“In the place of the contemporary conception of God, a personal God, God as a Spirit, God as a Being, Triune, or even a unitary God, the conception of a ‘holy law of evolution’ will emerge.... The thought of pure materialism cannot satisfy; we need something that will meet our desire for imagination and that does not contradict serious and honest thought.  We have this in the conception of a ‘holy law of evolution,’ a concept, which we piously call Providence”
Moritz von Egidy (1895), evolutionary ethicist, quoted by Richard Weikart in From Darwin to Hitler, p. 62.

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07/29/2005 Update on “young” Enceladus has just reported: go to 7/14/2005 story and read about the new claim of icy volcanos!

New Planet Discovered Beyond Pluto; Another Has a Moon   07/30/2005    
A 10th planet, the biggest since Pluto was found 75 years ago, has been discovered.  Late Friday, a JPL press release announced the find made in January by Dr. Mike Brown of Caltech in research partly funded by NASA.  The planet, temporarily designated 2003 UB313 until a name is approved, is three times farther than Pluto and is estimated to be 1.5 times as big, though its actual size is uncertain.  Brown is confident it is bigger than Pluto.  The object is currently 97 times farther from the sun than Earth.  It has a highly-inclined orbit in a region known as the Kuiper Belt.  See also the Space.com, Spacedaily.com, BBC and Planetary Society reports.
    Another smaller Kuiper Belt object (KBO) announced the same day, though smaller than Pluto, has a moon.  Designated 2003 EL61, it was actually discovered in 2003 but took awhile for its orbit to be determined.  The discovery of both these objects will probably revive the debate over the definition of a planet.  There seems to be a continuum of sizes of KBOs out there; it is even possible larger ones than the new one remain to be discovered.  Alan Boss is not sure tiny Pluto and its kin deserve to be in the same class as Jupiter and Saturn.

Since so many Kuiper Belt objects have been discovered in the last couple of decades, this is not quite the big news it might have been; still, new planets have historically been considered spectacular discoveries.  Uranus launched William Herschel to fame in the late 18th century, and Neptune led to a well-known priority dispute between Adams and Leverrier in the the 19th.  Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930 was a monumental task of searching through photographic plates.  Now, we know there are many other rocky bodies out there beyond Neptune and far past Pluto.  Having a 10th planet will certainly change the textbooks and might turn out to be one of those historical announcements you will tell your grandchildren about.  Just hope they don’t name it Darwin or Huxley or something.  (After Pluto, is another Disney character in the lineup?)
    The intriguing thing about the other object is, why does it still have a moon?  One would think that, after four billion years, a tiny object 1% the size of its parent, in orbit around a small object having low gravity to begin with, would have been swept away long ago.  The shortage of objects to form it by collisions and the unlikelihood of its being captured contribute to the puzzle.  Yet it is one of several (including Pluto) to have a satellite, according to Space.com.  We’ll have to scrutinize their explanations for this unexpected pairing (see also 10/05/2003 and 05/14/2003 entries).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Bad news for the Darwin Party.  What will they do when his racist writings become public (09/13/2002), and the world can see exposed his connivances with the Four Musketeers to shut off opposition to his little black book? (See 10/24/2002 and 01/06/2004 entries).  What will they do when the intelligent design movement puts links everywhere to their favorite quote? “A fair result can only be obtained by balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”  Great idea by Cambridge.  Now Charlie can be caught in his own web.
Next headline on:  Darwin

It takes a desperate Darwin junky to get high on tailpipe exhaust.  They should be weeping over their sins, seeing complex advanced molecules far too early for their cosmological models, but what are they doing instead?  Hallucinating with poison, making deadly molecules come alive in their imaginations.  How and when did science ever sink to this level?  Hydrogen is a building block of life, for goodness’ sake, and so are electrons.  Do we conclude that we have found the “building blocks of life” in a CRT?  Publicists go out of their way to put the L word in any cosmological story because they think it’s sexier and will attract the public attention.  If so, the Great Unwashed have only themselves to blame for giving birth to new suckers every minute.  Actually, they probably don’t even read this stuff.  The problem is with the Washed on the outside but not on the inside.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Did that little paean to evolution warm your bosom?  More importantly, did it contribute one whit to this article?  Cochella and Green, bless their Darwinista hearts, have illustrated again the freakish juxtaposition of intelligence and nonsense that characterizes evolutionary jargon.  It seems like a kind of schizophrenia or mystery religion to the uninitiated to hear high fidelity, quality control, optimization, genetic code and other design words ascribed to mindless processes of evolution.  Do they explain how this incredible system evolved?  Of course not; being brainwashed materialists, they just assume it had to, so it did.
    Everyone who has DNA should learn something about those aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (see 09/16/2004 entry and links in the commentary).  It’s a shame these high-tech machines in our bodies and in all living things have been given such geeky names; they are really remarkable in their specificity and accuracy.  More importantly, they constitute a classic logical proof of design, because they know two languages and are able to translate one into the other.  Here’s how Cochella and Green introduce them:

While the accuracy of DNA replication and transcription depend only on cognate base pair selection, translation depends on an additional, base-pairing-independent reaction that must be carried out with high specificity.  Each tRNA must be covalently attached to a specific amino acid – aminoacylated – preserving an unambiguous codon-amino acid correspondence known as the genetic code.  This reaction is carried out by aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases specific for each amino acid and a corresponding group of tRNAs (isoacceptors).  These enzymes must therefore recognize two substrates: first, a group of tRNAs which share a collection of ‘identity elements’ and second, an amino acid that may be distinguished by small differences in side-chain properties.

Having one language or code is proof enough of design, but possessing the ability to translate one into another requires a language convention – something never observed to be a product of chance or natural law, but always known to be the result of intelligence: whether with two intelligent beings communicating, or interacting programs that were produced by intelligent agents.  This should be clear to anyone not lobotomized by Darwinian education, but look how these authors explain it by just waving the evolutionary magic wand.  They are discussing how these machines can distinguish between very similar amino acids.  Watch the hocus pocus:

How do synthetases deal with this?  The aminoacylation reaction, which takes place at a site of the enzyme called the synthetic site, occurs in two steps.  First the amino acid is activated by adenylation (consuming ATP) and then it is transferred to the tRNA (releasing AMP).  Steric exclusion of amino acids with larger side-chains and recognition of specific properties of each amino acid generally make this synthetic site specific enough so that only the correct amino acid can be activated and transferred.  But amino acids having similar properties to and a smaller size than the cognate amino acid can be misactivated at frequencies that are too high to maintain an unambiguous code.  As a consequence, enzymes facing this problem have evolved a second active site, distinct from the synthetic site, called the editing site, where misactivated amino acids or misacylated tRNAs are hydrolyzed.

Did you catch that?  Astonishing! (see the Fairy Godmother song, 06/27/2005 commentary.)  Here were machines already accurate enough for most instances, but since there was a “need” for an “unambiguous code,” and some amino acids were so similar that mistakes leaked through, well – we are told, no problem– evolution to the rescue: they just “evolved” an editing site (Selah) with the ability not only to distinguish threonine from valine and serine, but to send the imposters to the recycle bin (Selah).
    It is therefore with great sadness to have to tarnish the reputations of these otherwise bright scientists with the SEQOTW prize, but they earned it.  Ignorance is no excuse.  They can gain absolution by removing the Darwinspeak and rewriting their article with more intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Cell Biology • Amazing Stories • Dumb Stories

While this feat was evolving, we wonder if it was like the early fighter planes trying to shoot machine guns through the propeller.  Until engineers figured out how to synchronize the firing between the propeller blades, how many test pilots shot themselves down?  (Uh, whoops....)  How many cheetahs in a full gallop had to learn to coordinate their attacks when the lights were on, till they got frustrated and sent their brains back to Tinker Bell’s workshop for an upgrade?
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Stories

McKay ought to know better.  He knows chemistry, and he knows thermodynamics.  If life is information made flesh (see 06/25/2005 article), where is he going to import that ingredient?  Astrobiologists are going to lose their last smidgeon of credibility totally if they keep pushing the myth that life just happens everywhere just because they need to justify their careers.  Honesty is the best policy.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Mars • Solar System • Dumb Ideas

Ironic that Julianna Kettlewell has the same surname as the infamous researcher of peppered moths (see 06/25/2004 entry).  This article doesn’t improve much on evolutionary storytelling.  Who is asking how or why the little flying bugs developed team spirit?  Can they even see their own wing patterns, let alone care whether that attractive, sweet-smelling female over there has identical strips?  Seems to be another case of imputing human aesthetic values on bugs.  As long as we’re speculating about butterfly fashion fads, why wouldn’t they just as easily be saying, vive la difference?
    The authors of the paper note that “empirical evidence has been sufficiently scarce to raise doubts about the importance of reinforcement in nature.”  Their own case is full of speculation and doubt.  So is this the best that evolutionists can do, 146 years after The Origin of Species supposedly settled the issue?  Look how excited they all get over a few wing styles, and how eagerly they want to invoke the magic phrase natural selection to help Charlie get a little credit.  They should be worried (see next entry).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

The three mechanisms gene duplication, regulatory sequence expansion and diversification, and alternative protein isoform expression accomplish essentially the same general result—they increase the sources of variation and minimize the pleiotropy associated with the evolution of coding sequences.  The global question of the genetic basis of the evolution of form then boils down to the relative contribution of gene duplication, regulatory sequence evolution, and the evolution of coding sequences, over evolutionary time.  I will first examine what is known about the role of regulatory sequences and then discuss the contributions of coding sequences and gene duplication to the evolution of anatomy.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

1. Regulatory Sequences:  Non-coding regions of DNA can affect the expression of coding regions (genes) during development, sometimes with dramatic effects.  Typical examples are extra or misplaced limbs in fruit flies or changes in pigmentation patterns.  Are changes to regulatory sequences fodder for evolution?  Carroll argues that while mutations in genes have pleiotropic effects, mutations in regulatory sequences do not, and as such, “enable a great diversity of patterns to arise from alterations in regulatory circuits through the evolution of novel combinations of sites for regulatory proteins.”  But can what is observed in pigmentation patterns account for the “more complex traits” like “body organization, appendage formation, and other, more slowly evolving characters”?  Carroll thinks so, but the only examples he provides,² from a “handful of studies” on this subject, are pigmentation patterns in fruit flies and reductions in pelvic fin armor in stickleback fish (see 06/18/2004 entry).  Nevertheless, these examples are enough for him to draw attention to what he considers a key point:

   The crucial insight from the evolution of Pitx1, yellow, and Hoxc8 is that regulatory mutations provide a mechanism for change in one trait while preserving the role of pleiotropic genes in other processes.  This is perhaps the most important, most fundamental insight from evolutionary developmental biology.  While functional mutations in a coding region are usually poorly tolerated and eliminated by purifying selection, even complete loss-of-function mutations in regulatory elements are possible because the compartmentation created by the modularity of cis-regulatory elements limits the effects of mutations to individual body parts.

   He seems to be emphasizing that mutations to non-coding regions have the advantage of permitting “tinkering” without damaging the machinery as a whole.  “Does this mean that coding sequences cannot contribute to morphological evolution?“ he asks, then answers, “Not at all” –
2. Coding Sequences:  Carroll discusses examples of Hox genes in fruit flies that have apparently diversified by duplication and selection into new forms.  Some apparently retain Hox function and some do not; these have taken on other functions, such as new dorsoventral patterning in some lineages of fruit flies.  “These arthropod Hox proteins demonstrate that some of the most conserved proteins can, under certain circumstances, evolve new and different activities.”  Yet, at best, these seem to be examples of genes that have modified existing anatomical parts rather than generated new ones de novo.  Further, they cannot represent the whole evolutionary bag of creative tricks, because “these events are, in the long span of the history of these lineages, rare relative to the extensive diversification of body forms.”  One case in point is that a change in the Ubx protein “has been well preserved throughout the course of more than 300 million years of insect evolution.”  Clearly there must be mechanisms for more rapid evolution.  Again, Carroll is confident: “Are there more common and rapid means of evolving morphological diversity via coding mutations?  Definitely,” he boasts.  OK, like what?  Like mutations in the MC1R gene, that “are associated with scale, fur, or plumage color variation and divergence in a wide range of species,” indicating that “the MC1R gene has evolved under natural and sexual selection.”  But again, this seems to assume that evolution rather than demonstrate it.  Another example about repeat sequences on a gene that differ between dog breeds, while interesting, might not help the evolutionary explanation: “this variation may have accompanying deleterious, pleiotropic effects that, while manageable under domestication, would limit its contribution to evolution under natural selection.”
3. Gene Duplication:  While gene duplication is certainly in the explanatory toolkit for the evolution of anatomy, there is a limitation: “Empirical evidence suggests, however, that while gene duplication has contributed to the evolution of form, the frequency of duplication events is not at all sufficient to account for the continuous diversification of lineages.”  The rate is estimated to be one duplication per gene per 100 million years, far too slow to produce changes at the rate expected by evolutionary theory, yielding “the 300,000 known species of beetles, or 10,000 species of birds” in far less time.  Furthermore, there is such dramatic stasis observed even in genes where past duplication is inferred: “the number and diversity of Hox genes in highly diversified phyla, such as the arthropods and tetrapods, appears to have remained fairly stable for very long periods (perhaps approximately 500 million years).”  Why, also, are some gene families found far back, among the most primitive multicellular organisms?  “Such deep ancestral complexity,” Carroll says, with apparent repudiation of long-assumed evolutionary mechanisms, “is much greater than would be expected under the hypothesis that diversity evolves primarily through the evolution of new genes.”  Why also did the human genome fail to fulfill expectations that it would contain more genes than lower forms of life?  And why do many of our genes have syntenic orthologs in the mouse?  For these reasons, Carroll rejects the idea that gene duplication is the essential part of the story of anatomical evolution.  The story must lie more in the way regulatory mechanisms evolve.
4. All Three in the Mix:  Now that changes in genes and the regulatory sequences that affect them are players, is Carroll prepared to stick his neck out and announce which mechanism is the leader in the evolution of form?  To do so seems to require working up one’s courage:

   The more subjective issue is whether, from the small sample of case studies mentioned here and in the literature, one can make (and defend) statements about the relative contribution of regulatory and coding sequence evolution to the evolution of anatomy.  We are, after all, in much better position now to do so than King and Wilson were 30 years ago.
       While the agnostic, “wait and see” position would appear safer, that would not at all be in keeping with the bold spirit of the pioneers who first wrestled with the question.  Moreover, I argue that a trend is evident, and that that trend should, of course, inform ongoing and future work.  Based upon (i) empirical studies of the evolution of traits and of gene regulation in development, (ii) the rate of gene duplication and the specific histories of important developmental gene families, (iii) the fact that regulatory proteins are the most slowly evolving of all classes of proteins, and (iv) theoretical considerations concerning the pleiotropy of mutations, I argue that there is adequate basis to conclude that the evolution of anatomy occurs primarily through changes in regulatory sequences.

   Carroll hastens to say this should come as no surprise to most theorists, but he chides the people working in comparative genomics and population genetics who seem to downplay the importance of the regulatory factor.

Any statements or claims, then, about the genetic changes that “make us human” must be weighed critically in light of the power and limitations of the methodology employed, and the scope of the hypotheses being tested.  While it is understandable that some biologists have reached for the “low-hanging fruit” of coding sequence changes, the task of unraveling the regulatory puzzle is yet to come.

If you thought Charlie had figured this all out 146 years ago, wake up and smell the bitter coffee.  Here we have The Theory of Evolution, that rock-solid foundation for all of law, ethics, philosophy, art, science, education and even religion, so secure that no student in public school should ever be allowed to hear anything else, and now they tell us that everything you thought you knew about it was wrong, and the biologists have to start over.  This can make one mad enough to spit the bitter coffee back into the face of the Darwin Party waiter who handed it to us and said there was nothing else to drink.
    The conceptual nakedness of evolutionary theory at the genetic level, where all the action is supposed to take place, cannot be clothed by small stitches of Hox cloth.  This is shameful.  Despite his bravado, did Sean Carroll provide any evidence strong to convince a skeptic that random changes in regulatory genes could produce an Einstein from Bonzo, or a from a flatworm for that matter, in any conceivable universe?  Assuredly not: the most solid items in his discussion were arguments against the evolution of anatomy: (1) pleiotropy, a phenomenon that resists change, (2) ultraconserved elements (see 05/27/2005 entry), which show no evolution for 500 million imaginary years, and (3) his utter silence on how a change to a regulatory element could ever produce a wing, eye, brain or any other complex system.  How can a regulatory element regulate something that is not already there, for crying out loud?  For all the case he makes for regulatory mutations in development providing the most important, fundamental insight into evolutionary mechanisms (evo-devo), other evolutionists disagree (see 06/29/2005 review of Carroll’s book by Jerry Coyne).  These opposite Darwinian perspectives essentially falsify each other on theoretical grounds; then there is the data, which falsifies them both.  If the complex regulatory mechanisms were already present at the beginning, what does that tell you?
    Carroll’s specific examples – stickleback fish fins and fruit fly pigment spots – are sad and poultry excuses for real evolutionary change, and I mean poultry, not paltry, because they are mere chicken feed.  Not only that, he pulled the roost out from under those who earlier had clucked the spring egg song over the FOXP2 mutation explaining Shakespeare (see 05/26/2004 entry).  Whether you call it gene duplication, gene regulatory mutation or gene coding mutation, it’s all chance in Old McDarwin’s chicken coop.
    This entry was longer than most because of its significance.  Here we listened to a faithful lord in the Darwin Party, giving the Allan Wilson Memorial Lecture at Berkeley, which he would not be in position to do if he didn’t know the score, and all he could say is that everyone has been on the wrong track for 30 years, and we should have turned when Wilson and King said so back there and checked out that other dead end.  Talk about being lost in a cave of their own making, and watching shadows on the wall.  Come to the light.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

In this timely book, Michael Ruse interprets the last 200 years of conflict between biology and religion as a struggle between evolutionism and creationism.  Evolutionism is not merely an endorsement of the scientific theory of evolution.  It consists of “the whole metaphysical or ideological picture built around or on evolution,” including a belief in progress and attempts to reduce cultural and ethical values to evolutionary biology.  As such, it constitutes a “secular religion.”  Thus, for Ruse (a philosopher of science at Florida State University), the debate over creationism is more a conflict between two religions than one between religion and science.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The Enlightenment offered a vision of progress based on human effort.  The emerging pre-Darwinian views of evolution (such as those of Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, and Robert Chambers), although hardly professional science, co-opted this vision in their accounts of organic change.
    Charles Darwin, in contrast, attempted to convert evolution into science by elaborating a material mechanism for it—natural selection.  Darwin was at best ambivalent about the ideology of progress.  (Alfred Russell Wallace was more convinced of its reality—strangely, he receives scant attention in Ruse’s story.)  Moreover, natural selection acting on blind variation was antithetical to the idea of progress with its implied directionality.  In spite of Darwin’s efforts, Ruse argues, evolution did not become established as a professional science in the 19th century or even during the first two decades of the 20th.  Instead, it remained popular science.  Given the generally accepted ideology of progress, natural selection was often abandoned in favor of directional mechanisms of organic change. According to Ruse, during this period, almost all of those who endorsed evolution also endorsed evolutionism.  The social Darwinism of the late 19th century only exemplifies the worst excesses of such an evolutionism.

On Ruse’s account, evolution became a professional science following the modern synthesis of the late 1920s and 1930s.  Ruse argues, though not very convincingly, that the architects of the synthesis continued to uphold an ideology of progress and endorse evolutionism.  He ignores the fact that, with the exception of R. A. Fisher, these architects largely rejected attempts to deploy evolution in the political arena.   (Some, such as J. B. S. Haldane, whom Ruse ignores, often explicitly rejected progress.)  Ruse’s sketch of contemporary evolutionary theory is also idiosyncratic,  with sociobiology presented as that theory’s most significant achievement.  Because the sociobiologists W. D. Hamilton and Edward O. Wilson are the heroes of this story, Ruse claims that contemporary evolutionary biology endorses evolutionism and not merely evolution.

The final chapters of The Evolution-Creation Struggle turn all too briefly to the contemporary debates over creationism.  Ruse offers a short and cogent critique of intelligent design that concentrates on its failure to spawn any serious scientific research.²  But the book ends with an unfortunate whimper: we are told that we should try to understand the other side; we are not told how Ruse’s understanding of that side will help us prevent the reintroduction of religion in our science classes.

Wow: this is quite telling.  Michael Ruse seems to be evolving toward rapprochement with I.D. with each new book.  Although he has been adamant against the cult of progress for quite awhile (see 06/12/2003 commentary), he is making even more startling claims now: (1) most historical evolutionists were more religious than scientific in their embrace of the cult of progress; (2) evolutionism is just as religious as Christianity, (3) the religion of evolutionism continues to the present day, and (4) evolutionists need to understand the other side.  Point (1) is clear to any halfway objective historian of science and should not be all that controversial.  But points 2, 3, and 4, though flimsy concessions from a creationist view, are almost fighting words to an evolutionist.
    To maintain their hegemony, the Darwin Party needs its supporters to be devoted to the doctrine that their position is based on science, not religion.  They need to keep the onus of religion on the other side where it can be swept aside as faith-based, irrational, dogmatic and irrelevant.  It must sting like acid for them to hear a Party member claim their views are just as religious as that of their opponents, and that we should try to “understand” the other side instead of fighting them with the full arsenal of Big Science.
    Based on this review, this new book by Ruse must be highly disappointing to those who have lived with the religion-vs-science paradigm embedded in their heads since high school biology class.  If Ruse keeps this up, it won’t be long before the Party condemns him as a heretic and throws him overboard.  If that happens, the creationists and ID community need to be prepared to rescue him and show him what true Christian (unevolved, real) altruism is like (see 06/12/2003 commentary).  They need to provide him clean, clear designer glasses with which to see the world in a new light, a revelation that brings joy, thankfulness and meaning.
    Undoubtedly the softening of Ruse’s hardline position is partly due to his historical research into the unsavory personalities and empty lives of some of Darwinism’s staunchest bulldogs (see 09/02/2004 entry) compared to the friendliness and logic of I.D. supporters with whom he has interacted, like Phillip Johnson.  Creationists need to be careful not to shoot those waving a white flag.  Some of the best allies for design-based science, like Dean Kenyon and Richard Lumsden, were once adamant evolutionists.  Give people space to see the light.  Whether they do or not, keep those Christian graces shining through.  Who knows; maybe Eugenie Scott will be next (see 05/25/2005 entry).
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

What follows is not to be taken in any way as a disparagement of Dr. Becerra and her efforts.  Unless proven otherwise (which seems highly unlikely), we should assume her a bright, active, diligent scientist, respected among peers, fulfilling her career as an evolutionary biologist with exemplary field work and analysis.  Her paper looks like standard research fare, complete with dozens of references, graphs, diagrams, equations, and all that would be expected in a scientific paper.  She made observations, proposed a hypothesis, tested it, and made conclusions.  Who could possibly criticize such a constructive enterprise, undertaken simply with the desire to shed light on the history of a particular group of plants?
    We want to explore this otherwise ho-hum paper that, for the majority of the population, will pass unnoticed into the growing corpus of scientific literature, where it will rest in peace except to a few specialists.  We want to use it as a case study in how the theory of evolution has become a self-perpetuating job security program with no necessary connection to the truth.
    Read this paper carefully, and you will find many useful facts about Bursera, but none that substantiate the two requirements to convince someone of evolution: proof of (1) long ages and (2) the creative powers of natural selection to produce novel structures.  On the contrary, every support for these claims comes from evolutionary assumptions, so it is inbred reasoning, like asking a Wahabi if the Koran is the word of Allah.  Would her support convince a creationist, or a neutral juror with mind uncluttered by evolutionary assumptions?
    The phylogenetic tree-making depends on assumptions of evolution.  The calibration of millions of years depends on evolutionary geological assumptions.  The story of diversification depends on the belief that niches create innovation: the “if you build it, they will come” theory of evolution.  This paper is shot through with evolutionary assumptions from beginning to end; evolution calibrates itself by evolution.
    Whenever there is an anomaly in the data, she patches up the evolutionary story with additional ad hoc assumptions: the diversification rate changed here or there, in this region but not that one because maybe the mountains were building faster there, etc.  She picks and chooses data based on evolutionary assumptions so as not to clutter the picture she is trying to present: for instance, ignoring certain species to avoid contamination of the story.  She used two separate equations to cross-check each other, ignoring the fact that both depend on evolutionary assumptions; whenever their results don’t agree, there is enough tweak space to get them to line up.  Fossils?  “Due to a scant fossil record,” she admits, “the history of the Mexican dry forest is still sketchy.  Although the floral affinities with other parts of the world, as well as the importance of the endemic elements, have been well established, little is yet known about the timing of the origin of this vegetation and the directions of its historical expansion or contraction.”  No matter – the story is the thing.
    Again, this is not to pick on Dr. Becerra; this paper can be considered a rather ordinary sample of evolutionary research.  Being largely a story of microevolution between members of a single genus, it isn’t even all that controversial.  The point is, it underscores the contention (see 12/22/2003 commentary) that Darwinian evolution has become job security for storytellers.  When you see an evolutionary story, no matter how professionally typed, no matter how many references, now matter how many nice graphs and charts and equations, you need to ask yourself how on earth the researcher knows what happened millions of years ago when he or she was not even there to observe it.  To an evolutionist, it doesn’t really matter.  It gives academics and naturalists something to do.  It supports the publishing industry.  It gives Darwinism an air of scientific respectability.  Why, every evolutionist agrees this is the way science is to be done (don’t ask non-evolutionists for their opinion—they are disqualified by definition).  This policy protects Darwinism from cross-pollination of ideas, so that the inbreeding can continue.
    Thus, evolutionary biology marches on.  The idea that 30 million years ago, this particular genus of plants began to diversify as mountains were rising, till around 7.5 million years ago it had filled all the available niches, makes a nice, plausible-sounding, self-consistent, albeit malleable, story.  Some of us have the gall to ask, Is it true?
Next headline on:  Plants • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Creationists are good for evolutionists.  Otherwise, who would keep their rampant speculations in check?  If evolutionists were really interested in truth, they would welcome debate over interpretations of evidence from anyone who argues with sound logic, integrity and respect for the brute facts.  Since the scientific establishment will not even consider any opinion coming from outside the Darwin cheerleader’s club, it’s up to individuals to hear both sides and judge who is providing the better interpretation.
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils

The Laetoli prints are identical to modern human footprints.  The only reason paleoanthropologists claim they were made by A. afarensis is the dating: they are too “old” to have been made by modern man.  That’s why the artist’s rendition shows the tracks being made by a family of evolving creatures with an upright gait, human feet and ape-like faces.
    Data are just pawns in the evolutionary chess game.  The King is Charlie Dumpty.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men must protect him from falling.
Next headline on:  Early Man

Evolution’s newest defenders, who came together in frustration after the November elections, have little political experience, apart from hoisting Kerry-Edwards signs in morning traffic.  They mostly are middle-class people with day jobs.  Some had protested the Vietnam War but had rarely felt inspired to undertake political activism since.  Together, they call themselves the Message Group and depict themselves as “determined and balanced” voters worried about social conservatives.
    “I fear for my country.  That sounds like a radical notion, something from the ’60s, but there is a pervasive fear, a scariness,” said Richard Lawrence, 63, a retired Environmental Protection Agency employee who voted for Nixon.  “We’re just a small group, maybe with a powerful idea.  We don’t have a clue, but we’re not letting go.”....
    The Message Group was created out of its members’ disappointment.  After President Bush was reelected and Republicans strengthened their hold on Capitol Hill, the group’s future comrades were among millions of demoralized Kerry voters who had invested fresh emotional energy and elbow grease in politics, only to fall short.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Now, though their aim of defeating intelligent design is explicit, their strategy is, well, evolving.
    They selected evolution after deciding that other issues, such as Social Security revisions, were well-covered by bigger, richer groups.  The emerging duel over the teaching of science, they reasoned, was important, local and manageable, an area in which they could make a small impact – and if they got lucky, a big one.

This is really funny.  It almost makes you feel sympathy for these old Vietnam hippies with their tie-dye shirts and long gray hair.  There must be something they can do.  Ah!  Here’s a flag we can send up the pole to see if anyone salutes: “Keep Virginia evolving!”  Yes, Virginia, there really is a Charlie Darwin.
    One of the leaders said, “I’m just a citizen, not a scientist.  I’ve even had to do a lot of reading to catch up.”  We could suggest some books.  We could also suggest a strategy.  Forget the Scopes sit-in, the chants and incense, and come up with a plausible Darwinian mechanism to explain the origin of life and the molecular machinery of the cell.  Explain the explosively abrupt appearance of all the major body plans in the fossil record simultaneously.  Prove that mind is nothing more than an emergent property of brain chemistry (without committing a logical fallacy in doing so).  Explain the fine-tuning of the universe by chance.  Provide solid scientific answers to these and the other questions the ID community are raising, and you will steal their thunder.
    Doesn’t this story just nail the connection between Darwinism and political liberalism? (see 12/02/2004 entry).  When liberal Democrats, who supposedly emphasize free speech, look for a cause in science to land on, it is predictably pro-evolution and the stifling of dissent about Darwin and his materialist philosophy.  Historically, this has usually been the case.  The pro-evolutionists throughout the 19th century were predominantly leftist or radical in political ideology, whether German materialists like Vogt and Buchner, or Karl Marx in London, even Darwin himself and his most ardent supporters.  Liberalism and evolutionism are inextricably linked.  The question is, which is the cart, and which is the horse?
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Politics and Ethics

Said co-author Daniel Morse, director of UCSB’s Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies: “It’s especially exciting for us to find the profound medical significance of our discoveries for human bone.”  He described the discovery of “molecular shock absorbers” providing a kind of self-healing glue holding biological mineralized structures together when studying the abalone shell six years ago.  “It’s truly remarkable to find the same fundamental mechanisms operating in bone,” said Morse.
    He noted that these mechanisms give young healthy bone its tremendous resiliency and resistance to fracture, and actually help heal small microcracks soon after they’re formed.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Since no evolutionists believe people evolved from abalones, their only recourse is to wave the magic wand of convergent evolution to explain built-in molecular shock absorbers.  Remember that improbabilities are multiplicative, not additive – and so are credulities.
    This story illustrates a difference between living and non-living objects.  In general, the closer you look at an inanimate object, like a rock, the simpler it appears.  For living structures, the complexity keeps apace with the magnification.  Some of the most amazing aspects have been invisible to human perception till recently.  If macroscopic things like an eye gave Darwin cold shudders, he could never have been prepared for the view under the atomic force microscope.  Let’s hope his shock absorbers are in good working order as we envision him collapsing in a dead faint.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Health • Amazing Stories

That such poor reasoning and lousy science would get prominent coverage in the leading popular geographic magazine in the world is an illustration of the pernicious influence of evolutionary thinking on our society.  This hypothesis downplays the intellectual and moral factors involved.  Consistently followed, it would lead one to believe that anti-Semitism has been a good thing, if it led to the genius of Einstein.  If this kind of sloppy research, based on faulty assumptions and selective statistics, were published in some other field, it would be quickly scorned by academics.  The phrase “natural selection” is like a free pass around the security guards of science.  Should evolutionary anthropologists watch an Auschwitz as detached observers, measuring what genetic traits are being naturally selected by the process?  It’s time to call moral evils evil instead of rationalizing them on evolutionary grounds.  Let’s see how they explain it when the public has had enough, and there is a widespread outcry against Darwinian thinking.  Would that prove survival of the fittest ideas?
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics • Dumb Ideas

If you read only Mencken’s account, dripping with big-city Northern snobbery, or remember Fredric March’s semi-hysterical performance as the fictionalized Bryan in “Inherit the Wind,” you could be forgiven for believing Darrow demolished Bryan and, with him, the biblical account of creation.  But the trial transcript and more objective contemporary coverage tell a different tale.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Go to this article and give it a good vote.  It was refreshing to see, for a change, a reporter helping dismantle the myths about the Scopes Trial rather than perpetuating them.  Johnson’s treatment actually made the northern liberals look bad and Bryan look good.  He showed how the perception of the Scopes Trial was due more to propaganda and the media circus surrounding it than to the actual record of what happened.  He pointed out that historians give a much more favorable impression of Bryan than is commonly assumed.  For those of us raised in public school with mandatory viewings of Inherit the Wind, it’s about time.  See The Monkey Trial site for a comparison of portrayals in the movie with the historical record.  Inherit the Wind deserves to be thrown into the bin along with Birth of a Nation as an egregious example of twisting history.  (Surprisingly, the play and movie was written to satirize the McCarthy era, not the actual Scopes trial, according to Johnson.)
    One unfortunate part of Bryan’s testimony during cross-examination by Darrow is that he waffled on whether Genesis should be treated allegorically, and compromised on the idea of long ages.  This made it seem that Christians were prepared to capitulate before the evolutionists over assumed evidence for long ages and transitional forms – evidence that was later shown to be flawed or even fraudulent.  Overall, though, he gave it his best shot and was prepared to put Darrow on the hot seat before the defense decided to plead guilty, thus undermining his chance to similarly grill Darrow.  The fact that this was the “first trial to be covered with the full arsenal of modern media – broadcast live on the radio, filmed for newsreels in the theaters, chronicled by hundreds of newspapers that printed the daily transcript,” made it a setup for any spin desired.  As such, the Scopes Trial provides a fountainhead of case studies on propaganda, logical fallacies and smokescreen tactics (see the Baloney Detector for examples).
    Teachers: teach Scopes!  Show your students the differences between the movie portrayal and the facts.  They will learn some valuable skills in how to interpret the media.  Many facts about the Scopes Trial should be resurrected to embarrass the Darwin Party.  Did you know, for instance, that the textbook Darrow was defending taught racism?  Did you know that Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man, both hoaxes, were going to be used as proof of evolution?  Did you know that John Scopes, a football coach and substitute teacher, could not even remember if he had taught evolution in the classroom at all?  Did you know he agreed to help the ACLU test the Butler Act by agreeing to lie that he had taught evolution?
    The whole event was a media circus from the get-go.  Poor Judge Raulston tried his best to keep the trial on the issue of whether Scopes had violated the statute or not, and so did Bryan, but they were no match for the spin doctors around the world who took what they wanted and ran with it.  Political cartoonists had a field day with this southern American phenomenon.  History should be kinder to the southerners than to the elitist reporters and scientists who printed unspeakable diatribes against Bryan and his supporters, such as: “he is still engaged in battling earnestly for organized ignorance, superstition, and tyranny... He has illuminated vividly for the rest of us the essentially bigoted position of himself and his followers, and the degree of religious intolerance which they will undoubtedly enforce upon the country if they ever get the chance.”  Have they no shame?
    Bryan only agreed to the cross-examination because he was promised he would have his chance to grill Darrow in return, but Darrow’s strategy was to hit and run, thus scoring points with the world media.  This strategy has served them well ever since (see 07/11/2005 and 06/13/2005 entries for recent examples).  Darwinists who have used Scopes for 80 years to push their myth should be put on the witness stand.  It’s about time.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

The story of creation is in your hotel room drawer.  Starstuff is just stuff, but it takes a mind to know one (see 07/15/2005 entry).
Next headline on:  Stellar astronomy • Cosmology

Since reporters often fail to do their homework and repeat the propaganda of the Darwin Party, it is important as always to have one’s Baloney Detector in good working condition.  Notice, for instance, how the Wichita Eagle labels the pro-evolutionists with the mild term “moderates” as opposed to the “conservative” members arguing for change.  What other political labels can you come up with for these opposing groups that could spin the story either way? 
Next headline on:  Education • Evolution • Intelligent Design

Microglia continually extend ... and retract ... processes, surveying their immediate environment within the brain.  The processes move rapidly toward a site of injury, such as a damaged blood vessel in the brain, in response to the localized release of a chemoattractant ... from the injured sited.  Once at the target site, the processes form a barrier to protect healthy tissue.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Similar to the story on junk DNA (see 07/15/2005 entry), this goes to show that nothing in biology makes sense apart from design.  If we would approach biology with a design perspective (see 06/25/2005 entry), we might really begin to understand what life is all about.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Human Body • Amazing Stories

Man’s solutions to both these problems have been clumsy, polluting and expensive.  It’s humbling to have to imitate supposed lower forms of life.  (Good.  Nothing like a little humility for us humans.)  Maybe the new biomimetics trend (see 02/09/2005 and 09/21/2004 stories, for example) will teach us how to cooperate with the environment instead of fighting it.  Need we point out that biomimetics operates on an implicit intelligent-design assumption.
    Shark facts are ubiquitous on the TV nature shows these days, to a fault (they seem to satisfy the peasants’ lust for gore).  How many more Shark Week specials can we take?  Time out, Discovery Channel and National Geographic TV.  If you can find the 1988 IMAX film Beavers, though, it’s a classic, fun for the whole family.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Mammals • Amazing Stories • Media

Hicks believes the Tulsa Park and Recreation Board that originally approved the creation display for the zoo ultimately caved in to the demands of a vocal minority.  He contends that the Interfaith Alliance, Tulsa Metropolitan Ministries and others of “these groups that claim to be all about tolerance and inclusion” are actually “more like political action committees affiliated with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.”

Tolerance in our culture has a very specific meaning: it means forcing Christians, with their hands tied behind their backs and their mouths gagged, to endure witnessing every weird, depraved or wicked viewpoint paraded in front of them, without recourse, with the mantras “separation of church and state!” or “evolution is a fact!” shouted endlessly if they appear tempted to resist, to see how much they will tolerate.  When the victims appear ready to burst their bands and fight back, they smile and pretend that they didn’t really mean it and only wanted to be inclusive.  Pacified, the victims relax for another round.  Now that you know this, you will understand liberalism much better.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Politics and Ethics

Gazzaniga is a lot less cautious when it comes to the implications of neuroscience for ethics in general.  As he puts it in his preface, “I would like to support the idea that there could be a universal set of biological responses to moral dilemmas, a sort of ethics, built into our brains.  My hope is that we soon may be able to uncover these ethics, identify them, and begin to live more fully by them.  I believe we live by them largely unconsciously now, but that a lot of suffering, war, and conflict could be eliminated if we could agree to live by them more consciously.”
    This conclusion would follow if our universal moral sense had been implanted by an all-knowing and all-loving God.  But biological evolution is a notoriously amoral force.  Innate moral universals would have been shaped by the selective advantages that arise from caring for our kin and cooperating with our neighbours, but nothing in our genes tells us that slavery is wrong, or that men and women deserve equal rights.  Such insights emerge through individual and group processes that engage all of our faculties, including our innate moral sense, but also the capacity to appreciate abstract arguments, formulate analogies, learn from experience, take other’s perspectives and so on.  Much of moral progress consists of using reason to override our gut feelings.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena.  The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data.  Contemporary physical theory brings directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices made by human agents about how they will act.  This key development in basic physical theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists with an alternative conceptual framework for describing neural processes.  Indeed, owing to certain structural features of ion channels critical to synaptic function, contemporary physical theory must in principle be used when analysing human brain dynamics.  The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics.  It is able to represent more adequately than classic concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing number of empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain function.

Bloom properly distinguished the stark contrast between theological and evolutionary explanations for ethics, but he committed logical fallacies in supporting the latter.  He borrowed Christian words like innate moral sense, appreciate, reason and progress which are undefined terms in the Darwin Dictionary.  How can he decide that the amorality of evolution is “notorious” without making a value judgment?  His argument shoots itself in the foot and thus leaves the alternative, the proposition that “our universal moral sense had been implanted by an all-knowing and all-loving God,” the logical choice.
    The paper by Schwartz does not establish the theological origin of our innate moral sense, but undercuts one more materialist assumption for the alternative – at least temporarily.  Since science is tentative, today’s quantum theory may not be a final theory: it cannot serve as an ultimate foundation.  Any ethical system not based on absolutes and the assumption of an all-knowing and all-loving God is doomed to become merely a matter of personal opinion and social convention, and thus not a moral system at all.  The Bible offers a sure standard, a bulwark of moral confidence for troubling times.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Physics • Politics and Ethics • Theology

The land of the Bible remains a buried treasure.  Only a small percentage of potential sites have been explored, and only a small fraction of artifacts have been uncovered.  Each fragment found in this politically-troubled land has enormous potential to shed light on the greatest story ever told.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

The relative constancy of the rate at which DNA sequences evolve has been a treasured icon of molecular evolution for nearly 40 years.  The occurrence of such a stochastic ‘molecular clock’ was initially quite unexpected, and was explained by Motoo Kimura by assuming that most changes to amino-acid and nucleotide sequences were neutral – “neither beneficial nor injurious”, in Charles Darwin’s prescient phrase.
    However, there have been several inklings that the rate of molecular evolution accelerates when measured over evolutionarily short timescales.  As they report in Molecular Biology and Evolution, Ho and colleagues have now put the evidence together.  Their analyses of primate and bird data sets reveal that there is indeed a decided acceleration of molecular evolution on short timescales.  This is an effect that demands explanation; moreover, estimates for the timing of recent events in population biology will need to be reconsidered.

For some reason, the continuum between population heterozygosity and long-term evolution has not been adequately studied.  Although it is a continuum, the techniques required may change as the timescale decreases.  For example, some concepts from long-term evolution (binary evolutionary trees with sequences studied only at the tips) have been extended into populations where trees are no longer binary, and ancestral sequences (at internal nodes) are still present in the population.  There are hints that a formal multiscale study is necessary, because even though the same underlying process is occurring, different features of trees are observed as the timescale changes.

Another evolutionary assumption has been overturned by more careful analysis; keep up the good work.  Next time, though, remove the assumption of evolution before making the observations.  Relativity applies to physics, not biology.  An evolutionary tale that requires relativity to keep its plot together has left the science department for the theater class (see 11/29/2004 entry).
Next headline on:  Genetics • Dating Methods • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The binary orbital period of HD 188753 is just 25.7 years, and the orbital separation of the stars, both of Sun size, is a mere 12.3 AU – about the distance from the Sun to Saturn.  Konacki’s velocity measurements reveal that the primary star (the more massive star, denoted HD 188753A) has a planetary companion of a minimum of 1.14 Jupiter masses that orbits the star every 3.35 days at a distance of about 0.05 AU.  Yet according to the orbital migration theory, this planet should not exist.  The secondary star is so close that its gravitational pull would have stripped away the protoplanetary disk of the primary star – where, even if it later migrated, the planet must have formed – reducing the disk to a radius of just 1.3 AU.  But within this radius, ices are unlikely to last and so cannot contribute to the formation of a massive core.  The alternative explanation – that the planet formed where it is – would challenge the standard picture, but runs into the problem of where the necessary solid material came from.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

It appears that within the favoured scenario for the formation of hot Jupiters, the planet around HD 188753A could not be formed (unless for some reason the orbit of HD 188753 AB was very different during a planet formation phase).  One possible explanation is that the snowline can indeed be as close as ~1 au from the star.  Another possibility is that hot Jupiters form in situ, near their current orbital locations.  However, the problem is probably more challenging.  It has been suggested that planet formation in binary systems may be less efficient because the stirring induced by the secondary can significantly heat up the protoplanetary disk.  This may hold true for both the standard core accretion scenario and the recently revived gravitational collapse scenario [i.e., disk-instability model] of giant-planet formation.  Presumably, the environment of HD 188753 is particularly prohibitive given a small semi-major axis and the high mass of the secondary.

Although the planet in the HD 188753 system presents a conundrum to theorists, there might be an easy way out: abandon the make-do-and-mend migration theory to Occam’s razor, and accept that not all planet-forming nebulae are similar to the solar nebula.  Large and small protoplanetary nebulae of the same mass might differ only in their total angular momentum, such that in smaller nebulae more mass is closer in – nursing young giants.
    The giant planets that orbit other stars exist in a diversity of systems and most are unlike the system of planets found around our own Sun.  In our view, the diversity of planetary systems probably reflects a diversity of protoplanetary nebulae, and wherever sufficient mass is available, planets, even giant ones, may form.  The neglected majority of double stars could thus fill the Galaxy with planets.

Anomalies and constraints are good for science.  They put the brakes on speculation.  Laplace’s nebular hypothesis was a plausible-sounding naturalistic story for its day.  What would he have thought with today’s reality checks?  Puzzles and surprises are also good in that they spur the problem-solving juices of humans, who like to find out the reasons for things.  That much is good.  What turns this good astray is failing to question one’s assumptions.  None of the theorists is questioning naturalism; the idea of design is never even on the radar screen.
    The two struggling contenders for naturalistic explanations of planetary systems – core accretion and disk instability – each theory already beset by nearly insurmountable problems – have essentially been disqualified by this discovery.  It may be that the proponents will find a workaround, some convincing ad-hoc, a posteriori explanation to keep their theory in the running, but they need to be reminded that planet-building is just one local crisis within a bigger crisis about the origin of stars (05/31/2005 and 02/28/2004).  That crisis, in turn, lies within the bigger ones about the origin of galaxies (07/08/2004 and 03/03/2003) and the origin of the universe (01/23/2004 and 10/06/2004).  Exceeding them all is the crisis over the origin of life (06/16/2005 and 02/06/2005).  What do all these nested crises have in common?  Naturalism.
    The assumption that natural explanations are the only tools permissible from the toolkit of science has brought each of these investigations to a grinding halt.  To make progress, why not return to the design assumptions of Kepler, Galileo, Newton and many others?  These Christian-creationist pillars of science made great progress by believing the universe had a Designer.  Though science has mushroomed over the last two centuries in which methodological naturalism has prevailed, it’s arguable that naturalism had anything to do with the actual progress made.  The tangible, verifiable discoveries have been made with either an explicit or implicit assumption of design or purpose.  Wherever pure naturalism has led an investigation, whether in cosmology or the origin and evolution of life, it has produced little more than job security for storytellers (see 12/22/2003 entry).
    As a guiding assumption in science, naturalism is freezing up like a neglected pickup on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere.  To lubricate the engine, add the oil of intelligent design, then turn around and get back on the superhighway, back there where we got off at exit 1859.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Planetary Science

Scientists find the temperatures difficult to explain if sunlight is the only heat source.  More likely, a portion of the polar region, including the “tiger stripe” fractures, is warmed by heat escaping from the interior.  Evaporation of this warm ice at several locations within the region could explain the density of the water vapor cloud detected by other instruments.  How a 500-kilometer (310-mile) diameter moon can generate this much internal heat and why it is concentrated at the south pole is still a mystery.

Enceladus illustrates several processes going on at Saturn that appear unlikely to be sustainable for billions of years (see 03/10/2005 and 03/04/2005 entries).  The BBC news article, for instance, mentioned that E-ring particles can only survive for hundreds of years, not billions.  This means that to maintain belief that the ring is ancient, planetary scientists must find that Enceladus has been continually replenishing the particles for over four billion years.  Recall, however, that a huge explosion and loss of mass from the E-ring was observed in early 2004 (see 07/02/2004 entry).  It is unlikely that event was atypical.  Such destructive processes do not add to the ring; they erode it even faster.
    Regardless of one’s interpretation of the images, one thing all can agree on: the Cassini team deserves congratulations from around the world.  To be able to glimpse this kind of detail on bodies that are mere specks from Earth telescopes, to be able to navigate a ship 880 million miles away with such precision, and to be able to send streams of ones and zeroes through empty space and reconstruct them into photographs on Earth, is truly astonishing.  With the extraordinary becoming so commonplace in our technological civilization, we tend to forget that we are living in a historic period of discovery.  Early astronomers could never have imagined what we saw today.  Had they been told it would one day become possible, how they would have longed for a chance to share this experience.  Catch the drama of what is happening.
Next headline on:  Solar System

It bears repeating what we have said for years about this (06/03/2004 and 10/16/2003): the concept of “junk DNA” was a useless dead end that resulted from evolutionary thinking.  It is similar to the now-outmoded concept of “vestigial organs” used for decades as proof of evolution: the idea that the wasteful process of evolution left relics of junk in our bodies.  This viewpoint actually delayed the progress of science.  It prevented research into the function of the appendix, tonsils, pineal gland, coccyx, pituitary gland and other body parts now known to be useful and even vital for life and health.  How long has fruitful research into the genetic function of non-coding DNA been delayed by the concept of “junk DNA”?  Who would want to waste time looking at junk?
    An intelligent-design approach to non-coding DNA would have been entirely different.  An ID scientist would say there must be a reason for it.  Just because its function is unknown does not mean there is no function.  The burden is on the scientist to figure it out, not on nature to explain itself.  Like a puzzle fanatic trying to solve the latest crossword, such a scientist would be motivated to search and discover the function of the phenomenon, and might have found the secret of gene regulation much sooner.
    The paradigm shift in progress about so-called junk DNA provides a classic rebuttal to the argument that intelligent design theory would shut down scientific progress.  Most anticreationist rhetoric includes the charge that ID brings scientific explanation to a halt with the quick explanation, “God did it that way.”  Here we have seen that the contrary is true.  Evolution labeled genetic treasure as “trash,” and possibly delayed our understanding of non-coding DNA for years.  We shouldn’t let the Darwinists get away with claiming credit for the turnaround.^*  They caused the delay.  If Darwinist Esaus want to continue to treat nature like trash, ID Jacobs will be glad to take possession of their hand-offs.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Intelligent Design

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^*Nor should we let them get away with taking back these newly-revalued treasures for trophies in their museums of evolution.  Evolutionary theory did not predict highly-conserved regulatory elements that are identical in extremely different organisms: the inexorable force of mutation and selection should have caused wide differences between them.  Darwinists are masters of deception, taking every observation, no matter how unexpected, as support.  It’s time to force them to face up to what amounts to a falsification of their beliefs.

They weren’t there, and they don’t know, but what they do know is that they were surprised by evidence that overturned a belief in a very slow, gradual process.  This is an update on last month’s story (see 06/30/2005 entry) but bears repeating, and noting who was surprised.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

It’s nice to hear naturalistic biologists admit that homochirality separates life from nonlife.  Now they need to explain how it got that way: see the problem explained in our online book, Ch. 3 and Ch. 4.  After a century since Pasteur discovered this property of the polymers in living things, it remains one of the major stumblingblocks for belief in chemical evolution.  Don’t let an astrobiologist get away with just assuming it happened somehow.  How, now, did we get a left-handed brown cow?
Next headline on:  Origin of Life

MZ [monozygotic] twins constitute an excellent example of how genetically identical individuals can exhibit differences and therefore provide a unique model to study the contribution/role of epigenetic modifications in the establishment of the phenotype [i.e., physical appearance].  What does make MZ twins differ?  By using whole-genome and locus-specific approaches, we found that approximately one-third of MZ twins harbored epigenetic differences in DNA methylation and histone modification.  These differential markers between twins are distributed throughout their genomes, affecting repeat DNA sequences and single-copy genes, and have an important impact on gene expression.  We also established that these epigenetic markers were more distinct in MZ twins who were older, had different lifestyles, and had spent less of their lives together, underlining the significant role of environmental factors in translating a common genotype into a different phenotype.  Our findings also support the role of epigenetic differences in the discordant frequency/onset of diseases in MZ twins.

Philosophers have argued about heredity and environment for a long time.  These studies carry the debate down to the molecular level of DNA and gene expression.  No conclusions are drawn in this commentary, except the caution that creationists and evolutionists both need to take epigenetic factors into account before propounding simple explanations of stasis or evolution.  Genes are not the only things in control; a host of epigenetic factors contributes to the way a plant, animal, or human looks and acts.  Staging the debate as heredity vs environment begs the question of whether those are the only explanations for why identical twins diverge over their lifetimes.  It would seem that personal choices and unseen mental, moral or spiritual factors cannot be ruled out as significant agents of change that can extend down to the genes and influence their expression.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA

The problem is that ID advocates attempt to dress up religious beliefs to make them look like science.  By redefining what is and isn’t science, they also put the public—particularly young people—at risk of being inadequately prepared to live in modern society.  Twenty-first-century citizens are regularly required to make decisions about issues that have heavy science- and technology-related content, such as medical care, personal security, shopping choices, and what their children should be taught in school.  To make those choices wisely, they will need to distinguish science-based evidence from pseudoscientific claims.
    There is an important distinction between a belief and a theory.  ID is cast by its proponents as a scientific theory, an alternative to evolution, but it fails the criteria for achieving that status.  In our business, a theory is not an educated guess nor, emphatically, is it a belief.  Scientific theories attempt to explain what can be observed, and it is essential that they be testable by repeatable observations and experimentation.  In fact, “belief” is a word you almost never hear in science.  We do not believe theories.  We accept or reject them based on their ability to explain natural phenomena, and they must be testable with scientific methodologies.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Just as the scientific community has broad responsibilities to monitor the integrity with which its members conduct their work, it also must take some responsibility for the uses of science and for how it is portrayed to the public.  That requires us to be clear about what science is and to distinguish clearly between scientific and belief systems, in schools and in various public venues devoted to science.  Otherwise, we will fail in our obligation to our fellow citizens and to the successor generations of students who will depend on science for their future.

So he is a naive positivist.  Sad.  That the president of the AAAS would have so little understanding of history and philosophy of science is pathetic.  He doesn’t even realize that he just disqualified Darwinism by his own criteria of science.  Clearly evolutionary theory involves heavy doses of belief, while ID entails sound scientific practices similar to those used in cryptography and archaeology.  Evolution is neither testable nor repeatable, yet is maintained with such tenacity that any observation, no matter how contrary, becomes retroactively forced into the belief system.  And who is Leshner to teach about wisdom, responsibility and integrity?  Did those moral qualities evolve, too?  If so, they are without foundation; if not, he has conceded the existence of moral absolutes, and by extension, a moral Lawgiver.
    All his propaganda tactics and fallacies are explained in the Baloney Detector (see especially either-or fallacy, association, equivocation and bluffing).  Leshner should become a political speechwriter where his skills would be more appropriate.

Next headline on:  Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education

Do no harm?  Well, so much for Darwinism.  Evolutionists deal with evil by denying its existence, and turn righteousness into a phantom, an artifact of selfishness (for example, see this recent just-so story on EurekAlert).  To a consistent Darwinist, harm can be a good thing, as long as it doesn’t happen to oneself.
    Ethics cannot be derived from a philosophy that denies the actual existence of mind, soul, intelligence or freedom of choice.  Here is a place where the new intelligent design paradigm, with moral motivation provided by religious principles of responsibility, unselfishness, charity, and righteousness, can really shine.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Reporters like MacKenzie display a profound ignorance of the history and philosophy of science.  Since the classical days of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, on through Augustine and into the medieval scholastic universities, well into the Renaissance and Reformation and deep into the Enlightenment, the vast majority of scientists were creationists.  Even deists like Voltaire readily admitted that the complexity of life argued for intelligent design.  Evolutionary materialism in its current neo-Darwinian guise is a relatively new thing.  The scientific revolution, with all its groundbreaking discovery of fundamental laws, with its great inventions and discoveries up into the 19th century, took place in a predominantly Christian culture.  No historian denies this.  Furthermore, great science continued to be done by Christians and creationists well past Darwin’s time all the way up to the present.  What are they afraid of?
    It is also a lesson from history that great debates about the nature of science vacillate between determinism and free will, empiricism vs romanticism, mind vs matter, reductionism vs skepticism, heredity vs environment, positivism vs pessimism, all the time.  Darwinism was never a final answer.  It was a work in progress, a heuristic device for exploring the possibilities of materialism for explaining all of life.  Darwinism has had its day.  Its multiple reorganizations, promising leads, false starts and anomalies, infighting and incorrigibility in the face of new evidence show it to be in eclipse.  It is no longer up to the task of explaining molecular machines in the most primitive cells on the small scale, nor the fine tuning of the universe on the large scale.
    Molecular machines and fine-tuning are recent and exciting developments in science, phenomena that would have astounded Darwin and his contemporaries and predecessors; indeed, they are hard for us moderns to fathom.  Though some advocates of intelligent design take part in the political and cultural debates over origins, the ID movement is not intrinsically political, and the force is not personal.  The force of the movement comes from the observational facts.  Since Darwinist reductionism has become the epicyclic monstrosity of our time, it is time for a new scientific revolution.  Science must ever be prepared to discard, like phrenology,^* any simplistic theory that becomes a dead end.  The new information/engineering paradigm (see 06/25/2005 entry) appears poised to usher in a golden age of discovery reminiscent of the age of Copernicus.

Next headline on:  Evolution • Education • Intelligent Design

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^* Phrenology was not considered a crackpot pseudoscience in its day.  It was advocated by Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a well-trained physician working in one of the most prestigious institutions in Europe.  The movement, replete with its own scientific laws, jargon, literature and methodologies, had a wide following for over a century.  Do the reductionist assumptions inherent in phrenology bear a resemblance to today’s neo-Darwinism?  Maybe Darwin outdid Gall; evolutionists attempt to attribute all the complexity and beauty of everything in the living world to a simplistic mechanism, natural selection.  Maybe that was forgivable in 1859, but surely not in 2005 after the revolutions in genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology.  It’s a new ball game: the information age.  Don’t fear changes in the content and nature of science; evaluate them, and if they look fruitful and full of explanatory power, embrace them.  Science will be the better for it.

1. They contain a diversity of cell types; one species contains “at least 11 specialized cell types arranged in a particular pattern.”
2. They contain collar cells with whip-like tails that create currents in the body to ingest food and excrete waste.
3. They produce sperm and egg cells.
4. They have an epithelial layer that provides protection.
5. They make use of a cellular adhesive, integrin, that works with collagen to provide a tether.
6. They communicate with signals that tell developing embryonic cells where to go.  “Like more complex animals,” Pilcher writes, “sponges solve this problem by using specific molecules to guide differentiation and migration as the cells develop in their embryos.”

Nature fascinates scientists and engineers with numerous examples of exceptionally strong building materials.  These materials often show complex hierarchical organization from the nanometer to the macroscopic scale.  Every structural level contributes to the mechanical stability and toughness of the resulting design.  For instance, the subtle interplay between the lattice structure, fibril structure, and cellulose is responsible for the remarkable properties of wood.  In particular, it consists of parallel hollow tubes, the wood cells, which are reinforced by nanometer-thick cellulose fibrils wound helically around the cell to adjust the material as needed.  Deformation occurs by shearing of a matrix rich in hemicelluloses and lignin, “gluing” neighboring fibrils, and allowing a stick-slip movement of the fibrils.  Wood is an example that shows the wide range of mechanical performance achievable by constructing with fibers.  Bone is another example of a hierarchically assembled fibrous material.  Its strength critically depends on the interplay between different structural levels—from the molecular/nanoscale interaction between crystallites of calcium phosphate and an organic framework, through the micrometer-scale assembly of collagen fibrils, to the millimeter-level organization of lamellar bone.  Whereas wood is fully organic material, bone is a composite, with about half organic and half mineral components tightly interconnected at the nanoscale.  However, nature has also evolved almost pure mineral structures, which—despite the inherent brittleness of most minerals—are tough enough to serve as protection for the organism.  In mollusk nacre, for example, the toughening effect is due to well-defined nanolayers of organics at the interfaces between microtablets of calcium carbonate.  In such structures, the stiff components (usually mineral) absorb the bulk of the externally applied loads.  The organic layers, in turn, provide toughness, prevent the spread of the cracks into the interior of the structure, and even confer a remarkable capacity for recovery after deformation.

The structural complexity of the glass skeleton in the sponge Euplectella sp. is an example of nature’s ability to improve inherently poor building materials [e.g., glass].  The exceptional mechanical stability of the skeleton arises from the successive hierarchical assembly of the constituent glass from the nanometer to the macroscopic scale.  The resultant structure might be regarded as a textbook example in mechanical engineering, because the seven hierarchical levels in the sponge skeleton represent major fundamental construction strategies such as laminated structures, fiber-reinforced composites, bundled beams, and diagonally reinforced square-grid cells, to name a few.  We conclude that the Euplectella sp. skeletal system is designed to provide structural stability at minimum cost, a common theme in biological systems where critical resources are often limited.  We believe that the study of the structural complexity of unique biological materials and the underlying mechanisms of their synthesis will help us understand how organisms evolved their sophisticated structures for survival and adaptation and ultimately will offer new materials concepts and design solutions.

Euplectella is a deepwater sponge whose glassy skeleton is a hollow cylinder.  On the first level of structural hierarchy, nanometer-sized particles of silica are arranged around an organic axial filament.  On the second level, alternating layers of silica and organic material form spicules.  On the third level, these small spicules are bundled together to form larger spicules.  On the fourth level, the larger spicules are arranged in a grid, with struts in longitudinal, circumferential, and diagonal directions, resisting all load modes (see the figure).  In the mature animal, these larger spicules are coated with a cementing layer of silica.  On the fifth level, this grid is wrapped into a curved cylinder.  Finally, on the sixth level, helical surface ridges further resist torsion and stiffen the structure. 

Wild dreams and imagination are not science; they indicate that Aizenberg is in a philosophical slumber by attributing engineering to evolution.  If evolution produced this sponge’s architecture, as assumed by faith by these investigators, each stage must have contributed to an end result.  Stage four would not help unless the lower stages in the hierarchy were already conferring their benefits; it would be like trying to build struts out of crumbly styrofoam or bits of broken glass.  But end results are prohibited by evolutionary theory which stresses that evolving organisms have no goal in mind.  In the Nature article, Simon Conway Morris extolled Tinker Bell: “Evolution is an extremely dynamic system and paradoxically a very lazy one.  It will co-opt whatever it can.”  Evolutionists preach that laziness and tinkering with available parts produced wonders of engineering that are the envy of materials science.
    It’s time to replace Darwin’s tomb in Westminster Abbey with Kepler’s, and change the objective of science from explaining away God back to thinking God’s thoughts after Him.  This will lead to productive inquiry in science.  Notice that the researchers here were oohing and ahhing not over Charlie’s little outworn myth, but over the engineering design apparent in the lowly sponge.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Stories

Let the evidence speak for itself.  Anyone infer millions of years with this kind of eyewitness testimony?
    Here is a candidate for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week from a tourist, reported by News.com.au: “It’s pretty unbelievable; it’s history in the making today... It won’t be the same sort of photo any more, but it is evolution.”  Darwinism wouldn’t generate much of an edifice with this kind of process.  If the tourist meant that Darwinism itself is crumbling in a similarly rapid manner, well, then the remark would be rather astute.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

It’s too early to evaluate the meaning of these exciting new data, but at first glance it seems hard to believe this fine, powdery material could have survived many orbits, or that it represents pristine material from billions of years ago.  Comets provide evidence of rapid erosion in the solar system (see 03/27/2003 entry).  For now it is worthwhile to congratulate the Deep Impact team on their success at building and navigating this historic mission.  Actual samples of dust from the tail of Comet Wild-2 will be returned from the Stardust spacecraft next January.
Next headline on:  Solar System