Solar System Solved?   08/30/2007    
Those who deal in models of the origin of the solar system sometimes have to entertain themselves to overcome grief.  See if you can detect this attitude in the following Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week from Space.com:

“This has been a stumbling block for 30 years,” said Mordecai-Marc Mac Low, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, of planet formation theories.  “The reason is that boulders tend to fall into the star in a celestial blink of an eye.  Some mechanism had to be found to prevent them from being dragged into a star.”
    The solution: Together, many boulders can join to fight a cosmic headwind that otherwise would doom them.

This is a real-life demonstration of the Harris cartoon that shows a scientist doing a derivation with complex equations on the blackboard, with one intriguing step inserted, “Then a miracle occurs.”  Titling this story “Planet Formation Mystery Solved” yields an even bigger chuckle.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dumb Ideas

Cosmological observations are so deeply intertwined with theory, it is often hard to tell the one from the other.  The hole could be real, or it could be an artifact of the theory and techniques used.  Some cosmologists (see the BBC article) are claiming this a confirmation of dark energy.  ScienceNow said it contradicts the inflation theory.  And it quoted one astronomer who thought the conclusion was premature.  The Minnesota team said their announcement will need independent confirmation, so it is unwise to lean too heavily on the reports.  Still, it’s fun to see scientists get surprised once in awhile.
Next headline on:  Cosmology

Solar System News   08/28/2007    
A flurry of discoveries about the Sun’s family has some scientists smiling and others furrowing their brows.  Astrobiologists, as usual, are wielding their divining rods, looking for water.  Some of these reports surfaced at the European Planetary Science Congress last week at Potsdam, Germany; see agenda and press releases at Europlanet.

1. Basalt assault:  How did small objects in the solar system get hot enough to melt?  The European Space Agency is baffled to find evidence of basalt on asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, reported Science Daily.  Dr. Rene Duffard said, “We do not know whether we have discovered two basaltic asteroids with a very particular and previously unseen mineralogical composition or two objects of non basaltic nature that have to be included in a totally new taxonomic class.”  See also the Space.com report.
       The Dawn Spacecraft, scheduled to launch Sept. 26, may be able to find out more about the asteroid belt when it orbits Vesta in 2011 and Ceres in 2015.  Basalt has been observed on Vesta, an asteroid considered large enough to sustain internal heating.  Before now, basalt-containing asteroids were thought to be fragments from Vesta.
2. Comet panspermia:  Chandra Wickramasinghe (Cardiff U) is still pushing panspermia, claiming comets are cosmic storks that seeded the Earth with life.  PhysOrg discussed his investigation of comet interiors based on the Deep Impact and Stardust missions, and quoted his conclusion: “The findings of the comet missions, which surprised many, strengthen the argument for panspermia.  We now have a mechanism for how it could have happened.  All the necessary elements – clay, organic molecules and water – are there.  The longer time scale and the greater mass of comets make it overwhelmingly more likely that life began in space than on earth.”
3. Jupiter: Earth’s protector?  A report on News@Nature questions whether Jupiter is Earth’s bouncer, shielding our planet from impacting comets.  This was a claim in Ward and Brownlee’s book Rare Earth and was also listed in Richards and Gonzalez’ book The Privileged Planet as an indicator of Earth’s good fortune.  Now, the case does not seem as clear cut.  National Geographic also reported on the study presented at the European Planetary Science Congress last week.  Astronomers Jonathan Horner and Barrie Jones concluded that Earth is no better or worse off with Jupiter present.  Their model found, strangely, that the highest risk to Earth would have come if Jupiter were about the mass of Saturn.  Many factors affect the risk analysis, so some disagreement remains.  Science Now mentioned that asteroids and different classes of comets respond differently to the gravitational pull of Jupiter.
4. Comet bomb:  Speaking of comets affecting Earth, PhysOrg presented a story from scientists at UC Santa Barbara that “a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mammals.”  They based this on iridium levels and microspherules with traces of gas said to be of extraterrestrial origin.  The cometary explosion would have affected ocean currents, ice sheets, and global climate, they claimed.
5. Enceladus no aquarium:  Don’t count on finding life at Enceladus, the erupting moon of Saturn, reported a press release from the University of Illinois.  A new model by Susan Kieffer invokes non-watery processes that don’t require a hot interior.  Her model is being added to the mix of possible explanations for this small moon’s activity.
6. Sharp moon:  The European Space Agency is using images from the SMART-1 spacecraft to try to piece together a story of our moon’s volcanic history.  They claim that “Different ‘pulses’ of volcanic activity in lunar history created units of lava on the surface,” yet did not mention a mechanism that would re-awaken the moon periodically between long periods of silence.
       The BBC News reported that Arizona State University is scanning Apollo moon photos at high resolution and releasing them on a new Apollo moon archive website.  These ultra-sharp orbital photos, taken from Apollo 15, 16, and 17, have been “locked away in freezers by Nasa [sic] to preserve them.”  Digital scanning at high resolution and contrast depth will allow these rarely-seen images to be widely viewed for the first time since the 1970s.
7. Uranus ring circus:  Now that the rings of Uranus can be seen edge-on for the first time in 42 years, scientists are taking advantage of the rare alignment to study them, reported EurekAlert, the European Southern Observatory and the BBC News.  A group at UC Berkeley was surprised that “their images show that the rings are changing much more quickly than researchers had previously believed.”  In particular, the inner rings are more prominent now than they were when Voyager 2 flew by in 1987.  A press release from UC Berkeley mentions that similar, dramatic changes have been detected in the rings of Neptune and Saturn, because a lot of forces act on the small dust grains in the rings.  “These forces include pressure from sunlight, drag produced as the dust plows through ionized plasma around Uranus, and even drag from the planet’s magnetic field.”  Impacts from larger bodies can also affect the rings.
8. Martian life redox:  A German astrobiologist is claiming that life could still exist on Mars, provided it uses hydrogen peroxide and water.  Science Now reported how Dr Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, looked at the Viking soil test results and speculated that “hydrogen peroxide may have been more suitable for organisms adapting to the cold, dry environment of Mars.”  A 1979 Viking image adorned Astronomy Picture of the Day along with Houtkooper’s “speculative question.”  While admitting “such speculation is not definitive,” it justified the story thus: “debating possibilities for life on Mars has again proven to be fun and a magnet for media attention.”  But Ker Than reported for Space.com that other scientists consider Houtkooper’s claim “bogus.”  Norman Pace (U of Colorado) said, “I don’t consider the chemical results to be particularly credible in light of the harsh conditions that Mars offers.”  He also noted that hydrogen peroxide is deadly to terrestrial cells except when cells produce it locally to combat bacteria.
9. Titan your seat belts:  When the Huygens probe descended through Titan’s atmosphere in January 2005, it had a bumpy ride.  EurekAlert reported that Cassini scientists working with weather balloon specialists are getting a handle on understanding how turbulence affected the probe’s descent.  The feedback from Titan may actually help improve weather balloon sensor design.  “We went to Titan to learn about that mysterious body and its atmosphere,” said Ralph Lorenz (Johns Hopkins U); “it’s neat that there are lessons from Titan that can be usefully applied here on Earth.”  The Cassini site also echoed the story that originated from the European Space Agency.
       Another story on Titan from the European Planetary Science Congress concerned the erosion of Titan’s methane (see Europlanet press release).  Vasili Dimitrov said “The conditions of Titan’s accretion and evolution are poorly understood,” admitting that the long-term storage of methane on the giant moon is a problem.  “Methane drives the chemical reactions in Titan’s atmosphere but, because it’s so highly reactive and therefore short-lived, it must be replenished,” he said.  He suggested that it might be stored in water-ice clathrates, like crystal cages, but the best packing ratio would require temperatures close to absolute zero.  How and where Titan’s methane reservoir was stored is an unsolved problem.
10. All you wanted to know about Hyperion:  The Cassini mission released a PDF presentation about Hyperion by James Bauer (JPL) and Peter Thomas (Cornell), describing all that is known from Voyager and Cassini about the “sponge moon” and its anomalous carbon dioxide deposits on surface.  Notable facts include the low density (40%), the dark deposits on crater floors, and the apparent match between the dark material on Hyperion and on Iapetus.  Speaking of Iapetus, Cassini is aimed at a super-close flyby of the black-and-white moon on September 10.  On the way it will make fairly close passes by Rhea and Titan on August 30 and 31.  Cassini’s last good look at Iapetus was from more than 76,000 miles away in 2005.  In less than two weeks, the spacecraft flies within 1,000 miles of one of the most intriguing moons of the solar system.
11. Saturn mysteries:  Charles Q. Choi wrote for Space.com that the mysteries at Saturn are mounting.  He catalogued some of the mysteries that Cassini has revealed and so far been unable to answer, including the north polar hexagon, the purity of Saturn’s ring material, the well-defined structures within the rings, the spin rate of the planet and the tugging effect by the little moon Enceladus, and the “energy crisis” of unexplained heat in Saturn’s atmosphere.  Dave Mosher wrote last week in Space.com about another Saturnian mystery that scientists cannot explain: the electrically-charged torus around Saturn is “a lopsided mess.”  For those wanting to just enjoy the pictures, Space.com posted a “Best Cassini Image” gallery for visitors to vote on.
12. Something nu under the sun:  “After 4.5 billion years, sunshine finally figured out,” said Andrea Thompson in her headline for Space.com.  That’s odd, since recorded human history only extends back about one millionth of that time.  Anyway, Princeton researchers using an Italian neutrino detector have detected the low-energy neutrinos expected from current models of solar fusion reactions.  Neutrinos are notated by the Greek letter nu.
        Solar energy was blamed for stripping Mars of its water, according to Space.com.  Scientists reporting at the European Planetary Science Congress said that “The water might have been blown into space long ago by strong gusts of solar winds, new satellite observations suggest.”  Effects of solar flares were studied by four spacecraft simultaneously: NASA’s Mars Express, Venus Express and Earth-orbiting GEOS satellite, and the European Space Agency’s SOHO solar orbiter.  High-energy particles were detected at Venus, Earth and Mars simultaneously.  The Earth’s atmosphere is protected by its global magnetic field; Mars is not so blessed.

These are great days for discovery about our solar neighborhood.  So much is happening in planetary science, it’s hard to take it all in.  Be sure to separate the observations from the speculations.  Sometimes that’s like trying to unbutter toast.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Geology • Physics

You, too, could leave tracks that will allow future scientists to speculate.  For fun, leave a note with your next footprint saying, “Today’s date is August 28, 1,598,251 BC.”
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils

1. Big insects:  Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory surmised that insects were larger in the past because there was more oxygen in the air.  “In the late Paleozoic Era, with atmospheric oxygen levels reaching record highs, some insects evolved into giants,” the press release claimed.  “When oxygen levels returned to lower levels, the insect giants went extinct.”  The article did not explain how oxygen could cause mutations that would make insects bigger.  It also did not explain how other systems in the insects would evolve to compensate for the gigantism.  It just said that they did: “This would allow larger-sized insects—even giants—to evolve.”  These questions are in addition to the conundrum of why it would be considered evolution for insects to be larger and more numerous in the past than they are today.  Speculating about how 35% oxygen levels might have exacerbated forest fires is left as an exercise.  See also Science Daily.
2. Radio bats:  The horseshoe bats of Sardinia tune into their own frequency, reported EurekAlert.  This allows each species to communicate on its own “private bandwidth” in order to “avoid all confusion” between mainland bats and island residents.  Although gene flow between related populations is well documented, the article did not explain how the sophisticated sonar of these bats arose by evolution nor how it diversified.  Nevertheless, evolution took the credit: “Once again, islands turned out to be excellent natural laboratories to explore evolutionary patterns and processes.”
3. Evolution helps you stay unevolved:  Evolution seems synonymous with change, but some species manage to stay the same even in changing environments.  One would think this property, called canalization, to be the antithesis of evolution, but an article on EurekAlert about plants found evolution in the lack of change.  “‘Don’t ever change’ isn’t just a romantic platitude.  It’s a solid evolutionary strategy,” the article quizzically began.  Even though canalization “keeps you in the zone” away from evolutionary change, “in many cases it’s better to just shake off the minor fluctuations in the environment because in evolution, there are optimal traits to have, a place you want to be.”  Evolution, therefore, explains non-evolution.
4. Symbiosis kumbaya:  A moth and a cactus live in such tight company, neither can survive without the other.  An article about this phenomenon, called mutualistic symbiosis, appeared in EurekAlert.  The work of Nat Holland (Rice University) was highlighted.  Though the short article did not mention evolution specifically, it can be safely assumed that Holland, an “assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology,” was not out to discover any non-evolutionary explanations for this remarkable relationship.
5. Panda thumbs an evolutionary ride:  Those lovable giant pandas are not an “evolutionary dead end,” declared an article on EurekAlert.  A Chinese team “has found that the decline of the species can be linked directly to human activities rather than a genetic inability to adapt and evolve.”  No mention was made of how giant pandas evolved in the first place, nor how they turned out to be successful in their natural niches, but that was not a liability for Darwin.  It only meant that “Our research suggests we have to revise our thinking about the evolutionary prospects for the giant panda.”
6. Snakes as evolutionarily success stories:  “Snakes are very evolutionarily successful,” said a researcher reported by PhysOrg who found a novel strategy snakes employ to avoid starvation: lowering their basal metabolic rates.  How snakes achieved this remarkable survival skill was left unstated, but evolution took credit once again: “Understanding the physiology that allows them to succeed in low-energy environments will help scientists further their understanding of the snakes’ evolution and their adaptation to their current ecosystems.”

We need to understand how the Darwin Party achieves its consensus that evolution is a fact.  They do it by assuming it.  Like the campers in the woods trying to figure out how to open their tuna can, they simply state, “assume a can opener.”  Assumption performs the miracles without all the hard work.  Say this often enough, and every camper can get on handsomely by assuming can openers and whatever other tools real campers used to have to pack.
    “Evolution takes credit,” this entry began.  That’s true in another sense, too.  Evolutionists charge their explanations on Darwin Party credit cards.  These attractive cards have the advantage of never requiring payback.  Why?  Look what happens when whistleblowers try holding the carriers accountable (03/25/2007).  As with citizens in a town controlled by the mob, it’s much safer to just let them run up a bill and pay it out of the public trust.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Mammals • Zoology

If you take out the evolutionary dates and assumptions, the facts show this: modern-looking gorilla teeth of unknown age were found fossilized in water-laid sediments in Ethiopia.  Where is the evolution?  There is none.  The ancestry/phylogeny talk is all inference based on the usual dogmatic evolutionary rules that require every fossil bone to decorate Charlie’s tree somehow, even if the fit is poor.
    They now have to believe that gorilla evolution was even more rapid from the time of some mythical common ancestor that must also have evolved rapidly from earlier primates.  They even tried to wave the magic wand of “convergent evolution” to explain some of the modern features.  Their whole story just got even more convoluted and implausible than it already was.  The story was already more gap than bone.  Some nice transitional form would have been welcome – but not modern-looking gorilla teeth farther back than they were supposed to exist.
    Nothing in the observable evidence suggests millions of years, nor any evolution or any ancestry between chimps, gorillas and humans.  Don’t fall for the evolutionists’ talking points.  Instead, follow their eyes.  The surprised looks are more revealing than their claims.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils • Mammals

What freedom-loving student wouldn’t be outraged to discover that his high school science teacher is teaching a theory as indisputable fact, and that university professors unmercifully crush any fellow scientists who dare question the prevailing system of belief?  This isn’t the latest Hollywood comedy; it’s a disturbing new documentary that will shock anyone who thinks all scientists are free to follow the evidence wherever it may lead....
    Ben Stein, the lovable, monotone teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years is on a journey to answer one of the biggest questions ever asked: Were we designed or are we simply the end result of an ancient mud puddle struck by lightning?  Stein, who is also a lawyer, an economist, a former presidential speechwriter, author and social commentator, is stunned by what he finds on his journey.  He discovers an elitist scientific establishment that has traded in its skepticism for dogma.  But even worse, along the way, Stein uncovers a long line of biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their reputations destroyed and their careers ruined by a scientific establishment that allows absolutely no dissent from Charles Darwin’s theory of random mutation and natural selection.

Well, this is an interesting development.  Will the Darwin attack machine try to take on Ben Stein, or just ignore him?  Do we finally have a courageous reporter unafraid to ask the hard questions and stand up to institutionalized suppression?  What will the NCSE do to forestall a media crisis, right when they are trying to make Darwin Day an international event?  They certainly have ample warning, so this will be a battle royale worth watching.  We just hope that the comedy-documentary format will not detract from the scientific and philosophical flaws of Darwinism.  These need airing in serious circles among trained minds.  Still, sometimes a media focus can help shake a stalled discussion loose.  Stein’s appeal to the rebel instinct may attract some youthful bystanders to ask questions.
    Most likely the Darwin Party will try to portray Ben Stein as a clown who doesn’t know what he is talking about, and treat the film like a small roadside protest that can be safely ignored as Big Science marches on in the Darwin parade.  We know their tactics: whitewash the cases of suppression in the film as small-time aberrations, lie about all the overwhelming evidence for evolution, pick on small flaws in the film but ignore the main points, and marginalize Stein and film fans as religious nuts.  It appears that Stein and the producers will not take being pigeonholed so easily.  They intend this to start a nationwide debate.  We’ll see.  The Darwin Party has amassed a huge arsenal to protect its idol.  The thing about idols, though, is: the bigger they are, the harder they fall.  Pieces of the Darwin idol may one day become trophies as coveted as pieces of the Berlin Wall.
Next headline on:  Darwin • Intelligent Design • Education • Media

Crows Use Tools on Tools   08/21/2007    
Crows can use one tool on another to get food.  A report in Science Daily says they appear to use analogical reasoning, not just trial and error, to figure out how to manipulate objects.  They used a short stick to get a longer stick out of a toolbox in order to reach a snack too far for the short tool.  In this, “The birds’ tool-use skills rival those seen among great apes, according to the researchers” at University of Auckland.
    Analogical reasoning was thought to be at the core of human innovation.  One said, “It was surprising to find that these ‘bird-brained’ creatures performed at the same levels as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem.”

Let’s be good empirical Darwinists and take the evidence where it leads.  Chimps evolved into birds, which evolved into humans.  Mustn’t let species bias cloud our reasoning, now.  Darwinists have made a big deal over intelligence as evidence of our evolutionary kinship to apes.  Now, having to eat crow at this finding, they must be feeling in the mood for some Old Crow at the Crow Bar.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

Compare the benefit of biomimetic research with the utter uselessness of Darwinian speculation.  The nonsense going on at U of Chicago, the Center of Tetrapod Evolution Fability (01/16/2007 commentary), is wasting our time.  They cannot connect the fossil dots in any believable sequence between fish and amphibians, but have the gall to lie to us: first, about the “shrinking evolutionary gap between fins and limbs,” and secondly by denying coelacanth is a living fossil.  Do they even know what a living fossil is?  Here was a creature known only from the fossil record, thought to be extinct from the age of dinosaurs, that was found alive and well in 1938.  It doesn’t matter whether it is considered a transitional form now, because it was thought to be so by all evolutionists then.  When they found that it does not use its fins for supporting its body on land, they had to quickly change their fable in light of the facts in front of them.  They’ve learned nothing in the intervening 70 years and have done no one any good.  Evolution is useless, vapid, evanescent speculation about things they cannot know and cannot prove, holding us hostage to promissory notes about insight that turns out to be positively anti-knowledge (see Luther Sunderland comments).
    The other story, by contrast, has real value.  The researchers saw an efficient design in nature.  They were inspired to create a similar mechanism that could improve our lives.  Which kind of science do you prefer gets the government funding?  If the rascally Darwinist usurpers ever get ejected from the lab for the crime of impersonating a scientist, civilization won’t miss them.  Real scientists will suddenly see a surge in funding and resources that had been wasted on fruitless storytelling.  Help mankind: fire a Darwinist.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Darwinian Evolution • Marine Biology • Biomimetics • Physics

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.
    “We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.

One of our readers thought that Szostak’s entry deserved to be called “Stupid Evolution Quote of the Century.”  But then, there are already too many entries in that category.  Tryouts are opening for the millennium class.
    Reality check: they are not creating life from scratch; they are copying existing technology.  To really make life from scratch, they would have to start by inventing the universe.  Copying the packaging, coding, and metabolism of existing life is a huge, huge head start.  These guys think they are dumber than Darwinism, and they are right.  Are they the ones you would trust to tell us that synthetic biology will be safe?
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Cell Biology • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Mystery of the Ultraconserved Elements, Cont.   08/18/2007    
In 2004, Gill Bejerano et al reported ultraconserved elements in the human genome (05/27/2004).  These were non-coding regions that, for some unknown reason, showed no evolution between mouse and human – a time span over tens of millions of years.  Since many of these ultraconserved regions are also found in bird genomes, they added that some genetic regions have maintained 100% sequence similarity for 300 million years.
    Now, Bejerano and others have reported in Science that these ultraconserved elements are also ultraselected.¹  It appears that strong purifying selection acts three times stronger on these regions than on genes.  The reason for the ultraconserved regions “remains a mystery,” they said.  They could offer no explanation for why natural selection would prevent changes to these sections that are 200 base pairs long and longer.  Whatever they are there for, “These data argue that ultraconserved elements are currently, as well as historically, strongly constrained functional elements.”
Update 09/06/2007: A press release from Berkeley Lab talked about this, calling it a “major challenge to our understanding of how highly conserved elements of the genome persist.”  Mice with one of the ultraconserved elements knocked out appeared to do just fine.  Their paper appeared in the September 2007 issue of PLoS Biology.²

Evolutionists had predicted that once genes could be deciphered, there would be a clear branching pattern of evolution retracing the assumed millions of years of steady evolutionary change.  The more “diverged” the groups, the more the genetic differences would be found.  Well, that picture has not materialized.  So now, Darwinites, since you have displayed ineptitude in finding the way to the future of biology, will you get out of the driver’s seat?
Next headline on:  Genetics • Darwinism

I imagined a universe full of tiny, hardy life.  Why not?  Microbes can live comfortably in the most absurdly unfriendly reaches of the planet.  If these little creatures can survive in volcanoes, at the bottom of the ocean, embedded in glacial ice, and even in countless human guts, then they must be able to exist on other planets!  Life must be absolutely everywhere!
    I didn’t know then that there was an entire community of scientists who felt exactly the same way.  I certainly didn’t expect that before I’d even graduated from college, I’d be working with them.

Another student spent her days studying the geology of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.  Scientists believe that it has a vast liquid water ocean beneath a layer of ice at the surface.  She analyzed images of Europa from the Galileo mission, looking for areas of the surface whose appearance changed over time and trying to determine if those changes are what you would expect if there were a liquid ocean.  She thinks the possibilities for life on Europa are especially exciting.  ’As soon as I heard about Europa, I thought, ‘Oh, awesome.  Let’s look for lobsters!‘’ she said.  So far, she hasn’t discovered any Europan crustaceans, but she’s enjoyed learning more about geology and approaching biology and chemistry from an astronomy perspective.

All of us got to take a week-long field trip to the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, home of the Allen Telescope Array, where Jill Tarter, SETI’s director of research and the inspiration for Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, explained how the telescopes work and what research they’ll be used for.  Several of us even camped overnight in tents under the array.  It wasn’t very scientifically useful, but it was definitely something to write home about.

Here’s a suggestion for them.  The name “Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates” is way dullsville and has no catchy acronym.  Nor does it convey what the SETI Camp is all about.  It fails to encapsulate the experience of being there.  They need something that connotes vivid imagery and action, where anything can become vibrant and moving and animated, where even stars, bubbles and volcanos can spring to life.  Maybe they should call it Fantasia.
    Should you awaken someone who is enjoying a fun dream?  What’s the harm of a blissful fantasy?  Even if life is never found, and if the evidence continues to go against them (read Michael Egnor’s comments and see the 07/27/2007 and 02/15/2007 entries), why spoil someone’s party? (read Larry Caldwell’s comments).  After all, lots of internet gamers and denizens of Second Life take their fantasies very seriously.  Maybe SETI Camp keeps them away from a life of idleness and crime.  Maybe something good will come from it, like chemistry did from alchemy, even if the hoped-for dream never materializes.  Their youthful zeal will advance our knowledge of extrasolar planets, the geology of planetary moons, the adaptations of extremophiles, and mineral content of meteors, with or without mythical lobsters under Europa’s ice.  And the Intelligent Design community can continue to harvest the irony of Contact (12/03/2005) whether or not the dreamers catch on.  What’s the matter, isn’t this all worth a little taxpayer money?  Still, it’s kind of sad....
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • SETI • Dumb Ideas

Evolution has crafted thousands of enzymes that are efficient catalysts for a plethora of reactions.  Human attempts at enzyme design trail far behind, but may benefit from exploiting evolutionary tactics.

Chemical reactions in living organisms are catalysed by enzymes, the vast majority of which are proteins.  These finely tuned catalysts are the result of billions of years of evolution, and far surpass anything yet created by humans.  Indeed, our ability to design enzymes, on the basis of our knowledge of protein structure and reaction mechanisms, can most charitably be described as primitive.

Although proteins have won the fitness contest of natural selection to become the pre-eminent enzymes, billions of years ago life may have started with RNA enzymes – ribozymes – in a putative RNA world that pre-dated proteins and DNA.⁴  The RNA bond-forming (ligation) reaction is a favourite of those studying evolution from an RNA world, because it is presumed to be the crucial chemical step of RNA self-replication.  Szostak and fellow molecular biologist David Bartel were the first to isolate a ribozyme ligase, using artificial selection.  Their technique is the prototypical method for the in vitro evolution of ribozymes, and has been adapted for protein enzymes by Seelig and Szostak in the current study.

Even a middle school biology teacher or an NCSE staff member would know this is not natural selection.  How can the premiere science journal in the world allow this egregious an example of the fallacy of equivocation to make it into print?  Happens all the time, folks.  If the logical inconsistency was obvious to you, you’re wiser than eggheads at UC Santa Cruz and the editors of Nature.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

When the first four-legged animals sprouted fingers and toes, they took an ancient genetic recipe and simply extended the cooking time, say University of Florida scientists writing in Wednesday’s issue of the journal PLoS ONE.
    Even sharks – which have existed for more than half a billion years – have the recipe for fingers in their genetic cookbook – not to eat them, but to grow them.

“We’ve uncovered a surprising degree of genetic complexity in place at an early point in the evolution of appendages,” said developmental biologist Martin Cohn, an associate professor with the UF departments of zoology and anatomy and cell biology and a member of the UF Genetics Institute.  “Genetic processes were not simple in early aquatic vertebrates only to become more complex as the animals adapted to terrestrial living.  They were complex from the outset.  Some major evolutionary innovations, like digits at the end of limbs, may have been achieved by prolonging the activity of a genetic program that existed in a common ancestor of sharks and bony fishes.”

It’s the only possible answer because it is the only answer the Darwin Party will allow in the arena, which has become a circus.  Let’s all do Steve Martin’s rendition of “When the shark bites...” while re-reading the quote at top right of this page.
Update: National Geographic was quick to join the feeding frenzy.  “The discovery pushes back the date of the evolutionary ‘fin to limb’ advance by some 135 million years,” the article said.  Which quote do you think should win?  The one above or this one by Marcus C. Davis?

“Dramatically different ways of being—new forms, new functions—may evolve through relatively minor adjustments to existing genes and gene functions,” Davis said.
    “It only requires modifications—‘tweaks’—if you will, to previously existing genetic systems,” he said.
    “A symphony can play dramatically different compositions by changing the role each musician plays, [but] only on occasion are instruments added or lost.”

And here you thought all along that symphonies were played by intelligent design.  Not this one.  It’s Darwin’s overture to his comic opera Farcical, dopus 135M, starring the fat lady who always sings last, Tinker Bell.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Marine Biology • Genetics • Dumb Ideas

Must have been a bad day in dinotopia.  Anyone know of a modern example of hundreds of large animals like elephants or giraffes all being buried at the same time over many miles while grazing peacefully along a river bank?  We were once taught the present is the key to the past.  Remember the specimen found under the North Sea? (04/25/2006).
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

Gratitude Protects Against Health Loss   08/15/2007    
A study in the “new science of gratitude” showed that thankfulness is good therapy.  Researchers at UC Davis and Mississippi University for Women tracked 12 female patients who kept journals of their hospital stays while receiving organ transplants.  A control group just reported “medication side-effects, how they felt about life overall, how connected they were to others and how they felt about the upcoming day.”  Another group answered the same questions but was asked to add five things they were thankful for, and why.  Guess which group fared better.
    “After 21 days, mental health and general wellbeing scores had risen for patients in the gratitude group but declined for those in the control group,” the article continued.  “Patients in the control group also reported a loss of vitality, while the grateful patients experienced no change.”

Gratitude is a healthful attitude.  It’s a Biblical attitude.  The Bible is filled with admonitions to be thankful (e.g., I Thessalonians 5, Philippians 4, Colossians 3).  Even in a hospital, there are many things to be thankful for.  The patients in this study should have been grateful that donors made their organs available for transplanting, and that medicine has advanced far enough to make transplanting a life-saving option, and that the body is filled with wondrous repair mechanisms (see next entry).  It should be easy to list dozens of blessings.  How many things can you count right now?  Don’t do it just for preventive medicine; really be thankful.  If you do it just for the health benefits, you’re not being grateful; you’re being selfish.
    Even with our modern affluence, gratitude is in short supply these days.  How many of your coworkers ever express true appreciation for the blessings they enjoy?  More often you are likely to hear the latest gripe about corporate politics, working conditions, the traffic on the commute, low wages, how hard I worked without being noticed, the slop the cafeteria is serving, or whatever.  A day living in North Korea might cure a lot of that.  Even the cheerful gossip often suggests cynicism – something stupid the boss did, an egregious mistake someone made, or the like – it’s the laughter of fools (Ecclesiastes 7:6), not the positive, uplifting joy of thankfulness.  People would look at you funny if you said, “Wow, what a beautiful day!  Is this a great country, or what?  I’m so glad to feel terrific and have this awesome job.  I can hardly wait to get to work!”  But then, guess who is likely to be in better health.
    Lack of gratitude rides on a current of pride and selfishness.  It conveys the attitude “I deserve better than this” or “the world owes me something.”  No you don’t, and no, the world doesn’t.  We’re all sinners and deserve judgment, remember?  We should be thankful for each moment of mercy.  The beginning of your list might be, “I’m very thankful for another day in which I did not get what I deserve.”
    Thanklessness and its root of pride and selfishness also underlies much of the fixation on biological evolution.    It makes God angry.  Paul wrote in Romans 1 that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because the truth about God is self-evident within them and has been revealed to them through what has been made (created).  In spite of the evidence, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.  And here’s the tie-in: what is producing the stream of atheistic rage against creationism (08/08/2007) spewed by the sourpuss spokespeople of the Darwin Party?  “because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful”
    Some people need a heart transplant.  Recommended surgeon: the Great Physician.  Offices conveniently located throughout time and space.  Hours: 24 x 7.
Next headline on:  Health • Bible

1. Repair shop:  A study reported by Lawrence Berkeley Lab indicated that double-stranded break repairs tend to take place in specialized locations like “repair shops” in the nucleus.  They have “found evidence that indeed there are specific regions where broken DNA is concentrated for repair.”
2. Damage suppressor:  Some sites in chromosomes are more subject to breakage than others.  A report from Tufts University reported by EurekAlert said that tumors can result from stalled replication at these sites.  Fortunately, there is a “tumor suppressor gene” whose presence is important for preventing tumor formation.  Most of the time, the article says, broken strands are repaired correctly.  Cancer can begin when the repair process goes awry, deleting or rearranging segments of DNA.
3. Speed translator:  Researchers at Einstein School of Medicine found that RNA polymerase can translate up to 70 base pairs per second – much faster than has been previously reported.  The molecular machine stalls and pauses for unknown reasons along the strand, however, making the actual throughput less.  The researchers believe that the pauses are somehow involved in gene regulation.
4. First response firefighters:  A study from Texas A&M University reported by EurekAlert found that two independent pathways converge on repair: chromatin remodeling and DNA checkpoint and repair.  “When molecular disaster strikes, causing structural damage to DNA, players in two important pathways talk to each other to help contain the wreckage,” the article began.  “....If DNA damage is like a fire that spreads when impaired cells divide and multiply, then the DNA checkpoint and repair system can be considered a first-response firebreak,” the article stated.  This stops cell division and allows the cell time to assess the damage.  Depending on the damage report, “The ‘fire’ is either doused by DNA repair or by programmed destruction of the cell.”
       The chromatin remodeling pathway, which shuffles DNA around nucleosomes to regulate access to DNA, is also involved, the report continued.  Modification of histones by the large “ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling complexes” serves to regulate the DNA checkpoint pathway.  The article mentioned that this pathway is conserved (i.e., unevolved) in all eukaryotes, from yeast to humans.
5. Come again?  A sample of the complexity of DNA damage response can be found in the jargon of this paper from PNAS by Laura A. Lindsey-Boltz and Aziz Sancar at University of North Carolina School of Medicine, titled “Reconstitution of a human ATR-mediated checkpoint response to damaged DNA.”  If you have trouble following this, good thing your cells understand it: “We show that the damage sensor ATR in the presence of topoisomerase II binding protein 1 (TopBP1) mediator/adaptor protein phosphorylates the Chk1 signal-transducing kinase in a reaction that is strongly dependent on the presence of DNA containing bulky base lesions.  The dependence on damaged DNA requires DNA binding by TopBP1, and, indeed, TopBP1 shows preferential binding to damaged DNA.”  And that’s just the introduction.
6. Stall at the typo:  Lindsey-Boltz and Sancar also suggested in a Commentary in PNAS that RNA Polymerase II, the DNA translator, could be “The most specific damage recognition protein in cellular responses to DNA damage.”  It acts like the “the universal high-specificity damage sensor for three major cellular responses to bulky DNA lesions,” they said.  When UV light has introduced an error, RNAP II stops and calls for help.  “The resulting structure recruits proteins that initiate repair, cell cycle checkpoints, or apoptosis [programmed cell death].”  Maybe this is what is going on when the translation process stalls: the word processing machine won’t proceed till the typo is fixed.
7. Repair champ:  Raquel Sussman reported in PNAS on a model animal that is “endowed with special qualities for detecting external as well as internal abnormalities” and can “repair chromosomal lesions to a much greater extent than the human population.”  The animal is the zebrafish.  As an easy-to-study organism in the lab, it promises to help scientists gain insight into the causes of cancer and DNA damage, which can include ultraviolet rays and chemicals in the water.

Isn’t the cell wonderful?  We each have trillions of them, but each one deserves our love and respect.  None of these articles, as usual, tried to explain how blind evolution could have produced all this coded information with its self-healing mechanisms.  Instead of Darwinizing it, maybe we should Pasteurize it: use the research to cure disease and improve the human condition, and to stand in awe of God.  Like Louis Pasteur said, “The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.”
Next headline on:  Genetics • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

1. Perspectives on perspectivism:  Perspectivism (a form of constructivism, i.e., that our view of reality is a construct of our sensations) claims that the human mind cannot extricate itself from an observation in a bias-free manner: what we call a quark, for instance, or what we perceive as red, is a function of how we, as humans, classify and perceive things.  Peter Lipton reviewed a recent book by Ronald Giere on this view, Scientific Perspectivism, in Science May 11.¹  Lipton reviewed the theories of Immanuel Kant and Thomas Kuhn (“Kant on wheels”), and discussed Giere’s own position.  Giere extended his discussion of color perception to all of science, concluding that “science is perspectival through and through.”

   Constructivists deny the “view from nowhere.”  Science can only describe the world from a human perspective.  Objectivists claim that, on the contrary, there is such a view.  You can’t think without thinking, but it does not follow that what you are thinking about--baryons, say--must somehow include the thinker.  Objectivists hold on to the idea that the world has its own structure, which science reveals.

   Lipton ended up disagreeing with Giere, but provided only fuzzy responses: he said the constructivist position “remains obscure” and “difficult to grasp.”  He said objectivists will “not be moved” by the book, because it has an “uncertain force.”  Here was his summary case for objectivism:

   Scientific descriptions surely are incomplete and affected by interest, but these are features the objectivist can take on board.  Completeness and objectivity are orthogonal.  Maybe in the end constructivism is true, or as true as a constructivist can consistently allow.  Nevertheless, the thought that the world has determinate objective structures is almost irresistible, and Giere has not ruled out the optimistic view that science is telling us something about them.

   It is not clear, however, that Giere or other constructivists would be put off by these arguments.  There is no necessary connection between an argument being pleasing and it being true.  Are not descriptions like “irresistible” and “optimistic” some of the very human perspectives Giere was talking about?

2. Who watches the watcher?  Chris Adami, usually known for his evolutionary computing work, reviewed an unusual book by Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, in Science May 25.²  Hofstadter tried to give a completely materialist explanation of mind:

   Hofstadter’s explanation of human consciousness is disarmingly simple.  Even though he spends most of the book giving examples and analogies from realms as disparate as particle physics and boxes of envelopes, the main idea is simply that our feeling of a conscious “I” is but an illusion created by our neuronal circuitry: an illusion that is only apparent at the level of symbols and thoughts, in much the same way as the concepts of pressure and temperature are only apparent at the level of 10²³ molecules but not the level of single molecules.  In other words, Hofstadter denies consciousness an element of ontological reality, without denying that our thoughts and feelings, pains and longings have an “inner reality” when we have them.  But to show that consciousness is a collective phenomenon of sorts, he needs to delve deep into the theory of computation and, in particular, Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel’s proof of his incompleteness theorem, as these concepts are key to the idea the author wants to convey.  And he does this admirably in a mostly playful manner, choosing carefully constructed analogies more often than mathematical descriptions.

   Again, however, it is not at all certain a philosopher of another persuasion would be tongue-tied over these arguments.  Playful arguments have no necessary connection with truth.  As skilled and admirable as Hofstadter’s writing might be, he has a fundamental problem explaining consciousness from particulars of neurons.  To do it, he tried to extend Gödel’s incompleteness realms upward into unknown territory where each higher realm provides the completion of each lower realm, then wraps in on itself: “Hofstadter suggests, our ability to construct symbols and statements that are about these symbols and statements creates the ‘strange’ reflexive loop of the book’s title out of which our sensation of ‘I’ emerges.”
       At this point, Adami (though admiring the book) comes close to bringing the case down with a pointed question:

   This ambitious program aimed at a deconstruction of our consciousness is not without peril.  For example, if we posit that our consciousness is an illusion created by our thoughts “watching ourselves think” [as the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett had previously suggested], we might ask “Who watches the watcher?”  Or, if I am hallucinating an “I,” who is hallucinating it?  However, an infinite regress is avoided because on the level of the neuronal circuitry, the impression of having a mind is just another pattern of firings--something consciousness researcher and neuroscientist Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology calls “the neuronal correlate” of consciousness.

   Yet is this answer not begging the question?  The issue is whether a mind can be reduced to neurons, yet Adami just stated as a matter of fact that “the impression of having a mind is just another pattern of firings” without arguing for how or why this could be so.
       Adami clearly enjoyed the book as a companion to Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness.  He accepted the premise that mind can be expressed as an artifact of neuron firing patterns.  One consequence is that humans should be able to build conscious robots some day.  A second consequence is almost purely metaphysical:

   Second, the Gödelian construction suggests a tantalizing hypothesis, namely that a level of consciousness could exist far beyond human consciousness, on a level once removed from our level of symbols and ideas (which themselves are once removed from the level of neuronal firing patterns).  Indeed, Gödel’s construction guarantees that, while statements on the higher level can be patently true but not provable on the lower level, an extension exists that makes the system complete on that higher level.  However, new unprovable statements emerge on the next higher level--that is, on a level that maps an improbable jumble of our thoughts and ideas to, well, something utterly incomprehensible to us, who are stuck at our pedestrian echelon.  How incomprehensible?  At least as inscrutable as the love for Bartok’s second violin concerto is to a single neuron firing away.

   Thus Adami ends on an irrational leap.  Appeals to higher levels of consciousness that are unknowable from our level, even in principle, beleaguer any attempts to encapsulate mind within a materialist world view.  (And, as a materialist himself, Adami clearly did not intend to suggest that the highest level includes God.)  Claiming such ideas are incomprehensible or inscrutable is no escape if Adami wants to play the philosophy game.  An interlocutor would call it another case of Adami begging his own question: who watches the watcher?

These book reviews have been in the queue for three months but finally needed airing, because they are important.  Scientists cannot escape philosophy.  They are embedded within it, whether they like it or not.  To pretend philosophy has no bearing on their work is itself a philosophy.  The question is not whether a scientist practices philosophy, but how well he or she does it.  These two did not do it very well.  Both appealed to emotion and flights of fancy to defend objectivism and materialism.
    Christians are objectivists, but are the only ones who have a warrant for it.  Christian objectivism is founded in the eternal, unchangeable Creator.  That “anchor on the infinite” is what gives us confidence in objective reality.  A materialist cannot anchor his thoughts on anything universal, necessary, or certain; he is trapped in his cage of limited perceptions.  He cannot prove that his sensations and perceptions pertain to anything that is “out there” in the world (the correspondence theory of truth).  The Christian has an infinite-personal God that gives us the completeness to our human incompleteness.
    The case is stronger than this.  Philosopher of science Greg Bahnsen forcefully argued that only the Christian world view provides the “preconditions of intelligibility” for any rational response to existence, epistemology and morality (see American Vision for lecture series).  A skeptic might accuse Christians of having a world view based on faith (fideism).  Bahnsen’s comeback is that without the Christian world view, you cannot prove anything.  The world makes sense from a Christian view; it makes no sense from any other view.  Christians accept that they start with a world view and its presuppositions, just like everyone begins with presuppositions.  But if you want to argue anything rationally, you must start with Christian presuppositions, or your answers become arbitrary or inconsistent, or both – and once you permit arbitrariness or inconsistency, you cannot prove anything.  This, Bahnsen explains, is the transcendental proof of God’s existence.  It’s not a slippery proof based on reason (like Descartes), or on empiricism (like Paley), or on pragmatism (like one’s personal testimony), or on any of the other approaches that usually result in a stand-off.  It is a proof based on the preconditions of intelligibility: without the Christian world view, you cannot prove anything.  All rational discussion ends before it begins unless you accept as a precondition that the infinite-personal God of the Bible exists.  Then, and only then, observations and arguments make sense   A corollary is that the only way that secularists like Lipton and Adami can make their arguments is by pilfering the presuppositions of Christians.  In a vivid metaphor, Bahnsen says that the only way the bad boy can slap his father’s face is by sitting in his lap.
    The Christian world view is also the precondition for intelligibility in science.  Both Greg Bahnsen and J. P. Moreland (see his book Christianity and the Nature of Science) have argued this case cogently that one must accept Christian presuppositions before one can even do science.  To do science, you must defend the correspondence theory of truth, be able to account for a world of natural law, defend the validity of inductive inference and deductive proof, accept the reality of the mind, believe in the universal applicability of the laws of logic, and uphold universal standards of morality.  All these functions come included in the Christian world view package.  They are indefensible in any other world view.
    Christianity, then, is a precondition for the intelligibility of science and for reason itself.  This does not mean that non-Christians cannot do science or use reason, because clearly they do; it means that they cannot account for the validity of science from within their own world view.  Whether they are aware of it or not, they plagiarize Christian assumptions whenever they reason inductively or deductively about the world.  (This, Christians know, is because they retain the image of God impressed on their souls.)
    The argument that a materialist, as a collection of particles and forces, can do science without God has no more power than plugging an extension cord into itself.  (That, indeed, would be a strange loop.)  For the power to flow, science has to be plugged into a socket named Christian Presuppositions.  We have minds that can reason about objective reality because we have an all-knowing, rational, all-wise God who imbued some of that rationality into us.  He is the completion to our incompleteness.  He is the one who watches the watcher.
Next headline on:  Theology and Philosophy

Immune System Appeared Early   08/12/2007    
“Social amebas” or slime molds have gotten praise recently as inventors of the immune system.  These amebas can band together in a “slug” that can move as a unit and generate stalks and spores.  Science Daily reported on research at Baylor College of Medicine that found “sentinel cells” in a colony of amebas that patrol the slug and engulf invading bacteria or toxins.  “Finding an immune system in the social amoeba (Dictyostelium discoideum) is not only surprising but it also may prove a clue as to what is necessary for an organism to become multicellular,” the lead researcher, Dr. Adam Kuspa, said.
    A Darwinian explanation was not long in coming.  The article continued,

One way to estimate the characteristics of the organism that went before those that were multicellular is to look for characteristics that are present in two, three or all four of these main groups, he said.
    “Those were likely present in the progenitor organism,” said Kuspa.  Because three of the four major groups of organisms have this pathway, “I argue that means that the progenitor of all multicellular organisms had this pathway.  Since that organism was not likely multicellular, it must have used it as some kind of signaling to respond to bacteria in the environment.”
    Looking at it from another point of view, “it’s possible that one of the properties of those (crown) organisms that allowed them to become multicellular was the ability to distinguish self from non-self -- the hallmark of an immune system,” said Kuspa.  “The speculation is that a requirement of multicellularity is that you develop systems to recognize pathogens and other non-self cells from yourself.”

The evolution of multicellular organisms on Earth was an important step in the diversification of life on our planet.  Understanding these important moments in the history of life can help elucidate the mechanisms through which life develops and evolves, which in turn can help astrobiologists determine the potential for life’s development on distant worlds.

As usual in evolutionary fables, the observation-to-assumption ratio is so low, the paper is indistinguishable from fiction.  They assume the millions of years, they assume a hypothetical progenitor, they assume neo-Darwinian mechanisms can invent an immune system, and they assume it can evolve into the highly-functional immune systems of higher animals and plants.  What’s the only observation?  that an organism observed today (not millions of years ago) has a clever way for ridding itself of harmful bacteria and toxins.  Those not infected by Darwin narcosis might think this to be evidence of design.
    “Don’t assume” is a security principle in almost every facet of life except evolutionary biology.  Don’t assume the power switch is off.  Don’t assume the gun is empty.  Don’t assume the items on the flight checklist have been checked.  Don’t assume Dad knows he’s supposed to pick up the kids.  Don’t assume the rock on the cliff will support your weight.
    Numerous Darwin Awards have been won by victims who assumed things.  The Darwinists who write in science journals, though, get away with their rampant assumptions because they never have to face the consequences.  We think it’s time for them to learn a little responsibility, or else kindly help humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Darwinian Evolution

This is not a surprise to creationists.  It is a surprise to big-bang secular cosmologists.  We hope the astronomers will rethink current ideas, but for significant progress, they will have to think outside the bang.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Dating Methods

1. Living dust:  Zap the dust in your living room and it may come alive.  Is that the gist of this story in PhysOrg?  A team of international scientists thinks that cosmic dust in plasma takes on properties similar to that of carbon-based life, like DNA.  Here’s the word bizarrely—

   Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers.  They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure.  These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.
       So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive?  “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.

   It should be noted that these behaviors were noted in computer models, not in real plasmas.

2. We could be Martians:  The same scientists who revived bacteria from alleged 8 million year old ice (see 08/04/2007) say their study helps refute panspermia.  Life could not have come on comets, says a reporter on NorthJersey.com, because radiation would have killed it.  But since it might survive inside meteorites, it was OK for him to trade one weird-science theory for his own.  Because life was so hardy on Earth, and since Mars is just one step away, isn’t it logical?  Staff writer Bob Groves ended on that note: “Microbes might survive a trip from Mars if encased in a meteorite, [Paul] Falkowski of Rutgers said.  ‘So we could all be Martians,’ he said.”

The gutless science reporters, who should be gatekeepers of rationality, let anything and everything pass as long as it is materialistic and Darwinian.  This, folks, is the sorry state of science reporting in our world today.  These same reporters will attack creationists in the worst vituperative rhetoric, and portray them as the enemies of science wanting to bring on the dark ages, but in the same breath will let weird Frankenstein tales pass right on through unopposed as long as they assume evolution.  The only controversies they occasionally report is when two Darwinists disagree about whose Darwinian tale is better.  We have a lot of work to do.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

In 2000 Leakey found an old H. erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the H. habilis, and both dated from the same general time period.  That makes it unlikely that H. erectus evolved from H. habilis, researchers said.
    It’s the equivalent of finding that your grandmother and great-grandmother were sisters rather than mother-daughter, said study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London....
Overall what it paints for human evolution is a “chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us,” Spoor said in a phone interview from a field office of the Koobi Fora Research Project in northern Kenya.

The skull also shows features that had previously been seen only in Asian fossils of H. erectus, such as a keeling (or ridge) on its frontal and parietal bones.  These traits had persuaded a growing number of researchers in recent years to split the fossils of H. erectus into two species, with H. erectus from Asia and H. ergaster from Africa.  But the skull's mix of traits shows H. erectus cannot be “easily divided between two species from Africa and Asia,” says Spoor.  Kimbel and Arizona State graduate student Claire Terhune reached a similar conclusion after studying the temporal bones of 15 H. erectus skulls, in a paper published in the July issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.
    Others who have championed H. ergaster are taking note.  “The new cranium blurs the distinction between H. erectus and H. ergaster,” says Wood.  “I am not willing to sell my shares in H. ergaster just yet, but I am not relying on them for my retirement!”

These people do not know who begat whom, and they can’t tell dates with any credibility; they keep losing links into gaps and moving things around, yet they expect us to believe they are the Masters of Enlightenment when telling us where we came from.
    It’s important to remember that the bones aren’t talking.  Data don’t just jump up into a scientist’s hands and explain themselves.  Instead, picture a group of scientists at a large, blank game board, with a few fossils as game pieces, but no instructions.  They approach the game with a mental picture of how the game should be played and where the pieces go, but they are free to move them around.  Depending on how committed they are to their mental picture, they can compromise here or there and keep the picture intact.  The compromises make the game confusing and even chaotic at times.  Still, the commitment to the mental picture is paramount: it was carefully selected to conform to the Official Myth of the Culture.
    We spectators might look with bewilderment at how they can keep playing such a confusing game, but, as outsiders, we are not permitted by the ruling elite to have an opinion, or to holler in suggestions to them.  They are all sworn to keep a straight face and maintain the appearance that everything is under control and that progress is being made.
    Appearances are not realities, however.  If the mental picture is incorrect, the chaos is real.  Don’t be distracted by the elaborate canopy the game players have erected over their board, and all the concession stands, reporters and public announcements that “they’re getting warmer” and the latest find “sheds new light on evolution.”  It’s all just a sport with no necessary connection to reality.
    The picture on the game board could be totally different, with a much better fit of the pieces.  No matter; if such a picture has been disqualified by an arbitrary consensus of the players, it will never be found, but the players will get to keep their jobs.  After all, a complex game with lots of twists and turns is more fun than a linear one.  And horrors, being told what the picture was supposed to be would spoil the party.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

1. Tinker Bell, not Jehovah:  Georg Striedter began a book review in Nature¹ with this line: “The human brain, and hence the human mind, is not an optimal, designed-from-scratch apparatus.  Rather, it is an imperfect amalgam of shoddy components.”  He was summarizing the view of David Linden’s new book, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God (Harvard, 2007).  Striedter took issue with Linden’s proof in the book, but not with the contention that our brains are products of evolution.  “What we do know, and what The Accidental Mind helps us to realize, is that the human brain is not designed as many have imagined.”  There was no discussion with any theologian or philosopher about these contentions.
2. Put it Aside:  An editorial in Nature² began, in bold print, “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”  The editorial acknowledged that many scientists are “religious” but didn’t mind as long as they keep their faith and their belief in evolution in separate compartments.
       The occasion for the stern editorial was an article by Senator Sam Brownback in the New York Times in which the presidential candidate affirmed a position believed by the majority of Americans: “Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order,” Brownback said.  Continuing an a conciliatory tone, he said, “Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge.  Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as atheistic theology posing as science.“
       That was enough to make the editors of Nature call hogwash.  “Humans evolved, body and mind, from earlier primates,” the editorial responded.  No sense trying to leave any room for the hand of God; it is Darwin all the way down: “The ways in which humans think reflect this heritage as surely as the ways in which their limbs are articulated, their immune systems attack viruses and the cones in their eyes process coloured light.  This applies not just to the way in which our neurons fire, but also to various aspects of our moral thought,” it said.
       From here, the editorial backed off a bit, admitting that the theological and philosophical issues involved with the human mind are “deep waters.”  Formulating an evolutionary theory of neuroscience is still a challenge.  But regardless of how uncomfortable it may be to accept the evolution of the brain, evolution is the only serious scientific option, they asserted: “Scientific theories of human nature may be discomforting or unsatisfying, but they are not illegitimate.  And serious attempts to frame them will reflect the origins of the human mind in biological and cultural evolution, without reference to a divine creation.”  Anyone disagreeing cannot be serious, in other words.
3. Getting our own dirt:  Synthetic biology is becoming a “welcome antidote for chronic vitalism,” stated another editorial in Nature.³  They said that new attempts to synthesize organisms from scratch amounts to agreement with this quote: ”for the first time, God has competition” (see joke).  To the Editors, synthetic biology will have particular value in ridding society of outmoded, pre-Darwinian beliefs that life is somehow special.  This even weighs in on the debate about abortion, they claimed:

   Synthetic biology’s view of life as a molecular process lacking moral thresholds at the level of the cell is a powerful one. And it can and perhaps should be invoked to challenge characterizations of life that are sometimes used to defend religious dogma about the embryo.  If this view undermines the notion that a ‘divine spark’ abruptly gives value to a fertilized egg – recognizing as it does that the formation of a new being is gradual, contingent and precarious – then the role of the term ‘life’ in that debate might acquire the ambiguity that it has always warranted.

   So if science trumps “religious dogma” in the process, so be it.  A callout quote states, “It would be a service to more than synthetic biology if we might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept.”
4. Dover over easy:  Kevin Padian, a partisan for NCSE in the Dover trail, got free rein in Nature to give his version of the Dover trial.⁴  It was full of references to “religious intolerance” and “right-wing Christians” in its portrayal of Judge Jones’ decision as a victory for science.  No space was provided to the other side.  No mention was made of articles and books critical of the decision.  Nothing was said about Jones’ heavy lifting of the ACLU source material (12/12/2006).  Padian ended with a portrayal of Dover as a “perfect storm of religious intolerance, First Amendment violation and the never-ending assault on American science education.”
       Those needing to hear the other side will have to buy a book: Traipsing Into Evolution by DeWolf, Luskin, West and Witt, who were close to the case as advisors and observers for the defense, though not litigants.  It’s ironic that Padian referred to the Scopes Trial, since the Dover case was nearly a polar opposite.
5. Get your hot dogma here:  In Science,⁵ anti-creationist Sean B. Carroll got free rein to trash Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution.  Behe does not even argue for God as such in the book, but Carroll was sure this was an easily-defused sneak attack to insert God into science.  He likened himself to Thomas Huxley, gloating, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.”  He ridiculed the book, titling his review, “God as genetic engineer.”  His review made unsubstantiated charges to key players in the Intelligent Design movement without rebuttals that the players have made in print numerous times.  With references to Monty Python to ridicule the creationists, Carroll ended, “the argument for design has no scientific leg to stand on.”
6. The critic of my enemy could still be my enemy:  Scott Atran in Science⁶ reviewed another book whose title is unambiguous: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolpert.  Here, Atran was a little more courteous to those who “believe” in God.  He did not think Wolpert was merciful enough to those who view religion as having some positive social effects: viz, “what ought to be, including moral framing that convinces people to commit to others beyond the logic and evidence for advancing self-interest.”  But does this justify believing in a real God, who really created the world?  Certainly not: “Religion involves the same causal categories that evolution endowed us with for everyday thinking,” he said without hesitation.
7. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy:  There was a stinging exchange in Science last week⁷ between Jonathan Haidt (U of Virginia) about moral evolution (see 05/17/2007), and David Barash, a psychologist from U of Washington.  The debate was over the role of group selection, but the common whipping-boy in both letters was the “religious right.”  Barash was incensed that Haidt explained “patriotism, respect for tradition, and a sense of sacredness” as artifacts of group selection instead of individual selection.  Haidt was quick to point out that “As for Barash’s final point about conservative morality, I do not believe that descriptive biology confers normative legitimacy.”  Patriotism and a sense of sacredness may evolve, for that matter, but that such notions are “disliked by political liberals and dismissed by moral psychologists.”  The subtext was clear: morals and beliefs about God did evolve, whether or not group selection did it.

The debating tactic of the Darwin Party in the public marketplace of ideas is unchanged since Huxley: ridicule, attack, threaten, marginalize, and hoard power.  None of the ideologues above have a scientific leg to stand on to claim that their brains evolved, because if that were true, they could never know it or claim it was true.  By asserting that their claims are true, and that religion and creation is false, they have affirmed that there is a world of knowledge outside the realm of particles that is eternal and does not evolve.  This cannot be possible within their own world view.  They have therefore shot themselves in the brain; their position is self-refuting, and necessarily false.
    So what do you do with such people?  You treat them like any other special-interest deadheads.  You answer them according to their folly when other people are listening in, and you answer them not according to their folly lest you be like them.  Next, you disarm them by taking back the power they stole.  Prepare for a long conflict.  Zombies are like automatons and don’t surrender easily.  Appeals to reason, for instance, are likely to fall on deaf ears.
    You scientists who are humbly and honestly going about your work figuring out how DNA repair works, what the sun is doing, and how soil organisms produce compounds that may fight cancer, blessings upon you.  Stay away from the D.P. ideologues.  They have nothing to offer.  Deal with them when you must, to get your papers published, but understand that the kind of dogmatic statements they make (like those above) are light-years apart from plain old observational, daily scientific work.  We need the products of your science; we do not need self-appointed shallow philosophers in places of power over you.  Join the growing Dissent from Darwin list to eat away at their totalitarian dictatorship, so that we can once again enjoy an open marketplace of ideas.  You might also ponder the origin of intangible, unchanging things like morals, truth and knowledge, which your work assumes are real.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Intelligent Design • Theology • Politics and Ethics

Some behaviours are purely innate (e.g., blinking), whereas other, “apparently innate,” behaviours require a degree of learning to refine them into a useful skill (e.g., nest building).  In terms of biological fitness, it matters how quickly such learning occurs, because time spent learning is time spent not eating, or time spent being eaten, both of which reduce fitness....

Using artificial neural networks as model organisms, it is proven that it is possible for an organism to be born with a set of “primed” connections which guarantee that learning part of a skill induces automatic learning of other skill components, an effect known as free-lunch learning (FLL).  Critically, this effect depends on the assumption that associations are stored as distributed representations.  Using a genetic algorithm, it is shown that primed organisms can evolve within 30 generations.  This has three important consequences.  First, primed organisms learn quickly, which increases their fitness.  Second, the presence of FLL effectively accelerates the rate of evolution, for both learned and innate skill components.  Third, FLL can accelerate the rate at which learned behaviours become innate.  These findings suggest that species may depend on the presence of distributed representations to ensure rapid evolution of adaptive behaviours.

It has been demonstrated that FLL accelerates the evolution of behaviours in neural network models.  Given that FLL appears to be a fundamental property of distributed representations, and given the reliance of neuronal systems on distributed representations, FLL-induced behaviours may constitute a significant component of apparently innate behaviours (e.g., nest-building).  Results presented here suggest that any organism that did not take advantage of such a fundamental and ubiquitous effect would be at a selective disadvantage.  Finally, if FLL accelerates evolution in the natural world, then it may have been involved in the Cambrian explosion, an explosion that began when brains (and therefore learning) first appeared.

Don’t be fooled by the math.  This is absolutely insane.  To think that inventing a term like FLL will generate brains and whole new body plans in nature is wonderfully weird.  Apparently Dr. Stone needs to learn some physics, particularly thermodynamics and information theory.  Even Julie Andrews could help: “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.”
    No amount of math can make up for bad assumptions.  Anybody can rig a model or a computer program to produce any kind of output he wants.  Set the starting conditions, then force the virtual organisms to evolve the way you want them to by rewarding the efforts you (as an intelligent human) desire, and they will obey your every bidding.  GIGO.  Don’t try this out on trilobites.
    Good grief, people, how did it come to this?  This is as silly as pouring sea monkeys into a test tube, adding water, and saying you have created life.  Psychologist, heal thyself.  Go get a real job, Stone, before you embarrass your colleagues.  The ID people are already laughing out loud.  If, on the other hand, this was an ornate prank to show the gullibility of journal editors, we forgive and encourage you.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

1. Trees of the living dead:  Cypress trees in Hungary supposedly buried for eight million years look pristine.  The wood is unfossilized and uncoalified, said the report on Breitbart.com.  All that remained were the trunks, the bottom six meters of trees estimated to have been 30-40 meters tall.  The trees “were preserved in their original form and material.”  Cellulose, the glue that holds the wood together, had decomposed.  That made the trunks disintegrate quickly on exposure to the air and sunlight.  The museum director overseeing the excavation said, “The discovery is exceptional as the trees kept their wooden structure, they neither turned into coal nor were petrified.”
2. Bacterial rip van winkles:  Bacteria buried under Antarctic ice have been revived, said BBC News, Associated Press and and National Geographic.  For how long have they been entombed in suspended animation?  They “range in age from 100,000 years to eight million years.”  “Imagine sticking some bacteria in the freezer and taking them out millions of years later to find that they are still alive,” National Geographic said.  “That would be similar to what happened recently, when scientists brought eight-million-year-old microbes back to life—simply by thawing them.”

Either give up the long ages, evolutionists, or give up your credibility.  Some of us have long ago given up our credulity.
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Plants • Cell Biology

The evolutionary explanation is dissonant cacophony.  Are they claiming chimpanzees have no emotion or motivation?  Monkeys show a lot of emotion when they screech, and a lot of motivation when they want a banana.  Besides, no amount of emotion or motivation is going to affect neo-Darwinism’s capacity to produce the random mutations needed for a brain containing a music appreciation module.
    There is no selective advantage for a reproductively useless thing like music – nor for literature, art, geometry, philosophy, altruism, wisdom, knowledge, theology, or prayer.  Evolutionists produce nothing but fables when trying to explain how these unique human traits “arose” by an unguided process (e.g., 03/07/2002), and they just make fools of themselves (11/12/2004) trying to bridge the chasm between monkey antics and Mozart.  What drives a man like Beethoven to write a complete symphony celebrating joy when he was deaf?  How could he hear it perfectly within his mind?  Is this the work of neurons firing in response to genetic accidents?  Flutter-tongue a tuba if you believe that.
    For fun, let’s all sing the Bonzo version of The Sound of Music:
The jungle’s alive, with the sound of screeches / With hollers we’ve yelled for a zillion years / The bush fills my bowels with a glut of berries / My voice tries to outshout each sound it hears.
My mouth wants to binge like the beak of a vulture that flies to the kill o’er the breeze / My chest wants to thump like a chimp that vaults from each limb in the trees / To laugh at the tourist who trips and falls o’er my dung in his way / To screech through the night, like an owl that is searching for prey.
I feel all the chills when my stomach’s empty / That grumbling sound I have heard before / My gut will be filled with a brown banana / And I’ll sleep once more.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Human Body

1. Lunar burps:  The moon is passing gas, reported Science News).  This explains the long history of observations of lunar transients, or bright flashes observed from Earth on certain parts of the moon.  Arlin Crotts (Columbia U) believes the flashes come from the decay of uranium that escapes through cracks, but mentions the possibility that volcanism is still active.

2. Flinging rings:  Saturn’s G-ring has been explained in an announcement from Jet Propulsion Lab (see also Science Daily).  A persistent ring arc in the outer bright rings, confined by the moon Mimas, gets swept by the magnetic field, flinging particles into the tenuous G-ring.  (The G-ring lies between the thin F-ring and the broad E-ring fed by the Enceladus geysers; see 07/11/2006).  The original paper in Science¹ says, “The dust-sized particles that dominate this ring’s optical properties should erode quickly in Saturn’s magnetosphere, yet there was no direct evidence for larger source bodies that could replenish the dust and no clear explanation for the concentration of such bodies in this one region.”  The article and original paper do not mention how long this has been going on, but presumably the material would have long been depleted well before millions of years, because particles in the arc are steadily being ground to dust by collisions.

3. Bursting moons:  Speaking of Enceladus, a recent paper in Icarus² said that tidal flexing cannot explain the heat coming out of this small moon, either now or in the past:

   The heating in Enceladus in an equilibrium resonant configuration with other saturnian satellites can be estimated independently of the physical properties of Enceladus.  We find that equilibrium tidal heating cannot account for the heat that is observed to be coming from Enceladus.  Equilibrium heating in possible past resonances likewise cannot explain prior resurfacing events.

   Meyer and Wisdom said that the neighboring moon Mimas, about the same size but closer to Saturn, experiences 11 times as much tidal heating but shows no sign of activity.  In their conclusion, they wondered that both Io (at Jupiter) and Enceladus (at Saturn) are both so active:

   But it is curious that one has to appeal to nonequilibrium tidal oscillations or episodic activity to heat both Io and Enceladus (Ojakangas and Stevenson, 1986).  If the fraction of time spent in an active state is, say, of order 20%, for each satellite, then the probability that both are found in an active state today is only 4%.

   Cassini will fly by Enceladus at very close range on March 10 and even sample particles in the plume; see announcement in Space.com.

4. Veil unveilings:  Portions of the wispy Veil Nebula in Cygnus have been photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope.  This highly-distended nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion long thought to be tens of thousands of years old (see 02/16/2001).  Now, a press release posted by Science Daily claims the explosion “could have been witnessed and recorded by ancient civilizations” as recently as 5,000 years ago.

Every once in awhile, it bears repeating: it is more empirically justifiable to infer young ages than old ages, because the observation-to-assumption ratio is much higher.  You can take an observed phenomenon and extrapolate it backward from the present a bit – that is reasonable.  But to start with an assumption of billions of years and then try to fit a short-lived phenomenon into it lowers the observation-to-assumption ratio by many orders of magnitude.  Would it be reasonable to observe a sparkler for 5 seconds, and then claim it has been burning for 100 years?  We think science should tether itself to the observations rather than run amok like a stray dog.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Solar System • Dating Methods

Darwinism Seen in Action!   08/03/2007    
An example of Darwinian evolution in action was reported by EurekAlert.  This dramatic announcement called it a “rare example” of a “controversial theory of genetic conflict” in the reproduction of certain fish:

The conflict has been likened to a “battle of the sexes” or an “arms race” at the molecular level between mothers and fathers.  At stake: the fetus’s growth rate and how much that costs the nutrient-supplying mother.
    The new research supports the idea of a genetic “arms race” going on between a live-bearing mother and her offspring, assisted by the growth-promoting genes of the father.

You have to laugh at the lengths the Darwinists will go to in trying to prop up Charlie’s idol.  They did not see these fish evolve.  They admitted that “The placenta is a complex organ of maternal and fetal tissues that nourishes the developing fetus in the uterus,” but did not explain how this complexity arose; they only found differing levels of one growth hormone.  They admitted that their theory of genetic conflict is controversial.  And they committed the usual grievous sin of the Darwinists, personifying poor little fish that don’t know their right fin from their left with goal-oriented actions and human patterns of conflict.  This was not evolution in action.  The only thing in action was the Darwin fogma machine (05/14/2007).
Next headline on:  Darwinian Evolution • Genetics • Marine Biology • Dumb Ideas

If they interbred with us, they were us.  Are there any doubters left?  Thus ends a century-and-a-half myth that Neanderthal Man was less than human.  The range of variations in fully human specimens probably encompasses other skeletons that paleoanthropologists mistakenly classify as outgroups.  Look at this picture from the Daily Mail: would you have classified these guys as separate species only from their skeletons?  Works for other species, too (see another Daily Mail picture).
Next headline on:  Early Man

And so another just-so story is born.  The sagacious primitives of the deep knew that all good things must wait, so they hid out in the depths till the surface was ready.  Perhaps they sent pioneers upwards every few million years to see if any returned with good news.
    The article asserts unknowable things with feigned certainty.  They said these vents are 1.43 billion years old, as if they read the time off a stopwatch to 3 significant figures (cf. 10/28/2003).  They called these organisms primitive, even though there are complex bacteria, worms, fish, crustaceans and arthropods often inhabiting the vents.  They provided no mechanism by which complex life could “emerge” in the dark, scalding heat and turbulence of one of the most vicious habitats on the planet (06/14/2002).  They ignored the problem of composing ribose, proteins and many other essential molecules of life.  They forgot how damaging sea salt is to incipient life (04/15/2002).
    “This discovery offers scientists valuable on-land samples for geological and geobiological research with implications for the origin and evolution of early life on Earth,” Kusky crowed.  Yet Harvard medical illustrator David Bolinsky said that life would not be possible without complex molecular machines (get link to animation at Uncommon Descent blog).  How did these machines just happen to come together, Tim?
    The raw data in this article provide no information on the origin and evolution of early life on Earth.  What they do reveal is the marketing hype used by certain scientists needing research funds for geological and geobiological research.  The article also reveals how easily certain people are tantalized by the power of suggestion.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Origin of Life