ).  Whose word would you trust, Dan Brown’s or the traveling companions of Jesus, all but one of whom died a martyr’s death without flinching on their testimony that He was the Son of God?  (The exception was John, who apparently died of old age, but was persecuted and exiled without flinching on his testimony, either).  The church was born and flourished in Jerusalem, the worst place of all to propagate a myth (if it were not true that Jesus had risen from the dead to demonstrate his deity) because of all the people who had seen Jesus and could have stopped the movement cold by producing the body.  Peter, in his first sermon to the crowd at the Jewish temple, appealed to the fact that they were all eyewitnesses of Christ’s miracles (Acts 2).  Paul, another unwavering martyr, spoke of 500 witnesses to the resurrection of Christ, many who were still living when he wrote (see I Corinthians 15).  So are we to believe that now, suddenly, after 2000 years, a novelist is going to tell us what really happened?  Come on.
    Only a fool who cannot judge evidence would swallow Brown’s myth.  It’s the same kind of conspiracy theorizing, suggestive reasoning that titillates late-night talk show audiences with claims NASA never went to the moon or that aliens built a face on Mars.  The Da Vinci Code will sparkle like a meteor for awhile then fizzle and vanish into the darkness.  Challenges like this can actually reinforce trust in the historical accuracy of the Bible, for anyone willing to examine the evidence squarely, as did former atheist Lee Strobel.  The Biblical records of the life of Christ have endured many waves of unbelief and spin doctoring, but always come through unscathed.  This Christmas season, take a fresh look at the account of the Baby in the manger, not as a religious story, but as fact of history.  Who is this Jesus?  What must we do with Him?  The message is not just for scholars to dispute.  Remember, the angels in the gospel account appeared to humble shepherds, proclaiming “good tidings of great joy for all people: for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord.” (Luke 2).  But honest scholars are not excluded.  The adult Jesus explained to a scholarly man, Nicodemus, a knowledgeable and mature judge of evidence, what His appearing was all about: read John chapter 3.
    From us at Creation-Evolution Headlines, have a level-headed, thoughtful, meaningful, merry Christmas.^*
Next headline on:   The Bible
^*And pray that Antony Flew (see 12/09/2004 headline) will continue to follow the evidence where it leads.

The history of science is a complex subject involving centuries of political and ideological trends, thousands of players, and multitudes of documents, but two things are clear: true modern science was born in countries that had a Christian world view, and the greatest scientists of the scientific revolution came from a Christian background.  Without slighting the contributions of the Greeks and Arabs, to portray otherwise is to distort history.
    Half truths are deadly because they contain some truth.  It is true that medieval European scholars were in debt to the Arabs for Greek texts, machinery, medicine, mathematics and more.  It is true that Arab scholars made significant advances in medicine, astronomy, and mathematics before the European Reformation and Renaissance.  But it is also true that Islam conquered countries mercilessly with the sword (as it does now) and would have overrun Europe had not the Europeans resisted.  Would their complete domination of Europe ushered in a golden age?  Would the rise of science have been as meteoric under the caliphs as it was under the Reformers?  Why is Nature so quick to praise the religion of Islam, and so silent about the Christian faith of most of the founders of modern science?
    Any scholar, including Sezgin, who brings historical facts to light is deserving of credit.  If he is helping correct some imbalances in the history of science, that is good.  Displaying devices that Arab inventors made, including complex astrolabes, surgical devices, water clocks and anesthetics, is as worthwhile as displaying those made by the Chinese, the Egyptians or the Mayans.  But to suggest that Europe stole science from the Muslims is a distortion.  Despite centuries of opportunity, a true self-sustaining scientific enterprise did not arise in Islamic countries, and Islamic countries today are some of the most scientifically backward of all (see 11/21/2004 headline).
    Science involves not just making inventions but striving to understand the working of the world.  Most cultures, in spite of their religions, have shown skill at architecture and invention, often due to necessity (war, sanitation, healing sickness or injury, providing water supply and food), or for artistic purposes.  All societies, additionally, have innately intelligent or skilled people who can achieve greatness and satisfaction in their works.  But that is not the same thing as science.  Only in Christian Europe did a true scientific revolution take place, largely because Christian philosophers saw nature as a handwork of God that operated under His law.  Abbott mentions many inventions in her article, but not any Arab search after scientific principles; yet she uses the phrase “Islamic science” repeatedly when Islamic technology would be more appropriate.  It is odd that Nature would have so much good to say about the Greeks whose works the Arabs translated, but whose scientific ideas were so often wrong, based not on the scientific method but usually on the reasonings of their fallible minds.  Yet much of Islamic “science” included a slavish devotion to the wisdom of the Greeks, especially Aristotle.  It took a long time for the Europeans to wean themselves off Aristotle and learn by experiment, like the work of Robert Boyle and Johannes Kepler (both devout Bible-believing Christians) that nature operates primarily through God-ordained natural laws.  These scientists, like many other Christians, explored nature not for gain or fame or pragmatism, but sheerly for the joy of discovering the workings of God.
    Abbott grossly whitewashes the Islamic sword of terror.  Notice this sentence: “As the reach of the Islamic world spread, stretching from northern India to Spain, they absorbed as much knowledge as they could from each conquest.”  Listen, people: the Islamic world did not “spread” like soft margarine on a butter knife, with the bread of humanity eager to soak it up.  The knife was a butcher knife, sharp and red with blood.  The caliphs Abbott speaks so well of promoted learning as much for personal fame and national fortune than for understanding.  Here is another whitewash:

In the fifteenth century, the Islamic world shrank under military pressure from western Europe – the last Muslim forces were forced out of Spain in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus reached America.  By this time, the European Renaissance was under way and Islamic knowledge was sucked up by powers on the rise, such as Spain and France.

Oh, those nasty Europeans, with their military and political ambitions trying to suppress the wisdom of the peace-loving Muslims, but taking their knowledge as booty.  Abbott should thank God that the Europeans finally had the guts to oust a religious empire that wanted to take over the world by the sword.
    This is the same religion terrorizing our world today.  Cry about separation of church and state in America?  There is none in Islamic countries.  This is the same religion holding its populace hostage to a seventh-century culture, impoverishing its citizens, denying its women of basic human rights and teaching a distorted history of the world (i.e., Jews were the Nazis, and there is no Israel).  Tell the truth, Nature – the whole truth.  Anthony Flew, the former atheist philosopher (see 12/09/2004 headline), said, “Islam has neither suffered nor enjoyed either a Reformation or an Enlightenment.”  He added, “As for Islam, it is, I think, best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism” —

I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam.  It was because the whole of Palestine was part of the land of Islam that Muslim Arab armies moved in to try to destroy Israel at birth, and why the struggle for the return of the still surviving refugees and their numerous descendants continue to this day.

He also described reading the Quran as “a penance more than a pleasure,” and compared Jesus and Muhammed thus: “for goodness sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.”  Muhammed was no scientist.  He was a superstitious, impetuous, conceited, philandering, bloodthirsty tyrant.
    Yet Nature seems to be on a new campaign to whitewash the very religion that is responsible for the most terror, the most tyranny, the most genocide and the most unenlightenment in the world today.  Imagine schools of the future slighting or ignoring Newton or Galileo, but paying homage to Avicenna and Muhammed as the fathers of science.  Imagine Christianity and Judaism being ignored or condemned as anti-intellectual.  Visualize the educational laws of the future forbidding the teaching of both atheistic Darwinism and Christian (European/American) science in the science class, but extolling the work of Arab scholars.  Imagine them recounting for students selective horrors committed by Europe and Israel in their conflicts with Muslims, but sweeping under the rug centuries of atrocities committed with the sword of Allah.  Would this be an improvement on the current tyranny of naturalistic science in the schools?  Is this the kind of new politically-correct philosophy of science that Nature will promote after the fall of the current idol, Charles Darwin?  Will Sagan, the popularizer of atheistic science, be eclipsed by Sezgin, the popularizer of Islamic science?  Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, you find the devil is clever.
Next headline on:   Politics, Ethics and History

Yet National Geographic in the September 2004 issue made the case that global warming was absolutely, certainly happening without a doubt, and only the ignorant or politically motivated would deny it.  Is this additional evidence that NG cannot be trusted in its science reporting? (see 10/24/2004 headline).  We all know that aliens cause global warming, anyway (see 12/27/2003 editorial).
    This article points out that models, age estimates and the evolutionary stories that go with them are spotty, inexact and uncertain, to use Poulson’s descriptions of past Cretaceous climate evidence.  How, therefore, can anything they say about the past or future be swallowed so uncritically by science news reporters?  They weren’t there, and they don’t know.
    Finding breadfruit tree fossils and other temperate and tropical plants (08/16/2004) and animals, including dinosaurs (03/29/2004) near both poles tells us something: the world was very different sometime in the past.  How could the poles get warm without the equator being too scalding for life?  It would seem there was a mechanism to moderate the global temperature like a mild greenhouse.  Maybe this will cause a rethink of theories of a pre-Flood global canopy; such models should get a hearing in the light of the failures of evolutionary modeling.  Let’s reconsider all those millions of years while we’re at it.
Next headline on:   Dinosaurs • Plants • Fossils • Geology

Most galaxies formed more than 10 billion years ago.  Those born later tend to be fashioned from recycled gas rich in metals that were forged by previous generations of stars.  But astronomers Trinh Thuan of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Yuri Izotov of the Main Astronomical Observatory in Kiev, Ukraine found the gas in the youngster, named I Zwicky 18, contains very little metal and is more like the pristine gas left over from the big bang.¹

Does something sound really fishy about this story?  Like, maybe, trying to keep the story going in spite of the evidence, or trying to force-fit objects into preconceived categories of old and young?  All they found was a galaxy with a lot of gas and few stars, and low metallicity in the gas.  So?  Look for the evidence of a prior assumptions in the abstract:

The question of whether there are young galaxies in the local universe forming stars for the first time is of considerable interest for galaxy formation and cosmological studies.  There are several reasons for this.  First, cold dark matter models predict that low-mass dwarf galaxies could still be forming at the present epoch because they originate from density fluctuations considerably smaller than those giving rise to giant galaxies. Thus, the existence of young dwarf galaxies in the local universe would put strong constraints on the primordial density fluctuation spectrum.  Second, while much progress has been made in finding large populations of galaxies at high (z =+ 3) redshifts (e.g., Steidel et al. 1996), truly young galaxies in the process of forming remain elusive in the distant universe.  The spectra of those faraway galaxies generally indicate the presence of a substantial amount of heavy elements, implying previous star formation and metal enrichment.  Thus, it is important to have examples of bona fide young galaxies in the local universe because they can be used as laboratories to study star formation and chemical enrichment processes in environments that are sometimes much more pristine than those in known high-redshift galaxies.  Moreover, their proximity allows studies of their structure, metal content, and stellar populations with a sensitivity, precision, and spatial resolution that faint distant high-redshift galaxies do not allow.  Finally, in the hierarchical model of galaxy formation large galaxies result from the merging of smaller structures.  These building-block galaxies are too faint and small to be studied at high redshifts, while we stand a much better chance of understanding them if we can find local examples.

So they went into their observations with preconceived notions of what they were looking for and what it meant.  That’s a recipe for delusion.  Meanwhile, the “young” galaxies that should be at high redshifts, and presumably therefore more pristine, are nowhere to be found; they already have heavy elements.  Where is the evolution?
Next headline on:   Stars • Dating Methods

“We know very little about the origin of life on the Earth... how it happened, what kind of environment it might have happened in, and how long it look to go from the origin to the last common ancestor of life as we know it – a very complex organism very much like modern life,” [Carrine] Blank [Washington U in St. Louis] said.
    Casting her eye back on Mars, Blank also said an unknown is whether conditions on early Mars were similar to what they were like on the early Earth when the origin of life likely happened.
    “If they were similar, then perhaps a ‘second genesis’ could have been possible on Mars.  Even if conditions were different on Mars, there could still have been a second genesis only with a very different result than what happened on the Earth,” Blank stated.  “If these different life forms were spread throughout the solar system, then they might have co-existed if they could learn to depend upon each other.  If, on the other hand, they were in direct competition for resources, then you might expect that one would ‘win’ and survive, and the other go extinct,” she advised.

Does water equal life?  Does mud equal a mud-brick pyramid?  Is science the art of building maybes on top of mights?  Does “might” make right?  Can they say the word “genesis” in school?  Does life just “happen”?  Can we say it “happened” when we know very little about the origin of life?  Can students have a chance to hear the controversy about evolution (see next headline), instead of the diet of empty speculation dished out by astrobiologists spending too much time watching old movies and not thinking straight?  Can they hear Jonathan Wells instead of H. G. Wells, and learn some science facts instead of science fiction?
Next headline on:   Mars • Origin of Life • Movies • Dumb Ideas

You, and only you, can help prevent the Atheist Charlie Lawyers Union from succeeding with scare tactics.  Just one victory over these bullies will energize sensible parents all over this country.  You might save $250 on your next purchase of Evolution, but who wants it for Christmas except the Grinch?
    The intro article to the debate says, “Sapolsky dodged the real scientific controversies and instead spewed stereotypes and politically motivated ad hominem attacks at intelligent design supporters.  Contrast that with the serious issues raised by Meyer and Campbell, who delve into the real issue of micro vs. macro evolution.  Read them both and judge for yourself.”  Good advice, provided you have your baloney detector powered on.  (Why is it that the creationists and ID supporters always want you to hear both sides, and the Darwinists only want you to hear theirs?)
Next headline on:   Darwinism and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Schools

Running on level treadmills is for mice.  Get out and breathe the fresh air and tackle a mountain.  Here’s a picture to inspire you, and here’s an encore.  For more benefits, join the club.
Next headline on:   Health

Most scientists agree that over very long periods of time, mutations in the genetic code are responsible for driving evolutionary changes in species.  One widely accepted hypothesis is that random, so-called single-point mutations – a change from one letter to another among the billions of letters contained in the code – minutely but inexorably change an organism’s appearance.
    UT Southwestern scientists, however, believe the single-point mutation process is much too slow and happens much too infrequently to account for the rapid rise of new species found in the fossil record, or for the rapid evolutionary changes occurring in species such as the domestic dog, whose various breeds have evolved relatively quickly from a not-too-distant common ancestor.

“I was struck by the prevalence of very highly mutable tandem repeats in the coding regions of genes responsible for development,” he said.  “That’s when it occurred to me that this may be an important mechanism whereby our genomes are able to create lots of useful variations in genes that are important for our development, our shape and structure, and our overall appearance.  “Many of the shape difference that we see in evolution are not suddenly adding a wing or a leg.  They are distortions, the stretching or squishing of a body part.  Mutations in these repeat sequences are responsible for such incremental, quantitative changes.”

Sean Carroll from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, worries that Fondon and Garner overestimate the importance of tandem repeats in typical evolution, noting that dog owners have bypassed natural selection by breeding for physical characteristics without thought to how the resulting changes would impact a dog’s survival in the wild.  Intensive breeding may have prompted the rampant changes in tandem repeats, more so than would occur under natural conditions.  But David King, an evolutionary biologist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, argues that it doesn“t matter whether natural selection or artificial breeding is at work–the role of tandem repeats is now clearly important: “[Fondon and Garner] have shown that tandem repeats are effective for fine-tuning evolution.”

This evolutionary food for thought is fit for a King.  (Here, King; here, boy.)  How do you squish an arm into a wing, or stretch a fin into a leg?  This sounds like the silly putty theory of evolution.  An intelligent kid can purposefully make things out of silly putty, but the putty by itself is silly and has no goal in mind.  Put the silly putty into a random machine of moving parts and chaos results.
    Other problems quickly evolve from this theory.  What if the top of the dog’s snout gets stretched by a tandem repeat mutation, but the bottom jaw does not?  The dog can’t eat.  What if the mutated dog can eat, but cannot find a mate with the same mutation?  And don’t these guys know that dog breeding is not evolution, but intelligent design?  How can David King, an evolutionary biologist, appear so ignorant of the difference between natural and artificial selection?  And how can he use evolution and fine-tuning in the same phrase?
    For these and other reasons, this Silly Putty theory of evolution gets Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  Fondon and Garner’s final sentence in the paper makes tandem repeats responsible for all the beauty and variety of living things:

How broadly this mode of evolutionary change is exploited in nature remains to be seen, but if the prevalence of repetitive elements within genes is any indicator, then mammals, insects, plants, and other genomes throughout the natural world may use this mechanism to achieve evolutionary agility.

“Evolutionary agility” – now there is an equivocation for the record books.  How did a lizard learn to fly?  By evolutionary agility.  How did an ape learn to build spacecraft?  By evolutionary agility.  How did a dog learn to become a whale and dive deep into the ocean, navigating by sonar?  By evolutionary agility.  What an agile concept.
    Papers like this diminish the prestige of the National Academy of Sciences.  Peer review is supposed to prevent dumb ideas from getting published.  If it were not for the desperation of the Darwin Party to keep sending new ideas up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes, they would have been forced to admit defeat long ago.  This entry’s only value is in pointing out that the old neo-Darwinian theory of natural selection, acting on point mutations, is inadequate to account for the rapid change found in the fossil record.  That is an admission that supports creation, not evolution.
Next headline on:   Mammals • Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Keep your eye on Titan; it’s the moon to watch over the next few weeks as the Huygens Probe mission climaxes on January 14 (see European Space Agency story).  Titan looked like a bland orange fuzzball when Voyager flew by 23 years ago, but now we can finally glimpse the surface under all that dense haze, and see that it is a planet-sized world beckoning a new generation of explorers.  This second-largest moon in the solar system, almost as big as Mercury and the only moon with a substantial atmosphere, is going to have amazing stories to tell – stories that are bound to rewrite theories of the origin of the moons and planets.
    If you were a kid during the Apollo moon missions, do you remember what you were doing when those famous Earthrise pictures came down on Christmas eve 36 years ago, as the opening words of Genesis 1 were read by the Apollo 8 astronauts?^*  You probably remember the moon landings more than anything else that happened in 1968-69.  Maybe you have kids of your own now.  Don’t let them be bored with life, or waste their time on stupid computer games and Christmas toys that will soon break and be forgotten.  Use this true-life adventure as an opportunity to give them a gift that can last a lifetime: the wonder of new worlds, and the thrill of discovery.
Next headline on:   Solar System
^*A dramatic reenactment of Apollo 8, including the Christmas eve message, can be found on the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.  Not all the episodes are equally good, but this one was well done.

“If you want to look at the evolution of music it’s important to do these types of studies,” says Laurel Trainor, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. She adds that this research supports the idea that humans have a special preference for consonance, one of the most basic structural elements of music.  This could account for the fact that as far as we know, only humans produce songs simply for enjoyment, she says.

   Cotton-top tamarins may resemble some youth of today, but without literature, semantic language, music or art, it looks like their monkey culture is pretty undeveloped.  They might relate to rap, which is more on their level, but even the Monkees seems too highfalutin for their taste.
    Listen to a symphony orchestra, or watch any group of talented musicians play finely-crafted instruments or sing, and ask yourself where is any evidence that music evolved from our primate ancestors.  Trainor should have said, “If you want to disprove the evolution of music, it’s important to do these types of studies.”  Only humans make true concordant music and only humans appreciate it.  Music is one of those things that humans don’t need for survival, but just enjoy.  It is a gift of God.  Let every heart prepare Him room, and heav'n and nature sing.
Next headline on:   Mammals • Human Body

They need to keep looking.  Even if these stretches do not code for genes or for regulatory agents, there could be other reasons they are there.  Maybe they provide structural integrity, scaffolding, bulk, or contain encrypted backup copies of genes, or provide something else no one has even considered yet.  If you looked at files on a computer, some would be easily readable but others would look like nonsense, and could be deleted without apparent harm.  That does not mean they were junk; maybe the function was just not discovered yet.  Maybe it was a device driver for a device you had not yet tried to use.  The apparently healthy mice with large portions of DNA removed might have been deprived of something they needed in a different environment, or might have aged quicker, or might have lost immunity to something.  The intelligent design approach is to assume there is a reason for it, and work hard to find it, not give up prematurely and call it junk.  This approach was successful in overturning the evolutionary myth of vestigial organs.  It will likely prove fruitful in this case as well.
Next headline on:   Genes and DNA

He’s just a deist now, pausing at the halfway house on the way to real faith.  Halfway, unfortunately, is just as lost as square one.  At least he admits the scientific evidence could not support the atheistic story that Nature assumes (see 12/08/2004 headline).
    Flew’s turnaround from atheism is a powerful justification of the intelligent design movement’s claim that the evidence itself, without reference to religion, is sufficient to convince a thoughtful person of design.  Flew admitted his views have similarities with those of intelligent design theorists.  But design detection is not enough to give anyone the joy of Christmas.  His designer is a distant watchmaker, not a babe in the manger who loves us and came to die for us.  Antony Flew, now an elderly man, has not yet any hope of heaven, and his hourglass is almost spent.  He should read this and keep making progress toward the light; following the evidence is good, but continuing in the direction the evidence points is necessary.
Update 12/10/2004: A lengthy interview by Antony Flew with Christian apologist Gary Habermas has been published online at the Biola University website.  It provides a very candid look at Flew’s view from the halfway house.  He is a man in transition, still balking at commitment to the claims of the Bible, but at least surprisingly sympathetic to many aspects of it.  To Dr. Flew, Christianity and its Scriptures are leagues above any other religion, especially Islam.  With naturalism inadequate to handle the origin of life, will deism be able to fill the vacuum for Dr. Flew?  Time will tell if the 19-year influence of Dr. Habermas, a man of intelligence, experience, integrity and compassion, will finally bear fruit in the life of this prodigal son who strayed from his Methodist father’s teaching 66 years ago.
See also the articles on this story that appeared in the Seattle Times and Dallas Morning News, reproduced on the Discovery Institute website, and an article on World Magazine.
Next headline on:   Intelligent Design • Origin of Life • The Bible

Don’t let that last sentence ruin your day.  Watch the Blue Angels, and watch the swifts at dusk sweeping in formation through the air.  Enjoy the fruits of intelligent aeronautical engineering design.  Maybe the designers of F16 tactical fighter aircraft someday will converge on the solution of building nests under the eaves of a barn, and reproducing exact copies that can grow, sing and catch fast-darting objects in mid-flight.
Next headline on:   Birds • Amazing Facts

Most of the evolutionary claims merely assume evolution, or make empty promises about how the new genomes will help shed light on evolution.  Example: “As life on Earth evolved over time, genes have been created, kept, discarded or deactivated, and reorganized.  At the particular point in evolutionary time over which a species first develops, these processes may have changed a gene in ways that allow scientists to use it to get a better fix on the human version of the gene.”
    OK, design scientists, get busy.  Don’t just sit around telling jokes about why the chicken crossed the road.  The Darwin Party is already busily invoking their favorite word games like convergence and homoplasy, and tweaking the rate of evolution for this or that chrome to make things fit their preconceived beliefs.  There’s a wealth of complexity and order to mine in these new genetic data.  Don’t let evolutionary storytelling win by default. 
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