Naturalism Extends Into All Realms of Scholarship   04/30/2007    
Defenders of evolutionary theory typically argue that their ideas are merely scientific approaches to explaining biological objects.  Why, then, are evolutionary approaches extended to intangible realms, like psychology, ethics, criminal law, politics, religion, character and morals?  Here are some recent examples to think about:

1. Evolution and the Criminal Mind:  In a paper this month in the Public Library of Science: Biology, four evolutionists gave naturalistic views on “Law, Responsibility, and the Brain.”  They said we need to examine the violent behavior of our alleged hominid ancestors to understand the criminal mind.  They also asked, “Should we rethink free will?”  One would think such subjects belong to the realms of moral philosophy and theology.  While they agreed that “Violent and anti-social behaviours undoubtedly arise from a symphony of factors,” they admitted only naturalistic approaches: “Optimal understanding will require cooperation among many disciplines such as economics, sociology, psychology, evolutionary biology, cellular physiology, and neuroscience.”  Preachers and philosophers apparently do not have any opinion worth thinking about—if, indeed, thinking is even possible in a world reduced to particles.
2. Matter over Mind:  In an essay in the same issue of PLoS Biology, Kevin J. Mitchell (Trinity College, Dublin) got physical in his essay, “The Genetics of Brain Wiring: From Molecule to Mind.”  That his conception of mind did not extend beyond the material world is clear in his conclusion, “Putting It All Together” –

   The challenge for the fields of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric genetics is to develop methods to take these factors into account in attempting to map from genotype to anatomical and physiological phenotypes and beyond to behaviour and cognition.  Modelling this complexity may require both new mathematical methods and more detailed empirical data derived from studies of model organisms.  Whichever approaches are taken, it is clear that to understand the origins of individual differences in psychological traits we must keep developmental trajectories, and not just phenotypic end points, in mind.

   Yet one might ask, is there a mind in which to keep such abstractions?
3. Language:  The ability to speak in abstract terms using verbal constructs is no longer a human distinctive.  In the evolutionary view, it’s only a matter of degree.  A duo from Emory University studied chimpanzee gestures for clues to a natural story of language.  Publishing in PNAS, they began and ended with Darwinian explanations: “The natural communication of apes may hold clues about language origins, especially because apes frequently gesture with limbs and hands, a mode of communication thought to have been the starting point of human language evolution.”  Popular news sources, like Live Science and MSNBC, quickly featured this speculation as a scientific “finding.”  Ker Than titled the story, “Apes Point to Origins of Human Language.”  It came complete with photo of a gesturing chimp.  No alternative viewpoints that would question naturalism were considered.
4. Natural Politics:  Not even political science is exempt from the naturalistic approach to the world.  Two Princeton economists writing in PNAS discussed “Political Polarization” with a Bayesian (i.e., mathematical) model of how groups tend to polarize on issues.  The content of the debates and the weight of arguments were not elements in the equation: “We offer an explanation of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic contexts and consistent with Bayesian rationality.”  The paper is full of calculus and graphs and models that predict degrees of polarization based on bimodal inputs.  What kind of political issues fall under the spell of their equations?  “Current examples are policies concerning discrimination, immigration, gender, religion, welfare state, human rights, terrorism, civil wars, national sovereignty, and nuclear armament.”

No one asks the questions that deflate these naturalistic studies and make them shoot their own feet.  Each one of these studies is self-refuting and thereby pointless.  If responsibility is an evolutionary by-product, it is not really responsibility.  If crime is an evolutionary by-product, it is not really crime.  If language is glorified ape gesturing, it is not really language.  And if voters are pawns of mathematical functions, they are not really informed, thoughtful voters.
    Overarching above all these conundrums is the meta-conundrum that pulls down the curtain on the whole charade: each of these scientists, according to their own presuppositions, is also a pawn of evolutionary forces.  Nothing they say, therefore, has any validity.  If they are thinking they need to rethink free will, they are not really thinking!  They are not free to think.  Their own thoughts are determined by their evolutionary past.  This is so obvious, why doesn’t anyone ever call their bluff?  On their own assumptions, you can dismiss everything they said.

There is nothing stopping a trickster from turning these same tactics against them.  Let’s say, for instance, that David Horowitz were to hire a skilled mathematician to construct a mathematical model of liberalism in academia.  A conservative sociologist could play the game, too.  They could produce an impressive-looking paper, loaded with graphs and equations, showing the tendency for academics to slide into liberalism as a function of time and peer pressure.  They could even formulate a new natural law: the second law of intellectual thermodynamics.  If they had enough connections to get this published in a major journal, would it not make as much sense as the paper on political polarization?

What on earth is a paper on poli-sci doing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences?  What are biologists doing trying to reduce responsibility and the mind and religion to molecular interactions?  Even if their models occasionally correspond with observations, that would not ipso facto validate them.  The cliche fits: even a broken clock can be right twice a day.  There are things about intelligent agents and their behaviors that science cannot address with laws and equations.  You can’t treat human beings like lab rats (the ratomorphic fallacy).  And we cannot let pointy-headed academics with a bad case of the Yoda Complex (03/21/2007, 09/25/2006) get away with folly in the name of science, using their minds to claim that minds don’t exist.
    When a materialist makes material claims, ask them those four little words, How do you know?  If the mind is the result of contingent or determined natural processes, then so are any thoughts about it.  This undermines any truth claims—including those of these papers.  We must not permit the evolutionists to stand outside their heads, looking down on the rest of us, telling us how WE evolved.  They must get into the game.  But a little reflection shows why they cannot do that.  When they enter the game, the game is over.  Without an Umpire, without rules, without standards, without truth, and without morals, it’s not a game.  It’s chaos.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Politics and Ethics • Theology

You probably had no idea that mucus had that function.  You knew that it conveys dust and particles out of the nasal passage and helps keep those sensitive linings moist, but did you realize it actually enhances your sense of smell?  Amazing.  Think of all the information you toss out with each tissue.  Now they need to figure out how to blow an electronic nose.  (Do NOT use the electronic finger.)
Next headline on:  Human Body • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Swifts also eat up to 20,000 insects a night.  Fortunately, no evolution fables polluted this story.  No one tried to say that a T. rex morphed into a swift over millions of years.  That wouldn’t fly on a wing or a prayer.  Who taught swifts the kind of aerodynamics NASA admires?  Who gave them both the hardware and software to live on the wing almost all the time?  Who programmed the autopilot that allows them to roost without a roost?  Calling a swift swift is like calling an orange orange.  What would they call a human?  Smart?  Wise?  Sometimes.  Homo is not always sapiens sapiens.  For proof, see next entry.
Next headline on:  Birds • Physics • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

I think it is the difficulty of communicating an understanding of what science really is.  This is affecting young people who don’t feel the fascination of science, and it is allowing the spread of all kinds of irrational beliefs, such as quack medicine.  Evolutionary biology is under repeated attack from those who think, or wish, that non-natural processes must be involved.

And it occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around.  Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere....
    According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code.  We are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species....
    The cosmologies of the societies represented in the Rockefeller Museum looked up toward the transcendent.  Their descendants still fight over sacred spots like the Holy of Holies a short walk away.  But the evolutionary society is built low to the ground.  God may exist and may have set the process in motion, but he’s not active.  Evolution doesn’t really lead to anything outside itself.  Individuals are predisposed not by innate sinfulness or virtue, but by the epigenetic rules encoded in their cells.

For the sake of Mr. Brooks’ reputation, we certainly wish he had been joking.  A worse statement of utter capitulation to Darwin could hardly be found.  It is totally groundless, self refuting, simplistic and uninformed – if he meant it seriously.
    Current Biology, true to form, dredged up another Darwin lover for its biweekly interview.  The answer to the obligatory question “Do you have any scientific heroes?” must include “Darwin” or else you get dunked.  It’s all a game the editors play.  Deborah Charlesworth, like her husband Brian, are card-carrying members of the Darwin Party attack force.  This means they have to portray the peace-loving Visigoths as the attackers.  At least she also included Gregor Mendel as a scientific hero.
    Charles Lineweaver showed the childlike faith in Darwin, characteristic of good disciples, that can permit the most damning questions to remain unanswered while ignoring those who have a different approach.  Oddly, he can give the time of day to weird science like Gaia, but not offer one short sentence to the kind of theistic science that built modern science in the first place (online book).
    It’s quotes like these that lead one to resign oneself to the strategy of Max Planck who, when asked why quantum mechanics became accepted, remarked that the doubters simply died off.  Sad to say, a younger generation of more open-minded scientists willing to consider design arguments will likely have to tolerate the rantings of Darwin’s old fogies (like certain Senators) for a few more years.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Bible and Theology • Dumb Ideas

1. Intranet:  In 2001 (07/13/2001), and periodically since (10/04/2004, 11/09/2004) we reported the current thinking about how a plant knows when to flower, and described a kind of email system the plant uses to keep in touch with itself.  Scientists have been hot on the trail of the mysterious “florigen” (whatever it is) that travels through the vessels to the growing tip and turns on the flowering process.  They have known since 1865 that something travels from a sunlit leaf to the apical meristem where flowers are produced.  Now, according to both Science April 20 and Nature April 26, they think the packet is not the messenger RNA from the FT gene, as previously announced (08/12/2005), but the protein it encodes.  Understanding what the protein does upon receipt is an obvious next step.  Then, what in a leaf triggers the email to be sent?  And is the packet sent throughout the entire plant?  For now, the botanist hackers are just trying to get good at sniffing the internet to find the packets, let alone decode the payload.
       Down below, at the root level, what happens?  A European team reporting in Current Biology thinks they have unmasked the signals that turn on (or off) root cell differentiation: “Analysis of the root meristems of cytokinin mutants, spatial cytokinin depletion, and exogenous cytokinin application indicates that cytokinins act in a restricted region of the root meristem, where they antagonize a non-cell-autonomous cell-division signal, and we provide evidence that this signal is auxin.”
2. Extranet;  When plants need to talk to their neighbors through their own kind of VPN (virtual plant network, our joke), they waft volatile compounds into the air.  Some of these compounds are chiral – they come in left- and right-handed forms.  Scientists are just at the leading edge of understanding what these compounds are and what they do.  A news item in Nature described the work of a team that flew a Lear Jet over the forest canopy to gather some of the compounds.  “A sophisticated survey of certain volatile organic compounds in the air over forest ecosystems shows how such work can reveal varied emission patterns of different chiral, or mirror-image, forms of these compounds.”  Plants emit more volatiles than animals by orders of magnitude, the article states.  Some compounds can repel insect pests, while others can attract pollinators.  This article described how the plant can send out different chiral forms of the same molecule for different purposes.  Some, for instance, appear to be temperature dependent, while others are light dependent.  “Volatile organic compounds have a fundamental role in the coexistence of the flora and fauna in ecosystems,” the article explains, “But there is still much to learn about the relationships and interactions between species that can be related to an effect of naturally produced compounds such as monoterpenes.”  The compounds may vary by species, by individual plant, and even by tissues within the plant.  The scientists are comparing forest emissions from South America, Suriname and Finland.

Don’t talk to your plants unless you learn the language.  Suggested learning tool: a Lear Jet.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts

1. Paleface:  If it is assumed that humans started out medium or dark-skinned, how long did it take for Europeans to lose much of that original pigment?  An article in Science April 20 says maybe just 6,000 to 12,000 years.  “This contradicts a long-standing hypothesis that modern humans in Europe grew paler about 40,000 years ago, as soon as they migrated into northern latitudes,” the article states, reporting on a March meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.  Pale skin is said to have an adaptive value at high latitudes: “Under darker skies, pale skin absorbs more sunlight than dark skin, allowing ultraviolet rays to produce more vitamin D for bone growth and calcium absorption.”  The new date was based on genetic studies that suggested a “selective sweep occurred 5300 to 6000 years ago” or up to 12,000 years ago, “given the imprecision of method”.
2. High life:  Ann Gibbons in Science reported on another discussion item from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists: how Tibetan children can tolerate the high altitude.  “Researchers seldom see Darwinian natural selection happening in living people,” she began.  “So physical anthropologist Cynthia Beall was delighted in 2004 when she discovered a trait that boosts the survival of some Tibetan children, apparently by raising the level of oxygen in their mothers’ tissues--a crucial advantage during pregnancy 4 kilometers above sea level.”  Updated research has revealed a genetic change that allows women to boost their blood volume and deliver more oxygen to the tissues.  Beall measured the selective pressure at 1:0.44, stronger than the fitness ratio measured for the sickle-cell gene.  They said, “the adaptation represents some of the strongest natural selection yet measured in humans.”
       Surprisingly, this appears to be a different adaptation mechanism than that found in populations living in the Andes.  There, mothers are able to boost the amount of hemoglobin.  These correlations are uncertain, however; “it’s quite possible that the Tibetans have evolved more than one way to boost blood oxygen,” Beall cautioned.  Mark Gladwin threw in a Darwinian proverb: “Study the pregnant women, because that’s where you’ll see evolution in action.”
3. Got milk?  Another strong selection effect in humans is for lactose tolerance.  Current Biology (April 17) had an article on this phenomenon, which “might have meant the difference between life and death” to early dairy farmers, Greg Gibson (North Carolina State U) said.  The admittedly imperfect ability to tolerate lactose represents another selective sweep some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, about the time humans began to domesticate cattle.  He remarked, “It is hard to refute that this is a lovely example of the coevolution of genes and culture.”
       Nevertheless, Gibson spent most of the article debunking the “thrifty genes” hypothesis of evolutionary selection.  This is a 45-year-old idea that the “high incidence of diabetes in modern humans is a result of positive selection for alleles that confer the ability to rapidly sequester rare caches of carbohydrates as fat that would tide us over during famine.”  This adaptation now works against us in our urbanized society, it is claimed: it tends us toward obesity.  So why does Gibson think this is a poor hypothesis?  “Unfortunately, these three preconditions for natural selection are all too often mistaken by adaptationists as both necessary and sufficient for evolution to occur,” he cautioned.  But we need to be more quantitative if sufficiency is to be proven.”  At the end, he was even more emphatic: “Those inclined toward Darwinian medicine like to explain disease as the price we pay for the beneficial effects of alleles that have accompanied human adaptation.  These cases of not-so-thrifty genes suggest though that we should not be so quick to jump on the bandwagon: the coevolution of genes and culture is tremendously more complex.”

It is curious that Charles Darwin, perhaps medicine’s most famous dropout, provided the impetus for a subject that figures so rarely in medical education.  Indeed, even the iconic textbook example of evolution—antibiotic resistance—is rarely described as “evolution” in relevant papers published in medical journals.  Despite potentially valid reasons for this oversight (e.g., that authors of papers in medical journals would regard the term as too general), it propagates into the popular press when those papers are reported on, feeding the wider perception of evolution’s irrelevance in general, and to medicine in particular.  Yet an understanding of how natural selection shapes vulnerability to disease can provide fundamental insights into medicine and health and is no less relevant than an understanding of physiology or biochemistry.

Although Paul O’Higgins thought a comparison of the brachial plexus to the pentadactyl limb was helpful, not all his students agreed—complaints were lodged that he was forcing evolution on them.  That lack of support was also reflected in the participation of only three medical students at the York meeting (albeit enthusiastic ones), despite being widely publicized.  It is not clear whether this is because medical students are more overburdened than most or because of a more deep-rooted resistance to the subject, reflecting wider political and religious prejudice against evolution.

You do NOT want an evolutionary biologist in the room when you need TLC at the hospital.  Lying in bed with pain and weakness, you are not going to look like a fit individual who deserves to survive.
    MacCallum again exhibited the shallowness and uselessness of evolutionary thinking.  Notice also the elitist snobbery: anyone who doesn’t agree with the Darwin Party Framework is prejudiced by definition, and must be sent to the re-education camp (cf. 12/21/2005).
    Despite the pleas to pul-lease teach Darwin in medical school, medicine is doing fine without the help of Dropout Darwin.  Medicine has a multi-thousand year history that was advanced largely by Christians.  The examples she cited, including the “iconic textbook example” of evolution – antibiotic resistance (dealt a blow by Jonathan Wells in his book Icons of Evolution; see also the Darwinist confession from 09/12/2004) – are all just microevolutionary changes.  The three examples reported above are all microevolutionary changes.  Natural selection at the micro level is not the issue.  Even young-earth creationists accept that.
    Such evidence has nothing to do with Darwin’s colossal simplistic generality, the Mystical Tree of Life (02/01/2007).  It has nothing to do with proving that humans have bacteria ancestors, and most medical students and professors know it.  You can almost hear the snickers of students in the classroom when the Prof tells his little fable about how the brachial plexus resembles the pentadactyl limb.  “Right, Teach.  Will that be on the test?  Can I take a pill and call you in the morning?”  Maybe the only way to get a higher turnout than three students at the next well-publicized “Medicine and Evolution” meeting is to award extra credit, provided the students are allowed to bring cots and pillows.
    Despite the Dobzhansky rallying cry, things make perfect sense without evolution.  In none of the three cases listed above is Darwin vindicated or needed.  All the humans in those societies are still one species with the rest of humanity, capable of intermarrying and raising children.  What’s more, the adaptive changes observed did not take hundreds of thousands of years.  To the consternation of earlier Darwinists whose ideas are now discredited, the changes fit easily within a Biblical framework of human history.  What is Darwin’s score?  Even MacCallum admits that previous evolutionary ideas like “thrifty genes” have been discarded.  Is anything left that is not controversial and subject to overthrow?  We don’t need Darwin.  We don’t want Darwin.  We want to make sense in the light of the evidence, and help the weak in the process.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Health • Genetics • Education

1. Placental mammals – Watch those assumptions:  How much can you trust dates that can vary by 50%?  A report in Science Daily says the new “consensus” date for the appearance of placental mammals just jumped from 122 million years ago to 84 million years ago.  The article mentions assumptions three times, though, with serious caveats about those dates: “However, this discrepancy may not be real, but rather appear because of the violation of implicit assumptions in the estimation procedures, such as abrupt acceleration of evolutionary rate entangled with gradual variation and large-scale convergent evolution in molecular level.”  Later, “They emphasize the necessity to scrutinize the implicit assumptions adopted by the models of molecular evolution and to develop procedures which rely little on those assumptions.”  A follow-up question: what are the new assumptions of the new study?
2. Laotian Rock Rat — Yep, It’s a Living Fossil:  The unusual rat-like mammal found in a Laotian food market in 2005 (05/16/2005) is a living fossil, reported National Geographic News.  Some researchers claim that it “belongs to a family of rodents thought to have gone extinct 11 million years ago.”
3. Bears – Keeping fit while sleeping:  On much shorter time scales (months), bears manage to keep most of their muscle strength during the winter hibernation.  Science Daily reported that “Bears in this study exhibited remarkable conservation of muscle function.... In spite of a size difference of almost three orders of magnitude and a 30 degree Celsius difference in torpor body temperature, the black bear may conserve muscle function to the extent of or perhaps better than small-mammal hibernators.” 

Anyone see evolution here?  Anyone see millions of years here?  Always scrutinize those implicit assumptions.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Evolutionary Theory • Dating Methods

It’s not funny.  For decades, Darwinian preconceptions have held back a promising field of genetic research with their falsified notion that most of the genome is composed of evolutionary leftovers.  Now that we see the design that was there all along, can we get on with what science should have been doing?  Away with this new plot line that junk DNA is a source of “evolutionary novelty.”  Darwinians, you have been exposed as usurpers.  Get out of the way.  The field is not evolving.  Intelligent design is taking back its rights.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Darwinian evolution

Thus piloting birds continue to maintain memories of, attention to, compass information even after they apparently have the sufficient and necessary route-based information homeward guidance.  While it is possible that such compass memories are, and have always been, associated with representations of familiar visual landmarks as hypothesized here, also possible that they originate from an initial, and now residual, olfactory navigational map.  In addition, a potential role for magnetic compass acting as a backup to the sun compass when solar and landmark guidance cues are put in conflict (although apparently not otherwise; see ref. 9) still remains to be explicitly investigated.  Either way, our results clearly indicate that birds combining multiple sources of onward guidance information during the local homing task.  Both the origin of this compass information and the function of its integration with landmark guidance remain to be elucidated.

Homing pigeons have fascinated humans for thousands of years.  How do they do it?  Here we are in 2007, still trying to figure it out.  The birds are not just robots with a compass.  They have the ability somehow to choose what cues to follow when they are in conflict.  There’s more going on in a bird brain than we can fathom.  The “origin of this compass information” doesn’t really need to be elucidated (if by that they think a Darwinian answer is in the wings).  They know where it came from.  In plain English, design reveals a Designer.  Make sense e’en to Pidgin speakah.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

Is this a “mangrove-like” plant or a true mangrove?  If the latter, it sounds like a big out-of-order problem for evolution, because mangroves were not supposed to appear till the late Cretaceous (source) and these forests are Carboniferous, over 200 million years earlier.  That would be a bigger problem than finding a living dinosaur.  A quick check of the original paper in Geology (May 2007) does not reveal any mention of family Rhizophoraceae or any of the other mangroves, but that doesn’t mean they were not found.  We’ll have to see if more of the details come to light.  In any case, gymnosperms were not thought to live in “mangrove-like” habitats.
    This story also illustrates, as seen so often before, that wherever evolutionists look, they find more complexity farther back in time than they expect.
Next headline on:  Plants • Fossils • Geology

  How little we know about Earth’s interior, from 04/02/2004.  Some models almost need to repeal the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  The Evolution of TV Dinners   04/20/2007    
Humans still have genetic memories of feasting and telling stories around the campfire, says Martin Jones at Cambridge University.  That’s why we gravitate toward eating TV dinners in front of the telly.  This opinion is expressed in all seriousness by United Press International, titled “Television dinners linked to evolution.”  Jones calls today’s TV dinners “today’s campfire.”  The article explains, “Martin told the London newspaper [The Telegraph] he believes it is natural for humans to gather and to eat while also consuming information and entertainment.”
    Other scientists are not sure about this idea.  “Martin’s theory has been called ‘unhelpful,’ particularly by groups who attribute child obesity to eating in front of the television.”
    Perhaps a few Darwinians worry that the all-seeing eyes of Creation-Evolution Headlines are ever lurking about the internet, searching for candidates for the SEQOTW prize.

Perhaps there is something to this idea – but in a philosophical, not evolutionary sense.  Lost humans have always amused themselves in Plato’s cave, thinking they understand the world, when in reality, their backs are to the light, and they see mere shadows projected on the wall.  Now, we have Hollywood to deliver the shadows to us in our own homes.  Goes best with the Swanson Pterodactyl Pteriyaki.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Fatty acids are key components of the cell, and their synthesis is essential for all organisms except archaea.  They are major constituents of cellular membranes and are used for posttranslational protein modifications that are functionally important.  Saturated fatty acids are the main stores of chemical energy in organisms.  Deregulation of fatty acid synthesis affects many cellular functions and may result in aberrant mitosis, cancer, and obesity.

Perhaps the most striking feature of fungal FAS is its high degree of architectural complexity, in which 48 functional centers exist in a single ... particle.  Detailed structural information is essential for delineating how this complex particle coordinates the reactions involved in many steps of synthesis of fatty acids.... The six alpha subunits form a central wheel in the assembly, and the beta subunits form domes on the top and bottom of the wheel, creating six reaction chambers within which each ACP can reach the six active sites through surprisingly modest movements.  This structure now provides a complete framework for understanding the structural basis of this macromolecular machine’s important function.

The crystal structure of yeast FAS reveals that this large, macromolecular assembly functions as a six-chambered reactor for fatty acid synthesis.  Each of the six chambers functions independently and has in its chamber wall all of the catalytic units required for fatty acid priming, elongation, and termination, while one substrate-shuttling component, ACP, is located inside each chamber and functions like a swinging arm.  Surprisingly, however, the step at which the reactor is activated must occur before the complete assembly of the particle since the PPT domain that attaches the pantetheine arm to ACP lies outside the assembly, inaccessible to ACP that lies inside.  Remarkably, the architectural complexity of the FAS particle results in the simplicity of the reaction mechanisms for fatty acid synthesis in fungi.

Reading this paper was almost a transcendent experience.  To imagine this level of precision and master-controlled processing on a level this small, cannot help but induce a profound sense of wonder and awe.  Here, all this time, this machine has been helping to keep living things functioning and we didn’t even know the details till now.  How would such revelations have affected the history of ideas?
    The authors did not say a peep about evolution except to note five times that certain parts are “conserved” (unevolved).  They also assumed evolution (without evidence) in one astonishing reaction to the fact that certain folds in the protein parts of this machine are unique in nature: listen – “They consequentially represent new folds and may have evolved independently to tether and orient the multiple active centers of fungal FAS for efficient catalysis.”  OK, everyone, a collective rotten-tomato toss for that enlightened suggestion.
    Remember that origin-of-life researchers are stumbling and fumbling trying to get even single amino acids to form (04/04/2007), let alone get them to join up in useful, functioning chains (see online book).    The fatty acids are useless without the amino acids, and vice versa (09/03/2004).  Even if some kind of metabolic cycle were to be envisioned under semi-realistic conditions, how did this elaborate machine, composed of amino acids with precise charge distributions, arise?  It’s not just the machine, it’s the blueprints and construction process that must be explained.  What blind process led to the precise placement of active sites that process their inputs in a programmed sequence?  What put them into a structure with shared walls where six reaction chambers can work independently?  All this complexity, involving thousands of precision amino acids in FAS (2.6 million atomic mass units) has to be coded in DNA, then built by the formidably complex translation process, then assembled together in the right order, or FAS won’t work.  But the storage, retrieval, translation and construction systems all need the fatty acids, too, or they won’t work.
    We are witnessing an interdependent system of mind-boggling complexity that defies any explanation besides intelligent design.  Yes, Bruce Alberts, “as it turns out, we can walk and we can talk because the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered.”  We have tended to “vastly underestimate the sophistication of many of these remarkable devices.”
    Yeast.  Who could have ever imagined this simple little blob possessed a high degree of architectural complexity and robotic technology.  Many questions remain.  Why do plants and animals have different mechanisms, but the same chemical steps?  Why do fungi, of all things, have the most elaborate architectures?  Are the other architectures equally complex in their own ways?  What other factories regulate this one, and how does this factory regulate other downstream systems?  We have much more to learn about fatty acid synthesis, but the “biology of the future” – design biology – is shedding far more light than Darwin’s myths ever did.  The fact that life functions so well, from yeast to human, should spur us on to uncover the design principles that make it all come together as a finely tuned system, in a finely tuned world, in a finely tuned universe.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

In contrast, natural spider silk is produced at room temperature with water as a solvent, says Chris Holland, a zoologist at the University of Oxford in England.  “It’s made in the spider, and with the spider eating flies.  That produces a fiber that we can’t even come close to.”

The dopes contain different proteins, and the resulting fibers have distinct properties.  Yet “what we see is that the flow properties are very similar,” [Chris] Holland [Oxford] says.  Despite their differences, the spider and silkworm “use similar tricks,” he continues.  “This gives fantastic insight into how silk production has evolved and how the production of an energy-efficient, high-performance fiber is made by nature.”

The evolution-talk ruined an otherwise great article.  Notice that the Darwin storytelling was absolutely useless.  Evolution was assumed without evidence and contributed nothing to helping the scientists on their quest to reverse-engineer the technology.
    Most people detest spiders and find them creepy or scary.  Let’s teach our kids to admire them and respect them, along with ants, honeybees and the many other critters around us.  Some of our fellow denizens we need to admire at a distance, and yes, it’s OK to keep them out of the house.  Spiders don’t mean to invade your space; they just wander and get disoriented sometimes and need a little help.  Maybe instead of stepping on every spider you see, you should teach kids to scoop them up and let them play in their own space outside.  Your reporter once watched a four-inch-wide hairy mygalomorph come strutting into the bedroom just before lights out.  Mutually startled, the human jumped up and the spider ran under the bed.  The spider needed a little help for about half an hour getting rediscovered and assisted into a more suitable habitat.  All lived happily ever after.
    Help children observe the wonderful ways spiders weave their webs.  Have you ever witnessed the whole web construction process?  The material is amazing enough, but watching how the spider creates the pattern is a lot of fun.  When they wrap their prey, it shouldn’t seem that different from what we do with our food.  Think how repulsed a hen in a Far Side Horror Movie would be watching humans cut up a rotisserie chicken, shrink-wrap the pieces and put them in the refrigerator.  It’s all in the point of view.  What do you want, a yard full of flies?  Spiders do us a service.  By capturing, stunning and wrapping their food, spiders keep their meat fresh and help maintain the balance in nature.  Their ability to turn fly guts into techno-silk should not be minimized.  Don’t feel slighted.  You can take barbecue chicken and transform it into cerebral cortex. 
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

1. Multicellularity – No contest:  In an essay in Nature April 5, Paul B. Rainey (U of Auckland) speculated that although the origin of multicellularity is “poorly understood,” good old Darwinian survival of the fittest rises to the explanatory rescue: “Could the evolution of multicellular life have been fuelled by conflict among selective forces acting at different levels of organization?”  The default answer must be yes, because no hint of a design alternative was even considered.  Instead, considering that the difficulties produce “an impossibly difficult challenge for evolution” that looks at first like an “evolutionary dead-end,” he offered “one plausible scenario” and explained it all with game theory, with cells acting as “cooperators” and “cheaters.”  Voila—“this is by no means beyond the capacity of evolution – given an appropriate selective environment.”  No debate, no challenge.
2. Marine biology – Born again:  One would think the phrase born again to be patented by Christians, but Philippe Janvier in the same April 5 issue of Nature titled his news article “Evolutionary biology: Born-again hagfishes.”  Hagfish are jawless, cartilaginous eel-shaped marine vertebrates whose evolutionary ancestry is confused: “the hagfish puzzle,” he calls it.  “Palaeontology sometimes settles such conflicts.  But it is powerless in this case, because the earliest (300-million-year-old) hagfishes, preserved as soft-tissue imprints, are very similar to living ones.”  But is this an opportunity for non-evolutionary hypotheses to get a hearing?  Clearly not.  Janvier discussed findings of a neural crest in one species that “possibly made vertebrates more competitive in the early stage of their evolution.”  Thus, even in the absence of evidence, Darwinian hopes can be born of water and the spirit: “Further analyses of the developmental genetics of hagfish embryos might enable us to discover whether hagfish anatomy is primitive or degenerate, and may help in reconstructing the theoretical common ancestor to all vertebrates.” 
3. Animal behavior – Unguided intelligence:  A book review in the April 5 Nature mentioned “intelligent” and “design” several times – but not together.  Tore Slagsvold reviewed a book called Animal Architects by James L. Gould.  Here was a prime opportunity to discuss theories of intelligent design, but the subtitle of the book reveals the only point worthy of discussion: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence.  The bulk of the review was only about how animal intelligence and the architectures animals produce might have evolved.  Humans were not exempt.  A sample quote: “Bower birds are considered to be intelligent, suggesting that recursive cycles of selection for a single set of cognitive building abilities and aesthetic refinements are part of the same sort of positive-feedback loop that may have led to the evolution of the human mind.”
4. History of science – A bow to our worthy opponents:  Lest this list appear overly selective, here is an example where non-evolutionary ideas got a plug.  Peter Dear (Cornell) reviewed a book in the April 12 Nature that acknowledged the religious motives of many early scientists: Stephen Gaukroger’s The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1685.  Dear’s review was favorable.  It acknowledged the debt of modern science to religion: “Far from separating itself from religion, European science at the time became the principal tool for underpinning it: understanding nature was the path towards knowledge of God” he says (see online book and recent article by Michael Egnor).  “And having attained this status by the 1680s, argues Gaukroger, science hasn’t looked back since.”
       Nevertheless, it could be argued that a historical survey ending in 1685 poses no threat to Darwinism.  “By starting the story in thirteenth-century Latin Europe, Gaukroger presents a world in which theology, not ‘natural philosophy’, was regarded as the ‘queen of the sciences’.  He then traces how this gradually ceased to be the case, and natural philosophy, albeit of a new kind, displaced theology as the touchstone of cognitive propriety.”  Indeed, the child grew to devour its mother: “By the end of the seventeenth century, many people were arguing that the standards and procedures of natural philosophy were appropriate models for all kinds of cognitive enquiry, including those involving theology and religion.”  The suggestion was that this was a good, progressive trend.
5. Morality – All men are evolved equal:  Whence the human motive for fairness and equality?  One need look no farther than natural selection, according to a team writing in the April 12 issue of Nature.  Five scientists presented a paper called “Egalitarian motives in humans” that placed this noblest of human ideals squarely on an evolutionary footing.  They modeled how a sense of fairness arises through emotions in social groups based on game theory: “The results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income-altering behaviours, and may therefore be an important factor underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity and, hence, cooperation in humans.”
       A question arises: WWJD? (What would Jefferson declare?)  In the scientific community, it is no longer self-evident that all men are created equal, nor endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.  The Founding Fathers were noticeably absent in the footnotes.  All 14 references (John Maynard Smith, etc.) were to Darwinian papers by Darwinian thinkers presenting Darwinian ideas on this question.
6. Tetrapods – Bite-size Darwin:  A paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that “Terrestrial-style feeding in a very early aquatic tetrapod is supported by evidence from experimental analysis of suture morphology.”  In other words, fish developed a bite before invading the land looking for something to eat.  A picture story of the whole tale was promptly supplied by Live Science: “Ability to Bite Evolved in Fishy Ancestors.”  No other explanation was hinted at, even though the evolutionary explanation was only tentative: “Did fish make the move to land to escape from predators or to exploit new food sources?” Jeanna Brynner asked.  “Our findings do support the idea that they came on land to exploit new food sources, but we’re not sure,” one of the authors admitted.  Still, the suggestion was fit enough to print.
7. Public policy – Framed Darwin:  Moving on to Science, the problem about what to do with “antievolutionism” was discussed.  Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney in the April 6 issue of Science equated evolution with science and anything else as pseudoscience.  The article mentioned creationism and intelligent design in context of other heated social-policy issues like global warming and stem cell research.  The idea was not so much how to hold fair debates on these issues in the marketplace of ideas, but how “scientists” should “frame” their arguments for best effect: “Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively ‘frame’ information to make it relevant to different audiences.”  They justified this tactic on the argument that opposed groups are also framing their arguments.
       Yet Nisbet and Mooney hedged a little on whether framing arguments for social acceptance amounts to a kind of misrepresentation.  Somewhat sheepishly, they stated at the end, “Some readers may consider our proposals too Orwellian, preferring to safely stick to the facts.  Yet scientists must realize that facts will be repeatedly misapplied and twisted in direct proportion to their relevance to the political debate and decision-making.  In short, as unnatural as it might feel, in many cases, scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it.”  This raises many moral and ethical issues for a group of professionals often on the public dole who are assumed to be objective.  Launching from that word “Orwellian,” some of the “antievolutionists” discussed these issues on Evolution News and Access Research Network.
8. Genetics – Primate’s Progress:  The rhesus monkey genome made the cover of Science April 13.  There were surprises, but nothing blocked the “evolutionary insights” from passing through.  One major surprise was that the chimpanzee seems to have more evidence of positive selection than humans.  This anomaly, however, was no threat to “big picture” of evolution but will undoubtedly “shed light” on how natural selection works.  The boon for “understanding primate evolution” was promptly echoed in Science News (“Primate’s Progress”), National Geographic, BBC News and other science news outlets.
9. Paleontology – Dino Protein:  Because it deserves mention again in this context, recall how the announcement of protein fragments in dinosaur bone was “framed” for the media (04/12/2007 entry).
10. Aesthetics – Dance for Darwin:  Venturing into the arts, an evolutionary ballet called Orion was reviewed by John Bohannon in Science April 13.  Except for a few simplistic reductions of complex subjects and trying to cover too much material, it was gorgeously good, he thought.  The script is seamless from big bang to man: “the dancers bring the rapidly evolving universe into being.... From here, we dance through the history of the universe along a logarithmic scale.  By the time we reach the midpoint, we’ve already seen inflation, solar systems, complex molecules, cells, and multicellular organisms, and judging by the sound of bird song in the distance, we’re past the Cretaceous by the intermission.  The final act is devoted to the past few million years of human evolution, both anatomical and cognitive.”  Bohannon describes some of the special effects: “During a footrace between knuckle-walking dancers, the losers curl up and play ‘extinct’ while the survivors gradually stand erect.... A woman peels herself out of a full-body condom and collapses in a melodramatic ending that is pure performance art.”  One wonders if this is a Darwinist answer to the creation of Eve.
11. Cell biology – Die, mascot, die:  Let’s wrap up this list with a classic example of “framing” an evolutionary argument that appeared today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Everyone tuned to the Darwin vs. Design controversy has heard about the bacterial flagellum, a molecular outboard motor found in many species of bacteria.  It has become an unofficial mascot of the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM).  Ever since Dr. Michael Behe (Lehigh U) brought the public’s attention to this molecular machine he described as “irreducibly complex” in his highly influential 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, the flagellum has been a standard-bearer for the IDM.  It is prominently featured in the intelligent design documentary Unlocking the Mystery of Life.  Could any scientist publishing in a journal be unaware of this?
        Yet the paper in PNAS by Renyi Liu and Howard Ochman, which specifically addressed the problem of the origin of the bacterial flagellum was startling not only for its claims but its omissions.  The reader will search in vain for any mention of intelligent design, or for any footnote reference to Behe, Dembski, Johnson, Minnich, Nelson or any of the other leading intelligent-design scientists who, for over a decade, have held up this molecular machine as a falsification of Darwinian evolution.  The reader will also fail to find any mention that alternative explanations exist: only that “Elucidating the origins of complex biological structures has been one of the major challenges of evolutionary studies,” and that “The bacterial flagellum is a primary example of a complex apparatus whose origins and evolutionary history have proven difficult to reconstruct.”
        Furthermore, the reader will fail to find a Darwinian mechanism by which a functional flagellum could emerge by mindless mutations and blind natural selection.  Their entire case relies on homology – similarities between parts.  Since there are some sequence similarities in the genes that code for the 50 parts of the flagellum (24 at the theoretical minimum), and since a smaller rotary motor (ATP synthase) bears a slight resemblance to the flagellum, the authors proposed a “Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system” by means of gene duplication and modification.  “Within a genome, many of these core genes show sequence similarity only to other flagellar core genes, indicating that they were derived from one another, and the relationships among these genes suggest the probable order in which the structural components of the bacterial flagellum arose.”  They left it unstated how ATP synthase might have arrived, considering that it is arguably just as irreducibly complex as the flagellum.
        Thus all the arguments offered by the IDM against this kind of structure forming naturally were ignored: the need for all the parts to function together or not at all, the failure of co-option to account for “irreducible complexity all the way down,” and the even more complex assembly instructions, to mention a few.  The authors did acknowledge that the Type-III Secretion System (TTSS) was probably a devolution, not an ancestor, of the flagellum.  But the entirety of their case rested only on similarities between parts.  They assumed that this “suggests” a common ancestry – not a common Designer. 

Amazingly, according to polls , the masses—after at least two generations of propaganda—aren’t convinced.  By majorities of at least 2-1, they still think “God” had something to do with where everything came from.  But evolution remains a basic assumption of the elites who control the media.  The evidence?  Almost never will you hear an argument.  What you almost always get instead is an ”expert.”

Undoubtedly, the PNAS flagellum paper will become the new official answer of the Darwinists to the IDM challenge of how a complex molecular machine could have evolved.  It will be cited endlessly in the journals as proof that the superweapon of the IDM has been defused once for all.  Don’t be fooled.
    Did you notice something?  In every case of Darwin spin, the strategy was twofold: (1) assume evolution (begging the question) and (2) ignore the opposition (sidestepping).  In case that fails, (3) characterize the opposition as stupid, insane and wicked with association and loaded words.  The popularizers take the oracles of the gods and decorate them for the public with visualization, humor, authority and all the other tricks of the tirade (pun intended, for our proofreaders).  One of the worst offenders is Lie Science (ditto).  The extent of distortion on their evolution propaganda page is breathtaking.  It is only surpassed by the silliness of their arguments.
    Now that you know how the Media Machine operates, you can see how the Darwin Party protects and perpetuates its tyranny.  The strategy is repeated in Current Biology, American Naturalist, BioScience and nearly every other mainstream science journal.  Intelligent design scientists and their arguments are systematically censored.  All arguments are “framed” to keep Charlie’s corpse looking fresh and pink, as materialistic utopia marches onward and upward right past their opponents behind the soundproof barrier.
    Aren’t you glad for the alternative media?  If you have a reaction to these revelations, write here and describe your feelings.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Media • Cell Biology • Marine Biology • Terrestrial Zoology • Genetics • Politics and Ethics • Theology

The problem is that even though the newest of the dinosaurs are 65 million years old, scientists’ understanding of them has been racing along, changing with each new find.  So the Carnegie staff has decided to dismantle – and rethink – its entire collection.
    Our image of dinosaurs comes mostly from what one finds in old sci-fi films – big, lumbering creatures, dragging their tails on the ground.  In recent years, scientists have decided they were probably much more energetic and agile – and the way most fossils were displayed was wrong.
    “Unfortunately, they don’t come with instruction manuals,” Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the museum, said with a smile.

The scientists back then certainly had the best of intentions but not the best information.  Very few of the fossil skeletons they dug up were complete, so they made educated guesses, sometimes based on their knowledge of other species.

Evolutionists insist that some of their theory’s greatest strengths are the very driving forces of the theory itself: change and adaptation.  However, when an idea that you defend constantly changes, very few would consider that a strength.  Indeed, Charles Darwin himself would scarcely recognize his own theory today.
   This is illustrated in scientific interpretations of dinosaurs.  When putting the bones together, they had to place the backs out of joint merely to fit with their beliefs of dinosaur skeletal structures – literally, forcing the evidence to match their theories.
   Notably, the Carnegie collection itself has not changed.  Those old bones remain the same, and it is only evolutionists’ understanding that has changed.  And as ABC aptly pointed out, it will probably all need to be changed again mere generations from now – which means that even this updated display is probably wrong in ways we cannot recognize.  So what is racing along?  Understanding?  Scientific progress?  Human imagination?  The bones aren’t saying.  —DM
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

There’s considerable interest in the question of whether M-Stars could host habitable planets.  Would the planets be tidally locked with one face always directed toward the M-Star?  Would flares wipe out life on the local planet?  If M-Stars could host habitable planets, life may be much more widespread that we’ve previously thought.  Thus, M-Stars are of interest to astrobiologists including SETI scientists who are searching for life beyond Earth.

Wishing upon a star does not make SETI dreams come true.  Ms. DeVore’s article did not delve into the problems: flares, narrow zones, tidal locking.  Notably, she remarked that initial hopes that solar systems would be arranged like ours have been dealt a blow.  “We also expected to find solar systems like our own with small terrestrial planets near the star, and larger gaseous planets farther out,” she said.  “This particular pre-conception was discarded with the discovery of hot Jupiters on 4-day orbits about their stars.”  There’s the fallacy of extrapolating from a sample of one.
    Choosing M-Stars as a backup plan, though, may not be a cause for joy.  It might turn out like the following hypothetical bad-news, good-news joke.  Two pioneers crossing a mountain range hope to live off the bounty of fruit trees on the other side.  Upon arriving, the trees that haven’t been destroyed are very few and far between.  “But look,” the younger one chimes in, trying to be helpful.  “There’s an endless supply of poison oak.”
Research Project:  Some of the free papers in the Astrobiology journal deal directly the problems of flares, tidal locking and other habitability issues of M-Stars.  Perhaps one of our readers would like to evaluate the claims and see if their hopes are plausible.  Keep in mind, though, that finding billions of suitable zones does not imply they have renters.  That’s a different question.
Next headline on:  SETI • Stars

1. String at the breaking point:  As noted previously, (02/18/2007), string theory seems to be on trial for impersonating a science.  What’s notable in a book review in The New Criterion, though, is that for a long time, it has been the only game