Motorized Ears Give Mammals Acoustic Acuity   07/31/2007    
Back in March 2001 (03/27/2001), we reported on the discovery of prestin, a motor protein that acts as an amplifier in the inner ear.  One of the fastest-acting molecular motors known (02/21/2002), prestin works by stiffening the rod-shaped cell body with its cilia.  Somehow, the action of this motor protein amplifies hearing in mammalian ears by several orders of magnitude (09/19/2002).
    In the intervening years, cell biologists and physiologists studying prestin have debated its role in amplification.  Some have thought that the cilia were the main players in amplifying the sound, as in non-mammals.  Now, according to an article in Science Daily, prestin’s role is to affect the sensitivity of the entire cell, not just the cilia.  Researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital bred mice with mutated prestin that extends the cilia instead of pulling them in.  If cilia were the key agents of amplification, they should have shown more gain – but they did not.  Somehow, prestin assists the entire cell to “bounce” more effectively in response to the sound ripples in the cochlear fluid.  This whole-cell response is called somatic motility.
    “The researchers concluded that somatic motility was not simply a way to make cilia do their job better; rather, there is no connection between the hair cell contractions and how the cilia do their job,” the article explained.  “Instead, somatic motility, generated by prestin, is the key to the superior hearing of mammals.”
    The presence of these prestin-assisted outer hair cells in mammals increases sound sensitivity a hundredfold, the article said.  “The finding could explain why dogs, cats, humans and other mammals have such sensitive hearing and the ability to discriminate among frequencies.”

Motors in your ears that amplify sound.  What more could be said?  He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Mammals • Amazing Facts

This study, in establishing the reality of increased Cambrian variability for trilobites, implies that evolutionary processes in the distant past may have acted differently, or in a different balance than in more recent periods of time.  The cause or causes for these differences likely relate to the proposed explanations for the extravagant evolutionary inventiveness of this period.  These explanations fall into two broad categories: genetic and ecological.  The former suggest that Cambrian genomes were less constrained, or otherwise less apt to generate profoundly novel morphologies, whereas the latter invoke the relative sparseness of early animal ecosystems in allowing large evolutionary jumps to become successfully established.
    As Webster notes, either or both of these explanations may account for the greater variability of Cambrian trilobites; more loosely organized genomes might be expected to produce a greater range of morphologies, and less occupied adaptive landscapes might be more permissive of the broad production of variants.  Nevertheless, this work highlights the uniqueness of the early Cambrian interval in the evolution of animals and thereby the importance of placing broad evolutionary patterns in a historical and paleontological context.

When the media, museums and universities are able to propound these magical fairy tales without any critical scrutiny, creationism doesn’t stand a chance being heard above the din.  Anything goes in ev-illusion (07/27/2007 commentary), including cartoons like Popeye (05/31/2005 commentary).
    How can this multiply-discredited theory ever get falsified?  The evidence can be 180° opposite Darwin’s prediction, and yet they turn it into a great victory.  Nobody asks any hard questions.  Nobody calls foul.  Nobody sees the intellectual crime being committed.  They get away with it, time and time again.  Doesn’t anyone in the scientific and media establishments have any sense any more?
    For a detailed look at the Cambrian explosion and a prominent evolutionist’s attempts to explain it, read our entry “Cambrian Explosion Damage Control” from 04/23/2006.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Evolution

Putative planets associated with stars of the M spectral type are commonly taken to be locations where life might occur, given the abundance of these stars and their longevity.  Photosynthetic organisms on an Earth-like planet orbiting an M star would experience stellar radiation with maximum photon fluxes at wavelengths in the infrared spectrum.  The ‘average’ photon would have a lower energy content, and there would also be a much greater absorption by water, than for solar radiation on Earth.

Significant photosynthesis could nonetheless occur on such a planet.  But there would be energetic problems in using the relatively low-energy photons to reduce carbon dioxide with electrons from water, with production of oxygen.  The mechanism on Earth relies on two photochemical reactions in series; on planets orbiting an M star more than two reactions in series would be required.  On any such planet, the longer wavelengths at which photosynthetic pigments would absorb would have implications for the remote sensing of pigments by reflectance spectroscopy as an indicator (with appropriate caveats) of photosynthesis, and hence life.

If the natural evolution of plants had been driven by the need for high efficiency of utilization of sunlight, then the leaves of all plants would have been black.  Black leaves would absorb sunlight more efficiently than leaves of any other color.  Obviously plant evolution was driven by other needs, and in particular by the need for protection against overheating.  For a plant growing in a hot climate, it is advantageous to reflect as much as possible of the sunlight that is not used for growth.  There is plenty of sunlight, and it is not important to use it with maximum efficiency.  The plants have evolved with chlorophyll in their leaves to absorb the useful red and blue components of sunlight and to reflect the green.  That is why it is reasonable for plants in tropical climates to be green.  But this logic does not explain why plants in cold climates where sunlight is scarce are also green.  We could imagine that in a place like Iceland, overheating would not be a problem, and plants with black leaves using sunlight more efficiently would have an evolutionary advantage.  For some reason which we do not understand, natural plants with black leaves never appeared.  Why not?  Perhaps we shall not understand why nature did not travel this route until we have traveled it ourselves.

Solar radiation is also just the right energy for the transitions in rhodopsin in our retinas that allow us to see the green plants.  The fine-tuning is observational fact; the evolutionary speculation is superstition.  That’s what we should call it.  Superstition is believing something totally without evidence, like believing a rabbit’s foot will bring good luck.  Actually, one could adduce evidence selectively in favor of a superstition, and that is what evolutionists do.  A child has a lucky day and thinks it proves the rabbit’s foot worked (selectively ignoring the owie of the day).  An evolutionist sees the success of photosynthesis and thinks evolution was responsible.  What’s the difference?  Dyson and Raven may envision exotic bacteria around an M-star with multiple stages of photosynthesis to harvest infrared light using black, purple and mauve pigments, but that is illusion.  [light bulb] Hey; that gives us an opportunity to coin a new word to describe Darwin’s brand of science, the result of superstitiously speculating in the absence of evidence: ev-illusion.
Next headline on:  Physics • Cell Biology • Plants

What hits you immediately about this subject is the large amount of uncertainty and the many different possible scenarios.  Concerning the transition from prebiotic chemistry to life, there is no clear evidence of chronology.  There are many different pathways from pre-biotic soup to living organisms, and numerous possible intermediate stages with any number of complex organic and biochemical reactions en route.  It’s also clear that the biochemicals of today may have performed very different functions in the past.  For example, the majority of chemical reactions are today mediated by protein enzymes but some indications from biology suggest that RNA was widely used as a catalyst during early chemical evolution.

This book covers every element of the evolution of life from the emergence of simple organic molecules to theories on how the first cells might have got together.  How did groups of chemicals and their associated reactions become compartmentalised into prototype cells?  What was the involvement of inorganic matrices and, the big one, how did complexity arise from simple origins?  The authors painstakingly pore over the limited evidence and make intelligent, though guarded, speculations as appropriate.  Anyone who is not comfortable with biochemistry might struggle at times but the summaries are less intense and will allow virtually all readers to grasp the concepts and uncertainties.  In describing the problem of how life emerged the authors also illustrate why astrobiology might provide one of the few experimental opportunities to test the hypotheses.

It’s all futureware, speculation, smoke and mirrors, bluffing and ignorance.  Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking this is scientific.  The use of scientific instruments does not justify calling this science.  Alchemists used the best instruments available and even came up with many useful techniques for physical chemistry.  Their findings about what did not make gold proved useful when the real science of chemistry supplanted alchemy.  But none of the effort, the experimentation, the writing, or the speculation justified the premise of alchemy at all.  Similarly, astrobiologists and chemical evolutionists are revising experimental methods and learning many things about chemicals while ruling out scenarios that prove hopeless for evolving life.  What remains is a bundle of raw speculation that has not yet been ruled out.  Speculation is not science.  If efforts to confirm the speculation result in some interesting scientific observations on the side, well and good for those observations, but the bundle of speculation itself is indistinguishable from modern alchemy – a fun trip on a dead-end road.  Someone quipped, if you don’t care where you are going, you ain’t lost.  We think people should care.  You may be lost and not know it yet.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life

What we say is that there are conservatives, like Pope John Paul II, who believe in the theory of evolution, and that it’s far from a liberal theory: it’s scientific, it’s as close to a fact as can be.  We did say that Flanders, who opposed the teaching of evolution, is sincere in his beliefs.  We tried to take his emotions seriously.
    What’s really funny is that they had a debate here between the Republican candidates [for the presidential nomination], and the moderator said “so, which of you believe in evolution?”  And you could see a couple sort of raising their hands and then changing their minds, and I’m going “how can you not be sure whether you think that’s true or not?  It’s not a matter of opinion.”

We think people need to be reminded that cartoons don’t just drop out of the sky into TV sets from unbiased sources.  They are the work of producers, writers, and publicists who are just as biased as anyone else.  You’ve just seen a portion of the mindset of the executive producer of a popular cartoon that always portrays the father as a bozo, the son as a delinquent, the religious leader as the sincere fool, and the girl who adores science as the savior of society from dangerous myths like creationism.  Why do you think they do this?  No agenda at all, would you say?  There’s nothing like humor to slip propaganda past the family radar.
    Al Jean may be a math whiz but he needs to do some homework.  If he thinks evolution is the closest thing to a fact as anything can be, and that one is not allowed to have opinions about it, even if the skeptic is a PhD scientist or world-class philosopher or theologian, then he needs to go back to school himself.  His assignment is to read all seven years of Creation-Evolution Headlines.
    Jean’s answer to a subsequent question in the interview provides a great case of dramatic irony.  He was asked, “Do you have a dream scientific guest who you’d love to have on the show?”  Without blinking an eye, he said, “Living or dead, it would be Isaac Newton.”  Ha!  Gotcha.  Now read this article by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe, and the entry on Newton in our online book.  Better send your cartoon heroine to keep this kook out of the public schools, Al.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Education • Media • Dumb Ideas

These measurements are indirect and tentative.  Confirmation must await observations from the refurbished Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, and refinements of the gravitational lensing technique.  There is also a fuzzy line between observation and theory in cases such as these.  Even using their own assumptions, however, the situation is paralleled by that in biology: more maturity and complexity as far back as they can see.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Dating Methods • Physics • Cosmology

1. Walking with dino ancestors:  Paleontologists used to think that the alleged precursors of dinosaurs were quickly supplanted by their more successful progeny.  That assumption was called into question by findings in New Mexico reported by National Geographic.  Now, they think the dinosaurs and their precursors lived side by side for up to 20 million years.  This was based on a paper in Science.¹  The finding was not limited to one locale; the authors said, “Our investigations have found the same co-occurrences in several other Chinle Formation and Dockum Group localities in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.”  In summary, they said, “The appearance of the first dinosaurs in the Ischigualasto assemblage, along with the late occurrences of basal dinosauromorphs from the HQ assemblage, extends the transition time from assemblages of dinosaur precursors to assemblages exclusively of dinosaurs and indicates that models of rapid competitive or fortuitous replacement are not correct.”  They were contemporaries for a long time, in other words.
2. Teen sex:  Another story in National Geographic claims that dinosaurs had teen sex.  This contradicts previous assumptions that, as ancestors of birds, dinosaurs must have behaved like them and waited till adulthood.  Now, they believe that they behaved more like promiscuous crocodiles.  Studies of bone maturation rates gave this idea to a paleontologist at University of Florida.  It was “a surprise because most scientists believe birds are akin to modern dinosaurs.”
       Does this upset the evolutionary apple cart, then?  Not at all; another paleontologist remarked that it is “a nice illustration that birds aren’t all dinosaur.”  They must have learned abstinence on their own.  The adolescent dinos, though, had good reasons: by mating early, they were “really holding on to their ancestry, rather than jumping into the modern-bird style of reproduction.”  Don’t tell that to the junior high class.

The dates and claims are all poppycock, you realize, because they have been falsified with the soft tissue (04/12/2007) and protein (11/26/2006) found in that T. rex bone (11/11/2006).  We already know that dinosaur bones cannot be as old as claimed.  The evolutionary paleontologists are living in Fantasyland to deny it.  Alan Boyle, bless his low-rating MSNBC heart, wrote in his column today about “dinosaur’s soft spots” and said soft tissue has been turning up in specimens as far apart as Madagascar and Montana.  Looking inside the bones for soft tissue remains opens up a whole new book of information on dinosaurs, he said, and tells how the soft tissue, once exposed to the air, rapidly decays – yet he still fails to question the ages!  He repeats the dates without any twinge of conscience: “Seventy million years ago, a killing drought was followed by torrential rains, which sent waves of mud and wet sand to cover up dead and dying dinosaurs,” he said, like an actor rehearsing the lines of a fictional play.  And these are the people you trust to tell us about dinosaur sex lives?
    To understand what’s really going on in evolution reporting, you have to realize that the Darwinists must balance two conflicting priorities.  One is to sound dogmatic enough to persuade the naive that they know what they are talking about.  The other is to discover surprises occasionally to convey the message that there is still enough mystery out there to keep the funds flowing (04/17/2007). 
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Dating Methods

No one knows what dark matter is, but they know what it’s not.  It’s not part of the ’standard model’ of physics that weaves together everything that is known about ordinary matter and its interactions.  The standard model has been hugely successful, but it also has some problems, and in trying to fix these, theorists have predicted hordes of new fundamental particles.  At first, these hypothetical particles were viewed as unwelcome additions, but now some of them are leading candidates for dark matter.  “These days a theory without a dark-matter candidate is not considered an interesting one,” says [Leszek] Roszkowski [CERN].  “The existence of the dark-matter problem is perhaps the most convincing evidence for physics beyond the standard model.”

Dark matter might prove to be a richer problem than anyone is expecting.  [Max] Tegmark [MIT] hopes for this outcome.  “This could be a wonderful surprise.  It’s very arrogant of us humans to say that just because we can’t see it, there’s only one kind of dark matter.”

But a decade further on, researchers seem to have swapped one theoretical conundrum for a bigger one.  Follow-up measurements have revealed little about the nature of dark energy, and theories to explain it have failed to gain traction.  And although astronomers are trudging forwards with a battery of new measurements, there is little guarantee that any will solve the problem – and thus no clear consensus on how much effort to put into them.  “The issue is: how much information do we get from these future observations?” asks Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University.

This sort of anthropic argument irks many scientists.  Critics say such reasoning is almost impossible to verify and doesn’t provide any deeper insight into the cosmos.  “Anthropics and randomness don’t explain anything,” says Paul Steinhardt, a theorist at Princeton University in New Jersey.  “I’m disappointed with what most theorists are willing to accept.”
    The trouble is that no other approaches are proving any more fruitful.  Some suggest that the problem lies with Einstein’s idea of gravity, which they then seek to modify in a way that fits in with dark energy.  “It would be very fortunate if the dark energy were a modification of gravity,” says Georgi Dvali of New York University, “because it would address fundamental questions of physics.“ But others see little mileage in such changes.  Leaving aside the cosmos, “it’s not so easy to get those theories to be consistent with our Solar System”, says [Michael] Turner [U of Chicago].....
    In general, the theoretical side of the debate is not a pretty thing.  “We’ve tried a whole bunch of things and nothing has sprung forward,” says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For now, many in the field are left with a sense of unease: the tantalizing clue they thought they had discovered has turned into an exasperating mystery.  And with no clear explanation of something that could be up to three-quarters of everything out there, it’s hard not to feel like you’re missing a big part of the picture, Susskind says.  “We could be wrong about cosmology for the next thousand years. Deeply wrong.”

They can’t even figure out our nearest star (the sun) and they want to tell us about the ultimate origins and fate of the universe – and even of multiple universes that would be beyond observation even if they existed.  What unconscionable arrogance.
    You know what the whole problem is?  These people refuse, by choice (not because of the evidence), to acknowledge God in their thinking.  Searching for answers is a noble undertaking, but if you throw away the key before you start, no one should feel sorry for you when you get lost.
    The secular cosmology community will not acknowledge the Creator despite being dragged kicking and screaming to the anthropic principle (08/11/2006, 05/11/2006).  They are determined to work out solutions to the universe by themselves, without recourse to the key to the problem.  They have made this choice a priori, before even looking through a telescope or at the output of a particle accelerator.  Materialism is so engrained, it has become an addiction.  The pain of withdrawal now is unthinkable.  A thousand years of being deeply wrong is preferable to kicking the habit.  This is your tax dollars at work: keeping an elite community hooked on a fruitless addiction. 

You can almost hear the irate comeback: “Well, what would you do?  Dismantle all this equipment and just say God did it?”  Of course not.  First of all, though, it should be clear that open-ended searches for ghosts is not good scientific practice, nor is spending a thousand years being deeply wrong.  Hopefully we can also agree that the public cannot be expected to pay for any and all quixotic pursuits scientists dream up.
    The LHC and other megascience projects employ many thousands of people, and require many bright, highly-trained PhDs to design and operate.  This alone, however, is not a justification.  One could just as well imagine building parallel-universe detectors – or fairy detectors.  Would job security for thousands justify such expenditures?  How about a megaproject to dig a big hole, then fill it in again?  We must think rightly about the uses of technology and the expected payback to the people who pay for it.  There has to be some relationship between the investment and the expectation of success.
    There is value in pure research.  A Murphyism states, “When you are investigating the unknown, you do not know what you will find.”  Perhaps some useful fact will come out of dark-matter detectors that will improve our lives.  If the goal is only to keep scientists busy, though, or to rationalize a materialistic philosophy, then the proponents should engage their hobbies on their own time and dime.
    So what do we do with the LHC and the dark-matter detectors, the WMAPs and other such projects?  We change the presuppositions.  We start with the presupposition that there is a Creator who has revealed Himself in His creation.  This is the presupposition that motivated the great founders of science.  Our efforts, then, are directed once again at “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” to understand how He ordered the world and the universe and life.  And, as Francis Bacon admonished, we gear our efforts for the betterment of mankind.  These two goals can justify large expenditures on elaborate projects.  This is a far cry from today’s elitist mindset that misuses science to eliminate all thoughts of God and thinks the public should give scientists anything they want just because they are curious about the latest unverifiable, materialist fad.

How ironic that the secularists should end up in quixotic pursuits after imaginary entities.  Their refusal to admit in their thinking a Holy Ghost who hovered over the surface of the waters at Creation did not free them from the need for ghosts.  They had to invent their own so that they could search endlessly for them.  What else can a soul do to alleviate the pain of denying its own existence?
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics

Evolutionary anthropologists make a big deal out of brain size (as inferred from skull capacity), but look how normal this man’s tiny brain functioned inside a normal skull.  This calls into question any measure of intelligence based on skull capacity.  And might not they have classified Mr. Bao Xishun and his bride as separate species?
Next headline on:  Early Man • Human Body

How many AU is the Earth from the sun?  Exactly one!  That’s a silly question, because the astronomical unit (AU) is defined in terms of the sun-Earth distance.  Impress your gullible friends with this coincidence.
    Though insufficient as a standalone piece of evidence, this article’s claim adds to the growing realization among astronomers that our solar system is special.  When you add in all the other independent evidences as described in The Privileged Planet, the cumulative case becomes convincing.
Next headline on:  Solar System

The biological cell is equipped with a variety of molecular machines that perform complex mechanical tasks such as cell division or intracellular transport.  One can envision employing these biological motors in artificial environments.  We review the progress that has been made in using motor proteins for powering or manipulating nanoscale components.  In particular, kinesin and myosin biomotors that move along linear biofilaments have been widely explored as active components.  Currently realized applications are merely proof-of-principle demonstrations.  Yet, the sheer availability of an entire ready-to-use toolbox of nanosized biological motors is a great opportunity that calls for exploration.

A huge amount of biological research in recent decades has spurred the realization that the living cell can be viewed as a miniature factory that contains a large collection of dedicated protein machines (1)².  Consider the complicated tasks that a single cell can perform: It can create a full copy of itself in less than an hour; it can proofread and repair errors in its own DNA, sense its environment and respond to it, change its shape and morphology, and obtain energy from photosynthesis or metabolism, using principles that are similar to solar cells or batteries.  All this functionality derives from thousands of sophisticated proteins, optimized by billions of years of evolution.  At the moment, we can only dream of constructing machines of similar size that possess just a fraction of the functionality of these natural wonders.

So, “thousands of sophisticated proteins, optimized by billions of years of evolution.”  Gimme a BREAK!
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Physics • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Keep the Stem Cell News Straight   07/19/2007    
Stem cell technology continues to make news, but the phrase “stem cells” alone can mask serious ethical issues.  Adult stem cells (AS) and embryonic stem cells (ES) are both being investigated for their ability to transform into any cell type in the body.  Both are advertised as promising dramatic cures for debilitating diseases, with their ability to regenerate damaged tissue.  ES cells are controversial, however, because a human embryo must be created and destroyed to harvest the cells.  AS cells have no such ethical baggage: they can be harvested safely from an individual’s own bone marrow, from skin, from cord blood, from placental tissue and other organs.
    News articles about “stem cells” do not always highlight the source of the cells, but the distinction is important in more than one sense.  As the following examples illustrate, ethically-challenged ES research holds only empty promises, while ethically-safe AS research has a growing record of impressive real-world therapies:

1. Adult Stem Cell News
   1. Amyloidosis:  A debilitating condition known as amyloidosis, which results in organ failure and death from misfolded proteins, has been successfully treated in 31% of test cases at Boston University Medical Center by blood stem cells and chemotherapy, reported EurekAlert.  The patients showed improvement in both organ function and quality of life, the article said.
   2. Cornea Defects:  Experiments on rabbits by Basque Research showed that adult stem cells from one cornea can regrow damaged cornea cells on the other eye.  “The aim of the procedure was to regain the damaged epithelium and thus restore transparency to the cornea,” the researchers said, and “The technique is being currently applied to patients with satisfactory results.”
   3. Tissue Replacement:  Researchers at UC Berkeley and Stony Brook University achieved remarkable success growing mesenchymal stem cells on a scaffold of biodegradable nanofibers.  The results, published in PNAS,¹ not only grew new endothelial cells, they resisted the formation of clots that occurred without the stem cells.
   4. Parkinson’s Disease:  In the same issue of PNAS,² a team of scientists from Yale, Harvard Medical School, UC San Diego and other institutions successfully treated primates suffering with Parkinson’s disease with human neural stem cells.  The cells “survived, migrated, and had a functional impact” in the subjects.  The neural stem cells, however, though not embryonic, were derived from human fetal brains, raising other ethical red flags.  The article did not say if neural stem cells could be derived in other ways.
   5. Hearing:  As reported here 07/01/2007, adult stem cells have also shown promise to cure hearing disorders that were once thought beyond the reach of medicine.  Bone marrow stem cells survived and grew in the inner ear, regenerating damaged hair cells.
   6. Magic brew:  Nature³ reported on the promising method of obtaining “ES-like” pluripotent stem cells from skin.  The new “induced pluripotent stem cell” technique, tried on mice, is showing promise for getting all the benefits of ES cells without the need for the embryos.  “If this method can be translated to humans,” Janet Rossant wrote, “patient-specific stem cells could be made without the use of donated eggs or embryos.”  The reported cells passed the test of being able to contribute extensively to all cell types, including the germ line.
          Next will be the hard task of going from proof-of-principle to actual therapy.  Rossant called the new stem cell elixir a “magic brew” ending with these encouraging words: “direct reprogramming of adult cells is clearly the way of the future, and promises to open up new frontiers in human biology and future therapy.”
   
   
2. Embryonic Stem Cell News
   1. Slated to die anyway:  Last month, Science reported on the ethical concerns over human embryo use from fertility clinics.⁴  Acknowledging the “moral concerns” and “contentious debates” over the use of human embryos in research, Anne Lyerly and Ruth Faden made the case that stored embryos from clinics will die anyway, and argued that 66% of the public doesn’t have a problem with using them.  They also cited “mounting evidence that American scientists are losing ground to other countries with less restrictive policies.”
   2. Technical progress, but...:  Late in June, Constance Holden expressed the frustration among stem cell researchers at President Bush’s refusal to allow federal funding for ES research.⁵  (President Bush had just vetoed a second bill on June 18; see Science Daily.)  Although she cited several recent advances in methods for harvesting the stem cells for embryos, no applications or cures were mentioned.  The tone of the article was that the Administration should relent and let the scientists do what they want: “Advocates were outraged by Bush’s second veto and were not mollified by an accompanying Executive Order encouraging the National Institutes of Health to continue to hunt for pluripotent cells that do not entail the destruction of embryos.” 
   3. Adventure stories:  M. Ian Phillips reviewed a stem-cell book for Science.⁶  Cynthia Fox’s book, Cell of Cells: The Global Race to Capture and Control the Stem Cell, is mostly an adventure story of the global race to tap the stem cell.  Phillips mentions that the Hwang scandal was nearly as disappointing as if Armstrong had been found to fake the moon landing.  In praising the book’s story, he did not mention any cures that have come from ES cells.  Yet he ended with this criticism of the Bush administration and a plea that the show must go on:

      Bush has twice vetoed congressional bills to increase federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research.  Cell of Cells illustrates the consequences for global science, states that fund their own researchers, and the dashed hopes of those who need potential treatments.  Fox eloquently chronicles the consequences of this isolationist policy and squarely advocates a rational approach to funding research on both adult and embryonic stem cells.

      His only reference to ethics was after a sad line about “desperate stories of patients with heart failure, autoimmune disease, kidney failure, and Duchenne’s dystrophy.”  Neglecting to mention whether ES cells provide any plausible hope for curing these, he said: “She [Fox] also warns of the trap of unethical, unscientific stem cell treatments in locations such as Moscow, Ukraine, and the Caribbean.”  In other words, Phillips acknowledged that ES hype is leading to abuses, but he neglected to mention the seriously-held moral qualms of many about harvesting human embryos.  Neither did he distinguish between the ethics of ES vs. AS stem cells.
   4. Giving up:  A news item in the same issue of Science⁷ seems a strange bedfellow to the book review mentioned above.  Dennis Normille reported that a Singapore firm named ES Cell International (ESI) is quitting ES research.  Why?  Investors have decided that “the likelihood of having products in the clinic in the short term was vanishingly small.”
          Normille treated this as bad news.  “ESI’s setback may dampen investors’ enthusiasm for stem cell therapies, says Robert Lanza, vice president for R&D at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts: ‘What the field badly needs is one or two success stories.’”  This implies that there have been none.  Indeed, Normille had no success stories to tell: only trials using other techniques that American institutions have “in the pipeline.”  The ex-executive of ESI, Alan Colman, admitted to “a tinge of disappointment that the field is moving more slowly than I had hoped.”

Do you ever wonder how the entire international scientific community can seem to be unanimously in favor of Darwinism, unanimously anti-Bush, and all in agreement that humans are to blame for global warming?  Just look at the “official” party line about stem cells.  Certainly there are hundreds, if not thousands, of ethically-sensitive researchers who are pursuing adult stem cells and legitimate therapies to help the afflicted.  They have made great strides.  Why, then, is the editorial staff of Nature, Science and the other spokespersons for Big Science pursuing the vain hope of ES cells, when they have nothing but scandals and empty promises to show for it?
    It is uncanny how they keep pushing their unethical research down the throats of people who think it is wrong to kill one life to save another.  Nobody is even stopping them; they are free to pursue it, if they wish – provided they get their own money.  Instead, they expect the taxpaying public, morally opposed or not, to pay for it.  Why?  Because real investors know how to read the tea leaves, and notice that funding ES research is a bad investment, with a “vanishingly small” hope of success.
    ES advocates rarely mention the arguments of ethicists, and never treat them seriously.  Their appeals are invariably based on selfishness or fraud: Americans will fall behind in the race, the embryos are not really human, and the like.  They make tear-jerking commercials with Hollywood actors pulling on our heartstrings about the afflicted (as if ES stem cells would help), promising cures that don’t exist.  One of the biggest scientific frauds in recent history was committed in the pursuit of ES cells.  All the while, adult stem cell research has been galloping ahead with real results with little fanfare from the media.  This puzzling behavior is documented in detail by Anne Coulter in her book Godless (Crown Forum, 2006), pp. 192-198.
    This is the only explanation that makes sense, and Coulter makes the connection: the same people who abuse science to promote ES research are the same ones opposing intelligent design to promote Darwin’s theory of evolution (p. 198).  The irrational pursuit of an untenable position in one arena characterizes the same godless, materialistic, amoral liberalism that pushes evolution on students.  It’s done in the name – but not the spirit – of science, but requires allegiance to a liberal agenda that cannot tolerate controversy, questioning, or debate (e.g., 07/13/2007).  Let the evidence speak to a candid world.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Health • Politics and Ethics

RoboSwift is a micro airplane fitted with shape shifting wings, inspired by the common swift, one of nature’s most efficient flyers.  The micro airplane will have unprecedented wing characteristics; the wing geometry as well as the wing surface area can be adjusted continuously.  This makes RoboSwift more maneuverable and efficient.  Resembling the common swift, RoboSwift will be able to go undetected while using its three micro cameras to perform surveillance on vehicles and people on the ground.

Their analysis reveals that the difference between the speed of small and large birds is not as great as expected; they suggest that this surprising result is likely to be the result of disadvantages associated with very slow speeds among smaller birds and with very fast speeds for larger birds.  They also show that the evolutionary history of the species helps explain much of the variation in flight speed: species of the same group tend to fly at similar characteristic speeds.  For example, birds of prey and herons had slow flight speeds, on average, given their mass and wing loading, whereas the average speed for songbirds and shorebirds was faster than would be predicted.

Scientists should be swift to learn, slow to mythologize.  Evolutionists could not begin to explain how a lumbering dinosaur got the right combination of mutations to turn into a flying swift with aerodynamic engineering that is the envy of our smartest inventors.  Evolutionary claims are vacuous and useless.  Give us RoboSwifts and other useful inventions inspired by nature – as long as the government doesn’t use them to spy on honest citizens.
    A reader wrote in about witnessing birds in flight:

About two years ago I was privileged to watch two (presumably male) nighthawks performing in front of a third (presumably female) nighthawk that was sitting on a rock and incidentally performing for me, sitting on a tractor a few yards from the one on the rock.  One appeared to be chasing the other as they flew up the road, came back down through the orchard, dodging limbs in the tops of the cherry trees.  The tail of the first and the beak of the second were separated by about a foot, no more than 18 inches.  They flew at pursuit speed, much faster that when they are feeding hundreds of feet above the ground.  They matched wing strokes as they flew around and over limbs, trees, sagebrush and rock, usually no more than two or three feet from the obstacles.  Now and then the leader would perform some type of pull-up maneuver and the follower would become the leader.  I think this is what happened, but it was too swift for me to be sure.  In a word, it was awesome.

Next headline on:  Birds • Physics • Biomimetics

You have to wonder how such intricate micro-machines like mosquitos got to be so nasty.  If they didn’t desire our blood and carry diseases, we would probably not notice them or mind them.  Did they have a beneficial purpose originally, like many other insects still do?  Did they pollinate plants or provide food and games for bats and toads?  Did something go wrong after the original creation?  That’s a question science cannot answer, but theologians can and do try to incorporate the observations of today’s world into the limited record of creation that has been revealed.  It’s clear from the Bible that God has on many occasions used his creatures as agents of judgment – but it is also clear that not every instance of a natural disaster or handicap is related to a specific sin by the victims.  Laymen might retreat to rhymes like: I don’t know why God made the fly, the mosquito, gnat or chigger; I’m just not sad, but indeed glad, he didn’t make them bigger.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Physics • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Iapetus, Charon Look Young for Their Age   07/18/2007    
Hard bodies in the solar system are supposed to be billions of years old.  Why, then, do so many look smooth and young-looking?  Two examples made news today:

1. Charon So Smooth:  Pluto has a moon named Charon (KAR-on) that apparently leaks beauty cream out of its interior.  Live Science and Space.com report about a study of Charon’s spectrum in the July 10 Astrophysical Journal that indicates it is being resurfaced by cryovolcanism.  They detected crystalline ice that would normally become amorphous in tens of thousands of years.  Though the paper claims water leakage is recoating the surface at a snail’s pace, it is remarkable that a body this small, this far from the sun, in the cold outer regions of the solar system, would be active at all.
       A press release from Gemini Observatory describes how astronomers detected the ice coating using spectra obtained through adaptive optics.  It says, “This action could be occurring on timescales as short as a few hours or days, and at levels that would recoat Charon to a depth of one millimeter every 100,000 years.”  These estimates, of course, were inferred from spectra without actually being able to see the eruptions.  Cryovolcanism, where water erupts outward through cracks in the surface (as on Enceladus), was proposed as the only mechanism to explain the presence of crystalline ice.  For this to occur, a large portion of the interior must consist of liquid water, and it must be able to propagate through cracks.  As water approaches the freezing point and expands, the article says it could propagate up half a kilometer to the surface in a matter of hours.
       But how could this small moon retain water?  The astronomers detected the signature of ammonia hydrates, which depress the freezing point of water and presumably allow the interior to remain liquid.  Ammonia hydrates have also been detected on Quaoar and at least one other KBO (Kuiper Belt Object).  Signs of active cryovolcanism have also been seen on Ariel, a moon of Uranus.  Ariel may have been subject to tidal flexing in the past, the article says.  “By contrast, Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) such as Charon, Quaoar, Orcus, and others are not tidally squeezed,” the press release states.  “Yet, they seem to show evidence of cryovolcanism.”  The only other source of heat they suggested was internal radioactivity.  Other KBOs larger than 500 km across also show crystalline ice on their surfaces, suggesting that cryovolcanism may be a common feature of these icy bodies in the outer solar system.
       An artist’s conception of Charon accompanying the press release shows eruptive plumes spraying crystalline snow onto the surface.  Close-up observations of Charon may be obtained when the New Horizons spacecraft flies by in 2015.
2. Iapetus Youthful Figure:  That’s JPL’s headline: “Saturn’s Old Moon Iapetus Retains its Youthful Figure.”  A press release claims that “The moon has retained the youthful figure and bulging waistline it sported more than three billion years ago,” leaving the question unanswered why it stands alone in that respect.  “Unlike any other moon in the solar system, Iapetus is the same shape today as it was when it was just a few hundred million years old; a well-preserved relic from the time when the solar system was young.”
       The model published in Icarus requires large amounts of short-lived radionuclides to heat the interior, and a rapid spin that created the equatorial bulge.  But then what happened?  “The challenge in developing a model of how Iapetus came to be ‘frozen in time’ has been in deducing how it ever became warm enough to form a bulge in the first place, and figuring out what caused the heat source to turn off, leaving Iapetus to freeze.”  Despite these challenges, the scientists feel it tells them Iapetus must be “roughly 4.564 billion years old.”
       National Geographic claimed the mystery of Iapetus’ shape is “solved,” but this represents just one competing model and does not answer all the questions, such as the origin of its equatorial mountain range, the source of the dark material that coats half the moon, and the reasons this particular moon would have had such different initial conditions from its neighbors.  Extreme close-up images of Iapetus are hoped for when Cassini flies by on September 10 at less than 1,000 miles above the surface.

You never see these planetary scientists proving the solar system is billions of years old.  You only see them assuming it.  Then, because that parameter cannot be altered, you see them squirm and wriggle the models to fit young-looking phenomena into old ages.  Proposing an ad hoc set of conditions that might fit the data is not the same as proving this is what happened, so National Geographic was way out of line to claim the mystery of Iapetus has been “solved.”
    As to the “roughly 4.652 billion years” figure, that is ridiculous.  What did they expect, the exact month and year?  There’s no way the evidence from Iapetus can yield a date to four significant figures without assuming the very thing they ought to be proving.  Dates are inextricably linked to the assumptions made.  Those assumptions should have been stated up front.  They have blindly accepted a consensus date from uniformitarian, evolutionary theories, and molded their data to fit it.  Yet they spoke of these dates as facts.
    Good thing the planets don’t talk back, because that wouldn’t go over too well on a date.  Imagine a college student telling his sweetheart, “Your figure is so youthful, and your skin so smooth; you look mighty young for a 4500-year-old.”
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating methods

News Reporters Knuckling Under to Darwinian Storytelling   07/17/2007    
The science news media are virtually going ape over a claim about how chimpanzees might have evolved into upright-walking humans: what is going on?  It began with a paper in PNAS.¹  Sockol, Raichlen and Pontzer measured the gaits of chimpanzees and humans and concluded that it is more efficient to walk upright than to propel oneself by knuckle-walking along the ground.  They began, “As predicted by Darwin, bipedalism is the defining feature of the earliest hominins and thus marks a critical divergence of the human lineage from the other apes.”  So their measurements seemed to support the idea that the cost of energy is what drove our imaginary forebears to gradually rise, stand up and walk.
    That was enough to send science reporters into a frenzy of headline writing:

• PhysOrg said, “For early man, two legs better than four.”
• News@Nature: “This chimp was made for walking.”
• BBC News: “Energy use ‘drove human walking’”
• Yahoo News (AP): “Humans walk upright to conserve energy.... ‘We think about the evolution of bipedalism as one of first events that led hominids down the path to being human.’”
• National Geographic: “Humans beat chimps at walking efficiently.... anthropologists...get a glimpse of what drove the evolution of our bipedal stride.”
• SciTech Today: “Humans Prove Genius with Bipedal Movement.”
• Live Science: “Why We Walk Upright: Beats Being a Chimp.... According to this theory, the energy saved by walking upright gave our ancient ancestors an evolutionary advantage over other apes by reducing the costs of foraging for food.”
• Science Daily: “Study Identifies Energy Efficiency As Reason For Evolution Of Upright Walking.”
• Breitbart: “Why did humans evolve to walk upright?  Perhaps because it’s just plain easier.”
• MSNBC News: “Why we quit aping around, began walking.”

Here, we compare human and adult chimpanzee locomotor energetics and biomechanics to determine links among anatomy, gait, and cost.  Our study focuses on two primary questions.  First, do adult chimpanzees follow the pattern of costs found previously for juveniles?  Second, do differences in anatomy and gait between bipedal and quadrupedal walking, as well as between chimpanzees and humans, explain observed differences in cost?  Using this biomechanical approach to link differences in anatomy and gait to cost, we then examine what changes, if any, would lower the cost of bipedalism for an early hominin, such that bipedalism would be more economical than the ape-like quadrupedalism of the last common ancestor.

Our results, therefore, support the hypothesis that energetics played an important role in the evolution of bipedalism.  Unfortunately, a lack of postcranial evidence from the earliest hominins and their immediate forebears prevents us from testing the hypothesis that locomotor economy provided the initial evolutionary advantage for hominin bipedalism.  However, regardless of the context under which bipedalism evolved, our biomechanical analysis of adult chimpanzee costs, coupled with previous analyses of early hominin pelvic and hindlimb morphology, suggests that improved locomotor economy may have accrued very early within the hominin lineage.  Future fossil discoveries from the earliest hominins will resolve whether this energetic advantage was in fact the key factor in the evolution of hominin bipedalism.

You have just seen another gratuitous, egregious, rambunctious, atrocious, nefarious, preposterous, loquacious, bodacious example of Darwin foot-kissing (cf. 11/19/2004).  Measurement of modern-day chimpanzees and humans has nothing to do with the evolution of upright posture, unless you already have sold your brain to the idea of evolution.  What does it mean?  Only that five chimpanzees, under artificially controlled conditions, spent a little more energy walking around on the ground with their knuckles than four human subjects did walking upright.  Big deal!  Guess what: chimpanzees spend much of their time climbing trees, for which they are well adapted.
    To get really rigorous here (as scientists are supposed to be), this study cannot really tell us anything about the entire population of chimpanzees or humans.  Why not measure a really fit monkey with a morbidly obese man?  Pygmy chimps vs marmosets and mandrills and orang-utans?  Tall people vs short people?  You cannot justify measuring five apes and four people on a treadmill and then making broad-brush generalizations about all apes and all hominins and all people for all time.  And you certainly cannot justify linking them historically through an unobservable process of evolution that happened once if at all, and cannot be repeated.  Why didn’t they ask Bonzo if he is envious of his human friends?  He seems pretty happy being all chimp.  He’s certainly more energy efficient moving about in the trees.
    To get an idea of how many major anatomical changes would be required to evolve upright locomotion, re-read our report on human endurance running.  What’s really disgusting is to see so many science reporters sucking up to Darwinian foolishness and spewing it out uncritically to the public, time after time.  Progress will only be made when science reporters acquire a new trait: an immaterial trait called courage.  Don’t expect it any time soon, though.  It requires intelligent design and purpose, and there’s a prerequisite: common sense.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

1. Precision formation flying:  The Scientist expressed amazement at the precision of key factors in development of the body plan in fruit flies.  The levels of expression in the bicoid factor “suggest a surprising level of accuracy in regulation of protein controlling body plan development.”  Words like “stunning,” “surprising” and “more complicated than we think” season the article.  “It’s very difficult to imagine how this could work,” said one.  The original papers on this process were published in Cell and summarized in a review article by Matthew Gibson.¹
       A press release from Princeton elaborated on the precision of this process.  During development, it says, “cells make decisions to become one part of the body or another by a process so precise that they must be close to counting every available signaling molecule they receive from the mother.”  The article also says, “This signaling requires a sensitivity approaching the limits set by basic physical principles.”  One result of being able to measure things in biology these precisely was mentioned in the first paragraph: these are “discoveries that could change how scientists think not just about flies, but about life in general.”  The press release mentioned nothing about evolution.
2. Chromosome triage:  Cells maintain a special “chromosome glue” called cohesin that can repair damaged DNA and keep sister chromatids together during cell division, reported EurekAlert.  The repair kit comes ready for emergencies: “Their results show that DNA damage can reactivate cohesin, which runs counter to the commonly held view that cohesion only arises during the DNA copying that takes place before cell division.”
       A paper on DNA repair was published in Nature last month,² titled, “Chromatin dynamics and the preservation of genetic information.”  After mentioning the harm that can come from double-stranded breaks in DNA, the abstract said, “Recent work indicates that chromatin – the fibres into which DNA is packaged with a proteinaceous structural polymer – has an important role in initiating, propagating and terminating this cellular response to DNA damage.”
       Science also chimed in on this subject, with a Perspectives article by Erwan Watrin and Jan-Michael Peters describing “How and why the genome sticks together.”³  Two papers in the issue give a new vista on the work a cell does to protect its library: “cohesion can be established in response to DNA damage independently of DNA replication,” they said.  “This overturns a long-held belief that cohesion is strictly coupled to DNA synthesis.  The papers also imply that DNA damage may have a broader impact than previously thought, triggering genomewide protection of chromosome integrity.”
3. Word processing foremen:  Non-coding sections of DNA may act as punctuation, an article on the Times Online reported.  This is further evidence that the concept of “junk DNA” is defunct. For years, evolutionary geneticists were puzzled by long stretches of apparently useless DNA: “This is puzzling, because scientists thought that evolution would fine-tune the human genome to preserve the essential bits and discard the rest,” wrote Anjana Ahuja for the Times. 

   Now an international team of scientists has discovered that junk DNA might regulate the activity of the genes they surround.  While genes do the hard work of making proteins, the junk DNA could be responsible for starting and stopping protein production.  “Some of the junk DNA might be considered punctuation marks – commas and full stops that help make sense of the coding portion of the genome,” says Dr Victoria Lunyak, of the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, one of the authors of a paper published in Science.  Another analogy is to think of genes as building labourers, and the surrounding pieces of junk DNA as foremen.

   This almost makes it sound like the “junk DNA” is in some sense more important than the genes – that is, if managers are more important than laborers – a dubious proposition.
4. Time to unwind:  A press release from Cornell shows an unwinding device at work: helicase, a molecular machine that unwinds DNA strands during replication.  “The research found that the helicase appears to actively exert a force onto the fork and separate the two strands,” the article said.  This shows that helicase is not a passive device.  It really works at its vital job.
5. A bouquet with love:  You may have heard of telomeres, the tips of chromosomes, as mere caps on DNA to keep it from unraveling.  Cell published a new study that shows that these DNA ends organize into a “bouquet” that is essential for spindle pole formation during meiotic cel