“There are also warrants for believing that the design feature, the nomic necessity, all of those things that allow one to negotiate space and time... offer ample evidence of design, intention, plan, intelligence.... There are good arguments for assuming that the whole thing has a point, and that that point points ultimately to a divine and providential source.... I choose that one.”
—Dr. Daniel J. Robinson (Oxford), conclusion of 60 lectures on The Great Ideas of Philosophy, The Teaching Company.

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Scientist of the Month: Better late than never – the November Creation Scientist of the Month is finally published in the right hand column.  Click here for a short biography of a medieval prof worth getting to know.  “Dark Ages”?  Hardly.

Mao Tse-Tung Killed 77 Million for Darwin   11/30/2005    
World Net Daily reported that the body count from Mao’s reign of terror in China has been revised upward to 77 million by R. J. Rummel, a Nobel Peace Prize winning political scientist who had earlier estimated it at half that (38 million).  This augments Mao’s Guinness reputation as the worst mass murderer in history.  His intentional killings, including policies that intentionally starved tens of millions of Chinese people, exceeded those of Hitler and Stalin.  Deaths attributed to Mao’s democide (death by government) amount to over twice the total combat deaths in all wars between 1900 to 1987, including World Wars I and II.  Of 174 million killed in 20th-century incidents of democide, 148 million fell victim to Marxist regimes – four times the deaths by combat, estimated at 34.1 million.
    Rummel, who has chronicled 20th century democides, said, “I’m now convinced that Stalin exceeded Hitler in monstrous evil, and Mao beat out Stalin.”  All three dictators were committed to scientific materialism congruent with the Darwinian principles of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest.  According to an article by Answers in Genesis, Mao listed two of his favorite authors as Darwin and Huxley.  In a quote attributed to the Chinese communist leader on Coral Ridge Ministries, Chairman Mao said, “Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”  Stalin became an atheist after reading Darwin, and Hitler, though from a different end of the political spectrum, based Mein Kampf on Darwinian principles of struggle and fitness.  Such ideas had become very popular among leading German thinkers in the decades after Darwin’s Origin, as documented in historian Richard Weikart’s book, From Darwin to Hitler (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
    Visualize how long it would take to read the names of 77 million people.  At one every five seconds, day and night, it would take over 12 years just to read their names, without even knowing who they were or the nature of their hopes and dreams – dreams that were strangled in prison, brutal work camps, torture or policy-induced famines.  Add another 12 years for those killed under all the other communist leaders, and 3 years 4 months for Nazi deaths – a total of almost 28 years of reading name, after name, after name, day and night.  By contrast, reading the names of the 9/11 victims at this rate would take a little over four hours.
    Some historians have speculated that Charles Darwin’s mysterious illnesses derived at least partly from stress and depression over the possible impact of his radical ideas (see Russell Grigg article).  He once wrote, “It is like confessing to a murder.” (See PBS).

Darwinism was to Nazism and communism like fuel and spark to fire.  Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jong Il and all communist despots past and present have been committed scientific materialists.  They shut down churches and promoted atheism, exalted Darwinism and promoted evolutionary theory as the scientific rationalization for the state and the ethical justification for their brutal policies.  John West on Evolution News reminded readers about Darwin’s own support of eugenics and racism, and accused the American Museum of Natural History of sanitizing this aspect of his life in their multi-million dollar Darwin exhibit (11/21/2005).
    This is a stern reminder why the debate over creation vs. evolution matters.  We are not talking about some minor issue for scientists and egghead philosophers to speculate about.  Ideas have consequences, and as Richard Weikart demonstrated in a lecture worth watching (available from Access Research Network), the same Darwinian principles that motivated Hitler and the communists are alive and well among prominent evolutionary biologists today.  Many university professors and evolutionary biologists are avowed Marxists.  Let them ponder the horrible results of their belief system, and then ponder the warning of Jesus, “every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  Therefore by their fruits you will know them.” (from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7).
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

This will be a good test of the scientific values of the Darwinists.  They always claim to be skeptical of any finding, never taking anything on “faith” like those religious-right fundies.  OK, Darwinists, you’ve got a problem.  Show us some rationality and objectivity.  We seem to recall that creationists quickly withdrew claims of Paluxy human tracks on the first hint of a problem with the data, and have been very cautious ever since.  In their case, however, the find was not a necessary piece of evidence, just a tantalizing one.  In this case, if humans or advanced hominids were in Mexico over a million years before the famed “out of Africa” story, there is a lot of Darwinian storytelling at risk of unraveling.  Either evolutionists cannot trust their fossil skills, or their dating methods (see 11/05/2005), or both.  What would it take to falsify human evolution?  If nothing – no amount of contrary evidence or logic – could ever dislodge the idea that humans slowly emerged from primitive ancestors, then your critics are going to stick a note on the seat of your pants: “Kick me; I’m a fighting fundamentalist.”
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils • Dating Techniques

• Define the Opposition Out of Science:  Another University of Kansas professor is offering a class that will maintain that ID is pseudoscience, according to Lawrence Journal-World.  (For the other “ID as mythology” class, see the 11/29/2005 story.)  Anthropology professor John Hoopes will associate ID with belief in alien crop circles, ESP and pyramidology.  Brian Sandefur, an engineer at the university, said this is just an attempt to box ID into inappropriate areas; it’s about chemistry and molecular biology, he argues, so it belongs in science classes.
• Sue Me, Sue You:  That the pro-evolution ACLU is quick to sue what they perceive as violations of separation of church and state is old news, but evolutionists are on the receiving end of church-state litigation this time.  According to Mercury News, and Associated Press (MSNBC), Larry and Jeanne Caldwell are suing two biologists and an official from the National Science Foundation for using $400,000 in federal funds for a pro-evolution website that promotes religious ideas.  In their suit, they claim that the Understanding Evolution website strays into religion, and is geared “to modify the beliefs of public school science students so they will be more willing to accept evolutionary theory as true.”  Casey Luskin in EvolutionNews diagnosed the AP article as infected with inaccuritis and false facts syndrome.
• Voodoo Hex:  When the San Diego Union-Tribune called ID “Voodoo Science” the students at the IDEA Center fired back with evidence instead of pins.  So did Evolution News with links aplenty to denounce the ridicule.
• Dark Ages Ahead:  Lord May of Oxford, in an outgoing address as president of the Royal Society, warned that science faces dangerous times ahead.  He claimed that fundamentalism from East and West is creating a “denial lobby” that is making it harder for scientists to deal with global problems like climate change; according to Lord May, their “response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason.”  The article did not make it clear if he meant by Eastern fundamentalism radical Islam, but there was no such delicate treatment of those on the other side of the globe.  The Western fundamentalists, he said, are the ones promoting creationism and intelligent design.  He claimed these have a “wider agenda which is to replace scientific materialism by something more based on faith.”  He called on scientists to become more active in speaking out against ID and other “threats” to “modern scientific values.”
• What Controversy?  Russell Jacoby wrote in the LA Times that some controversies are not worth teaching about, like ID.  Tom Magnuson wrote for the Discovery Institute to correct Jacoby’s errors and defend the grand liberal tradition of engaging controversial issues.
• Spectrum Narrows:  In USA Today, both the liberal Bob Beckelis and the conservative Cal Thomas agreed that ID should get a hearing, but for different reasons.  Interestingly, Beckelis, a liberal Democratic strategist, agreed that ID is a scientific concept and that the way scientists are attacking it as religion is wrong: “Not only are there still gaping holes in the evolutionary chain from single cells to man, the science crowd hasn’t come close to explaining why only man among all living things has a conscience, a moral framework and a free will,” he said, and later added, “...these scientists will say the overwhelming body of evidence supports evolution, and no other theory comes close.  Well, of course it doesn’t because no other theory has been studied seriously.  This crowd has a vested interest in proving Darwin correct, and anything else is dismissed out of hand.”  He thought the ID scientists had a strong case but have been denied a forum.
• Fights Are Good for Sales:  Like vendors at the gladiatorial arena, merchants are finding a new market for niche products related to the evolution wars, reports KansasCity.com.  Books, videos, Darwin fish, bumper stickers and anything having to do with Darwinism or intelligent design are hot sellers.

We need an army of Diogenes disciples with updated baloney-detecting lanterns.  Notice how Lord May and his other Darwin Party insiders equate Big Science with materialism, and label anything else than that with the emotionally-charged labels fundamentalism and faith.  “Darkness of fundamentalist unreason”?  How’s that for a classic mudsling.  Come on, Lord May, just show us all that alleged evidence for the arrival of cellular machinery and human rationality by mindless, undirected processes, or else the shoe fits your own foot.  Robert Boyle, your eminent predecessor and founding father of the Royal Society, would be ashamed of you.
    The ones who can only come up with ridicule, fear-mongering and loaded words show themselves to be intellectually unarmed in the dark.  Keep the light on; when there’s enough light for everyone to see Emperor Charlie’s new clothes, he will go running embarrassed into the woods.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Education

Great idea, but they seem to be lacking a theory to explain it.  Here’s one: meditating on creation brings our hearts closer to the Creator, the Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace.  This theory was proposed many places in the Bible.  Read, for example, Psalm 104, Psalm 111, and Psalm 148.  Many pioneers of science tested this theory and found it solid: Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Antony van Leeuwenhoek, to name a few.  Here’s a practical theory everyone can test.
Next headline on:  Health

There you have it, folks.  Parents, when you sent your precious sons and daughters to college, with visions of enlightenment, scholarly advancement and the contemplative life, is this what you had in mind?  Were you aware the devil was head of the religion department?  Do you accept his apology for half a second?  Do you believe for a moment this wrist-slap is going to stop his face-slapping intentions?  Better wake up; this is not an isolated case.   This was the university that took up arms against the Kansas school board in their attempt to de-dogmatize Darwin and permit (not mandate) critical discussion of his views, but attitudes like Mirecki’s are rife in today’s radical-leftist academic institutions.
    Now you know why a fair and honest discussion of intelligent design is hard to come by in most universities.  One can only hope enough people are repulsed by this venomous behavior enough to drive the vermin out, open the windows, clean out the garbage, and let in some fresh air and sunshine, to recreate that once-sacred environment for the free exchange of ideas among scholars motivated by a love of the truth.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Bible and Theology

Here is prima facie evidence that Enceladus is young.  The burden of proof is on the moyboys (09/16/2005 commentary) to prove otherwise.  The E ring has been known for over 20 years and is composed of particles so small (micron sized), it must be continuously replenished or it would disappear within decades.  Does this mean that these Enceladus geysers have been erupting continuously for decades, centuries, millennia?  How can it be credible to believe this kind of process can run for millions or billions of years?  Everyone can enjoy the discovery of a new Yellowstone.  Those open-minded to allow for far younger ages of solar system objects have the added entertainment of watching the moyboys scramble with each new eruption.  Maybe the new plume should be called the Fountain of Youth.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Geology

• My Rhea Lies Under the Spacecraft:  Cassini added another trophy to its moon collection Saturday, skimming just 300 miles above the surface of Saturn’s large moon Rhea.  (Saturday is named after Saturn, hey).  Rhea is the largest moon after Titan, and one of two (along with Dione) remembered from Voyager days as having wispy or feathery streaks on its leading hemisphere.  Now that Cassini has gotten in for a closer look, scientists found that the streaks are not frost deposits as formerly thought.  Instead, they are regions of sharp cliffs exposing bright water ice.  Rhea also has a prominent fresh-looking rayed crater.  Though made of ice, the surfaces of Saturn’s moons are frozen so hard, the ice has the properties of hard rock.  Impacts produce craters, therefore, very similar to those on our moon, complete with central peaks, rays and ejecta blankets.  The Cassini Imaging Team has put together a gallery of the best raw images; the complete set is available on the Cassini Raw Image Database.
• Spiral Ring:  Saturn’s F-ring is one long spiral, according to an international team that proposed the new theory in Science (see report on Space.com and click link to the artist’s conception).  If so, this raises lots of new questions.  Prometheus and Pandora, long thought to shepherd the ring particles into the narrow ringlets, may actually act more like attack dogs.  The ring appears tenuous and dynamic.  The spiral structure appears unique, with no clear explanation leaping out of the data about how the spiral is generated and maintained.
• Japan Mines an Asteroid:  The Falcon (Hayabusa) successfully gathered samples of asteroid Itokawa (see Planetary Society report).  This gives the fledgling Japanese space agency a first, especially if the samples are successfully returned in 2007 at The Outback (not the restaurant, but the real Aussie wasteland, out back and down under).  The asteroid appears to be a rubble pile of loosely-cohering material with few craters.  Though it visited a different type of object – a comet – Stardust will hit the tape first on January 15 when its samples parachute into the Utah desert.  Hopefully it will not make a crater like Genesis did.
• Mars with Spirit:  The Mars Exploration Rover imaging team released a blockbuster to celebrate Spirit’s first “Martian Year” anniversary in Gusev Crater, complete with special effects.  If you wonder how Spirit was able to take a picture of itself in the distance, well, that’s Hollywood.
• Next Mars Champ Doing Fine:  The hefty Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, affectionately known as “Mr. O,” is halfway there.  Already, Mars Express seems a hard act to follow, but when MRO goes into orbit next March, its best-ever cameras and instruments are slated to send back more data than all previous missions combined.  Till then, we hear Opportunity, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Global Surveyor hollering, “Hey, don’t forget me!”

These are great days of exploration.  At this time 200 years ago, Lewis and Clark were settling in at Fort Clatsop for a long winter.  At this time 100 years ago, Percival Lowell was squinting eagerly through his Lowell Observatory eyepieces, imagining cities and exotic inhabitants on Mars.  In such a short time, look what their country – their world – has done.  Space exploration did not evolve.  It is a demonstration of the power of intelligent design to order and direct natural materials toward purposeful ends.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Mars

1. Iguanas Promoted:  A “radical reorganization” of the tree of reptiles was reported by Science Daily based on work by two Penn State biologists.  Iguanas, for instance, had long been placed near the bottom of the tree due to their “primitive” appearance.  Now, the molecular tree graduates them to the top.  The new study compared 19 genomes from all the major reptile lineages.  So many anomalies were found, the researchers had to invent entirely new categories of classification.  In addition, most of the branches appeared to start early and remain relatively unchanged over vast periods of time.  Toxic venom, for example, was thought to be a recent innovation, but now appears rooted at the time of the earliest dinosaurs.  Reptiles with two egg teeth appear to precede those with one egg tooth – a step toward simplicity, not complexity.  These and other findings are inverting a family tree of reptiles accepted by evolutionary biologists for over a century.  One of the team members said, “If this new tree is correct, all the morphological characters that traditionally have been used to identify similarities between species will need to be reevaluated to understand how these traits evolved” (emphasis added in all quotes).
2. Slow Humans:  Another startling finding reported in Science Daily started with the title, “Early Animals Had Human-Like Genes.”  If humans are the late-comers, why and how did early-Cambrian roundworms produce innovations that would persist unchanged for hundreds of millions of years?  The team compared human and fruit-fly introns with those of a roundworm thought to be 600 million years old, close to the period of the very first multicellular organisms.  Contrary to earlier expectations, introns – those spacers in the DNA cut out by the transcription machinery – were already present in the worms and have persisted all the way to the human line, while other branches, like insects, lost many of them quickly.  To save the evolutionary tree, researchers are speaking of “fast-evolving” and “slow-evolving” branches.  “The worm’s genes are very similar to human genes,” said one.  “That’s a much different picture than we’ve seen from the quickly-evolving species that have been studied so far.”  Another remarked, “Now we have direct evidence that genes were already quite complex in the first animals, and many invertebrates have reduced part of this complexity.”  Not only were the introns the same, but their positions within the genome “have been preserved over the last half a billion years.”

What’s most amazing about both these stories is not the genes.  It is the psychology of Darwinists.  They can hang on to a theory no matter how much contrary evidence comes to light.  Invented terms like “conserved genes” and “slow-evolving species” mask their desperation.  They are clinging to a dogmatic evolutionary position in spite of evidence that looks like creation: abrupt appearance, stasis, and loss of original complexity.  Simultaneously, they accuse creationists of accepting their view on “faith” while bluffing that “there is no controversy among scientists about evolution.”  Yet how would an impartial jury rule, based on the empirical evidence alone, with no evolutionary presuppositions?
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

When you watch a music video you are inundated with a seemingly incoherent and rapid stream of visual scenes, changing on average every 2.3 seconds.  Such a rate of change may appear fast to an old fashioned television consumer, but it is still about seven times slower than the rate of scene change imposed by rapid eye movements on the visual system.  While the former may be tiring, the latter goes seemingly unnoticed.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Of particular importance for such adjustments may be neurons in the lateral intraparietal, frontal, and even early visual areas which shift their receptive fields shortly before the occurrence of a saccadic eye movement, causing an internal re-mapping of visual space.  These neurons signal that a saccade will bring an object into their field of view, even if that object has been removed from sight just before or during the saccade.  Such a re-mapping could result in predictive adjustments in early cortical areas that prepare for scene changes, thereby minimizing their negative impact, and maximizing rapid information processing following a saccade.  This requires a substantial amount of trans-saccadic integration.

Just set aside that little piece of evolutionary fat, so you won’t lose your appetite.  As you visually scan that plate full of colorful, fragrant, tasty food, think about this one of all those senses taking in those cues.  You have a high-tech, integrated, super-fast, high-resolution video recording, processing, and display system, and it even has image stabilization.  “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both” (Proverbs 20:12).  Give thanks, and enjoy.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Stories

Nature Cover Exploits Intelligent Design While Inside Attacks It   11/24/2005    
The 11/24 issue of Nature included two very caustic letters attacking intelligent design, yet its cover story highlighted the promising new field of Synthetic Biology.  In one of the leading papers,¹ David Sprinzak and Michael B. Elowiz of Caltech (see 06/25/2005 entry) described the synthetic approach in terms reminiscent of William Paley’s old Divine Watchmaker:

By taking apart an old clock, you could probably come up with a pretty good guess at how it works.  But a more concrete understanding of the clock mechanism might be obtained by designing and building one’s own clock out of similar parts.  Contemporary biology presents us with similar reverse-engineering problems.  For example, Drosophila [fruit fly] cells contain a circadian clock that oscillates with a 24-h rhythm and self-synchronizes to the day/night cycle.  Using genetic and biochemical techniques, researchers have isolated genes and proteins involved in interlocked feedback loops of gene expression...that are necessary for clock function.  However, many fundamental questions remain difficult to answer: what sets the period of the oscillation, how does the clock operate reliably in diverse cellular conditions, and what features of its design are responsible for its reliable operation?  To gain insight into such questions one could design and build new clock circuits, using similar genes and proteins, and study their dynamics in the organism.  In fact, several synthetic genetic clocks have now been constructed in bacteria.... These circuits are much simpler than the Drosophila clock.  They fail to operate as reliably, but they provide a proof of principle for a synthetic approach to understanding genetic circuits.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Today, four challenges that greatly limit the engineering of biology are (1) an inability to avoid or manage biological complexity, (2) the tedious and unreliable construction and characterization of synthetic biological systems, (3) the apparent spontaneous physical variation of biological system behaviour, and (4) evolution.  In considering how best to address these engineering challenges, one practical starting point is to consider past lessons from when other engineering disciplines emerged from the natural sciences.  Are any past lessons relevant to the engineering of biology today?  For example, could we usefully consider adapting or extending ideas from structural engineering to synthetic biology?⁶

Let’s do a little thought experiment (pardon the oxymoron).  Let’s say a grad student at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich succeeds in remodeling some E. coli such that the colony swarms into a photograph image of whatever shadow falls on them.  Let’s also imagine that she surreptitiously watermarked her invention by encoding her name in the DNA of the new synthetically-engineered species.  Question: How would an independent researcher detect the intelligent design of the student?  Let’s proceed further in our story.  A biologist ignorant of the history of this bacterial species discovers it, and writes it up with a brief Darwinian just-so story about how the bacterium evolved this capability, and how the function might confer fitness.  Another scientist suspects the engineering and writes a paper rigorously defending his reasons for inferring this particular species was modified by an intelligent agent.  Question 2: which paper would Nature publish?
    This entry is extremely important to comprehend.  It basically illustrates that intelligent design is the future of biology.  Oh, they may not use the loaded words “intelligent” and “design” together, but the authors saturated these articles with de facto ID principles.  We might call it Lab-Implied Intelligent Design (LIMPID) or Virtual in vivo Intelligent Design (VIVID).  Enthusiasm will grow when AVID (Ardent Voices for Intelligent Design) stimulate a new generation of Fit, Energetic Researchers Vindicating Intelligent Design (FERVID).  When synthetically engineered biological products hit the market some day, we might call them Canned Intelligent Design (CANDID).  Most will think this is splendID, except for the remaining critics who will be seen for what they are: miserable, ornery, rancid badmouthers of ID (MORBID).  Like slobbering drunks, they have nothing to offer but froth and spit (11/21/2005).  Get them off the tracks before they get hurt by the new bullet train of design-inspired science.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Stories

On the Origin of Hee-Hees by Natural Selection   11/22/2005    
From slime to smile in 200 million years: some Darwinists feel they have explained the evolution of laughter.  In all seriousness, EurekAlert announced, “The first laugh: New study posits evolutionary origins of two distinct types of laughter.”  The story is about a new hypothesis by Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson.  The origin of comedy, they explain, was no laughing matter:

Using empirical evidence from across disciplines, including theory and data from work on mirror neurons, evolutionary psychology, and multilevel selection theory, the researchers detail the evolutionary trajectory of laughter over the last 7 million years.  Evolutionarily elaborated from ape play-panting sometime between 4 million years ago and 2 million years ago, laughter arising from non-serious social incongruity promoted community play during fleeting periods of safety.  Such non-serious social incongruity, it is argued, is the evolutionary precursor to humor as we know it.
    However, neuropsychological and behavioral studies have shown that laughter can be more than just a spontaneous response to such stimuli.  Around 2 million years ago, human ancestors evolved the capacity for willful control over facial motor systems.  As a result, laughter was co-opted for a number of novel functions, including strategically punctuating conversation, and conveying feelings or ideas such as embarrassment and derision.   (Emphasis added.)

What spoilsports the evolutionists are.  They take everything from the most sacred to the most enjoyable and turn it into ancestral ape antics.  Did you know that Darwin himself wrote a book on this in 1872?  (See the somewhat flawed, somewhat balanced Newsweek cover story on Darwin this week).  On the Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals was published 13 years after The Origin.  To a certain degree, this could be a somewhat worthwhile subject to study, but Charlie got some of his suckers to photograph themselves making all kinds of funny faces (see plates).  According to Janet Browne in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002, p. 367), for instance, photographer Oscar Rejlander [see photos]...

struck histrionic attitudes—grief, pleasure, disgust, and so on—and either photographed himself with a timelapse device or got his wife to aid him.  The resulting pictures depended as much on comically exaggerated gesture and body position as on facial expression.  On the back of one picture he scribbled in pencil, “My wife insists upon me sending this for you, that your ladies may see that I can put on a more amiable expression.”  Rejlander’s wife posed for a photograph of a sneer (Darwin thought that sneering evolved from the expression of disgust).  Gamely, she allowed herself to be reproduced thus in Darwin’s volume.   (Emphasis added.)

All in the service of science, of course.  (Who knows; maybe Mrs. Rejlander was expressing her emotions at Darwinism—picture.)  This was all in the post-Origin period when Darwin’s new fan club was trying to evolutionize everything: the evolution of romance, the evolution of music, the evolution of religion, the evolution of grooming, the evolution of nose-picking, etc., doing their best to unite their eminent British fellow-citizens with their monkey past.  Science marches on.
    And so the tradition continues, with Gervais and Wilson looking for the first laugh in mythical serious-minded primates just beginning to discover what to do with their leisure time.  We don’t care who got the first laugh.  We want the last (see next story).
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man • Dumb Ideas

1. Party Hardy Against the Bible, Bush, Propriety and Aesthetics:  The New York Daily News Daily Dish depicted a bizarre portrait of the opening gala for the new “Darwin” exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.  The event seemed more an odd concoction of anti-Bush politics, celebrity low-cut gowns, blasphemous rock, Bible bashing, gay advocacy and Saturday Night Live comedy than support for Darwin’s theory.  One of them even mocked Jesus.  Was this supposed to help attract visitors?
2. Teach ID?  OK, We’ll Teach ID:  Kansas has acquiesced, and yes, will now teach intelligent design – as mythology.  LiveScience and MSNBC News continued their long series of anti-ID reporting with an A.P. story about professors at the University of Kansas who have added a new course to the Religious Studies Department, entitled, “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.”  Paul Mirecki, the department chairman said, “The KU faculty has had enough.  Creationism is mythology.  Intelligent design is mythology.  It’s not science” (emphasis added in all quotations).  John Calvert, the pro-ID Kansas attorney, is not flustered.  He thinks the tactic will backfire and Mirecki will go down in history as a laughingstock.
3. Hmmmph:  John Brookfield (U of Nottingham), wrote a book review of The Plausibility of Life by Gerhart and Kirshner in Current Biology (Volume 15, Issue 22, 22 November 2005, Pages R908-R910).  The book, as explained in the 10/31/2005 entry, raises some serious questions about the standard view of Darwinian evolution.  After exploring puzzles about adaptive variation, Brookfield chided the authors for questioning the standard paradigm, and gave his recommendation for how to scientifically deal with critics:

   Depressingly often, the alternative that the authors rule out is not a view of organisms coming from other evolutionary scientists, but a view that exists only in the imaginations of those determined to believe that evolution is impossible without intervention from an intelligent designer.  Some of the tone of the book flows from the authors regrettably living in a social milieu where they are forced to specifically refute claims from advocates of ‘creation science’ and ‘intelligent design’, rather than contemptuously ignoring them as we British tend to do.

4. Dilbert Fans Turn Against Author:  Scott Adams is not your typical religious nut – quite the opposite.  All this usually irreverent icon-basher did was suggest on his Dilbert Blog recently that Darwin might have feet of clay, and was he in for a surprise.  The mud flew on P.Z. Myers’ Pharyngula blog, with words like idiotic, creepy, worthless, scary, kook, and ridiculous the most printable epithets from his erstwhile cartoon fans.  Myers’ last comment must have stung: “Maybe Adams isn’t a Wally.  He actually sounds more like a pointy-haired boss.”
       Scott Adams clarified his position with “Intelligent Design, Part 2” on Dilbert Blog.  He wasn’t espousing intelligent design, he said, but just exercising the freedom to doubt the Darwinists: “The people who purport to have evidence of evolution do a spectacular job of making themselves non-credible,” he said.  “To me, it’s like hiring a serial cannibal as a babysitter based on the fact that he PROMISES not to eat your kids despite having eaten all the other kids on the block. It might be a fact that he’s telling the truth.  The problem is that he’s not credible.”
5. No More Mr. Nice Guy; Let’s Kick Some Butt:  According to Jonathan Witt writing for Discovery Institute, some evolutionists are getting downright gladiatorial.  Here’s what P.Z. Myers (U of Minnesota) recommended:

   Our only problem is that we aren’t martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough.  The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians.

   Sounds like the Darwinists are sending in their champion, Gluteus Maximus.  Jonathan may have proved the Survival of the Wittest with this line, however: “Modern evolutionary theory is less a cornerstone and more the busybody aunt – into everyone’s business and, all the while, very much insecure about her place in the home.”

Do the Darwinists really think this kind of out-of-control behavior is going to help their cause?  We’re all taking notes for the historians.  When the Charlie idol collapses, we’re going to resurrect some of these braggadocio episodes as entertainment, or as lessons to would-be mockers of the 21st century.
    To informed observers, this all resembles one last drinking binge on a sinking ship.  Belshazzar, recall, drank wine out of the sacred golden vessels with a lot of laughter and chutzpah, but not for long.  The handwriting is on the wall again.  Darwinism has been weighed in the balances, and found wanting.
    The Babbleonians may soon see their downfall.  Perhaps their kingdom will be divided among the Mediators and the Perversions.  No matter what comes next, if you want to stand tall through it all, dare to be a Daniel.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Bible and Theology • Politics and Ethics

These folks need to read the RATE book (see 11/05/2005 entry).  They built their interpretation on a foundation of sand; their dating method cannot be trusted.  It won’t help the origin-of-life crowd anyway (09/15/2005).
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Geology

1. You Are What You Get High On:  Michael Balter in ScienceNow asked, “Did endorphins make us more human?”  Pondering that question is a photo of a chimp and a naked ape (i.e., man) facing opposite one another in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker.  Balter reported on research by Duke University scientists who found a large difference between apes and humans in the expression of an endorphin-precursor gene.  Endorphins are “opiatelike molecules involved in learning, the experience of pain, and social attachment and bonding.”  Presumably this implies our chimp brethren are less endowed in those areas.  “The team concludes that the pattern is a solid example of natural selection acting on the human lineage after it split from the chimp line from 5 million to 7 million years ago” [emphasis added in all quotations].  Some critics counter that it is “not yet clear what mental or behavioral traits were favored by selection.”  Bruce Lahn (U of Chicago) gave only mild criticism: “It is a bit early to say that these changes were key to what makes us human.  But it seems like a reasonable hypothesis.”  Balter left it at that.
2. Patriotic Genes:  EurekAlert announced matter-of-factly, “Genes contribute to patriotism and group loyalty.”  J. Philippe Rushton of the Charles Darwin Research Institute has found a correlation between genetic similarities and group behavior.  At the lowest level, he thinks, this explains kinship behavior between identical twins and family members, but extends all the way up to clans, tribes, races and nationalities.  Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, believes this is all clear if we look from the gene up.  The article explains: “Human social preferences, like mate choice and ethnic nepotism, are anchored in the evolutionary psychology of altruism.  Adopting a ‘gene’s eye’ point of view allows us to see that people’s favoritism to kin and similar others evolved to help replicate shared genes.”  Rushton’s article in the October issue of Nations and Nationalism was, according to EurekAlert, about “how genes affect group loyalty and patriotism.”

Is there any doubt left about why we need to “teach the controversy” about Darwinian evolution?  Look at what these Darwinists did.  Like dispassionate gods on Mt. Olympus, they reduced everything about you and me to our genes, but exempted themselves.  Pretentiously and arrogantly, they explained some of the deepest ideals of human behavior in terms of chance consequences of molecular happenstance in some dim evolutionary past.  If that were true, their own rationality would be worthless.  It’s hypocritical and logically impossible to proffer rational explanations for why rationality is a phantom.  If rationality is reducible to molecules in motion, it is not rationality at all.
    We don’t need intelligent design moved out of the science class into the philosophy class, we need some philosophy moved into the science class.  We need cogent thinkers and logicians to interrupt Darwinists when they make foolish, self-refuting statements.  We need them to distinguish between observable science and religious or philosophical pronouncements made in the name of science that go far beyond the evidence.  Now read the next entry.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man • Genetics • Dumb Ideas

One of his contentions is that the concept of information flow in biology is problematic.  Sarkar repeatedly mentions the incompleteness or inadequacy of the central dogma of molecular biology.  Although the idea of a genome as a program that spontaneously unfolds to produce a living organism is clearly too simplistic, that hardly renders the notion of information flow without value.  A computer program, too, is totally dependent on its physical context in hardware and an operating system that can interpret it; its output is only as predictable as its input and can be rendered seemingly unpredictable by a temporary power surge or a scratch across a magnetic disk.  We can recognize different inputs--including chance, environmental influences, and developmental context (e.g., maternal cytoplasmic effects)--in the interpretation of the genetic program, and we can even accept that some lines of that program (introns, intergenic regions) are of unknown function, without forgetting the program’s key role in development.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Perhaps because of his bleak outlook on the nature of information flow, Sarkar considers the Human Genome Project somewhat of a worthwhile failure.  He notes how controversial the idea was even among geneticists and how tenuous the prospects for a full understanding of human biology and an incredible ability to cure diseases were.  In retrospect, the project’s early proponents may be forgiven their exaggerated promises.  Few geneticists have ever proclaimed that day-to-day human behavior could be explained simply by gene interactions, and many have argued against attempts to connect behavioral traits and genetics.  Nor, as Sarkar points out, did we imagine that there were so few genes, such a complex relation between genes and the protein forms they encode, and so much genetic material of unknown function.  Nonetheless, we must understand that we can gain valuable insights from reading the human genome in all its variety.

“Today the claim seems laughable.  None of the promises of Gilbert’s radical genetic reductionism has been borne out.  Proponents of the HGP promised enormous immediate medical benefits.  Arguably, at least, there have not been any.  Gilbert routinely promised the birth of a new theoretical biology.  Instead, the emphasis now is on informatics....”  On the upside, Sarkar notes that at “the very least, the HGP has killed the facile genetic reductionism of the heyday of developmental genetics.”  His dim view contrasts sharply with Robert Sinsheimer’s recent proclamation that the project “succeeded even beyond our hopes.”

So two millennia of debate about reductionism and determinism have come to this.  If human biology cannot be reduced to terms of its basic physical components, but rather must be understood as information flow comparable to a computer program, and if that program can only be understood in its context of the hardware and operating system needed to interpret it, well then – it seems like stock in the intelligent design movement is about to skyrocket.  Obtain your intellectual shares now.
Next headline on:  Health • Human Body • Genetics • Intelligent Design

We’ll award that line Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  To interpret stories like this, you have to understand that it is all just a game.  The object is to get mentioned in National Geographic, preferably on the cover, by saying something just controversial enough to draw attention to oneself without ever throwing the whole enterprise of evolutionary paleoanthropology into doubt.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Observing systems in nature has inspired humans to create technological tools that allow us to better understand and imitate biology.  Biomimetics, in particular, owes much of its current development to advances in materials science and creative optical system designs.  New investigational tools, such as those for microscopic imaging and chemical analyses, have added to our understanding of biological optics.  Biologically inspired optical science has become the emerging topic among researchers and scientists.

Imitating nature is a complex endeavor, and a blind biomimetic approach is not the best methodology.  Instead, molecular-level studies of the biological development of natural vision systems are key.  For example, current infrared sensors can distinguish more than what human eyes can see, but they require a sophisticated cooling system to work.  Somehow, insects have this same ability without the limitation of temperature control. This is but one example of how it is primarily nature’s designs that are superior to man-made equivalents.  However, if we are able to decode the designs, then the combination of our creativity in materials and nature’s wisdom is [a] synergistic one with incredible potential.

There was no mention of evolution in thess papers; not even of natural selection, Darwin, or millions of years.  Who needs it?  This is the cutting-edge of science and technology for the 21st century: a design-inspired approach to science that not only will bring exciting new benefits to society but will help us “understand and imitate biology.”  This is exactly the kind of “methodological engineering” that William Dembski predicted in The Design Revolution (IVP, 2004, p. 312) would show that ID has the power to generate fruitful research.
    If you are a tired Darwinist reading this, here is your way out.  Kick the Charlie habit and get in on the leading edge of biomimetics.  No more need for storytelling or fantasizing – just real-world research with “incredible potential” – and it looks incredibly fun, too.  It will push technology to the limit.  Field biologists can still go out and collect species for study, but now with a new vision instead of force-fitting everything into imaginary phylogenetic trees.  Lab technicians can devise new ways to measure and study phenomena.  Profs and grad students can stay gainfully busy.  It’s the cure for overspecialization: think of the new interdisciplinary labs that could be built (10/29/2005).  Dollars and research papers will flow.  The government would love to fund this kind of research.  If you can propose spin-offs for the military, antiterrorism, medicine, or “green” technology, your future is secure.  It will take the pressure off the origins battle.  Politicians, theologians, teachers and the public will love you for it.  It’s a complete win-win situation for science and for humankind, while old worries about Darwinism, like dead autumn leaves, will simply drop off and wither away for historians to sweep up.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Mammals • Terrestrial Zoology • Marine Biology • Amazing Stories

• Bio-Advocacy:  The journal BioScience contained two articles and an editorial attacking intelligent design and strategizing ways to defeat it in science classrooms (see 11/01/2005 entry for one of the articles).
• Cornell Students vs. Their President:  The senior editor of the Cornell Sun responded to the President’s anti-ID speech by reporting about the ID debate on campus, listing faculty members supporting and opposing the new ideas.  Xiaowei Cathy Tang found that it’s not just students, but some “faculty members urged the University and the nation to view I.D. as a valid challenge to some aspects of evolution.”
• Conservatives for Darwin:  CEH readers wrote in about anti-ID articles in the Washington Post by noted conservative columnists George Will and Charles Krauthammer, who pulled no punches with, “Let’s be clear.  Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud.”  He called it “ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God.”  He finds it “more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine” to picture, in the beginning, “a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein” even if it also produced the Kansas State Board of Education, he ended with a smirk.  Jonathan Witt on EvolutionNews claimed all Krauthammer did was knock down a straw man.
• Whose Claptrap?:  Tennesseean Tom Bohs wrote a torrid anti-ID editorial for the Jackson Sun, but his litany of ridicule, straw man tactics and ad hominems might backfire for some readers.  Sample: “If you believe the Earth is flat, well, I have a theory of evolution for you: intelligent design.  This is the pseudo-scientific claptrap some Christian fundamentalists are trying to foist off on society and have taught in our public school biology classes.  Don’t fall for the sales pitch.  It isn’t science.”
• Toe-Dipping in Indiana:  Mary Beth Schneider wrote in the Indianapolis Star about GOP state assemblymen who are testing the waters about intelligent design.  “We were trying to see if this is a hot-button issue for people,” said Bill Friend, Indiana House Majority Leader, and one of 36 Republican legislators who included the issue on a survey.
• UI no ID:  The Tribune reported on over 150 University of Iowa faculty who have signed a statement opposing intelligent design.
• The Sun Will Come Up, Tomorrow:  In a Malaysia newspaper, Dr. Stefan Tan claimed that Darwinism is dying.  He ended, “As one who believes that the universe is not an accident (the probabilities weigh against it), I believe it is a matter of time before macro-evolution will be nailed down in the coffin by an ever-increasing preponderance of evidences now trickling in.  Some might prefer to wait all night for the sun to rise but do we have that much time before we believe?”
• Get It Right, Reporters:  Frustrated at repeated misrepresentations in the media about the Kansas science standards, Evolution News listed the definitions of science in the standards of all 50 states.  The New York Times and other newspapers had claimed that Kansas made a dangerous change to its definition of science by robbing it of “natural explanations” for phenomena; Ker Than in LiveScience accused Kansas of bringing “supernatural explanations” into science, while MSNBC News portrayed it as a “subtle” but “brilliant” tactic to “open the door for divine interventions.”  The record shows that, prior to the vote, Kansas had been the only state embedding methodological naturalism into the definition of science.  The new definition actually is closer to the definition in 40 other states, while 9 states did not even specify a definition.

When you look at who acts cool and rational, and who strives for honesty and accuracy in reporting, and who thinks instead of repeating sound bites, there really is no contest.  That the Darwin Party must resort to constant mudslinging and power plays can only mean one thing: they are running scared.
    As to the Vatican astronomer, we’ll have to wait and see how that battle plays out.  Father Coyne fails to see the contradiction in what he said.  Everything characteristic of the Catholic faith involves God’s actual intervention in the affairs of mankind: the Creation, the Fall, the virgin birth, and the resurrection, to name a few.  The Darwinists want unguided, directionless, purposeless evolution; how can that possibly be reconciled with Catholicism without schizophrenia?  It appears that Coyne is more wedded to his scientific reputation than his faith, and more loyal to Pope Charlie (02/13/2004) than to Pope Benedict.  Press coverage of their disparate views may force a confrontation.  Does it matter?  Only to Catholics, and to Darwinists desperately seeking quotes from religious celebrities to shield their naked materialism.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Theology

There was little mention of evolution in any of the papers, except that the BBC article stated that the butterflies “had been using this method for 30 million years,” and News@Nature mentioned in passing that the system had “evolved to direct the emitted light outwards” without venturing to say how.  All the evolutionists seemed so amazed that a butterfly figured this out.  Even Ker Than, Mr. Dogmatic Darwinist and ID-Basher, didn’t dare speculate about how this precision optical system evolved.  To top that, Nature, that Darwinese foghorn, actually subtitled their piece, “Butterflies shine brighter by design.”  Cowabunga!  Are they beginning to see the light?
    Think about the fact that a butterfly goes through an egg, caterpillar, and chrysalis stage.  In that last stage, all its guts are transformed into precision LEDs, flight software and hardware, vision, incredibly-sensitive olfactory systems and much, much more.
    Kids should get out with their butterfly nets and learn some creation science like they always have.  Only now, they should learn some physics and optical electronics, too.  Sounds like some good Science Fair material here.
Next headline on:  Physics • Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Stories

Speak for yourself, babe.  This oft-repeated line suggests a modification of the old distinction between stuff and junk.  Junk is the stuff natural selection throws away, and stuff is the junk natural selection keeps.
    Aside from the fact that it is hard to envision any teenager getting excited over being told he or she is star stuff – unless they think their talent has finally been recognized – the reductionist, naturalistic philosophy inherent in this epigram betrays profound ignorance of western philosophy going back millennia.  Only recently have materialists gained ascendency in intellectual circles, and atheistic materialism permeates SETI through and through.  Their forefathers are Democritus, Lucretius and Epicurus, with few takers till John Locke and David Hume built their systems on sense experience alone.  Others dabbling with atheistic materialism were shunned or outmaneuvered with trenchant rational arguments by philosophers as varied as Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Thomas Reid, and Immanuel Kant.  Even most Enlightenment deists did not deny a rational design principle in the universe.  The early Newtonians and proponents of the mechanical philosophy were nearly all Christians to various degrees.  They never would have suggested that “star stuff” gave rise to the rational human soul.
    Without even considering the long history of theological arguments for natural theology, great philosophers have long debunked atheism with finesse.  Thomas Reid and Kant, for example, undermined the empiricist viewpoints of the materialists from first principles.  They argued forcefully that such views are reductionist and self-refuting.  To even speak about observation and empiricism presupposes a rational power that is not reducible to sense experience.  In addition, nothing inherent in the physical mechanisms of the body can account for the operation the mind or grant its rational arguments legitimacy.  The same arguments can be wielded just as effectively today against the modern materialists.  Unfortunately, they rarely get a hearing.  Atheists routinely run amok in the science journals with tall tales about game theory producing human morals, DNA developing into souls, and collections of neurons generating the mind.  The peer review process fails to call them on the carpet for illogic or carelessness, and so they get away with it; why?  Because Darwin’s bulldogs succeeded long ago in gaining control of the scientific institutions and codifying their world view into the very definition of science.
    SETI is part and parcel of a conspiracy to create a culture of materialists.  If it were not so, they would engage their critics and opponents in serious debate.  Instead, just like the astrobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, they shun scrutiny and usurp authority by co-opting the banner of “science” and conflating their materialism with the otherwise worthy goals of scientific research.  To a person, they idolize Father Charlie, because he liberated them from the need for both scientific and philosophical rigor.  Without apologies to Dawkins, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually-foolfilled atheist.
    Now that the Intelligent Design Movement has mounted the first volleys against the Darwinist naturalistic empire, the materialists are resorting to subterfuge instead of honorably engaging their opponents on the intellectual battlefield.  Pamela Harman has revealed that a huge educational program for the recruitment of young minds into philosophical materialism is underway: the Search for Educational Targets to Indoctrinate.  All that is necessary for foolishness to triumph is for good philosophers to think nothing.
Next headline on:  SETI • Origin of Life • Evolution • Education