“We see that the Darwinian world view must look upon the present sentimental conception of the value of life of the human individual as an overestimate completely hindering the progress of humanity.... The state only has an interest in preserving the more excellent life at the expense of the less excellent.”
—Robby Kossmann, German zoologist (1880), cited by Dr. Richard Weikart in From Darwin to Hitler (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 78.

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Darwinists Refute ID “Irreducible Complexity” Argument   10/31/2005    
“New book explains how evolution really works, rebuts intelligent design.”  That’s the triumphant title of a new book announcement from Harvard Medical School, reported on EurekAlert.  According to the release, Marc W. Kirschner (Harvard Medical School) and John C. Gerhart (UC Berkeley) have addressed a “key problem in evolutionary theory that has puzzled scientists from Darwin on and which is now under intense scrutiny by proponents of intelligent design: where do the big jumps come from in evolution?” (emphasis added in all quotes.)  The product of their investigation is their new book The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (Yale Univ. Press, 2005).  The answer, they claim, lies in newly-discovered molecular properties of organisms:

The origin of novelty, the development of new arrangements of interlocking parts that some call “irreducibly complex,” can only be understood in the light of the last 20 years of research in cell biology and development.
    We now know that the ‘parts’ that make up a living organism are very unlike the rigid parts designed for machines.  Instead, they can flexibly connect and re-connect, using the same pieces over and over to make new functions.
    For example, one might think that a mutation that makes the neck of a giraffe longer would have to be accompanied by several other mutations, one that expands the length of the muscles of the neck, another that makes the blood vessels longer, and so on.  But instead, the muscles grow to fit the length of the bone and the blood vessels grow until all the muscles have a sufficient supply of oxygen.  Apparently very complex adaptations can therefore be achieved with few, simple mutations.
    Today, it is understood for the first time that all animals use the same set of core processes to develop into adult forms.  Applying this knowledge to evolution, the authors show that novel traits emerge from the ways the organism is constructed: its complex mechanisms for adapting to the environment, its modular construction, and its internal circuitry that can be re-specified and reconnected.

The diversity and complexity of life on Earth—from bacteria and fungi to plants and animals—suggest the generation of remarkable variation upon which natural selection can act.  But how do new traits—new morphological architectures (bodyplans), developmental processes, and behaviors—arise?  Did the vertebrate brain and neural crest arise through processes that are different from those that generated new hairs on the legs of the fruit fly?  Can major evolutionary transitions in the history of life be explained by random variation—variation that is random with respect to the future needs of the organism—filtered through the process of natural selection?  These questions are not new, but the promise of a more mechanistic basis for answering them through comparative developmental biology imbues them with a fresh urgency.

In Kirschner and Gerhart’s view, there are four aspects of gene regulation and development in animals that constrain the direction of heritable variation.  These are the extensive conservation across metazoa of certain regulatory patterns; a modular pattern of organismal design; what the authors term “weak linkages” in gene regulation, caused by, in their view, regulatory interactions that do not specify outcomes; and nondeterministic outcomes of development.

This is the first place where the authors get into trouble; for through much of the book they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how evolutionary biologists use the term “random.”  By random mutation, evolutionary biologists mean random with respect to the adaptive needs of the organism, not, as the authors would have it in the early part of the book, completely random in the sense that many nonevolutionary biologists may think of the word “random.”  One of Charles Darwin’s key insights was that the combination of undirected mutation and natural selection is a powerful positive force for evolutionary creativity (and not, as so many later biologists have suggested, merely a negative force).  Evolutionary biologists have long understood that the nature of variation depends critically on what has already evolved.  Indeed, there is a rich literature discussing how phylogeny, function, structure, and other features constrain evolutionary variation.  Kirschner and Gerhart ignore this uncomfortable fact, dismissing constraint as “a minor effect, or trivial, for example, in explaining why mollusks (sic) and echinoderms were less able to evolve wings than vertebrates.”  They refer to variation as random alterations that can have little positive impact or that “lead to catastrophic failure.”  This results in the appearance of some odd comments as, for example, when the authors claim that evolutionary biologists “do not commonly appreciate...”  that “present-day organisms come from previous organisms.”  Indeed.

Presenting no evidence, they claim that these waves of innovation are not linked to changes in the physical environment.  In fact, one of the most exciting areas of current research addresses how the origin and spread of these innovations are linked to a variety of geochemical, climatic, and other changes.  These core processes—DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis, formation of the cytoskeleton, and limb patterning—have descended relatively unchanged since they first arose.

Kirschner and Gerhart invoke exploratory behavior as a means of avoiding what they view as an otherwise insurmountable difficulty: that novelty appears to require multiple, correlated changes from phenotype to function.

The most important part of this book is, in my view, the authors’ description of the evolutionary significance of the interactions between compartments and the conserved regulatory networks that underlie them via weak linkages [i.e., signals that trigger a response without specifying information about what the response should be].  Although the authors do not emphasize this sufficiently (at least for a paleontologist), this network of relationships imposes a developmental reality to the architectural forms described as body plans and generally characterized within Linnean systematics as phyla and classes.  As Kirschner and Gerhart note, this modularity of design often allows relatively independent evolution of different body parts without greatly increasing the coordination among them.  The gills, paddles, mouthparts, claws, and walking legs of various arthropods are all modifications of a single ancestral structure.  The modularity of arthropod body plans has enabled the rapid adaptation of limbs without inhibiting the workings of the whole animal.

The generation of morphological variants is a critical issue, and several of these book authors have raised important questions and proposed new viewpoints.  But the generation of variation is only the beginning of the problem of evolutionary novelty.  Novel phenotypes succeed or fail based on their ecological relationships with other organisms and with the physical environment.  This ecological dimension is conspicuously lacking in these books, yet we cannot really understand novelty without it.  In particular, evolutionary biologists need to address such issues as how phenotypic “space” expands, how new niches are constructed, and related ecological events.

Is the neo-Darwinian view of evolution in need of reformation?  Certainly the diversity of rumblings indicates some degree of unhappiness, but evolutionary biologists have regularly published new models of evolution since the late 19th century (see Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, Johns Hopkins, 1993).  Is there reason to think that our view of evolution needs to change?  The answer is almost certainly yes, although not, as the purveyors of creationism/intelligent design would have it, because the reality of evolution is under question.  Rather, we need to revise our view of evolution to reflect a more detailed understanding of how genetics and development both allow and facilitate phenotypic variation, to take into account the temporal dynamics of changes in the environment, and to incorporate the likelihood that there is selection and feedback at multiple levels (cell, tissue, organism, clade).  The central issues that need to be incorporated into evolutionary theory are the origin of phenotypic novelty and the discontinuous patterns of appearance of new phenotypes.

If you get a kick out of watching villains shoot themselves in the foot, you will rollick with this entry.  We provided extended quotes to let you savor the moment.  Here is the biggest problem in the history of evolutionary thought: the abrupt appearance of new body plans and complex structures with interrelated parts each necessary for function.  The Darwinists realize that the creationists and intelligent design proponents have been hammering them on the fact that they have no answers.  And finally, here was the new book that EurekAlert said was going to put those criticisms to rest once for all.  And what is it?  Blind search!  “Exploratory behavior” is putting feelers out in the dark and seeing if anything sticks.  But then what is leading the blind: the blind random variations in the molecules, or the blind random variations in the environment?  Can anyone really believe that a succession of blind actions will produce irreducibly complex systems like wings, gills, paddles, mouthparts, claws, legs, and rotating motors of exquisite design and efficiency?  If this book had the answer, Erwin would not have left it (“the origin of phenotypic novelty”) and “the discontinuous patterns of appearance” (e.g., the Cambrian Explosion), as unsolved problems.  Then Erwin did us the favor of pointing out that all the other books don’t solve them, either – though they have been trying since the 19th century.  [Quiz question: in what century did Charles Darwin write his famous book?]
    If you found anything other than smoke and mirrors in all the mumbo-jumbo they came up with, go ahead and put your money in Darwin Circus stock.  That’s where the magicians have mastered the art of mass hypnosis, pointing their fingers into the air and and saying “watch this space” (e.g., 08/19/2004) till everyone is staring, mind-numbed, at nothing.  That’s where the clowns, wearing pink-tassled slippers and conical hats (see 04/01/2005) end their long comedy of errors act by shooting each other’s feet simultaneously.  One of their lines is starting to go over like a lead balloon, though.  That’s when they say the real clowns are the ones across the street at Philharmonic Hall, listening with soaring hearts and minds as the Maestro conducts hundreds of skilled players and singers in his masterpiece, The Creation.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

Baloney Detecting Exercise:  Alan Elsner of Reuters tries to make the case that the U.S. is becoming “hostile to science” largely because of its opposition to evolution (see MSNBC News).

Replace the word “scientists” by “elitists” and the article makes a lot more sense.  Conservatives love good science, but they have this thing about leftist liberals in academia (see 12/02/2004) who always seem to take the far-left position on everything and try to cloak it in scientific robes.  Will education really suffer if the leftists lose power?  Will students be deprived if Darwinist lies are expunged from science textbooks?  Will hearing that alternatives to evolutionary theory exist make students bored with science?  See non-sequitur in the Baloney Detector.

Is Darwin or ID the New Halloween Spook?   10/30/2005    
Scary, isn’t it?  A textbook committee in Montgomery, Alabama approved dozens of new textbooks, but found objectionable material in three of them: they contained material on evolution that was deemed controversial for children.  They decided that pictures of reptiles evolving from amphibians and humans evolving from apes was not appropriate for elementary children who were not developmentally ready for such controversial material.  The AP story reprinted on the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer website on October 27 quoted a sociologist at Troy University who objected to one textbook that he claimed was “nothing other than a full endorsement of Darwinian evolution.”  He also called it “at best a waste of taxpayers’ money and at worst a numbing of student minds.”
    “Scary” was a seasonally-correct word included in another AP story posted by the Arkansas news service ArkCity.Net.  John Hanna reported on a speech by Phillip Johnson to a student group at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas.  Johnson described the reaction of the scientific establishment to people who question evolution.  “This is very scary to the Mandarins of science,” he told the audience at the off-campus meeting sponsored by Christian Challenge.  “There’s been a panicky and hysterical response to this, some of which you’ve seen in your state recently.”  Johnson also spoke Saturday night at the university student union.
    In Kansas, meanwhile, two professional associations are barring the doors to the ID spooks.  MSNBC News said that the National Academy of Sciences and the National Teachers Association wrote the Department of Education, refusing to let the school board use their copyrighted material in the proposed science standards, because they feel the standards promote creationism.

If the Darwin costume is scaring the children, acting panicky or hysterical only makes it worse.  Which side wants to keep high school students in the dark, and and which side wants to turn on the lights?  Which side wants to shield impressionable elementary students from pedagogical tricks, and treat them to the truth?  Which side is shrieking and threatening, and which side is calmly asking for an enlightened discussion of the facts?  The thing apparently scaring the Darwinists the most is that the morning twilight reveals their long night on Bald Mountain is coming to an end, and that can only mean one thing: Thanksgiving is near.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education

An interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently formed the Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) with the goal of capitalizing on the rich source of design solutions present in biological processes.  The researchers believe nature can inspire design and engineering solutions that are efficient, practical and sustainable and thus have the potential to greatly enhance new technologies, materials and processes.
    “Biology can be a powerful guide to understanding problems in design and engineering,” said Associate Professor of Biology Marc Weissburg, CBID co-director.  “In comparative physiology, we teach that every animal has to solve a particular problem to survive, so every animal is a design solution for a particular problem.
    “They can provide solutions for more efficient manufacturing and design of materials with new capabilities, for example.  These are things the biological world has solved, and if you study them, you have the opportunity to apply that knowledge in the human sector.  You can also extend that reasoning to ecological processes.  These are guiding principles behind the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

OK, Intelligent Design community, charge again!  (See 06/25/2005 commentary.)  This is exactly the kind of new infusion of creative energy and practical benefit that a design perspective can bring to science and technology.  Despite the humorous reference to Mother Nature, this approach does not need to focus on the identity of the Designer to parlay design detection (a fundamental principle of intelligent design) into fruitful scientific research.  This is not to say that knowing the Designer personally would be a hindrance, obviously – but it demonstrates that design science can produce a cooperative enterprise among diverse people regardless of their religion.  Maybe someday the plagiarism will be rectified by appropriate attribution.  For now, though, the ACLU and other religion-hating groups would not be able to get their bony fingers on the CBID, because members only need good observational and engineering skills.  Simultaneously, the ability to tell spooky Darwinian stories would drop off the list of qualifications.  Are Georgia Tech and Caltech’s new multidisciplinary centers for biological design indicating that a major shift in scientific research is underway?  Is there a promised land beyond the crumbling, haunted remains of Down House?  Bioneers!  O Bioneers!  The fruitful land, the frontier of discovery and happiness, belongs to you.
    There was no mention of evolution in the press release, demonstrating again that Darwinism has no necessary or pragmatic connection to the new wave of institutions like the CBID.  Unlike the founders of science who, like Francis Bacon, put a high priority on applying science to improve the human condition, the Darwinists, like the later scholastics, waste their time looking for confirming evidence for the outworn philosophy of their Victorian Aristotle.  It’s time to question the presumptive authority of the past 146 years, and look to the future, where the Bioneers of design science are taking their inspiration from the exquisite contrivances of observable nature.  A Darwinist Bioneer is almost a contradiction in terms.  Any Darwinists on the CBID faculty must certainly be Darwinists in Name Only (DINOs), because whether or not they bow at the shrine of Charlie, pitch the obligatory incense and repeat the mantra “Evolution is a fact, like gravity,” such exercises contribute nothing to their actual research.  DINOs should be distinguished from DODOs (those who squawk “Darwin Only!  Darwin Only!), but it doesn’t matter, since both clades are rapidly going extinct.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Amazing Stories

It may shed light on humans, all right, but not in the way evolution-obsessed National Geographic wants.  It underscores the difference between humans and animals.  Even though the study was investigating the “evolution of primate behavior,” they had to admit that altruistic behavior appears to be a uniquely human trait.
    We must not assume that the chimpanzees were acting selfishly, because that would require a moral sense.  They were just acting like the beasts they are.  Could we perform a mind-meld with a chimp during the experiment, we would probably be cognizant only of the instantaneous present.  The body would react to whatever senses call most for attention at the moment.  The memory would bring forth stored responses that brought pleasure, but there would be no planning for the future, no awareness of the mental state of the neighboring chimp squealing for a treat, and no sense of moral obligation – only a memory of what previous actions elicited pleasure, whether or not they benefited the other.  That is the chimp’s mental state.  It is not wrong for the chimp, just chimpy.  We don’t expect more of the beasts.  They cannot ascend to our nature, but humans can descend to theirs (look what Peter said).
    We have many physical similarities to animals, especially to the apes.  The image of God does not relate to our physical nature, but to our spiritual, moral and intellectual nature: the ability to think, love, create, communicate in abstract language, care for one another, contemplate our origin and destiny, and to have a personal relationship with God.  Most animals care for their young and many form cooperative groups, but these are instinctive behaviors.  You won’t see a chimpanzee sending a donation to disaster relief (see next story) or praying.  Exercise your human nature – all of it – not just sharing a banana.  (See David’s counsel.)
Next headline on:  Mammals • Politics and Ethics

Famous last words: “Look at this mess of trees blocking our view of the sea.  How are we supposed to get our boats on the water through all that tangled up wood in the way?  Those mangroves are such a pain.  Cut ’em all down.  I’ll start a fishery, and Sam, think of all the money you could make with a beach resort hotel over there.”
Next headline on:  Botany • Amazing Stories

The shape of red blood cells is also the optimum for maximizing surface area (for diffusion) without sacrificing volume (for payload).  If they were rigid disks, they would get stuck, starving tissues of oxygen and causing death.  As you work today, think about those little erythrocyte spelunkers making their rounds, delivering the goods from that last breath of air to every cubic micrometer of your body.  The Creator thought of everything.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Cell Biology • Amazing Stories

• Diving Champs:  Emperor penguins can dive as deep as 500m for up to 20 minutes, without getting the bends or excess free radicals in their blood.  This is enabled by several adaptations: the ability to lower their heart rate during dives from 200 to 60 beats per minute, storage of extra myoglobin in their tissues, and storing more blood per body weight than humans.  Their stiff bodies and flexible flippers also reduce drag, making them better designed hydrodynamically than most mammals, the article claims.  “They can keep swimming even when their bodies’ oxygen stores have been depleted beyond levels that would knock out a human diver,” a photo caption states; specifically, 20mm of mercury, compared to a human’s lower limit is 25mm.  Scientists still do not understand how the birds can avoid damage from the rush of blood as they surface rapidly and catapult onto the ice.
• Marching Champs:  The birds make their long marches in complete silence.  Some colonies have a few hundred breeding pairs; others can have 10,000.  There are about 40 colonies known.  In midwinter, there is only three hours of dim light per day sandwiched between 21 hours of darkness under aurora-spectacled skies.
• Huddle Champs:  The conditions during storms look miserable to us, but the male birds huddle to conserve body heat, and actually get “toasty” at 20° C in groups.  A male could only survive alone only down to -10° C; in groups, they can lower their metabolic rate by 40%.  They seem to actually have to go outside once in awhile to cool off; at all times, however, the safety of the precious eggs must be the highest priority.  Inside the huddle, their heads on flexible necks can be seen sticking up like periscopes once in awhile, with little puffs of warm air indicating things are OK.  In springtime, the young learn to huddle early.  Both parents go off to forage as soon as they can, leaving the young in playgroups to learn on their own.
• Diet Champs:  The males incubating the eggs all winter actually starve themselves with their bellies full, the article says.  They are able to block their digestion and maintain enough store to feed the growing chick with reserves till the female returns.
• Travel Champs:  Radio-collared penguins have been found to forage as far as 1,900 km at sea.
• Fashion Champs:  Those tuxedos have to come off once a year.  In the summertime, the birds fast again for a month, standing on ice floes to molt.  All the old feathers come out and the new fluffy ones come in underneath.  The undercoat of down provides an insulating layer of air, and the oiled outer feathers provide a “waterproof dive suit” that compresses underwater, keeping the downy feathers dry and preventing the chilly water from reaching the skin.

Fortunately, Susan Milius did not try to speculate on how the emperor penguin evolved.  If you tried to count how many lucky mutations would be needed to evolve from a dinosaur to an early bird to an emperor penguin, what number would you come up with?  Hundreds?  Thousands?  Tens of thousands?  It’s a total remake.  The biochemistry of the cell, the oxygen handling capabilities, the pressure protection and scuba gear, the dive suit, the lungs, the bones, the dietary adaptations, core body heat, timing of the molt, ability to waddle upright, the stiff body and flippers, the incubating patch and tough feet, eyes adapted to deep underwater vision, navigating ability over vast distances on ice and in the sea – and these are just some of the physical changes that the ambitious dinosaur would need.
    Then there are the behavioral adaptations.  How did the penguins learn to transfer the egg from the female to the male without breaking it, and when did the male decide to forego eating for months, holding the egg on its feet?  How did the males overcome their usual territoriality instinct and decide to pack in tightly together, 10 birds per square meter?  How did the females figure out when the eggs would hatch, and learn to forage only long enough to get back in time to feed them and give hubby a well-deserved break?  How did they find their way back to the correct nesting site?  What made them regurgitate their own food for the sake of a chick they had never seen before?  How do they find their mates when everyone looks alike?  How do the feathers know when to molt all at once (unlike on air birds, who molt continuously), so that the reupholstering job minimizes time out of the water?  Where did they learn those rocket jumps out onto the ice?  How do the young catch on to all this so fast?
    Evolutionists provide only empty speculations for these things, arguing from ignorance that “if these mutations had not occurred, the penguins would not be there.”  That only assumes their materialistic view without explaining the observations.  Creationists may not be able to explain everything about why God would create emperor penguins to live like this, but they surely need far less faith than an evolutionist.  If this were the only example of a creature possessing dozens of tight-knit adaptations needing to function together simultaneously or not at all, it would be challenging enough for evolutionary theory.  Now let’s talk about giraffes, bats, water striders, cheetahs, geckos, kangaroos, hummingbirds, humans....
Next headline on:  Birds • Marine Life • Amazing Stories

1. tRNA: Guided Trackways:  A paper in PNAS¹ took five pages describing one tiny segment of the DNA translation process: the moment when transfer RNA (tRNA) enters the inner sanctum of the protein-building machine, the ribosome (see also summary on Science Now).  If you have seen the animations in the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life, you probably remember the climactic scene of tRNAs lining up in assembly-line fashion as their attached amino acids are fastened together.  Stunning as that animation was, it was vastly oversimplified.  The ribosome actually contains a precisely-molded entrance tunnel where each tRNA is inspected and guided into place before allowed into the active site.  Each tiny movement along the track is authenticated by contacts with specific atoms at checkpoints along the way.  A Los Alamos team achieved the highest-resolution images yet of this process and found that parts of the tRNA and the tunnel turnstiles actually flex as much as 20° as part of the guided entrance, called accommodation.  Their diagrams show multiple precision contacts all along the four specific stages of accommodation they investigated.  Whether able to follow their dense jargon-laden description or not, the reader is sure to get the sense that something incredibly precise is going on.  And then to learn that it all takes place in two nanoseconds is almost too much to handle.
2. DNA Copying: Tight Fit:  Another paper in PNAS² explored the fit of DNA bases in the copying machinery at the sub-angstrom level (an angstrom is 10^-10 meter, about the width of a hydrogen atom).  Stanford and MIT scientists investigated how thymine fits into DNA Polymerase I as the genetic code is transcribed.  As in the tRNA case above, the fit is precise and guided.  They were surprised to find a little bit of margin inside the active site, which they speculated might “allow for an evolutionarily advantageous mutation rate.”  Nevertheless, their “results provide direct evidence for the importance of a tight steric fit on DNA replication fidelity.”  The tight fit ensures that illegal interlopers cannot make it into the active site.  They also found that simple Watson-Crick base-pairing was not sufficient: the machines actually force the bases together in a coordinated way with error-checking.  They remarked that this authentication and guidance system is speedy: “This choice, which occurs dozens of times per second, involves the selection of one nucleotide among four for insertion into the growing primer strand, opposite each DNA template base as it is addressed in turn.” (Emphasis added.)
3. Unzipping Acrobatics:  A paper in Nature³ investigated helicases, the molecular machines that unwind and unzip DNA strands.  “Helicase enzymes can move along DNA or RNA, unraveling the helices as they go,” said Eckhard Jankowsky in an analysis of this paper in the same issue.⁴  “But simply traveling along a nucleic acid in one direction seems not to be enough for some of these molecular motors.”  They discussed how helicase repeatedly bends over, forms loops, and snaps back into position during the operation.  These acrobatic machines don’t just plod along in one direction but undergo a complex choreography with moving parts as they consume ATP for energy.  The “repetitive shuttling” the authors described has a purpose, possibly for “keeping the DNA clear of toxic recombination intermediates.”
4. Cellular Oarsmen:  Three German researchers imaged eukaryotic flagella with twice the resolution of previous attempts.  The whiplike propellers, which beat with back-and-forth motion (unlike the rotary flagellar motors of bacteria), contain a 9+2 arrangement of microtubules that are tied together with motors and spokes.  “Both the material associated with the central pair of microtubules and the radial spokes display a plane of symmetry that helps to explain the planar beat pattern of these flagella,” they wrote.  Their paper in PNAS⁶ includes a stereo pair image that provides a 3D look down the flagellum shaft.

These are just a few of the reasons students should be allowed to hear about intelligent design.  Darwin?  He was just an old Victorian who didn’t know anything about this.  If he had, he might have decided to stick with his training to become a country parson after all.  This is the 21st century, folks: the age of nanomachinery and biophysics.  Enjoy!
Next headline on:  The Cell • Physics • Amazing Stories

Males sometimes harm their mates as they seek to maximise the number of offspring they sire.  But are females really suffering or do the benefits of having sons that inherit their father’s manipulative traits make up for the costs?  Three recent studies provide the first hard data addressing this issue, but they differ in their conclusions.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The population was established over 300 generations ago and has been maintained continuously at high population size to retain genetic diversity.  The authors claim that this approach means that the flies have had time to become adapted to the laboratory.  Although this may be true in the sense that alleles present at low frequencies in the wild population that are beneficial in the lab can be expected to have raced to fixation, it cannot be true in the broader sense of gradual evolution through new mutations.  A small glass tube in which males and females are forced into close proximity and walk around on a sea of food bears little resemblance to the varied natural environments where D. melanogaster are found, and it is safe to assume that there will be a continual stream of new mutations that prove beneficial on this laboratory island.  Indeed, recent work documents on-going evolution in fly populations maintained in the lab for over a 1000 generations.  This constant adaptation to the lab may mean that naturally selected differences between individuals are much more important than sexually selected differences, but whether this is the case in the wild is a point of contention.  A second issue is that the lab is particularly unusual in relation to conflicts over mating because of the high-density housing conditions and females cannot escape from males since they are robbed of their major natural defence, which is to simply fly away....

But we still have no clear idea what the relative magnitude of direct and indirect effects are generally.²  If we are really going to move this debate forward and out of the lab, incorporating the full gamut of costs and benefits of sexual selection, then systems are needed where trans-generational fitness can be measured in nature.  Tellingly, in one of the few long-term studies of organisms in the wild, sexual selection is reported to have no fitness consequences, which suggests either the equilibrium situation Fisher envisaged (where the benefits of choice are balanced by natural selection costs), or perhaps that the costs and benefits of sexual selection alone are balanced.  If this is the case, and costs generated through sexual conflict are balanced by benefits through traditional sexual selection mechanisms, then we may not expect sexual selection to drive rapid evolutionary change.  Determining how commonly males impose serious costs on females without compensatory benefits in nature is the next major challenge in the study of sexual conflict.

It is said that those who respect the law and love sausage should never watch either being made.  The same could be said of Darwinian theory.  It’s packaged in the textbooks nice and neat, but inside it is full of baloney, fat, and filler, the composition of which you would not want to know.
    Let the reader understand.  These two knowledgeable scientists, both evolutionists at the Centre for Ecology and Conservation in Cornwall, UK, have just spilled the beans.  They confessed in print that there is no real-world, long-term, multi-generational study of any animal that proves sexual selection accomplishes anything!  They effectively pulled the rug out from the lab studies by emphasizing how artificial they are.  But what Darwinist has ever taken the time to watch critters in their natural habitats, without interference, and actually get a grip on the slippery parameter called “fitness” so as to prove Charlie right?  Peter and Mary Grant?  Ha!  All they showed after 30 years was that evolution is unpredictable, and oscillates back and forth (08/24/2005).  Their results, after probably the longest and most detailed experiment in the history of evolutionary research, showed no net evolution – and even they complained that 30 years is probably way too short (considering how slowly evolution must act) to draw any firm conclusions (04/26/2002).  As far as anyone could know, the finches were essentially unchanged since Darwin’s visit in 1832.  Where is the evolution?  Yet their study is often cited (10/24/2004 commentary), as it was here, as one of the few long-term, real-world examples of evolution at work.
    Notice that whatever undercuts the value of sexual selection, the silver coin in Darwin’s currency, also undermines the golden coin: natural selection – because both depend on the concept of “fitness.”  Fitness is just as slippery a metric in either case (see the 10/29/2002 entry, “Fitness for dummies: Is it running in circles?”).
    To be considered scientific, a theory needs mathematical and observational rigor.  Mere hand-waving with charts and graphs and lab activity won’t cut it.  Also, for a theory to gain credibility, experiments should reinforce one another, not lead to opposite conclusions.  Hosken and Tregenza’s article ended like most Darwinian papers, with appeals to the future: “We need more data” or “We need more fossils” or “We need more real-world experiments.”  When Darwinists cannot even define their parameters or measure them, let alone study them in realistic settings, one begins to get the distinct feeling that this has been a 146-year long con game.
    Admissions like this should make one angry.  Dr. Richard Weikart, in his recent book From Darwin to Hitler (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), quoted page after page after page of influential German thinkers after Darwin – scientists, doctors, eugenicists, militarists, ethicists, philosophers and political scientists – who built their entire worldview on this slippery notion of Darwinian “fitness” (for instance, see the quote at the top right of this page).  The fit overpower the unfit.  This is the law of nature: Darwin proved it.  The strong overcomes the weak.  The superior race exterminates the inferior race.  The healthy deserve to live; the weak should get out of the way or be sterilized lest they contaminate society.  Whole groups of innocent people were deprived of basic human rights when categorized as “unfit”: first criminals, mentally ill, “idiots” and “imbeciles” and other “defectives”, then handicapped, elderly, sickly, deformed, “primitives,” and finally entire races, countries and continents.  We all know what happened next.  And now they tell us they can’t even measure fitness, which means they don’t even know what it is.  Yet today the same Darwinian worldview reigns nearly unchallenged in academia and the centers of intellectual power, built on the very same slippery concept of “fitness.”
    As we weep over the mass graves of the victims of this false and destructive doctrine, let us rush to Dover and demand accountability, as we vow, with informed passion: Never again.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

H. floresiensis’ diminutive stature, long arms, and nearly chimp-size brain resemble body proportions of australopithecines, Morwood says.  That group of human ancestors lived more than 2 million years ago.  The Flores population may have directly evolved into a Homo species from an unknown Asian australopithecine, Morwood speculates.   (Emphasis added.)

When Homo florensiensis gets renamed as Homo sapiens that lived in modern times, remember the fanfare and chutzpah displayed by the evolutionary paleoanthropologists over this discovery.  Nature and other Darwin foghorns were cocky they had another missing link with which to hammer the creationists.  Remember also the incredible leap of imagination that Morwood et al. asked us to believe, that a population of Lucy’s children moved to Indonesia and evolved into tool-making modern humans independently.  The date of 12,000 years for some of the bones must have been a staggering disappointment to the Darwinists.  The true date is most likely much less than that.  Maybe a living Hobbit will sneak up behind them on Oct. 31 and scare the living daylights out of them – or rather, into them.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Early Man

This article has all the usual airy SETI fluff.  It is pathetic to see these aimless wanderings in speculation space get associated with science.  Life in the Universe was inspired by Star Trek, not chemistry, physics, biology or mathematics.  No other religion than secular materialism could get away with scientific carelessness at this level.  It could be termed “rigor mortis.”
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • SETI

• Surprise, Surprise:  AP reports that the Dover school board did not expect the uproar when it drafted its policy allowing alternatives to Darwinism to be heard; see LiveScience.com.  MSNBC News also carried the story.
• Alas, Poor York:  the York Dispatch printed another article about Michael Behe’s testimony at the trial, and the debate that ensued.  It followed with another story Oct 21 about the defense witness lineup.
• Czech Cache:  The first European Intelligent Design Conference was announced by PR Newswire, based on information from the Discovery Institute.  It began Oct. 21 in Prague and is called Darwin and Design; the Discovery Institute wrote about it, and the Prague Post interviewed one of the speakers, Dr. Charles Thaxton.
• Official Condemnation:  The American Association for the Advancement of Science printed remarks by fellow John Staver denouncing ID with “strong concern” about the Kansas school board decision to allow criticisms of Darwinism.
• Battle of the Books:  Alan Boyle on MSNBC News talked about the book wars for and against evolution, and suggested that Michael Behe has probably made a million in royalties for his popular book, Darwin’s Black Box.  He thought that lay books that fit public opposition to evolutionism are likely to sell better than serious works on science, and quoted an author who tells science writers to emphasize the scientific process and the practical applications of evolutionary theory.
• His Two Pence:  Current Biology 10/25/2005 interviewed Russell Foster (Imperial College, UK) who said, “I think the science community should be very proactive over this issue and take every opportunity to explain why Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory and that it has no place in the teaching of biology.”
• His Two Pounds:  Nigel Williams, also writing in the 10/25 Current Biology, weighed in hard against I.D. in the lead editorial.  He thought it odd that so many creationists and political conservatives are using the movie March of the Penguins as evidence of design, but ended with a reference to the “major new exhibition on Charles Darwin at the American Museum of Natural History in New York next month are expecting controversy and tackle the issue of intelligent design head-on.”  The museum directors are baffled by ID’s prominence, but don’t see any debate worth their time, because, to them, “Darwin is so fundamental to modern science.”
• Outmatched Armies?  Over 7000 scientists signed an online petition stating intelligent design is not science, reported PRNewsWire.  Organizer R. Joe Brandon, an archaeologist, wanted to show up the Discovery Institute’s list of 400 scientists who question evolution and support intelligent design.  (Don’t make any inferences from Brandon’s website name, ShovelBums.org.)  Casey Luskin of EvolutionNews was not particularly impressed by the appeal to authority, arguing they were attacking a straw man version of ID.
• Doctors’ Orders:  The 17,000-member Christian Medical Association issued a statement decrying the “scientific inquisition” against intelligent design, according to Christian Communication Network.  CMA Director Dr. Gene Rudd pointed to a survey of over a thousand doctors that found 76% believe in God, 59% believe in some kind of afterlife, and 55% said their faith influences how they practice medicine.  The statement also referred to historical scientists whose breakthroughs were “consistent with their religious faith and belief in the God who ordered the universe.”
• Scare Tactics:  Brad Harrub of Apologetics Press wrote an editorial criticizing how the Darwinists are trying to “plot, dictate, threaten and scare” to keep their control over science education.
• Down Under and Below the Belt:  Aussie blogger Stephen Jones discussed the underhanded tactics of the anti-ID crowd in his country.
• Hypocrites:  George Neumayr on American Spectator called the ACLU lawsuit a Kangaroo Court, writing, “No sooner had the Darwinists ended their 80th anniversary celebrations of the Scopes trial than they turned their attention to conducting censorship trials of their own.”
• Morning Gory:  Donald Hoffman on Morning Call Online defended ID and claimed the plaintiffs in the Dover trial are over-reacting and making much ado about nothing.
• Big Target:  Patriot News reporter Bill Sulon wrote about how the Dover policy would be difficult to defend, according to district solicitor Stephen Russell, because it would be perceived as initiated for religious reasons.
• Tech Stress:  TopTechNews said “Tension mounts on intelligent design.”
• Students Demand Free Speech:  the Berkeley of the 21st century?  The Cornell IDEA Club responded to university president Hunter Rawlings’ tirade against ID Oct. 21.  He spent two thirds of his State of the University Address attacking intelligent design, with what they felt was a “blatant disregard for the facts” and speaking in an “unscrupulous, unknowledgeable manner.”  They called for free and open exchange of ideas.
• And more...  Access Research Network writer Denyse O’Leary keeps abreast of additional columns and articles of note about the ID controversy.

Something is strangely missing in all these reports.  No Darwinists seem to be defending any evidence that humans have bacteria ancestors.  It seems to be all about power.  (Social Constructivists, don’t get any ideas.)  The ACLU may silence a Behe, but if intelligent design is built into the fabric of the universe, 7,000 Darwinists cannot fight it any more than they can stop a glacier.  Same advice still applies: watch for flying baloney, keep away from the heat, know history, re-read If by Kipling, have a deep and abiding respect for brute facts, and fear not the wroth of the people of froth.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education

We don’t think that Wilbur and Orville would be flattered by the suggestion that their invention was the product of blind, unguided processes of evolution.  Whatever Microraptor gui was, or how it lived, it was not an experiment.  Chance does not do experiments.  Humans sometimes do, but they more often stumble around in their own imaginations.
    Darwinists need to be more embarrassed.  To call the gap before Archaeopteryx “slightly embarrassing” does not do justice to the degree of blushing we should be observing.  Did this new maniraptoran fossil explain how the early bird, a strong flyer with completely modern feathers, arose from a grandpa its own age?  Did the aboreans convince the cursorians by finding a fossil dinosaur leaping off a fossilized limb of a fossilized tree? (see Kevin Padian’s sarcasm, 05/19/2003).  We may not be witnessing the evolution of flight, but we are amassing plenty of observations on the flightiness of evolution, both from the top down and the bottom up.  We’ve even identified the species: cuckoo.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Birds • Fossils • Evolution

By listening to the songs, scientists and students alike can hear the structure of a protein.  And when the songs of the same protein from different species are played together, their similarities and differences are apparent to the ear.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Need we remind Clark that Theme and Variations is a musical form created by intelligent composers?
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Genetics • Dumb Ideas

This commercial is really funny to watch, and very clever, but it demonstrates the pervasive influence of Darwinism on our culture.  We like the intelligent design commercial by Honda better (see 03/01/2005).
Next headline on:  Media • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

This result cuts across previous results based on adult structure, and to see the wider implications we need some historical background.  The composition of the arthropod head is one of the bitterest and longest-running problems in animal evolution.  Unresolved after more than a century of debate, this sorry tale is (in)famously known as the “endless dispute”.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

a, If pycnogonids branched off before the appearance of insects, crustaceans, myriapods and arachnids, we can interpret their protocerebral chelifores (red) as equivalent to the supposedly anterior great appendage of fossil groups such as Anomalocaris.  The labrum (green) would have evolved in the common ancestor indicated with a star.  b, But if pycnogonids are related to arachnids, then either their protocerebral chelifores could be an atavistic re-evolution of the great appendage, or the labrum must have evolved independently in arachnids and the other three taxa.  Both of these latter hypotheses are contentious, and could raise doubts about the conclusions of Maxmen and colleagues.

The conclusions of Maxmen et al. overturn entrenched ideas about the body plan of the sea spiders and, furthermore, lend support to some controversial theories of arthropod evolution.  Unlike their terrestrial analogues, sea spiders lack a poisonous bite, but this paper is bound to inject venom into what is already one of the most controversial of all zoological topics.

You probably didn’t even know that the Darwinists had this problem.  Behind the scenes, they have been injecting each other with venom and battling each other for over a century about where arthropods fit in the evolutionary tree, all the while telling the rest of us evolution is a fact.  Should we feel sorry for them?  Do you feel sorry for someone who builds a sand castle on a fault line?
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Terrestrial Zoology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Surface ages can be derived from the spatial density of craters, but this association presumes that the craters are made by interplanetary impactors, arriving randomly in time and location across the surface.  Secondary craters cause confusion because they contaminate the primary cratering record by emplacing large numbers of craters, episodically, in random and non-random locations on the surface.  The number and spatial extent of secondary craters generated by a primary impact has been a significant research issue.  If many or most small craters on a surface are secondaries, but are mistakenly identified as primaries, derived surface ages or characteristics of the impacting population size-frequency distribution (SFD) will be in error.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Our work raises doubts regarding methods that use the lunar small-crater distribution to calibrate other inner Solar System surface ages (for example, Mars).  If, as on Europa, lunar and martian secondaries are 95% of the small crater (less than a few kilometres) population, the error bars (and thus derived surface ages) on any residual primary crater population become large (uncertainties are 20 times the measured density value).  This uncertainty applies to both the measured population on a martian surface unit and the lunar SFD that supposedly represents absolute age.  We emphasize that traditional age-dating analyses still derive robust ages when using large craters (greater than a few kilometres diameter), which are less likely to be secondaries.  However, the technique becomes increasingly unreliable when applied to dating tiny geographical units using small craters, which may be mostly secondaries.

Things are not always what they seem.  This announcement must hurt like a rock to Darwinists, who really need those long periods of uniformitarian processes.  Imagine ten million craters forming in one day!  If crater counts say nothing about age, why could not all the observed cratering have occurred quickly, in relatively recent times?
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Mars • Solar System

Genes Are Not Telling the Whole Story    10/20/2005  
A growing realization is dawning on geneticists: there is more going on in DNA than previously imagined.  Now that whole genomes are becoming available, scientists are eagerly trying to understand how the genetic code (genotype) produces a full-grown organism (phenotype), like a fruit fly or human.  The interesting stuff in DNA used to be the genes, but two recent stories are showing that other players in the nucleus may have much more to do with the outcome than just the genes that code for proteins (09/08/2005, 09/23/2005).
(1)  A study from UC San Diego has, once again, showed the functional value of “junk DNA”.  Peter Andolfatto found large differences in non-coding DNA between closely-related species of fruit flies (Drosophila).  These differences appear to be important to the flies, perhaps in maintaining their genetic integrity.  He speculated that these non-coding regions may, therefore, have evolutionary importance.  Andolfatto, who published his findings in Nature,¹ explained the change in focus:

“Protein evolution has traditionally been emphasized as a key facet of genome evolution and the evolution of new species,” says Andolfatto.  “The degree of protein sequence similarity between humans and chimpanzees, and other closely-related but morphologically distinct taxa, has prompted several researchers to speculate that most adaptive differences between taxa are due to changes in gene regulation and not protein evolution.  My results lend support to this view by demonstrating that regulatory changes have been of great importance in the evolution of new Drosophila species.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Once upon a time, the world seemed simple when viewed through the eyes of evolutionary biologists.  All genomes were tightly controlled by various forms of natural selection.  DNA encoded functional genes, and most mutations that occurred were rejected through negative selection.  Those exceptional mutations that were beneficial substituted for the original gene variant (allele) and spread through the evolving populations by positive selection.  And polymorphisms – where several alleles coexist within a population – were maintained by yet another, balancing, form of selection.

Exactly one year ago this week, scientists announced that they had finished the ‘Book of Life’.  The complete sequence of the human genome had been painstakingly reduced to an ordered list of letters representing the four bases of DNA.  This text was believed to be virtually identical for every person on Earth – and the major differences between individuals, such as hair colour, were said to be the equivalent of typographical errors, no longer than a single letter.  The next major task for scientists was to find out which of these tiny differences can cause disease.
    But even as the ink was drying on the complete sequence, some researchers were questioning whether there was really such a thing as the definitive edition of the Book of Life.  By skim-reading individual genomes, these scientists were finding bizarre and unexpected irregularities.  In some people, whole paragraphs of the text were duplicated, whereas in others, large passages were missing, or even printed backwards.  These major revisions turned up in all kinds of people, including many who seemed healthy and normal.  Suddenly, it seemed possible that there was actually no standard version of the Book of Life, and researchers wondered whether we are all much more different from each other than they had thought.

Neo-Darwinism was built on a pre-genomic, simplistic view of inheritance.  It, and its successors, can no longer pretend to account for the new complexities of genetics that are coming to light.
    More recently, evolutionists have attempted to arrange organisms into phylogenetic trees based on sequence similarities of this or that gene.  This is like focusing on individual trees and missing the forest.  There is much more than just genes and their protein products accounting for our individual differences.  If the genes are just pawns of regulatory processes, who is regulating the regulators?  How does a mature individual arise from the complex sequence of developmental processes that know which genes to switch on at the right times?
    In times of intellectual ferment such as this, it is unfair to grant sole authority for explanations to one team, the Darwin Bulldogs, that has repeatedly struck out.  Manager Charlie would never have predicted the curve balls that the nature would pitch at them.  Bluffing confidence and armchair strategies have proven inadequate.  Let design science come to bat.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Evolutionary Theory • Human Body • Zoology