“Darwinists sometimes claim that their theory helps us to understand which animals are most closely related... on the basis of their genetic and biochemical similarities.  But this is just comparative biology at the level of genes and proteins.  Linnaeus did comparative biology, yet he was a creationist who lived a century before Darwin; Owen and Agassiz did comparative biology, yet they rejected Darwin’s theory.”
—Jonathan Wells, in an upcoming book (see Evolution News).

Funny, honey; none of these articles mentioned evolution, but they seemed to have no problem using the word design.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design • Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Amazing Stories

Geneticists would have been way ahead of the curve if they had listened to IBM instead of Dawkins.  “The average lab does not have the resources to prove or disprove this, so it will need a lot of effort by lots of people,” said Dr. Rigoutsos.  Not only are Information Technology (IT) people better suited to understanding codes, they might even benefit from imitating nature’s programming tricks.  Life’s code works, doesn’t it?  Look at a bird, or a butterfly, or a human baby.  Most of the time the right parts come out in the right places, generation after generation, for thousands of years.
    Dr. Stephen Meyer used this point to good effect in a debate with evolutionist Peter Ward in Seattle yesterday.  “Meyer countered that neo-Darwinian evolution had been heuristically unfruitful in leading science to think that non-encoding DNA was simply ‘junk’,” an eyewitness said.  “Meyer insisted that design assumptions more readily led one to conclude there was purpose in such ‘junk DNA.’”  Read all about this debate on Evolution News.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Intelligent Design

• The team suggests three species evolved as a single lineage between at least 4.4 million years ago and 2.9 million years ago – an era when humankind refined its ability to walk upright while developing new ways to live (see timeline below).
      The idea is one of the most contentious in palaeoanthropology.  The fossil trove, reported earlier this month (T. D. White et al. Nature 440, 883-889; 2006) has confirmed [sic] some important aspects of the trail towards the genus Homo, which appeared around 2.3 million years ago [sic].  But experts are still bickering over the relationship between the species that have been found.
• Experts have squabbled over the relationship between Ar. ramidus, Au. anamensis and Au. afarensis ever since they were discovered.
• This month’s Nature paper makes a bold argument, and shows the Awash team seeking to put its mark on the record.  Others in the field are impressed.  “When you find 30 new hominid fossils, you are allowed a certain amount of conjecture,” says Bernard Wood, a palaeoanthropologist at George Washington University in Washington DC.  “As always, they have done a fantastic job.”
      But he and others are unconvinced by the Awash team’s conclusion: “This is only the first half of the rugby match,” says Wood.
• Meave Leakey, lead author on the Au. anamensis discoveries in Kenya, is more blunt.  “I don’t believe this,” she says.  “We do not have the specimens to fill the gaps.”
• The existence of other species would cloud or eliminate the argument for a direct lineage.  “My prejudice is there are more lineages rather than fewer – more diversity,“ says Wood.  “I have to concede these new data are dramatic.  But we should beware coming out with a complete explanation when we don’t have all the evidence.”
• This argument frustrates White.  “There were Martians there back then too,” he says.  “And spacecraft all over the Pliocene – we just haven’t found them yet.”
• Similar arguments run for various phases of hominid evolution, for example whether Homo ergaster evolved into H. erectus, or whether they were two coexisting lineages – White advocates the former.  But ultimately, the argument comes down to the point that more fossils could always be found, so it is unclear that the two sides will ever agree.

Didn’t we foretell this?  Go back to April 12 when all the news media were slain in the spirit over White’s holey relics.  We warned that “the field of evolutionary paleoanthropology is filled with rivalry, contradiction, deception, exaggeration and outright fraud.”  Notice that Dalton’s depiction of rivalry applies not just to this case, but to “various phases of hominid evolution” – indeed, all of them.
    We also said, “Too bad the news media are all dupes; they think this is science instead of mud wrestling.”  Our only mistake was getting the sport wrong.  We should have known that rugby is more bloody.
Next headline on: Early Man

CEH leaves this controversy for others to debate, but mentions it for those interested in “shaking the pillars to make sure they’re rigid” (or not) as Andy Fabian (U of Cambridge) is quoted as saying in the article.  Sometimes the most confident things in science become less confident as more knowledge is gained.  If we are not sure about constants of physics, how much less so for shaky, slippery things like evolutionary theory?
Next headline on: Cosmology • Physics

Evolution is both a fact and a theory: the most comprehensive explanation of the features and diversity of living things.  It is the most important theory in biology, yet is surrounded by paradoxes.  Despite the simplicity of its central concepts, evolution has a long history of misunderstandings.  Despite its lack of moral or prescriptive content, evolution has been used to justify social policies that range from the admirable to the appalling.  Despite the increasingly important role evolutionary principles and knowledge play in human biology, evolution is rejected by more than half the American public.  Of all the biological disciplines, evolutionary biology has the most far-reaching philosophical implications and the most diverse applications to society.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Darwin succeeded where others before him had failed in part because he offered the first truly scientific (i.e., purely materialistic and therefore testable) theory to explain the history of life.  He permanently changed the terms on which theories in biology would be acceptable as science.  Yet few of Darwin’s contemporaries or those who followed truly internalized Darwinism into a coherent and consistent world view.  Materialistic science is vastly more important to modern society than it was in Darwin’s time, yet scientists and non-scientists alike still struggle to fully reconcile materialistic science with their personal and social search for meaning in life.  On the one hand, proponents of intelligent design have declared their intention to overthrow “materialism and its cultural legacies”, which presumably would include not just Darwinism but also everything from agriculture to modern medicine [sic].  On the other, many mainstream scientists – both those who claim to be religious and those who do not – have attempted to reconcile their scientific pursuits with their non-scientific personal philosophies.  Can one simultaneously hold two mutually exclusive philosophies of reality – one materialistic and the other not?  If so, how?  And does doing so make one intellectually dishonest?  Is it possible to construct a logically consistent world view that fully accommodates meaningful religious belief with materialistic science?

Notice several flaws, contradictions, and admissions in these abstracts.

• Charlie Worship:  It is always Big D that is the figurehead of everything wonderful in science. 
• Charlie Science:  Notice that Darwin was responsible for redefining science as materialism.  Before Darwin, creationism and design thinking was common and produced no conflict, but Darwin “permanently changed the terms on which theories in biology would be acceptable as science.”  Changing the terms of acceptability is not a matter of science, but a matter of philosophy about science.
• Charlie Morals:  Darwinism knows no morals (as Futuyma admits), so it is illogical for him to find anything “admirable or appalling,” or for Allmon to talk about intellectual honesty and meaning.
• Charlie Truth:  Futuyma and Allmon just shot themselves in the foot (see self-refuting fallacy).  As materialists, they pulled the rug out from under any validity to concepts of truth, while referring to “philosophies of reality.”
• Charlie Logic:  Allmon asserted that attacks on evolution are attacks on agriculture and modern medicine (see non-sequitur).  Those disciplines were doing just fine before Charlie came along.
• Charlie Control:  This Astrobiology symposium was only open to evolutionists.  This shows you not only which bed Astrobiology sleeps in, but how evolutionists rig the game to ridicule their opponents while keeping them out of hearing range.
• Charlie Leadership:  If less than half the population accepts Darwinism, Futuyma should seriously consider the proposition that it would be good for him to get religion, because that apparently confers better fitness.  This would be a win-win situation.  Religion would lose an enemy, and he would necessarily undermine the fitness principle of Darwinism itself – thus burning the bridge behind him.  As a bonus, he might even win Pascal’s Wager.

The only question left is which of the two quotes is winner of the SEQOTW prize, or whether it’s a draw.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

...and maybe to prophecy buffs.
Next headline on: Bible and Theology

A four-ton land rover buried in sediment a mile and a half under the seabed – think about it.  Does this sound like the setting described in the article: “dry plains with rivers running through them”?  If the dinosaur lived in that environment, what happened?  Meanwhile, they should look for more down there.  What if the dinosaur fossils we find on the surface represent a tiny fraction of bones buried deep under the sea, all over the world?
Next headline on: Dinosaurs • Fossils • Marine Life

Check out what Ken Ham said on Answers in Genesis about this latest salvo.  If the snake had legs, does the evolutionary claim have any?
Next headline on: Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Evolution

The Cambrian “explosion,” or radiation, is perhaps the most significant evolutionary transition seen in the fossil record.  Essentially all of the readily fossilizable animal body plans first appear in the fossil record during this interval (Valentine 2002).  We move from the depths of the Precambrian world, where the sedimentary record is essentially devoid of animal fossils, to the Phanerozoic, where animal life leaves pervasive evidence of its existence, both as body fossils and as disturbers of the sediment.
    Numerous explanations for the Cambrian “explosion” have been posited (note here that I am not considering here in any detail explanations for the precursor to the Cambrian “explosion,” the Ediacaran radiation).  Classification of this rich panoply of explanations is somewhat arbitrary but typically explanations center on one of the following factors: (a) changes in the abiotic environment, (b) changes in the genetic or developmental capacity of the taxa involved, or (c) changes in the biotic environment, i.e., in ecology.  All of these factors must have played a role, but how important was each?  To what extent did the Cambrian “explosion” flow from an interaction between them?  How might we develop a conceptual framework for understanding that interaction?  Developing a coherent explanation for the Cambrian “explosion” faces several challenges....   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

There are five major components of the Cambrian “explosion” that need to be explained: (a) the spectacular increase in animal disparity, (b) the rise in animal diversity,³ (c) why the time of onset of the explosion was some 543–542 mya, (d) why the duration of the explosion was some tens of million years long, and (e) why the event appears unique.
    There are also two problems that emerge once we begin to examine the fossil record in some detail: (f) Where are the (largely) missing fossils of the bilaterian stem-groups, and (g) What are the phylogenetic affinities of the Ediacaran biota?

1. Environmental Explanations:  These look for geological or atmospheric changes that created environments suitable for change.  He says, “There has been a resurgence in this class of explanation, partly owing to increased interest in the Cambrian ‘explosion’ within the wider geoscience community.”  (Who, in particular is interested, and why, is not detailed.)
   1. Increased oxygen?  Were oxygen levels too low for large animals?  Probably not.  Some Ediacarans were large.  Hard to test: we don’t know the minimum oxygen requirements of the first animals, and we don’t know how much oxygen there was.
   2. Snowball Earth?  Did biology’s big bang after the Earth emerged from a deep freeze?  Unlikely; too early.  More importantly, “It is also hard to see how a major environmental catastrophe could have lead [sic] to fundamentally new levels of developmental and morphological organization.”
   3. Carbon shock?  Maybe the Earth underwent some catastrophe at the time, as suggested by carbon isotope anomalies found at the beginning of the Cambrian.  Some compare this with the presumed extinction of the dinosaurs, followed by the rapid radiation of mammals.  Marshall does not feel this comparison is appropriate.  Both dinosaurs and mammals were vertebrates.  The CE, by contrast, saw “a dramatic increase in both disparity and diversity.”  Worse, even though “We have much to understand” about such things, this suffers from the same objection: “it is hard to see how a simple (even if large) environmental disturbance can lead to an increase in disparity.”
   4. Continental shakeup?  Maybe polar wanderings of continents caused “methane burps” that altered Earth’s temperature.  Same flaw: “No explanation is offered as to why an increase in diversity, per se, should have led to new levels of disparity.”  He tries not to be too hard on these suggestions.  “This remains an intriguing hypothesis,” he grants.
   In summary, each of these sets the table but doesn’t invite the guests.  “While it is clear that the environment needs to have been conducive to the evolution of large animals for the Cambrian ‘explosion’ to proceed,” he explains, “none of the environmental explanations address why an environment permissive of complex animal life should necessarily lead to the evolution of complex animal life, and especially why we should see a shift from diploblastic-grade organisms to complex triploblasts.”⁴
2. Developmental Explanations:  These look for developmental or genetic reasons for the sudden onset of evolutionary innovation.  Marshall mentions a key point: “Animals cannot evolve if the genes for making them are not yet in place.”
   1. Bilateral Development?  While the discovery of Hox genes began a “revolution in our understanding of the genetic basis of morphological form,” Marshall admits we still “understand little of how and when the system originated,” but perhaps gene duplication was involved.  But here he uses his first exclamation point.  Noting that all animal groups share the same developmental program, we can make inferences about their common origins: “While we only have detailed genetic data from a very few species (the so-called model systems), the last common ancestor of these species also happens to be the last common ancestor of all the bilaterian phyla!” he announces triumphantly.  This allows us “to make quite powerful inferences about the genetic capacities of animals that lived at the Precambrian/Cambrian transition.”  Disparate animals may look as different as apples and oranges on the outside, but are “genetically comparable” on the inside.  Maybe these developmental programs originated even farther back in time.  Time for a reality check:

      However, the significance of the presence of these shared genes is still an open question (Erwin & Davidson 2002).  Does the presence of the tinman/NK2.5 gene in the last common ancestor of the bilaterians indicate the presence of a heart and circulatory system in that ancestor, or does the gene simply mark a special type of muscle that was later and independently co-opted to initiate the development of fully developed circulatory systems in different lineages (Erwin & Davidson 2002)?  If the latter view is correct then there must have been considerable developmental sophistication on route from the last common ancestor of the bilaterians to the living phyla.

   2. Code Shuffling?  Since genes are combinatorial, like Lego blocks, maybe complexity can arise as an “emergent property” (i.e., an unforeseen level of complexity independent of the building blocks).  He refers to Stephen Wolfram, who wrote about this controversial idea in A New Kind of Science (08/18/2003).  More on this later.
   3. Entrenchment?  This is the “appealing idea” that the first members of a clade are the most plastic, but later on, they become entrenched (canalized) and resistant to change (11/02/2005, 06/25/2002)    Marshall does not think this idea is a winner, either; he thinks it more plausible that “ecological/functional constraints, not entrenchment” led to the fossil patterns seen.
   Like the environmental explanations, this class also comes up short of the dynamite needed for the CE:

   The developmental class of explanation, per se, does not address the question of why the origin of such a system should, ipso facto, lead to increased diversity or disparity.  In fact, if at least one Ediacaran is a bilaterian (Kimberella, Spriggina, Dickinsonia, or Arkarua, for example), then the bilaterian developmental system existed at least a few tens of millions of years prior to the Cambrian “explosion,” suggesting something more than just developmental innovation might be needed to account for the “explosion.”

3. Ecological Explanations:  Suppose some Precambrian animal develops an eye or a mouth (trilobites, after all, already had complex eyes)  Suddenly, the lucky winner is like a burglar with a gun in a supermarket.  To cope, all the other animals all must develop defenses, like shells and armor.  The world is divided into predators and prey.  An evolutionary arms race is on.  Marshall quotes Valentine and others who invented “niche space” models (i.e., the pace of evolution is rapid till all available niches fill up), but doesn’t feel that these ecological explanations explain why the CE was unique, or why it lasted as long (or short) as it did.  What does he think of those who suggest that macroscopic eyes and color perception triggered the CE?  Not much; there are other ways to find food, “so there almost certainly would have been some sort of radiation even if large compound eyes had not evolved in the Cambrian.” 
4. Theoretical Explanations:  Marshall considers Stewart Kauffman’s idea about “fitness landscapes” and the emergence of evolutionary innovation: “the rate of evolution dramatically slows as the landscape is explored.”  So we should expect to see an explosion, followed by a rapid decline in evolutionary innovations, “simply as a consequence of the time it takes to find progressively more optimal solutions.”  Nice math, but we must get real, Marshall reminds us:

   The challenge for this class of explanation is understanding how the theoretical constructs related the real world.  In the case of Kauffman’s NK models, the roughness of the landscape is controlled by K, the number of interactions between the N genes.  However, it is difficult to meaningfully assign a value of K to a set of genes, and it is even more difficult to interpret these landscapes in morphological terms; i.e., the NK model does not explicitly incorporate the phenotype into the calculation of the fitnesses.

There is a little word, presto, with two meanings appropriate here.  In music, it is a very rapid tempo.  In entertainment, it is a magic word that produces rabbits out of hats and beautiful women out of gunny sacks stuffed into tiny boxes.  Marshall has explained the presto tempo of the Cambrian explosion with a presto magic act.  Discerning readers know it is just a trick.
    Theists believe God created the world and life, with good reason: the world looks designed.  We must not be misled by the term Cambrian “explosion.”  We think of explosions as accidents and terror attacks, wreaking havoc and leaving a scene strewn with debris and damage.  The CE was the opposite of this.  It was a sudden, explosive appearance of order and complexity, with tissues, organs, systems and a whole ecology appearing out of nowhere – just as would be expected if it had been created.
    Duane Gish, the veteran creationist debater, never appealed to religious or Biblical arguments when standing toe-to-toe with the greatest evolutionists in debates at prestigious universities across America and Europe.  He didn’t need to, because the science was on his side.  Though he believed in the God of Genesis, he hammered on two scientific nails that shut the coffin on evolution.  He would say, (1) the law of entropy shows evolution could not happen, and (2) the fossil record shows it did not happen.
    Go to the fossil beds and look.  Strata do not come with dates on them, labeled “545 million years old.”  You can go to Mongolia or southern California and you will find rock layers with fully-formed, complex trilobites, and nothing underneath.  Gish might have believed that the strata are young, but he could grant his opponents the geological column and give them the widest possible time latitude in which to work; the conclusion is the same: the fossil record looks like creation, not like evolution.  Each new animal appears abruptly.  There is not enough time in the best of cases for that much complexity to “arise” without design.  None of the precursors on Marshall’s chart, whether the Ediacaran biota, the trace burrows, or the small shelly animals, are precursors in ancestry.  No matter how much the timeline is stretched, each new body plan appears suddenly, without ancestors.  Face it, evolutionists!  This is not what your theory predicts, and no amount of handwaving is going to make this huge problem go away.  To an unbiased observer, it falsifies evolution.  Only dogmatic adherence to a philosophy pushes evolutionists to imagine their theoretical and highly implausible yarns to explain away the evidence of their senses.
    Marshall’s elaborate fairy tale shows that the materialists cannot extricate themselves from miracles.  Creationists readily admit that God works miracles, and that the creation was miraculous.  Evolutionists despise miracles, but find them very handy.  They shield their miracles in “presto!” words, saying such-and-such a complex animal or organ (even eyes!) just emerged, arose or developed.  If you watched carefully, you saw that was exactly what Marshall did.  Though earlier he criticized other explanations for failing to provide an account for the origin of the genetic information required, he just pushed it offstage, and when needed, had a stage hand ready to sneak it in the hat, so that he could claim the rabbit was there all along.  His “Abracadabra!” was the term morphogenetic rule, some kind of unspecified, miracle-working process that builds complex bodies out of nothing.  With that sleight of mind, he distracted the audience’s attention from the fact he had cheated when we weren’t looking.  Rules imply a Rulemaker, and necessity is the mother of invention only when there are intelligent designers around.
    His math is bad, too.  Marshall thinks that a simpler “combinatorial” genetic system in the invisible ancestors is sufficient to produce eyes and circulatory systems and all the rest when the landscape “roughens”.  Any kid can try this with a Lego set.  Scatter them at random all over a trampoline, start bouncing, and see what happens.  The number of useless combinations vastly exceeds anything ordered and functional.  5 million years – 10 million – 20 million – 65 million is pitifully insufficient to hope for anything interesting, and the parts themselves are not sentient beings to care whether they live or die.  No amount of time is going to produce robots and tanks and monsters out of bouncing Lego pieces; but turn a kid loose applying his intelligent design, and you will get all these things prestissimo, along with a complete ecology in which they interact that he will be glad to explain to you.
    Marshall even had a magic fairy in the act: the evolutionists’ favorite goddess, Tinker Bell.  Did you catch her brief appearance?  Marshall referred to co-option, a synonym for “tinkering” with tools and materials that are already there, as a suggestion on how hearts and circulatory systems “developed.”  He repeatedly spoke of evolution in personal terms, as if Evolution were some frontier pioneer, capable of exploring the landscape, deciding where to build a town, then with his “toolkit” setting up the bank, general store, blacksmith shop and saloon by calling whatever materials available to order with the word, “Presto!”  With this tale, Marshall gets diverse trilobites with compound eyes; brachiopods, worms, starfish – even chordates and vertebrates.  No matter that each of these animals had many complex tissues and organs and systems with interrelated parts that had to have existed simultaneously to work.  No observational data are needed in this pagan nature religion.  The Spirit of Evolution, guided by Tinker Bell, does the miracles.
    If anyone was not convinced before now that Darwin pulled off a massive con job on science, this should clinch it.  He knew about the Cambrian explosion but delegated the solution to the future.  Well, the future is here, and the problem is worse.  In place of the holding to the standard of rigorous proof in science, Darwin introduced the power of imagination, one “long argument” (aka story) to support his own personal myth.  To back it up, he claimed he was invoking purely natural causes that were rational and did not depend on a God of the gaps.  Well, here you have the result: all he did was replace the omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise God of creation with Tinker Bell of the gaps, a blind, deaf, dumb, careless fictional deity that his disciples are free to invoke whenever a miracle is needed to patch up the Big Just-So Story.  Out of this mythology, a hierarchy emerged with a set of traditions that stifles criticism, keeps the peasants ignorant, and persecutes any perceptive lover of truth able to read the book of nature without the “official” interpretation.  It’s time for a protestant reformation.
Next headline on: Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Geology

What are you waiting for?  It’s spring, it’s beautiful outside, life is good – go feel the burn and bulk up those amazing electrical motors (02/13/2004) in your mitochondrial power plants.  The stronger they get, the better you will feel the next time you challenge your body and explore creation.
Next headline on: Health • Human Body

• Royal Edict:  The Royal Society announced in a press release an official “statement on evolution, creationism and intelligent design.”  The upshot: evolution is well-established and an essential part of science education; criticism of evolution is criticism of science; you can believe in a creator as long as you don’t call it science; bacterial resistance demonstrates evolution; creationism is religion and intelligent design is disguised creationism; debate is good in science but undermining students’ confidence in science by distorting evidence is not (and that is what creationists do, by implication); and evolution is an essential part of the rise of a scientific understanding of the world, whereas anything else is based on faith.  (No new weapons, in other words; just more of the same from the NCSE armory.)
• Hear Ye, Hear Ye:  In addition, the Royal Society published a podcast from Professor Steve Jones.  Its title left no room for doubt about the contents: “Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right.”  Prime arguments: (1) science is about disbelief, but religion is about faith; (2) while it is true that a majority in the public distrusts evolution, why do no biologists agree? and, oddly, (3) “creationism does more harm to religion than it does to science.”
      Randy Boswell reported on these two Royal Society statements on Canada.com, titling his article, “Academic Worry Grows Over ‘Intelligent Design.’”
• Sound the Alarm:  In another of a series of anti-ID attack pieces with not an inch granted the opposition, PLoS Biology warned about “Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology.”  Liza Gross associated intelligent design with doubts about stem cell research, doubts about global warming, and doubts about science in general.  Her equation is simple: intelligent design = scientific illiteracy.  Reporting the thoughts and advise of John D. Miller, she quoted his advice: “Scientists need to become involved in partisan politics and to oppose candidates who reject evolution or attack scientific research” – implying that the two go hand in hand.  No intelligent design supporter was given two words, but NCSE Director Eugenie Scott got a big sidebar, complete with big, smiling picture of her.  The end of Liza Gross’ article included the obligatory disclaimer, “The author has declared that no competing interests exist.”
• Hold Your Fire: A Parley!  A conservative group at Cornell, Sounding the Trumpet, announced rather joyfully that Cornell is going to offer a class on intelligent design this summer.  World Net Daily seemed to share this optimistic news, and so did the campus IDEA club.  William Dembski, however, interviewed by Agape Press, sees a Trojan Horse.  The teacher, Allen MacNeill, once called Dembski a “bald-faced liar,” and Cornell president Hunter Rawlings sternly denounced ID last year (see ARN reprint of IDEA Club response).  Dembski is certain the class will have a strong pro-Darwinist bias.  His take on Cornell’s strategy: “the academic mainstream ... is hunkering down, stonewalling, [and] wanting to say there’s nothing of merit here, we’ve got to shut this down – and if we’re going to teach a course on it, it’s purely to debunk it.”
• And, In This Corner... ?:  Evolution News is waiting for Science magazine to let Michael Behe respond, since last week’s claim that “irreducible complexity” had a Darwinian explanation (04/06/2006) effectively admitted that the concept was scientific.  They seem to know that it will be a long wait.  For the expected silence, Discovery Institute provided a stack of reading material on the irreducible complexity argument.
• Pre-Emptive Strike:  Remember Frazier Mountain High School?  the little rural school with its little elective “Philosophy of Design” class that earned international attention when sued and forced to recant? (see 01/25/2006 story).  Well, now that a local church is planning to rent the town hall this Sunday and show the film Icons of Evolution, the Mountain Enterprise local newspaper published a three-page, multifaceted attack on intelligent design, discounting the credibility of the teacher highlighted in the film and the Darwinism-discrediting facts presented by Dr. Jonathan Wells.  In a semblance of balanced reporting, they have also kept a list of their running news stories on the episode, mostly overtly or covertly biased against intelligent design (such as posting teacher Sharon Lemburg’s initial outline for her elective course, which was never approved or even voted on, and had no bearing on the class).  Whether this pre-emptive strike will accomplish the desired result in this largely religious and conservative community remains to be seen.
• Wind Talkers:  Alan Leshner is so keen on the war correspondence, he must be hearing things.  According to Evolution News, he heard “code language” when Oklahoma proposed criticisms of Darwinism in a new Academic Freedom Act.  To the president of the AAAS, “exposing students to all sides of the scientific debate about evolution” is really “code language” for promoting a “narrow religious agenda.”  A blog by Lawrence Selden responds in plain English.
• Quarantine the ID Flu:  A press release from the Hunter Valley, NZ Scoop warned that 2,800 Australian students are at risk of being infected with the ID that is “infiltrating” science classes.  An education spokesperson “called on federal and state education ministers to withhold public funding until these schools agreed to quarantine science teaching from religious dogma.”  Unless students are “isolated” from this “myth,” there will be appalling consequences: “They are at risk of becoming unemployable in many important areas of the economy where scientific method is essential.”
• Battle Tactics Unveiled:  Writing in American Enterprise, Joe Manzari and Seth Cooper discussed the tactics of the ACLU to intimidate school boards with lawsuits.

• Jews for ID:  David Klinghoffer wrote an ID-friendly article for Jews in the Jerusalem Post.
• Getting the Darwinists’ Goat:  Ted Byfield gave his thoughts on “Rebutting Darwinists” in two editorials on World Net Daily.
• Truth or Talk:  True.origin tries to keep a running set of scientific responses to Talk.Origins, one of the pro-Darwinist blogs often cited as authoritative by evolutionists.
• Lone Rangers:  Individuals can always write letters to the editor (if they will print them).  Here’s one by Jonathan Bartlett printed by Tulsa Today answering Alan Leshner’s attacks against the Oklahoma bill.
• Some Isolated Fair Fights:  ID the Future keeps tabs on the isolated instances of open debates between evolutionists and ID proponents.
• Bias and Anti-Bias:  When the mainstream media won’t retract their misrepresentations, Evolution News does it for them.

One of the most intriguing, dynamic and fateful cultural debates in recent history is taking place before our eyes.  No one can afford to be uninformed.
    The Darwinists are attempting to corral all non-materialists into a funny farm labeled “faith” and deny them any voice in matters of science, truth, reality or history, while their opposition are calling their bluff and demanding accountability for 150 years of misdirection and deceit.  Who’s right?  Well, look at the Darwin Party’s behavior.  If their case were so strong, they could state it before a crowd of educated, reasonable people, and easily trounce their opponents.  Since they cannot, and have failed to do so for over a century, all they can do is shore up their castle walls with the same recycled fluff, surround it with a moat of fear tactics, catapult out media bombs of misrepresentations, drug the populace with hallucinations, and desperately cry for reinforcements from the ACLU secret police.  Inside the castle, where the undecided can’t see the enemy, they decorate King Charles’s coffin, as he lies in state, telling the peasants that here lies the Great Leader Who Saved Science.  Now, what does this tell you?
    If you need responses to Steve Jones and the other Royalist propaganda, well, keep reading, and reading, and reading.  We’ve got over five years of antidotes, and unlike the Darwinist Press, you get to hear the very best on both sides make their case.  The next article is a good place to start.
Next headline on: Education • Darwinism • Intelligent Design

• Octopus elbows:  Noticing that octopuses have an uncanny ability to bend their boneless tentacles into shapes resembling vertebrate elbows, EurekAlert says this about how the ability evolved: “The presence of similar structural features and control strategies in articulated limbs (for example, jointed vertebrate arms) and flexible octopus arms suggests that these qualities have evolved convergently in octopuses and in vertebrates, and it also suggests that an articulated limb--controlled at the level of joints--is the optimal solution to the challenge of achieving precise point-to-point movements by a limb.”  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
      The authors of the original paper in Current Biology¹ went further.  “Despite the evolutionary gap and morphological differences, humans and octopuses evolved similar strategies when fetching food to the mouth,” Sumbre, Hochner et al. said.  They even postulated that this ability arose at the dawn of animals, hundreds of millions of years ago:

  Because the hypothetical common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates dates back to the beginning of Cambrian era (about 540 million years ago), fetching appears to be a genuine and rare case of evolutionary functional convergence, where two independent attributes (morphology and neural control) coevolved to achieve a common goal.  We therefore suggest that the combination of a kinematically constrained articulated limb and a movement control strategy with simpler, more stereotypical movements in intrinsic coordinates offers an optimal solution for achieving precise point-to-point movements.

  Commenting on this study in the same issue of Current Biology,² Scott L. Hooper explored the idea that function can give rise to form, by evolution.  Noting that “muscles predate the evolution of hard body parts,” Hooper personified evolution into a creative programmer: “flexibly creating different ‘skeletons’ of stiffened muscles against which other muscles can act may be the mother of all motor control strategies.”
      Live Science picked up on this line, also, stating that “The similarity of structural features and control strategies between jointed vertebrate arms and flexible octopus limbs suggests that these configurations evolved separately in octopuses and vertebrates, a result scientists call an example of convergent evolution.”  In none of these papers or news articles did any of the authors attempt to connect function to form by a series of plausible evolutionary steps.  Apparently, they didn’t have to – since evolution is already a fact.

• Bat digital computing:  With their sonar-guided aerial acrobatics, bats are true wonders of the class Mammalia.  The only mammals to fly under their own power, bats make up one fifth of all mammalian species, said Michael Balter in Science Now.  But how did they get the ability to fly?  Surprisingly, a paper in PNAS³ found a tale in the absence of evidence:

  The earliest fossil bats resemble their modern counterparts in possessing greatly elongated digits to support the wing membrane, which is an anatomical hallmark of powered flight.  To quantitatively confirm these similarities, we performed a morphometric analysis of wing bones from fossil and modern bats.  We found that the lengths of the third, fourth, and fifth digits (the primary supportive elements of the wing) have remained constant relative to body size over the last 50 million years.  This absence of transitional forms in the fossil record led us to look elsewhere to understand bat wing evolution. 

  Since (of course) evolution is already a fact, no fossil evidence is necessary.  What they looked at were genes for finger development in bats and their presumed cousins, mice.  They found that a common gene for bone growth is activated differently in bats, causing the digits to grow much more rapidly, but only in the forelimbs.  “Together, our results suggest that an up-regulation of the Bmp pathway is one of the major factors in the developmental elongation of bat forelimb digits, and it is potentially a key mechanism in their evolutionary elongation as well.”
      In this “suggestion,” no attempt was made to integrate this into a comprehensive picture of how the membranes developed, how flight muscles developed, where the avionics software came from, and all the other parts that would have had to have emerged simultaneously for long fingers to become tools rather than impediments.  Since evolution is a fact, this is not a problem; each attribute becomes a piece of the grand evolutionary picture, something that “suggests” or “sheds light” on a detail of what is already known to be true.
      Michael Balter shamelessly gave his write-up on this paper a Kipling-esque just-so-story title in Science Now: “How Bats Got Off the Ground.”  Calling bats great examples of “Darwinian success,” Balter quoted other scientists who called this a “an excellent paper” that “helps us to understand how evolutionary transformations are achieved by tinkering with the development of individual structures--in this case, the digits.”

• The purpose-driven bird:  Darwinists have often claimed that humans have evolved to the point where they can now take charge of their own evolution.  But can birds do this?  That’s a new line promoted by Katherine Unger on Science Now, a news service of the AAAS.  “Species need not sit around waiting for natural selection to shape them,”  she said.  “According to a new study, a creature’s personality can also be an important evolutionary driving force--one that may give the species some control over its own destiny.”  The study, described in PNAS, showed how some bluebirds can alter their habitats and foraging behaviors based on how aggressive some members get (see also EurekAlert summary).  The odd thing is that no evolution occurred before or after the study; the bluebirds were still bluebirds.  The key finding was merely a suggestion: “By selecting the environment in which they live, animals can actively affect the natural selection they experience.”  Evolution by natural selection is, of course, the fact that (by implication) produced the bluebirds in the first place.

“The ‘evolution is a fact’ claim is awkward for evolutionists.  It makes the man behind the curtain all the more obvious and is empirically unsupportable.  How should evolutionists respond when a savvy buyer starts kicking the tires and asks “Why is this a fact again?”....
The dual mandates that (i) science must adhere to methodological naturalism and (ii) evolution is a fact, serve to diminish the importance of the empirical data.  Monumental evidential problems become mere curiosities when the theory is beyond question.

We’re going to keep holding up this garbage to public view as we have for over five years now, to expose Darwinian research for what it is: institutionalized question begging, assuming what needs to be proved, making up tall tales in the absence of evidence, ascribing exquisite design to dumb processes of randomness, and murdering Baconian scientific rigor.  Once the Darwin Party came to power, they dumbed down the high standards of research, substituted bravado for caution, and brought in the dark ages of speculative biology where facts and data don’t matter any more.  The highest value now is keeping the story line begun by Pope Charlie going ad infinitum.  The usurping Darwin Party elitists not only lounge around, engaging one another in “tantalizing speculations” (12/22/2003) in the institutions once devoted to induction and proof, but then have the gall to condemn anyone who calls them on the carpet for their shenanigans.
    Let this awareness promote a new day in science, where conclusions are rare, where “suggestions” are criticized, where evidence is king, and no principle based on human authority becomes a premise for deduction – i.e., like it used to be when men and women who loved nature and loved the truth (predominantly Christians and creationists – see online book) explored nature as seeking out the wisdom of God.  Disallowing deduction and reinstating rigor might not cure the hard-core Darwinian materialists, but it would go a long way in clearing the fog away from the debate.
Next headline on: Evolutionary Theory • Marine Life • Mammals • Birds

Fossils have long provided snapshots of the human family tree, but a new find in Africa gives scientists a kind of mini home movie showing man’s primal development.
    Because the 4.2-million-year-old fossil is from the same human ancestral hot spot in Ethiopia as remains from seven other human-like species, scientists can now fill in the gaps for the most complete evolutionary chain so far.
    “We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time,” said Ethiopian anthropologist Berhane Asfaw, co-author of the study being reported Thursday in the journal Nature.  “One form evolved to another.  This is evidence of evolution in one place through time.”  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The species, Australopithecus anamensis is not new, but its location is what helps explain the giant leap from one early phase of human-like development to the next, scientists say. All eight species were found in a region called the Middle Awash.
    “It’s like 12 frames of a home movie, but a home movie covering 6 million years,” said study lead author Tim White, co-director of Human Evolution Research Center at University of California at Berkeley.  Fossils in the region cover three major phases of human development.
    “The key here is the sequences,” White said.  “It’s about a mile thickness of rocks in the Middle Awash and in it we can see all three phases of human evolution.“
    Modern man belongs to the genus Homo, which is a subgroup in the family of hominids.  What evolved into Homo was likely the genus Australopithecus (once called “man-ape”), which includes the famed 3.2 million-year-old “Lucy” fossil found three decades ago.
    A key candidate for the genus that evolved into Australopithecus is called Ardipithecus.  And Thursday’s finding is important in bridging – but not completely – the gap between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.
    In 1994, a 4.4 million-year-old partial skeleton of the species Ardipithecus ramidus – the most recent Ardipithecus species – was found about six miles from the latest discovery.
    “This appears to be the link between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus as two different species,” White said.  The major noticeable difference between the phases of man can be seen in Australopithecus’ bigger chewing teeth to eat harder food, he said.

While it’s looking more likely, it is not a sure thing that Ardipithecus evolved into Australopithecus, he said.  The finding does not completely rule out Ardipithecus dying off as a genus and Australopithecus developing independently.
    The connections between Ardipithecus and Australopithecus have been theorized since an anamensis fossil was first found in Kenya 11 years ago.  This draws the lines better, said Alan Walker of Penn State University, who found the first anamensis and is not part of White’s team.
    Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, agreed: “For those people who are tied up in doing the whole human family tree, being able to connect the branches is a very important thing to do.”

In yet another example of circular reasoning, White and team have assumed evolution, fit the data to the evolutionary just so story, and paraded the result as “proof” that evolution happened.  Evolutionists are so desperate to deal with the lack of intermediate fossils that now the location of a fossil qualifies it as somehow being intermediate.  Arranging fossils in some increasing order of complexity to prove evolution has been around for a long time, for example, the horse evolution series, but it doesn’t prove that evolution happened any more than arranging old cars in a junkyard in order of complexity proves they evolved.
    For an analysis of the human fossil data from a different worldview, read Marvin Lubenow’s classic book, Bones of Contention,  available from AIG.  Also, AIG has an excellent video critically analyzing the Lucy fossil, “Lucy, She’s No Lady,” by Dr. David Menton.
Next headline on:  Early Man

What would bury a group of heavy, agile, strong, mobile, intelligent monsters suddenly?  Think about it.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs • Fossils

Another thing that I think about, which may be more ethereal, is that cell biologists interested in molecular mechanisms should always be reminding themselves that evolution proceeds without any predestined direction, and this is as true for cellular regulatory mechanisms as it is for organismal evolution [sic].  Even if we don’t think too much about evolution in our day-to-day work, it is the backdrop against which everything takes place, and one needs to keep a very open mind [sic], and not be too dogmatic, about how biological systems may be “designed”, because there is no designer [sic].  The best stimulus for this is to watch a few nature programs on TV.   (Emphasis added.)

If anyone can figure out how being dogmatic about evolution is an example of open-mindedness, or how directionlessness produced cellular regulatory mechanisms, or how maintaining faith in purposelessness as a backdrop aids thinking, or how telling oneself there is no designer demonstrates things are not designed, let us know.  Notice two other things he said: (1) scientists don’t think too much about evolution in their day-to-day work, indicating that evolutionary theory is useless, and (2) TV is this evolutionist’s source of inspiration (see visualization in the Baloney Detector).  So producers get their stimulus from the dogmatic claims of the evolutionary biologists, and biologists in turn get their inspiration from watching the resulting TV shows: a vicious cycle, with emphasis on vicious.
    Example: last night The Science Channel replayed The Rise of Man, one of the dumbest examples of evolutionary storytelling ever made for the tube.  In this ridiculous portrayal of made-up history, presented in all seriousness, naked ape-faced actors invent religion when lightning strikes, invent language when stealing ostrich eggs, invent the family when she-ape needs help in childbirth, and invent art when one ape-man sticks a shiny stone on his female’s mud-plastered forehead.  The group all giggles in the mud together at this new sign of beauty.  If this is Sawin’s inspiration, God help him.
    Cave Man was much better.  At least Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach and John Matuszak all knew it was only a spoof.  Let’s offer Sawin and his ilk free unending reruns of all the evolution shows they want; maybe this will keep them in a permanent state of euphoria – and out of the classroom.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Media • Dumb Ideas

Submarine hot springs no doubt could have played a role in brewing the primordial soup that gave rise to life [sic], Cody said, but other environments must have contributed too.  “If I said it all happened in hydrothermal vents, that won’t move this field ahead,” he says.  “Thinking more globally could open up something.”  Perhaps the real action came along continental margins, he said.  There, prebiotic compounds from deep-sea vents rose to meet drainage from the land’s warm little ponds and fallout from atmospheric reactions triggered by lightning and sunlight.  “This is a very good [sic] approach, quite novel,” says organic chemist Vera Kolb of the University of Wisconsin, Parkside.  “People get bogged down with the particular conditions they’re studying, but he wasn’t pushing his own work.”
    Such a “global origin” scenario, however, would make it less likely that life arose elsewhere in the solar system, Cody says.  The subsurface oceans on the icy moons Europa and Enceladus might not have offered the required diversity of environments.  And Mars may not have had even a short-lived ocean.