“The truth is Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but a materialistic creation myth masquerading as science.... This is becoming increasingly obvious to the American people, who are not the ignorant backwoods religious dogmatists that Darwinists make them out to be.  Darwinists insult the intelligence of American taxpayers and at the same time depend on them for support.  This is an inherently unstable situation, and it cannot last.” 
—Dr. Jonathan Wells, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), in “Why Darwinism is Doomed,” WND Sept. 27, 2006.

Today’s news is often forgotten a few days later.  But when one opens ancient texts that have appealed to a broad audience over a longer period of time, such as the Bible, what does one often find in the opening chapter?  A discussion of how the constituents of the universe--light, stars, life--were created.  Although humans are often caught up with mundane problems, they are curious about the big picture.  As citizens of the universe we cannot help but wonder how the first sources of light formed, how life came into existence and whether we are alone as intelligent beings in this vast space.  Astronomers in the 21st century are uniquely positioned to answer these big questions.

This combined observational and theoretical effort should shed light on various mysteries that now plague the theory of galaxy formation.  One set of questions concerns the massive black holes in the centers of galaxies.  Over the past decade astronomers have realized that almost every galaxy in the present-day universe, including our own Milky Way, hosts a massive black hole.  These holes are believed to be fed with gas in episodic events, triggered by mergers of galaxies.  During these growth spurts, the accreting gas shines much more brightly than the entire rest of the galaxy, producing a quasar.  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has revealed that quasars with black holes of more than a billion solar masses already existed at a cosmic age of one billion years.  How did such massive black holes come to exist so early?  Why did they stop growing?
    Another set concerns the size distribution of galaxies.  Theorists believe that the ultraviolet radiation produced by dwarf galaxies during the epoch of reionization heated the cosmic gas and suppressed the formation of new low-mass galaxies.  How did this suppression unfold over time?  Which of the dwarf galaxies we find today were already in existence at the beginning?  These are only a few of the many questions whose answers lie in the Dark Ages.

Proud man exalts himself above the word of the Lord and places his own perception, aided albeit by his instruments, as the discoverer of Truth about ultimate things.  One only needs to see the history of human speculation about cosmology, with its many upsets, to get a reality check on the likelihood today’s theories have arrived.  And one only needs to consider the magnitude of the remaining questions to doubt the propriety of confidence.
    Loeb’s tidy picture would require that the universe went from an almost completely homogeneous soup of particles to highly structured arrangement of stars and galaxies and clusters of galaxies in a relatively brief period of time.  Not only that, these stars would have had to age, collapse, and form supermassive black holes at the centers of quasars within 7% of the presumed age of the universe, because that is what we now observe at the farthest extent of our current observational capabilities (09/24/2006).  Hoping that the next generation of space telescopes will fill in the blanks is only hope.  If history is any guide, any answers lurking in the Dark Ages will be outshone by new questions.
    Loeb does well to have us ponder the big picture, something often lost in the nightly news.  And it is certainly honorable to extend our vision as far as we can, and to seek for understanding.  That is a far cry, however, from claiming we already have it.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Bible and Theology

1. Garden of Eden?  A place called Gobekli Tepe in Kurdish Turkey is contending for the title of the Garden of Eden, reported The First Post.  Archaeologists found carvings of animals and a temple they claim are much older than Stonehenge; they estimate the date as 10,000 years old.  Carvings include images of scorpions, water birds and river life.  The researchers feel these are images depicting an Edenic life of the hunter-gatherers before they took up the toils of agriculture.
2. Gems in the Temple Mount rubble:  Haaretz published an update on what Gabriel Barkay and crew are finding in the Temple Mount debris tossed over the wall by Muslims building a mosque (04/17/2005).  The artifacts cover a wide range of dates, from neolithic to Byzantine.  Finds include potsherds, jewelry, statuettes, game pieces, remains of mosaics and much more, some of it from the First Temple period (the time of Solomon to the Babylonian captivity).  Students, soldiers and tourists are getting into the project.  The team seems conflicted between the thrill of seeing artifacts come to life from areas inaccessible till now, countered by anger at the “archaeological crime” committed by the Muslims for their illegal excavations on this holiest of sites and their cavalier dumping of the soil over the wall.  For a taste of the responses, see the Talkback at the end of the article.
       The Jews have another reason for concern.  Muslims are planning to build a fifth minaret on the Temple Mount, the first construction in 639 years, and the tallest at 134 feet high.  Todd Bolen commented on the double standard in his Bible Places Blog for 10/13:

   Such a construction is a violation of the principle of status quo of disputed holy sites in Israel, and almost certainly will be built without any archaeological supervision.  It is ironic that if one wants to build a cottage in a remote part of Israel and antiquities are present, then an excavation must take place.  But if one wants to construct on one of the most important sites in the Holy Land, there are no such requirements.

   Update 11/10/2006: Todd Bolen has more pictures and commentary about Barkay’s rubble-sifting project at Bible Places Blog for 11/10.  He mentioned a website, har-habayt.org, that documents the situation on the Temple Mount, and said that a newer website is coming with up-to-date information.

The difference is incredibly stark between the way the Muslims and the Jews treat their history.  It’s plainly obvious to any tourist in the Holy Land.  Israeli national archaeological parks are clean, attractive, educational, and welcoming.  Go anywhere near a Muslim site without their approval only at the risk of death.  Jewish buses must avoid the West Bank for fear of being pelted with rocks or blown up.  Jews who would love to remember their sacred history on the Temple Mount are forbidden, but Muslim kids are free to play soccer, fly frisbees and drop their ice cream wrappers and other trash all over the place.  Many Palestinians make their living selling Biblical trinkets at places like Bethlehem, it is true, and not all Muslims approve of violence, but the Israeli Antiquities Authority has to walk on eggs to avoid riots even for protesting the violation of their most sacred sites.  Where is the United Nations?  Oh—most of them are Muslim or Muslim supporters.
    As to the Garden of Eden claim, get real.  This dig, though interesting, is post-Flood, and post-Babel, made perhaps by tribes without written language settling here to form the beginnings of settlements.  Every country wants some fame, but calling this Eden is illogical, if not a ploy for Turkey’s tourism industry.  It also treats the Biblical account of Eden like a myth, a mere fable portraying the evolution of primitive man to civilization.  It is apparent that whatever people made these structures were already civilized and talented.  Enjoy the pictures, but don’t buy the line.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Politics and Ethics

Highly reactive peroxide would scour organic chemicals from Martian soil, says [Gregory T.] Delory [UC Berkeley].  That process would make the surface of the Red Planet hostile to life.  Furthermore, because the planet lacks an ozone layer, large quantities of ultraviolet radiation reach Mars’ surface.  Deep in the soil, where neither ultraviolet radiation nor peroxide infiltrates, however, life might survive.

Delory left intact a tiny bit of hope by saying, “The jury’s still out as to whether there is life on Mars.”  The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Physics

• Toad in the hole:  A blog named Toad in the Hole expresses some of the fervor of certain Darwinists who cannot tolerate the thought of intelligent design in a scientific context.  They are on a campaign to pressure libraries to move copies of Darwin’s Nemesis (an anthology by ID leaders about Phillip Johnson) from the life science section to the religion section. 
• Canadian intolerance:  For some Darwinists, it’s not enough to force creation and ID out of the public school science classrooms.  The Quebec National Post reported, “The Quebec Ministry of Education has told unlicensed Christian evangelical schools that they must teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and sex education or close their doors....”  Read what Evolution News said about this “winter chill” in Quebec.
• Dawkins Talkin’:  Richard Dawkins, on a book tour with The God Delusion, is making the rounds to combat religion.  The science journals are mostly praising the book, if not the intensity of his rhetoric.  The famous atheist and scientific rationalist has been also facing some stiff opposition, however; see Resurgence link to a YouTube clip (funny), and listen to this MP3 excerpt of debater David Quinn giving him a run for his money.  Terry Eagleton, English professor at U of Manchester (and no fundamentalist) was quite incensed at Dawkins and said so on the London Review of Books.  In addition, eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel (NYU School of Law) gave him bad press on National Review recently (see ID the Future).
      At an appearance at a local bookstore in Washington D.C., a visitor asked Dawkins whether it was consistent for him to believe in determinism and then take credit for writing his book.  Access Research Network tells how Dawkins hemmed and hawed, and then conceded he had to live as if determinism is false, and society must treat people as if they are responsible for their actions.  He admitted “it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable.”  Evolution News has links to more stories about how “everyone’s talkin’ about Dawkins’ crusade against religion.”  There’s more Dawkins Talk on William Dembski’s blog Uncommon Descent (Oct 25-26) and on Post-Darwinist.
• This means war:  When a British ID-friendly group named Truth in Science decided to give out free copies of the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life to secondary schools throughout the UK, some in the media went ballistic.  Evolution News described the “unsupported assertions, editorializing in a manner that even some of the most agenda-driven reporting in the US has yet to do.”
• Detective mystery:  Who is the “British Centre for Science Education”?  David Anderson of Derbyshire decided to investigate.  He found some surprising clues about this organization which emerged to condemn the Truth in Science campaign, and reported his findings on his blog BCSE Revealed; it reads like a detective mystery.
• The Polish front:  The deputy education minister of Poland, a member of the conservative League of Polish Families (LPR) that entered the ruling coalition in May, got vocal with anti-Darwin statements recently: “The theory of evolution is a lie” and “It is an error we have legalized as a common truth.”  Immediately, the scientific establishment mobilized to fight this “catastrophe.”  Nature 10/26 reported that “Members of the Polish Academy of Sciences protested against the LPR campaign in an open letter that was published in several Polish newspapers,” hoping that “the quick response will avert damage to Polish science and education.”  Some were worried that “People could easily get the impression that there is a controversy about evolution among scientists.”
      Included in the report are charges that the LPR is “ultra-right-wing” (see loaded words) and that the deputy education minister has “openly homophobic, anti-Semitic and nationalistic opinions” and “is also known to favour creationist views” (see association).  It quoted one signer of the letter that said, “However, the point that really requires further discussion is not evolution, but how a minister can say such stupid things” (see ridicule).  Another researcher was “shocked” by the anti-Darwinist statements, saying, “We really did not expect a creationist movement to emerge in Poland.”  (Nature 443, 890-891(26 October 2006) | doi:10.1038/443890c).
• Keep on schmucking:  The same issue of Nature contains three favorable book reviews of anti-creationist books: (1) a mostly-favorable review by Lawrence M. Krauss of Dawkins” book The God Delusion, (2) a friendly review by Brian Charlesworth of Sean B. Carroll’s new book The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, and (3) a positive review by Paul Bloom and Izzat Jarudi of Marc D. Hauser’s book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong which presents “A view of morality as the product of an innate mental faculty – rather like language.”
      When creationism or intelligent design is mentioned at all in these reviews, it is only to dismiss it briefly; Charlesworth, for instance, says “A favourite ploy of creationists is to accept the possibility of small-scale evolutionary change by darwinian means, but to deny that this has any relevance to the evolution of complex structures or new species.”  A large cartoon in Krauss’s review shows a man with a sandwich board proclaiming, “Renounce God and be saved.”
• Remote slander takes no guts:  Columnist Mike Adams in his Oct 30 entry on TownHall.com describes how he had to give a speech to a hostile audience at the University of Minnesota.  Before he even arrived, he had been lambasted by P.Z. Myers, associate professor of biology at UMM and author of the anti-creationist blog Pharyngula (07/06/2006, 11/21/2005).  How had Myers described Adams?  For starters, “Horowitzian shill, anti-feminist, creationist clown, homophobic bigot, warrior for free speech, professional racist, gun kook, academic-by-accident, beauty contest judge, and just generally contemptible far, far right-wing nutcase.”¹  Adams told how Myers, though vicious in his attacks online, did not have the courage to ask any questions in person.  After the talk, which went smoothly without incident, Myers continued his web attacks afterwards, including telling lies that were refuted by the videotape.

The intensity of anti-creationist rhetoric exceeds all bounds of reason.  One cannot imagine these same people being as angry at the Taliban or child molesters as they are against a lot of innocent people who simply feel that whenever Darwinism is taught, students should have the right to know the problems also, and that evidence for design deserves to be discussed.  Remember: first they ignore you, then they fight you, then they become hysterical, then they collapse from brain short-circuits, then you win.  With reaction #3 right on cue, the ID Movement has a bright future.
Next headline on:  Darwin • Intelligent Design • Education

1. Bee Genes:  Nature published the honeybee genome this week.  This is important not only to entomologists, but to social scientists interested in the unique social structure of these insects, and to ecologists and agriculturalists interested in the economic importance of honeybees as pollinators.  Summaries of the genome report can be found on EurekAlert, Science Daily, CSIRO, National Geographic.  Another EurekAlert story contains links to other research papers.  Surprisingly, bees seem to have fewer protein-coding genes than other insects.
2. Bee Gems:  A fossil bee in amber claimed to be 100 million years old, 35-45 million years older than the previous record holder, was announced in Science.  Though it was predominantly bee-like in morphology, researchers claim it had some wasp-like characteristics that hinted of a common ancestry.  They’re claiming that the emergence of honeybees corresponded to the explosion of flowering plants.  Reports about this can be found on EurekAlert, Live Science, Science Daily, National Geographic and the BBC News.  The amber-imprisoned insect was in “remarkable condition, showing individual hairs on undamaged portions of its thorax, legs, abdomen and head. The legs and wings are clearly visible,” according to an Oregon State press release.
3. Beehavior:  EurekAlert reported on work at Arizona State attempting to explain the complex foraging behavior of bees from data in the genome.
4. Bee on time:  EurekAlert has a story about researchers at Hebrew University that found a surprise: “Biological clock of honey bee more similar to humans than to insects.”  Dr. Guy Bloch said, “Discovering that molecular characteristics of the biological clock in bees is closer to the biological clock of mammals than that of flies was a big surprise, since previously it had been thought that there is one type of clock that is typical of insects and another typical of mammals.  These results change our understanding of the evolution of circadian clocks.”
5. Out of Africa:  A press release from UC Irvine and a EurekAlert echo of work from University of Illinois claim that the bee genome shows that bees first emerged in Africa.  This is based on a paper in Nature Oct. 26.
6. Bee brain chemistry:  U of Illinois scientists are also figuring out the peptides in bee brains, reported EurekAlert.  A second EurekAlert story discussed findings about the chemoreceptors bees use to detect tastes and smells.  Apparently bees beat out fruit flies and mosquitos in smell receptors, but don’t have as much tasting equipment – surprising, considering their life around nectar.  Interesting fact: “There are a million neurons in the brain of a honey bee (Apis mellifera), a brain not much larger than the size of the period at the end of this sentence.”
7. Pollen nation:  The importance of pollination (principally by honeybees) was discussed in Science Daily and a press release from UC Berkeley.  The second article contains images of how much better fruits develop when pollinated by insects instead of wind or self-pollination.

There’s way too much material here to digest; links are provided for those who wish to follow up.  As usual, evolutionary storytelling occurs side-by-side with amazing observational facts about these marvelous insects.
    We may get afraid of the occasional bee that hovers over our picnic plate, but the wealth in our supermarkets depends on them.  Most won’t sting you if you don’t startle them.  Take the time to get to know honeybees.  They really are spectacular creations.  Imagine a million neurons, coded with biological clocks and social instincts and flight software, all packed into a brain as tiny as a period on a sentence.  Evolutionists claim they have changed little in 100 million years, even after coming out of Africa once upon a time and taking over the world and causing an explosion in flowering plant diversity.  Let’s help science once again focus on facts, not fables.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Genetics • Amazing Stories

You can’t call it a terror bird without being there to watch it.  Inferences from living ostriches and rheas are probably warranted, but maybe these were big, beautiful, stupid and sweet.  Maybe they would have made good pets.  Don’t put it together with the cat, though.  (Imagine it having a chirp like Here, kitty kitty kitty.)  Best put the bird in the yard and the cat in the cage.
Next headline on:  Birds • Fossils

The discovery of Priscomyzon within a Late Devonian marginal marine estuarine environment pushes the minimum date of lamprey-like fishes back by some 35 million years, and provides a new minimum date for molecular-clock-based estimates of the cyclostome crown node.  The well developed oral disc, annular cartilages and circumoral teeth of Priscomyzon suggests the evolutionary long-term stability of a highly specialized parasitic feeding habit.  Lampreys have long been recognized as highly apomorphic but only now is it possible to appreciate just how ancient these specializations are.  In this particular sense, lampreys might be described as ‘living fossils’, and Priscomyzon adds new phylogenetic perspective to studies using modern agnathans as model systems for deriving insight into primitive vertebrate conditions.

The relationships between living hagfishes, lampreys and jawed vertebrates are hotly debated, because of conflicting distributions of morphological and physiological traits on the one hand, and of DNA and RNA sequence data on the other.  The morphological and physiological aspects suggest that lampreys (but not hagfishes) are the sister group of jawed vertebrates, whereas gene sequences generally suggest that lampreys and hagfishes are sister groups.  Fossils sometimes help to resolve such conflicts, by revealing combinations of traits in an extinct species that better support a particular relationship.  Frustratingly, Priscomyzon does not help in resolving the problem of lamprey relationships, because it provides no new informative combinations of characteristics compared with post-Devonian and extant lampreys.
    Morphology-based evolutionary trees of living and fossil vertebrates have long been prone to change.

The researchers performed some tree-building magic with their new lamprey to give it the illusion of fitting into an evolutionary ancestry somehow, but clearly finding one so early, so little evolved, was a surprise.  Their unwieldy chart now has to place lampreys 35 million years farther back, where its unique morphology was already well-developed.  Then they have to claim that very little changed for 360 million years.  During that same amount of time, all the varieties of reptiles, birds, mammals, and land plants supposedly emerged: an embarrassment of riches for the fecund process of evolution.  Why did lampreys miss the party?  May as well add to the story; in the absence of fossils, National Geographic speculates, “When the fossilized lamprey lived, there were probably many types of jawless vertebrates.  Except for the lamprey and hagfish, all of them seem to have died out.”
    Interestingly, Janvier pointed out that we cannot assume a parasitic lifestyle just from the morphology.  It may look like this fossil lamprey used its mouth to suck blood, “Yet only 19 living lamprey species (out of 38) feed this way,” he said.  “Other lampreys mainly use their sucker to either secure themselves while at rest or carry stones for nest building.”  This opens the possibility that parasitism was a degenerate behavior for structures that had another purpose.
    The overarching theme, though, was the surprise of finding a nearly modern lamprey so far back in time; it means that any alleged common ancestor had to be pushed even farther back: “lamprey morphology has been astonishingly stable for 360 Myr,” Janvier said.  Thinking inside the Darwinian box, he said this “proves that lampreys and hagfishes had already diverged by late Devonian times, earlier than previously thought.”
    So there you have Darwinists experiencing the surprise effect of anomalies again, yet with no prospect of thinking outside the box.  (In fact, the same issue of Nature had several tirades against those close-minded, evil creationists.)  Finding organic molecules in fossils 350 million years old does little to jar the evolutionists, nor does finding living fossils virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.  The gumby Darwinists are masters at turning every falsification into confirmation.  The evolution talk is all in future tense, as usual: this “may give us insight” into evolution (yawn).  We’ve been waiting a long time for said insight, and all we keep getting is outdark.  It makes us downright ready to upchuck.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Life

Rock formations there are used as a frame of reference to judge the ages of rocks throughout North America.  So these new results mean that many scientists will have to revise their work.  Estimates of when certain animals went extinct may change.
    “Unfortunately, this means that a lot of people are going to have to re-examine work that they thought was done,” Cramer said.

“We have this great geological record of climate changes in the past,” Cramer said.  “The problem is, the rate of change that we’re worried about in the modern day is on a very short time scale.  And when we look into the deep past, our ability to know where we are in time isn’t that precise.  If we can get our time constraints down more precisely, we can begin to ask the same sort of questions of the past that we’re asking of the modern era.”

The Niagara Gorge was the site of another episode where the word “unfortunately” is apt.  Creation on the Web retells how Charles Lyell, the father of uniformitarian geology (who had a huge influence on Darwin) fudged the data about the rate of erosion of Niagara Falls.  His estimate of the age of the falls—35,000 years—undermined the faith of many Christians about the Biblical record of the age of the earth.  Only after the damage was done did the facts come out: his estimate was also at least four to five times too slow!  The corrected date puts the age at an upper limit of 7000-9000 years, much more credible in a Biblical timescale, considering that the erosion would have been much more rapid right after the Flood.
    Now, another measurement in the same gorge has been found to be off by a factor of five.  Sure, everything is still stated in terms of millions of years, but bigger questions need to be faced.  Think of the confidence that many other geologists placed in the earlier estimate.  Think of the timelines, tables, and charts published in geology textbooks and scientific papers that counted on the Ireviken Excursion dating to a particular age and rate of formation.  Now, “a lot of people are going to have to re-examine work that they thought was done.”  They need to re-examine at a much deeper level and question another formation: the geological column itself.
    Uniformitarian geologists might respond that this error represents one correction out of a vast body of data and will not have that big an impact on the geological column.  But Cramer’s comments bear deeper reflection: “when we look into the deep past, our ability to know where we are in time isn’t that precise.”  Then he said that “if we can get our time constraints down more precisely, we can begin to ask” the pertinent questions (italics added).  That is a big if.  Geologists apparently counted on this marker from 1800 to 2006, only to find that the formation was laid down at least five times faster than they had estimated.  What confidence can we have in other measurements?  How much can one infer about millions of years when all he has to go on is some carbon isotope ratios?
    The problem is, their methods are married to their assumptions, and those assumptions were raised in Darwinland.  Cramer was only questioning the rate of formation of this particular gorge, not the framework of geological history that assumes it occurred hundreds of millions of years ago when fish were presumably evolving.  A new generation of geologists needs to arise with bigger questions, and fewer assumptions.  For too long, the marriage of geology with evolutionary theory has been a bondage instead of a blessed union.  Calling a rock stratum “Silurian” for convenience based on a type section is harmless taxonomy, but why must Silurian correspond to evolutionary beliefs?  The evolutionary beliefs usually dictate the interpretations.
    For example, as we have seen, no one in secular geology questioned the disconnect between the geo-evolutionary assumption that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and the finding of flexible soft tissues in a dinosaur bone (06/03/2005, 03/24/2005).  It’s like a wife exclaiming, “Wow, look at how fresh this bone looks!” only to have the husband put his hand over her mouth and tell the reporters, “What she means is, we have just realized that soft tissue can survive 65 million years, because we all know that dinosaurs went extinct long before humans evolved.  Isn’t that right, honey?” and she nods submissively in agreement.
    Evolution is an abusive spouse.  It beats research into conformity with its own needs and desires.  If geology can get a divorce from evolution, and if geologists can once again start dating outside the Darwin Party concentration camp, a union of new questions and answers might emerge from the minds of liberated researchers, and the offspring could be precocious.  For a good discussion on thinking anew, read The Right Questions by Dr. Phillip E. Johnson.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

This upset is just the next episode in a long line of speculations about what happened to the dinosaurs.  They thought they finally had it nailed with the big crater in Mexico.  Now that the impact theory is coming under fire, it’s going to be a hard sell with these new scenarios.  Why didn’t the worms afflict the mammals and birds that came through the extinction unscathed?  Why didn’t global warming and volcanism have the same effect on all animal groups?  Dinosaurs, remember, inhabited almost every longitude and latitude on the globe, and were successfully adaptive in a wide variety of climes.
    If they perished in a world-wide flood, however, and the remaining stock were hunted to extinction as pests by humans, this would fit the evidence.  The flood was accompanied by volcanism and, maybe, triggered by meteor impacts.  If this sounds too radical, it’s no more radical than finding soft tissue inside the bones of a T. rex (02/22/2006).  Evolutionists haven’t been able to hold onto an explanation that fits the evidence any better.  The Science Daily article ended, What the microfossils are saying is that Chicxulub probably aided the demise of the dinosaurs, but so did Deccan trap volcanism’s greenhouse warming effect and finally a second huge impact that finished them off.  So where’s the crater?
    “I wish I knew,” said Keller.  “There is some evidence that it may have hit in India, where a crater of about 500 kilometers in diameter is estimated and named Shiva by paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee from the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock.  The evidence for it, however, is not very compelling at this time.”

It’s funny.  It’s cute.  But here’s what I really think about the theory of evolution: It’s not real.  It is not the way we got here.  In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live.  We are not creations of random chance.  We are not accidents.  There is a God, a Creator, who made you and me.  We were made in His image, which separates us from all other creatures.

Corrected version: There is no theory of evolution.  Just a list of Darwin Party creatures Chuck Norris has not shared Christ with yet.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Theology

But nearly 150 years after Darwin first brought this elegant idea to the world’s attention when he published The Origin of Species, the evolution of complex structures can still be hard to accept.  Most of us can envision natural selection tweaking a simple trait—making an animal furrier, for example, or its neck longer.  Yet it’s harder to picture evolution producing a new complex organ, complete with all its precisely interlocking parts.  Creationists claim that life is so complex that it could not have evolved.  They often cite the virtuoso engineering of the bacterial tail, which resembles a tiny electric motor spinning a shaft, to argue that such complexity must be the direct product of “intelligent design” by a superior being.
    The vast majority of biologists do not share this belief.  Studying how complex structures came to be is one of the most exciting frontiers in evolutionary biology, with clues coming at remarkable speed.

In case you didn’t notice, National Geographic’s understanding of Darwinism and the many philosophical and evidential arguments against it is not much above a high school freshman level.  There are so many problems in their presentation, and so much pure propaganda the way it is presented, the editors ought to be ashamed of themselves.  For instance, they still appeal to Haeckel’s embryo argument—not with Haeckel’s original forged drawings, but with newer ones that do not look at all alike.  But the caption says, “The early embryos of three different vertebrates—a fish, a chicken, and a human—look much the same.”  Any reader is going to look at the drawings and say, “Huh?”
    Where have the editors been?  Don’t they read the literature against Darwinism?  Don’t they know how to deal at a more scholarly level with problems that even biologists inside the Darwin Party acknowledge?  In their simplistic minds, Hox genes under natural selection can create anything and everything, even “Masterworks” of engineering.  They chide creationists for finding it “hard to accept” the evolution of complex structures.  This is classic question begging.  Who says it’s right to accept a flawed theory, full of holes and wishful thinking with the whitewash of artwork substituting for the brick and mortar of evidence?
    You may have noticed the similarity of Carl Zimmer’s title “A fin is a limb is a wing” with the statement by Ingrid Newkirk of PETA (see source), “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”  No they aren’t, and no he isn’t.  Notice how word choice is operative in the propaganda both PETA and NG employ: a human boy is a rat when they want to dispose of a fetus, but an extinct ape’s juvenile offspring is a “baby” when they want to promulgate evolutionary philosophy.  Connect the dots between the philosophies of both of these dehumanizing, desensitizing philosophies.  If you get a picture you don’t like, it’s time to write more letters to the editor.
    Dr. Brad Harrub has investigated the “Lucy’s Baby” evidence on Apologetics Press.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man

The fossil skeleton shows the fish’s skull had large holes for breathing through the top of the head but importantly also had muscular front fins with a well-formed humerus, ulna and radius – the same bones are found in the human arm.

Whereas the braincase and dermal cranial skeleton exhibit generalized morphologies with respect to Eusthenopteron or Panderichthys, taxa that are traditionally considered to be phyletically close to tetrapods, the presence of a deeply invaginated, wide spiracle, advanced internal spiracular architecture and near-horizontal hyomandibula are specialized features that are absent from Eusthenopteron.  Furthermore, the pectoral fin skeleton of Gogonasus shares several features with that of Tiktaalik, the most tetrapod-like fish.  A new phylogenetic analysis places Gogonasus crownward of Eusthenopteron as the sister taxon to the Elpistostegalia.  Aspects of the basic tetrapod limb skeleton and middle ear architecture can now be traced further back within the tetrapodomorph radiation.

The conspicuously large spiracular opening (Fig. 1a-c) is proportionally similar to those recently reconstructed for Panderichthys and Tiktaalik.  The pectoral fin endoskeleton of Gogonasus is described here for the first time (Fig.  2), the new specimen being the only known Devonian fish that shows a complete acid-prepared pectoral limb.  There are some surprising similarities to the recently described pectoral fin in the advanced elpistostegalian Tiktaalik.  As such features could indicate homoplasy between Gogonasus and early tetrapods, we present a revised character analysis to determine whether the new anatomical information supports a more crownward position for Gogonasus in the stem-tetrapod phylogeny.

When you read scientific papers, with all their unknowns, all their qualifiers and disclaimers and uncertainties and admissions of doubt and lack of evidence, then read the popular news reports gleaming with confidence and glittering generalities glibly stating how some new fossil proves evolution, it gets really disgusting.  Any Darwin Party advocate holding up a stack of science journals at a school board meeting and claiming they represent mounds of evidence backing up Charlie’s wacko story about humans coming from bacteria is either a charlatan or a dupe of the popular press.
    When you hear a wild, reckless claim like “This is the mother of all tetrapods!” don’t be a sucker.  Read the original source paper like we do.  It has the fine print.  It suggests a revised claim that, unfortunately, makes for a very poor sound bite for reporters: something like:

If we could figure out how these shallow-water inhabitants got from Australia to the arctic, and if we had the soft parts, and if we understood how morphological features could appear and disappear and re-appear within a Darwinian mechanism, and if we could unscramble these mosaics and redistribute them into lineages, and if we had the vaguest idea of what kind of environments the creatures actually lived in, and if we could rule out the possibility (as in Coelacanth) that the observed bones were used for other purposes other than what we expect, and if we could wiggle out of the Lamarckian charge of orthogenesis, and if we could somehow connect these morphological differences to beneficial mutations that natural selection could act on (with no purpose or goal in mind that they might prove advantageous on land, if both the breathing apparatus and the fin bones were to get lucky at the same time), then we might be able to make the claim that our particular fossil fits somewhere in an ancestral relationship to tetrapods, however controversial, that could be a contender in scientific conferences, and could get us some powerpoint slides that won’t be criticized, and might get us some brief popularity at the closing dinner, and maybe even a question from a reporter, or at least avoidance of ridicule, until our rivals find something else the following spring that blows our entire scheme out of the water.

That, discerning students, is how real Darwinism is done.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Life • Darwinism

The creationist faithful would do well to take a look, says van Wyhe.  “If people feel so strongly about Darwin, they should actually take the time to read his own words rather than relying only on the interpretations of others.”  Even if this doesn’t convert them to evolution by natural selection, it should expose the popular misconception that Darwin had an anti-Christian agenda, he says.  “This was not what he was about,” says van Wyhe.  “He was simply a scientist trying to explain how the world works.”

It’s a fair request that creationists consult the actual words of Darwin instead of relying on the interpretations of others, as long as that same request cuts both ways.  Darwinists routinely misquote and misunderstand the points of creationists and those in the intelligent design movement.  Many Darwinists don’t understand Charlie, either—including Mr. van Wyhe who thinks Darwin had no anti-Christian agenda and “was simply a scientist trying to explain how the world works.”  Read Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin for some disturbing details that provide more finesse than a quick either-or judgment on Darwin’s motivation.
    Critics of Darwin should welcome this site.  Now it will be possible to trace the evolution of Darwin’s own ideas, including his loss of faith in the Bible.  For instance, early editions of Voyage of the Beagle are said to indicate he still believed the Bible and creation, and supported Christian missionaries for some time after his voyage, till gradually his faith wore away under the influence of ideas from Lyell and others who cast doubt on the historicity of Scripture.  His mind began to interpret what he had seen in terms of slow, gradual change over long periods of time.  Now that the uniformitarian foundation that caused this slide into apostasy has been undermined, it is well to consider the lesson of building a world view on fallible ideas.
    A digital archive is not the same as a book.  With the advantages come some disadvantages.  One can only hope the administrators of both websites will have high standards of integrity, and will not surreptitiously expunge politically incorrect words or passages from the documents.  Van Wyhe need not fear creationist faithful will avoid taking a look.  When some uncomfortable details come out, the question will become, will the Darwinist faithful take a look?
Next headline on:  Darwin • Bible and Theology

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.  At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated.  The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Stringer, a positivist and progressivist, thinks science is self-correcting, and will no longer fall for such a low deed.  We leave it to the reader to judge if the Darwin Party has learnt their lessons, or earnt any credibility or respect among civilized human beings.  Maybe we should let them inhabit their own island and evolve this way if they want to.  The rest of us will read good books and hone our social skills for the common good, choose our soul-mates wisely, and develop the moral character needed to be good citizens and fulfill our Creator-endowed rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of eudaimonia.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man • Dumb Ideas

These experiments suggest that the diptera [flies] may have ‘opened their eyes’ (invented neural superposition) by a single change: reprogramming the expression of Spacemaker [a gene] for novel expression in the ommatidia [the eye segments].  It is not often that we get such a clear glimpse of the blind watchmaker at work.

The Role of God in Science and Life    10/18/2006  
Big science today may seem to be controlled by atheists, but that’s clearly not the case for many involved in science.  Here are two unrelated stories from unexpected quarters expressing support for belief in God:

• No God, No Scientific Laws:  Noted philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has a new paper coming out that argues that one cannot have the concept of scientific laws without God.  The full paper, that begins as follows, is available on her personal website.

  My thesis is summarized in my title, ‘No God, No Laws’: the concept of a law of Nature cannot be made sense of without God.  It is not as dramatic a thesis as it might look, however.  I do not mean to argue that the enterprise of modern science cannot be made sense of without God.  Rather, if you want to make sense of it you had better not think of science as discovering laws of Nature, for there cannot be any of these without God.

  Cartwright, a philosophy professor at LSE and UCSD, won the McArthur prize in 1993.  She has previously argued that science gives us a dappled picture of the world, not a progressive, exact, certain image of reality.
      Speaking of God and philosophy, another philosopher of science, Del Ratzsch, was interviewed by Galilean Library.  He talked about God-of-the-gaps, front-loading, intelligent design, scientific motivations and other issues related to science and theology.  He said he has been influenced by a third philosopher of science, Alvin Plantinga – another who has made a case for God in scientific endeavor.

• No God, No Career:  Shuttle astronaut Jack Lousma said his faith led him to his career in space and gave the program success, reported Petoskey News.  Speaking at a church in Michigan, the 70-year-old veteran of 17 years as an astronaut spoke of his faith that began at age 9.

  It was that belief in God that led him to his career with NASA and helped him through his 17 years as an astronaut.
      “I believe my relationship with Jesus Christ and my decision to do so was the best decision I ever made,” Lousma said during the “Dinner with an Astronaut” evening hosted by the Liberty Baptist Church of Alanson.  “At every juncture ... we noted that whenever there was a change it was God directed.  God helped us prosper.”

Lousma’s testimony recalls Solomon’s wisdom in Proverbs 3:5-6 – “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.”  Maybe that’s why the Darwinists are in such a hopeless muddle of dogmatism on the one hand, and despair on the other: they do not acknowledge God.
    Great Christians scientists have been known to stop and pray for wisdom and guidance in the lab during their work.  They were not asking for miracles, but for Divine guidance and providence, knowing their own limitations, and acknowledging the wisdom of the Maker of Nature.  That’s perfectly natural.
    Are you reading this and missing out on the vast, spiritual dimension of reality?  Are you adrift with a world view lacking purpose and direction?  Faith in God is not antithetical to science: look at Newton, Faraday, Pasteur, von Braun and so many other scientific heroes outlined in our online book.  They believed, like astronaut Lousma, that God directed them into science and gave them success; Newton said, “All my discoveries have been made in answer to prayer.”  Read the wise words of Boyle, Joule and von Braun about science and God.
    If you are not ready for this, do a controlled experiment.  Live like a consistent Darwinist.  Don’t use the phrase scientific law.  Purge your mind of all thoughts of purpose, beauty, direction, goals and morality (if you can do this for more than a few seconds without pain), and imagine a world where everyone felt the same.  Ask yourself: can I live with this belief?
    That’s one half the experiment.  Now try out Proverbs 3:5-6 on yourself.  It must be sincere, though; no scientific fraud gets past the Ultimate Reviewer.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

• Weird Tooth:  An “ancient mammal that defies classification” has been given a name, at least.  EurekAlert reported that Horolodectes sunae, found 30 years ago in Alberta, remains a mystery: “the creature mystified the researchers, who could not positively identify it, and exactly where it fits into the evolutionary ladder is still unknown.  Horolodectes remains an enigma to this day.”
• Dwarf Hoof:  A previously unknown dwarf water buffalo was found by chance in the Philippines, reported EurekAlert.  The Field Museum points to this as a classic case of “island dwarfing,” in which natural selection produces smaller species due to limitations on resources in isolated environments.  See also the New York Times and Science Daily reports.
• Super Camel:  A fossilized camel, twice as big as today’s models and as big as a giraffe or elephant, was found in Syria, according to the BBC News.  They think this previously-unknown species may have been living 100,000 years ago – maybe even a million.  “It was not known that the dromedary was present in the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago,” said one paleontologist.  This biggie had competition: “It may even have been killed by humans, who were living at the once water-rich site during the same period.”
• Mighty Mouse:  For a story about a mammal still wearing its fur, BBC News reported a “living fossil” rodent on Cyprus.  Mus cypriacus was thought to have gone extinct an estimated 9-10,000 years ago when humans arrived on the Mediterranean island.  It was thought that every species of mammal in Europe had been identified.  Apparently giant camels couldn’t stand up to human hunters, but humans never did build the ultimate mousetrap.

“Living fossil” is the opposite of “Fossilized liver.”  Are you pretending to be alive, when your soul is dead?  Better to be a living fossil than a fossilized liver.  Live to the fullest while you can, before you become a dead fossil.  Solomon said, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).  You might want to check out this entry next.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Fossils

Titan, has a dense atmosphere of nitrogen with a few per cent of methane.  At visible wavelengths its surface is hidden by dense orange-brown smog, which is produced in the stratosphere by photochemical reactions following the dissociation of methane by solar ultraviolet light.  The most abundant of the products of these reactions is ethane, and enough of it should have been generated over the life of the Solar System to form a satellite-wide ocean one kilometre deep.... Here I explain the mysterious absence or rarity of liquid ethane: it condenses onto the smog particles, instead of into liquid drops, at the cold temperatures in Titan’s atmosphere.  This dusty combination of smog and ethane, forming deposits several kilometres thick on the surface, including the observed dunes and dark areas, could be named ‘smust’.  This satellite-wide deposit replaces the ocean long thought to be an important feature of Titan.

It is entirely reasonable that these few molecules would not reside on the smust particles.  A possible difficulty is that this small amount of ethane vapour would be unable to condense.  On the other hand, if more ethane were available one would expect the cloud particles to grow larger; probably the attachment of most of the ethane to the smust particles is necessary to prevent this.

It’s fair to propose an explanation for something, but a little unfair to propose one when it cannot be tested for a long time.  It may be well into the 2030s before another probe returns to Titan, and even then, it may be a blimp-like device incapable of digging several kilometers into the surface to measure the deposits.  What if Hunten’s mechanism works somewhat, and a lander detects these smust particles on the surface, but cannot determine if the layer is only inches deep?  One could not know that there is enough of it to explain the missing billions of years without extremely difficult and costly efforts.  Additionally, it is very difficult to simulate Titan conditions on Earth.  The only lab evidence Hunten mentioned did not support his theory:

It would be desirable to verify in the laboratory the attachment of ethane molecules to smog particles, here deduced from their behaviour on Jupiter.  Such particles, with their fluffy structure, have, however, not been produced in experiments, which instead generate a dense deposit on the walls of the vessel.  It will be a challenge to reproduce this structure along with a realistic composition, and then to expose the particles to ethane molecules.

In other words, this is just an airy, fluffy suggestion on his part.  Even if the particles formed and fell as he suggested, what would keep them from liquefying on the surface after they compacted?  The fact is, Titan was not the oceanic planet that the best scientists predicted.  Speculating after the fact what happened to the missing ethane is not science till verified.  While no one would deny Dr. Hunten his right to speculate based on his own assumptions about the age of Titan, his little story should not be put forth as “the answer” to this huge problem.  Speculation is no substitute for openmindedness that one’s assumptions could be vastly in error.
    As for the relentless suggestions that liquid water or ethane mean the possibility of life, this is so silly it is tiring.  Here’s a better form of entertainment that’s realistic.  For a wild ride down to the surface of Titan aboard Huygens, based on actual photos and measurements, download the animations from the Huygens CD-Rom available from the European Space Agency.  For the download page, click here.
Next headline on:  Geology • Physics • Solar System • Origin of Life

The ancient rise of atmospheric oxygen is of great interest because of its close relationship with evolution, but the geological evidence for this is indirect and subject to interpretation.  The consensus for more than 30 years has been that atmospheric oxygen first reached appreciable levels around 2 billion to 2.4 billion years ago, an occasion known as the great oxidation event (GOE).  But doubters of this event have remained.

But this would still leave some unexplained observations.  For example, the Witwatersrand gold deposits in South Africa contain detrital minerals that were washed down streams between 2.8 billion and 3.0 billion years ago.  In the presence of oxygen, these minerals should have become oxidized and dissolved.  So, either the oxygen levels were never high enough for that, or they repeatedly went up and came back down very quickly.  Or perhaps oxygen concentrations did not increase at all, and the low-MIF anomaly seen in post-GOE rocks was produced by some entirely anoxic mechanism, such as the shielding of solar ultraviolet rays by an organic haze.

What needs a Great Oxidation Event is the air in the Darwin Party Castle.  It is so stuffy in there it’s stifling.  Maybe science would take on giant new wings in a less suffocating environment.
    It is an observational fact, though, that giant insects did once inhabit the earth.  It’s interesting to study what environmental conditions allowed for giantism, not only in insects, but in other organisms, inclu