“Orthodox atheists may not like it, but the shouts of the evolutionary priesthood may signal the demise of a great secular dream. Besides, the alternative looks pretty good: There’s something appealing about holding science up without casting humanity down.” 
—Nancy Pearcey, commenting on Richard Dawkins’ recent anti-religious rants and advocacy of eugenics, on Pro-Existence 11/23/2006.

In Science and Politics, Expect the Unexpected    12/29/2006  
Two findings reported this month illustrate how science changes.  Paradigms and policies can have their scientific underpinnings yanked out from under them, causing both consternation and opportunities for new ways of thinking.

• Bring back the acid rain:  Pick your poison: acid rain or global warming.  Acid rain was the bogeyman of the 1980s, leading to severe cutbacks in sulfur emissions by law.  Now, reported EurekAlert, new studies of streams in Appalachian hardwood forests show an “unexpected result” of the reduction in acid rain: an alarming rise in dissolved carbon dioxide.  The streams are now as pristine as you could get, but that means the plants are now more efficient at respiration and are emitting more CO₂.  A Penn State researcher said, “Rising amounts of carbon dioxide in streams and soil could have implications for the forest ecosystem, and the carbon balance in general.”  And what does that imply?  “Higher amounts of carbon dioxide in the soil means more of it ultimately may be emitted back to the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.”  Maybe the forests need to do their fair share in abiding by the Kyoto Protocol.  Or, maybe some nations will now have an excuse for not cutting back, saying they are emitting less than plants.  See also the report in LiveScience that agrees “less acid rain is not always so great.”
• Silent mutations get noisy:  “Another dogma in cell biology seems about to be toppled,” reported Science Now last week.  Certain mutations in the DNA translation process were dubbed “silent mutations,” because they didn’t affect the amino acid inserted into the protein.  If a triplet codon with a silent mutation inserts the exact same amino acid, what could possibly be different in the result?  A new discovery by researchers for the USDA hinted that these mutations are not so silent after all.  It turns out that an unexpected triplet codon can slow down the rate of translation.  When this happens, the resulting protein takes slightly longer to form.  This, in turn, can affect its folded shape.  As a result, the protein may act differently, even though it is composed of the same amino acid sequence.
      The researchers found this out when observing that some cancer cells are more effective at pumping out chemotherapy agents.  The protein pump that performed better had a silent mutation that slightly altered its shape.  The news report issued an analogy: “Like designs made with Silly String spraying out at different velocities, the folding of an amino acid chain into a 3D structure is somewhat speed-dependent, and slower production could cause the protein to take an altered final form,” Mary Beckman reported.  “The cell might be able to compensate for one silent mutation but not for multiple rarely used triplets.”  This “entirely new concept” is causing scientists to “start listening to what silent mutations have to say.”
      One possibility is that the “degeneracy” in the genetic code (i.e., the fact that some amino acids can be coded for by up to six different triplet codons) has a function, regulating the rate of protein production or the activity of the resulting protein or enzyme.  As in the case of the cancer cell, environmental pressures may trigger the dominance of one form over another to provide robustness under varying circumstances.

If we are vulnerable to this much uncertainty about present-day, observable facts of science, how can the Darwinists be so smug that they know how the universe and life began and what dinosaurs were doing 100 million years ago?  The role of assumptions in scientific knowledge cannot be overemphasized.  The only way to be certain about anything is to have an omniscient being who always existed and who made everything tell us.  But that would require faith.  Science is not about faith (see Finagle’s Creed and the rest of the Quick Guide to Evolutionary Theory).
Next headline on:  Genetics • Plants • Politics and Ethics

Cell Zippers, Linemen and Editors Put on a Show    12/28/2006  
The golden age of cell biology continues.  Scientists keep unlocking the secrets of cellular machinery with newer and better techniques.  With the curtain rising on a show we could not previously imagine, played out on a stage so small it took centuries of scientific work to even see it, biochemists are discovering amazing tricks that the little autonomous actors have been performing all along, right inside of us.

1. Zip me up, road crew:  A press release on EurekAlert pointed to a new paper in Cell¹ where researchers found a kind of monorail zipper.  The original paper by Kikkawa and Metlagel actually calls it a “molecular ‘zipper’ for microtubules.”  The EurekAlert article discusses “Roadworks on the motorways of the cell.”  Cellular highways are 3-D monorails that run in all directions and are constantly being formed and recycled.  Composed of protein units of tubulin, they first form into sheets that fold into a tube shape.  That’s where Mal3p comes in.  This little protein zips up the edges of the tube, forming a stable structure that would otherwise unravel easily.  The zipper even forms an alternate trackway for the molecular “trucks” that use the microtubules to deliver goods all over the cell (12/04/2003, 02/25/2003, 07/12/2004).
2. Mr. Goodwrench, the inchworm:  DNA is tightly compacted in the cell, but needs to be unwound frequently for translation and duplication.  A family of machines called helicases unwind the double helix as part of the process.  Scientists wondered how the machine travels up and down the helix, and have now found that one particular helicase named UvrD both twists and jumps in a two-part power-stroke.  The authors of another paper in Cell² describe this as a “wrench-and-inchworm” mechanism.  Each step, which traverses one DNA base at a time, requires two ATP fuel pellets.  See also 06/19/2003, 01/05/2006, bullet 9, and 10/27/2005, bullet 3; see 01/19/2005 about an RNA helicase.
3. Not many typos get past this editor:  Life depends on 20 specialized translators that connect the DNA code to the protein code (see 09/16/2004 for historical background, and 06/09/2003 and its embedded links for conceptual background).  The awkwardly-named “aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases” (AARS for short) are highly specialized to connect the two codes correctly and edit out mistakes before they cause serious trouble.  A paper in PNAS³ discussed one of the ways the AARS for the amino acid phenylalanine works.  For jargon lovers, the model is: “the role of the editing site is to discriminate and properly position noncognate substrate for nucleophilic attack by water.”  To test the model, they tinkered with some of the pieces of the protein machine and watched the editing precision drop dramatically.  The precision of the active site is part of the “translational quality control,” they said (see 12/20/2003, 09/09/2002).
4. Oxygen can be bad for your health:  We like to breathe in that oxygen, but in the wrong places it can be a poison.  Authors of another paper in PNAS⁴ found that “oxidized messenger RNA induces translation errors.”  They put the gene for the light-glowing protein luciferin into rabbits (imagine a glowing Bugs Bunny) in both oxidized and non-oxidized forms.  Although the oxidized translation machine stayed intact, the “translation fidelity was significantly reduced.”

Since the discovery of ribozymes and the development of the idea of life first emerging from an RNA world (Gilbert, 1986), biologists have struggled to imagine the logical progression of events that led to proteins.  At the same time, regardless of what the imagination can conjure, a connection to reality has to be made.  That, in turn, requires experiments to test specific hypotheses or to provide an opportunity for serendipitous findings.
    To go from RNA to proteins requires the genetic code—triplets of nucleotides representing single amino acids.  The modern code is an algorithm determined by aminoacylation reactions, whereby each of 20 amino acids is linked to its cognate tRNA that bears the anticodon triplet of the code.  The 20 aminoacyl tRNA synthetases (one for each amino acid) that catalyze these reactions are ancient proteins that were present in the last common ancestor of the tree of life (Carter, 1993 and Cusack, 1997).  As the eons passed, the tree split into the three great kingdoms—archaea, bacteria, and eukarya, which encompass all life forms.  Yet, the genetic code remained fixed, with the same 20 aminoacyl tRNA synthetases making the same connections between anticodon triplets and amino acids.  Thus, clues to the history of the transition from the RNA world to proteins might be imbedded in the tRNA synthetases themselves.

Thus, what is reported in this most recent work on GluRS—that a synthetase can use tRNA to direct a conformational change that perfects amino acid specificity, using in part a contact with the tRNA itself—may provide a general mechanism of tRNA-dependent amino acid specificity.  The much bigger implication is that perhaps this functional interaction is a picture or a “holdover” from an earlier era in the evolution of the genetic code.

Hope you enjoyed another peek into cellular wonders.  We had to throw in an evolutionary tale just for the sheer contrast of seeing actual scientific investigation into observable machinery operating with high fidelity and quality control juxtaposed against the speculations of certain humans forced by their worldview to imagine that it just happened by chance.  You can see what they’re up against.  Shamelessly, they dove right into fantasyland, using their captive imaginations to portray impossibilities that they believe must have happened because, after all, we’re here, and no other approach than evolution is allowed in the dictatorship of King Charles.  Those of us with liberated minds no longer forced into contradictions can enjoy the non-fiction to the fullest.  We don’t know whether to sigh or chuckle at the fiction the slaves are forced to write.  The evolutionists are right on one point: “regardless of what the imagination can conjure, a connection to reality has to be made.”  We do hope they make it some day.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Amazing Facts

• Insects are fantastically diverse.
• Insects are among the most successful animals.
• There are no insect fossils earlier than the Devonian (evolutionary date: 410 million years ago).
• The earliest segmented body plans appeared in the Cambrian (511 million years ago).
• There are no marine insects, but the first segmented Cambrian animals were marine organisms.

Although hexapods--those arthropods having six legs, including insects--are the most diverse group of contemporary animals in terms of biological niches and number of species, their origin is highly debated.  A key problem is the almost complete absence of fossils that connect hexapods to the other major arthropod subphyla, namely Crustacea, Myriapoda (such as centipedes and millipedes), and Chelicerata (such as scorpions and spiders).  Over the years, hexapods (insects, springtails, proturnas, and diplurans) have been phylogenetically linked to all of these major arthropod taxa.

The successful colonization of the terrestrial environment by hexapods seems to coincide with other major groups of land pioneering animals such as the chelicerates and the myriapods in the Late Silurian and the tetrapods (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) in the Late Devonian.  All these events appear to have occurred through a freshwater dwelling phase in their evolutionary transition from marine to true terrestrial animals.  The Devonian is believed to have been a time of severe drought, which might have forced these animals (at least hexapods and tetrapods) onto land as their freshwater habitats vanished.

It has been a puzzle as to why hexapods--in particular insects, which possess a morphology that apparently enables them to adapt to virtually all types of terrestrial environments--have not been able to diversify successfully in the marine environment.  It is likewise remarkable that the crustaceans--fulfilling a biological role in the sea comparable to the insects on land--have not been able to invade land to a greater extent despite their considerable age.  The recent phylogenetic analyses of molecular sequence data suggest a paradigm shift concerning the phylogenetic position of hexapods--that crustaceans successfully invaded land as insects.  It is possible that when insects entered terrestrial habitats, their crustacean ancestors had already diversified in marine environments and occupied all potential niches, which could explain why insects were prevented from colonizing the sea subsequently.

Commercial: This portion of Just-So Stories for Grown-Ups has been brought to you by Darwin Party Facilitators, the research problem solvers extraordinaire.  In a tangle?  Got an enigma?  Call DPF for a quick, easy way out of any pernicious puzzle or distressing dilemma.  Why do research the old-fashioned way, with tedious observations and rigorous analysis, when you can finish your paper in no time.  Our technicians can help you escape your troubles as if by magic!  Don’t fret any longer over that missing fossil evidence.  Worry no more when the review board checks your data.  DPF experts have the inside connections needed to get you through peer review.  Drawing on their international resources, they will customize a solution to fit your needs, no matter the subject, with just the right blend of natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection, group selection, game theory, niche construction, Lamarckism, orthogenesis, gradualism, punq eq, microevolution, divergence, convergence, determinism, contingency, anthropomorphism, Gaia or whatever else the occasion calls for.  They can help you adjust the molecular or paleontological clocks to fit your uncooperative data points.  Their secret blend of jargon, speculation and personification, seasoned lightly with equivocation, is laboratory-proven to lubricate the editorial process, no matter how many contradictions you struggle with.  When all else fails, they know the magic word* to hypnotize the reviewers and get you on the fast track to publication.  After all, most reviewers are current or former members of the DPF, so it’s futile to try doing research these days alone.  Don’t let your career fall behind by focusing on accountability and scientific integrity when you can pad your resume with dozens of publications in reputable high-impact journals.  Darwin Party Facilitators, the world’s largest charlatan agency with thousands of licensed practitioners, can help you rise above your peers.  Gain tenure faster.  Publish without fear of perishing.  Earn the respect of the movers and shakers of the modern world.  All DPF work is backed by the full force and protection of the ACLU.  What are you waiting for?  Operators are standing by.  Call now: 1-800-SNOW-JOB.
    Stay tuned for the next exciting episodes, The Ghost of Kiwi Past and How Rocky Earned His Sails (12/13/2006).
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils

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^*Emergence.

Incredible Stasis in Evolution: What Does It Mean?    12/26/2006  
Quite often in phylogenetic research, evolutionists find examples of extreme conservation of genes or traits.  How they explain the lack of change is almost as interesting as the phenomenon itself.  Here are two recent examples.

1. Your cousin the shark:  Surprise: you have more in common with horn sharks than bony fishes do.  Craig Venter’s international team found evidence for “Ancient Noncoding Elements Conserved in the Human Genome” and reported this in Science last week.¹  They found more similarities in these noncoding regions between sharks and humans than between sharks and bony fish.  Here’s how they interpreted such an astonishing result:

   Thus, it appears that, even though cartilaginous fishes diverged from the human lineage before teleost fishes, higher proportions of regulatory elements are conserved between cartilaginous fishes and human than between teleost fishes and human.  This implies that the regulatory regions of teleost fishes have been evolving faster since their common ancestor diverged from the lineage that led to mammals.  The divergent regulatory regions in teleosts may be partly explained by the partitioning of regulatory elements between duplicate gene loci that arose from the fish-specific whole-genome duplication event in the ray-finned fish lineage.  Teleost fishes, with about 25,000 extant species, are the largest group of vertebrates and exhibit vast diversity in their morphology and adaptations.  The accelerated rate of evolution of regulatory regions may be an important factor in the rapid radiation and diversity of teleost fishes.

2. Make like a leaf:  A fossil leaf-mimicking insect said to be 47 million years old is virtually identical to modern ones, reported Mongabay.com.  What this means, according to the article, is that this insect found a “time-tested strategy” to avoid predators.  The article calls this “an outstanding example of morphological and, probably, behavioral stasis.” It means that “leaf mimicry had already evolved early in the Eocene period when insect predators would have included birds, early primates, bats, and other insects.”  See also the story on Live Science.
   Update 12/29/2006: the paper in PNAS appeared online Dec. 29.²  Portions of the abstract demonstrate the degree of stasis of this fossil:

   .... Here we report the first fossil leaf insect, Eophyllium messelensis gen.  et sp.  nov., from 47-million-year-old deposits at Messel in Germany.  The new specimen, a male, is exquisitely preserved and displays the same foliaceous appearance as extant male leaf insects.  Clearly, an advanced form of extant angiosperm leaf mimicry had already evolved early in the Eocene.  We infer that this trait was combined with a special behavior, catalepsy or “adaptive stillness,” enabling Eophyllium to deceive visually oriented predators.  Potential predators reported from the Eocene are birds, early primates, and bats.  The combination of primitive and derived characters revealed by Eophyllium allows the determination of its exact phylogenetic position and illuminates the evolution of leaf mimicry for this insect group.  It provides direct evidence that Phylliinae originated at least 47 Mya.... This fossil leaf insect bears considerable resemblance to extant individuals in size and cryptic morphology, indicating minimal change in 47 million years.  This absence of evolutionary change is an outstanding example of morphological and, probably, behavioral stasis.

   This fossil was found in Europe, while most leaf-mimic insects live today in southeast Asia.  This indicates that leaf insects were much more widespread in the past.  It’s possible that fossil hunters missed finding them before now because the mimics were so good, people mistook them for leaves.
       What traits did the authors feel were primitive?  Their paper tries to place the new fossil between the stick insects and modern leaf mimics, but admits that their origin is “poorly understood” and that “exact phylogenetic position of the Phylliinae within the phasmid phylogeny is unknown”.  It seems arbitrary, therefore, that their chart places the new insect halfway between the stick insects and the leaf insects, considering that the fossil shares many characteristics with extant leaf insects.  They only pointed to “straight fore femora and the absence of tergal thorn pads” as “primitive” traits resembling those of the stick insects; yet, clearly, this fossil was not primitive.  They restated at the end of the paper that this fossil is an example of “exceptional evolutionary stasis of a highly derived morphology, most likely coupled with very specialized cryptic behavior that lasted for [greater than or equal to] 47 million years.”
       As to how exactly this morphology and behavior evolved, they suggested that necessity was the mother of invention: “In all probability,” they speculated, “this advanced type of crypsis evolved in concert with angiosperm leaves on which the insects feed.  It must have been caused by vigorous selection pressure by visually oriented predators” such as birds, lizards, bats and primates. 

Do you see how the evolutionary mindset works?  The thought never enters any evolutionist’s brain that evolutionary theory could be at fault.  No matter how bizarre, conflicting and falsifying the evidence, Darwin’s image must be worshipped and the sacrifices* must continue.  It doesn’t matter that no evolution happens in some lineages for tens or hundreds of millions of years (think about that!) for them to keep the pieces of their story straight, while evolution is extremely, fantastically rapid in other quarters.  In the time tree-swinging monkeys supposedly became philosophers, and all kinds of dramatic other changes took place, leaf-mimicking insects changed nada.  Are we to believe that the predators were all so stupid in this time never to catch on to the trick?  “Don’t eat me; I’m a leaf!”  Right.
    Even more astonishing is the conservation of noncoding elements between sharks and humans.  Evolutionary theory is so plastic and malleable, like silly putty, (12/14/2004), it makes evolutionists downright silly, buddy.  We are asked to believe that all the radiations of fish into seahorses and angler fish and tunas showed more evolution of these elements from their cartilaginous swimming mates than 530 million years of evolution of all the other vertebrates—reptiles, birds, and every mammal from shrews to giraffes to elephants and man.  We are expected to trust the evolutionists because they are priests of Science and know the Truth of Almighty Darwin (t.o.a.d.).  Don’t be a toady.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Genetics • Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils

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^*The sacrificial system consists of offering to the idol the live brains of human children.

Surely someone is joking.  This story is either a spoof, or some researchers who never took a logic class have way too much time on their hands.   Other nations aren’t happy because of football victories far more recent than 14 years ago.  Lowered expectations don’t bring happiness, either; remember Murphy’s Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations? (see 12/14/2006 commentary).  Maybe the Danes just have a higher proportion of jolly nincompoops who just don’t know what’s going on.  If they did, they would be depressed (see this, for instance).      Happiness based on anything material or temporal can be taken away.  And happiness based on lowered expectations is not really happiness.
    There was a high expectation once that did come to pass.  It had been expected for years (Simeon, Anna) and centuries – even millennia (Peter).
Long lay the world, in sin and error pining—
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” said Solomon, “but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”  Waiting for the promised Messiah must have seemed hopeless at times to the beleaguered exiles, Hasmoneans, and scattered of the remnant who still read the copies of copies of scrolls of Isaiah and the prophets.
But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.  (Micah).
Looking back more than 2000 years, we can hardly imagine the expectation tinged with doubt of those who, under Roman oppression, longed for redemption.
Till He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.
This season, you can have something better than happiness.  You can have joy.  C.S. Lewis described joy as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”  The fact that we have such a desire, Lewis argued, is proof there must be an Object for it (see Probe Ministries exposition by Michael Gleghorn).  Evolution would not produce a desire that universal experience shows is incapable of being satisfied by material things.  Christmas represents the manifestation of the Object of that deepest of universal human desires.  It was the breakthrough of heaven to earth.
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn...
If you get a football or soccer ball under the tree, it will disintegrate into dust.  The euphoria over a sports event will fade into oblivion.  But 2000 years after the first Christmas, individuals all over the world continue to rejoice:
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!  Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room, and heav'n and nature sing.
There is still Joy in this dark old world.  We just need to get the word out to the people who need it most (watch this).  Merry Christmas!
Next headline on:  Dumb Ideas • Bible and Theology

Symphony: that’s intelligent design language.  Some ID thinkers have compared creation to a living symphony instead of a mechanical clock.  We hope you were paying attention.  If you were, you just got a free concert without the need for headphones.  You may now applaud the Composer (12/11/2006).
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Facts

Anybody smell Darwin in these comments?  The fresh air of intelligent design “logic” in the operation of living things brings with it a renewed sense of vitality for research.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts

1. I was a Spanish monster:  A new giant sauropod has been found in Spain, reported EurekAlert based on a paper in Science.¹  Named Turiasaurus riodevensis by the discoverers, it ranks among the largest of dinosaurs and is the first giant sauropod found in Europe, weighing 40-48 tons (equal to six or seven adult male elephants).  To help modern sports fans visualize the beast, it would have extended the length of an NBA basketball court, EurekAlert said.  National Geographic News added that it had a claw the size of a football.  Must have been quite a half-time show at the Dino Bowl.
       The Science paper described the new sauropod as “primitive” because “The proximal end of the tibia is compressed mediolaterally,” as in other assumed “basal sauropods.”  They classified it into a new clade, Turiasauria.  Most giant sauropods have been found in North and South America and Africa, and belonged to a different clade, Neosauria.  “Turiasaurus however, demonstrates that at least one of the more basal (non-neosauropod) lineages achieved gigantic size independently.”
       An artist’s rendition of the beast can be found on the Reuters story at MSNBC, along with a photograph of the excavators at work.  See also EurekAlert.
2. Go eat a rock:  You might think only pranksters would feed rocks to ostriches, but that’s what some German scientists did, reported EurekAlert.  They were trying to find out of stomach stones (gastroliths) in large birds and dinosaurs were actually used for grinding up food.  The pieces of granite, rose quartz and limestone from the dissected birds after they were slaughtered showed rough edges and wear.  This is not how alleged gastroliths from sauropod sites look.  Those smooth stones also represent a much smaller proportion of the animals’ bodies and are not found at all sauropod sites.  The scientists are at a loss to explain the stones.  Maybe the dinosaurs ingested them accidentally or absorbed minerals from them.  The scientists are also puzzled about how the behemoths digested the large quantities of vegetable mass they must have eaten each day.
3. Two mouths are better than one:  At the other end of the size scale, a tiny juvenile dinosaur with two heads was found in China.  BBC News has a picture of the unusual fossil.  Two-headed snakes and turtles are known, but the rarity of the embryonic defect makes this a highly improbable find.  Since both heads had independent long necks, the critter might have been able to hold conversations with itself – not for long, though; its tiny size indicates it died young.

The articles both mentioned evolution but only in an offhand, inconsequential manner.  To think that gigantic sauropods evolved independently is a stretch.  The description “primitive” is in the eye of the phylogenist.  Clearly these were successful, well-adapted creatures that knew more about digestion than we do.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Birds

Human-Ape Gap Quadruples   12/20/2006    
Remember that old truism that humans and chimpanzees share 98.5% of their genes?  Try 94% instead.  That’s a new estimate by Matthew Hahn (Indiana U) and a team who published in a new online journal, PLoS One.¹  J.R. Minkel, writing for Scientific American, said “The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited figure of 1.5 percent.”
    Why such a drastic revision?  Hahn says the earlier estimate fails to take into account duplicated genes.  As Minkel explains it assuming evolution,

The new finding supports the idea that evolution may have given humans new genes with new functions that don’t exist in chimps, something researchers had not recognized until recently.  The older value of 1.5 percent is a measure of the difference between equivalent genes in humans and chimps, like a difference in the spelling of the same word in two similar languages.  Based on that figure, experts proposed that humans and chimps have essentially the same genes, but differed in when and where the genes turn on and off.
    The new research takes into account the possibility for multiple copies of genes and that the number of copies can differ between species, even though the gene itself is the same or nearly so.

There you have it: another bad case of the statistics fallacy.  Genomes are extremely complex entities that are just barely understood.  Depending on what you choose to look at, you can find all kinds of similarities and differences and come up with agenda-driven numbers.  It seems clear that the earlier estimate was motivated by an evolutionary agenda to show how similar we were to the apes.  If this new estimate becomes widely accepted, evolutionists are going to have a terrible time explaining this many genetic changes in “only” six million years.  It’s too late for them to even try, though, now that neo-Darwinism has been falsified (see 12/14/2006 entry).
    We really must help the Darwinian science reporters get over their bad habit of personifying evolution.  It’s so pre-ID.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Genetics
Related entries:  08/22/2006, 05/26/2004, 05/25/2004, 10/25/2002, 09/23/2002.

Based on these findings, we suggest that hummocky cross-stratification optimally forms above (but near) storm wave base where aggradation rates during storms are high enough to preserve hummocks but unidirectional current speeds are sufficiently low to generate low-angle, isotropic cross-stratification.  Swaley cross-stratification is also hypothesized to be deposited by an aggrading hummocky bed between fair-weather and storm wave base, but in shallower water where aggradation rates are low enough to cause preferential preservation of swales.

OK, you learned something about a peculiar geological formation, which the authors describe as “enigmatic sedimentary structures.”  So what?  Well, what is interesting is where these are found.  The Grand Canyon has lots of HCS.  You can see a prominent outcropping along the Supai Trail, for instance, up from the springs.  A creation geologist was pointing these out on a hike one day, and said, “What’s unusual about these examples is their size.  These are very large hummocks – much larger than anything that is being formed today.”  It must be remembered that these sedimentary layers exposed in the Grand Canyon extend throughout several Western states and some of them throughout a good portion of North America.  Considering not only their size, but their widespread distribution throughout the canyon, he considered these as uncontrovertible evidence of a flood catastrophe like the world has never seen.  Perhaps so; nobody was there to witness these rocks being laid down, but models can help us evaluate the plausibility of such inferences.  Think about it.  Whatever happened at this point on the Supai Trail, it was certainly not a good day for a beach picnic.
Next headline on:  Geology

“The most abundant minerals are the crystalline silicate minerals, olivine and pyroxene, along with troilite (FeS).  These are very stable phases, common in planetary materials; however, finding them here is somewhat surprising because many expected that cometary material would be similar to interstellar material, in which most silicates are believed to be amorphous.

The Stardust spacecraft collected thousands of particles from comet 81P/Wild 2 and returned them to Earth for laboratory study.  The preliminary examination of these samples shows that the nonvolatile portion of the comet is an unequilibrated assortment of materials that have both presolar and solar system origin.  The comet contains an abundance of silicate grains that are much larger than predictions of interstellar grain models, and many of these are high-temperature minerals that appear to have formed in the inner regions of the solar nebula.  Their presence in a comet proves that the formation of the solar system included mixing on the grandest scales.

We love planetary scientists, but sometimes they deserve to get rattled for thinking inside the box.  There’s a creation scientist who thought outside the box and predicted things that have now been confirmed from Stardust and Deep Impact.  Read Walt Brown’s theory at CreationScience.com.  It includes a detailed explanation of why the other theories don’t work.  Dr. Brown has a PhD from MIT and taught mathematics and physics at the college level.  His ideas will be too radical for some, but isn’t science supposed to be about making predictions that can be falsified?  Look at the scoreboard and watch the secularists scratching their heads on this one before ruling out the mavericks.  His article is also beneficial for its review of physics and celestial mechanics, and shares many interesting little-known facts about comets often glossed over in the textbooks.
    For millennia, comets were seen as bad omens, striking fear and worry into observers.  It’s amazing how history repeats itself in unusual ways.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Physics

The incorrigible Big Science pragmatists see only riches and fame for themselves in the promise of ES gold.  It matters little to them that adult stem cells are working medical marvels right now.  It matters less to them how immoral it is to create a human life only to harvest its parts.  Moral absolutes?  Bosh; those are forgotten notions from Christian days when people believed Truth and Morals didn’t evolve like everything else.
    Moral barriers are falling fast in the stampede to be first.  The relativists add insult to injury by turning the blame onto those with ethical concerns.  They accuse them of using “harsh words” when bringing up the E word eugenics.  The criticism assumes a moral standard of harshness.  Such hypocrisy warns us that the pro-ES crowd has abandoned all consistency and morality in the rush for ES research.  They laugh all the way to the bank that only a small minority in France follow the Church on moral issues these days.  Ten thousand amoral Frenchmen, of course, could never be wrong.
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics

1. Underwater jet propulsion lab  Squid know how to maneuver in ways that are the envy of submarine operators.  That’s why researchers at U of Colorado are trying to imitate the “vortex ring” method of propulsion, according to Live Science.  “Vortex rings are formed when a burst of fluid shoots out of an opening, moving in one direction and spreading out as it curls back.”  If mastered, this technology might not only help underwater exploration subs, but permit the designing of microscopic craft that “guide tiny capsules with jet thrusters through the human digestive tract, enabling [doctors] to diagnose disease and dispense medications, the researchers said.”
2. Skin so shiny:  The octopus and its relatives, cuttlefish and squid, have an unusual skin that is perfect for camouflage, reports News@Nature.  A group at Woods Hole, Massachusetts found a protein with “remarkable properties” that is responsible: it reflects light almost perfectly.  Roger Hanlon found that the bottom layer of octopus skin is made up of cells called leucophores “composed of a translucent, colourless, reflecting protein” that has such perfect broadband reflection, “they reflect all wavelengths of light that hit at any angle.”
       Cuttlefish have an additional trick.  Their leucophores are covered by flat platelets called iridophores that enhance “the brightness of the whiteness,” Hanlon said, adding, “These are very complex 3-D cells.”  The protein involved is appropriately named reflectin.
       Reporter Katherine Sanderson explained how this knowledge can help humans.  “The molecules that make octopus skin so successful as a dynamic camouflage could provide materials scientists with a new way to make super-reflective materials.”  Such knowledge would be of interest to law enforcement and the military.  Not only would this protect those working at night; some day, a Halloween costume made of cuttlefish skin could look pretty scary.
3. Too cool watercraft  Jet skis are going to seem like kid stuff when “Dolphin watercraft” become popular.  Look at the picture on CNet News.  The high-performance, submersible Dolphin can leap above the waves and do barrel rolls, just like a dolphin.  Are these for real?  Believe it or not; Innespace Productions has a website and picture gallery.
       The boats really do look like dolphins and come in one-person and two-person versions.  Designers Dan Innes and Rob Piazza explain the principle: “These positively buoyant vessels use their forward momentum and the downward lift of their wings to literally fly below the water’s surface.  This radical departure from the typical method of sinking below the surface allows the Dolphins to achieve an unparalleled level of freestyle performance.”
       As a result of their mimicry wizardry, their “fully functional show ready watercraft” is able to “perform sustained dives, huge jumps, barrel rolls, and many other amazing acrobatic tricks.”  After their upcoming 2007 Dolphin demonstration tour, everybody will want one.  Will this be the next competitive sport?  Maybe someday Sea World will have live dolphins and their trainers in Dolphin watercraft competing side by side for audience applause.  (If the inventors can get theirs to eat fish and reproduce, then they’ll really be onto something.)
4. Bug in a fix:  Microbes may not be animals per se, but they also have technical secrets to teach us big animals.  A deep-sea microbe at a scorching hot vent figured out how to fix nitrogen at a record temperature, 92°C, reported Science Daily and News@Nature.  Though both articles speculated on how this new form of nitrogen fixation might have evolved, the feat has chemists interested in learning “to better mimic the process for industrial use.”  Current artificial methods of fixing nitrogen to produce fertilizer are costly and inefficient compared to the way microbes do it.  News@Nature quoted a French scientist saying, “Given the importance of nitrogen fixation in global agriculture and the creative exploitation of novel organisms by the biotechnology industry, a heat-stable nitrogenase is likely to find a useful industrial application.”
5. Robo-flagellum:  Live Science reported that somebody is already trying to mimic the bacterial flagellum.  An Australian inventor has achieved higher rpm with less twisting force by imitating the way bacteria swim.  Some day, his tiny inventions may be able to swim through your blood vessels, hopefully for beneficial ends: “Ultimately, tiny microrobots would give surgeons the ability to avoid traumatic and risky procedures in some cases,” Bill Christensen reported.  “A remotely-controlled microrobot would extend a physician’s ability to diagnose and treat patients in a minimally invasive way.”  Imagine surgery without scalpels and anesthesia.  Could we see a day where you get surgery at an outpatient clinic, and watch a microbot in real time on a monitor screen as it swims on command inside you to the problem area with a load of medicine?  It tickles just thinking about it.

If so, fire him for incompetence.  Even a real dolphin could tell that a high-performance watercraft had to be intelligently designed.  Don’t even ask the inventors unless you want to get slugged.  The Dolphin boat didn’t just “emerge” by chance in their machine shop.  They made it on porpoise.
    There’s a revolution going on that is positive, exciting, stimulating, promising, and beneficial to all: the imitation of nature’s designs.  The projects listed above have no use for evolutionary theory.  They were stimulated by good old-fashioned curiosity and careful observation.  It’s time for the Darwinists to step aside with their useless speculations and distasteful arrogance, and let science get back to its roots: understanding how things work and using them for the benefit of mankind.  The researchers and inventors mentioned above are not going to work better or harder by being told Tinker Bell fairy tales about how these things ”evolved” or “emerged” without a design or plan.
    If the Darwin cultists want to preach their dogma, we have freedom of religion in this country.  Let them build their own temples and offer sacrifices to their Charlie idols and see if anybody cares. 
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Marine Life • Genetics • Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Comets as Life’s Lego Jumper Cables    12/15/2006  
Results of the Stardust mission made the cover of Science this week.¹  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory put out a press release that condensed the abstruse papers into a simplistic story built around the L word life.  Publicist David Agle wrote for the Lego generation:

Just as kits of little plastic bricks can be used to make everything from models of the space shuttle to the statue of liberty, comets are looking more and more like one of nature’s toolkits for creating life.  These chunks of ice and dust wandering our solar system appear to be filled with organic molecules that are the building blocks of life.

Scientists writing for the journals should learn to be more careful about uttering the L word in their writings.  It tends to trigger a knee-jerk reaction in publicists and actors, causing an uncontrollable reflex ending with insertion of foot in mouth.  Sometimes the foot misses the mouth and hits the eye or forehead.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Subjecting TEM-1 to random mutational drift and purifying selection (to purge deleterious mutations) produced changes in its fitness landscape indicative of negative epistasis; that is, the combined deleterious effects of mutations were, on average, larger than expected from the multiplication of their individual effects.  As observed in computational systems, negative epistasis was tightly associated with higher tolerance to mutations (robustness).  Thus, under a low selection pressure, a large fraction of mutations was initially tolerated (high robustness), but as mutations accumulated, their fitness toll increased, resulting in the observed negative epistasis.  These findings, supported by FoldX stability computations of the mutational effects, prompt a new model in which the mutational robustness (or neutrality) observed in proteins, and other biological systems, is due primarily to a stability margin, or threshold, that buffers the deleterious physico-chemical effects of mutations on fitness.  Threshold robustness is inherently epistatic—once the stability threshold is exhausted, the deleterious effects of mutations become fully pronounced, thereby making proteins far less robust than generally assumed.

Thus, theory and simulations have predicted a tight correlation between robustness and epistasis.  Our work provides an experimental verification of this correlation and proposes a mechanism that accounts for it.  Our model implies that any biological system that exhibits threshold robustness, or redundancy robustness, is inevitably epistatic.  In such systems, mechanisms that purge potentially deleterious mutations, such as recombination (through sexual reproduction and other mechanisms) are of crucial importance, as they help to maintain this threshold.  In this way, recombination, threshold robustness and negative epistasis may be interlinked—each being an inevitable by-product of the other.

It is extremely important that followers of the creation-evolution debate understand this story and the earlier one (10/14/2004), because they cut to the heart of Darwinist claims that mutations and natural selection can create brains out of atoms given millions of years.  This is where the rubber meets the road: can mutations and recombination under selection act in concert to produce evolutionary progress, including wings and eyes and sonar and powered flight?  Complex systems need an explanation at the genetic level.  The modern synthesis of evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism) maintains that mutations are the source of evolutionary novelty, and that natural selection preserves the rare beneficial mutations in a cumulative way.  This is the machine room from which “endless forms most beautiful” (06/29/2005) emerge without a Designer.  Two scientific papers reported here, that would likely be little noticed otherwise, have essentially falsified neo-Darwinism in the lab.  Theory and experiment both show it does not work.
    In the previous entry (10/14/2004) we likened the situation to a victim held up by robbers but protected by guardian angels.  The bad news was that the robbers either shoot each other or shoot the victim simultaneously, and the guardian angels fight each other instead of helping the victim.  It’s like a Murphy’s “Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations” that state, (1) Positive expectations produce negative results, and (2) Negative expectations produce negative results.  The neo-Darwinists have put all their hope in positive expectations, but real-world experiments show that mutations do not and cannot add up for good.  They conspire for bad!  Only the built-in safety mechanisms in the cell hold off mutational catastrophe.  This same lesson should have been learned from the important 03/17/2003 entry almost four years ago; presumed benefits actually cause “slippage on the treadmill” to keep the organism, at best, just running in place.
    Another analogy may illuminate what this new outwardly dry, boring, technical paper said.  Picture a large, well-run factory with numerous modern systems for safety, backup and security.  Along comes a motley gang with no plan other than to wreak havoc at random.  Some are blocked by the entrance controls.  Those that get inside start overturning tables, knocking out factory workers, setting off alarms and creating general mayhem.  The security systems each come into play as planned, trying to isolate the damage, restore backups, and start the redundant processes.  Workers scramble to copy off the important data to other sections of the factory where the work can continue.  Security guards manage to neutralize some of the attackers, but more keep coming in.  Some gangsters plug the real workers then steal their lab coats and badges, wandering around to do their harm by stealth.  To an outsider, it may not be apparent that anything is wrong – for awhile – because the factory continues to function; supplies come in, goods go out.  In time, however, the best-prepared factory may not be able to carry on.  Fires are set at random.  Automatic sprinklers respond as designed, but now they have damaged the computers.  Gangsters pull fire alarms here and there, confusing workers who don’t know whether to ignore them or run outside.  Security forces are eventually overwhelmed.  Backup systems are damaged as soon as they are brought online.  It’s too much; the factory implodes in a catastrophe, and everything shuts down.
    If this is really the way mutations work in a cell, it should be obvious to everyone that trusting any random mechanism to produce order is a vain hope and supreme folly.  This, of course, is what anti-Darwinists have been maintaining since 1859.  That it would take two research teams with no ties to creationist organizations or the intelligent design movement, published in two of the most adamantly anticreationist scientific journals in the world (PNAS and Nature) to finally figure this out should be of great interest to historians and sociologists.  What is it about Darwinian faith that generates negative epistasis against common sense?
    Evolutionary theory is coasting downhill on a dead-end track with no fuel in the engine, while the passengers are being served cheese and wine, not knowing anything is wrong.  Creation-Evolution Headlines is like the tattler running down the aisles warning everybody about bad news only the engine crew is aware of, despite the pleasant announcements on the intercom.  We think the customers who paid for the trip deserve to be told the truth: despite how smoothly things appear to be running, they just got sold a dead-end trip to destruction.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Darwinism • Genetics

1. Kiwi ghost:  New Zealand wasn’t supposed to have any native mammals, but bones of a small rodent near Otago on the South Island were reported in PNAS this week.¹  The discoverers said this points to a “ghost lineage” of one or more mammals that must have inhabited the isolated archipelago.  Since they dated the mammal in the Miocene (19-16 million years ago), they are puzzled that it seems to represent an early rodent that pre-dates the split of marsupials and placentals assumed to have occurred in the early Cretaceous 125 million years ago.  That means that mammals must have existed in New Zealand for over 100 million years, but as yet, no other traces of them have been found.
2. Your soul-mate, the whale:  EurekAlert reported that a specialized kind of brain cells found in humans, called spindle cells, has been found in whale brains.  This is odd, since whales are thought to have split off the mammal line prior to 30 million years ago.  They speculate that these cells first appeared in the hominid line 15 million years ago.  Finding spindle cells in such widely separated groups represents an evolutionary puzzle.  The article speculates, “It may also be that they evolved several times independently in the two cetacean suborders; part of this process may have taken place at the same time as they appeared in the ancestor of great apes, which would be a rare case of parallel evolution.”
3. Get your nitrogen fix:  Bacteria were thought to possess the secrets of nitrogen fixation, but now this ability has been found in Archaea, a separate kingdom of single-celled organisms, reports EurekAlert.  The article also states that Archaea are far more widespread than earlier believed, not just denizens of hot springs and other extreme environments.
4. Shrimp special:  A “Jurassic shrimp” was discovered in a marine census, reported New Scientist Environment.  Thought to have gone extinct 50 million years ago, this species was found alive and well 5000 meters below the Sargasso Sea.
5. What’s my line?  An australopithecine thought to be on the human family tree must be relegated to a separate branch, reports National Geographic News and University of Liverpool.  “Little Foot,” a member of the Australopithecus africanus family, can’t be our ancestor, because new radiometric experiments on the soil surrounding the bones in a South African cave yield a date of “only” 2.2 million years old.  “This is because the team found that ‘Little Foot’ lived after the arrival of the stone tool makers, Homo habilis, raising the possibility that this family was more of a side branch of the human evolutionary tree.”
6. Amber alert:  Germs have been identified in amber said to be 220 million years old, reported National Geographic News.  “Surprisingly, these microscopic organisms look quite familiar to today’s scientists.”  What does this do to the concept of index fossils?²   “Most fossils of microorganisms have been found in marine sediments, not terrestrial environments,” the article explains.  “And such marine fossils typically reveal patterns of great change over Earth’s many epochs, unlike the new Triassic amber find.”  The authors of the paper in Nature³ ended by noting this remarkable stasis:

   Our findings show that different genera, and even species, of microbial taxa have been able to survive geological epochs.  Higher levels in food webs, on the other hand, have been shaped by environmental changes, such as those that caused the mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary.  Unchanged since the Lower Mesozoic, protozoans survived the entire era of the dinosaurs, as well as the diversification of angiosperms, birds and mammals.

7. Rocky’s rival:  A gliding squirrel-like mammal has been found in Mongolia clocking a shocking evolutionary date of 125 million years and reported in Nature.⁴  The New York Times had a story about the find.  A paleontologist who reviewed the discovery said this “wholly unexpected diversity of something adapted for gliding at this early time is absolutely astonishing.”  Only recently, he said, scientists thought mammals of the time were small, shrew-like animals living under the shadow of the dinosaurs.  “This was just totally out of nowhere,” said one of the team members, referring to the time gap this creates between this mammal’s time period and the earliest appearance of mammal flight that had been assumed before:

   Until now, the earliest identified gliding mammal was a 30-million-year-old extinct rodent.  The first known modern bat, which is capable of powered flight, dates to 51 million years ago, but it is assumed that proto-bats were probably gliding much earlier....
   In the journal report, Dr. [Jin] Meng and colleagues wrote, “This discovery extends the earliest record of gliding flight for mammals at least 70 million years earlier in the geological history and demonstrates that mammals were diverse in their locomotor strategies and life styles”.....
   “We have very little fossil record of mammalian flight, and suddenly this one comes along at such an early time,” Dr. Meng said.  “Now the question is, what happened to this group between then and now?”

   Between then and now, in fact, something big happened: the dinosaurs went extinct in some global catastrophe.  A corollary of Meng’s question is why the big dinosaurs went extinct, when fragile furriers lacking the body armor of thick-skinned giants like Ankylosaurus survived.  It wasn’t simply a matter of habitat.  Now we know that some Cretaceous mammals lived in the water, some burrowed underground, and this one lived in the trees.

The stretch-and-squish theory of evolution (12/14/2004) is the biggest con job in the history of science.  Data are props to the trick.  The spotlight is on the Darwin Party street comedian’s ability to spin an entertaining story out of anything that happens along, while surreptitiously filching funds from the public pocket.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Fossils • Dating Methods • Mammals

In December of 2005, critics of the theory of intelligent design (ID) hailed federal judge John E. Jones’ ruling in Kitzmiller v.  Dover, which declared unconstitutional the reading of a statement about intelligent design in public school science classrooms in Dover, Pennsylvania.  Since the decision was issued, Jones’ 139-page judicial opinion has been lavished with praise as a “masterful decision” based on careful and independent analysis of the evidence.  However, a new analysis of the text of the Kitzmiller decision reveals that nearly all of Judge Jones’ lengthy examination of “whether ID is science” came not from his own efforts or analysis but from wording supplied by ACLU attorneys.  In fact, 90.9% (or 5,458 words) of Judge Jones’ 6,004-word section on intelligent design as science was taken virtually verbatim¹ from the ACLU’s proposed “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” submitted to Judge Jones nearly a month before his ruling.  Judge Jones even copied sev