Do you understand why Governor Buttars was concerned?  Search the evolutionary literature, and you will find many more examples like this.  No matter what the data are, evolutionists contort it into an evolutionary picture and then speculate wildly on things they cannot possibly know.  Never is there any opportunity in these publications for critics of the whole show to explain why it is utter foolishness.  That’s why the Darwin Party is so paranoid about letting honest criticism make its way into the public sphere.  The Darwin Society of Storytellers would not be able to handle the embarrassment.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Dr. Morris demonstrated how one man, committed to God and his word, can make a difference.  Almost every creationist leader today is indebted to his life and works.  In the 1960s there were very few books on creation.  Evolution dominated the textbooks and most churches, intimidated by science, preferred to avoid the issue.  Henry Morris’s first small paperback, The Bible and Modern Science, began to change things.  Then The Genesis Flood electrified a new generation of college-educated Christians.  Liberal churches had long since given in to Darwinism completely, and many Bible-believing churches had capitulated to long ages and uniformitarianism.  Assuming that science had proved deep time, they merely tried to accommodate it with compromises like the gap theory or progressive creation.
    Morris and Whitcomb demonstrated that it was possible to look at the fossil record and the geological strata in a new way that corroborated the Bible record of a world-wide flood.  Not only that, they showed how the scientific evidence was superior to that of the evolutionists.  A new army of creation scientists launched into further investigations that continue to the present day.  New organizations, like the Bible-Science Association and the Creation Research Society, were formed and numerous spin-off clubs and societies have kept the creation movement growing in strength and extent around the world.  Almost all of them can trace some ancestry back to ICR.  We hope to have a lengthier bio on Morris for the March Scientist of the Month.
    Henry Morris never boasted about himself but always sought to honor Jesus Christ and remain faithful to God's word.  He was aware to the last of the crucial nature of this intellectual battle.  The battle has become more heated than ever (see next story).  Having passed the torch on to a new generation, he didn’t leave the field, but continued to challenge and encourage others to the end.  Dr. Morris has been the Moses of modern creationism.  His personal endurance, patience and integrity, and the wisdom of his books, need to inspire a new generation of Joshuas and Calebs to be strong and very courageous, and to take back the land, for good science and the glory of God.
Next headline on: Bible and Theology

• Support our troops:  Nigel Williams in Current Biology this week¹ said, “Evolutionary biologists in the US got a little early seasonal cheer in December with a detailed and comprehensive attack on the increasingly widespread notion of intelligent design.”  Though he repeated the caution that it is far from over, he called Judge Jones’ decision “a coruscating attack on the intelligent design case.”  Calling Darwin’s ideas of evolution “rock solid,” Williams was surprised that so many British disbelieved his views, as shown by a recent poll (01/26/2006).  Williams repeated common criticisms about ID, that it is religiously motivated, a right-wing American phenomenon, and if successful, would bring science to a halt.
• Political science:  Nature² praised Al Gore’s new global-warming documentary, and took note of Randy Olson’s advice in Flock of Dodos that the evolutionists need to beef up their public relations (see 02/17/2006).
• Medical emergency:  Donald Kennedy in Science,³ accompanied by some evolutionary friends, called doctors to the fray.  “Medicine needs evolution,” he said.  Stressing the positive, they said, “training in evolutionary thinking can help both biomedical researchers and clinicians ask useful questions that they might not otherwise pose.”  On the negative, evolutionary training can help biomedical researchers “understand that both the human body and its pathogens are not perfectly designed machines but evolving biological systems shaped by selection under the constraints of tradeoffs that produce specific compromises and vulnerabilities.”  Examples: lower back pain in humans, wisdom teeth, narrowness of the birth canal, etc.  “There is growing recognition that cough, fever, and diarrhea are useful responses shaped by natural selection,” he claimed.
• Das Boot:  Constance Holden reported with an air of triumph in Science⁴ that Ohio “booted out” ID.  She quoted evolution supporters who called the decision to remove a “creationist-inspired” sentence allowing for criticism of evolution a “stunning victory.”  The article included a political cartoon of a Trojan Horse in the shape of a Panda, referencing the suggested alternative textbook, Of Pandas and People.  She discounted the surveys that show strong public support for ID, quoting a professor who touted, “anyone can play the survey game” because another poll found 84% of respondents had never heard of ID (although the poll noted by the Discovery Institute was not about ID, but about whether criticisms of evolutionary theory should be allowed; see 02/15/2006).  In an editorial in the Cincinnati Inquirer, Roddy Bullock regretted that Ohio had “turned back the clock” on intelligent design, thus granting Darwinism state protection as a dogma to be believed, not merely learned.
• All the Bias That’s Fit to Print:  Evolution News has had several entries this week criticizing the New York Times for continuing to misrepresent ID even when they have been repeatedly corrected by the Discovery Institute.
• Sunday School for Anti-ID Warriors:  Science Daily reported on the recent AAAS Sunday conference for educators on how to deal with creationism and intelligent design (see 02/20/2006).  “Evolution on the Front Line” also produced a strong statement on the teaching of evolution and opposition to intelligent design (see AAAS website, PDF) taking its cue from Judge John Jones’ ruling that ID is religion, not science.  It stressed that there is “no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution.”  The soldiers are all in uniform and lined up in straight ranks.
      The AAAS also posted a press release about the event, showing Animal Planet star Jeff Corwin at the podium and giving prominent place to Vatican astronomer George Coyne who called creationists “a plague in our midst.”  The release has a link to audio and powerpoint files from the meetings.
• Not Backing Down:  The Discovery Institute, despite all this criticism, announced that its list of scientists encouraging criticisms of Darwinism has swelled to over 500 (see also World Net Daily story).  Discovery Institute has opened a new website to post the names: www.dissentfromdarwin.org.  Given the climate, each signatory has taken somewhat of a career risk to become associated with the statement, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.  Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

What if they held a war, and nobody came?  The elitist science institutions are increasingly out of touch with reality, let alone American culture.  A huge undercurrent of American sentiment finds Darwinism unconvincing and wants it to be open to critical examination.  They also find arguments for ID compelling.  Nevertheless, mirroring the coastal blue states that surround a vast red-state middle America, you will notice that the same journals that trash ID praise political liberals (Al Gore), and never have anything good to say about political conservatives (George W. Bush).  They love religious liberals who capitulate 100% to Darwinism (see 02/11/2006) but hate religious conservatives who think the Bible might actually have something worthwhile to say.  These scientific elitists tend to congregate in government-funded institutions rather than for-profit businesses.  They occupy the campuses where Democrats outnumber Republicans 20 to 1, where Political Correctness rules allow Marxist radicals to gain tenure and a platform to trash America with reckless abandon while conservatives (or even moderates) must guard their every word, like Larry Summers who was finally ousted from the presidency of Harvard this week (see Ben Shapiro epitaph).
    As shown many times here, this is not a battle of science vs. faith.  We all have the same scientific evidence.  It is understandable that religious conservatives would be attracted to intelligent design, because they already believe in a Designer.  But the pro-Darwinians project themselves as unbiased, religiously-neutral, scholarly lovers of truth who were led to their position merely by the preponderance of evidence (but compare the next two entries).  Why, then, are they almost uniformly political liberals and far leftists? (see Michael Fumento column).
    The same battle went on in the 19th century in Britain.  At about the time a consensus on “science” was firming up, and the word “scientist” became a new title taken up by what had been “natural philosophers,” similar political forces opposed one another.  The battle lines became drawn between younger, anti-establishment types in the British Association and the older, more conservative natural theologians in the universities.  The BAAS tended toward mechanical philosophy that viewed the universe as a machine governed by laws, as opposed to the romantic science championed by Schelling and Goethe that viewed nature as an organism of which humans were intertwined.  Ironically, the mechanists viewed man as an evolved animal, but tended to discuss science as if objective, outside observers.
    The human dynamics of the 19th century battles are instructive.  At about the same time, science became a career, and large institutions took shape.  In many respects, the ones who gained control of the institutions and journals were the liberal, radical followers of the likes of Darwin, Tyndall and Huxley.  It was not that their science was better than that of Maxwell, Faraday, Sedgwick, Agassiz, Pasteur and other “people of faith” (whatever that vapid phrase means).  Darwin’s “people of froth” managed to steer a movement that had the presumptive authority of “science” toward the acquisition of power for those who were predominantly liberal and anti-establishment.
    This complex history should not be oversimplified, but it underscores the fact that science is inescapably a human enterprise.  It is not purely an objective process of gathering facts toward unbiased conclusions.  Philosophy and politics are inextricably involved, and the more removed from the observable and testable, the more the worldview of the practitioner matters.  Nothing in science could be more worldview-laden than the origin and meaning of life.  Should the mechanists and materialists have the final word on such important subjects?  What if one party were to gain control of the centers of power and manage to ostracize the competition?  Is that not what has happened?  “History is written by the victors,” Henry Gee reminded us.  It is the duty of all fair-minded and knowledgeable observers to ensure that the Darwin Party, which usurped power in the late 19th and 20th centuries, does not succeed in their ongoing efforts to write their critics out of the history books and shut off all accountability for their disreputable shenanigans.
Next headline on: Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Education

How many anomalies like this is it going to take?  This completely-unexpected find pushes the evolutionary ancestry tale and timeline to the breaking point.  Imagine finding a good-sized, well-adapted, aquatic mammal way back in the mid-Jurassic.  You didn’t see these in Jurassic Park.  LiveScience and the other Charlie-worshipping news outlets expect us to believe that this pushes back the origin of aquatic mammals 100 million years.  How can you believe that?  This critter pops out of nowhere, goes extinct, and a hundred million years later, the Beav pops up out of nowhere?  LieScience also claims this animal was not a monotreme or a beaver, but a close relative, and achieved its lifestyle adaptations by “convergent evolution”.  When are people going to get sick and tired of these cop-out excuses?
    Darwin defenders have long claimed that it would be easy to falsify evolution: just show a vertebrate in the Cambrian.  So we did.  Or find a mammal in the Cambrian.  We’re getting close.  There have been a steady stream of discoveries that have push advanced life-forms farther back in time (e.g., next story), meaning that mucho evolution had to take place in poco tiempo.  At the other end, the Cambrian explosion (02/14/2006) with its sudden emergence of all the major body plans in the blink of a geologic eye has gotten tighter.  These problems arise even assuming the geologic timetable.  Now, mix in the discovery of flexible, soft tissues in as much as half the dinosaur bones found (see 02/22/2006) and the Darwin storytelling machine is pushing past the red line.
    Adding to the crisis from another angle, consider the situation in planetary science.  At a public lecture at JPL today, the speaker described the huge puzzle of supersonic winds on Venus (driven probably by active volcanoes), and the completely unexpected discovery of water geysers on Enceladus (see 11/28/2005) – impossible to maintain for billions of years.  He had no answers.  He stressed how baffling Enceladus is in particular, because scientists can’t invoke tidal flexing or any of the other tricks used to explain Io’s volcanoes.  These are just two samples among a number of recent anomalies that have scientists scratching their heads and scrambling to explain things that, in an old solar system, simply cannot be.
    These problems each stem from trusting in a timeline that is no longer plausible.  Lyell, the lawyer, was wrong about his quasi-eternal, steady-state earth.  Like the other Charlie, he is dead, and the ideas of both of them have outlived their 15 decades of fame.  Let them rest in peace, and let’s move on.  Who in the science community will be first to state the obvious?  That fur is not 164 million years old, and neither are those blood vessels in the dinosaur bones, or those geysers on Enceladus.  They look young because they are.
Next headline on: Fossils • Mammals • Dating Methods • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

So, if lancelets really are close relatives of echinoderms, what are the implications for our picture of deuterostome evolution?  The short answer is that the textbook scheme is turned on its head.  Rather than the steady acquisition of progressively more chordate-like (and, by implication, human-like) features from an ancestor with nothing much to recommend it, the story becomes one of persistent loss.  The last common ancestor of extant deuterostomes would have been a free-living, bilaterally symmetrical creature with a distinct throat region perforated by gill slits, segmented body-wall musculature and possibly a reasonably sophisticated brain and central nervous system.  In a sentence, the ancestor would have looked like a cross between an amphioxus and a larger, brainier, tunicate tadpole larva.  Crazy? Possibly. But possibly not.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The monophyly of Olfactores invalidates the traditional textbook representation of chordate, and even deuterostome, evolution as a steady increase towards complexity culminating in the highly specialized brain of vertebrates.  This anthropocentric interpretation is perhaps best reflected by the terms ‘Euchordata’ (that is, ‘true chordates’) or ‘chordates with a brain’, which are used to designate the grouping of cephalochordates and vertebrates.  Tunicates should therefore no longer be considered as ‘primitive’ but rather as derived chordates with highly specialized lifestyles and developmental modes.

Evolutionists could use a lot more humility.  They should quit the parochial school of Pope Charlie that is producing a class of lemmings who cling to crazy ideas.  What Gee is saying contradicts evolution.  This new story line puts the advanced muscles, nervous system and mobility of Amphioxus before organisms that were assumed more primitive (in the old “progressive” evolution picture), and describes subsequent evolution as a story of persistent loss.
    Meanwhile, Eugenie Scott and Alan Gishlick sit on a Grand Canyon beach trying to whoop up enthusiasm for their evening song service: “It’s a long way from amphioxus / It’s a long way to us. / It’s a long way from amphioxus to the meanest human cuss. / Goodbye fins and gill slits / Hello lungs and hair! / It’s a long, long way from amphioxus, / But we come from there” (10/06/2005 commentary).  It’s even longer when you’re going backwards.  Gee’s story gives them more food for cuss.
Next headline on: Fossils • Genetics • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Tom Turnipseed, writing for the website Zmag.org, suggested that the real message lies in the penguins’ “cooperating with one another and sacrificing their own lives and individual gain for the common good and survival of their own kind” – behaviour that executives at Enron, the US energy company involved in an infamous corruption scandal, should have emulated.  Other reviews also allude to this supposedly altruistic behaviour and the “inexplicable love” shown.
    Were we watching the same film?  In fact, the penguins are perfect little darwinians, selfish as can be.  No one seemed to question why the birds took such pains on their return to the breeding grounds to find their own mate, their own chick, in a crowd of thousands of look-alikes.  It seemed human, after all, like sailors returning from war eagerly seeking their families among the throng on shore.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

But if the penguins simply needed to save the species, surely any chick would do, and feeding the nearest hungry beak would save all that tramping through the snow searching for one’s special little one.  Why bother?  Evolution supplies the answer: only scrupulous discrimination of your own kin will perpetuate one’s genes.  How the penguins manage such sophisticated feats is a fascinating area of study, one that will yield much more than a consideration of whether they are good role models for monogamy.
    If we use animals as poster children for ideology, we not only end up in meaningless arguments over whose examples are more significant (cannibalistic mantids or promiscuous bonobos?), we risk losing sight of what is truly interesting and important about their behaviour.  What the executives at Enron are supposed to learn is another story.

This article provides a case study on the self-refuting nature of Darwinian explanations.  The commentary that follows is not going to defend anthropomorphism and moralizing from animals – Zuk is right that you could pick and choose between extremes and find any moral lesson you want out there in the wild.  According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, morality requires a rational mind and personhood.  A knowledgeable theologian would not make the mistake of attributing penguin behavior to rational moral choice and forethought.  Object lessons from penguin behavior might prove useful as pedagogical aids, as long as one does not really believe the birds are rationally choosing moral actions.  The intelligent design perspective would be that animals operate according to internal programs designed to preserve the species in a dynamic environment.  But how can Zuk, on the other extreme, claim that the emperor penguins are “perfect little darwinians, selfish as can be?”  Her explanation might sound reasonable to a high-school biology student, but is unworthy of scholarly readers of Nature, because a careful look reveals that it falls into the same anthropomorphic, moralizing trap.  Worse, it overlooks the most important aspects of the march of the penguins that need explaining.
    Zuk tried to pre-empt the objection that “any chick would do,” so let’s consider her answer.  Why wouldn’t any chick do?  Within a strictly Darwinian picture of the scene, the objection she sweeps away so dismissively seems valid.  Why would natural selection go to the extra cost of evolving strict pair-bonding?  That would require heritable genetic mutations leading to accurate discrimination of specific calls from one mate out of thousands, and behaviors that defer compensation till the correct mate is found.  Let’s call one pair Homer and Marge, and their little chick Maggie.  Wouldn’t it make much more sense in evolutionary terms for Marge to go direct to the fittest-looking chick in the crowd?  Suppose Marge finds Homer, only to see that little Maggie is a sickly, scrawny youngster not likely to last long in the struggle for life.  If evolutionists talk about “mate choice” and “choosy females” as part of the process of passing on one’s genes, then certainly we can ask about “chick choice.”  It seems that would make even better sense in a Darwinian world, where the individual doesn’t really matter in the long run.  The fittest chick is going to be the one most likely to carry on the genes of the population.  Why wouldn’t penguins evolve toward a behavior where all the chicks go running out to the mothers, and the fastest ones get the food?  By this time Homer’s work is done.  He may not even link up with Marge next season.  If a male is needed for another month of rearing, any of the nearly identical tuxedo-attired dudes could do the job.
    The only way Zuk could claim her answer is better is to violate a Darwinian principle and commit a logical fallacy.  She has to admit to a moral standard and commit anthropomorphism, the very errors she set out to debunk.  The moral standard, perverse though it is, is that individual selfishness is good.  Notice her words, “perfect little darwinians, selfish as can be.”  By implication, selfishness is a good thing because it contributes to survival and the passing on of one’s genes.  But that begs the question of why these are good values.  The logical fallacy is to imagine that penguins can be selfish, or exercise enough forethought and self-control against the severe rigors of their harsh environment to decide, in penguin-English, “If I can just manage to hold on against these hardships, I will be rewarded by passing on my genes.”  If penguins cannot care about monogamy, they cannot care about what happens to their genes.  If nobody cares, though, then the cheaper way for evolution to keep the penguin population booming is to reward the top contenders; line up the 90th percentile of fittest chicks with the females that have the most food, and let the rest die off, regardless of who the parents are.
    Zuk completely ignored a more serious problem.  She only addressed the individual pair-bonding behavior, not the origin of the penguins themselves (see also 11/10/2005 and 10/27/2005 entries).  How did the bones, wings, scuba gear, ears, eyes, waterproof coat, muscles and tendons, and organ systems evolve?  She assumes that we will accept the Darwinian mechanism for all the wonders of nature just because she can concoct a story about how selfish genes produced individual pair bonding.  This is so typical of evolutionists.  They seize the gnat and claim ownership of the camel.  Finding one customer willing to say he feels better after taking Darwin’s Finest Natural Selection Snake Oil, they advertise it to the world as the panacea for the universe.  Also, she herself points to the fact that sexual behaviors in the animal kingdom are extremely diverse.  If Darwin fulfilled the Newtonian Dream of finding a natural law for biology, how can it explain opposites?  Where are his equations?  Why would not Darwin’s mechanism steer all populations toward uniform behaviors, instead of producing cannibalism among mantids, promiscuity among bonobos, and monogamy among birds?  By explaining everything, it explains nothing.  Evolutionary theory does not predict the behavior observed among emperor penguins, but only tries to attach a story to it after the fact.  The Darwin Party has replaced the science lab with a storytelling pub for lazy scientists (see 12/22/2003 commentary).
    A nice film like March of the Penguins may stir our hearts, but whether or not penguins make good role models for humans is completely beside the point.  Darwinism fails to account for the origin of all living things, not just penguins.  Evolutionary explanations are speculative, anthropomorphic, and inadequate.  By moralizing herself in a somewhat haughty tone, Zuk has only reinforced the reality that humans care about right and wrong.
    As for the penguins, they are getting pretty tired of all this evolutionary speculating, too.  See Eco Inquirer for the story....
Next headline on:  Birds • Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

OK, the hunt is on.  Time to examine dinosaur bones from around the world and analyze this new source of data.  “Seek and ye shall find,” one of the subtitles states without referencing Jesus.
    These findings need to be correlated with solid research on the fossilization process.  This could be a test not only of theories about fossilization and dating methods, but of the willingness of evolutionists to follow the evidence where it leads.  Don’t count on it; Peggy Ostrom has already remarked, “we can actually look at the real molecules that existed half a million years ago.”  Dr. Epistemology responded, “Well, what do you know.”
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Dating Methods • Fossils

Of the thousands of different metabolites that plants can produce, many form a cloud around the plant.  These volatile compounds reflect the metabolic complexity of plants and also serve a diversity of functions.  Volatile compounds signal opportunity to insects, pathogens, and pollinators alike.  In a classic case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” plants being nibbled on by insect herbivores can produce volatile signals that call in other insects to prey on the herbivores.  For plants that flower at night, volatiles may be a better signal than floral color or shape to draw in the best insect pollinators.  Volatile signals are also read by neighboring plants and reinterpreted as instructions to adjust their own defenses.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Plants may “eavesdrop” on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by herbivore-attacked neighbors to activate defenses before being attacked themselves.  Transcriptome and signal cascade analyses of VOC-exposed plants suggest that plants eavesdrop to prime direct and indirect defenses and to hone competitive abilities.  Advances in research on VOC biosynthesis and perception have facilitated the production of plants that are genetically “deaf” to particular VOCs or “mute” in elements of their volatile vocabulary.  Such plants, together with advances in VOC analytical instrumentation, will allow researchers to determine whether fluency enhances the fitness of plants in natural communities.

Had you ever given much thought to this amazing phenomenon?  If you have ever studied organic chemistry, you know how complicated synthesis of particular compounds can be.  Plants do this kind of synthesis in hundreds of thousands of ways, easily and purposefully, via complex enzymes.  The enzymes, furthermore, do not just perform at random in the cell, but deliver their messaging molecules with storage and emission machinery.  This is all in addition to the sophisticated “interplant internet” processes that keep the individual plant in touch with itself (11/09/2004, 08/12/2005).
    Animal and human olfactory senses also require extremely sophisticated mechanisms for detecting, transmitting and decoding these signals (08/31/2005, 06/07/2005)   The whole picture is one of rich symbiosis involving numerous organisms working together to maintain a rich and diverse ecology.

The “warfare of nature” metaphor may be misleading (plants being “attacked” by insects, etc.; see 07/04/2003 “Metaphors Bewitch You”).  It may be more appropriate to think of these interactions as checks and balances in a homeostatic system.  In a dynamic world (picture ice hockey players with everyone in motion), there need to be ways to accelerate some processes and put the brakes on others.  Catastrophic imbalances that lead to devastation or extinction may reflect not so much on the design of an originally perfect creation, but on the judgment of a cursed world.

Evolutionists want us to believe that all this complexity and interconnectedness is the result of blind, unguided, processes that managed to accumulate single benefits of rare beneficial mistakes here and there.  This story should remind us of how improbable that explanation is.  As usual, the evolutionists failed to offer detailed scenarios of how the enzymes, vacuoles, emitters and sensory organs evolved.  They merely assumed that they did, somehow, even to the absurd length of invoking that old hand-waving trick, “convergent evolution.”
    Don’t let the fallacies of fallible humans ruin your day.  Plant volatiles enrich our lives and make the world beautiful and informative.  Get out and smell the roses and tomatoes.
    It was hip during the new age fad to talk to your house plants.  Whether they listened to your words or not is debatable, but they might have been eavesdropping on your own VOCs.  Your wilting ficus or rhododendron might be trying to tell you something.
Next headline on: Plants • Health • Amazing Stories

Presenters at the conference said the battle is far from over.  On Sunday morning, they announced the formation of a new organization of scientists, scientific groups and supporters – the Alliance for Science – to fight what they see as an assault on science from religious conservatives.  The new organization aims to create graduate fellowships, increase funding for research, train math and science teachers, and build tax incentives for research and development, said co-chairman Paul Forbes.
Earlier in the conference, which began last week, a panel outlined tactics that public school teachers and scientists can take in teaching concepts such as intelligent design and creationism – and how to keep them out of the classroom.  They talked of using the media, educating voters and going to court, if needed.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Welcome to the American Association for the Advancement of Dogmatism, and the Alliance for Silence.  The pigs are in power, and have ruled that all religions are equal, but some (like naturalism) are more equal than others.  They now want to train the attack dogs on the workhorses who built Empirical Farm and bully them into submission.  Meanwhile, they tell visitors, “Controversy?  There’s no controversy here.  This is utopia.”
    Did you notice the non-sequitur in their battle plan?  Increase funding for research, create graduate fellowships, train math and science teachers, build tax incentives for research and development – great ideas (unless the pigs are the teachers and the attack dogs guard the doors).  Do the pigs ever look in the mirror and realize they resemble Farmer Jones?
    We have a better idea for them.  Find scientific evidence that chance and necessity can turn hydrogen into people.  Then find evidence that it did.
    Wonder what Jesus would think about Coyne calling those who trust the word of God a “plague in our midst.”  We take this to mean Coyne feels about them like bugs feel about Raid.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education • Bible and Theology

The emergence of life on Earth is on a short list of the biggest unknowns in science.  Did life begin in a small, warm pond at the edge of a primordial sea, as Charles Darwin speculated?  Or deep beneath that sea, around one of the burbling hydrothermal vents first seen in the 1970s?  And never mind the where: What was it, this initial germ of life?  Was it a cell?  A replicating molecule?   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

This is probably not what opponents of the teaching of evolution want to hear, but it seems that a kind of molecular natural selection applies even to the world of geochemistry.  Some types of molecular chains outcompeted [sic] other molecular chains for the planet’s resources, and gradually they led to [sic] the kind of molecules that life depends upon—and all this before the first living thing oozed forth [sic].  Many scientists say that life wasn’t a freak accident at all, but the likely outcome of the interaction of the molecules and minerals of the Earth.  “Life is an elaboration of something very simple,” says Smith.  “It looks easy and inevitable.”

All of this is sure to be a matter of contentious debate for a long time.  But ours would not be so interesting a world if its ultimate secrets were easily discovered.  It took us four billion years to evolve to a point where we could even begin the search. 

Achenbach’s page should be ridiculed, scoffed at, deplored and castigated on scientific grounds, let alone on grounds of philosophy, theology, or history.  Why is there no rebuttal?  Why do stupid ideas get free press in NG and most other pop-sci rags, even when any educated science writer should be aware of the extreme implausibility of the whole scenario?  Any kind of metabolic cycle that consumes all available resources is not going any further, even if geochemists find one (don’t hold your breath).  A chemical cycle is not a perpetual motion machine, and natural selection cannot be invoked for a system that does not yield progeny able to mutate.  Furthermore, it is virtually impossible that a genetic molecule would ever arise with a code matching this chemical cycle, let alone incorporate it into a membrane and discover the art of complete automated self-replication, even if it “wanted” to (which is against materialist rules to even imagine).
    “Emergence” is one of those miracle words in the naturalist dictionary.  Hazen talks glowingly about emergence in his lectures, but the examples he gives are really lame.  For inorganic processes, are you impressed by wave patterns in sand?.  All his examples in the living world, whether internet commerce or neurons producing consciousness, involve intelligence, or else logically beg the question whether naturalistic processes could have produced them.  In short, the whole theory of metabolism-first origin of life is fraught with extremely serious scientific and conceptual challenges.  The little bit of chemistry lab work done in support of it is irrelevant, because it is done under highly controlled conditions by intelligent design.  Metabolism-first is a fringe opinion among evolutionists themselves.  Its popularizers are in no position to start lecturing about determinism, human consciousness and the meaning of life.  We trust that any explanation of why the quote above wins SEQOTW is superfluous for our highly perceptive and intelligent readership.
    Scientific materialism became a fad in Germany in the mid-1800s.  Ludwig Feuerbach popularized the term “you are what you eat.”  Karl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott and Ludwig Büchner formed an “unholy trinity” of scientific materialists who promoted, with religious fervor, a radically naturalistic view of a universe consisting of nothing more than molecules in motion.  Their materialism was absolute and positivistic.  It included human rationality: Vogt wrote that “thoughts stand in the same relation to the brain as gall does to the liver and urine to the kidneys.”  They built their materialistic house on the assumptions that (1) life was simple (just one more natural arrangement of matter) and (2) natural laws in a clockwork universe rendered a Creator obsolete.  They also worked to promote a new view of scientific practice – methodological naturalism – i.e., working as if scientific materialism is true.  Like today’s evolutionary evangelists, they demanded surrender of all of philosophy and the humanities.  Worth noting, each of these men hated Christianity.  By young adulthood, having become enthralled by scientific laws, each went on a crusade to replace all religion with a “scientific” view of the world.  It was time, they preached, for mankind to grow up and get real.  Science had taught us to jettison all “superstitions” about God and a spiritual realm.  The only thing that existed was matter, obeying Newtonian-style force laws.  Mind was just an artifact, an “emergent property” of matter, a secretion of the brain.  (Historians note: Karl Marx was also caught up in this materialistic euphoria.)
    The science that fueled 19th century materialism can no longer hold up.  We know much more now about the fine-tuning of the universe and the extreme complexity of life.  We have discovered that living cells are not just bags of molecules obeying force laws, but programmed factories of molecular machines with incredibly rich libraries of coded information.  Though mind is clearly influenced by the brain, scientists still struggle to reduce consciousness and rationality to mere neurons.  Natural laws expressible in equations, the Newtonian dream of the materialists, have proved elusive in biology.  The “clockwork universe” of Laplace has given way to a statistical world, with uncertainties residing in the basic units of matter.  We have learned that positivism is self-refuting.  The hope of eternal progress has turned to vanity.  The vision of an eternal, steady state universe has been replaced by one with a sudden beginning and a slow, ignominious end.
    Notice that their assumptions and anti-religious sentiments preceded their “scientific” writings and popularizations of materialism.  The same assumptions and motivations still drive today’s evolutionary-science community, even though their castle was built on an obsolete early-19th-century conception of the world.  Meanwhile, the enforcement of methodological naturalism that came to dominate scientific practice after Darwin ensures they will never escape from their bonds.
    The present crop of scientific materialists, with their evident optimism and confidence in the eventual success of origin-of-life studies, should consider the bitter end of their path.  They should ponder the fact that depression afflicted many of the early scientific materialists.¹  Büchner, the symbolic leader of the scientific materialism movement, expressed his personal feelings years after the publication of his immensely popular and influential materialistic gospel, Force and Matter.  His pessimistic conclusions must necessarily follow if Ge•ne•sis rather than Genesis is the true history of the world.  Extremely depressed and nearly suicidal, Büchner wrote under a pseudonym what he felt about life around the same time he was confidently preaching materialism in his book.  He reflected, “We are like dogs on a treadmill.  The glowing irons of life prod us to restless running without goal, until we fall dead from exhaustion in the grave we have made for ourselves.”²
Next headline on: Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

---

¹Historical information about 19th century scientific materialism was gathered largely from an excellent series of lectures by Dr. Frederick Gregory, History of Science 1700-1900, The Teaching Company, especially lecture 31: “Scientific Materialism at Mid-Century.”
²Would you rather have an abundant life?  Start with different assumptions.  Not “in the beginning were the particles,” but in the beginning was the Word.

• Beam Me Up, Scott:  Pro-evolution activist Eugenie Scott took a column in Cell¹ to try to explain why creationism is such a mainstay in American culture.  Presenting her usual arguments that ID is not science but a polished form of religious creationism (after all, Judge Jones said so), she tried to list some historical reasons why it is so hard to stamp out; after all, “Outside of the United States, people are dumbfounded by events like these.”  Discussing social, political, and religious history of the United States, she argued that the primary reason is that giving everyone their fair share at the microphone is “the American way.”
• Viewpoint Discrimination:  One man’s reasoned discussion is another’s propaganda.  When Robert Hazen came to U. of Iowa to preach “Why intelligent design is not science,” a reporter asked ID proponent Guillermo Gonzalez (co-author of The Privileged Planet) what he thought.  He wrote in a letter to the Iowa Tribune that he expected to hear propaganda, and his expectations were realized.  Hazen used irrelevant arguments, Gonzalez said, that can be disproved by looking at the reception to the big bang theory.  It had profound religious implications, yet scientists evaluated it and accepted it based on scientific evidence.
      Gonzalez has taken heat for his views at Iowa State.  The Iowa Hawkeye describes how his beliefs have been condemned, his qualifications questioned, and his book ridiculed by peers.  Michael Francisco on Evolution News refuted the claims of the critics, and sees this as more evidence of attempts to marginalize ID as religion so that scientists can dismiss it outright rather than discuss its merits.
• Selective Evidence:  Jodi Rudoren reported about the Ohio ID flipflop (see 02/15/2006 story) in the Feb. 15 New York Times.  Tom Magnuson at Access Research Network filled in some blanks: “The story never mentions the personal character attacks made against the drafters of the lesson plan, nor does it mention that ID is NOT in the lesson at all,” he said.  “Also not mentioned was that the relevant science standards benchmark specifically says that ID is not mandated in Ohio.”
• Skell Irrelevance:  Darwinism is simply beside the point, argued Phillip Skell in the Philadelphia Daily News (see Discovery Institute reprint).  The fact that hardly any scientist refers to Darwinian theory in their work shows that it is not the cornerstone of biology, as claimed by its supporters.  Skell also pointed out how Darwinism is so flexible, it is used to explain opposite things, and therefore is untestable.
• Genetic Fallacy:  New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary hosted several intelligent-design lectures and a debate this month as part of the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum.  Baptist Press reported on a lecture by Francis J. Beckwith (Baylor U), who argued that religious motivations should not negate intelligent design.  Striking down a policy (such as a school board science framework) strictly because of the religious beliefs of some of its adherents is “logically fallacious and constitutionally suspect.”
• Ruse Ruse and Dempski Dempsey:  At the friendly ID boxing match at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Michael Ruse took the first punch against ID, reports Baptist Press, by asking William Dembski, “If Intelligent Design is indeed a true scientific paradigm or research program, what results in science are you actually getting?”  Dembski blocked the punch by claiming that it is not the burden of ID to gather new facts, but to make sense of them.  Dembski countered by asking Ruse why Darwinism should use guided scientific experience to produce unguided explanations.  Ruse kept trying to corner Dembski to admit the God word.  Sounds like a lively interchange ensued, with other speakers like philosopher William Lane Craig joining in the fray at the end.  Baptist Press posted a second article on the debate.
• Back in Kansas Again:  William Dembski followed his appearance in New Orleans with an appearance at University of Kansas, Baptist Press reported.  1500 people attended a Campus Crusade event, where Dembski acknowledged Darwin as a great man, but denied that his theory could account for the big changes in the history of life.  The article has links to MP3 files of the event.
• Dismiss or Engage:  Ajit Varki (UC San Diego) doesn’t want to debate evolution any more than he wants to debate a flat earth, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune in an article on the “hot topic” of evolution.  Meanwhile, students at the IDEA club on campus were drawing equations on the whiteboard.  Ken Miller and Eugenie Scott dismiss all the creationism as just a cultural phenomenon.  Josh Norton, a senior and leader of the IDEA club, is disappointed that he can’t get the faculty to objectively interact with the club and its arguments.  They just dismiss his requests with cliches like, “There’s no intelligence in intelligent design.”
• No on ID, No on Darwin:  “Pitt professor challenges Darwin,” writes the Pitt News about Jeffrey Schwartz and his revolutionary ideas about evolution (01/26/2006).  He denies Darwin’s claim that evolution happens gradually, opting instead for his own “Sudden Origins” theory largely because of the fossil record (see 02/14/2006) and discoveries in cell biology that show they resist change.  An evolutionist and no friend of ID, Schwarz nonetheless feels a kind of empathy experienced among foxhole mates: “Darwinism’s presence in science is so overwhelming,” Schwartz said.  “For the longest time, there was no room for alternative thinking among the scientific community.”  He says that time will tell if they will open up to alternatives.
• DODO Heads:  Alvin Powell reviewed Randy Olson’s “Flock of Dodos” film (see 01/07/2006) for the Harvard Gazette.  Olsen handled the ID community “gently,” Powell writes, saying they are presented as “likeable” people marketing a “shaky” theory.  The film’s theme is about communication: the scientific community has failed to sell evolution through neglect, while creationists know how to present their ideas in an attractive way.
• Catholic Counter-Reformation:  Here’s an enigma from Vatican astronomer George Coyne, found on Reuters.com: “The intelligent design movement belittles God.  It makes God a designer, an engineer.  The God of religious faith is a god of love.  He did not design me.”  Come again?
• Catholic Appeasement:  A Reuters story published by MSNBC tells about Hans Kung, a liberal Swiss priest who has found a way to make peace with the evolutionists.  Basically, he gives science all the authority of explanation for everything in the natural world, leaving for theology only questions of ultimate causation and meaning.  Another article on MSNBC portrays the Pope as embracing the conquests of science and trying to embrace dialogue and understanding between science and religion.

As to Hans Kung’s compromise (we don’t call him father because Jesus said not to), it’s about as practical as compromising with a grizzly bear.  If the bear needs a meal and the shivering man needs a fur coat, who gets the better deal?  If Kung was a better student of history and logic, he would understand that Darwin acid will eat him alive and dissolve away his faith into ephemeral vapor that will disperse into the molecular randomness of a purposeless universe.  How can he maintain any semblance of Catholicism and espouse such a position?  Where, in his compromise, is room for Jesus and the Bible?  Where is history and archaeology?  Give the Darwinists the natural world, and they will take everything and leave you with nothing (02/11/2006), gloating and snickering all the way to the bank.  Kung is not engaging the debate, he is capitulating.  His whole surrender is predicated on the assumption that the Darwinists have proven their case.  Why, then, is Schwarz pointing out that the fossil and genetic evidence disagrees with Darwinism?  How ironic that the scientists seem to be more attuned to weaknesses in evolutionary theory than liberal theologians who are ready to wave the white flag at the first sign of blood, even if it is only stage blood.  They are turncoats who are more quick to slander their allies as “fundamentalist Christians who ignore science” than to call the Darwin Party to task for bloviating microevolution into a theory of everything (TOE).  Of course, the Darwinist media is all too happy to publish the TOE-licking antics of these Belafontes on their front pages for propaganda value.
    Bless Michael Ruse’s heart for engaging his rivals in honest debate before an audience largely opposed to his views.  Hard to believe he would still use finch beaks and Archaeopteryx as evidence for Darwinism, though.
    As for Eugenie Scott’s garrulity metric, our blovimeter blew out the top end, so we will have to upgrade to the Humvee model.  She hasn’t thought of anything original since Huxley roamed the earth.  Like Clepsydra Geyser in Yellowstone, she has been erupting steadily for years without taking anything in, like a perpetual