|
RAFT THE GRAND CANYON! Join the 3-Day Adventure with
Creation Safaris this August. See postcard.
Details here.
Watch for the Recycle logo to find gems from the back issues!
3 Out of 5 Doctors Leaves 2 02/28/2007

Every once in awhile its good to be reminded that yesterdays 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, isnt 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 youre feeling OK, though, just dont 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 tomorrows 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, dont 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
The Moth in Spiders Clothing 02/28/2007

National
Geographic News has a picture story about a moth that mimics a jumping spider.
It appears to work. Scientists staged a battle royale between contestants of mimics
and non-mimics in the ring with their jumping spider enemies, and the mimics won hands
down. The spiders went for the normal moths 62% of the time, but backed away from their mirror-images,
the moths in spider clothing, in all but 6% of cases. The fooled spiders even made aggressive
territorial displays against some of their mimics. The metalmark moths of Costa Rica flare
up their wings and make a spidery pose when threatened. A somewhat similar strategy is
recommended for humans when facing a mountain lion.
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? Didnt they learn the Darwinian lesson?
And if the predators also had the same time, why didnt 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
The Evolution of School Boards 02/27/2007

A press release from Michigan
State University encourages scientists to run for school boards on a pro-evolution
platform. Alarmed that 40% of students are doubting evolution, Jon Miller encourages his
fellow evolutionists to get involved in improving science literacy. He sees
this as a necessary counter to other special interest groups, often conservative or
religiously fundamental, highly organized in training and supporting candidates.
Theres a price to pay for involvement beyond the 15-hour-a-week commitment.
No scientist can run on a pro-evolution platform and not expect to find themselves
engaged in other issues, Miller said. In his 3-year stint on the DeKalb County
school board, he learned more about school finances than he had thought possible.
Its 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?
Its not like the Darwinists dont already have a complete
monopoly on textbooks, curriculum and media with the ACLU-KGB at their beck and call.
Isnt 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.
Dont 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. Thats what happened in Kansas this month
(see ARN).
Next headline on:
Education
Politics and Ethics
Evolution
Checkmate, Charlie: Cellular lineman at work earn an ovation,
from 03/31/2005.
Archaeology Alert: 02/27/2007

If youre wondering about claims of a discovery of family tombs
of Jesus, take a reality check. Read Todd Bolens 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 orchids kinfolk. An evolutionary biologist
explained, To be deceptive means that the orchids have less sex, but the sex is better because
its not with a close relative. From the insects point of view, though, how
do biologists answer Darwins enigma? Why dont 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 cant 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, todays 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.
Yet it seems hardly a law of nature that some species would opt for deception, luring pollinators without
a reward, while others would stick with the standard strategy of rewarding visitors with nectar.
The former get less sex with better quality while the latter get more sex (and more offspring) yet with
risk of inbreeding. Plausible as this sounds, the same theory is being used to explain opposite
strategies among very similar plants. This seems hardly a deterministic explanation.
The most promising evidence for the evolutionary view in Ledfords article was that
a certain Australian species appears to have invented its pollinators pheromone from scratch:
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.
The article did not elaborate, however, on how the botanists knew that the ability to produce these
compounds was not already present in the ancestor. Some species produce the chiloglottone, while
others do not. To call a compound novel would require knowledge of the genetic history
of todays species. It would require knowing whether the haves evolved from the have-nots
rather than vice versa.
Nevertheless, the plants and their pollinators show remarkable specificity today.
Insect pollinators such as wasps and bees are often picky about the flowers they visit, and the flowers
often show exotic adaptations to succeed in attracting the right insects. The article left the
question of sympatric speciation unresolved. Ledford did not address, furthermore, the larger
questions of how these flowers and insects arose in the first place.
1Heidi Ledford, News Feature: Plant biology: The flower of seduction,
Nature
445, 816-817 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445816a.
2Sympatric speciation (as opposed to allopatric speciation)
suggests that species can split into two without members becoming geographically isolated.
See 01/15/2003.
Nothing in this article contradicts the view that
todays 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.
Its 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.
Its 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.
Its 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
History Highlight: The Two Wilberforces 02/25/2007

Those seeing the new movie
Amazing Grace (opened Feb 23)
may not realize the family connection of
the films hero with the controversy over Darwinism. William Wilberforce, the champion of
abolition who brought an end to the slave trade as depicted in the film, had a son, Samuel, who became
a leader in the fight against Darwinism in 1860. The Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce stood
strong not only against the rising tide of liberal theology in the mid-19th century, but took particular
umbrage at Darwins flimsy speculation as he called it. He wrote a strident
review against The Origin of Species for the Quarterly Review that really got under
Charles Darwins skin. Darwin recognized the input of his arch-foe, Richard Owen, director
of the British Museum, the leading paleontologist of the day.
Bishop Wilberforce was
at the focal point of a pivotal event in the rise of Darwinism. At a lively series of lectures
at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, just months after the publication of Darwins
Origin, Wilberforce faced off against Thomas Huxley in a famous interchange about evolution.
Contrary to later depictions of the event as a victory of Huxleys rationalist science against
Wilberforces theological dogmatism, each side felt they had made the better case. Wilberforce,
not only a theologian but a professor of mathematics,
spoke for nearly half an hour before Huxley. Apparently he got strong support from the audience. It is highly
doubtful he uttered an insulting jibe about Huxleys ape ancestry as later revisionists alleged, or that Huxley delivered
a devastating counterthrust. In fact, Huxley and Wilberforce both acted on amicable terms of mutual
respect after the episode.1 Darwin himself, though, glad that illness prevented his
attendance at the meeting, told Huxley, I would as soon have died as tried to answer the Bishop in
such an assembly. He probably would have also had died to have heard his former Beagle
captain FitzRoy at the meeting giving an impassioned denunciation of the evolutionary views of the
erstwhile shipboard naturalist.
Many came to the meeting lusting for a fight over the new evolutionary views.
Activists on both sides tended to hear what they wanted to hear and report it
accordingly. Unfortunately for Wilberforce and other theists, the apparent progress of materialist
science (as evidence through industrial progress), coupled with discontent over established religion,
combined to give Darwins views a more trendy air that appealed especially to young
scientists. Darwins aides capitalized on this in a rapid-fire sequence of articles, attacks,
pamphlets, new journals and other publicity strategies in the days following the June meeting at Oxford.
Within 10 years, most opposition to evolution had been swept away.2
Throughout his life, Bishop Wilberforce continued to be an adamant opponent of Darwinism.
His prestige and trenchant criticisms gave the father of evolution fits. See also the postscript in
an article about Amazing Grace by Jonathan Sarfati on
Creation on the Web and an analysis of
the urban legend by a pro-evolution writer, J.R. Lucas.
1This was also apparently the meeting where Huxley presented his famous monkeys and
typewriters illustration that has also become an urban legend. It is not at all credible that
Wilberforce, a mathematics professor, was stupefied by Huxleys imaginative story as often depicted. See the
article by Russell Grigg on CMI.
2The event also took place during a sea change in natural science. A new class of researchers
dubbed scientists by Anglican priest and historian William Whewell
in 1834 was beginning to carve out its turf. Formerly
natural philosophers who worked either from their independent means or within church-run academic
institutions, this growing class was seeking academic respectability and a unique professional domain (and the auspices of the
universities). Darwins theory came just at the time the scientist was emerging as
a new kind of professional animal. Historian of science Lawrence Principe, for example, has emphasized this very
period as a kind of turf war for the emerging scientist class. Books characterizing a
warfare between science and religion became popular at this time. One particularly awful
example, Principe relates in his Teaching Company series Science and Religion, was written by
John Draper who, incidentally, was the first (and a rather boring) speaker at that same
British Association meeting!
Wilberforce understood better than most that Darwins 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 originsa 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 Huxleys victory for science was
falsely embellished by sciences supporters. In this dispute, the challenge was clear.
Any success for the Darwinian scheme would require renegotiatingoften with bitter
controversythe 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 Darwins 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 Darwins 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 todays 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 Huxleys retort a claim they were
increasingly anxious to assert. In matters of science, effectively, the opinions of theologians were no longer
welcomean ironic outcome considering Darwin himself had but one degreein 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 Darwins mechanism. There were highly-educated, well-trained and eminently-respected
scientists who vigorously opposed Darwins ideas: e.g., Adam Sedgwick, Darwins 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 Darwins 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 Maxwells 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 todays 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 Wilberforces 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.
Its 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
Apes Evolved into Humans by using Tools?
02/23/2007

The BBC News
reported on an article in
Current
Biology on the
discovery of chimpanzees in Senegal (Pan troglodytes verus) using spears to hunt prey.
Spear-making is a multistep process that had not been previously
observed in animals. Many species use simple tools such as
sticks,
twigs, and rocks to get food, but a spear requires up to five steps,
including cutting a branch to length, stripping it clean, and
gnawing the end to make it sharp. The report quickly made a
connection from chimps using tools to intelligence in
early man: The multiple steps taken by Fongoli
chimpanzees in making tools to dispatch mammalian prey involve the kind
of foresight and intellectual complexity that most likely typified
early human relatives.
Reuters
and National
Geographic News also reported the story.
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
Extrasolar Gas Giants Turn Up Dry 02/22/2007

A dramatic step led to a big surprise, said a press release from
Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASAs Spitzer Space
Telescope was able to capture the first spectral information from two planets orbiting
other stars. HD 209458b and HD 189733b are so-called hot Jupiters
similar in size to our gas giants, they orbit much closer in. The astronomers predicted
they would find evidence of water vapor in the upper atmospheres of these exoplanets, but
they found only dust.
The techniques used are called a dress rehearsal in the search for
evidence of life around smaller, rocky planets. This would allow them to look for
the footprints of life molecules key to the existence of life, such as oxygen and
possibly even chlorophyll.
The New
York Times also reported on the story, as did
Space.com.
An artists conception appeared on the Feb. 27
Astronomy Picture of the Day.
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
Submarine, Make Like a Fish
02/21/2007

Submarine designers are learning a thing or two from fish. The latest fish trick
to imitate is the lateral line: a row of specialized sensors fish have along their
flanks. Fish use these for synchronized swimming and predator avoidance.
EurekAlert
reported on work by scientists at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne to build artificial
lateral line sensors on submarines to augment visual and sonar systems. The sensors on
the artificial lateral line detect changes
in water pressure and movement. They may one day allow submarine operators to
autonomously image hydrodynamic events from their surroundings.
Team lead Chang Liu expressed the
motivation behind the work: Although biology remains far superior to human engineering,
having a man-made parallel of the biological system allows us to learn much about both basic
science and engineering. To actively learn from biology at the molecular, cellular,
tissue and organism level is still the bigger picture.
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
Watch a Ribosome in Action 02/21/2007

A remarkable article about a remarkable machine: thats what
Chemical and Engineering News
has published about the ribosome, a molecular machine vital to everything alive in the world.
Stu Bormans article lavishes praise on the details of this assembly-line factory that
translates RNA into proteins. He surveys the history of investigation into the ribosomes
secrets. The article includes several animations that illustrate current understanding of how
the factory works. Molecular springs and ratchets made out of molecules show off their robotic skill.
Things really get exciting when the translation
movie revs up closer to actual speed.
Theres 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 Behes 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. Youre 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
Be afraid when Darwin writes the Law, from 03/15/2005.
Be very afraid that it is already happening, from
03/08/2005 and
03/04/2005.
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. Were most interested in people,
in the same way that click beetles are most interested in click beetles, he explained.
Thats 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 arent 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 weeks 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: its a trick.
Its 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! Lets 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. Hows that? Isnt 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
Article: Phillip Johnson Still Wields the Wedge 02/19/2007

The standard-bearer of the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM) since 1991, Berkeley
Law Professor Dr. Phillip E. Johnson, still wields his pen like a wedge against Darwinism.
His latest article for Think magazine (The Royal Institute of Philosophy) is reproduced
on the Discovery Institute
website. He shares the current status of the movement, his disappointments with the entrenched dogmatism of
the scientific elite institutions as well as satisfaction over the victories by design scientists, and reiterates many
of the themes for which he is famous. Memorable line: The goal of the Intelligent Design
Movement is to achieve an open philosophy of science that permits consideration of any explanations
toward which the evidence may be pointing.
Adding any comments would be gilding the lily. Go
read it.
Next headline on:
Darwinism
Intelligent Design
Theories of the Moon: Looney Tunes? 02/19/2007

The TV science channels tell it like a matter of fact: our Moon originated from the coalescing
debris of a glancing impact with Earth from a Mars-sized object, sometime long ago. They
even have computer animations to show how it all happened. How reliable is this theory, though?
This months
Planetary Report
from The Planetary Society contains some sobering qualifiers
from Dave Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at Caltech.
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 dont
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.
Whats 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 happenedit simply seems more likely
than rival hypotheses.
Stevenson referred to the recent finding of activity on the surface (see
11/09/2006) as an indication that the moons interior
must still be hot. Though he pointed to a few indirect evidences in support of the leading
theory, the tone of his article is that the gaps in our knowledge are still large
even after the Apollo missions make the Moon the only body (other than Earth) for which we
have rocks of known provenance. And if we cant get the Moon right, what does
that say about our theories for the origin of the rest of the Solar System?
See also the 01/26/2007 entry.
Stevensons candor was refreshing, even if it contains an
ulterior motive for justifying the Planetary Societys 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 didnt exist, neither would we.
Next headline on:
Solar System
Physics
Geology
Tangled String: Cosmology on the Brink 02/18/2007

The February cover of Astronomy
Magazine poses an intriguing question: What if string theory is wrong?
Maybe you are unfamiliar with string theory. Writer Sten Odenwald is not talking about
violins or balls of string, but about the current leading theory of fundamental physics.
Superstring theory, Odenwald explains, is based on three ideas that remain
experimentally unproven after 30 years of research: the principle of supersymmetry, additional
spatial dimensions, and gravity as a force defined by the exchange of quantum particles.
You dont need to understand these three ideas in depth other than to know
they are extremely weird. They envision exotic particles like selectrons and squarks,
and physical dimensions and universes we could never know except by mathematical inference. Yet this theory
is the leading candidate in an attempt to unify the forces of nature and give a physical explanation
for why the universe is the way it is. It seems strange that scientists would cling to a
theory that has no experimental support. Odenwald mentions that the Steady-State Cosmology
held sway for some 30 years before collapsing. Is string theory, of comparable age, also on the brink?
Odenwald is not predicting an impending collapse, nor are most cosmologists.
But he does ask what would happen to physics and cosmology if it turns out string theory is wrong.
Heres where the consequences are astronomical:
Without superstring theory, wed lose the intriguing philosophical appeal for the
multiverse, with its infinite and eternal creativity in spawning new universes.
Wed 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.
Mathematical knowledge gained from string theory has advanced so far since the 1970s, no one is envisioning
a return. Odenwald reminds readers also that general relativity had a rough time gaining experimental
support at first. Still, he leaves it as an open question whether string theory will survive middle age.
Its sobering to realize what we stand to lose if physics best bet proves to be a
complete dead end.
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 todays
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 isnt 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, thats 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. Its 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. Theres 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 lets 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,
todays cosmologists are forced into speculating about how material objects created worlds of exquisite
design and complexity without help from a Mind. Its 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. Its 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 werent really scientists. They werent 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).
Next headline on:
Cosmology
Physics
Blind Cave Fish: Can Darwinism Be Credited for
Regressive Evolution? 02/16/2007

It is a worldwide phenomenon that cave creatures go blind. Some cave fish lose their eyes
entirely; in others, the eyes shrivel and lose function. In many cave fish, scale pigmentation also
changes. Are these gradual modifications due to natural selection, Darwins mechanism of evolution, or to
genetic drift? Darwin himself could not see any positive value in functionless eyes. He
attributed the blindness to disuse a Lamarckian idea. Maybe his mechanism was the better
explanation after all.
Some American biologists investigated whether the changes in cave fish were due to
natural selection or random genetic drift. Their publication in the upcoming issue (Feb. 20) of Current Biology1
was summarized by Science Daily.
Basically, they concluded that the pigmentation changes are due to genetic drift, because sometimes the
pigments grew lighter and sometimes they got darker. But since the eyes always atrophied, they
ascribed the blindness to natural selection regressive evolution as they called it.
Evolution selects for blindness because of the high energetic cost of maintaining eyes. Their explanation
of this cost brings out some amazing facts about animal eyes in general:
Is it possible that Darwins 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.,
Lebers 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 retinas 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.
So in a sense, they exonerated Darwins famous mechanism for its ability to explain the phenomenon. But in
another sense, by underscoring the high cost of maintaining eyes with all their parts, they re-opened the question of
how such a complex visual system could have evolved in the first place by a blind process.
1Protas, Conrad, Gross, Tabin and Borowsky, Regressive Evolution in the Mexican Cave Tetra,
Astyanax mexicanus,
Current
Biology, online preprint for the Feb. 20, 2007 issue.
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 worlds living things are always undergoing neutral genetic drift and
regressive evolution, Charlies 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 fools 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 Juliets 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
Platos 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 minds 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.
Next headline on:
Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory
Fish and Marine Creatures
Genetics
OOL on the Rocks
02/15/2007

An important survey of the origin-of-life (OOL) field has been published in
Scientific
American. Robert Shapiro, a senior prize-winning chemist, cancer researcher,
emeritus professor and author of books in the field, debunks the Miller
experiment, the RNA World and other popular experiments as unrealistic dead ends.
Describing the wishful thinking of some researchers, he said,
In a form of molecular vitalism, some scientists have presumed that nature has an
innate tendency to produce lifes building blocks preferentially, rather than the
hordes of other molecules that can also be derived from the rules of organic chemistry.
Shapiro
had been explaining that millions of organic molecules can form that are not RNA
nucleotides. These are not only useless to life, they get in the way and clog up the
beneficial reactions. He went on to describe how extrapolation
from the Miller Experiment produced an unearned sense of euphoria among researchers: By extrapolation of these results,
some writers have presumed that all of lifes building could be formed with ease
in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites and other extraterrestrial bodies.
This is not the case, he warned in a section entitled, The Soup Kettle Is Empty.
He said that no experiment has produced amino acids with more than three carbons (life uses
some with six), and no Miller-type experiment has ever produced nucleotides or nucleosides,
essential for DNA and RNA.
Shapiro described in some detail the difficult steps that organic chemists employ
to synthesize the building blocks of RNA, using conditions highly unrealistic on the primitive earth.
The point was the demonstration that humans could produce, however inefficiently,
substances found in nature, he said. Unfortunately, neither chemists nor
laboratories were present on the early Earth to produce RNA. Here, for instance,
is how scientists had to work to create cytosine, one of the DNA bases:
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.
There seems to be a stark difference between the Real World and the imaginary RNA World. Despite
this disconnect, Shapiro
describes some of the hype the RNA World scenario generated when Gilbert first suggested it in 1986.
The hypothesis that life began with RNA was presented as a likely reality, rather than a speculation,
in journals, textbooks and the media, he said. He also described the intellectual hoops
researchers have envisioned to get the scenario to work: freezing oceans, drying lagoons, dry deserts
and other unlikely environments in specific sequences to keep the molecules from destroying themselves.
This amounts to attributing wish-fulfillment and goal-directed behavior to inanimate objects, as Shapiro
makes clear with this colorful analogy:
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.
Realistically, unfavorable molecules are just as likely to form. These would act like terminators for
any hopeful molecules, he says. Shapiro uses another analogy. He pictures a gorilla pounding on
a huge keyboard containing not only the English alphabet, but every letter of every language and all the symbol
sets in a typical computer. The chances for the spontaneous assembly
of a replicator in the pool I described above can be compared to those of the gorilla composing, in English,
a coherent recipe for the preparation of chili con carne. Thats why Gerald Joyce, Mr.
RNA-World himself, and Leslie Orgel, a veteran OOL researcher with Stanley Miller, concluded that the
spontaneous appearance of chains of RNA on the early earth would have been a near miracle.
Boy, and all this bad news is only halfway through the article. Does he have any good news?
Not yet; we must first agree with a ground rule stated by Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, who called
for a rejection of improbabilities so incommensurably high that they can only
be called miracles, phenomena that fall outside the scope of scientific inquiry. That
rules out starting with complex molecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins (see online book).
From that principle, Shapiro advocated a return to scenarios with environmental cycles involving simple
molecules. These thermodynamic or metabolism first
scenarios are only popular among about a third of OOL researchers at this time. Notable subscribers
include Harold Morowitz, Gunter Wachtershauser, Christian de Duve, Freeman Dyson and Shapiro
himself. Their hypotheses, too, have certain requirements that must be met: an energy source, boundaries,
ways to couple the energy to the organization, and a chemical network or cycle able to grow and reproduce.
(The problems of genetics and heredity are shuffled into the future in these theories.) How are they doing?
Over the years, many theoretical papers have advanced particular metabolism first schemes,
but relatively little experimental work has been presented in support of them, Shapiro admits.
In those cases where experiments have been published, they have usually served to demonstrate the
plausibility of individual steps in a proposed cycle. In addition,
An understanding of the initial steps leading to life would not reveal the specific events that
led to the familiar DNA-RNA-protein-based organisms of today. Nor would plausible prebiotic cycles
prove thats what happened on the early earth. Success in the metabolism-first experiments
would only contribute to hope that prebiotic cycles are plausible in principle, not that they actually happened.
Nevertheless, Shapiro himself needed to return to the miracles he earlier rejected.
Some chance event or circumstance may have led to the connection of nucleotides to form RNA,
he speculates. Where did the nucleotides come from? Didnt he say their formation was impossibly
unlikely? How did they escape rapid destruction by water? Those concerns aside, maybe nucleotides
initially served some other purpose and got co-opted, by chance, in the
developing network of life.
Showing that such thoughts represent little more than a pipe dream, though, he admits: Many further steps
in evolution would be needed to invent the elaborate mechanisms for
replication and specific protein synthesis that we observe in life today.
Time for Shapiros grand finale. For an article predominantly discouraging
and critical, his final paragraph is surprisingly upbeat. Recounting that the highly-implausible
big-molecule scenarios imply a lonely universe, he offers hope with the small-molecule alternative.
Quoting Stuart Kauffman, If this is all true, life is vastly more probable than we have supposed.
Not only are we at home in the universe, but we are far more likely to share it with unknown companions.
Update Letters to the editor appeared in Science1 the next day,
debating the two leading theories of OOL. The signers included most of the big names: Stanley Miller,
Jeffrey Bada, Robert Hazen and others debating Gunter Wachtershauser and Claudia Huber. After sifting
through the technical jargon, the reader is left with the strong impression that both camps have essentially
falsified each other. On the primordial soup side, the signers picked apart details in a paper by the
metabolism-first side. Concentrations of reagants and conditions specified were called implausible
and exceedingly improbable.
Wachtershauser and Huber countered that the prebiotic soup theory
requires a protracted, mechanistically obscure self-organization in a cold, primitive ocean, which
they claim is more improbable than the volcanic environment of their own pioneer organism theory
(metabolism-first). Its foolish to expect prebiotic soup products to survive in the ocean, of all places,
wherein after some thousand or million years, and under all manner of diverse influences, the magic of
self-organization is believed to have somehow generated an unspecified first form of life.
Thats some nasty jabbing between the two leading camps.
1Letters, Debating Evidence for the Origin of Life on Earth,
Science,
16 February 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5814, pp. 937 - 939, DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5814.937c.
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 its 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!
Shapiros 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.
Next headline on:
Origin of Life
Darwinism and the Valentines Day Massacre
02/14/2007

Romance, schmomance, snarls the title of press release on
EurekAlert
from the Association for Psychological Science. Natural selection continues even after sex.
Not only is natural selection driving the mating process in humans, in other words, but it continues even
down to the level of sperm cells competing to reach the egg. Instead of love, caring, tenderness, soul
bonding, or any kind of spiritual values, this article is all about nit and grit. Grungy descriptions
of body parts and processes present the evolutionary picture as all competition and conflict, a
coevolutionary arms race between the sexes. Natural selection is even used to explain
lustful feelings, sexual performance, rivalry, jealousy and infidelity: e.g., the human male may want
to copulate as soon as possible as insurance against possible extra-pair copulation.
Happy Valentines Day, sweetheart.
Darwinisms propensity to destroy traditional views of eros extends to
agape as well. Beginning with Darwin, evolutionists have wondered how unselfish love and
self-sacrifice could have come about by natural selection. Only humans appear moved to compassion and
charity with distant people not of their own kin. Convinced that these behaviors have a material basis,
evolutionists propose selection-based explanations in the scientific literature regularly.
One such
view was summarized on New
Scientist in December by Richard Fisher. Altruism is costly sometimes with ones
life, ending all chance of passing on ones genes. How, then, could the gene for altruism be
passed on? While recognizing that The origin of human altruism has puzzled evolutionary biologists
for many years, Fisher suggests that Humans may have evolved altruistic
traits as a result of a cultural tax we paid to each other early in our evolution, a new study suggests.
Maybe thats like the joke about the lottery being a tax paid by people who are bad at math.
It seems a little stretched to picture Mother Theresa acting out behaviors that early apes developed as
pawns of their selfish genes.
The possibility of anything beyond blind forces of natural selection producing the appearance
of selfless love never enters the equation in these papers. Both Nature and Science the
week of Dec. 7 included book reviews and articles that dealt specifically with altruism and cooperation
none of them entertaining in the slightest way that real love had anything to do with it. To these
evolutionary biologists, human behavior was just a more difficult problem of the same nature as that of
honeybees, and subject to the same equations: for example, Samuel Bowles wrote,1 This study investigates
whether, as an empirical matter, intergroup competition and reproductive leveling
might have allowed the proliferation of a genetically transmitted predisposition to behave
altruistically.
Happy Valentines Day, world.
Oddly, these same scientists and mainstream journal editors do not hesitate to preach the need for
scientific ethics. This is usually after a major scandal, or public distrust of research threatens
funding for embryonic stem cells, cloning or human-animal chimeras or whatever. For instance, the editors of
Nature Jan. 18 got downright preachy,2 encouraging scientists to lead by example with high
ethical standards. Everybody likes a good scandal, and there is nothing like a fresh allegation
of research misconduct to set tongues wagging in the scientific community and outside it, the editorial
began. It ended with the following call to righteousness:
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.
The wording carefully avoids the value-laden word morals, substituting more-nebulous and less-judgmental words
ethics and good conduct. It hints that there are biological studies of good conduct
that play into societys support for science. These editorials, however, usually fail to define what
good is, or why an independent researcher should subscribe to a relative ethical standard when the referred-to
studies on human cooperation allow for a certain number of non-cooperators to succeed.
1Samuel Bowles, Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism,
Science,
8 December 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5805, pp. 1569 - 1572, DOI: 10.1126/science.1134829.
2Editorial, Leading by example,
Nature
445, 229 (18 January 2007) | doi:10.1038/445229a.
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 its 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.
- 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?
- 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.
Dont 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.
- 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, arent 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.
Its the cops struggle against the sniper shooting victims at random.
Sometimes this kind of fight is the most loving act in the world.
So, happy Valentines 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. Dont allow destructive philosophies to wreak their havoc without a good fight.
Recommended Reading: C. S. Lewiss novel That Hideous Strength is as timely today
as when he wrote it at the end of World War II. Lewiss 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.
Next headline on:
Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory
Bible and Theology
Politics and Ethics
Cells Perform Nanomagic
02/13/2007

The cell is quicker than the eye of our best scientific instruments. Biochemists
and biophysicists are nearing closer to watching cellular magic tricks in real time but
arent quite there yet |