“Still, some critics claim that science by definition can’t accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there.  But we can’t settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore.”
Michael Behe, in the New York Times Feb 7.

Stars: Born of Violence, or Doing Violence to Theories?   05/31/2005
Two stunning images from the giant orbiting telescopes are breeding tales of violence, but the reader can decide if the trauma is building stars and planets, or pummeling theories.  Space.com tells about the new Spitzer infrared photo of Eta Carina, announcing, “As they destroy the huge cloud that is their home, wildly energetic stars may be triggering the birth of the next generation.”  The idea is that material blasted away by the central star’s ultrasonic winds and ultraviolet radiation clumps in eddies where new stars can form.  Yet Nathan Smith explained that current theory does not explain the apparent synchronized star formation in the Carina Nebula.  Dust and gas will not collapse into stars without becoming concentrated.  Smith invoked a snowplow metaphor to explain how the material might have piled up, then “eventually formed knots where new stars could form.”
    Science¹ described observations of the Orion Nebula made by the Chandra X-ray telescope, where X-ray flares emanating from the Trapezium – thousands of times more energetic than anything our sun generates – are making some astronomers imagine birth through violence.  They speculate whether such conditions keep newly-forming planets from spiraling into their host stars, and might also explain the formation of chondrules, melted meteoritic material that has been difficult to explain in our solar system.  Confident claims such as “The results turn back the clock to the infancy of our own sun” are contrasted with mysteries, such as:

• No one knows the impacts of such giant magnetic short-circuits.
• ...it stretches current theory, [Eric] Feigelson readily admits.
• This was a whole category of energy release and physics that we just couldn’t study before.
• Feigelson thinks this “planetary protection” picture, in a phrase coined by NASA, needs a better theoretical anchor before anyone hops aboard that boat.  “The story is not necessarily persuasive because of the complexities of planet formation, but it’s very tempting,” he says.  “COUP [Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project] gives us much more confidence that our young sun was very magnetically active.  I am not as confident about the other steps in the argument.”

The pictures are beautiful.  The stories are entertaining.  No human lifetime could watch the whole sequence, so the interpretations are very much model-driven and riddled with difficulties.  Certain ones claim this or that feature supports their pet theory (see Finagle’s Second Law).  Others claim it turns the pet against its owner.
    Evolutionists seem drawn to violence as a creative process.  Though biological evolution is many orders of magnitude more implausible than stellar evolution, it still seems that theories of star and planet formation, though dealing in the hard-science realms of physics and chemistry, still require many ad hoc elements to work.  Note Feigelson’s remark about the “complexities of planet formation” – they are many, and serious.
    Telescopes bring us light from these objects that, though it left long ago, is received in our present.  The light gives us information about color, temperature, wavelengths, magnetic fields, velocities and a few other things that were going on when the photons left the object.  It is “tempting” to “hop aboard the boat” of this or that speculation, but boats without firm planks tend to leak.  A “firm theoretical anchor” makes a leaky boat leak even faster.  Moral: keep the data distinct from the stories.  Collect watertight planks before setting out to sea.  The next publication could well reveal today’s Spanish Armada of blustering hype sinking under the violent onslaught of new observations.
Next headline on:  Astronomy

What the Darwinists lack in data, they make up for in imagination.  That makes sense, all right – financially.  It explains why the Darwinists argue that teaching evolution is good for the economy (see 04/29/2005 entry).  It provides jobs for animators and other imagineers.  Malik wins the Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: “Eyes, for example, have evolved several times on Earth and are likely to pop up on other light-filled worlds, researchers said.”  Apparently, this crowd believes in Popeye as well as Tinkerbell (see 03/11/2005 commentary).
    The sad result of decades of evolutionary indoctrination by movie animators is revealed by Malik’s last line: “A National Geographic-commissioned telephone survey of 1,000 Americans found that 60 percent believe life exists on other worlds.  About 90 percent of those who believe in extraterrestrial life thought the Earth should respond to any communications emanating from an alien planet.”  Yet these true believers usually refuse to listen to or respond to the only Being who is communicating, and has communicated since the beginning (see Hebrews 1).  Only the technology of deception has changed since 700 BC.  Read it and weep: Isaiah 30, especially verse 10.
Next headline on:  SETI • Media • Evolution • Dumb Stories

• Shower power:  Drinking more and showering less may not help conserve water, say Australian scientists reported by EurekAlert. 
• Sun bath:  We were always warned to keep out of the midday sun to avoid cancer, right?  Science Daily talks about Manchester scientists saying we need that midday sun exposure for Vitamin D production.  All in moderation, of course; skin cancer is still a risk.
• Bone appetit:  Contrary to earlier beliefs, exercise to reduce fat does not hurt your bones, says EurekAlert.  It can even increase bone mass in senior citizens.
• Zitgeist:  Mineral oil doesn’t give you zits, says another article on EurekAlert – unless it’s the industrial grade stuff.
• Schism:  Not as many people are schizophrenic as previously thought, says EurekAlert.  Now you need another excuse.

The point is not that any of these reports are the last word on those subjects, but if scientists cannot get things right about everyday issues regarding our daily habits, how can they presume to tell us about things millions of years ago?
Next headline on:  Health

The authors of the study hasten to add that their hypothesis does not mean we can’t change our prejudices:

People sometimes assume that because we say prejudice has evolved roots we are saying that specific prejudices can’t be changed.  That’s simply not the case,” [Steven] Neuberg [ASU professor of social psychology] says.  “What we think and feel and how we behave is typically the result of complex interactions between biological tendencies and learning experiences.  Evolution may have prepared our minds to be prejudiced, but our environment influences the specific targets of those prejudices and how we act on them.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Neuberg can’t get off the hook so easily.  If prejudice is an evolved adaptive strategy, then it has no moral implications whatsoever.  Nobody can say that this or that target of our hardwired prejudice is wrong.  Prejudice, if it evolved, is as “good” as eyesight or hearing.  If anything is “wrong” to a consistent Darwinist, it is standing in the path of evolution.  But ironically, their very claim shoots itself in the foot.  If what they were saying was true, then we would have to dismiss their claims as evolutionary adaptive strategies for their own self-protection, and therefore inapplicable to our own interests.
    The press release avoids words with moral connotations, like right or wrong, good or bad: instead, it sidesteps moral implications with words like inappropriate – “One important practical implication of this research is that we may need to create different interventions to reduce inappropriate prejudices against different groups.”  Well, for crying out loud, who decides what is appropriate?  It doesn’t seem very appropriate in a Darwinian world, where might makes right, to deny a bigot his adaptive self-protective strategies.  Isn’t that like trying to stop rams from banging their heads together?  What gives these ivory-tower intellectuals the power to tell their fellow academics that “we may need to create different interventions”?  What does need mean in an amoral world where selfishness rules?  Whatever happens is what evolution does.  If race riots happen, just observe and take notes.  Only those with a foundation for morals can dare to say we should intervene.
    You’ll notice that the news media never question this stuff; they just regurgitate the barf and say, “Well, I’ll be, isn’t evolution interesting.”  No other human enterprise seems so immune from criticism as Darwinian propaganda, even when it is as politically charged as this.  What gives any fallible human, including scientists, the right to claim that human evils are amoral artifacts of evolutionary adaptive strategies?  Is it their superior wisdom?  Is it their empirical evidence?  Is it their philosophical neutrality?  Don’t be conned.  If you get angry at the Darwin Party’s rationalization of everything evil as an evolutionary adaptation, including rape and child abuse, then join the anti-Darwin revolution and help put this foolishness into the dustbin of discredited ideas, where it can take its place beside Bad Marx and Sickman Fraud.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Stories

To the liberal left, free speech is the highest ideal, and censorship is arguably the worst crime in the world.  So who are the censors here?  Who are the book-burners here?  Who are the ones for indoctrination, against the open marketplace of ideas, and for stifling debate here?  The very groups that want to defend homosexual advocacy and Islamic religion in public schools, believing that even grade schoolers and kindergartners should be exposed to it, exhibit rank hypocrisy when it comes to anything not on their leftist agenda.
    This is another egregious case of far-left liberals running to the courts to do an end-run around the voice of the people and their elected representatives.  It’s not just critics of Darwinism that should be outraged.  If the courts can define what science is, then Big Science itself should tremble.
    If the ACLU succeeds, we suggest they be consistent.  No more computer science in public schools, because it is a science based on intelligent design.  No more mention of SETI.  No archaeology.  No information theory.  No cryptography.  No forensics.  No mention of molecular machines or cellular networks (see 03/14/2005)  No teaching on DNA as a genetic “code” or “language”.  Since these sciences use design words, which might imply intelligent design, they are inherently religious.  While they’re at it, maybe they should exclude all mention of Kepler, Newton, Herschel, Faraday, Maxwell and any other scientist who was a Christian or creationist (see online book).
    If intelligent design is religious, then so is Darwinian evolution and the philosophical naturalism that underlies it.  The ACLU is not trying to keep science classrooms free of religion.  They just want it free of everyone else’s but theirs.  They want to keep biology classrooms safe for the Cult of Tinkerbell (03/11/2005 commentary), so that Pope Charlie (02/13/2004) won’t get a stomach ache (11/29/2004) when clever students discover problems with his fairy tales.
Next headline on:  Politics • Intelligent Design • Education

This is a prime example of the leaps of faith rampant among Darwinians, who can discuss with apparent wonder the technologies of the animal kingdom – capabilities that dwarf human efforts based on intelligent engineering – then say they just evolved, with utter, implicit, and complete faith in the inspired Word of Charlie, who alone does wonders.  Then they have the audacity to accuse non-Darwinians of relying on faith instead of science.
    Vollrath apparently was not at all aware of nor troubled by the fact that he dodged the question about evolution.  How did the spider web evolve?  It evolved, he said.  Any skill or technology needed was available to the spider with the snap of the evolutionary fingers.  Example: certain spiders “have evolved to produce web fibres that have an aqueous coating, supplied and maintained by hygroscopic compounds to attract the required water molecules from the atmosphere.”  How did the spider find these hygroscopic compounds and incorporate them into the production line?  It evolved.
    That explanation is all-sufficient.  The precise acidity control?  It evolved.  The hyperbolic extrusion die?  It evolved.  The exact recipe of proteins, sugars, phosphates, calcium, sulfur, neurotransmitter peptides and other organic and inorganic ingredients that yielded a substance humans cannot emulate?  It evolved.  The ability to control the solidification and folding at exactly the right time and place?  It evolved.  The ability to sort out tough silks and soft, flexible sticky silks into a radial pattern?  It evolved.  The skill to snare insects, detect their presence, and get to them without getting stuck itself?  It evolved.
    It evolved because it evolved: that is apparently enough intellectual content to satisfy a brainwashed Darwinist.  Some humans build webs, too; the tangled kind, spun by self-deception.  Watch from a safe distance.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Stories • Evolution

• The race card:  Fiona Morgan on Salon.com trashes those who try to link Darwin to racism.  The cartoon shows Darwin with a dunce cap sitting in the corner, but Morgan says he is one of the good guys.
• Anti-modern heartland hicks:  That’s the description Andrew Gumbel gave of anti-evolutionists in L.A. City Beat.
• Revenge of the Sith:  Atheists organize to fight back, reports Greg Sandoval in the Bakersfield Californian.  A worship service included booing and hissing at a picture of Pat Robertson.
• Revenge of the Six Days:  MSNBC News highlighted the Creation Museum that is taking shape in Kentucky, which will “fire people up” about the Biblical view of origins.  Darwinists are appalled, but admit director Ken Ham is a better communicator than most mainstream scientists.  Jerry Falwell predicts it will become Cincinnati’s #1 tourist attraction.
• Culture war:  Yahoo News reported that the Kansas school battle is likely to spill over into all 50 states.  Both sides are calling the other side pseudoscience.
• Sticker shock:  MSNBC News reported that workers in Cobb County, Georgia, under court order, are removing 34,452 stickers from textbooks that stated evolution was only a theory, not a fact, and should be studied with an open mind.  The ruling is being appealed (see 04/09/2004, 11/23/2004, and 11/08/2004 entries).
• Soap box:  Stephen Meyer printed his letter that Nature wouldn’t (see 05/19/2005 entry) on the Discovery Institute website.
• Brazilian infestation:  Alan Leshner, CEO of the AAAS, wrote in the Kansas City Star that the plague of creationism is infecting Brazil.  Denyse O'Leary on Access Research Network quotes a Brazilian who says it isn’t so; the only anti-Darwinists are a small group of second-class citizens with no influence on society.  O'Leary quips, “Leshner is using Brazil’s second class citizens as a bug-a-boo to frighten his fellow science boffins.”
• Rationale and rationality:  Departing NAS president Bruce Alberts spoke his mind in Science,¹ commenting on various topics, including the debate over teaching evolution: “It says we’ve failed as scientists and science educators to convey the nature of science and its values to the American public, despite our world leadership in science and technology... We all fear that this movement toward a biblical interpretation of scientific facts will eventually make us look like some of the countries in the Middle East.  If we’re going to remain a world leader, we’re going to need all the scientific rationality that we can muster.”  (See also 04/27/2005 entry on Alberts.)
• Declination:  Robert McHenry on Tech Central Station ridiculed ID as “intelligent decline.”  Jonathan Witt on ID the Future responded that the article organizes all the bad arguments against ID in a single, convenient place.  Next day, Mustafa Akyol submitted a rebuttal on Tech Central.
• Scoping Scopes:  Chuck Colson on Breakpoint tried to clear up misconceptions about a historical event often compared with the Kansas debate: the Scopes Trial of 1925.
• World leader:  World Magazine led off with a cover story about the Kansas debate.  Detailing the histrionics in the board room, Timothy Lamer comments, “Lost in the propaganda and facial expressions is just how modest the proposed revisions are.  For all the comparisons to the Scopes trial, the roles in that trial have been reversed 80 years later.  Today, it’s the critics of Darwinism who want to introduce what they see as important scientific evidence into science classrooms and it’s the Darwinists who are fighting to keep out what they see as heresy.”

Alberts should be ashamed of himself for insinuating that anti-evolution efforts will make America look like a Middle Eastern country.  He put three types of baloney in that sausage.  First, intelligent design is not “a biblical interpretation of scientific facts.”  ID does not rely on any theological position but rather on design detection using established scientific reasoning.  Second, the only Middle Eastern country with a Biblical view is Israel, which has a strong pro-science record and a modernized civilization with political freedom for all.  Why didn’t Alberts point his attack where it belongs, at those unsavory, tyrannical countries with a Koranical interpretation of scientific facts?  Third, evolution has absolutely nothing to do with making a country a scientific world leader.  Darwin, whose only degree was in theology, was an imposter (see 05/02/2003 commentary) who snuck naturalistic philosophy into a scientific tradition that was built on belief in design (see online book).  Of all people, Bruce Alberts, co-editor of The Molecular Biology of the Cell, and one who stated that the biology of the future is the study of molecular machines (see 01/27/2003 and 01/09/2002 entries), should realize that naturalism is hopelessly inadequate to explain the complexities of life.
    The taproot of the culture war is the debate over origins.  What carves the deep divide in our country and the world are the big questions of who we are, where we came from, and what we are here for.  The Darwinists have had free rein for over a century to tell everyone that “science” says we are the end result of a mindless, natural chain of unpredictable events, and therefore have no ultimate purpose.  They claim that the unfathomable designs in the living world and the universe are illusions, mere artifacts of stochastic combinations of chance and natural law.  They claim that our minds, our wisest and most sublime thoughts, our love, and our character are reducible to molecules in motion, and ultimately to particles that emerged out of nothing.  If you think these assumptions should be challenged, join in the biggest and most momentous battle of the century, where the arms are not swords or bullets, but facts – and the ability to wield them with knowledge, wisdom and skill.  Let Creation-Evolution Headlines be part of your armory.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design.  • Education

• Match point:  The BBC News and many other news sources published South Korea’s announcement that stem cells matched to the individual have been tailored for the first time.
• First clone:  The BBC News also announced that the UK had made its first human cloned embryo for harvesting stem cells.  The article quotes a ProLife alliance representative appalled over this; “No matter how it is created,” Josephine Quintavalle said, “a human embryo’s destiny should be to live and not to be turned into human stem cells.”  She also protested the “unsafe and inefficient” practice, and how it might subject women to dangerous fertility drugs in order to collect sufficient eggs.  Proponents agree that embryonic stem cell therapies only exist in theory; one professor said, “We are talking about several years before we are talking about a cell-based therapy that can go back into the patient.”
• Contradictory results:  Science last week¹ tried to clarify contradictory lab results by explaining “red herrings in stem cell research.”  They identified eight factors influencing stem cell plasticity, especially injury to the cells during lab procedure.
• Korea and Ethics:  Gretchen Vogel in Science² elaborated on South Korea’s widely-reported advance in the efficiency of deriving stem cells from cloned human embryos.  They got the success rate down from one in 200 to one in 20.  The improved skills of the Korean group nevertheless raise difficult ethical questions,” she says, referring to a Stanford bioethics statement in the same issue that warns, “research proceeds internationally, these issues must be adequately addressed for public confidence to be maintained.”³  Ethic problems include demand among scientists for fresh oocytes from young women, medical complications, long term complications, and chances that renegade doctors will attempt reproductive cloning.
• Presidential angst:  President Bush said he was “very concerned” about Korea’s rapid advances in stem cell research, and said he would veto any bill loosening restrictions on federal funding for it.  See report on MSNBC News.  Although the research is not “banned” in the United States, federal funding is restricted.  Bush said he worries about a “world in which cloning becomes accepted,” and does not believe taxpayer money should “promote science which destroys life in order to save life.”
• Political battle:  MSNBC also reported that a heated debate is brewing between Congress and the President over a bill proposed by a Republican from Delaware and a Democrat from Colorado to ease restrictions on federal funding of stem cell research.  Advocates are emphasizing promised cures “with emotional appeals from celebrity supporters as well as parents who ‘adopted’ their children as embryos,”  the article begins.  Supporters and opponents are deeply divided over whether the embryos are human beings.
• International tensions:  Nigel Williams in Current Biology⁴ surveys the international scene, particularly in Europe where the EU has member states that stand “poles apart” on the issue.  He contrasts Switzerland’s liberal policy with Italy’s stern opposition due largely to the Catholic church.
• International standards:  In Nature May 26,⁴ Erika Check suggested that nations need to pull together to decide what’s right.  Quoting Arthur Caplan, bioethicist at U. of Pennsylvania, “An international effort to coordinate stem-cell research would lend transparency to the field and ensure it proceeds in an ethical way.” 
• Insufficient guidelines:  Nathaniel Nelson and Bert Thompson on Apologetics Press examined the NAS guidelines for embryonic stem cell research and found them “largely insufficient in dealing with the ethical stipulations” raised by the technology.

Our 02/08/2005 commentary still stands, and now we are in the thick of the ethical morass we knew was coming.  Bioethical voices seem powerless over the lure of money and prestige.  Erika Check quoted Caplan describing ethicists as standing on the sidelines and pouting, “you can’t do this.”  But would international controls help?  The U.N. with its Oil-for-Food scandal showed that international agencies are no guarantors of ethics: they can become the problem, not the solution.  Nor has the U.N. been willing or able to stop human rights violations in rogue nations like North Korea or Sudan.  It is doubtful an international science community would have any power over rogue nations and individuals now that stem cell research is hot.  We have seen that there are researchers within the civilized world with no qualms about trying anything that is possible, even putting human cells into rat brains (see 03/10/2005 entry).  In today’s amoral, selfish research culture, it seems as if the tables have turned: rat cells have invaded the human brain.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Cell Biology

DNA keeps surprising us.  The old picture of a relatively static library occasionally mutating to provide grist for natural selection is out.  Now, we see that even among our own species – all of us being interfertile – there are remarkable differences not in just a DNA letter here or there, but in whole stretches of DNA sometimes 100 base pairs long or more.  What this all means is not clear.  It may be that most of our genomes cannot tolerate much divergence (see 11/26/2004 entry), but a certain fraction can vary quickly to provide robustness against changing environments and diets as people groups migrate into new areas.  If so, thank God for this variability.  Consider the differences in habitat between the frozen tundra, rain forest, the Sahara, grasslands, Asian steppes, forests and coastlands.  The food available, air pressure, climate, insolation and biota can vary considerably.  But even that explanation is simplistic; Americans go on vacation to Iceland, China and the Serengeti, don’t they?  And international marriages usually produce offspring possessing “fitness,” whatever that is (see 10/29/2002 entry, “Fitness for Dummies: Is it Running in Circles?”).
    Darwinists cannot claim they understand this variability any more than anyone else; that is why Check calls this a “surprising conclusion.”  Thankfully, it is still politically correct for her to say, “We’re still one human family, of course.”  But this knowledge through a Darwin filter could feed a new eugenics (compare 04/22/2004 and 10/12/2001 entries).  When Darwinists claim that certain genes are being acted on by natural selection, some individuals are going to appear more fit than others.  Certain gene patterns may be deemed unfit to reproduce.  Don’t think we’ve learned our lesson and are beyond that.  One only has to visualize North Korea (02/11/2005 commentary) to consider how such information could be quickly twisted for evil.  “Diversity” is the politically-correct word now, but “Unity” is potentially just as potent a rallying cry for demagogues.
    Associating a DNA inversion to more fecundity is unwarranted.  There are many more factors than one stretch of DNA entering the picture of reproduction rates.  If that were true, why are Europeans having so few kids, and worrying about their countries being overrun with foreigners?  Africans and Asians seem to be overcrowding their parts of the world just fine without the inversion.  The claim overlooks the many social, moral, religious, pragmatic and economic factors that go into the equation.  Darwinists bluff about selection pressure and genes undergoing active selection when the picture is far too complex to draw such conclusions (see, for instance, 03/28/2005 and 01/17/2005 entries).  They can’t even get one mutation in one gene to correlate well with fitness (see 02/04/2005 and 09/07/2004 entries), let alone large structural variations.  Besides, the genome itself appears to be a pawn in the hands of numerous, complex epigenetic regulatory factors (see 06/03/2004 and 10/27/2004 entries).  The new data about human genomic variability should remain fair game for all honest scientists, especially those outside wearing designer lab coats instead of Darwin-brand straitjackets.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Human Body • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

These bones reveal population variability among true humans.  If they were capable of interbreeding, they fit the “biological species concept” of a single species.  Neanderthals have long been used for evolutionary propaganda.  The propaganda continues today, in spite of findings like this.  For instance, a TV program on The Science Channel showed brutish Neanderthals happening upon the camp of more modern humans, unable to figure out who the strangers were and what made them so smart.  The story is made up in the imagination of evolutionists committed to a form of evolutionary racism, calling modern humans “us” and Neanderthals “them.”  It is no more legitimate than lumping Watusis and Eskimos into different species.
    The original paper revealed uncertainties in the dating methods not reported by the popular press.  Without Creation-Evolution Headlines, you might not have known that dates on the same tooth differed by 4,130 years, or that there is no calibration curve for the period assumed (for a discussion of problems with radiometric dating, see this article by Carl Wieland).  The dating is driven more by The Tale of Human Evolution than by science.  Since carbon dating loses accuracy rapidly after just a few thousand years, nothing in this story disproves that these were fully human individuals living relatively recently.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

Ibrahim Jaafari, the prime minister of Iraq, has appointed Bassima Yousef Boutros, a 44 year old biochemist at Salah Eldin University in Erbil, Iraq as the country’s new science & technology minister.  Boutros is a member of the Chaldo Assyrians, a sect of Christians living in Iraq who suffered severe persecution under the previous Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.
    The Chaldo Assyrian Christians were forbidden to vote, hold public office, were often arrested and imprisoned, & often became the victims of random homicide & other violence from Baathists under the authority of Saddam Hussein.  An estimated 800,000 live in Iraq, & more than 40,000 fled the country under the previous regime.  Since the American military covered Iraq, the Chaldo Assyrian Christians & other minority religious groups in Iraq suffered from terrorist attacks at random, including the bombing of many Chaldo Assyrian churches, which killed scores of men, women, & children.

Having women in science is century-old news (they outnumber men in some circles), but a Christian woman, communicating with a Christian website that supports intelligent design?  How can this be?  We all know from the media that ID people don’t understand science and are the enemies of science.  Maybe the Darwin Party should lobby for a return to the good old days in Iraq.  What could be worse for Darwinism than a Christian in science leadership who believes in creation and who (gulp) knows biochemistry?
Next headline on:  Politics

OK, since some readers are intimidated when Big Science raises its collective voice against anything, let’s examine this correspondence.  First, we don’t know how many readers wrote responses, and of those, how many were pro vs. con.  Since Nature was born as a pro-Darwin mouthpiece (see 03/04/2004 commentary), it is not surprising the editors would continue the propaganda campaign of associating Charlie with science and anything else with foolishness.  Second, scientists are fallible.  The majority has been wrong before, often strenuously, sometimes for long periods of time.  Third, scientists can be woefully ignorant of issues outside their specialties; in fact, one of the writers (Roy, below) admits it.  This means that a molecular biologist or geneticist may know a lot about a particular molecule or gene but very little about intelligent design theory and the history and philosophy of science except what his liberal Democrat ivory-tower colleagues in academia tell him or her (see 12/02/2004 entry).  They may be oblivious to the fact that their work rests on the shoulders of centuries of creationists and believers in design (see online book).
    What onlookers must do is get past the hot air, bluffing and bandwagon tactics of these selectively-printed letters and evaluate the strength of the arguments.  See if you are impressed with what any of these self-styled Darwin champions have to say:

• Jerry Coyne (U of Chicago) uses the word science or scientist 17 times in 3 paragraphs, but really means materialism.  Substituting in the correct word makes his whole point fall apart, i.e., “scientists” have no duty to help “religious” people come to terms with “science” – recast as: materialists have no duty to help non-materialists come to terms with materialism.  By perpetuating the either-or fallacy of science vs. religion, Coyne contributes nothing to the discussion.  Remember how Coyne flip-flopped in the 07/05/2002 entry?
• David Leaf (Western Washington U): this letter is all about politics and strategy for fighting ID.  He thinks high schoolers are too dumb to understand the controversy, because they are “just learning the basics of science” (read: materialism).  He recommends waiting to allow students to think until they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by their junior or senior year of college.  (In the film Icons of Evolution, a high school student takes offense at the suggestion they can’t handle the controversy.  He points out that evolution is taught to kindergartners.  “If we can’t handle it, we shouldn’t be in high school,” he quips.)
• Chris Miller (Brandeis U): no merit in this letter, either; he just perpetuates the dysteleology argument with a presumably witty remark about Tinkerbell in the kitchen, “Evolution is a short-order cook, not a watchmaker.”  Read the 05/18/2005 entry again, and the 03/11/2005 commentary.
• Douglas Yu (East Anglia U): perpetuates the non-overlapping magisteria science vs. religion stereotype, making the odd claim that “ID actively undermines the basis of Christianity.”  Presumably Darwinistic materialism does not.  He defines all of Christianity in terms of the advice to doubting Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”  Talk about a quote out of context (see half truth).  Jesus often urged his disciples to follow the evidence, not engage in blind faith (and especially not human tradition).  Thomas should have followed all the overwhelming prior evidence he had rather than demanding more physical proof.  Jesus meant that future disciples would not have the benefit of his bodily presence.  It does not follow that they had no evidence or should have believed out of ignorance.
• Rustum Roy (Penn State) equates ID with the ignorance of different cultures or belief systems, and advocates a relax and stay-the-course strategy.  “Ham-fisted efforts will simply alienate much larger numbers of people from the rest of science,” he says, so just treat ID like you would those who are ignorant or illiterate.  Even for scientists, “amazing ignorance” of things outside their specialties does little harm, he argues.  Maybe if they ignore ID it will go away.  What if it doesn’t?  Again, no effort to understand or answer the case for ID was offered.
• Michael Lynch (Indiana U) pounds the nail about ID being equivalent to intellectual laziness: i.e., just giving up and saying “the Designer made it that way.”  That didn’t seem to be an obstacle for James Joule (see Joule’s own words) and many other great scientists (see also von Braun’s own words); on the contrary, their fascination with God’s design was their motivation to do good science.  Lynch also tries to distance evolution from dependence only on natural selection – interesting admission that Charlie’s famous mechanism is not omnipotent, but then what naturalistic mechanism can produce a wing or an eye? (see 05/15/2005 attempt).  Lastly, he repeats the faulty analogy that evolution is not just a theory, but a fact like respiration or digestion.  Surprisingly, Lynch touts evolution as the most quantitative field in biology, and suggests that teaching evolution will help students gain the mathematical skills necessary to compete in our technical world.  Is this a record for non-sequitur density per paragraph?
• Dan Graur (U of Houston) embarrassed himself with a senseless rant, equating ID with “flat-Earthers, tea-leaf readers, astrologers, geocentrists and phlogiston theorists” who, like ID (he thinks), “cannot publish their studies in respectable journals.”  This guy is clueless; the egg is on Nature’s face for printing it, unless their intention was to make ID look good by contrast.  Jonathan Wells on Discovery Institute shouldn’t have had to give it the dignity of a response.

So thank you, Nature, for giving us a sample of your best and brightest Darwin defenders taking on intelligent design.  If this collection of ridicule, straw man arguments, loaded words, false dichotomies, big lies, equivocation and pure ignorance of the issues is the best the Darwin Party can offer, then all ID must do is stand back and watch evolutionism implode.  Just don’t let them try to delay the inevitable by letting their illogic and ignorance go unchallenged.

---

Suggested reading: The Design Revolution by William Dembski.  This 2-PhD mathematician/philosopher answers typical objections to intelligent design, including all those of the above challengers.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design

• ESA published a full mosaic of all the Huygens Probe descent images
• The Planetary Society, Universe Today and Astronomy Picture of the Day also described the mosaic.
• Science News April 30 contributed the fullest account yet of the Huygens Probe findings.
• EurekAlert compares Titan’s atmosphere with that of Earth.
• Universe Today does the same.
• Cassini Imaging released a movie of Titan’s outer atmosphere changing over time, and discussed its complex “anti-greenhouse.”
• Icarus researchers model Titan’s interior.
• Artemieva and Lunine, also in Icarus, consider the impact of meteor impacts on the surface.
• National Geographic highlights the bizarre landscape of Titan.
• Physics Web talks about the atmosphere and the interaction of atoms and molecules with the magnetic field.
• Astrobiology Magazine considers the intriguing images of runoff channels from the Huygens cameras.
• Science printed a special issue on Titan on May 13, with nine articles about the first two flybys:
  • Brooks Hanson provided an overview of science results.
  • Paul Mahaffy summarized the papers in the issue:
  • Radar mapping results.
  • Winds and atmosphere interdisciplinary results.  One quote: “The lifetime of CH₄ [methane] in Titan’s atmosphere is only 4 x 10⁷ years, and it requires a surface or interior source if the current inventory is typical of Titan’s long-term history.”
  • Ultraviolet probes of the atmosphere.
  • Mass spectrometer samples of the upper atmosphere.
  • Radio and plasma wave measurements of the cold ionosphere.
  • Magnetosphere measurements on energetic neutral atoms.
  • Magnetic field sensing: no evidence of an internal field detected.

These are great days for the Cassini team.  Everything has worked so well it is almost scary.  Why are the media giving these discoveries so little press?  This is one of the greatest achievements in history for solar system exploration, but few are hearing about it.  We make these links available for those who have better things to do than listen to daily decadence from the Michael Jackson trial.  Come, sail to the new world.
Next headline on:  Solar System.

Mother Nature had nothing to do with it, but that’s beside the point.  Every engineer knows that designing robustness into a system subject to perturbations is a mark of intelligence (see 03/14/2005 entry).
    Mt. St. Helens has also overturned many uniformitarian geological notions.  For a long list, search the word Helens on the ICR website and read this sample by Dr. Steven Austin.
Next headline on:  Geology • Plants and Botany • Terrestrial Zoology

Darwinists, are you interested in maintaining your philosophy, or in finding the truth?  Re-read the quote of the month at the top right of this page.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Education

Make exercise a part of your routine.  Your body needs it in more ways than one.  This is the best time of year for outdoor strolls, where you can improve both mental and physical health.
Next headline on:  Health

Design Language Gushes Out of Article Describing Cell Quality Control    05/18/2005
Here are the design words found in a press release from Michigan State describing the editing mechanisms of the cell DNA-to-RNA transcription process: high fidelity, quality control, inner workings, genetic coding, exquisite nanotechnology in living systems, genetic control, blueprint for life, industrial assembly line, conveyor belt, preloading, criteria, backs up to correct the error, sensed and corrected, acceptable level of error required for the speed at which cells must reproduce, elegance of cell creation, fidelity mechanism, tried and true design, and enduring design.  Here are the words in the press release describing the evolution of this system: [null].
    The aspect of transcription that so impressed the researchers was the ability of RNA polymerase (the main transcription machine) to preload bases before need: “Preloading of NTPs [nucleoside triphosphates, the “letters” of RNA code] hints at a previously unknown quality control station to maintain accuracy of RNA synthesis,” the article states (emphasis added in all quotes).  “We’re able to show how an error will be sensed and corrected,” said Team member Zachary Burton.  “The quality control system checks NTP loading several ways.  If it doesn’t match the criteria, it gets booted out.”  Details of the research were published in Molecular Cell.¹  Another statement by Burton encapsulated the tone of their study: “RNA polymerase is one of nature’s great designs.”

This is how science should be done.  No useless Darwinspeak, just careful analysis of design when design is evident.  Neither the formal paper nor the press release contained any mention of evolution.  Instead, the language of design was shown to be both useful and appropriate in a purely scientific discussion.
    By the way, the research focused on human RNA polymerase.  The press release was titled, “High fidelity keeps human DNA assembly line humming.”  All that quality control is on your assembly line, keeping you humming.  Need a tune to hum?  Try this.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Human Body • Intelligent Design

Short-lived water flowing on Mars is not going to help get life going.  In the first place, the mineralogy shows that Mars water was poisonous (see 01/05/2005 entry).  In the second place, if the probability of getting one useful protein by chance is astronomically small (see online book), the chance of getting error-correction mechanisms to emerge in time for life to survive the radiation bath is absurdly, ridiculously out of the question.  We saw that amino acids have a half-life of eight hours in a Martian environment (see 01/28/2005 story).  Do the logic: if error-correcting life is ever found on Mars, it did not arise by chance.
    “Violent eruptions of groundwater” – Hmmmm... did Mars have “fountains of the great deep”?
Next headline on:  Mars • Physics • Origin of Life

The structures would have to be pretty large and elaborate to function for social group recognition.  How many lucky mutations did that take?  A mole or nub on one stegosaur’s back would probably not be enough to get the ball rolling, to make all the others think that it was so attractive, he or she would be the only one getting a mate.  Maybe some things in nature are just for looks and contribute little or nothing to survival of the fittest.  Structures might be amplified by microevolution into extreme forms, but Darwinian theory would have a hard time explaining how they got there in the first place.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Evolution

The discovery of a bacterial clock unexpectedly breaks the paradigm of biological clocks, because rapid cell division and chromosome duplication in bacteria occur within one circadian period (Kondo et al., 1994 and Kondo et al., 1997).  In fact, these cyanobacterial oscillators in individual cells have a strong temporal stability with a correlation time of several months.    (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Need we tell readers what we are about to say?  “There is no mention of evolution in this paper.”  The inverse law of Darwinese stands: the more detailed the discussion of cellular complexity, the less the tendency to mention evolution.
    This is wonderful stuff.  The cell is alive with wheels, gears, motors, monorails, winches, ratchets and clocks.  Paley would be pleased.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Stories

See also the unexpected discovery of a lungless salamander in Korea (see 05/10/2005 entry).  Who knows what other strange animals remain to be discovered in remote parts of the world.  Keep your eyes open for that duck-billed mastodon that might be lurking in an alley in San Francisco.  Maybe Tom Weller’s menagerie of skunkosaurs, wooly turtles and saber-tooth ducks will some day be seen as prophetic, and the Darwinists will marvel at more cases of convergent evolution.
Next headline on:  Mammals

I here estimate the energy cost of changes in gene expression for several thousand genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  A doubling of gene expression, as it occurs in a gene duplication event, is significantly selected against for all genes for which expression data is available.  It carries a median selective disadvantage of s > 10^–5, several times greater than the selection coefficient s = 1.47 x 10^–7 below which genetic drift dominates a mutant’s fate.  When considered separately, increases in messenger RNA expression or protein expression by more than a factor 2 also have significant energy costs for most genes.  This means that the evolution of transcription and translation rates is not an evolutionarily neutral process.  They are under active selection opposing them.  My estimates are based on genome-scale information of gene expression in the yeast S. cerevisiae as well as information on the energy cost of biosynthesizing amino acids and nucleotides.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Clathrin has an established function in the generation of vesicles that transfer membrane and proteins around the cell.  The formation of clathrin-coated vesicles occurs continuously in non-dividing cells, but is shut down during mitosis, when clathrin concentrates at the spindle apparatus.  Here, we show that clathrin stabilizes fibres of the mitotic spindle to aid congression of chromosomes.  Clathrin bound to the spindle directly by the amino-terminal domain of clathrin heavy chain.  Depletion of clathrin heavy chain using RNA interference prolonged mitosis; kinetochore fibres were destabilized, leading to defective congression of chromosomes to the metaphase plate and persistent activation of the spindle checkpoint.  Normal mitosis was rescued by clathrin triskelia [complete 3-part clathrin proteins] but not the N-terminal domain of clathrin heavy chain, indicating that stabilization of kinetochore fibres was dependent on the unique structure of clathrin.

Gene duplication is one of the mechanisms Darwinists invoke when Natural Selection seems inadequate for a job, and they want to make it seem like there are other tricks in the toolkit of Charlie the Magician.  The abstract of Wagner’s paper seems to make it clear that duplication is not going to help.  If two tools are fighting each other, like front and rear tires spinning in opposite directions, the vehicle is not going anywhere.  Now go back and reread the 10/07/2003 entry about endocytosis and see if you think the Darwin Party has a prayer for explaining it.  Be sure to watch Allison Bruce’s cool video of clathrin making geodesic domes.  How many of you would vote for chance and natural selection producing this geometrical marvel?  Someone other than a Darwinist, who not only has a prayer but a Recipient, should get a hearing.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Evolutionary Theory

• MSNBC News says the Kansas hearings ended on a bitter note.  It gave approximately equal press to both sides, including attacks and counterattacks.
• CNN host Lou Dobbs led a lively interchange between Michael Ruse, John Morris of ICR and Jonathan Wells and printed the entire transcript. 
• NBC Nightline hosted a debate between Michael Ruse and William Dembski.
• Bryan Leonard, PhD candidate, made a case for teaching the controversy in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Rob Crowther on EvolutionNews.com calls it “one of the most compelling presentations of the entire Kansas Board of Education hearings on teaching evolution.”
• Dr. Philip S. Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote an open letter to the Kansas school board encouraging them to teach the controversy on evolution.  The letter is posted on Discovery Institute News.
• The Discovery Institute lambasted evolutionary scientists for failing to appear and answer criticisms.
• John Gibson’s Big Story on Fox News May 6 included Eugenie Scott facing off with Stephen Meyer.  Gibson seemed to lean in the direction of Meyer’s intelligent design position, based on the harder questions he posed to Scott, who tried to justify the evolutionists’ decision to boycott the Kansas hearings.
• World Magazine published a pro-ID report of the Kansas debate.
• Agape press writer Jim Brown claims Darwinists are getting desperate to defend a faulty theory.
• MSNBC News also posted a lengthy and lively interchange between creationist David Bump and cosmic evolutionist Neil deGrasse Tyson, after the latter compared Darwin with Einstein in an interview with science editor Alan Boyle (see MSNBC April 19).  Boyle received a hard-hitting critique from David Bump and printed it in its entirety, along with Tyson’s point-by-point responses.

Tyson is a Darwin demagogue who cannot be trusted.  Look at the propaganda piece he pulled in the TV series Origins (see 09/29/2004 review), a Saganesque phantasmagoria of evolutionary imagery two-thirds animation and one-third irrelevant data.  There, as here in this interchange, he shows himself a bluffing ignoramus about history and biology, more interested in snappy sound bites than truth.  He repeats debunked ideas about Copernicus and Galileo, even when confronted about it.  Remarkably, he preaches Lamarckian ideas, even when confronted about that, too: he said, “Frequent use of organs or appendages, where that use contributes to one’s survival until reproductive years, will reinforce the existence and utility of that feature, as continuous variations of that feature get further tuned for survival.”  Can you trust someone that ignorant about evolutionary theory making TV specials about it?  Frequent use or disuse has nothing to do with natural selection; that’s basic high school Darwinese.  Unless a random mutation brings about some selective advantage, you can use your parts to the ultimate and none of the increased fitness will make it into the progeny.  Tyson also is a naive positivist, reiterating the canard that, despite a century and a half of evolutionary frauds, science has “built-in error correction” that eventually leads to progress.  OK, what will he think when science corrects the errors of Darwinism?  He also lies about Darwin’s theory of inheritance: “You are mistaken if you believe that Darwin’s ideas of inheritance were wrong,” he chides Bump.  What?  Pangenesis was out of style as soon as Darwin published it.
    Alan Boyle, pathetically, doesn’t seem to have enough baloney detecting skill to discern who’s right.  He just seems to be leaning on Tyson’s reputation as a prize-fighter for Darwin.  Bump landed some pretty solid blows, which Tyson tried to dodge with misdirection, hot air, audience baiting and arm-waving.  The Darwinists had better send this champ back to the corner and give him some remedial education before he embarrasses them further.
    All the articles listed above are worth reading.  It is a good sign when journalists stop printing outworn stereotypes from only one side, realizing they will get called on the carpet by readers.  It’s a good sign when the journals can no longer give ID a one-sided brush-off (compare 08/21/2003 with 04/27/2005).  The persistence of anti-Darwinists – some eminently qualified scientists and some informed laymen – no longer cowed into silence, is keeping editors on their toes.  Perhaps a few journalists are beginning to notice themselves the weakness of the ruling Darwin Party’s responses.  The most vocal Darwin advocates themselves are becoming cautious in their rhetoric (see 05/06/2005 entry).
    When ID reaches critical mass, the demise of Darwinism could be quick and relatively painless.  It might even start celebrations, like the fall of the Berlin wall.  It will become chic to ridicule Charlie and uncool to wear the Darwin Fish logo.  Editors will remark, “I never really did believe that stuff, anyway.”  The hard-core Darwinists will be forced to support their ideas with real empirical work (see 08/20/2003) instead of bluffing from a position of usurped authority and pilfered prestige (see 05/02/2003 commentary).  Like welfare queens put on a work-for-food program, accountability will be their undoing (see 12/22/2003 commentary).  The culture need not worry at the collapse of such a large institutionalized paradigm.  Good science with all its desirable fruits will prosper – yea, flourish – within the new Reformation (see 08/19/2003 commentary).
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinism • Education

It’s good to see students engage the controversy when so many Darwinists don’t even want to debate this issue (see 04/29/2005 and 04/27/2005 entries).  Paul Laddis, despite his valiant attempt at overcoming irreducible complexity with the co-option argument, fails to mention that there is irreducible complexity everywhere, not just with the bacterial flagellum.  Like Scott Minnich emphasizes in the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life, Darwinists need to address not only the parts that are similar between different structures, but the assembly instructions, which are even more complex.  You cannot invoke co-option endlessly; Minnich says, “You can only carry that argument so far” until you wind up borrowing parts from nothing.  Laddis starts with a complex protein: stop right there!  Tell us how the complex protein arose, when getting a precise sequence of left-handed amino acids to perform a function is astronomically improbable (see online book).  Don’t grant a Darwinist any unwarranted boundary conditions (see “Get your own dirt” on the Humor page).
    Darwinists have a besetting sin that might be dubbed the Cartoon Method of Science.  They don’t need data.  If they can just imagine an evolutionary sequence and draw cartoons of it, they feel they have done their job.  Using a common Darwinist trick, Laddis tells an imaginary tale of sequences (notice his phrase “to visualize how this works...”) and expects us to believe it is plausible just because he says so.  Then he has the gall to turn around and tell the intelligent design empiricists that they don’t understand science (see 01/15/2004 commentary).  It’s time to call the Darwin Party’s bluff and point the accusation where it belongs.
    Laddis thinks he can co-opt the Emperor’s New Clothes metaphor (see 01/31/2003 entry) and call his opposition the dogmatists.  Maybe the rituals in the Temple of Charlie (see 01/12/2004 and 04/21/2005 commentaries) require taking the Hypocritic Oath.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design

Oh, how the Darwinists would love to find a sequence of complexity in eyes, to ease Chairman Charlie’s stomach pains when contemplating the wonderful designs in nature.  But this story can’t help.  The jellyfish eyes appear over-designed for their task (see 06/19/2002 entry).  These remarkable optically-near-perfect structures are well adapted to the needs of the organism.  Perfect focus would be a drawback for the jellyfish.  It would create an image crowded with irrelevant details.  Instead, it has a “low-pass filter” to help it see what it needs to see: large, stationary objects so that it can avoid obstacles and find prey in its habitat.  If an animal has a structure that meets its needs and is well designed, is it not a non-sequitur to say it is evolving?  Did the Darwinists find a gradual sequence of intermediates leading from primitive eyes to complex eyes?  No.  Brittlestars (see 08/23/2001), trilobites (09/18/2003) and even sponges (08/20/2003) exhibit optical perfection, yet none of these are on a phylogenetic line – evolutionists claim all these things evolved independently (and suddenly, too, considering they burst onto the seen during the Cambrian, without ancestors).  So instead of helping Charlie sleep better, this story gives him more indigestion: his tale now needs multiplied miracles of chance and natural selection to keep from falling apart.
    We need to get rid of the useless Darwinspeak in biological research, and focus instead on the functional information and adaptive excellence of each species.  Arranging the tools in your garage into a hypothetical evolutionary sequence does nothing to help you use them better.
Next headline on:  Marine Life • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

• Eccentric neighbors:  A story in Science Daily draws attention to the highly eccentric orbits of most extrasolar planets found so far.  The press release from Northwestern University begins, “Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe.  But, beginning with the discovery 10 years ago of the first planet outside our solar system, evidence suggests that, as far as planetary systems go, the solar system might be special indeed.”  The point is that, because gravitational interactions between planets often slingshot them into extremely elliptical orbits or even eject the smaller ones away, having a solar system with planets mostly in circular orbits is a rare thing.  One scientist in the article stated, “This is what makes the system so peculiar.  Ordinarily, the gravitational coupling between two elliptic orbits would never make one go back to a nearly perfect circle.  A circle is very special.”  The long-term stability of our system is also “rather peculiar,” he said.  A similar story is found on Space.com.  A related article on Space.com reviews what is known about extrasolar planets after ten years of cataloging them.
• Ionic Breeze:  A press release from Purdue University proposes that our atmosphere may be more effective at removing pollutants than previously thought.  Some naturally-occurring chemicals can react with sunlight to produce ions like OH radicals that can scrub the atmosphere of smog.  Unlike Titan, the Earth may possess a self-cleaning atmosphere.
• Heaven or Hell?  Two articles seem to contradict each other about the early Earth.  Bjorn Carey on MSNBC News suggests that the “Early earth [was] not so hellish” as previously thought.  But then Robert Roy Britt on Space.com surmises that “The Sun might have had an incredibly violent youth in which tremendous X-ray flares battered the Earth into being, a new survey suggests” – yet somehow these favored the formation of rocky planets.  A short piece on Science Daily agrees that super-flares from the early sun might have helped form our rocky planet.  Based on Chandra X-ray Observatory data, scientists propose that “The bigger flares would prevent Earth-like planets from plummeting into the star, while such a planet would likely be drawn into a star with smaller flares and disintegrated.”

Nothing in any of the observations suggest life is common on other planets around other stars, but rather the opposite.  In the Q&A of the film The Privileged Planet, Guillermo Gonzalez asked how his hypothesis could be tested.  If the observations continue to support the connection between habitability and discoverability, he said, it would gain strength, and if not, it would lose credibility.  So far it’s looking pretty good.
Next headline on:  Solar System

This confirmation will add satisfaction to your viewing of the Moody Science film that demonstrates von Frisch’s experiments, a classic named City of the Bees.  The segment is also included in the anthology Wonders of God’s Creation.  The “language of the bees” via the dance is a great story, all the more wonderful because it is true: 2-good 2-bee 4-gotten.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Stories

For example, a red book on the dashboard of your car casts a red reflection in the windshield.  Through the reflection you perceive distant objects, including green grass, in their normal colors.  Light from the green grass and the red reflection physically mix to produce yellow.  The yellow is observed when seen through a small hole punched in a piece of cardboard held up so it blocks out the surrounding context.  Without the cardboard, however, no yellow is seen, only the red and green layers.  The brain is thought to split the yellow light into the red and green layers using rules that invert the usual rules of color mixing.  This is called scission.
    Or consider the image of a white house reflected in the shiny surface of a black car.  Neither the house nor the car appears gray where their images overlap.  Rather the light at that location is perceptually split into a white and a black layer.
    Strictly speaking, the illumination that falls on surfaces is not a separate layer.  But the same scission algorithms that work for transparent layers can be effectively applied to the illumination.  Mathematically a shadow and a sunglass lens have the same effect on the image.
    When the processes of image formation are inverted in this way, surface reflectance is not merely computed, it is recovered.

Stay tuned: that implies we have limited ability to fathom such design.  Speaking of staying tuned, our ears do a similar kind of processing.  Students of advanced mathematics know that through Fourier Analysis and other techniques, one can separate out the individual contributors to a complex waveform.  For instance, your ear hears a hugely complex single waveform when listening to a symphony orchestra, but you are able to discern the individual sounds of the oboe, violin, trumpet, horn, timpani and all the rest.
    It should be noted that our confusion with optical illusions should not cause us to infer errors in the code.  For one thing, our eyes were designed to operate in our natural habitat, not in the pages of books of optical illusions.  Second, the ability of humans to trick the software with illusions shows that humans have creative ability to alter a designed system and understand how it was tricked.  The algorithms of our image processing organs work for the environment for which they were designed.  They pull together the best responses to a vast array of possible inputs.  This is constrained optimization, the art of achieving the ideal compromise between competing inputs and priorities.
    Gilchrist credits Johannes Kepler, one of the champion creation scientists in our online book, with discovering “that an image of whatever we look at is projected onto the rear inner surface of the eye,” just like in a camera obscura.  Ever since then, he says, “it has been natural to assume that the rods and cones function much as modern day photocells, reporting the point-by-point intensity of light in the image.”  Now we are realizing that the truth is far more amazing.  If Kepler’s discovery was marvelous to him, how much more should these recent discoveries make us stand in awe of the supreme optician of the universe?  (See also 05/09/2002 entry.)
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Stories

Here is a tree that showed no evolution whatsoever for supposedly 200 million years, while continents broke apart and most of the mammals evolved from small rodents to elephants, whales, giraffes and people, and Attenborough isn’t worried that this does some damage to his world view?  Bizarre.  Logically, he should be questioning whether 200 million years was just a figment of Lyellian imagination.  The BBC should be announcing: Wollemi lives; evolution extinct.
Next headline on:  Botany • Fossils • Evolution

The prevailing view holds that self-replication is an ability that organisms or objects either have in full or lack entirely.  But Lipson’s team theorizes that self-replication isn’t a yes-or-no proposition, but exists at varying degrees.
    The researchers present their new robot as an example of this theory.
    The team says the extent to which something is self-replicating depends on many factors.  For example, mineral crystals build exact replicas of themselves, but only in a solution.  By contrast, rabbits reproduce themselves less accurately than crystals do but are less dependent on a specific environment.
    Through understanding the principles of self-replication in nature, the team aims to make robots that are more robust and adaptive.

The gizmo is cute, but is as far from life as a toy from a boy.  Its value is a demonstration of intelligent design.  Without the cube being built to specifications with an appropriate energy source provided, nothing would happen.  Without the lab assistant carefully placing the next cubes in the exact position where the robot could make electrical contacts with them, no replication would take place.  If useful nanotechnology comes from these efforts, that’s good.  If any speculator wants to imagine we are on the way to creating life, he or she has been watching too much Star Trek.
    Not to underestimate the team’s interesting achievement, let’s see the cubes invent themselves without help.  Let’s watch them find useful parts and reject harmful ones, and build something that actually performs a useful task other than stacking blocks.  Let’s see it encapsulate all its information in a genetic code and build its own translation and fabrication system with error-checking.  Let’s see it propel itself with an outboard motor and manufacture its own energy currency from protons harvested from sunlight.  The simplest cell runs circles around this toy, without help from Cornell graduate students.  Make the logical inference.
Footnote: a reader sent in this link to a chart of essential biochemical pathways on ExPASy.com.  He said this and chart 2 represent only the known essential cellular processes – about 2% of what goes on in the cell.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life

The authors make no mention of how this mechanism evolved, but do use the word design.  Presumably, they believe the design preceded the medieval crusades.  For organisms rooted to one spot, plants sure have some amazing ways of getting around.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Stories

The theory of panspermia proposes that life really gets around, jumping fron [sic] planet to planet – or even from star to star.  Life might be everywhere!  Assuming this is true, how do single-celled bacteria make the journey through the vacuum of space?  Easy, they use chunks of rock as space ships, in a process called lithopanspermia.  And now, researchers from Princeton and the University of Michigan think that life carrying rocks might have been right there at the beginning of our solar system, keeping their tiny astronauts safe and sound, frozen in statis until the planets formed and the right conditions let them thaw out, stretch their proteins, and begin a process leading from microbe to mankind.   (Emphasis added.)

No comment necessary.  He made a fool of himself without our help (see April Fool’s Day entry).
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Solar System • Origin of Life • Dumb Stories

Most software has bugs, but who would have thought that bugs have software?  The authors did a short phylogenetic analysis of light-sensing genes among butterflies, but otherwise never mentioned evolution.  They made no attempt to explain how a time-compensated sun compass, circadian clock, hormonal system and flight navigation hardware and software arose by a Darwinian process.  Intelligent human designers of guidance and control systems should stand meekly and humbly before the Monarch butterfly, and – much more than they did as kids – wonder.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Stories

If he believes in freedom, he is not a true Darwinist.  Freedom does not derive from material substances; on the contrary, it is an endowment from our Creator: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
    Thank God for a more fair-minded evolutionist like Michael Ruse who is willing to look at the problems on his own side.  Pray for Ruse, and for Scott, too.  They appear desperately trying to defend an indefensible position, an antiquated Victorian dogma that is no longer up to explaining the complexities of biology.  They must realize this in their heart of hearts.  When intelligent design finally dismantles the Darwinian regime, it will be a day to proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinism • Education

The new salamander poses a major mystery: How did the tiny lungless amphibians, less than 2 inches long from snout to tail tip, that live on land and breathe through their moist skin, show up in Asia, where all their distant relatives -- who are unknown on any other continent -- live in the water, mate in the water and breathe with their lungs?   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

“People have gone on expeditions looking for terrestrial salamanders, in places like Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics,” said Wake.  “They didn’t bother with northern China or Korea or Japan because we thought we knew everything that was there.  And so here (in Korea) they show up, and in the most surprising way, when some guy who’s a high school teacher from Illinois goes out with his class and says, ‘Let’s look for salamanders, let’s see what we can find when we turn over rocks and logs.’”

Major discoveries can still be made by laymen, even Christian laymen (perhaps better, especially Christian laymen, who believe God created everything, so everything under the sun is worth investigating).  All that is needed is a willingness to challenge orthodoxy and look where the experts say things cannot be found.  One’s worldview affects where one hunts for data.  If you think, “There are no lungless salamanders in Asia because they evolved in North America,” you aren’t going to waste time looking under rocks in Korea.  Congratulations to Stephen Karsen for illustrating this point.  May he encourage all of us to be observant and to challenge the “gospel” of scientific experts.
    Evolutionists sometimes challenge Biblical creationists that animals could not have migrated around the world after the flood from Ararat.  Here we see that evolutionists have similar problems of their own.  We should also be reminded that some salamanders are living fossils, displaying no evolutionary change over 160 million alleged years: see 03/27/2003 story.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology

• New York Times article (as analyzed by Discovery Institute)
• Wichita Eagle: Evolution players set out positions.
• Kansas City Star: Intelligent design theory argues for a designer of life.
• MSNBC: Witnesses criticize how evolution is taught.
• MSNBC: The evolution of a fight to the end.
• CNN: Evolution hearings open in Kansas.
• Science Daily: Teachers, scientists lead evolution fight.
• Lawrence Journal-World: Scientists: Board of education can’t determine evolution issue.
• Washington Times op-ed: Debating Darwinism.
• World Net Daily editorial: Explosive memo reveals Darwinist strategy for Kansas.
• Insight on the News (UPI): Evolution dispute continues.

• California Agee: Intelligent Design theorist [Behe] challenges Darwinism
• Agape Press: Parent Sues Evolutionist, Claiming She Defames Him in Anti-Creationist Article.
• MSNBC: The stirring on the mount (how a creationist is using Mt. St. Helens to support Biblical geology)
• Kentucky Post: Creationism facility here on a mission (Answers in Genesis creation museum)

Things are shaping up for a battle of wits, facts and propaganda to engage the national attention.  Best be well armed: get out that Baloney Detector and recharge the batteries.  Notice what is not said as much as what is said.  Try to look long and hard for the Darwinists to answer the claims about fossils and molecular machines – not with bluffing and redefinition of science, but with real, hard evidence.  It looks like they’re not up to it, so they are going to stick to their tactic of scaring citizens with the big lie that anything other than 100% pure Darwinism is bad for the economy (see 04/21/2005 and 04/29/2005 stories).  Don’t believe it.  Families will probably flock to a state that doesn’t cram Darwin down their children’s intelligently designed throats, and will bring their dollars with them.  Industry wants young people with “analytical thinking” skills, they say?  Good: teach them to analyze the controversy over Darwin.  ID arguments are “faith-based” they say?  No faith is as diehard as Charlie worship (see 04/30/2005 commentary).
    It’s noteworthy that more and more news sources that were previously hostile are starting to take a second look at ID and creation science and giving them serious consideration.  Can the monolithic liberal Darwin Party Big Science Empire stand up to all this scrutiny?  No matter how big the Goliath, it had better beware any stripling who knows his weapon, knows his target, and knows how to connect them.  That’s all the majority any intellectual battle needs.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Education

Therizinosaurs are here proposed as shifting their dietary habit from predation to herbivory on the basis of the development of a number of features that seem convergent with clades of other herbivorous dinosaurs.  The most significant of these features include small, leaf-shaped teeth, an edentulous beak, posterior displacement of the pubis and lateral expansion of the pelvis associated with greatly increased intestinal volume, and shortening of the tibia relative to the femur and an increased number of weight-supporting pedal digits—the latter two being specific reversals of the cursorial condition.  Falcarius demonstrates the mosaic nature of this evolutionary transition, indicating that the dentition and pelvis were among the first hard-tissue structures to undergo modification.  These changes probably coincided with modifications in food acquisition and digestion during the early stages of therizinosauroid evolution.  Moreover, similarities between the dentition of the basal therizinosaur Falcarius and the basal oviraptorosaur Incisivosaurus, in combination with their proposed sister relationship (Fig. 3), raises the possibility that the common ancestor of these clades had already undertaken the initial steps in this transition.

Falcarius casts further doubt on the affinities of Eshanosaurus by increasing its stratigraphic and phylogenetic inconsistency.  Given the discovery of North American members of the therizinosauroid clade, together with the poor record of Middle Cretaceous dinosaurs, it seems that the generally accepted hypothesis of an Asian origin and radiation for Therizinosauroidea requires additional testing.

Researchers like details and big words, but the news media like slang and humor.  Researchers speak in tentative and reserved language, but news media like certainty.  The scientists here proposed an interpretation that these species, despite the poor fit within a “generally accepted” hypothesis and uncertain dating, that Falcarius was undergoing a dietary change, even though (1) the number of simultaneous morphological adaptations needed would be considerable, difficult to account for by chance mutations and natural selection, and (2) they had to invoke the multiply-improbable concept of “convergent evolution” to link these changes to those going on in other species.  These problems notwithstanding, perhaps the shape of teeth and pelvis suggested that these dinosaurs were in the midst of a transition from meat-eating to plant-eating.    That’s all the news media needed: a picture and a sound bite: “Fossil-hunters working in the dusty Utah desert have caught a dinosaur in the act of going vegetarian.”  *Sigh*.  Who do they think we are – children, who can’t handle the solid meat of data, and who cannot discern interpretations from evidence?  These dinosaurs were not sitting around experimenting on lettuce for dessert after their usual steak.  Get real; the herd was living within their well-adapted niche, when a flood suddenly came and buried them all.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Dinosaurs • Media

Weeds are full of bioactive compounds.  These are chemicals that weeds have evolved over thousands of years to compete against other plants and to prevent predators, such as insects, from munching their leaves.
    These compounds “are toxic to predators.  But [when] used in the right dose, they have therapeutic benefits for humans,” Stepp said.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

This is an update on a story reported on 06/04/2004.  We hope Stepp is making progress finding that cure for cancer in your lawn.
    John Roach is fogging up the discussion to say that plants “evolved” complex bioactive compounds.  He makes it sound as if weeds had the ability to plan and invent things.  Plants have no brains; they just sit there and run the program.  They only look smart because they have a good Programmer.
Next headline on:  Botany • Health • Amazing Stories

“The fossil record confirms that the evolution of fish was a step-wise event,” explained Professor Aldridge.
    “The various characters that make up a fish, or a vertebrate, didn’t all appear at once – they were added one by one through evolutionary time.
    These [new] fossils help fill in this pattern of how early vertebrate evolution began.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

If evolution had a fast-forward button, it would be an intelligently designed machine.  These two articles illustrate the extreme flexibility of evolutionary logic, where any data point, no matter how anomalous, can be fit into the tall tale somehow.  Contradictions, rather than being disturbing, make the plot thicker and more interesting.  Somehow, in an early world with a plethora of unfilled ecological niches, fish took their time evolving over tens of millions of years.  Then in a relatively small lake habitat on one continent, Tinkerbell hit the fast-forward button and generated hundreds of species of fish in a geological instant.  Evolution marches on.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Fish and Marine Biology • Fossils • Dumb Stories