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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. | ||||||||||||||||
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![]() If you thought the story of horse evolution was well understood as a poster child of Darwinism at work, consider what Weinstock et al. say in a preprint in PLoS Biology:1 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.)Tackling that challenge, the team rewrote the evolutionary history books. Now, they put all North American horses into two species, claim they are distinct from their European look-alikes, and came earlier than the South American Hippiodon genus, which was supposed to be ancient. This is all summarized on EurekAlert, which claims the conclusions made by comparing mitochondrial DNA helps clarify the origins of two extinct New World horse species. 1Weinstock et al., Evolution, Systematics, and Phylogeography of Pleistocene Horses in the New World: A Molecular Perspective, Public Library of Science: Biology, Volume 3 | Issue 8 | AUGUST 2005. 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. Its no picture; its a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting random bits of broken colored glass.Did Old Metamorphic Rocks Form in Just 10 Years? 06/30/2005 ![]() A discovery in Norway may collapse a geological process by five or six orders of magnitude. A paper by Camacho et al. announced in Nature,1 yielded this comment by Simon Kelley (Open University, UK) in the same issue,2 Conventional wisdom says that changes to crustal rocks pushed down deep when continents collide develop over millions of years. But it seems that some metamorphism may be caused by tectonic events lasting only a decade (emphasis added in all quotes). The gist of the story is that certain rocks called eclogites, long thought to have formed slowly over millions of years, might have formed rapidly instead, maybe in only ten. The authors of the paper deduced that they could not have remained at the temperatures assumed for very long without losing all their argon. Kelley explains why the mixtures in the rock suggest conflicting requirements for their formation: 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.Kelley explains why the overturning of this classic case of a slow process points out an assumption that may need just as radical an overturn: However, the very short timescales involved will make this idea controversial, as existing work on garnet seems to indicate processes operating on a million-year timescale; but also, perhaps, simply because we geologists are attuned to thinking in millions of years, whereas the features we observe may be just the aggregations of many shorter events. 1Camacho et al., Short-lived orogenic cycles and the eclogitization of cold crust by spasmodic hot fluids, Nature 35, 1191-1196 (30 June 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03643. 2Simon Kelley, Geophysics: Hot fluids and cold crusts, Nature 435, 1171 (30 June 2005) | doi: 10.1038/4351171a. 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.Is Evo-Devo the Source of Endless Forms Most Beautiful? 06/29/2005 ![]() Even staunch Darwinist Jerry A. Coyne (U of Chicago) thought this evolutionary book went overboard: Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo by Sean B. Carroll (Norton, 2005), which he reviewed in Nature last week.1 (The title comes from a phrase at the end of Darwins Origin of Species.) Its a first-rate introduction to evo-devo written by an adept communicator, he feels, but its faintly self-congratulatory message that the most important problems in understanding the evolution of development have been solved left me feeling uncomfortable. In Coynes opinion, Carroll overplayed the evo-devo card. Evo-devo assumes that gene regulation is the most important agent of evolutionary change; Coyne gives more place to gene duplication, genome duplication and ordinary old adaptive natural selection on genes and proteins. Some of Coynes criticisms point out the problems inherent in all evolutionary theories. Some examples:
1Jerry A. Coyne, Switching on evolution: How does evo-devo explain the huge diversity of life on Earth?, Nature 435, 1029-1030 (23 June 2005) | doi: 10.1038/4351029a. 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 Gods 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 Coynes 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.Endless forms most beautiful speak of a Designer, not a blind process of evolution. The shortcomings of Coynes view provide an opening for the claims of Carrolls, and vice versa, such that they strangle each other, leaving both gasping for evidence. Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory Genetics and DNA Small Wonder: Tubulin Visualized Up Close 06/28/2005 ![]() Science Daily printed a neat story about microtubules, complete with a 3D visualization of how the protein components are arranged. They are not just ropes or chains, but complex cylinders of precise parts. Scientists are starting to get an idea of why they continually grow and shrink within the cell. The process allows them to explore their cellular environment to find their goals, and is coordinated by numerous genes and protein parts. Microtubules form the cells superhighway (see 04/13/2005 and 12/04/2003 entries), and are also critical in cell division for winching chromosomes into the daughter cells (see 04/30/2005 entry). 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.Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week 06/28/2005 ![]() This entry is from the BBC News, in an article about hummingbirds, the master fliers of the bird kingdom (see 06/24/2005 entry). The article interviews Douglas Warrick (Oregon State), describing how evolution produces exquisite machinery by an unguided process of cobbling parts from existing stuff: 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 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.Nose Knows More than Math Pros Suppose 06/27/2005 ![]() The aroma of coffee, of a steak, of cherries these smells are all composed of dozens if not hundreds of separate molecules, yet our brains immediately recognize them each as a coherent whole. How does the nose and the brain process all this information? This is the subject of an article in the Caltech magazine Engineering and Science1 by Gilles Laurent, Caltech professor and neurologist, who studies olfaction and also how single neurons perform nonlinear operations such as multiplication. Unlike vision and hearing, our olfactory sense does not allow us to decompose a composite input into its constituents. We perceive odors as single entities. Studies on insects by Laurent and his students show that this is because individual receptors fire in patterns that are mapped like a code to a large number of unique sensors called Kenyon cells. In insects, these cells reside in a part of the olfactory apparatus called the mushroom body (in vertebrates, its the olfactory cortex of the brain). Each Kenyon cell gets a very unique set of inputs from the receptors, and thus a distinct, composite signal from a highly diverse set of inputs. Laurent does the math to show the staggering number of possibilities for odor memory that this system permits: 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 800the number of possible connection patternsis about 10240. Its 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 fromassuming random connectivityalmost 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.)Laurent noted at the beginning of the article that olfaction is a form of pattern recognition, and that Brains solve pattern-recognition problems much better than any machine built today. His lab tries to figure out how brains solve these problems. Most of the research by Laurent and his students is on insects, whose olfactory receptors are on their antennae. A fruit fly has 1300 receptor neurons, with 60 different receptor types, but some moths might have several hundred thousand receptor neurons. This gives them an amazing sensitivity to low concentrations of odors like pheromones. A diagram and electron micrograph on p. 44 shows what receptor neurons look like. They have dozens of cilia projecting into the nasal cavity. The reason dogs have superior sensitivity to smells, he explains, is that their nasal cavity contains much more surface area where the receptors project from sponge-like tissue called turbinate bone. Dogs have ten times as much turbinate bone as humans. He provides a fragrant illustration: In a medium-size dog, he says, the turbinates have a total surface area the size of a large pizza. In humans, theyre the size of a large cookie. Each receptor neuron has a single sensitivity dictated by the order of the amino acids in its multi-folded receptor proteins. The amino acid sequences of receptor proteins show areas of both high conservation and high variability between species. They loop seven times through the cell membrane, providing pockets where the odor molecules bind. Laurent describes something striking about how the receptor neurons map their inputs to ball-shaped structures called glomeruli (singular, glomerulus). In an amazing feat of organization during development, a picture caption states, each type of receptor neuron... sends its axon to the same glomerulus.... He calls it a surprise that all the axons of the same receptor type (colored red in the diagram) converge so neatly to their exact counterparts. By implication, he continues, this means there are about as many glomeruli as there are receptor types. And with the exception of the roundworm, this extraordinary organization is found in almost all the animal species that have so far been looked at. From the glomeruli, the information is passed on to a smaller group of nerve cells called projection neurons, which have no axons but connect with a dozen or more glomeruli. With 100,000 receptor neurons converging on just 800 projection neurons, what is being computed? he asks. Experiments show that the precise timing of firing creates a kind of code from the multiple inputs, a pulse pattern that can be mapped and analyzed. He likens the result to the unique arrangement that billiard balls take after the player breaks them with the cue ball; two very similar initial setups, but with slightly different angles of attack, can produce initially similar but ultimately divergent patterns of balls on the table. (The billiard game in the nose is super-fast. He notes on p. 48, This happens so quickly that the representations are optimally separated within 100 to 300 milliseconds.) As a result, differences between very similar smells can be amplified by the system. Thats basically what we think is taking place in the olfactory circuit, he says. The remarkable thing is that this near-chaotic process is very sensitive to the input, but very reliable nevertheless. To recap, the receptor proteins in the cilia of the receptor neurons react to molecules in odors. These neurons fire their axons to the glomeruli. The glomeruli then pass their encoded information patterns to the projection neurons. That noise-reduced information is passed in very unique ways to the tens of thousands of Kenyon cells, which have a near infinite way to respond to the myriad possible combinations of smells. Kenyon cells are so specific that they only recognize one, or at most a few, odors, a caption explains on p. 51. He summed it up earlier (p. 46): In other words, each odor is defined by a certain combination of receptors; the code is combinatorial.... The perception of an odor must therefore result from the brains interpretation of combinatorial activity patterns. Why, though, do a large number of receptors map to few encoders, and then those few to a large number of interpreters? Theres a reason for everything: 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 theres 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.(p. 49; for more on the problem of noise reduction, see 12/20/2004 entry). The sense of smell, obviously, is quite complex. It involves many more receptor types than other senses, like vision, which uses only four types of photoreceptor. How did the code in the nose, and all the apparatus in the circuitry, come about? Early in the article he speculated briefly about this question, but his answer assumes a remarkable convergence rather than demonstrating the evolutionary steps: 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....How that happened is left as an exercise, but for Laurent, his job is in the here and now, studying the sensitive yet reliable olfactory computer: Finding the rules of such nonlinear dynamical problems is one of our goals (p. 49). Concluding, he says, Our research into olfaction is...giving some valuable insights into how such kinds of high-level synthetic representations arise from the organization and dynamics of neural circuits (p. 51). The nose shows that Classifying and recognizing patterns is, after all, what our brains do best. 1Gilles Laurent, Olfaction: A Window into the Brain, Engineering and Science (LXVIII:1/2), [summer] 2005, pp. 43-51 (PDF). 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 dont usually give them the same respect we pay the eye or ear, but each sense is more wonderful than we could possibly realize.Reverse-Engineering Biological Networks Challenges Caltech Scientists 06/25/2005 ![]() Evolutionists love to quote Dobzhansky saying, Nothing in biology makes sense apart from evolution. An article in the current issue of Caltechs magazine Engineering and Science,1 however, might change that proverb to, Nothing in biology makes sense apart from information theory and systems engineering. The article makes no mention of evolution, but rather looks at biology as a model of complex information processing, computation, control, logic circuits, optimization and error correction. TMI, meet IST, is the title, meaning too much information meets the office of Information Science and Technology. The IST is an interdisciplinary initiative at the prestigious university that draws together mathematicians, information theorists, physicists, biologists, and social scientists with the goal of understanding how information works in complex systems biological systems providing the guiding example. It is organized into four new centers, the Center for the Mathematics of Information (CMI), the Center for the Physics of Information, the Center for Biological Circuit Design (CBCD), and Social and Information Sciences Laboratory (SISL), and two old ones, the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering (CNSE), and the Lee Center for Advanced Networking. Each new center attacks a basic question, the article explains. Can we find an abstract mathematical description of information that applies across disciplines? What are the fundamental physical limits to information storage and processing? How does nature compute and communicate information? And how does information shape social systems? (emphasis added in all quotes). Author Douglas L. Smith opens by wowing the reader with the complexity of a worm. A tiny roundworm controls its development and biological systems in a manner that staggers the researchers with its precision and complexity. Smith compares worm information processing to modern intelligently-designed automobiles. A sedan can contain more than 35 million lines of code in its computers, he says; but that creates a problem for human designers the cars are getting so complicated, future development is actually getting stuck because they dont know how to manage the software. Enter C. elegans for a little humility lesson: 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 division79 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, dont understand how to handle all the information in that map. We dont 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 preciseyou 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. Its like driving on the freewaysometimes you need to slow down and let another car pass. Organisms are just information made flesh.Sidebars in the article provide the history of information theory, from George Booles binary algebra to Claude Shannons Boolean circuitry. Information storage and processing, guidance and control of circuits dealing with vast amounts of information under constraints of time or bandwidth, are some of the technical challenges discussed in the article. The overlap between biological and engineered systems throughout the article is almost seamless, except for the fact that biological systems are vastly superior to anything man has invented so far. For example,
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?!! 1Douglas L. Smith, TMI, Meet IST, Engineering and Science (LXVIII:1/2), [summer] 2005, pp. 6-15. 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 programmingi.e., their design. The design is so extraordinarily complex that Caltechs 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.Wind Tunnel Experiments Reveal Dynamics of Hummingbird Flight 06/24/2005 ![]() Scientists have found out that hummingbirds and insects dont hover in the same way. Insects support 50% of their weight on both up and down strokes, but hummingbirds support 75% on the downstroke and 25% on the upstroke. This was published in Nature this week,1 and summarized on Science Daily. The latter article reminds us why hummingbirds attract our interest: You would be hard-pressed to find someone who isnt amazed by hummingbirds, said H. Ross Hawkins, founder and executive director of The Hummingbird Society. Perhaps its 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.)Another bird story making the rounds this week was published in Science.2,3 Apparently, chickadees have a sophisticated signalling system in their chirps. They can alert the flock to a size and type of predator nearby with a kind of chirping language; the number of dee syllables at the end of the call is code for the kind of threat. See EurekAlert, National Geographic News, Science Now and Peoples Daily Online. 1Warrick, Tobalske and Powers, Aerodynamics of the hovering hummingbird, Nature 435, 1094-1097 (23 June 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03647. 2Templeton et al., Allometry of Alarm Calls: Black-Capped Chickadees Encode Information About Predator Size, Science, Vol 308, Issue 5730, 1934-1937, 24 June 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1108841]. 3Greg Miller, Bird Alarm Calls Size Up Predators, Science, Vol 308, Issue 5730, 1853-1855, 24 June 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.308.5730.1853a]. 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 its best we dont 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.SETI Researchers Affirm Planetary Privilege Criteria 06/24/2005 ![]() In the weekly SETI Thursday column on Space.com, Douglas Vakoch corroborated two claims made about the habitability of planets in the film The Privileged Planet (shown at the Smithsonian last night see 06/09/2005 story): namely, (1) smaller stars have smaller habitable zones or Goldilocks zones where life can exist, and (2) planets within the habitable zone of a small star are closer in, tending to tidally lock one face toward the star reducing the chance for habitability. They admitted even more, that such conditions (if an atmosphere existed) would whip up enormous wind velocities. They balanced that bad news with hopes that such worlds might have enough greenhouse effect to moderate the winds. Since the discovery of Gliese 876, the smallest extrasolar planet so far, astrobiologists and SETI researchers are taking a second look at smaller M-class stars as homes for habitable planets. None of the ones surveyed so far has a Jupiter-class planet, so the thinking is that most planets might be small rocky worlds around small, warm stars. 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. Dont count on a booming economy, though.Croc Teeth Bite Fatal Wound into Dino Phylogeny 06/23/2005 ![]() This line sounds serious: We have pretty much erased the record of Triassic ornithischian dinosaurs from North America, Europe and worldwide, except for South America. This is what William Parker said about his find of a complete Revueltosaurus fossil in Arizona that upsets the leading story of the rise of the ornithischian dinosaurs (one of two major dinosaur groups). The fossil, earlier known only from teeth, was presumed to be a dinosaur, but now has been found to be mostly crocodilian. What damage this does to assumptions about dinosaur evolution is explained by EurekAlert and LiveScience.com. 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 cant 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 childrens picture books, how much confidence does this give a reasonable observer that other figments of the story have validity?Lions Guard Kidnap Victim in Ethiopia 06/22/2005 ![]() Some news stories make you wonder about divine providence. Netscape News reported a story of lions that rescued a kidnapped Ethiopian girl who was being beaten by seven men trying to force her to marry one of them. In Ethiopia, men will often beat and rape a woman who resists a forced marriage; up to 70% of marriages involve such abductions, often with severe beatings. The lions guarded and protected this woman for about half a day till she was found, then left her like a gift and went back into the forest. 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 mens 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. Lets 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.*Battlefront Dispatches 06/22/2005 ![]() Activities in the Darwin-vs-Design controversy continue generating national news: Yahoos 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.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?
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, its more a sign of rigor mortis.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:
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 genes 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. 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.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].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 weeks travel beyond Namche.Many world mountain climbers brag if they make it up Everest, but these sherpas consider such feats all in a days 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 worlds highest mountain could not have succeeded without them, it says. 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.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 (lets 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 Renos 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.Its 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. Bowers article contained the obligatory artists conception of Lucys family life, all based on myth and unwarranted speculation. Even though he tried to provide criticism of Lovejoys 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?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.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 earths 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....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:
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.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 doesnt 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. 1Christopher Chyba, Rethinking Earths 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.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 its 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.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 Darwins theory. MSNBCs 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.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: |