“Evolution says that the whole universe is made up of nothing but matter and that all things came into existence by chance – therefore, there is no God.  Evolution – taught as fact in our schools and universities – is a mortal and moral danger to the lives and souls of our nation’s young people.  Without God, there are no absolutes, there is no moral standard; and civilization descends into the abyss of despair, hedonism, and violence.  Evolution poisons everything it touches.”
—Dr. D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Ministries, monthly letter Aug 2006 promoting a new book and documentary.

Rock Video Illustrates Nihilism of Evolution   08/31/2006    
Senseless sex.  Mass death.  Religious hypocrisy.  Moral equivalence.  Impersonality.  Irresponsibility.  Male aggression, abduction and murder.  Glorification of lust.  Book burning.  Assembly-line babies.  Dehumanization.  Terrorism.  Holocaust.  Armageddon.  It’s all illustrated with raw intensity in the Pearl Jam rock video, Do the Evolution, available on YouTube.com.¹  Evolution wipes out humanity, without remorse, in just 3:53 minutes.  Watch it only if you dare.

WARNING:  This video is filled with intense and disturbing images and screaming rock.  Not suitable for children and definitely jarring to anyone.  Its value is in shocking the remaining sensible and civil adults among us to the reality of what evolutionary nihilism is doing to our world (see 08/23/2006 entry).*
    Entertainers (if that term fits here) can sometimes communicate things with an intensity beyond logic and facts.  The phantasmagoria of horror in this video is clearly shown to be mere acting out of the beast within us, from which we all emerged as bacteria long ago, according to the dominant “scientific” theory of human origins taught as fact in our schools without alternatives.  As a consequence of this world view, bombing millions of people is no different than a little girl stepping on an anthill.  There’s no responsibility, no moral consequences, no worries.  It all makes perfect nonsense when you do the evolution.
    We’d like to see the Richard Dawkinses and E. O. Wilsons of this era comment on this video.  Let them try to disown it and explain to Pearl Jam fans around the world that this is not what gentle old Father Charlie intended when he unleashed his little bombshell book to the world.  Let them explain why this kind of world view is not a logical extension of evolutionary theory.  Any comments, Eugenie Scott?  Ken Miller?  Are you proud of this?  Where is the ADL now?  Where is NOW now?  All you Tolerance people, your silence is deafening.
    Clergymen accustomed to speaking lovey-dovey platitudes to gently smiling seniors and soccer moms should be forced to watch this video before standing in their pulpits this weekend and facing the young people in the pews, who probably consider this number just ordinary fare from the grunge rock rage of the late 1990s, and pretty cool animation: “I’ll do what I want, but irresponsibly / It’s evolution, baby / I’m a thief / I’m a liar / That’s my church; I sing in the choir... I crawled the earth, but now I’m higher / Twenty-ten, watch it go to fire / It’s evolution, baby / It’s evolution, baby / Do the evolution / Come on, come on, come on!”  How about showing that in your church for Evolution Sunday, all you liberal pastors who signed allegiance to Charlie? (see 02/11/2006).  Invite Elie Wiesel to enjoy it with you (02/28/2006, 09/19/2005).
    Pearl Jam, just one band of a whole genre of grunge rock, gets thousands of screaming admirers on its world tours with its brand of sermon preaching hate and meaninglessness.  If this does not send a man of God to his knees, nothing will.

Some may relegate this kind of expression to normal youth rebelliousness and criticism of authority and hypocrisy, combined with shock value for publicity.  Some may think it was just a satire on evolution without really taking it seriously, or was actually a criticism of evolutionism.  That doesn’t seem to be the case from the Wikipedia analysis: “The video begins with the evolution of life, from the smallest cell to the extinction of dinosaurs and reign of homo sapiens,” it says matter-of factly; “The video evolves into depicting human beings in violent yet historically true scenes.”
    In other words, any intended message against violence is swamped by the assumption that evolution shows the true history of the world as one of violence and extinction, one species devouring another, for millions of years.  What humans have done to each other, and might do, is all in character with evolution.  On what basis could or should they do anything else?  Do the evolution, indeed.
    The album was apparently inspired by Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, an evolution-based novel with an overt Malthusian, anti-JudeoChristian message that has a cult following of its own.  It’s remarkable how much of this cult includes an obsessive hatred of Genesis.
    The fans get the message, too.  Consider that the Columbine High School massacre (see Wikipedia) occurred only a few months after this album was released, and one of the young killers wore a T-shirt proclaiming “Natural Selection.”  The Wikipedia article includes a quote from their diary expressing nihilistic rage very similar to that in the Pearl Jam song – again, with NATURAL SELECTION, in all caps, the centerpiece. 

Wake up, people.  This is deadly serious.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Media

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*Recommended material for follow-up research, to show how such horrors are already part of recent world history, listen to the following lecture series from The Teaching Company: Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century, by Dr. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius (U. of Tennessee).  Every American should listen to the lectures on Hitler, Stalin and Mao (cf. 11/30/2005).
    With videos like Do the Evolution all the rage (literally), no one should expect that the horrors possible from evolutionary thinking are all behind us; some day, unless Darwinism is defeated, the 20th century may only seem like a warm-up practice.
    For a case study in stark contrasts, compare the above lectures with another set from The Teaching Company, American Ideals: Founding a Republic of Virtue (Dr. Daniel N. Robinson, Oxford).  He discusses how the Puritans sought to establish a society of liberty under law, wherein each individual had the opportunity to flourish into a responsible, virtuous citizen.
    Thought experiment: imagine John Adams or Rev. John Witherspoon watching this Pearl Jam video....

To some extent these excesses are not Mindell’s fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits.  Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say.  Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably.  But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding?  Not very much.  Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’.  Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties.  Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.

One reason why Mindell might fail to sell Darwin to the critics is that his examples all involve microevolution, which most modern creationists (including advocates of intelligent design) accept.  It is macroevolution – the evolutionary transitions between very different kinds of organism – that creationists claim does not occur.  But in any case, few people actually oppose evolution because of its lack of practical use.... they oppose it because they see it as undercutting moral values.

In the end, the true value of evolutionary biology is not practical but explanatory.  It answers, in the most exquisitely simple and parsimonious way, the age-old question: “How did we get here?”  It gives us our family history writ large, connecting us with every other species, living or extinct, on Earth.  It shows how everything from frogs to fleas got here via a few easily grasped biological processes.  And that, after all, is quite an accomplishment.

You heard it right here.  We didn’t have to say it.  One of Darwin’s own bulldogs said it for us: evolutionary theory is useless.  Oh, this is rich.  Don’t let anyone tell you that evolution is the key to biology, and without it we would fall behind in science and technology and lose our lead in the world.  He just said that most real progress in biology was done before evolutionary theory arrived, and that modern-day advances owe little or nothing to the Grand Materialist Myth.  Darwin is dead, and except for providing plot lines for storytellers, the theory that took root out of Charlie’s grave bears no fruit (but a lot of poisonous thorns: see 08/27/2006).
    To be sure, many things in science do not have practical value.  Black holes are useless, too, and so is the cosmic microwave background.  It is the Darwin Party itself, however, that has hyped evolution for its value to society.  With this selling point gone, what’s left?  The only thing Coyne believes evolution can advertise now is a substitute theology to answer the big questions.  Instead of an omniscient, omnipotent God, he offers the cult of Tinker Bell and her mutation wand as an explanation for endless forms most beautiful.  Evolution allows us to play connect-the-dot games between frogs and fleas.  It allows us to water down a complex world into simplistic, “easily grasped” generalities.  Such things are priceless, he thinks.  He’s right.  It costs nothing to produce speculation about things that cannot be observed, and nobody should consider such products worth a dime.
    We can get along just fine in life without the Darwin Party catalog.  Thanks to Jerry Coyne for providing inside information on the negative earnings in the Darwin & Co. financial report.  Sell your evolution stock now before the bottom falls out.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory

There is very little difference between this journal and one that could have been written by a participant on a creationist dino dig (07/23/2003, 05/21/2002).  Both groups might have described similar emotions in sharing a sometimes monotonous, sometimes exciting adventure, learning teamwork, and feeling good about contributing to science.  The main differences would be the songs sung around the campfire – undoubtedly “Amazing Grace” at the creationist camp instead of the selection Perkins listed at the evolutionist camp, “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” – and the dates.  The evolutionary paleontologists tossed around their millions of years without a qualm or objection.  Perkins saw himself, though, that the delicate, crumbly fragments of bone were easily damaged by footprints and weather.  Eyewitnesses on creationist digs in Montana have been stunned to find vulnerable dinosaur bones all over the surface.
    We live in a world of constant change easily seen within our own lifetimes.  A hurricane or tsunami sweeps away a coastline.  A volcano buries an island or emerges from the sea.  Landslides open a new canyon.  Earthquakes rearrange the terrain.  Glaciers melt back for miles, and worldwide climate trends frighten the pundits.  These changes are the stories we tell our children, and written human records reveal a thousand more examples.  In spite of that, the paleontologists want us to believe that these dinosaur bones, some with soft tissue inside (02/22/2006), remained entombed within this formation for a duration exceeding all human recorded history by 37,000 times, enduring global tectonic changes, mountain building episodes, continental uplifts, climate fluctuations, floods and fire, only to crumble away now in an ordinary winter rainstorm or cow’s footstep.
    You can choose to sing a song about roadkill and trust in theories vulnerable to being trampled underfoot.  Some look at the same data and sing, I once was lost and now am found, was blind but now I see.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Dating Methods

• Globular cluster ages:  Our 10/05/2003 entry reported that beliefs about globular cluster ages were undergoing a radical revision.  You can almost feel the rumblings in a related story on News@Nature; “In a complex Universe, astronomers thought they had at least one simple system to tell them how stars are born.  Turns out they were wrong,” reported Jenny Hogan.  Other statements say that globulars “aren’t as simple as astronomers used to think,” and that “it’s changing our ideas completely,” and that this will require us to “tear up textbooks.”  Moreover, the realization that GCs are not homogeneous collections of ancient stars, but are now seen to contain young blue stars, will have ripple effects.  “If you have problems reproducing star formation in globular clusters, you will have problems with a galaxy,” reported one astronomer.
      To be sure, a new interpretation is emerging that there were two episodes of star birth in most GCs.  Hogan downplays the impact of the revelations, commenting that the new picture “shouldn’t upset long-term calculations of age too much.”  To remind us, though, that shouldn’t has an element of wishful thinking in it, she ends: “But, astronomers add, they haven’t yet had time to work out all the implications.”
• Atmospheric methane sources:  In a 01/12/2006 entry, we reported the surprising finding that plants contribute a third of the methane budget in Earth’s atmosphere.  Nature brought the story up to date in the 08/17/2006 issue (442, 730-731(17 August 2006) | doi:10.1038/442730a).  In “The methane mystery,” the magazine said that this finding has “shaken up atmospheric scientists.”  The January claim, corroborated by another team in March, “rattled many, because textbooks hold that methane is produced from organic matter decaying in oxygen-free environments, not from living plants,” the news item said.  “If true, his finding could account for a substantial fraction of the methane entering the atmosphere – potentially throwing off calculations of how much humans contribute.”  Scrutiny of these announcements has not yielded a consensus to confirm or refute the data.  Analysis is complicated further by another finding in Brazil that suggests some species can emit 4,000 times more methane than others.
      The findings are contentious and may have major ramifications on how atmospheric scientists interpret the human contribution to global warming.  The goal now is to collect better data.  Nature did not land on a particular side of the debate, but quoted one scientist’s advice, “You need to understand the entire greenhouse budget before you can start thinking about mitigating climate change.”

Since these are controversial subjects, students should only be taught the standard view.  Teachers do not have time to teach the controversy, and it is not the job of public schools to go beyond the prescribed curriculum.  Students might be confused by hearing differing views.  Despite the credentials of the scientists involved, we can’t be sure they were not politically or religiously motivated.  This is how science is done, and if you are going to play the game of science, you must play by the rules.  Administrators should prohibit teachers from showing these articles to students under the guise of “supplementary material,” even if they come from the scientific journals.  Failure to cease and desist will provide grounds for a lawsuit.  (Commentary inspired by Eugenie Scott and the NCSE thought police.)
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Geology • Early Man

Figuring out how to mow the slanted roof may be a drawback, but in designing products for daily living, why not consider biology more often?  After all, nature’s solutions were designed with ecology in mind.
Next headline on:  Plants • Biomimetics • Amazing Stories

A cell isn’t merely a bag of enzymes sloshing around in a thick soup of cytoplasm.  According to Assistant Professor of Biology Grant Jensen, it’s more like a multistory factory—a set of interwoven production lines complete with conveyor belts, forklifts, and steel I-beams to hold up the roof.  Or, if you prefer, the world’s most elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption.  The cell’s cogs and camshafts, springs and motors, girders and sheet metal (or, in the Rube Goldberg case, gloved hands on sticks, precariously balanced bathtubs, and spring-loaded mallets) are protein molecules.  Protein machines conduct the cell’s metabolic business; protein motors make muscles contract, amoebas crawl, and paramecia swim.  When a cell is preparing to divide, protein diazo machines make a duplicate set of the genetic blueprints, and then protein winches and cables pull the two copies to opposite ends of the cell.  Shells of interlocking proteins armor-plate viruses, protein trusswork gives cells their shape, and protein stickers on the protein girders tell the cell which end is front.  Jensen’s research group wants to photograph each rod, flywheel, and bearing and work out its mechanical interactions with its fellows, in terms as solid as a cast titanium sprocket.  As Jensen puts it, “Ultimately, of course, we want to understand how things work at an atomic level—a proton goes here and it causes this atom to move over there, which causes that atom to move over here, and the sum of it all is that the cell swims, or eats, or reproduces itself.”

Embryonic Stem Cells No Longer Needed?    08/25/2006  
Two announcements this week may make harvesting embryonic stem cells obsolete.  First, it’s not necessary to kill an embryo to get a stem cell, reported Associated Press (see Fox News) and Live Science.  While this does not solve all the ethical problems, a White House spokeswoman called it “encouraging to see scientists at least making serious efforts to move away from research that involves the destruction of embryos.”  Robert P. George later claimed in National Review that the hype was a lie.  The technique did involve the destruction of embryos.  He argued, though, that the push for alternative techniques shows that the researchers recognize the need to find ways to address the ethical issues surrounding stem cell technology; this, he said, is a “welcome development.”
    Second, and more significant, Japanese scientists found that adult stem cells can be made pluripotent, like embryonic stem cells, by the addition of a few factors.  A press release on EurekAlert expresses the benefit of this procedure:

“Human embryonic stem cells might be used to treat a host of diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, and diabetes,” said Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan.  “However, there are ethical difficulties regarding the use of human embryos, as well as the problem of tissue rejection following transplantation into patients.”
    Those problems could be circumvented if pluripotent cells could be obtained directly from the patients’ own cells.

The first method still presents ethical problems.  The technique could cause unknown damage to the embryo, and the cell that is taken out, if it could still grow into a human being, does not circumvent the ethical issues.  In fact, pro-life groups are already speaking out against it according to the AP article.  The second technique looks much more promising and is the one to watch.  If adult stem cells can have all the advantages of ES cells, including the holy grail of pluripotency, it pulls out the rug from under all arguments for needing to destroy embryos to get at their pluripotent stem cells.  If scientists continue to push for ES cells then, their true motives will be unmasked.
    An important lesson from these two stories is that pressure from ethicists and concerned citizens is essential for reining in the otherwise out-of-control ambitions of scientists about ES cells.  Science is not ethically neutral.  It cannot operate outside of a social context.  The citizens who fund research and expect to reap the benefits need to monitor the direction science is going and voice their concerns when researchers look like they are about to cross the line.  For instance, read this EurekAlert press release, “Brave new world in life sciences,” about threats to public health and safety from new kinds of research.
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics

“There is going to be a howl, even outrage,” over these findings, geologist and isotope geochemist Paul Knauth at Arizona State University told LiveScience.  They will say hot springs could have swamped the rocks Ohmoto and his colleagues looked at with normal sulfur, or that the crystals they analyzed washed in from elsewhere, or that their measurements are inaccurate, he said.  However, Knauth noted Ohmoto and his colleagues did address these points “and make good arguments.”

Scientists have found that oxygen and the life that generates it might have enriched the Earth far earlier than currently supposed.
    The discovery, sure to be controversial, suggests life could arise earlier than now thought on alien planets, too.

For spinning a disastrous finding into a blessing, Choi wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  Bringing oxygen into the picture before photosynthesis is like bringing out the rugby team before the grass has sprouted.  The astrobiology gardeners will only get mud if Ohmoto is correct.  Early oxygen will destroy any chances of life starting by chemical evolution (as if that fairy tale had a chance to begin with).  If they respond like Choi and just assume this implies “alien life might arise quickly,” then they must believe a second miracle, that the complexities of photosynthesis also arose quickly.  Watch those miracle words emerged, appeared, and arose.  Words can’t short-circuit reality.  Arose by any other name would smell as cheat.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dating Methods

Solutions with as little as 1% enantiomeric excess (ee) of D- or L-phenylalanine are amplified to 90% ee (a 95/5 ratio) by two successive evaporations to precipitate the racemate [mixture].  Such a process on the prebiotic earth could lead to a mechanism by which meteoritic chiral {alpha}-alkyl amino acids could form solutions with high ee values that were needed for the beginning of biology.

We propose that such a process could occur and may have occurred under prebiotic conditions.  As a water solution of one of the meteoritic amino acids or of one of the products from it dried, there would be an increased enantiomeric concentration in the solution.  If that solution ran off from the solid racemate, or indeed if subsequent chemistry simply occurred in the solution, the modest ee’s from the meteoritic components or their subsequent products could be amplified in solution to start the processes leading to our observed homochiralities in life today....

These two apparently hoped their brief paper would start the herald angels of astrobiology sounding their trumpets.  Nothing really new, however, was shown, and the problems are still staggering.  Keeping in mind that molecules do not care anything about forming life, consider just a few of the problems:

1. It only worked with the alpha-alkyl amino acids (so far, although they said they are testing other kinds).
2. All the amino acid types would have to conspire to be left- or right-handed.  For the 20 different amino acids in living organisms, this is astronomically improbable.
3. In realistic prebiotic conditions, nothing is going to prevent the next wave, meteorite or current from mixing the two hands all up again.
4. The need for repeated evaporations severely limits the physical space where all required ingredients could form and process their blind, random walk through configuration space.
5. This scenario rules out the deep-sea vent and open-ocean scenarios.  Champions of those views are undoubtedly going to find ways to shoot it down.
6. Evaporative environments expose the amino acids to ultraviolet radiation that will destroy them all within a few hours anyway.
7. There is still the problem of getting amino acids to link up into polypeptides.
8. There is still the problem of getting a nascent polypeptide with a functional sequence.  Remember, only chance arrangements are permitted.
9. One mis-handed amino acid in a growing chain will still render it useless for biology.  The chance for this happening, even if amino acids did link up somehow, grows with the length of the chain.
10. Even if, under the most wildly improbable strokes of luck, a pure polypeptide formed, it would be the end of the line without a genetic code that is also homochiral and able to make backup copies.

That’s just a first draft of the possible problems.  The fact remains that amino acids, enantiomeric excess or not, cannot care what happens.  Nobody is cheering them on.  Nobody will give them a gold medal if they purify themselves.  Molecules have no personality, except that, according to the Law of Perversity of Inanimate Objects, they love to frustrate chemistry students and astrobiologists.
    It is a logical fallacy to assume evolution to demonstrate evolution.  You have to be realistic and put yourself at the edge of the primordial soup as a detached observer, unable to assist with your lab equipment and intelligent design.  The molecules are only going to obey the laws of mass action, valence bonding and thermodynamics.  It will be a long, boring, hopeless wait when you realize that you cannot interfere.
    Despite the glee in the subtext of this short paper, there is nothing left but vanity and despair.  The mythical primordial soup did not have a Columbia chemistry lab with PhDs present to help.  Without guidance, molecules just bounce and stick in careless ways.  All these researchers did was illustrate again the power of intelligent design to overcome the innate tendencies of mindless matter to never mind about such matters.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life

Notice how the critics malign D. James Kennedy’s positive, honorable organization of citizens who care deeply about the direction of this country as “Christian supremacists” (an example of name-calling and association) designed to elicit images of the KKK.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Kennedy, a learned and compassionate pastor who teaches the gospel of grace, believes that Christian principles gave this country its freedom and liberty for all people and wants a return to the founding principles of our forefathers.  Kennedy’s campaign to reclaim America is as far from totalitarianism as a 9/11 rescuer is from a terrorist.  Let’s keep the outrage where it belongs, at the materialistic ideologies that gave us the bloodiest century in the history of the world (see next entry).
    Despite the rage at Pharyngula, the Darwinists cannot escape culpability.  It’s not just Kennedy and Coral Ridge who make the claim that Hitler was a convinced Darwinist and believed he was acting out the principle of the survival of the fittest.  Many secular historians have attributed a great deal of the blame for the genocidal totalitarian regimes of the 20th century to the rigorous application of Darwinian beliefs.  Karl Marx felt himself a kindred spirit to Darwin as he formulated his materialistic version of “scientific socialism” to the class struggle in history; at his death, he was extolled as “The Darwin of Politics.”  Lenin, Stalin and Hitler each expressed Darwinian beliefs in their writings (Stalin turned from divinity student to atheist upon reading The Origin of Species).  These regimes rounded up clergymen for their gulags and death camps, and turned churches into museums of atheism.  The blame extends from beginning to end, from international to personal.  One of the Columbine killers, as he dispassionately gunned down his fellow high school students, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with “Natural Selection.”
    If the ADL and today’s evolutionists want to really distance themselves from Hitler’s applied Darwinism, let’s hear two things: (1) a complete and utter repudiation of all social Darwinist and eugenics ideologies, including neo-eugenics (see 10/12/2001, 04/22/2004) and the views of Daniel Dennett and other leading Darwinists who justify killing on evolutionary principles, and (2) a rigorous explanation of how evolutionary theory promotes equal rights, justice, freedom, reason and sanctity of life instead of statism, survival of the fittest, determinism, mass population control and the glorification of death.  Good luck.  Neither the history nor the philosophy of evolutionism permit other than what has already been showcased to the world as the ugly fruit of an undirected, uncaused, purposeless world that values fitness and survival above all else.  This world was envisioned by Charles Darwin and put into practice by his ardent disciples.  Nearly 200 million souls cry from the grave in its aftermath.  The Darwinists want to tiptoe around this fact in their sneakers, but the only shoe that fits is the jackboot.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics • Media

The 20th century, “Darwin’s Century,” was the bloodiest in history by a long shot.  Political terror machines based on utopian ideologies, enabled by the industrial revolution and new methods of mass communication and control, were mostly inspired by post-Enlightenment scientific secularism (with some exceptions, like Turkey, Rwanda, Iraq – minor players in terms of numbers killed).  The worst culprits by far were communism, Nazism, facism.  The leaders of these campaigns of genocide and mass terror – Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong (11/30/2005), Pol Pot – were convinced Darwinists and believed their regimes were advancing the fitness of the human species.  The horrors of these despotic population experiments can only partially be appreciated by looking at total numbers killed.  Individual accounts by survivors (e.g., this book) need to flesh out the story.  For many of them, most of their lifetimes were spent trying to endure conditions unimaginable to us.  Such atrocities continue in the remaining communist holdouts; compare what happens when Christianity makes a comeback (see Baptist Press News).

Searching across the four genomes, the team looked for regions of DNA about 100 letters long that had made the biggest leaps. One, they found, had changed nearly twice as much as any other region, with 18 letters of DNA different between humans and chimps. A similar stretch of chicken DNA, they found, has all but two letters in common with the chimp DNA.

We just claimed yesterday that “Darwinian evolution is so malleable that it bends itself to every anomaly, and therefore fails” the scientific criteria of testability and verifiability (08/21/2006).  Here’s another example.  Rather than wear sackcloth and ashes and moan and wail over their sins, they spin this story into support for Darwin.  Now they expect to believe that these genes sat there undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years, only to explode into activity after Bonzo’s kid had a mutation, and presto! philosophy.  Gong; next.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Early Man • Evolution

• Hotz shots:  From the LA Times, Robert Lee Hotz wrote, “In the border war between science and faith, the doctrine of ‘intelligent design’ is a sly subterfuge – a marzipan confection of an idea presented in the shape of something more substantial.”
• Rat Sass:  From Current Biology 22 Aug 2006, Robert Hendrix wrote, “At the risk of sounding cynical, though, I would venture that most of the people pushing ID do not give a rat’s patootie about having a scientific discussion over evolution or considering what the data might tell us; they’re simply looking for a way to insert their own peculiar religious beliefs into public education.”
• Me Scientist, You Dogmatist:  John Tyler Bonner wrote in Nature (27 July 2006) a favorable book review of Brockman’s anti-ID anthology (05/09/2006), subtitled, “Destroying the argument that intelligent design has a scientific basis.”  He ended by saying, “Intelligent Thought is a book for scientists; that is, for those who see evolutionary biology as a science.  If you are a creationist you will be unmoved; there is no point in looking at the evidence.”
• Keep On Whacking:  John Derbyshire, on National Review, responding to an earlier article by George Gilder:

  It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists.^*  Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole.  They make an argument, you whack it down.  They make a second, you whack it down.  They make a third, you whack it down.  So they make the first argument again.  This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it.  It isn’t actually any fun.  Creationists just chase you round in circles.  It’s boring.....
  ^*Amongst whom I include Intelligent Design proponents.  The Kitzmiller case demonstrated, to courtroom standards of evidence, that I.D. is a species of Creationism.  That’s good enough for me.

  Casey Luskin and Joe Manzari wrote a three-part response to this article on Evolution News.

Sign on a bathroom hand dryer: “For a short speech about Intelligent Design by a Darwinist, push button.”  These missives can be sloughed off with a chuckle by sophisticated Visigoths for the amusement of watching Darwin Party heralds who claim to be rational losing their cookies.
    Worthy of more thoughtful response are arguments by some evolutionists who really do try to seriously critique intelligent design without resorting to emotional tirades, especially when they have sufficient historical background about science, theology and history to do so intelligently (see next entry).
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Evolution • Education

Let’s see if any of the pillars of his argument are left standing after our critique of his critique.

• Intelligent Design is a second-generation version of creationism that has already lost several court rulings.  Actually, the controversy goes much further back, to the ancient Greeks at least.  Later, Goldman acknowledges that design arguments are ancient and that asking the question is an intelligent hypothesis (though, he says, not a scientific one) worth discussing, but then defends theistic evolution as a compromise: i.e., God as the ultimate designer, but evolution as the process.  These are incompatible positions (see David Klinghoffer op-ed) despite the ability of many schizophrenics to claim they can have it both ways.  We doubt, also, that Goldman seriously believes that politically-appointed judges should be the arbiters of what constitutes science.
• Who decides if a hypothesis is scientific, if not the community of scientists who deal in science?  Somebody has to decide, he argues, and who else but the very people doing the research in question?  This ignores the possibility that the entire community can become entrenched in a habit that excludes new ways of thinking and discourages asking new questions.  It also downplays the role of the maverick in science who bucks the establishment and turns out to be right.  Further, it fails to distinguish between the science communities of the past, who were often theologians working independently out of their own resources, and the Big Science establishments of today, whose motives are tainted by the need to keep government funds flowing.  (Elsewhere in the series, Goldman shows he is keenly aware of these issues.  He has a good treatment of Kuhn’s argument that science has a paradigmatic character.  He concludes that, with all its flaws, Kuhn’s critique cannot be entirely dismissed.)
• I.D. fails the minimum criteria of a scientific hypothesis.  Goldman hastens to explain that there are no ironclad formulas, or methodological rules to decide if a hypothesis is scientific, but argues that, at a minimum, it should include the following:
  1. Explanatory power:  He claims that a legacy of science from the earliest medieval philosophers is that scientific explanations for natural phenomena can only appeal to natural causes.  He argues that I.D. necessarily invokes a supranatural agent, and that this breaks the rules of the game (and only the scientific community can make the rules).  Further, he argues that without access to the Designer to interview, or without the blueprints of the design, pursuing a design explanation is vacuous.  What instruments do we build to detect the signals? he asks.  Radio telescopes?  he asks in an offhand way (though catching himself to remember that radio waves were discovered accidentally).
         In answer, what if intelligent design is true?  What if there really is a Designer, a Creator, or God, that intentionally made the universe, the world and life?  A science committed to natural causes will never find the truth.  We believe that science should at least be a search for the truth about the world.  This cannot exclude a cause from the toolkit of science just because of a philosophical dislike for it.  A science restricted to natural causes when intelligent causes were responsible will degenerate into a false religion or cult, and that is what many in the ID movement believe has happened.
         Goldman should recall his own sermon that science is not just a game, but that it has huge sociological implications: nuclear weapons, stem cells, health and safety, matters of life and death.  Science is much more serious in the 21st century than just making up a game as they go along.  In fact, Goldman’s whole series struggles with the truth claims of science and how they should be understood.  Why, he asks, is Darwinian evolution so threatening if it is just about method?  “Because the evolutionary explanation claims to be true.”  If evolutionists deny they are searching for at least a semblance of truth, and believe instead they are just playing a game, let them set up their own game clubs, like bingo or lotto, and not expect the citizens to pay for it and have it force-taught to their children.
         The most serious flaw in this argument is that it does not address the capacity for Darwinists to trade in just-so stories in order to keep their pet paradigm going.  Busy-ness with all kinds of ecological, geological and biological storytelling does not justify evolutionary theory’s continuance, with its insatiable demand for public funding, when the facts keep stacking up against it (e.g., the Cambrian explosion, the fine-tuning of the universe, the molecular machinery in the cell).  Goldman also fails to recognize the sciences that already invest huge amounts of money on design-theoretic assumptions, such as SETI, cryptography, forensics, archaeology and information theory.  It’s ironic that he mentioned radio waves.  ID supporters have long pointed out that SETI proceeds on the assumption of intelligent design.  SETI presupposes that intelligence is detectable by the methods of science.
  2. Predictive success: while not necessary for a scientific hypothesis, this is at least valuable, Goldman argues; a good hypothesis predicts novel phenomena and makes startling predictions that at least give us confidence in the hypothesis.  Yet throughout the series, Goldman repeatedly pointed out the “fallacy of affirming the consequent” – i.e., just because a prediction comes true, this does not prove a hypothesis.  ID predicts that we will find large amounts of functional information in DNA and proteins, even if we don’t understand the function.  This prediction continues to bear fruit.
  3. Control over nature:  Though there are exceptions to this rule, like black hole theory and the big bang, a scientific hypothesis should produce a research program that gives us some degree of control over nature.  Without access to the design blueprints, Goldman claims, ID does not specify the kind of research a scientist would do, so what good is it?  Since the design scientist would end up doing the same kind of research as the evolutionist, ID is operationally vacuous, he claims.
         Tell this to SETI, then.  Tell it to the FBI searching for patterns in noise.  They are spending an awful lot of money building elaborate detectors and computers on the assumption that intelligent design leaves footprints.  None of these and the other design sciences have the blueprints either, but they know that intelligently-caused patterns are detectable.  ID does have a criterion.  It is complex specified information (CSI), any effect that, as William Dembski argued exhaustively in The Design Inference and No Free Lunch allows us rule out chance as a cause, and infer intelligence as the cause.  As for control over nature, biomimetics (see below) is the most promising avenue today for such control.
  4. Testability and verifiability:  Goldman knows that these are sufficient criteria, but not necessary ones, for scientific hypotheses.  He fails to recognize that Darwinian evolution is so malleable that it bends itself to every anomaly, and therefore fails this test.  ID, by contrast, has an ironclad criterion: CSI.  Dembski granted an extremely generous universal probability bound of 10^-150 before excluding chance and natural law and making a design inference.  ID can have false negatives – there may be cases where a designer hid his design from us, as in some modern art – but it does not generate false positives.  When CSI exists, it came from an intelligent cause.  That’s testability.
  5. Suggestive of a research program:  What experiments will a scientist do to research intelligent design? Goldman asks.  He repeats the common canard that ID brings explanation to a halt: “God did it--end of story.”  He says this should at least make us deeply suspicious about the ability of ID to satisfy the rules of scientific hypotheses.  Apply this rule to the Darwinists, then.  When they say “evolution did it,” or disguise that simplistic answer in phrases like “This represents a remarkable case of convergent evolution,” the playing field is level.  Darwinists brought the study of interesting biological phenomena to a halt by explaining away unknown biological phenomena as junk DNA or vestigial organs.
         Goldman recalled Francis Bacon’s measure of good scientific hypotheses, “By their fruits ye shall know them” (three guesses where Bacon got that idea from).  So here is the fruit: design thinking is actually producing some of the most vibrant and cutting-edge research in the world today: biomimetics.  Whole multidisciplinary labs are springing up to mimic nature’s designs.  To do so, these designs must be understood – and science marches along.
• Irreducible complexity is an argument from ignorance.  Goldman claims that ID cannot merely argue that Darwinian evolution is inadequate because it cannot explain the spontaneous emergence of complex biochemical systems (e.g., Behe’s mousetrap).  Debunking Theory A does not establish Theory B.  This is the “argument from ignorance,” he says, a logical fallacy.  Granted, but it does not follow that Darwinism must be taught as fact without debate, either: that would be the best-in-field fallacy.  Darwinists have an endless capacity to rationalize and tiptoe around the problems.  Refusing to let serious challenges be heard is not healthy for any scientific explanation.  That being understood, irreducible complexity is not merely an argument against Darwinian evolution, anyway.  It is a marker for CSI that allows one to discriminate intelligent causes from non-intelligent causes.
• Scientists are not convinced irreducible complexity is a challenge to evolutionary theory.  Maybe evolution cannot explain complex systems yet, he says, but the community of biologists does not seem worried about it.  This is a very weak response.  Maybe they should be worried about it.  Geologists weren’t worried about plate tectonics and catastrophic floods for decades, either, till they were forced to follow the evidence.  How the community of scientists feel about something is no measure of its validity or importance.  They’ve had 146 years to explain complex systems by unguided processes and are in worse shape now than in Darwin’s time.  How much longer do they get to filibuster?
• Self-organizing systems show promise for explaining irreducible complexity.  The new study of self-organizing systems shows that complex systems can emerge spontaneously, Goldman argues; ID needs to make sure self-organization is incapable of producing complex systems before reaching outside of nature to explain them.  Been there, done that.  Why is this a requirement?  Why is it better to follow blind alleys?  For how long should we take a wrong road before giving up?  We already know that intelligent causes are adequate to explain CSI.  The kind of complexity that self-organizing systems exhibit is very different from information, the hallmark of intelligent design.  Spilled ink might produce wave patterns if shaken or subjected to the wind, but it does not produce meaningful text.
• By analogy, technological systems do form spontaneously without planning.  Goldman argues that nobody followed a master plan that resulted in all the complex systems built around the automobile: the internal combustion engine, gasoline as fuel, highways, carburetors, filling stations--these were all co-opted after the fact without any top-down design.  The system emerged from the bottom-up emergence for self-interested reasons, so why not consider this as a model for how the biochemical world emerged?  (“I’m not saying it’s true,” he adds).  My dear Dr. Goldman, do you fail to realize that your analogy is irrelevant, because human beings are intelligent agents?
• Criticizing gaps in evolutionary theory misunderstands the nature of scientific theories.  ID focuses its criticisms on “Darwinian” evolution, but a lot has happened since Darwin.  Theories evolve.  Evolution is now woven into a web of correlated theories, which is a key test of a scientific theory.  Geology, ecology, molecular biology, and genetics have all incorporated Darwinism or some variation of evolution, though there is still a controversy whether natural selection is the only force acting.  These are lively controversies, he argues, but none of the combatants have raised intelligent design as the missing ingredient that stymies their progress.
      Again, science is not just a game, and you cannot trust Big Science to set the rules of their game fairly when they have a great deal of self-interest to perpetuate their ideologies and exclude alternatives from consideration.  In the history of science, proponents of one view have failed to see the significance of gaps in their explanations even when face to face with contradictory evidence.  Sometimes they died maintaining their flawed theories.  No historian of science can claim that evolutionary theory is immune from a massive paradigm shift.  Its critics feel it is a monstrous house of cards on a shaky foundation and that the pressures of new discoveries are making it vulnerable to a collapse of historic proportions.
      Goldman had argued forcefully in the earlier lectures that scientists cannot entirely dismiss the sociological and historical nature of their theories.  He illustrated this not only by quotes from the most eminent philosophers of science, but also with specific instances.  Our concepts of the universe, the earth, life and atoms have changed dramatically since 1900.  We have no guarantee there will not be similar radical transformations in the future.  That being understood, he cannot rule out that science is evolving again in the current controversy.  Biology of the future will include intelligent causes in its toolkit, while evolutionary theory may be on the way out.
• ID may be a legitimate support for believing in a Designer behind nature, but design is not a scientific hypothesis.  Goldman recognizes that the design argument has a long and venerable history.  Everyone knows that nature looks designed, he acknowledges.  So are we to throw out the evidence of our senses, and our common sense, and be forced to invoke uncaused, undesigned forces to explain the most elegant machinery we know?  Who decides?  Calling something a scientific hypothesis does not make it so, nor does the converse make it not so.  Since evolutionary theory fails all of Goldman’s own minimum criteria for scientific hypotheses, and ID does not, he cannot simply dismiss ID as a scientific hypothesis by a flat-out statement of his opinion.
• Attacking a theory because it threatens one’s religious convictions is not a scientific posture.  OK, so ID threatens materialism and atheism.  Let the Darwinists admit that, and let’s talk about the evidence.  Evolutionists continually attack ID and creation as being religiously motivated.  This rule cuts both ways; Dawkins said that evolution allows one to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist.  Attacking one’s motives instead of his argument is the ad hominem strategy.  So evolutionists, stop attacking the motives of creationists, and focus on the evidence.

Goldman noted that he only wished only to critique ID, not malign it.  We leave it to the reader to judge if any of the pillars of Goldman’s critique are left standing.  Though cogently argued, none of his points are new.  William Dembski has answered them all, and many more, in his book The Design Revolution, to which the interested reader is referred for more detail.
    At the end of the lecture, Goldman acknowledged that “Imperial Science” misconstrues the debate as much as “Imperial Religion.”  He says that the defensiveness of the scientific community over the attacks by sociology, philosophy and religion “obscures the fundamental fact that we have learned in this course, namely, that no theory – no theory – can have the status of an empirical fact.”  It is a category error to claim that evolutionary theory or any other scientific theory is a fact, “contrary to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and various op-ed pieces opposing intelligent design,” he remarks.
    Sounds like we have a legitimate controversy here.  Good; let’s teach it.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Evolution

Do you think National Geographic will now retract their infamous racist artwork of a black, primitive-looking miniature ape-man with prey over his shoulder?  That piece of fiction was propagated all over the news.  Let’s hear a retraction, NG.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Early Man

• Royal portrait:  The magazine contains a report by renowned Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay of archaeological finds at Ramat Rahel (pp. 34-44).  This site, on a hilltop halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, excavated by rival archaeologists Yohanan Aharoni (1960s) and Yigael Yadin (1970s) yielded remains of a village and palace dating from the First Temple Period (the time of Judah’s kings).  Barkay argues that artifacts date from the time of Hezekiah, though a new excavation under Hebrew University auspices is underway to reassess the evidence.  Its location on a hill with a great view northward to the City of David and Temple Mount would have been desirable for the king.  The town was destroyed by Sennacherib during the Assyrian siege, but apparently rebuilt after the war either by Hezekiah or his son Manasseh.
      Excavations at Ramat Rahel have revealed a complex water system (see Reuters story on MSNBC), a citadel, numerous jug handles inscribed with “Belonging to the king” (a style attributed to Hezekiah’s monarchy), pre-Ionic column capitals and balustrades, and a palace wall with mortarless stones so finely shaped that even today a knife blade cannot fit between them.  Most tantalizing is an image found by early excavators sketched on a piece of pottery, showing a side view of a king seated on a throne.  If Barkay is correct, this may be may be the only picture of a Judahite king ever found: a portrait of King Hezekiah himself.¹
• Wash and see:  Further excavations of the newly-discovered Pool of Siloam (see 08/09/2005, bullet 2) at the south end of the old City of David have revealed the end of an elaborate street and plaza, reports Bib-Arch.  The report includes new photos of the columned street that may have led all the way north to the Temple Mount.  This is the pool where Jesus sent a man born blind to wash and be healed.  It was apparently a much more elaborate project than historians realized.
• Jordan photojournal:  Herschel Shanks provided an informative photo-journal of his 3-day tour of Jordan this summer on the Bib-Arch website.  His adventures included stops at Jerasa (NT Gerasa), Amman (OT Rabbath-ammon), Machaerus (where John the Baptist was imprisoned) and Edom, where remains of extensive copper mining have recently come to light (02/18/2005).
• Collateral damage:  The Bib-Arch website has a status report on the effect of the Lebanese-Israeli war on archaeological digs in progress, and damage to some.  Sites listed include Megiddo, Tel Dan, Hippos, Ramat Rahel and others.  Mark Hequet provided a first-hand report of what it was like to be digging under fire.
• Dig this blog:  Archaeology is one of the sciences where lay people can make a significant contribution.  Bib-Arch advertises expeditions people can join, and maintains a blog by two enthusiastic young archaeologists about what’s happening at various sites.  The pictures show this to be an invigorating pastime for college students.
• Apathetic outrage:  On a tragic note, destruction of antiquities on the Temple Mount by illegal Muslim building projects continues (see 11/11/2005, bullet 4).  The Bib-Arch report says that since the Palestinian police took over the mount in 1990, “systematic destruction of any vestige of Jewish presence on the Mount was begun.”  Two portions of the old city wall have suffered unsightly damage due to Muslim activity, and new Arab graves encroach aside holy places outside the wall, desecrating them for further Israeli investigation.
      Despite 35 violations of Israeli antiquities law by Muslims on the Temple Mount, including the construction of a new underground mosque that has damaged the wall and sent truckloads of artifact-laden debris over the wall, the Israeli government has done nothing to stop it.  “The IAA (Israel Antiquities Authority) is powerless to interfere because it has been so ordered by the highest levels of government,” the report says.  One can only imagine what would happen if this highly asymmetric political situation were reversed, and Israelis damaged Arab holy sites.  “This is the most important site in Israel, and yet we don’t see the authorities there,” complained archaeologist Eilat Mazar, whose digs on the City of David may have uncovered the palace of Judah’s kings (see 08/09/2005, bullet 3).  “We have to wake up and realize that if we don’t take care of it, the vandalism and illegal construction will continue.”
• Bible and spade:  Another publication by another organization – Bible and Spade by Associates for Biblical Research – has articles this month about the Magi, Herod the Great, the city of Smyrna in Asia Minor, and extra-biblical evidence for the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites under Joshua.  Founder and archaeologist Bryant Wood is a world expert in pottery identification.  The ABR current weekly article seems off-topic, but not really: how hybridization and polyploidy might explain the diversity of plants since the original creation.
• What is this thing about snakes?  On a different note, from a different source, Marvin Olasky in World Magazine (Aug 19, pp 30-31) bounced off the latest movie thriller Snakes on a Plane to ask why so many cultures have “Snakes on the brain.”  Peoples as geographically separated as the Sumerians, Canaanites, Greeks, Norse, Mayans, Persians, west Africans, National Geographic editors, Burmese, Lombards, Indians and Chinese have held snakes as central idioms of their religious traditions, sometimes worshiping them as gods and givers of wisdom.  Many of their traditions employ symbols strikingly similar to the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden, with a tree, forbidden fruit, a man and a woman, and a serpent.  Consider this example from Africa:

  What should we make of the Bassari people of west Africa speaking of a great god, Unumbotte, who made Man and made Snake; when Snake proposed the eating of fruit, “Man and his wife took some of the fruit and ate it.  Unumbotte came down from the sky and asked, ‘Who ate the fruit?’  The first couple admitted eating the fruit and said Snake had told them to do so.”

  Olasky rejects the interpretation of the late Joseph Campbell that the serpent icon is merely a Jungian archetype: “...what if the stories all over the world, whether similar to the biblical account or turned upside down into praise of the serpent, suggest that stories about the real Garden of Eden, passed down through the generations and distorted in the process, lingered for millennia?” he asks.

Now that the cosmologists have acquiesced that the physical evidence of the universe leaves a multiverse fantasyland as their only escape from the conclusion of intelligent design (see 08/11/2006), we can no longer grant the naturalistic scientists the presumptive authority to interpret the universe.  A Designer intelligent enough to choose the constants of physics is more than a force.  It is a Person with all power, all wisdom and all authority in heaven and earth, who intended for our existence.  How could anyone exclude the reasonable corollary that such a Designer would exhibit one of the most fundamental characteristics of personality: the desire to communicate?  And that is what He did: He created a universe to be inhabited (Isaiah 45) and He communicated his nature and salvation to us, in many portions and in many ways (Hebrews 1).
    For those raised on the false hope of Enlightenment rationalism that science could explain the true cause and history of the world, we have come full circle.  It’s time to dust off the age-old claims of the Bible and take them seriously once again.  Consider just the last bullet point above about the worldwide traditions of a serpent and temptation.  How could those evolve from an ape-like ancestry?  Clearly, if these traditions, so closely resembling the Garden of Eden account, are linked in cultural memories to a real event, it was not millions of years ago.
    The pieces of archaeological evidence fit together in a coherent way to support the historicity of the Garden of Eden, Hezekiah, Jesus, Paul and the entire Greatest Story Ever Told.  When occasional findings are interpreted in ways that seem to contradict the Biblical record, wait long enough, and the skeptic’s claims usually evaporate under further analysis (e.g., see 04/12/2003, 02/18/2005).  It’s not only archaeological sites that need careful digging.  Historical records, one’s own conscience, and especially the Bible itself yield treasures when unencumbered by the bankrupt theories of rationalist skepticism.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Politics and Ethics

On page 786 of this issue¹, Genzel et al. present remarkable observations of what appears to be a newly formed spiral galaxy, observed when the Universe was just a fifth of its current age.  The result is doubly significant: first, it provides the most detailed glimpse so far of the formation of a galaxy similar to our own Milky Way; second, it demonstrates the power of a new generation of high-resolution instruments that use adaptive optics to study the information and evolution of far-off galaxies.

The authors’ observations of BzK-15504 reveal it to be a giant spiral galaxy, with a size and mass similar to that of the Milky Way, but observed just 3 billion years after the Big Bang.  It shows many similarities to present-day spiral galaxies, with rotational properties that, again, are nearly identical to those of the Milky Way.  These similarities are notable because they imply that at least some large disk galaxies were broadly in place even at these early cosmic epochs.

It remains unclear, however, over what timescales galaxies were assembled and when and how bulges and disks—the primary components of present-day galaxies—were formed.  It is also puzzling that the most massive galaxies were more abundant and were forming stars more rapidly at early epochs than expected from models.

The juxtaposition of cockiness about their models and head-scratching about the particulars is what is puzzling.  To keep the model together, they have to have this galaxy, which is surely representative of billions more, forming stars and evolving so rapidly that it looks mature at one-fifth the assumed age of the universe.  This pattern of early maturity is the Cambrian Explosion of cosmology, also known as the Lumpiness Problem.  The early universe shows much more structure (lumpiness) than expected from a nearly homogeneous expansion of an initially uniform particle soup (uniform, that is, to within one part in a hundred thousandth of a degree temperature of the cosmic background radiation).  Astronomers seem to take their lumps in stride.  Sometimes, however, discretion is the better part of valor.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Dating Methods

The erosion and vertical stirring of surface materials under seasonal slab ice may have significantly altered the metre-scale sedimentary structures in the polar-layered deposits in a manner similar to bioturbation on the Earth.  This erosion and redeposition of the surface material on vertical scales of a few metres may have produced sedimentary structures that reflect this modification process, rather than the initial depositional environment.  If so, this process may present major complications to the interpretation of the sedimentary record observed in upcoming Polar Lander observations, and must be considered in relating this record to the climate history of Mars.

Yellowstone, eat your heart out.  What a sight it must be to look out over the south polar cap and see jets of dirty gas roaring upward hundreds of feet into the atmosphere every few hundred yards.  It might be even more dramatic to see the geysers of Enceladus, discovered last year (see 11/28/2005).
    Imagine if scientists for the upcoming polar lander mission measured these layers carefully, correlated them with other Martian strata, and came up with a detailed model of the climate history of Mars.  They would be wrong, according to this model.  Interpretations of data are not the same as data.  Sometimes, weird processes can be at work to scramble the data, misleading humans that were not present when the formations were made.  These authors mentioned bioturbation on earth, wherein underground organisms, with their burrowing and tunneling, carry fossil material upward or downward from its initial location (see 05/21/2004).
    Many times, scientists can recognize these effects and account for them in their models.  This new Martian process, apparently unique in the solar system, however, was unrecognized till now.  In this case, the effects take place in the present and can be observed.  (One wonders, offhand, whether this process could continue for billions of years.)  On Earth, much of the history cannot be reconstructed except by fallible inference from complicated data.  Peter Sadler said in the aforementioned 2004 article that cryptic signatures of bioturbation or reworking can go unrecognized by scientists, yet have significant effects on deposits – and by extension, on their interpretations.
    Undoubtedly different physical effects take place on Earth deposits used to infer past geological and climate history.  But by definition, one cannot know all the unknowns.  Let this instance be a lesson that new discoveries can blow holes in the best of scientific models.
Next headline on:  Geology • Solar System • Dating Methods

Perhaps the rise of science relates to the importance that Iran’s government attaches to the development of nuclear technology.  Many regard Iran’s interest in these technologies with extreme suspicion.  Nonetheless, Iran’s embrace of science should be welcomed.

One practical advantage for science in Muslim countries is the lack of direct interference of religious doctrine, such as exists in many Christian countries.  There has never, for example, been a debate about darwinian evolution, and human embryonic stem-cell research is constrained by humanistic rather than religious ethics. The Royan Institute in Iran was the first in the Middle East to develop a human embryonic stem-cell line, using spare embryos from its in vitro fertilization programme.

But what if its motivation is to wipe out Israel and destroy Europe and America?
    It’s time to awaken Nature from its drunken stupor and dowse the editors with a splash of sobering letters.  If you aren’t fed up enough with the utterly illogical pro-totalitarian, anti-Western, ultra-liberal leadership of the Big Science elitists, go find a breathalyzer.  It’s incredible that Nature could write such a piece, especially now, right after Iran was exposed guilty as a demon for supplying Hezbollah, one of the worst terrorist groups on earth, with thousands of rockets to rain on Israel, along with money and soldiers in its offensive war against the tiny strip of land that actually is, despite its diminutive size and population, the #1 most scientifically productive country in the Middle East.
    The editors did not address their love letter to the many Iranians yearning to breathe free in a modern, civilized country instead of a 7th-century tribal warrior theocracy, but to the Ahmadinejad regime itself, which many believe used the Hezbollah war to distract attention from its nuclear ambitions.  Why not praise the other end of the Axis of Evil in North Korea while you’re at it, guys?
    Many worthy scientists contribute their research results faithfully to this rag, hoping for the prestige and publicity it carries; they are not responsible for what the editorial board thinks.  It would be one thing if Nature were pressuring Iranian scientists to push for democratic reforms in their country, so that Iran could join the community of nations in a spirit of rational diplomacy and scientific openness.  The whole editorial, by contrast, reeks of a blame-the-West attitude, while praising one of the most dangerous and irrational regimes in the world today for – what? – uncontested Darwinism and unrestricted stem cells.  Unbelievable.
    Big Science may be infested with ultra-liberal bias (12/02/2004), but this is too far and over the top.  It’s time to clean house.  Along with Eric Pianka and Ward Churchill and the profs blaming Bush for 9/11, these guys are completely out of touch with reality, and should get an earful from Christian and Jewish scientists and citizens, to say nothing of moderate Muslims (who, incidentally, usually believe in intelligent design), and whichever scientists, educators, politicians have any sense left.  Outrageous positions deserve a broad-based and cogent response.
    This is not the first time Nature (and Science, too, for that matter) have cast America and Israel in a bad light, and have polished the image of the Holocaust-deniers.  But this piece shows their true colors.  If they hate the democratic West and its Judeo-Christian, Darwin-doubting heritage so much, let them move to the Muslim utopias.  Let their women scientists don burqas and enjoy the time-honored traditions, like honor killings.  Let them subject themselves to daily disruption of peace and quiet from minaret loudspeakers blaring wails of men who can’t sing any better than crybabies.  Let them experience for themselves the torture prisons reserved for those who say a word against Allah or the tyrant in power.  Let them watch their little boys trained to hate from their earliest years, and taught to view, as the noblest ideal, the suicide bombing of as many Jews as possible on a bus or in a shopping mall.  Let them witness their science subverted to the goal of destroying the one small democratic safe haven in the Middle East that grants freedom to all scientists. 
    These minor inconveniences would apparently be tolerable to the editors of Nature in exchange for the sheer ecstasy of envisioning a Beulah land with uninhibited Darwinist preaching and unencumbered access to embryonic stem cells (08/13/2006).  If they long for such a promised land, it’s all there waiting for them in Tehran.  Let them kiss the face of Mahmoud, their favored patron of science, who is certainly relishing this vote of confidence from the leading scientific journal in the world.  How did it ever come to this?
Update 09/20/2006: Nature got an earful from readers in three letters to the editor in the Sept. 20 issue.  The president of Tel Aviv university was “horrified” at the editorial.  He quickly reminded Nature of Iran’s abuses of human rights, denial of the Holocaust, and supp