“Hence it appears that whoever maintains that there is no force in the argument from final causes [design] denies the existence of any intelligent being than himself.  He has the same evidence for wisdom and intelligence in God as in a father or brother or a friend.  He infers it in both from its effects and these effects he discovers in the one as well as the other.”
Thomas Reid (1780) rebutting the arguments of David Hume (1779); cited in The Design Revolution by William Dembski, p. 229.

The rich fossil record of horses has made them a classic example of evolutionary processes.  However, while the overall picture of equid evolution is well known [see 03/18/2003 entry], the details are surprisingly poorly understood, especially for the later Pliocene and Pleistocene, c. 3 million to 0.01 million years (Ma) ago, and nowhere more so than in the Americas.  There is no consensus on the number of equid species or even the number of lineages that existed in these continents.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Are you tired of the hype?  Every new Darwinian study overthrows the propaganda that was taught to the world for 100 years or more, but then they spin the bad news with the line, “this helps clarify the picture of evolution.”  It’s no picture; it’s a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting random bits of broken colored glass.
    These guys have no handle on what really happened to horses.  Remember?  They’re the same ones that want us to believe that our human ancestors, who were fully modern in every way, even capable of producing art that rivals Picasso, couldn’t figure out how to ride a horse for half a million years (see 01/19/2002 entry).  Now they want to tell us that all the fossil horses in North America, long thought to represent multiple branches on the Darwinian tree, are all just two species, and that “North American caballines—traditionally classified as multiple species based on their diverse size—belong to the same species.”  Any horse breeder could have told them that.  You can breed a Morgan and a quarter horse, even a Clydesdale and a Shetland (with a little help....)
    The lab work is irrelevant, because the evolutionary timeline is already a given (imagine trying to measure time with a broken clock: see 04/20/2004 entry and links in the commentary).  No amount of data is going to falsify their evolutionary belief, because this is just a game for them.  Their methodology assumes evolution, so no wonder they “prove” it!  They don’t know how fast DNA mutates, they don’t know how to classify fossils into species, and they weren’t there watching these animals move around the world.  It’s all made up to keep the Darwin Storytelling Empire in business.  Why do we trust them?  If they knew the true history of the world they would be dumbfounded, more than they already are.
    Darwinian storytellers ought to do some sweaty work on a ranch, ride a real horse (see 03/18/2005 commentary and 01/02/2003 entries), watch a sunset on our privileged planet, and learn about the real world.  Maybe it would open their eyes to consider some credible options, ones that coincide with the observations for a change.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The authors go on to estimate the temperature in the granulite lens during eclogite formation.  Their conclusion – less than 400 °C – is a problem for the conventional interpretation of these rocks, given that a temperature of around 700 °C is required for the formation of the adjacent eclogites.  Camacho et al. calculate that the total heating durations must have been around 18,000 years to explain the ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar age profiles, but that individual fluid-flow events must have lasted just ten years to avoid significant heating of the granulite regions between the shear zones.  This model evokes a radically different picture of the conditions during eclogite formation; but any alternative explanation would have to invoke a mechanism that explains why these phlogopites retained argon despite exceeding temperatures at which the gas would normally escape.

Now there was a daring and honest admission: perhaps geologists are just in the habit of throwing around millions of years, when the features they observe could just as well be “aggregations of many shorter events.”  Wow.  Think about that.  Here was a classic case of long ages from the Bergen Arcs in Norway that now must be reinterpreted.  Neither Kelley or Camacho are claiming that this formation came into being recently, but it represents, nevertheless, a monumental shift in thinking about geological processes in general.
    Dr. Terry Mortenson did his PhD thesis on the origin of old-earth thinking.  He found that most scientists until the late 18th century believed the earth was young, and that the revisions upward to millions of years were due primarily to theological and philosophical attempts to discredit the early chapters of Genesis.  Darwin, of course, later found all that extra time essential for his theory of evolution.  Today, biologists and geologists don’t dare question the vast ages because Charlie needs the time: in fact, Darwin was aggravated to a pique when Lord Kelvin robbed him of the millions of years he required (see 02/02/2004 entry).  Geologists found ways to steal those years back using radiometric dating methods, and have relaxed in complacency with their textbook geologic column, mumbling out those millions & billions nonchalantly, without much challenge (at least among the Darwin Party brethren).  But what if (as many other dating methods suggest) things are really not that old?  Follow the chain links on Dating Methods for examples.  These articles in Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, should be a wake-up call for geologists not to take vast ages for granite (which, by the way, also shows evidence of rapid formation; see 12/07/2000 entry).
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Geology

• Carroll presents his vision of the field without admitting that large parts of that vision remain controversial.  I would have appreciated a caveat or two, and non-scientists may mistakenly believe that Carroll presents the scientific consensus about evolution and development.
• Carroll emphasizes throughout that the evolution of animal form and complexity results from three factors.
  1. The first is modularity of organization: the ground plan of bilateral animals involves repeated segments that can evolve independently....
     
  2. The second factor is that most animals share a small but similar set of ‘tool-kit genes’ that regulate the development of different modules.....
  3. But modularity and a shared genetic tool kit cannot by themselves account for “endless forms”, because conserved genes cannot explain diversity.  Carroll therefore repeatedly emphasizes his third thesis: that the main engine of evolution is not change in protein-coding genes but in the switches that control them.
• The evidence for this critical hypothesis, however, rests more on inference than on observation or experiment.
• Carroll also claims that proteins are resistant to evolutionary change: they are often involved in many pathways, and therefore a change in protein sequence, while enhancing one aspect of the protein’s many functions, could damage several others....
  But recent data cast doubt on this argument.  Humans have about 32,000 protein-coding genes, fruitflies only 13,000.  Clearly, the difference between these species involves the origin of new proteins: in fact, between 40% and 50% of our protein-coding genes have no known homologues in flies.  So one could argue that the evolution of form is very much a matter of teaching old genes to make new genes.  And, given the data, this cannot be difficult.
• [Coyne argues for the evolutionary significance of gene duplication and adaptive selection.]  In contrast, the evidence for the adaptive divergence of gene switches is still thin.  The best case involves the loss of protective armour and spines in sticklebacks [see 06/18/2004 entry], both due to changes in regulatory elements. But these examples represent the loss of traits, rather than the origin of evolutionary novelties.
• Carroll also gives many cases of different expression patterns of Hox genes associated with the acquisition of new structures (such as limbs, insect wings and butterfly eyespots), but these observations are only correlations. One could even argue that they are trivial.
• Carroll’s correlations, however, do not compel us to believe that changes in these genes are the key factor in the evolution of such traits.  We now know that Hox genes and other transcription factors have many roles besides inducing body pattern, and their overall function in development – let alone in evolution – remains murky.
• In the end, we simply don’t know the relative importance of protein and non-protein changes in creating biological diversity.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Is evo-devo the evil-devil among Darwinists?  Like Satan, does he twist the word of lord Charlie?  Does he distort the evidence for his own nefarious ends?  Assuredly not; both Carroll and Coyne are on the same side, trying to oust God’s design from nature and account for everything by chance and biological laws.  What anti-creationist Coyne fails to realize is that he has cast both theories, evo-devo vs. standard Darwinism, in a deadly embrace.  Carroll wrote his book because of the weaknesses of standard Darwinism, and Coyne provided only bluffing assertions that standard Darwinism is sound, while arguing that evo-devo is just a clever idea that distorts the evidence and cannot really account for the diversity of life.  To argue otherwise requires simplification; i.e., the generous use of glittering generalities to create tall tales.  Neither evolutionary hypothesis can account for the complex and subtle realities of the living world mentioned in Coyne’s review – worms, lobsters, frogs, humans, chimpanzees, fruitflies, butterflies, mice, “the Cambrian explosion, the biology of dinosaurs, the brains of humans, and the striping of zebras” – and their “eyes, limbs, hearts and other complex structures” including “fly legs, fish fins and the tube feet of sea urchins.”
    But while calling Carroll’s evidence “thin,” Coyne is just as guilty of simplification: for example, look at this paragraph (our comments in brackets):

There are other ways beside gene duplication that proteins have evolved adaptively.  These include gene conversion [left unexplained], recruitment [personification fallacy] of genes to new functions (responsible for creating the antifreeze glycoproteins that allow fish to live in frigid waters) [see 05/13/2004 entry], exon shuffling (involved in the evolution of blood clotting factors) [Whoa!  Michael Behe showed how this is an irreducibly complex system unexplainable by evolution] and the addition of transposable elements to coding sequences [as if evolutionists understand this].  Finally, and simplest of all, we have many examples of adaptive changes of protein sequence between closely related species, including differences in the coat colour of mice [see “Peppered Mice?”, 04/18/2003], the digestive enzymes of herbivores, and the haemoglobins of high-altitude birds and mammals [do we just take his word for it?  Digestive enzymes and hemoglobins were already complex, functional protein machines before evolution tweaked them, even if it could].

Endless forms most beautiful speak of a Designer, not a blind process of evolution.  The shortcomings of Coyne’s view provide an opening for the claims of Carroll’s, and vice versa, such that they strangle each other, leaving both gasping for evidence.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics and DNA

We like to keep pointing out research projects with no need for mentioning evolution, that fit within a design approach.  The cell provides plenty of examples.  Here are two more: waterwheels (12/22/2003), quality control (12/20/2003), and many, many others in the chain links on Cell Biology and Amazing Stories.  Every person, from philosopher to man on the street, should ponder such things.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Stories

He said the hummingbird could serve as a useful model for engineers seeking to build small, flapping aeroplanes.  “You can probably learn something about building a machine from the way nature builds a machine,” he said.
    “The one big caveat is that an engineer can start from scratch – biological evolution doesn’t ever start anew.  It’s encumbered with the trappings of one’s ancestry.”   (Emphasis added.)

The cult of Tinker Bell lives on.  Evolution is a tinkerer that dabbles with existing material and produces machines that are the envy of intelligent human designers.  What is amazing about this belief is not just that scientists keep repeating it, but that all the major news media just parrot it without question.  When the Darwinian idol finally collapses, our SEQOTW entries will provide plenty of fodder for cartoonists.
Next headline on:  Birds • Dumb Stories

The locust has 800 projection neurons connecting to 50,000 Kenyon cells.  With such a large mismatch in numbers, how are these nerve-cell populations interconnected?  When Ron Jortner, a graduate student in my lab, recorded simultaneously from both projection neurons and individual Kenyon cells to assess the probability of connection between them he found, surprisingly, that the probability was about 0.5.  In other words, each Kenyon cell seems to connect on average to half of the input population, that is, to 400 projection neurons.  The number of ways in which 400 neurons can be selected out of 800—the number of possible connection patterns—is about 10²⁴⁰.  It’s an enormous number.  To put it in context, there are about 10¹⁰ seconds in a century, and there have been about 10¹⁹ seconds since the beginning of the universe.  With 10²⁴⁰ possible combinations of projection neurons to choose from—assuming random connectivity—almost every Kenyon cell is likely to sample a combination of inputs that is very different from that sampled by the other Kenyon cells.  Each cell will therefore gain a picture of the state of the projection neuron population very different from that gathered by any other Kenyon cell.  It follows that the responses of individual Kenyon cells will be very specific; a given cell should respond only to particular combinations of activated projection neurons, maximally different on average from those experienced by the other Kenyon cells.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

It seems wasteful that hundreds of thousands of olfactory receptor neurons converge on their respective glomeruli in an amazingly precise way, but that this precision is then thrown away when seemingly disordered patterns of activation are generated in the projection neurons.  But there’s a good reason for it.  A system that amplifies small differences in signals runs the risk of also amplifying noise, in this case the noise coming from the receptors.  Noise fluctuations would make the output of the projection neurons unreliable: the averaging that results from this kind of convergent design is precisely one way to reduce such fluctuations.

In parts of the looping receptor protein chain, the order in which the amino acids are strung together is so variable that some animals, such as the rat, have over 1,200 different receptor types.  On average, mammals have about 1,000 types, fish and birds between 100 and 200, round- worms (Caenorhabditis elegans) 1,000, and fruit flies 60.  Humans have only 600 different odorant receptor genes, but almost half of these are “pseudogenes” that no longer function, leaving us with only 350 receptor types in our nasal mucosa....
    Interestingly, when the receptor genes of mammals, flies, and worms were compared, no sequence homology was found.  In other words, the genes had probably not evolved from a common ancestor: different types of animals had come up with their own particular (but related) designs for olfactory receptors independently throughout evolutionary history.  Such convergent evolution, as it’s called, happens a lot in biological systems.  The single-lens eye design, for example, has evolved independently at least eight times in the animal kingdom.

This article is a good companion to the next one (see 06/25/2005 entry).  The language is similar: circuitry, computation, communication, codes, signals, and information.  The lead-in photo shows a man with a very satisfied look savoring a cup of coffee, probably unaware that he is sensing a cocktail of two to three hundred compounds.  Did you have any idea how much computation and circuitry make that pleasant feeling possible?  We joke about our noses and don’t usually give them the same respect we pay the eye or ear, but each sense is more wonderful than we could possibly realize.
    Werner Gitt, in his delightful book The Wonder of Man, elaborates on some wonders of our human sense of smell.  We have between 10 and 25 million receptor cells where the odor molecules fit with the proteins like a lock and key.  Each olfactory cell measures only 5 to 15 millionths of an inch.  Past these cells waft about 12 cubic meters of air per day, as we inhale and exhale 12,000 times.  Our olfactory sense is extremely sensitive, exceeding the capabilities of most technological measuring instruments.  We can detect one ten million millionth of a gram of mercaptan, for instance, and even distinguish between left- and right-handed forms of the same molecule.  Remarkable as that is, we all know how the animal kingdom relies even more heavily on the sense of smell, marking territory with scents, using scents for sexual attraction, and navigating by their noses.  A dog has 220 million receptor cells, tenfold more than we do; think of how dogs can be trained to sniff out bombs in luggage and people trapped under rubble or avalanches, or how bloodhounds can follow the footsteps of a crook all the way from the crime scene to his shoes.  Maybe it’s good we humans don’t have that TMI problem, but our olfactory sensitivity is nothing to sneeze at.  Smells enhance the taste and flavor of our food, color our world, and influence the way we think and act in many subtle ways.  They warn us of danger, or attract us to pleasurable sensations.  “Our memory for odours is astounding,” Gitt says; “nothing can stir up old memories better than a certain scent.”  The fresh air in a pine forest, the sunshine after the rain, the fragrance of a rose, the symphony of smells at a table of great food – how impoverished life would be without a sense of smell.  Thank God for your nose.
    Laurent’s brief side trip into Fantasyland with Tinker Bell (see 03/11/2005 commentary) provided some comic relief for this intense and thought-provoking look at a system of mind-boggling complexity.  Did you enjoy the Fairy Godmother’s song, the Ballad of Convergent Evolution?
Impossible!  for a random mutation to become a neural circuit;
Impossible!  for an unguided process to produce a code so perfect.
And four DNA bases will never produce Code Morses,
Such fol-de-rol and fiddle-dee-dee of course is:
Impossible!
But the world is full of zanies and fools
who don’t believe in sensible rules
and won’t believe what sensible people say...
and because these daft and dewey eyed dopes
keep building up impossible hopes
impossible things are happening every day!
Nothing like a magic wand named Natural Selection to do impossible things.  Just wish... and believe.  While the Darwinists are wishing upon a star in Fantasyland, design scientists are turning Frontierland into Tomorrowland.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Terrestrial Zoology • Mammals • Amazing Stories

But Nature controls far more complex mechanisms with ease: Consider the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.  A lowly roundworm about the size of this comma, it grows from a single-celled egg to an adult containing exactly 959 cells.  The little fellas are clear as glass, and entire generations of lab students have spent countless hours hunched over microscopes tracking the career of each cell.  The whole process takes 24 rounds of cell division—79 of the 959 cells line the guts from mouth to anus, 302 become nerve cells, and 131 die along the way.  “Everything has been mapped precisely,” says [Jehoshua] Bruck [Moore Professor of Computational and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering, and director of the IST], who has a framed poster of this developmental tree on his wall [the article contains this diagram].  “But we, as engineers, don’t understand how to handle all the information in that map.  We don’t understand what the principles are.”  But, somehow, the cells understand.  The egg divides, and one cell has to call heads and the other, tails.  The process involves the random diffusion of signaling molecules, but the result is very precise—you never end up with a two-headed worm.  Then the other divisions have to follow in the correct order.  “And even when every cell has a clock and the timetable,” Bruck points out, “they still need to coordinate their actions.  It’s like driving on the freeway—sometimes you need to slow down and let another car pass.”  Organisms are just information made flesh.

• But building complex machinery from molecule-sized parts is no cakewalk—how do you put all those tiny pieces in the right places?  Nature uses a program encoded in the genes.  Inspired by this, [two center members] are making DNA “tiles” that spontaneously assemble into complex patterns based on information contained in the DNA.
• Cells do amazing things with seemingly slap-dash components.  The body heals broken bones and fights off diseases, and we walk around and we do crossword puzzles, all with flimsy, floppy protein molecules packed into cells that keep dying.  There’s nothing magical about the stuff we’re made of, so clearly the miracles are in the circuits—broadly defined—that they’re organized into.  How do these circuits work?  And what else can be done with the same components? [p. 12]
• The goal of the Center for Biological Circuit Design (CBCD), says Paul Sternberg, Morgan Professor of Biology, investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and director of the center, “is to learn about biological circuits by trying to build them.”... There are actually three nested levels of circuitry, says Sternberg: networks of signaling molecules within a cell that handle such things as regulating metabolism or allowing an amoeba to find and engulf its prey; circuits consisting of several cells, such as the ones that coordinate our defense against infection; and the vast neuronal circuits that are responsible for, say, understanding speech.  The CBCD will initially tackle the first two, leaving the brain to the ganglion of neuroscientists on campus.
• By biological standards, the human brain is only middlingly complex–a protein molecule can have 10 thousand atoms, a cell can contain a billion macromolecules, and the heftier E&S reader might consist of 100 trillion cells.  That’s 27 orders of magnitude of organization from an atom to a person, which is like going from the diameter of an atom to the distance to Sirius [p. 12.  For a visualization, see Secret Worlds: The Universe Within.]
• [Sidebar] A schematic of Arnold’s cellular band-pass filter.  The sender cell emits molecules of ALH... [He describes the complex interactions of seven parts in the cascade].  Got all that?  And this is a very simple regulatory scheme, as things go.... [p. 13].
• Says Sternberg, “...we’re just trying to get anything to work.”  It helps that the CBCD houses people who are building artificial circuits and people who are reverse engineering real ones.  “Now we say, ‘This cell has switchlike behavior—what mechanism is it using?’  It would be nice if you could say, ‘Well, there are four different ways that cells usually do that.’  It would be even better if you could say, ‘Well, there’s one way that they usually do it, let’s go test that one first.’” [p.13]
• “Everything we do in CNSE [Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering] is IST-related,” says director Pietro Perona, professor of electrical engineering.  “We take neurobiological principles and use them in engineered systems, and use engineering expertise to try to understand the brain.”

Says Bruck, “In time, I think ‘information’ will be a first-order concept.  So in 20 years, if a high-school student asks her friend, ‘Do you like algebra?’ the other girl will say, ‘Yes,’ or ‘No,’ or ‘Yes, but I hate the teacher.’  But the other day I asked my daughter, a high-school junior, ‘Do you like information?’ and she said, ‘What?!!’”

OK, Intelligent Design Movement, charge!  Grab this paper and wave it in the faces of the Darwin Party, and say, “Look!  The future is information, reverse engineering, and treating biological entities as intelligently designed circuitry.  That is what ID is all about.  This entire article had as much use for Darwinism as an astronaut for a pogo stick.  Biological systems could only be understood in terms of their information content, their logic, circuitry and programming—i.e., their design.  The design is so extraordinarily complex that Caltech’s brightest stars are at square one trying to figure it out.  Darwinism is an impediment, an 18th-century, Industrial Revolution paradigm that is not up to the requirements of the Information Age.  Step aside!  ID is the future.”
    This article is one of many recent entries at the intersection of biology and nanotechnology that illustrates the power of a design-theoretic approach to science.  Although it does not mention intelligent design (and, undoubtedly, many of the participants are probably evolutionists), the content of the article plays right into the hands of the intelligent design movement.^*  Look: a large interdisciplinary scientific enterprise (IST) has been organized with the goal to understand and capitalize on the information content in biology.  The same topics in this article are prevalent in the ID literature: information theory, reverse engineering, understanding and detecting design, programming, circuitry, complexity and communication.  The identity of the Designer, though an important and interesting subject,^** did not enter into the discussion, and was not essential for achieving the goals of the IST.  This shows that ID is a non-religious scientific approach; it can bear fruit in a multicultural, secular setting.  Rather than bringing science to a halt, it promotes, stimulates and encourages scientific discovery—findings that will promise to revolutionize society, help cure disease, remove the drudgery of our lives and fulfill the promise of Daniel 12:4 that “many shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”  It’s past time to remove the ball and chain of Darwinian mythology and speed ahead into the Information Age—the golden age of intelligent design. 
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Stories • Intelligent Design.

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^*Did you catch Smith’s comment on miracles?  “There’s nothing magical about the stuff we’re made of, so clearly the miracles are in the circuits—broadly defined—that they’re organized into.”  Think about it.  By miracle he is not suggesting something like the parting of the Red Sea, but that the awe-inspiring aspect of the system is its organization, or information.  ID can latch onto this statement by reasoning that the programming, or information content, of the system cannot be generated by natural law, chance or any combination of the two (see No Free Lunch by William Dembski for rigorous proof).  This implies that something outside Nature (if defined as matter in motion) must have supplied the information.  As such, that is supernatural, or “miraculous” in that sense of the word.
^**Though the identity of the Designer is not essential to progress in ID science, thinking people will surely ponder the obvious.  Looking at the circuitry in a roundworm or human brain, and watching Caltech’s best and brightest sweating to imitate the processes organisms execute flawlessly with ease, will prompt the logical conclusion: This didn’t just happen.  Someone with incomprehensible wisdom and power made this.  The attributes requisite for such an Engineer should narrow the choices sufficiently, to where preachers on Sunday could make good use of the anecdotes emerging from the CBCD Monday through Friday.  Smith said “Organisms are just information made flesh.”  Does that prompt a sermon text?

“You would be hard-pressed to find someone who isn’t amazed by hummingbirds,” said H. Ross Hawkins, founder and executive director of The Hummingbird Society.  “Perhaps it’s their iridescent coloration and miniature size, or their ability to drop their heart rate from 500 beats per minute during the day to 40 beats per minute at night.” (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

There are few classes of animals more varied, colorful, intelligent, talented and interesting than birds.  Makes you wonder what they think when they take up people-watching.  Perhaps it’s best we don’t know what that chickadee is telling its friends when we walk by.  When a Darwinist says, like in the Miller article quoting James Hare, “The work ... shows us that even very common species that we may take for granted have evolved to have very elaborate and exacting systems of communication,” they might be chirping, check a duh, duh, duh.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Stories

How much hoc can an ad hoc hawk for an ad hoc post hoc post?  An M-class star needs a Jupiter for its comet shield, remember?  And is intelligent life going to thrive on the dark side of a tidally locked world in time to build a flashlight, let alone a radio telescope?  Or is it going to bake in its sun forever on the lit side and never see the stars, dreaming of who else is out there?  Maybe there is a thin great circle on its twilight zone suitable for life.  Don’t count on a booming economy, though.
    Don’t expect sitcoms or even kid fare on the M channel.  If Goldilocks had to broadcast from such a world she would move to a nicer zone.  Like the film suggests, that leaves out 90% of the market.
Next headline on:  SETI • Intelligent Design

It is wondrous how Darwinians get their ability to build epic tales, animated features and all, on such flimsy data as a few teeth.  If they can’t even get the class of an animal right from the teeth, how can they tell us all about the age, and which ancestor begat which?  When the wrong story was assumed, for so long, and passed the peer review of children’s picture books, how much confidence does this give a reasonable observer that other figments of the story have validity?
    Dinosaur evolution theories will survive this catastrophic impact, as Darwinian tales always do; in fact, the vacancy left behind may open up more niches for rapid diversification of new plot lines.  This is known as adaptive radiation.  Any Darwinian with this positive spin rolling around in his head has evolutionary theory in a nut shell. 
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

No unwarranted claims here; just an interesting item.  The flip side is that this story should make us all angry about the lowest of beasts, sinful men, who would do such a thing.  The article says this kind of atrocity is the norm.  In this depraved culture, kidnapping and rape, with beatings, is the men’s “customary” way to force women into marriage when they resist.  For more ugliness, see what a photographer found going on in neighboring Darfur, Sudan, as reported in National Geographic News.  Let’s hear it for the lions.  If you find a Darwinist trying to excuse this “customary” behavior as an evolutionary adaptation from our ape-like past (see 07/18/2003 entry), let out a loud roar.*
Next headline on:  Mammals • Amazing Stories

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  *Maybe a roar-shock test will help them psychoanalyze their beliefs.

Volcano erupts:  Yahoo News poured hot lava over creationists with its article, “US radicals blow their tops over volcano movie as Darwinism debate rages” (emphasis added).  It talked about how many customers are not buying the evolutionary line in several IMAX films (see 03/23/2005 entry), like “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea” that suggests life may have originated deep in the ocean.

Yahoo’s piece was not a volcano, but a mud pot; better, a fumarole.  Darwinists are the ones erupting when people object to having philosophical naturalism in the form of chemical-evolution mythology crammed down their throats.  So what are the Darwin Party imagineers going to do in a free market economy?  Force the customers to watch their cartoons?  Many IMAX films are wonderful explorations into the natural world when they stick to observable facts.  Adding Tinker Bell is only distracting.
    Pastors and scientists who don’t understand the issues should keep their mouths shut.  The “Reverend” Baxter Wynn, if he was quoted accurately, appeared to be utterly ignorant of the controversy and what his Bible says about it.  His statement simultaneously commits the either-or fallacy and shouts peace, peace, when there is no peace.  Charles Townes, bless his holy heart, is a smart engineer but a weak philosopher.  His comments play right into the hands of those who would banish his Christian beliefs from public discussion.  What we need are more men like Larry Caldwell able to stand up to the lies of the dogmatic Darwinists and get them to back down.  Somebody ought to turn Liggett’s big lie back on him.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Education • Media

Macroevolution Claims Investigated    06/21/2005  
Two scientific papers recently used the word “macroevolution” in their titles.  Did they actually point to cases of natural increase in information or function?

1. Diatoms:  A paper in PNAS by Finkel et al.¹ was called, “Climatically driven macroevolutionary patterns in the size of marine diatoms over the Cenozoic.”  All it discussed was the sizes of diatoms as a function of biodiversity and ocean temperature.
2. Island Biodiversity:  Douglas Erwin wrote a Perspectives piece in Science last week,² entitled “Macroevolution: Seeds of Diversity.”  It is more a theoretical treatment of opposing evolutionary hypotheses (niche construction and classical gradualism) in the context of adaptive radiation on island communities, than an examination of any particular case of a plant or animal evolving into a different kind of organism.  Erwin proposes that biodiversity itself generates biodiversity: “Simply put, the reason the tropics have so many species is that they have so many species” or, “future diversity is a function of current diversity.”
       He continued by speculating that runaway biodiversification might be capped by periodic mass extinction events.  He concluded, “If periodic disturbance does provide a major control on diversity, then niche generation may be an ongoing process, more rapid during macroevolutionary transitions, but providing a regular source of new adaptive possibility until the next crisis occurs.”  Overall, macroevolution in his article was assumed, not demonstrated.

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¹Finkel et al., “Climatically driven macroevolutionary patterns in the size of marine diatoms over the Cenozoic,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, published online before print June 14, 2005, 10.1073/pnas.0409907102.
²Douglas H. Erwin, “Macroevolution: Seeds of Diversity,” Science Vol 308, Issue 5729, 1752-1753, 17 June 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1113416].

Mere microevolution masquerading as macroevolution by mangling the meanings of messages.  Microevolution is not under dispute.  If macroevolution is a fact, Darwinists, give us an example instead of “ingenious speculation but not much rigor” (see next entry).  There should be millions of examples.  Why is this so hard to demonstrate?  A bluffing assertion is not a sign of rigor, or of vigor.  In science, it’s more a sign of rigor mortis.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Marine Life

Something from Nothing Dept.: Can a Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Climb Mt. Improbable?    06/20/2005  
Darwinian evolution from the most primitive organisms to the most advanced must have produced huge increases in functional information (see 06/12/2003 entry).  Yet finding specific genetic mechanisms for just how DNA succeeded in “climbing Mt. Improbable,” as Richard Dawkins termed it in his book of the same name, has been daunting.  In a recent paper in PNAS,¹ Austin L. Hughes meant to encourage his fellow Darwinists that explaining the origin of new function in proteins has been given a boost by recent findings.  In the body of the article, however, he appears to have conceded more than he affirmed.  He began,

Evolutionary biologists agree that gene duplication has played an important role [intelligent design term] in the history of life on Earth, providing a supply of novel genes that make it possible for organisms to adapt to new environments.  The existence of diverse multigene families, particularly in eukaryotes, provides evidence that numerous events of gene duplication followed by functional diversification have shaped [intelligent design term] genomes as we know them.  But it is less certain how this panoply of new functions actually arises, leaving room for ingenious speculation but not much rigor.  Cases where we can reconstruct with any confidence the evolutionary steps involved in the functional diversification are relatively few.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

To switch from gloom to hope, he described an investigation by Tocchini-Valentini et al. that examined genes for tRNA endonuclease among three branches of Archaea.  Two of them contained a single gene that combined the functions of stabilization and catalysis, but a third subdivided the functions between two genes.  They feel this is an example of subfunctionalization (see 10/24/2003 entry); i.e., a case of a multi-function gene splitting sometime in evolutionary history into separate genes that carry on the original functions separately.  Hughes was glad to hear about this report, which to him was “particularly welcome as a concrete example of how new protein functions can arise.”  Yet this would seem to be merely a case of rearranging functions rather than originating new ones, i.e., of dividing without necessarily conquering.  Did he provide any examples of new functions arising by this process?
    The rest of article only elaborates on the theme of subfunctionalization.  Hughes presented various theories, by Ohno, Jensen, Orgel and others, about how gene duplication might have shared and diversified functions among ancestral genomes (see 05/15/2005 entry for another recent example).  He talked about “gene sharing,” in which a gene might produce multiple products depending on the context: i.e., an enzyme in one type of cell, but a crystallin in the eye, but this also begs the question about where the genetic information came from.  He speculated about how subfunctionalization might produce better-adapted proteins by the “Babe Ruth effect” – analogous to how the famous baseball player performed better as either a pitcher or outfielder/hitter, but not both simultaneously – yet did not prove that subfunctionalized proteins either contained more information or did a better job.
    What is more revealing in Hughes’ commentary are statements he made about evolutionary theory, evidence and proof.  Coming from someone who accepts evolution without hesitation, these remarks cast doubt on both the methodology and achievement of an evolutionary approach to genetics:

• Oh no:  He discredited the original subfunctionalization hypothesis of Susumi Ohno:

  The first hypothesis regarding the origin of new gene function was that of Ohno, who assumed that, after duplication, one gene copy would be entirely redundant and thus freed from all constraint.... There are a number of reasons for doubting this hypothesis  First, as the late Marianne Hughes and I showed in the case of the tetraploid frog Xenopus laevis, duplicate genes are not in general freed from all functional constraint.  Rather, purifying selection [i.e., conservation] acts to eliminate deleterious nonsynonymous (amino acid-altering) mutations even in apparently redundant gene copies.  Furthermore, there are a number of multigene families where there is evidence that positive Darwinian selection has acted to promote amino acid changes in functionally important regions of proteins.  In these families, new function clearly has not arisen as a result of random mutation alone, contrary to the prediction of Ohno’s model.

  In its place, Hughes offered the alternative hypothesis that “both functions are already present before gene duplication.”  This, however, does not explain the origin of the functions, but only their rearrangement.

• Who needs Darwin?  In a paragraph entitled “The Role of Natural Selection,” Hughes started by denying that natural selection had much to do with it:

  One theoretically attractive feature of their model of subfunctionalization, as pointed out by Lynch and colleagues, is that it can occur without the need for positive Darwinian selection, which is thought to be relatively rare at the molecular level.

  If daughter genes inherit just one of two functions, he says, “conservative or purifying natural selection will act against any mutation that eliminates function,” while the other fragment might accumulate mutations by genetic drift.  Again, this does not describe the origin of any new functions, but only the preservation of existing information.

• Gimme your best shot:  Hughes surveyed some of the best examples of Darwinian selection at the molecular level, explaining the “Babe Ruth effect.”  Even these, however, overlook the need for new functional information:

  On the other hand, some of the best-documented examples of positive Darwinian selection at the molecular level involve functional diversification among members of multigene families.... It may often be as true of molecules as it is of human beings that “a jack of all trades is master of none.”  In such cases, positive selection may actually favor the loss of one function in a bifunctional molecule if a duplicate gene is able to take up the slack.

• Dunno:  Hughes did not suggest that much is known about evolution by gene duplication, if anything; indeed, it cannot be known:

  In the case of archaeal tRNA endonucleases, there is no direct evidence whether drift alone gave rise to subfunctionalization or whether positive selection played a role.  These events occurred in the distant past; thus, the most convincing signal of positive selection, an accelerated rate of nonsynonymous nucleotide substitution is not obtainable, being obscured by numerous subsequent neutral changes.  However, the fact that subfunctionalization has occurred twice independently and by different pathways in the same gene family suggests that positive selection may indeed have been involved.  Perhaps, in the high-temperature environments occupied by these archaeal species, there is something less than optimal about the homotetrameric type of tRNA endonuclease, where the same polypeptide does double duty as a catalytic subunit and a spacer.

• Lessons learned:  Near the end of the article, Hughes made a remarkable admission about the predictive power of Darwinian biology.  He also makes his first mention of a mechanism for new function, but prefaces it with the word perhaps:

  If we have learned anything at all in a century and a half of evolutionary biology, it is that facile generalizations are dangerous.  The evolutionary process finds a way to create exceptions to every model we propose.  Thus, it seems unwise to expect that functional diversification after gene duplication follows the same pathway every time.  Sometimes, subfunctionalization may occur by drift alone.  On other occasions, as we know, positive selection is involved.  Perhaps there are even cases where a new function has arisen by Ohno’s model of resuscitation of a dead gene. 

• Somewhere in the mix:  Hughes briefly elaborated on the possibility that new function is an emergent property from the mix and match of dynamic interplays between multi-talented genes and proteins:

  In fact, as recent data on gene expression and protein-protein interaction networks make clear, all genes are multifunctional.  Even in its infancy, systems biology makes clear that protein functions are complex processes existing in multiple dimensions.  It thus seems a reasonable extension of Jensen’s original insight to propose that new protein functions arise as the multidimensional space of functional interactions is parceled out in new ways, new links in biological networks are formed, and old links are broken.

In his concluding paragraph, Hughes made it clear that the proof is left as an exercise:

Testing this hypothesis will require work at the interface of molecular evolutionary genetics and systems biology.  We will need to be able to understand the diversification of gene duplicates in terms of the totality of each gene’s role in cellular processes.  It is a tall order given our present knowledge, but this kind of evolutionary systems biology not only will increase our understanding of how new protein functions evolve but also will shed essential light on why biological systems work the way they do.

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¹Austin L. Hughes, “Gene duplication and the origin of novel proteins,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, published online before print June 13, 2005, 10.1073/pnas.0503922102.

This article sounded intriguing by its title, “Gene duplication and the origin of novel proteins,” and ostensibly set out to explain how new functions arose – but it did nothing of the sort.  All Hughes could identify by observation were degradation effects.  If genes and proteins underwent subfunctionalization, the function was already operative in the ancestor, as well as the information needed to produce function.  Did he prove that the daughter products contained more information?  No.  Did he prove that subfunctionalization actually occurred, rather than being created that way?  No.  Did he give away the store?  Yes.
    Hughes illustrated for the perceptive reader that Darwinian theory is useless and bankrupt.  It has produced little else than dangerous facile generalizations with exceptions for every proposed rule.  He has cast doubt on whether natural selection, the evolutionary mechanism that made Charlie the Philosopher-King of Science, acts as anything more than a conservative process to preserve existing information.  He tossed in for free a few falsifications of his colleagues’ speculative hypotheses.  He made up a story committing the personification fallacy about molecular Babe Ruths, without proving it has any relevance to real genes and proteins.  He demonstrated that evolutionary biology is an unending series of falsified tales, and he admitted that after “a century and a half of evolutionary biology,” almost nothing is known and everything remains to be discovered, which is “a tall order given our present knowledge” (better, lack of it).  So much for the origin of novel proteins.
    We provided extensive quotes from this paper to illustrate a recurring theme in the evolutionary scientific literature: Darwinists boast much but deliver nothing, only emptiness and confusion.  Does this vain litany of excuses and leaps in the dark deserve to be enshrined as the only valid approach to science, such that no student should be allowed to criticize it or hear any alternatives?
Next headline on:  Genetics • Evolution

Supermen Living in Nepal    06/17/2005  
There is a race of people at the base of Mt. Everest capable of feats that defy scientific explanation: the Sherpas.  They can carry up to twice their body weight under three hostile conditions that would wear out most of us in a minute: (1) high altitude, (2) long distance, and (3) steep inclines.  Somehow, the techniques they use and the adaptations their bodies have made from living in that environment have made them the supreme load carriers of the human world (they even beat out African women who routinely carry heavy loads on top of their head).  This was the subject of a research paper in Science this week.¹  Science Now sums it up:

When the going gets tough, the tough use their heads.  Porters around the world carry loads that would floor backpackers by balancing baskets atop their noggins or slinging sacks from their craniums.  Now a new study reveals that Nepalese porters do the job better than anyone else, hefting huge bundles while using relatively little energy.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The study, also reported by National Geographic News, found that Nepalese porters or sherpas routinely carry double what backpackers carry, under more extreme conditions, yet burn less energy:

The town of Namche (at an altitude of 3500 m [11,400 ft]) near Mount Everest hosts a weekly bazaar.  Porters (Fig. 1A), predominantly ethnic Rai, Sherpa, or Tamang, typically take 7 to 9 days to travel to Namche from the Kathmandu valley.  The route, no more than a dirt footpath, covers a horizontal distance of 100 km, with total ascents (river crossings to mountain passes) of 8000 m [5 vertical miles] and total descents of 6300 m [4 vertical miles].
    One day before the bazaar, we counted 545 male and 97 female porters (and 32 yaks) en route to Namche; others passed by earlier and later in the darkness.  We weighed randomly selected porters and their loads.  The men carried loads of 93 +- 36% of their M_b (mean +- SD, n = 96 male porters), whereas the women carried 66 +- 21% of their M_b (n = 17 female porters).  The youngest porter was 11 years old, and the oldest 68; the greatest load measured was 183% of M_b, and 20% of the men carried > 125% of their M_b.  More than 30 tons of material were ported to Namche that day.

The researchers measured their oxygen intake and carbon dioxide output under controlled conditions, and found that their energy utilization was “far more economical than the control subjects at all loads and more economical than the African women at all except the lightest loads.”  They marveled at watching them in their normal business hauling loads around the mountains.  How they do it is a mystery:

The load versus speed versus energy-cost trade-off chosen by these porters is to walk slowly for many hours each day, take frequent rests, and carry the greatest loads possible.  We observed, for example, a group of heavily loaded porters making slow headway up a steep ascent out of a river gorge.  Following whistled commands from their leader, they would take up their loads and labor uphill for no more than 15 s at a time, followed by a 45-s period of rest.  Incredibly, this group of barefoot porters was headed for Tibet, across the Nangpa glacier (altitude 5716 m [18,700 ft]), about another week’s travel beyond Namche.
    So how do they do it?  They might reduce the muscular work required to carry a load or increase their overall efficiency.  The actual mechanism is unknown at this time.

Many world mountain climbers brag if they make it up Everest, but these sherpas consider such feats all in a day’s work.  National Geographic News adds that after unloading and selling their goods, they race home for more, running down the mountain for two days, even poorly equipped and usually with very bad shoes or none at all.  They usually sleep on the trail, with nothing but rocks for pillows, even in below-freezing temperatures.  Some of their women bring their babies with them.
    See also the National Geographic story from May 2002 about the legendary Sherpas of Mt. Everest.  Many of the famous climbing expeditions on the world’s highest mountain could not have succeeded without them, it says.

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¹Bastien et al., “Energetics of Load Carrying in Nepalese Porters,” Science, Vol 308, Issue 5729, 1755 , 17 June 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1111513].

Every once in awhile we get glimpses into the suggestion that there is far more potential in the human body than most of us realize.  Those of us who have backpacked in the mountains know the strain of carrying even 40 pounds up a steep mountainside for just a couple of hours, and that at much lower elevations.  The worst feeling at a rest stop is to have some 68-year-old frail-looking grandma with a bigger pack prance right on by saying, “Mighty fine day, is it not?” as you sit there gasping for breath.
    Here we see, in Nepal, a community of men, women and children that make the impossible look routine.  They don’t shop at REI and use Patagonia gear or high-tech climbing boots; they don’t compete in the Olympics or win medals, but all of us must regard the way of life of these human mountain goats with admiration.  How much stronger and smarter could our ancestors have been?  A little humility is always in order.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Stories

Obsessed With Sex: How Much Can Be Known About the Sexuality of Hominids?    06/17/2005  
Bruce Bower in Science News (June 11, 167:24, p. 379) reported on the controversy about the sex life of Lucy and her mate(s).  Owen Lovejoy and Philip L. Reno (Kent State U, Ohio) have “unabashedly” put forth a hypothesis that Mr. and Mrs. Australopithecus afarensis (let’s call him Desi) had long-term relationships and stable families as they evolved along on the way to humanity.  This conclusion was based on statistical analysis of fragmentary bones which represent somewhere between 5 and 22 individuals.  They assumed that the largest femur heads were from the males and the smaller, from the females, then deduced that australopithecines displayed slightly less sexual dimorphism than gorillas do.  From there, they made presumptions about what this implied about their sex lives in the prehistoric I Love Lucy sitcom.
    Bower gave good press to Lovejoy and Reno’s hypothesis, but then surveyed the reactions of other researchers:

Other scientists express a mix of chagrin and disdain at the amount of energy that researchers have expended on trying to separate fossil boys from girls.  Investigators need to drop their obsession with the sex of fossils and examine how individual differences in skeletal anatomy arise, contends Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide in Australia.  For body weight and many skull measurements, including braincase size and facial width, individuals within each sex usually differ far more from each other than average members of opposite sexes do, he argues.
    Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis also derides efforts to identify the sex of ancient bones.  Sex assessments always begin with the unjustified assumption that bigger bones must belong to males and smaller ones to females, he says.  And the numbers of individual specimens of A. afarensis and other ancient hominid species are too few to generate reliable estimates of male and female size ranges, in his opinion.
    Louisiana State’s Tague doesn’t go that far, but he notes that even the pelvis, the body part regarded as the gold standard for telling apart primate sexes, is surprisingly tough to read.  His work shows no consistent pattern of the pelvis being larger in females than in males.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

It’s not even clear to all researchers that Lucy was a female, to say nothing of whether the Mertzes were part of the same tribe.  Bower hopes that additional specimens will help resolve this “battle of the sexes.”

The nonsense that Darwinists get away with is atrocious and silly.  Bower’s article contained the obligatory artist’s conception of Lucy’s family life, all based on myth and unwarranted speculation.  Even though he tried to provide criticism of Lovejoy’s wacky idea, he only extended the debate between members of the Darwin Party.  Why do non-Darwinists never get a chance to provide their scientific critiques?
    Historical anthropology is out of control.  It is an endless parody of untestable speculation masquerading as legitimate research.  Science needs creationism as a check against “rampant Darwinism” as Dr. Phillip Skell called it in a recent interview (see IDURC).  He said, “The conflation of neo-Darwinism with the historical biology, and its frequent companion materialist philosophy, should be recognized and exposed for what it is, rather than disingenuously introduced as science.” 
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Stories

Did Fossils Inspire Thunderbird Legends?    06/17/2005  
Adrienne Major thinks that the Lakota got their legend of the Thunderbird from looking at fossil pterosaurs in the badlands.  Her speculation is explored in National Geographic News.  Major thinks other world legends have their origin in fossils that ancient people observed.

This hypothesis is no less speculative than the one by creationists that Indians saw live pterosaurs and the Chinese saw live dinosaurs.  Evolutionists would never consider such an idea, because they have their own myths.  They are wedded to the tale that dinosaurs and pterosaurs died out long before man appeared.  Do they know this for a fact?  No; they were not there, for one thing, and their prior commitment to evolutionary theory dictates how all data are to be interpreted.  The discovery of flexible blood vessels in a T. rex recently (see 03/24/2005) shows the extent of their commitment; rather than consider the obvious, that this unfossilized material could not be 70 million years old, they adjusted their assumptions to fit their myth.
    Were the Chinese and the Lakota skilled in paleontological interpretation of disarticulated bones?  Would it not be more plausible to suggest that perhaps they saw some of these creatures before the last ones died out?  It would seem more likely that the fearsome appearance of imposing live creatures would generate better myths than would dead bones to untrained eyes.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs

Miller Time Party Drags On    06/16/2005  
Astrobiologists threw a party when a team of researchers decided there was more hydrogen in the early earth’s atmosphere than thought (see “In the beginning, hydrogen: was it Miller Time?, 04/22/2005).  While this was good news for those wishing for better conditions on the early earth for chemical evolution, a few are staying sober enough to warn against letting the celebrations get carried away.
    Last month, veteran origin-of-life researcher Christopher Chyba, buoyed by the announcement, was nevertheless cautious about how much it helps the Miller scenario.  He wrote in Science:¹

In 1952, Stanley Miller, working with Harold Urey, simulated the atmosphere of early Earth with a gas mixture of methane (CH₄), ammonia (NH₃), molecular hydrogen (H₂), and water.  When he introduced an electrical spark to represent lightning, he observed the formation of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins....
    However, by the 1960s, the validity of hydrogen-rich (and hence reducing) model atmospheres for early Earth, such as the CH₄-NH₃ atmosphere used by Miller and Urey, was under attack.  Since the 1970s, carbon dioxide (CO₂)-rich atmospheres have been favored.  Miller has shown that the production of amino acids and other organic molecules is orders of magnitude less efficient in such atmospheres.  For this and other reasons, the Miller-Urey approach to the origin of life has fallen out of favor with many researchers.  But on page 1014 of this issue, Tian et al.² argue that the early-Earth atmosphere might have been hydrogen-rich after all.
(Emphasis added in all quotes; see also 05/02/2003 entry on the history of the Miller experiment.)

Chyba described the Miller-Urey scenario in more detail, but admitted it was “probably largely wrong.”  Such a reducing atmosphere would have been hard to form or sustain.  If, however, there was a sustainable hydrogen abundance of 30% or more, as suggested by the Colorado team, conditions favoring higher production of amino acids might have existed.  Still, “Many uncertainties and problems remain,” Chyba said, and they seem serious, indeed:

1. Rinse:  Tian et al. focus on the oceans as the “birthplace of life,” but polymerization of amino acids into proteins (or nucleotides into RNA) is thermodynamically unfavorable in liquid water.
2. Salt:  Furthermore, in an early ocean as saline as that of today, the salt inhibits key prebiotic reactions.³  The bulk ocean may thus have been one of the worst places to try to originate life.
3. Toss:  After making life’s building blocks in the ocean, one needs to look elsewhere to carry the chemistry further.

He suggested that meteor impacts “may also have been a major driver of organic production in an early H₂-rich atmosphere,” but with all the hope and hype, Chyba advises sobriety:

These are tumultuous times in the study of the origin of life.  The early ocean may have been even less hospitable for prebiotic chemistry than previously thought, and claimed evidence for the earliest signatures of life on Earth is being strongly challenged.  Now a 30-year, albeit shaky, consensus on the nature of the early atmosphere may have to be reexamined, and the geochemical implications of an H₂-rich early atmosphere will need to be scrutinized.  This turmoil makes it a great time for young scientists to enter the field, but it also reminds us that some humility regarding our favorite models is in order.  As Jacob Bronowski noted, “Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.”

These week in Science,⁴ Richard Kerr also wrote about the higher hydrogen estimate:

Thirty years ago, geochemists took away the primordial soup that biologists thought they needed to cook up the first life on Earth.  Now, some atmospheric chemists are trying to give it back.
    Creating the primordial organic goo used to be easy.  If you combined the methane and ammonia seen in the still-primordial atmosphere of Jupiter, passed lightninglike sparks through the mixture, and added some water, voilà, complex organic compounds such as amino acids formed.  But then in the 1970s geochemists spoiled the party by insisting that Earth’s earliest atmosphere was nothing like Jupiter’s.  Earth’s carbon would have been part of oxygen-rich carbon dioxide, and its nitrogen part of inert nitrogen gas, they said.  And hydrogen seeping from the planet’s interior would have quickly escaped to space.  That left chemists with a thin gruel indeed.

Kerr summarizes the new estimate and what it means: “Overall, hydrogen would have escaped at 1/100 the rate previously assumed, the group says.... That would make for a far more productive atmosphere than chemists have been coping with for 30 years” – allowing vast amounts of organics to form into the ocean “ to make a soup.”
    Kerr hastens to make clear that there is still disagreement.  While the announcement “is going to make the biologists a lot happier,” another doesn’t feel that Tian et al. adequately dealt with all the factors that contribute to hydrogen escape; “a more sophisticated model would show that hydrogen escaped the early Earth at least as fast as it does today.”  (Kerr does not even mention the problem with salts in the ocean.)  Is the Miller party running out of food?  He ends, “Time will tell whether too many cooks spoil the primordial broth.”

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¹Christopher Chyba, “Rethinking Earth’s Early Atmosphere,” Science, Vol 308, Issue 5724, 962-963 , 13 May 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1113157].
²Tian et al., “A Hydrogen-Rich Early Earth Atmosphere,” Science, Vol 308, Issue 5724, 1014-1017, 13 May 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1106983].
³Monnard et al., “Influence of ionic inorganic solutes on self-assembly and polymerization processes related to early forms of life: implications for a prebiotic aqueous medium,” Astrobiology 2002 Summer;2(2):139-52.  They write that concentrations of salts anything like those in our contemporary oceans inhibits formation of amino acids and completely disrupts primitive membrane systems.  Conclusion: “These observations suggest that cellular life may not have begun in a marine environment because the abundance of ionic inorganic solutes would have significantly inhibited the chemical and physical processes that lead to self-assembly of more complex molecular systems.”
⁴Richard Kerr, “A Better Atmosphere for Life,”, Science, Vol 308, Issue 5729, 1732, 17 June 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.308.5729.1732].

Same comment as in 04/22/2005: too little, too late.  The good news is no better than that in the Geico commercials: “I have good news and bad news.  The jury has found you guilty, you have to go into the slammer for life, your wife and kids have left you and are changing their names, your stocks went bust, and you have cancer.”
“What’s the good news?”
“I just saved $400 on my car insurance by switching to Geico.”
Everything is against the astrobiologists: the chemistry, the sources, the geology, the salt, the water, the information, the probability, the thermodynamics, the philosophy.  Does the good news really matter?  “I just saved 30% on my hydrogen when switching to the Tian et al. model.”  It would make any knowledgeable astrobiologist want to hold his head and groan, “Oh, shut up.”
Next headline on:  Origin of Life

Are Teens Like Roaches?    06/16/2005  
A press release from University of Manchester concluded that being a teenage mother might be a good thing.  The conclusion was based on observations of the mating behavior of cockroaches.  Dr. Patricia Moore, one of the researchers, wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: “Although it’s hard to compare the experiences of the female cockroach to humans, the biological mechanisms are similar and so an inappropriate apoptosis response to the ‘mistiming’ of reproduction may explain the evolution of the loss of fertility with age.”  EurekAlert reproduced the press release without any challenge.

To an evolutionist, human society acts on the same principles as cockroach society.  To evolutionary reporters, any idea that glorifies Charlie is fit to print.  As a prime example of evolutionary folly, this story speaks for itself.
[Gong.]  Next.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Stories

Reports Differ on Kansas Evolution Debates    06/16/2005  
How is the debate over evolution in Kansas going?  It depends on whom you ask.  MSNBC News focused on personal attacks between board members (see also the Lexington Herald-Leader).  The Discovery Institute, by contrast, focused on the content of the new proposed standards that allows a “common-sense” approach for teaching all the science about evolution, including the problems with Darwin’s theory.

MSNBC’s title suggests that both sides are bickering, claiming “School board members hurl insults at each other.”  But if you look into the article, the only ones hurling insults are the evolutionists; the other side is just putting up their shields.  All Connie Morris said was, after being insulted, “Had you attended, you would have been informed.  You would be sitting here as informed individuals and not arrogantly calling us dupes.”  The article claims Morris mentioned the moderates by name in print, but does not say she insulted them like the Darwinists did; she only derided evolution itself, the article says.  The evolutionists, though, called the conservatives “dupes” of intelligent design advocates and their decision based on “absolute and total fraud.”  Judge for yourself which side is acting with civility and responsibility.
    The majority conservatives had invited the pro-evolution moderates to come to the hearings, but they wouldn’t.  The Darwin Party could have contributed to the discussion, but chose to sit and pout.  If they had been listening, they would realize that the Board is taking no position on intelligent design.  The new standards are very mild.  They do not call for teaching creation or intelligent design, but only for permitting critical thinking about evolution such that it is treated like any other scientific theory, not like a sacred cow.  No advocates of a scientific theory would worry about that unless their position was weak.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Education

Are Natural Poisons Health Cures in Disguise?    06/15/2005  
Three recent stories are suggesting that natural toxins may be too much of a good thing:

1. Snail Trail:  John Roach in