“Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance.  Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.”
—Bertrand Russell

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3 Out of 5 Doctors – Leaves 2   02/28/2007    
Every once in awhile it’s good to be reminded that yesterday’s nutritional advice can be wrong.  We need to beware of simplistic approaches to health.  For instance, the cliches “If a little is good, more is better” or “it worked for me” can be deadly.  TV commercials are filled with glowing promises for this or that pill, followed by rapid-talking disclaimers.  Live Science warned of two principles that contradict conventional wisdom: (1) Some antioxidant supplements may increase the risk of death (see also Science Daily about overdosing on vitamins A and E).  (2) Iron can make you strong or kill you (ironic, isn’t it?).  But then there is a third announcement from Nottingham University that most people will be glad to learn: chocolate is healthy.  We hope the bad news is not another cliche: “less is more.”
    Incidentally, speaking of health and human physiology, PNAS reported earlier in the month that your forearm skin is literally a zoo crawling with bacteria, many kinds unknown to science (see also Science Daily).  If you’re feeling OK, though, just don’t think about it and everything will be fine.

Human physiology is so very complex, we cannot know for sure the truisms in which we trust will not be overturned by tomorrow’s findings.  Complicating the picture are the influences of genetics, age, sex, geography, weather, time of day, time of year, ecology and psychosomatic effects.  Even prayer can render all the above irrelevant.  If medical science struggles with understanding these things, don’t expect the salesperson with supplements at your door to have the pill to cure all ills.  Moderation is usually good advice (except when it comes to wisdom).
Next headline on:  Health • Human Body

Mimicry is a common occurrence in nature.  Evolutionists explain this as a result of natural selection, and it is, but not in the macroevolutionary sense Darwin needs.  These moths already have wings, legs, and sophisticated pigmentation software.  If Darwin had discovered a deterministic law, all species would follow this strategy, and every prey would look like its predator.  If the non-mimic moths had the same amount of evolutionary time, why did they remain behind?  Didn’t they learn the Darwinian lesson?  And if the predators also had the same time, why didn’t they catch onto the trick?
    Horizontal changes can occur rapidly under sufficient predation pressure or competition (cp. 02/26/2007 with orchids).  A population of dogs isolated in the Arctic will favor long-haired survivors if the genes for long hair already exist.  A population of desert plants will favor those able to reach deep if the genes to do so already exist.  Find a moth that evolves a machine gun via slow, incremental steps and creationists will take notice (requirement: all the intermediate forms must be found, too).
Suggested new book:  A medical doctor, Geoffrey Simmons, has just completed a new book Billions of Missing Links (Harvest House, 2006).  It is loaded with examples of clever and sophisticated designs in nature that could never have evolved by gradual evolutionary steps.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Facts

It’s a free country and whoever has the time, money and talent can give it their best shot.  But would you vote for the Stalin Party for Congress?
    It’s not like the Darwinists don’t already have a complete monopoly on textbooks, curriculum and media with the ACLU-KGB at their beck and call.  Isn’t it interesting that, after decades of government-funded indoctrination, this very one-sided situation in their favor has still not enabled them to convert more students.
    Don’t think the pro-evolution candidates want to just add their voice to a fair and balanced democratic process.  They want to protect the Charlie Temple Mount from entry by other religions.  That’s what happened in Kansas this month (see ARN).
Next headline on:  Education • Politics and Ethics • Evolution

Archaeology Alert: 02/27/2007   
If you’re wondering about claims of a discovery of family tombs of Jesus, take a reality check.  Read Todd Bolen’s Bible Places Blog, World Net Daily, an A.P. report on Breitbart.com, and commentaries by NT scholars Ben Witherington and Darrell Bock.  Even National Geographic News said this claim has been “slammed by scholars.”  These kind of anti-Christian blockbuster announcements usually indicate Eastertime is near.  As usual, follow the money trail.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

Orchid Deception: Is It Evolution?    02/26/2007  
Orchids comprise the most exotic and diverse group of flowering plants.  Some 30,000 species strong, this group contains members with unusual sex organs.  Some have organs that look and smell like the female of the insect species that pollinate them.  They seduce the males without giving them a reward of nectar for their stopover.  How could such a strategy of deceptive seduction evolve?
    Heidi Ledford explored this question in Nature last week.¹  About a third of orchids seduce pollinators without giving them nectar.  The orchids that deliver nectar typically have better reproductive success, at least in terms of numbers of offspring.  Darwin thought that the insect pollinators would eventually learn the trick and avoid the flowers, driving them extinct.  Ledford explained how evolutionary theorists believe, however, that “dishonesty gives them the evolutionary edge.”
    This might work, for instance, by reducing inbreeding.  A pollen-dusted but disgusted visitor may fly to more distant plants, where they are less likely to visit the orchid’s kinfolk.  An evolutionary biologist explained, “To be deceptive means that the orchids have less sex, but the sex is better because it’s not with a close relative.”  From the insect’s point of view, though, how do biologists answer Darwin’s enigma?  Why don’t male bees catch onto the trick?  Some suggest that young males are profligate, not picky, among the scarce females.  One researcher puts himself into the bee brain, saying, “Hey, I will go for anything that looks like a female because I can’t afford not to.”
    Does this explanation hold up?  Does it explain the origin of the elaborate reproductive organs of the flowers, and their amazing ability to mimic the pheromones of female insects?  Further digging in the article shows problems.  Researchers mentioned in the article are looking for evidence of “sympatric speciation,” a controversial idea that has lacked firm evidence despite decades of investigation.²  Evidence that this has actually occurred in the case of orchids is only tentative at best.
    Additionally, today’s oddball orchids may represent degenerates of more complex ancestors.  Ledford comments that “plants produce hundreds of volatile compounds to repel predators and microbes”; one of the pheromone mimics, in fact, a complex chemical concoction, consists of “14 different compounds that are also common components of the waxy cuticle that protects the surface of many plants.”  Elaborating on how this might have happened, she said,

They showed that the same combination of compounds is present in the volatile sex pheromone that a female bee uses to attract a mate, and that a blend of these chemicals could make bees mate with dummy flowers.  The finding also revealed how sexual deception could have evolved in this species by gradual modification of systems the plant was already using to make its own compounds.  Each tweak in the ratio of compounds that increased pollinator visitation would have given the orchid a reproductive advantage.

The team found evidence to back this idea [that plants attract pollinators by adjusting their chemical bouquet] in the orchid blooms of Australia. They repeated the experiment [matching plant compounds with pollinator odor receptors] on the orchid Chiloglottis trapeziformis, which tricks the male thynnine wasp (Neozeleboria cryptoides).  Analysis of C. trapeziformis scent revealed a surprise – rather than adapting existing mechanisms, the orchid was producing an entirely different chemical compound they named chiloglottone, which is also a pheromone made by female wasps. They also found that another Ophrys species, O. speculum, concocts a different wasp pheromone by developing several novel compounds. In this case, the orchid mimic worked so well that, when offered a choice between a female or an orchid, male wasps courted the orchid.

Nothing in this article contradicts the view that today’s highly-specialized exotic plants and their pollinators represent degenerations of original complex ancestors.  By degenerations, we mean that they contain less genetic information than the parents.  If the parents already possessed the genetic information and machinery to produce hundreds of volatile compounds, it is plausible to presume that they eventually lost the information that was not needed for survival in specialized environments.  This is not evolution in the macroevolutionary sense – the sense needed for propping up the Charlie idol.
    Think of a well-equipped soldier landing in Iraq with all-purpose gear and deciding he can shuck his snow parka.  He is now better adapted to his new desert environment.  Does that mean he is more highly evolved?  Of course not.  As with the case of blind cave fish (02/16/2007), natural selection (a conservative process) eliminates the excess baggage and only retains and exaggerates what aids survival.  None of this requires new genetic information.  The Darwinians cannot make a case here that orchids and wasps evolved from bacteria.
    That being said, this article shows that the study of microevolutionary adaptations is a legitimate area for research.  Learning more about how orchids and bees have become adapted to their unique ecosystems can help explore the processes of horizontal change over time.  It’s interesting, also, that even the evolutionary biologists themselves admitted that these adaptations could occur rapidly.  One researcher was quoted saying, “We think that speciation can occur fairly quickly in that system.  The plants need only to change their odour bouquet to attract a new pollinator.”  These horizontal sorting-out adaptations do not require millions of years.
    Keep in mind, furthermore, that the concept of “species” is artificial and controversial.  The simplistic high-school definition that a species is a group of organisms able to produce fertile offspring has problems when investigated in detail; what about asexual organisms?  What about fossils?  Philosophers debate over to what extent the word species represents something real in nature instead of an artificial construct we impose on nature.  And for those who think the scientific-sounding word species is more intellectual than the Genesis word kind, we remind them that species comes from the Latin word for kind.  We add that the father of taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeus, was motivated to classify living things in order to explore the limits of the Genesis “kinds”.  As a footnote, his method of classifying plants was by their reproductive organs.  Not all botanists have agreed with his criteria for classifying species; nevertheless, Linnaeus considered the pistils and stamens of flowers exquisitely designed structures for both function and beauty.
    Orchids surely are among the most beautiful, prosperous, diverse life forms adorning our world.  It’s no wonder they are flowers of choice for corsages on that special date.  Yes, they have diversified into a splendid array of fascinating varieties.  Calling this evolution, however, risks confusing the larger issues with Darwinian materialism (see 02/25/2007 commentary) that reduces sex to selfish strategizing and nihilism (05/01/2002, 02/14/2007).  Evolutionists are in no position to claim they understand the origin of sex (e.g., 05/16/2004, 05/12/2004) in all its bewildering complexity and diverse manifestations.  If materialism cannot deal with the origin of sex, much less can it address questions of human mores and aesthetics.  Why we find orchids beautiful, and why we should be honest and faithful to our soulmates, are not questions for Darwin.
    It’s forever important to reason properly and avoid logical pitfalls.  Confusing microevolutionary adaptive sorting with macroevolutionary innovation is the fallacy of equivocation.  Envisioning plants strategizing for reproductive success, and being capable of dishonesty and deception, is the fallacy of personification.  And taking observable evidence from the present and stretching it to absurd lengths into the unobservable past is the fallacy of extrapolation.  Be reasonable (adj., not exceeding the limit prescribed by reason; not excessive).  After that requirement is met, reward your soul: take time to smell the orchids.
Next headline on:  Plants • Evolutionary Theory

Wilberforce understood better than most that Darwin’s views, if accepted, would be dangerous.  He also perceived that they were less scientific than anti-Christian, relying not on evidence but on “flimsy speculations.”
    Nevertheless, the Huxley-Wilberforce debate became a pivotal event in the history of science.  Its effects rippled far beyond the question of how species arise.  The significance of this event was described by Janet Browne, one of the most respected biographers of Darwin, in a penetrating analysis of the occasion after her depiction of the events as they unfolded on June 30, 1860 at Oxford.  Notice the references to strategy, propaganda, and jockeying for position by the “Darwinites” as she calls them:

The significant thing is that a contest had taken place.  This occasion presented a clearly demarcated display of the respective powers of conflicting authorities as represented in two opposing figures.  Wilberforce and Huxley were perceived as fighting over the right to explain origins—a dispute over the proper boundary between science and the church that seemed as physically real to the participants and to the audience as any territorial or geographical warfare.  Each side was convinced that its claims about the natural world were credible and trustworthy, that its procedures were the only valid account of reality.  As it happened, these opposing forces were unequally balanced in Victorian England.  Science at that time held little innate authority in itself, and its status was sustained mainly through the the rhetorical exertions of its practitioners, among whom Huxley would come to shine, whereas the church was the strongest body in the nation, attracting and retaining the very best intellects of the age.  Afterwards, it was rumored that Huxley’s victory for science was falsely embellished by science’s supporters.  In this dispute, the challenge was clear.  Any success for the Darwinian scheme would require renegotiating—often with bitter controversy—the lines to be drawn between cultural domains.  Science was not yet vested with the authority that would come with the modern era.  Its practitioners were exerting themselves to create professional communities, struggling to receive due acknowledgement of their expertise and the right to choose and investigate issues in their own manner.  As Wilberforce demonstrated, that authority currently lay for the most part with theology.  The gossip running through the crowd afterwards quickly crafted an epic narrative, a collective fiction with an inbuilt meaning much more tangible and important than reality.  All felt they were witnessing history in the making.
    A public polarization of opinion had emerged.  The issue became excitingly simple.  Were humans descended from monkeys or made by God?
—Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002), pp. 124-125.

Browne launched from this episode into a chapter about Darwin’s “Four Musketeers” (Huxley, Hooker, Lyell, and Asa Grey, 01/04/2004) who capitalized on this public relations bonanza.  Within a decade, through an almost master-planned campaign of smearing opponents and popularizing Darwin’s views, they pretty much won over the entire intellectual world.  Now you see why J. P. Moreland said that the Darwinian revolution was primarily a movement to rid science of theology.

The supposed “warfare between science and religion” was not started by the theologians.  Science and theology had a long, mutually supportive history.  It was started by the Darwinites, like Americans John Draper and Andrew D. White, whose revisionist histories (Draper, 1863; White, 1896) needed to demonize churchmen in order to legitimate the Darwinian revolution.  Historian Lawrence Principe emphasizes that the conflict model of the science-religion interaction is dismissed by all modern historians.  For today’s Darwin Party to insist they need to defend science from creationism rings as hollow as hearing Ahmedinejad say he needs nukes for defense.

Evolutionist J. R. Lucas agrees in his analysis of the Huxley-Wilberforce interchange.  “This is the most important reason why the legend grew,” he says; “At the time, Wilberforce was perfectly entitled to have an opinion about science, but in the later years of the century scientists were increasingly jealous of their autonomy, and would see in Huxley’s retort a claim they were increasingly anxious to assert.”  In matters of science, effectively, the opinions of theologians were no longer welcome—an ironic outcome considering Darwin himself had but one degree—in theology!
    One cannot ignore the sociopolitical and economic forces that contributed to the rise of Darwinism.  Other evolutionary theories had been proposed in prior decades (Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Robert Chambers), with only a modicum of success.  Why did Darwin succeed so triumphantly?  Was it the genius of his theory of natural selection, and the scientific evidence he amassed to support it?  Certainly his theory contained more detail and logical development, but to what extent was it a well-timed pretext for more substantive social factors to come into play?

As evidence, consider that natural selection theory fell into disrepute over the next four decades and was nearly moribund by the turn of the century.  Darwin himself had to concede more to Lamarck under repeated attacks on his mechanism by other scientists.  It cannot be, therefore, that evolutionism became popular because of the scientific soundness of Darwin’s mechanism.  There were highly-educated, well-trained and eminently-respected scientists who vigorously opposed Darwin’s ideas: e.g., Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s geology teacher; Richard Owen, founder and director of the British Museum; John Phillips, Oxford geology professor and president of the Geological Society of London; Louis Agassiz, one of the most famous American scientists of the period, and many others.  In fact, ironically, most of the early criticisms of Darwin’s thesis came from scientists, not theologians.

Nevertheless, the vision of a “fact” of evolution (i.e., common ancestry through material mechanisms, whatever they were) rapidly took over the intellectual world right at the time three powerful social movements were in place to empower its acceptance: (1) the widespread belief in progress (evidenced by the apparent superiority of the British Empire), (2) discontent with establishment Victorian religion (with a resulting value put on secularism), and (3) the rise of the scientist class as an independent profession.  Given these forces, any cause celebre that facilitated movements already underway could have been more celebre than cause.  One can see how the Huxley-Wilberforce story could be blown out of proportion.  It became a distortion, exploited by an avant garde ready to claim its portion by extortion.
    The upshot was that science was taken captive by materialism, not by force of evidence, but by revolutionary tactics of agenda-driven advocates on a turf war against a weakened church (whose own leaders were either undermining the historical foundations of the faith, or were living lives inconsistent with the teachings of Christ).  By 1874, in a presidential address to the British Association, John Tyndall had pretty much established the claim of institutionalized naturalistic science to explore anything and everything it desired, including origins, meaning and ultimate destiny, baptizing its speculations (e.g., 01/17/2007) in the name of science (see James Clerk Maxwell’s satirical poem in the 08/10/2005 commentary).  This went far beyond the first limited claims by Darwin to explain the origin of species.  Like communists, the Darwinites seldom concede power once they have usurped it.  That explains the histrionics of today’s professional science elites when creationism and intelligent design proponents, despite a much longer experience in natural philosophy, move to reassert rights to their historic domains of inquiry (e.g., 01/11/2007, 01/06/2007).
    Samuel Wilberforce’s fight against the incipient intellectual slavery of science to materialism is another story that must be told, because the Darwinite propaganda and subterfuge continues unabated to this day.  There are only preliminary signs its grip is weakening.  The science of the 21st century is too big a challenge for an outdated, simplistic philosophy devised by a 19th century bearded Buddha and his disciples.
    Meanwhile, go see Amazing Grace: the Movie.  It’s an excellent use of the film medium to educate and inspire.  Here is a movie that brings to life a period of history that should be known by everyone.  Watching William Wilberforce struggle through the darkest days of opposition presents a sober lesson: never underestimate the lengths to which those who allow evil to exist will rationalize their positions with pragmatic and intellectual-sounding arguments – as his son Samuel Wilberforce would discover again in 1860.  But never underestimate also the power of perseverance and the courage of rightly-based convictions.  And, as the film illustrates, a little creativity and strategizing can help when dealing with entrenched, self-serving interests.
Next headline on:  Media • Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

Since evolution requires that we come from something simpler, and chimpanzees are handy, we are subject to a constant stream of propaganda each time research comes across some similarity between humans and chimps.  If toolmaking resulted in a gradual evolutionary increase in intelligence, then crows should soon be writing poetry, because they are way ahead of chimpanzees.  The Behavioral Ecology Research Group website discusses an animal that makes some of the more sophisticated tools found in nature:

New Caledonian crows use tools to forage for invertebrates in dead wood.  They use at least four different tool types including tools cut from the thorny edges of leaves of Pandanus trees.  These tools are produced in a series of manufacturing steps and have complex shapes – they are the most sophisticated animal tools yet discovered.  The shape of Pandanus tools varies regionally, and it has been suggested that this may be the result of cultural transmission of tool designs, with crows learning from relatives and other members of social groups how to manufacture and use particular designs.  In other words, it is conceivable that these crows possess a culture of tool technology – akin to that found in our own species.

Our 08/09/2002 entry said the tool-making ability of these crows exceeds that of chimpanzees.  Yet crows remain crows.  Beavers are among the most skilled architects in the animal kingdom, but beavers remain beavers.  Egyptian vultures use rocks to open ostrich eggs, and yet they remain vultures (see Tufts U).  Nowhere do these articles discuss where this intelligence comes from in the first place.  It is just assumed that since it is there, and there is no other way it could have got there except to evolve, that it therefore somehow evolved
    Evolutionists criticize creationists for invoking miracles any time they come across something they cannot explain, yet they have no problem invoking the magical, unseen power of Evolution to explain anything and everything in the biological world.  The difference between Pan and man is not a matter of gradual acquisition of intelligence, but of our being made in the image of God.
–DK
Next headline on:  Mammals • Early Man • Birds

Sorry for the upset.  There have been many of those in astrobiology lately (02/15/2007).  Thanks for downplaying the obligatory non-sequitur that water equals life.  Maybe we can still relate to HD 209458b and HD 189733b in another sense.  Maybe they have dust bunnies.
Next headline on:  Stars and Stellar Astronomy • Origin of Life

The 1960s slogan was: better living through chemistry.  The 2005+ slogan is, better living through biology – or, make like an animal.
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Marine Biology • Amazing Facts

There’s buzz inside the intelligent design community whether to use this as the new mascot of ID instead of the bacterial flagellum.  It surely has a lot going for it.  This is a case of “irreducible complexity all the way down” to borrow a phrase Jonathan Wells elaborated on Michael Behe’s concept.  The flagellum still has an advantage of instant recognition – everyone recognizes an outboard motor when they see one – but the ribosome is even more astonishing.  Plus, it is universal, essential to life, and unevolved from bacteria to man.
    If you remember that dazzling translation sequence in the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life, these new animations provided updated versions showing more detail from recent discoveries.  The mechanism gets more and more marvelous with each new discovery.  This machine is well worth getting to know.  The article admits there are many questions still to be answered: for instance, how are the correct transfer-RNAs called into position so quickly?  We have barely begun probing the depths of design of these molecular factories.
    The answers to these and more questions will not come from Darwinian theory, which was not even mentioned in the article.  The future of molecular biology belongs to intelligent design.  Charlie, hand over the keys.  You’re fired.  What for?  Fraud, thinking such things could happen by a series of mistakes.  Dr. Paley, hello!  Nice to have you back.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Define Pseudoscience    02/20/2007  
A couple of articles lately have lumped creationism in with astrology, ESP, space aliens and lucky numbers.  How valid is this grouping?
    Randolph E. Schmid (Associated Press; see Live Science) conveyed statistics presented by Jon Miller (Michigan State U) and a panel of researchers at an AAAS meeting in San Francisco this past Saturday.  “People in the U.S. know more about basic science today than they did two decades ago, good news that researchers say is tempered by an unsettling growth in the belief in pseudoscience such as astrology and visits by extraterrestrial aliens,” Schmid began.  A few sentences down, he adds, “In addition, these researchers noted an increase in college students who report they are ‘unsure’ about creationism as compared with evolution.”
    The association was strengthened farther down in the article, when a paragraph about bigfoot and aliens was followed by a paragraph about creationism.  “But there also has been a drop in the number of people who believe evolution correctly explains the development of life on Earth and an increase in those who believe mankind was created about 10,000 years ago,” Schmid writes, presuming to lump these all together into the box labeled pseudoscience.  “Miller said a second major negative factor to scientific literacy was religious fundamentalism and aging.”  These “negative” factors, Schmid contends, could be offset by the “positive” influences of college education, “informal science learning through the media,” and having children at home.
    Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute also chimed in on this theme.  On Space.com he asked, “When Did Science Become the Enemy?”  Shostak deplored the portrayal of scientists as dark, mysterious, suspicious villains, and explored why the media become so infatuated with unscientific heroes and celebrities.  “We’re most interested in people, in the same way that click beetles are most interested in click beetles,” he explained.  “That’s evolution.”  Evolution is also responsible for human attraction to heroes, he argued.  “Heroes, in other words, have survival value.  The peculiar thing is that American heroes aren’t often very good at science.”
    So what does science really represent, in contrast to pseudoscience and pop culture?  Shostak did not attack creationism directly in the article.  The association was implicit, though: the lead illustration prominently displays icons of science: a spiral galaxy and other astronomical objects, an equation, and the fatherly portrait of Charles Darwin.  See also last week’s entry by another SETI Institute leader, Edna Devore, who advocated celebration of Darwin Day and Evolution Sunday as ways of honoring science (02/11/2007).

In both of these articles is the overt or covert message that if you love science, you will love Charlie, and if you are a fool or afraid of science, you will mistrust the Father Figure of Evolution and run to your security blanket, the Bible.  This is how propaganda works, particularly the use of association and loaded words.  The goal is to achieve a subliminal response without making you think.  The message is: the real heroes in the world are the Charlie-worshipers, and the poopheads are the creationists and other pseudoscientists like UFO chasers who live by their daily horoscope or read the Bible.
    Surely many creationists reading this will say, “Wait a minute; I abhor astrology.  I love science.  I have nothing but contempt for the supermarket tabloids about space aliens and ESP.”  Many may have degrees in science, teach science, or sit on public school boards.  How did you get lumped into the same pool with fruitcakes?  The answer is: it’s a trick.  It’s an escape from debating and understanding the issues in the creation-evolution controversy.
    We could play that game, too.  In fact, how would they like it if we launched a campaign to call Darwinism pseudoscience?  We could certainly make a good case.  We could call attention to the fact that it is held to with religious ardor despite being repeatedly falsified, engages in mythmaking, dogmatizes its victims and relies on irrationality for its maintenance.  Yes!  Let’s rid our schools of pseudoscience.  Out with Darwin!  No more Darwin exhibits in our national museums.  No more finch beak pseudoscience in the textbooks.  Portray, instead, the noble, lonely ID scientist as the seeker of the truth wherever the evidence leads, even if it leads toward design.
    Or, we could go on a smear campaign to lump all Darwinists with Hitler.  If you think natural selection is a good idea in any sense, you are in favor of incinerating people in ovens.  We must rid the world of hate, anti-Semitism, communism, apartheid, evolution, Jonestown-like cults, despots and dictators.  How’s that?  Isn’t association a fun game?
    Such lumpings of conglomerates into emotionally-charged labels represent shoddy thinking.  A case can be made that Darwin influenced Hitler, and that his ideas underlie many destructive ideologies.  It does not follow that Seth Shostak is a Nazi because he believes in evolution.  There are creationists who accept a young earth (one just earned a PhD in science at a secular university: see story at Uncommon Descent).  It does not follow that they expect a miracle around every corner.

Another problem in these articles is their failure to define pseudoscience.  They do not define it because it cannot be defined.  Any time philosophers of science try to create a line of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, they wind up excluding “legitimate” sciences and including illegitimate ones.  There are no sufficient conditions that, if met, guarantee something is science, and no set of necessary conditions that, if not met, guarantee something else is pseudoscience.  Falsifiability, explanatory power, ability to make predictions, testability, adherence to natural law or mathematical expression, simplicity, elegance, holding a theory tentatively, acceptance by consensus of professionals – put together any combination of criteria you wish, and you will include some pseudosciences and exclude some recognized sciences.  Furthermore, there is no one scientific method!  You cannot find all sciences adhering to a methodology or set of methods that cannot also be found in non-scientific fields, and you will find some pseudosciences that use the same “scientific” methods in their work.  This is not to argue that science and pseudoscience are all of the same cloth, but the problem of demarcation is much more difficult than often realized.

The Darwin dogmatists are only speeding the collapse of their ideology by relying on propaganda tactics like the reckless application of the pseudoscience label on their critics.  Let them attend to the rampant pseudoscience in their own house.  Meanwhile, let all who honor science practice its values: make the best case you can based on evidence, and, humbly recognizing the limitations of science and the human propensity for self-deception, be willing to follow the evidence where it leads.  (One might notice that these values are not entirely foreign to theologians or practitioners in most other scholarly disciplines.) 
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Bible and Theology • SETI

Adding any comments would be gilding the lily.  Go read it.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design

In many respects, our Moon is the best-studied body other than Earth.... If we have already learned so much, what do we expect to gain by going back? .... I argue ... that we really don’t understand the Moon very well, and that it is a body the understanding of which features prominently in our attempts to figure out what took place when the planets formed.

The Apollo program and subsequent research revealed that our Moon is an oddball.

What’s wrong with the standard story of the Moon that we need more explanation to fix the story?  ... Part of the answer lies in something that often happens in science: we have a story that is widely accepted, but it is a story that is actually incomplete and poorly tested.  To some extent, the so-called giant impact origin of the Moon has gained acceptance through the failure of alternatives rather than through its evident correctness.

Several alternatives to the impact origin have been proposed.... All these alternatives have very major and extensively studied shortcomings.  This is, however, not the same as saying that we know for sure that the giant impact happened—it simply seems more likely than rival hypotheses.

Stevenson’s candor was refreshing, even if it contains an ulterior motive for justifying the Planetary Society’s lobbying for new lunar missions.  Just remember these doubts the next time the news media give the impression that we have our tidy theories all locked up.  The best theory is not ipso facto a good theory – see Best-in-Field Fallacy in the Baloney Detector.  Remember also something Dr. Kevin Grazier (JPL) said in the film The Privileged Planet: “if our moon didn’t exist, neither would we.”
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics • Geology

Without superstring theory, we’d lose the intriguing philosophical appeal for the multiverse, with its infinite and eternal creativity in spawning new universes.  We’d have no mathematics for spanning the gap between everyday physics and the high energies where quantum gravity operates.  The road to creating a quantum description of gravity will be a murky one.
    More immediately, dark matter and dark energy would remain imponderable enigmas, shorn of any clues about where they come from.  Astronomers can live without knowing the quantum properties of gravity.  But to learn that 96 percent of the cosmos is unknowable would be a bitter pill for astronomers to swallow.
    It would be even worse for physicists.  Without a logical framework in which to pose and answer questions, our inquiries into the fundamental aspects of the physical world would devolve into semantic quibbles.

Something is terribly wrong with a theory that cannot make predictions that are experimentally verifiable, posits imponderable substances, and envisions multiple universes we can never know, just to keep the universe eternal.  Earlier scientists were ridiculed for appealing to imponderable substances like caloric and phlogiston.  Those were tame compared to today’s dark matter and dark energy, extra dimensions, and multiple universes.  Cosmologists claim their imponderables make up the vast bulk of reality, such that we inhabit a tiny fraction of what “must” exist.
    But why must these imponderables exist? (see PhysOrg.com for an alternative view).  Odenwald says, “In some respects, a world without superstring theory isn’t so bad.  The standard model and ordinary general relativity hold all astronomers need to describe accurately most of the phenomena they study, from galaxy evolution and supernova detonations, to the extreme physics of neutron stars and black holes.”  OK, so why not leave well enough alone?  Richard Feynman said, “Perhaps it is difficult for physicists to unify gravity with the other forces because nature never intended for them to be unified in the first place.”
    Two motivations may be driving the superstring craze.  One is the desire for a theory to be elegant.  Cosmologists have found many laws that are simple and elegant, allowing a wide variety of phenomena to be expressed in simple equations.  Well, that’s great, but does nature owe us an obligation to dress according to our style?  This is an example of a metaphysical paradigm as the controversial philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn described it.  It’s a way of doing science that the guild of scientists agrees on.  Philosopher J. P. Moreland calls this a second-order theory change – not just a change of one theory with another one, but a change in what scientists value in a theory.  Scientists used to think of their craft as the art of verifying natural phenomena by experimentation.  If we are changing the rules now, such that a theory must be elegant, then we are on a different track entirely.  A scientist remains on good terms with the guild if he comes up with theories that are elegant, even if they have no connection with reality.  What if, however, reality turns out to be very inelegant in this arena?  What if we are stuck with an ugly theoretical mess?  What if no amount of mathematical modeling will reduce all the forces to a unified set of equations?  A man spoke into the sky, “Universe, I exist!” to which the universe responded, “But that fact places on me no sense of obligation.”
    The second motivation driving the superstring craze is the desire to escape intelligent design (11/27/2006).  The fine-tuning of the laws of physics for our existence has been studied now for well over 60 years.  There’s no escaping the anthropic principle (08/11/2006).  If the laws and constants of physics were not what they are, we could not be here to study them.  Theists have a ready answer for this.  The God who spoke the universe and its laws into existence formed it to be inhabited (Isaiah 45:18).  That cosmologists would escape into multiple universes to avoid the obvious is a measure of extreme desperation.
    Where did this desperation come from?  Think back to the late 19th century, when Darwinism was on the rise.  Various social, political, economic and philosophical trends were moving away from natural theology and toward philosophical materialism.  The Myth of Progress was the “in” thing.  Materialists such as Tyndall and Huxley inculcated a third-order theory change: a change in what constitutes science itself.  There were two sides to this theory change: an exclusion, and an inclusion.  Moreland explains that Darwinism was an attempt to exclude theology from science.  As a consequence, this led to the inclusion of storytelling.

This is commonly stated that appeals to miracles and the supernatural are no longer permissible in science.  OK, define miracle.  Is it a one-time event, with no known cause?  Is it a completely unpredictable circumstance?  What is supernatural?  Does it involve imponderable entities beyond the range of human experience?  Undoubtedly the materialist is thinking of angels dancing on the head of a pin, but let’s ask some interesting questions.  Was the big bang a miracle?  Are extra dimensions beyond experience supernatural?  In what way do extra universes differ from the supernatural, if they can never cross into our experience?  At least God interacts with the world and with human beings, but the materialists are invoking alternate realities that can never be known by scientific investigation.
    Ask the question also whether intelligence is a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry.  Is information an imponderable substance?  Is it really possible to reduce intelligence and information to atoms?  If we deal with information on a daily basis (as in fact, your intelligence is right now pondering the semantics of this information you are reading), why should not science be able to investigate information and its causes?  These examples show that the issues are more nuanced than often described in the either-or dichotomy of natural vs. supernatural.  See also the 05/11/2006 entry with its question, “Is our universe natural?”

Since appeals to design have been ruled out of bounds, today’s cosmologists are forced into speculating about how material objects created worlds of exquisite design and complexity without help from a Mind.  It’s not that science must be defined this way.  The purveyors of this third-order theory change won a strategic battle in academia.  As a result, cosmologists are stuck with material particles and efficient causes as their only explanatory resources – even if such limitations lead to absurdities.
    The founders of science would be shocked to see modern cosmologists auditioning for the theater of the absurd.  It’s one thing to discover the absurd, but quite another to stay there.  Arthur C. Clarke once said that the only way to find out the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.  OK, fine.  Now that cosmologists have tested that boundary, will they be prepared to retreat, and escape back to reality?  Watch them.  If they jump off the cliff, they weren’t really scientists.  They weren’t really interested in following the evidence wherever it leads, but rather in fulfilling their own selfish desires in the futility of their own imaginations (01/17/2006).
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Is it possible that Darwin’s premise was simply incorrect?  Are eyes in a cave disadvantageous, and if so, why?  In essence, the argument against selection is that the cost of making an eye is trivial compared to the cost of its replacement tissue in the socket or that the developmental cost is paid by cave fish anyway because the eyes start developing and only degenerate after many cell cycles of tissue growth and replacement.  However, modern physiology and molecular biology suggest that these arguments might address the wrong costs.  The vertebrate retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues, with a metabolism surpassing even that of the brain.  Underscoring this high metabolic demand is the observation that one manifestation of genetic defects decreasing the efficiency of mitochondria is blindness (e.g., Leber’s hereditary optical neuropathy).  Thus, maintenance of eyes might pose a significant burden in the cave environment.  Increasing this burden, the vertebrate retina uses more energy in the dark than in the light because the membranes of the photoreceptor disks must be maintained in the hyperpolarized state until they are depolarized in response to light.  Oxygen consumption by the vertebrate retina is approximately 50% greater in the dark than in the light.  Adding further to the retina’s cost is its structural maintenance.  Ten percent of the photoreceptor outer disks in vertebrates are shed and renewed each day, and the structure may be completely replaced over 35 times yearly.

The Bible describes a storm at sea endured by Luke and Paul (Acts 27).  When the sailors realized the trouble they were in, they knew what to do: lighten the ship.  Over the sides went the cargo and the tackle – of little use with a higher priority (survival) in mind.  In an Old Testament story of a storm at sea (Jonah 1), the wish to survive drove another crew to toss overboard another piece of costly but cumbersome baggage: Jonah.  In neither of these cases could it be claimed that survival of the fittest was helping the ships evolve into speedboats.
    According to Darwinian theory, selection can be progressive and regressive.  Populations can climb up a fitness peak, and slide down a fitness peak.  Natural selection can add new organs and shed useless organs.  But think; if the world’s living things are always undergoing neutral genetic drift and regressive evolution, Charlie’s little myth will never produce endless forms most beautiful.  Everything will go extinct!  Assuming that “regressive evolution” awards Charlie another medal, therefore, gives him only fool’s gold.  This is not the way to explain the living world.
    What have we learned?  Natural selection is real.  It is downward!  This is the sense in which Edward Blyth (10/10/2002) and even William Paley (12/18/2003) understood it (before Darwin plagiarized their ideas and turned them upside down).  Natural selection is a conservative process.  It either maintains what exists or gets rid of it.  It cannot generate new organs and new genetic information.  As Hugo deVries quipped, survival of the fittest does not explain the arrival of the fittest.  Removal of the fitless is all this case has demonstrated.  Natural selection gets rid of things that inhibit survival in a storm and tosses them overboard.  That is not evolution in the sense most people have been taught.  Have these scientists, or Darwin, actually demonstrated that random mutations could build an eye or any other complex organ from scratch?  Only in their dream-world of imagination (01/17/2007).
    More importantly, these scientists have reminded us how precious and costly the organs of sense are to their possessors.  Romeo may say Juliet’s eyes are like pearls, but they are much more valuable.  They are the lamps of the body.  It takes elaborate, costly power plants and extensive maintenance crews to keep them running.  The crews must be paid daily in hamburgers, french fries and chocolate.  (OK, soy, garlic, and broccoli for some.)
    Darwin may be able to explain how eyes break down, but not where the blueprints and programs for eyes came from.  To fail to see the sense of this is to enter Plato’s cave, where lingering too long diminishes all sense into shadows.  The Darwin Party headquarters is located down there, past the twilight zone.  Temptresses at the entrance lure passers by (students) with promises that greater enlightenment lies below (01/12/2007).  Victims are usually afraid of the dark at first, but become seduced with the promise that the decreasing daylight will be replaced by a better, inner light of imagination (01/17/2007).
    Thus the blind lead the blind into their niche with their bait and switch sales pitch.  Inductees (12/11/2006) are taught the ritual: offer the Charlie Buddha, the idol of the cave (07/10/2006 footnote), his daily incense and all will go well (07/18/2006, 08/07/2003 commentary).  Once acclimated and accepted by the clan, novitiates find the light of imagination to be bright, beautiful, and liberating, filled with wondrous possibilities (12/21/2005, 12/05/2006).  Visions of complex creatures emerging from the void play across the screen of the mind’s eye (12/10/2006, 11/11/2006).  Simultaneously, the skin grows extremely sensitive.  Any suggestion that a true light can be found above ground produces a violent reaction (01/11/2007, 10/27/2006).
    Beware, travelers; while you are able, come to the light.  Then learn to walk in the light.  Caves are interesting places to visit, but never enter without a reliable flashlight and spare batteries.  Read these pages for details.
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I will cite one example of prebiotic synthesis, published in 1995 by Nature and featured in the New York Times.  The RNA base cytosine was prepared in high yield by heating two purified chemicals in a sealed glass tube at 100 degrees Celsius for about a day.  One of the reagents, cyanoacetaldehyde, is a reactive substance capable of combining with a number of common chemicals that may have been present on the early Earth.  These competitors were excluded.  An extremely high concentration was needed to coax the other participant, urea, to react at a sufficient rate for the reaction to succeed.  The product, cytosine, can self-destruct by simple reaction with water.  When the urea concentration was lowered, or the reaction allowed to continue too long, any cytosine that was produced was subsequently destroyed.  This destructive reaction had been discovered in my laboratory, as part of my continuing research on environmental damage to DNA.  Our own cells deal with it by maintaining a suite of enzymes that specialize in DNA repair.

The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence.  He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time.  No physical law need be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are so immense, that the suggestion implies that the non-living world had an innate desire to generate RNA.  The majority of origin-of-life scientists who still support the RNA-first theory either accept this concept (implicitly, if not explicitly) or feel that the immensely unfavorable odds were simply overcome by good luck.

Thank you, Robert Shapiro, for unmasking the lies we have been told for nearly a century.  The Miller Experiment, the RNA World, and all the hype of countless papers, articles, popular press pieces and TV animations are impossible myths.  We appreciate your help revealing why it’s all been hyped bunk.  Now finish the job and show that yours is no better.
    You know you cannot stay with small molecules forever.  You have not begun to bridge the canyon between metabolic cycles with small molecules to implausible genetic networks with large molecules (RNA, DNA and proteins).  Any way you try to close the gap, you are going to run into the very same criticisms you raised against the RNA-World storytellers.  You cannot invoke natural selection without accurate replication (see online book).

Funny how these people presume that if they can just get molecules to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to the replicator stage, Charlie and Tinker Bell will take over from there.  Before you can say 4 Gya, biochemists emerge!

Shapiro’s article is very valuable for exposing the vast difference between the hype over origin of life and its implausibilities – nay, impossibilities – in the chemistry of the real world.  His alternative is weak and fraught with the very same difficulties.  If a golf ball is not going to finish holes 14-18 on its own without help, it is also not going to finish holes 1-5.  If a gorilla is not going to type a recipe in English for chili con carne from thousands of keys on a keyboard, it is not going to type a recipe for hot soup either, even using only 1% of the keys.  Furthermore, neither the gorilla nor the golf ball are going to want to proceed further on the evolutionist project.  We cannot attribute an “innate desire” to a gorilla, a golf ball, or a sterile planet of chemicals to produce coded languages and molecular machines.
    Sooner or later, all the machinery, the replicators, the genetic codes and complex entropy-lowering processes are going to have to show up in the accounting.  Once Shapiro realizes that his alternative is just as guilty as the ones he criticizes, we may have an ardent new advocate of intelligent design in the ranks.  Join the winning side, Dr. Shapiro, before sliding with the losers and liars into the dustbin of intellectual history.
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A respectable level of ethics training for all postgraduate students is an important element of this.  It needs to be introduced at all research universities – alongside stricter rules on record-keeping, and arrangements for protecting whistleblowers, where this is missing at the national level.
    But most important of all, as the first scientific studies of the factors behind good conduct confirm, is the example set by senior researchers themselves.  It is here in the laboratory – not in the law courts or the offices of a university administrator – that the trajectory of research conduct for the twenty-first century is being set.

So Tinker Bell just shot Cupid.  Folks, this is where the rubber meets the road in the battle between the Darwin-Only-Darwin-Only DODOs and the noble and altruistic Visigoths.  If you are repulsed at the ugliness of the wreckage left in the wake of Darwinian thinking, thank God: you still might have a soul.  We shudder at the criminal mind that will torture a child without any sense of right or wrong, and even get a perverse delight out of it, but how does that differ intellectually from what the Darwinists say about love?  They have done worse than rob it of any meaning, value, purpose and virtue.  They have turned altruism into selfishness, purity into dirt, and tenderness into conflict.  No wonder we are raising a generation of sex-crazed young people looking at a meaningless existence and deciding it’s all about me, me, me and what my selfish genes make me do.  Never before has selfishness been given complete license by a world view as it has by Darwinism.  It has made selfishness the ultimate virtue, justified by science.
    There are three things you need to understand about the Darwinian explanations for love and altruism that rob the DODO heads of any credibility, and make them worthy of the utmost scorn and adamant opposition.

1. The evidence is against them.  Here they are, 148 years after Charlie wrote his little black book, still trying to figure out “what is this thing called love?”  How long do you give a scientist time to scratch his head before the head is worn away entirely?  A decade perhaps?  Maybe two?  How many miles on the wrong road do you let a scientist take the wheel before demanding he ask for directions?
2. In their view, nothing is good.  They cannot be allowed to call anything good, ethical, right, correct, moral or worthwhile, because those words are not in the Darwin Dictionary.  Don’t let them plagiarize Christian words; they need to be consistent and use their own.  St. Paul can write a lofty, elegant paean to agape in I Corinthians 13 because within the Christian world view, love is real.  In Darwinland, by contrast, love is an illusion, and with it, all descriptions of it are illusory as well.  They cannot speak of love as if it has some immaterial and immortal existence.  To them, it must be nothing more than a phantom produced by a certain configuration of neurotransmitters undergoing particular rearrangements in response to stimuli.  It is an artifact, an illusion, with no epistemic status.  We must slap their hands when they borrow Christian words.  We must laugh at them when they hug or weep.  We must take disinterested notes in our white lab coats when they are indignant over evil.  Only by forcing them to live in the prisons they have constructed for themselves can we offer them the possibility of repentance for what they have done to the greatest word in any language.
3. Their view is the death of science.  The Darwinist materialists try to exempt themselves from the human race.  From their ivory towers in the air, they pontificate to the rest of us about what makes us tick.  Like gods in their own eyes, they know what is real, what is empirical, and what constitutes knowledge that is universal, necessary, timeless, and certain.  We need to unmask them and let them look in the mirror.  If humans are pawns of natural selection, then nothing is universal, necessary, timeless and certain.  Even if something in the world is universal, there is no way that a material object like a scientist could know that.  Science, therefore, under their own presuppositions, becomes impossible.  Yet, a critic counters, many atheists are doing good science, aren’t they?  Yes; but only by stealing from Christian presuppositions.  Stop the welfare and they will starve.
       It is a basic principle of logic (without which all reasoning is impossible) that any self-refuting proposition is necessarily false.  It is also axiomatic that a philosophy cannot be arbitrary or inconsistent, else one could prove anything.  Since Darwinist ontology, epistemology, and moral philosophy is self-refuting, it is necessarily false.  Since it is arbitrary and inconsistent, its postulates are incapable of logical proof, including the postulate that science can provide knowledge about the external world.  A Darwinist cannot reason within his own presuppositions.  He cannot, therefore, be a scientist.  He cannot know anything.  He cannot be sure that his sensory impressions correspond to reality.  His actions must be considered products of blind selective pressures.  As a mere product of selfish genes and memes that are using his body and brain to reproduce, he cannot claim to be interested in Truth, or to know it when he sees it.  Science is impossible in this world view.

It is only by forcing these materialists to face the consequences of their presuppositions that we can offer them a life preserver, provided they drop their Darwinian millstone and embrace a Christian world view where love and science are real.  (They can only grab onto it if they have some trace of unseared conscience left.)
    Experience shows, unfortunately, that Darwinists are often incorrigible.  Forced into this logical corner, many of them do start acting consistent with Darwinian values: i.e., they go on the attack, resorting to conflict, competition, and survival of the fittest.  If you observe this behavior, you understand now what is happening.  Unable to reason their way out of their dilemma, they snap, snarl, and use all means to seize power and shut up their opponents.  So be prepared for a fight.  There is such a thing as a good fight.  One does not have to descend to the immoral tactics of the enemy, but should work to prevent the enemy from destroying himself and everyone else.  It’s the cop’s struggle against the sniper shooting victims at random.  Sometimes this kind of fight is the most loving act in the world.
    So, happy Valentine’s Day.  St. Valentine gave his life as a martyr.  He was an altruist.  He did the most un-Darwinian thing: he valued truth and love over passing on his genes.  He followed in the footsteps of Jesus, who said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  Undoubtedly this happened to Valentinus because he confronted the dogmatists of his day and refused to bow to their false gods.  What the world needs now is love, tough love.  If you have it, show it.  Don’t allow destructive philosophies to wreak their havoc without a good fight.

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Recommended Reading:  C. S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength is as timely today as when he wrote it at the end of World War II.  Lewis’s complex story, interweaving numerous themes, cannot be adequately summarized in a few words; we hope this feeble attempt at describing one of the themes will interest those unfamiliar with it to read the novel in its entirety.  A modern, liberal couple begins with a selfish, shallow view of love and sexual relationships.  They find through a horrendous experience with a monstrous scientific institution that its overt materialism is really just a cover for a deeper evil.  When the deeper evil is revealed and overcome, their discovery of true agape love ends with another discovery: that eros, in its soulish context, is also real, rich, and beautiful. 
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