Evolutionists Say Parasites Made Humans Successful   09/30/2007    
“If cooperation has been the secret to our evolutionary success, we may have our parasites to thank for that.”  That’s a pretty big If, but that’s what two evolutionary biologists claimed this month Current Biology.¹  The cooperative behaviors naturally selected in evolutionary host-parasite wars, by implication, are what gave human beings the ability to build cities, governments and scientific laboratories – like the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh, where Andy Gardner and Stuart A. West work.
    Surprisingly, their claim came at the end of an article that discussed primarily the downfall of one of the leading theories for social cooperation: the kin selection theory of W. D. Hamilton.  Their first paragraph explained why this theory fails:

Cooperation abounds in the natural world, and biologists are faced with the difficulty of reconciling this fact with the principle of the ‘survival of the fittest’.  A fundamental step in our understanding of cooperation was provided by W. D. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness.  This reveals that altruistic behaviour, where an individual pays a direct fitness cost in order to enhance the fitness of others, can be favoured by selection if individuals tend to promote the reproductive success of their genetic relatives.  This raises the question of how altruists ensure that their selfless behaviour is directed primarily towards their kin.  One possibility is genetic kin recognition, where individuals identify close kin on the basis of physical similarity because relatives look more similar than unrelated individuals.  Despite the apparent incentive for such kin recognition, however, there is relatively poor empirical support for this mechanism in nature.  A new theoretical study of genetic kin recognition by Francois Rousset and Denis Roze reveals that, left to its own evolutionary devices, this mechanism will drive itself to ruin.

But all is not lost for genetic kin recognition.  As Crozier suggested, the mechanism could be stabilised by extrinsic processes that maintain marker diversity.  Rousset and Roze have confirmed this by incorporating an ad hoc advantage to rare markers into their model and found that, provided this was sufficiently strong relative to the fitness consequences of altruism, genetic kin recognition is maintained and selflessness prevails.  This could explain why, when genetic kin recognition does occur, it often involves genes that are implicated in host-parasite interactions, a potent source of strong balancing selection.  The paragon of genetic kin recognition is the detection of major histocompatibility (MHC) genes, involved in immune function, upon which rodents and humans appear to decide their social and sexual relationships.

Scene: a university science lab.  Excuse me, sir.  May I help you, officers?  We’re looking for a Dr. Darwinlover.  That’s me; what is this about?  I’m afraid we’ll have to take you into custody.  You’re under arrest.  Wha...? On what grounds?  What’s going on here?  According to our warrant, you are being charged with impersonating a scientist, violating established laws, and using academic resources to promote a narrow religious agenda.  What are you talking about?  Who are you?  The CEH Police.  I’ve never heard of you.  We are a non-governmental agency of trained volunteers authorized by the court to conduct citizen’s arrests.  What court?  The court of public opinion.
    You can’t do this to me.  I’m a scientist.  So you say.  We hear that one all the time.  Please don’t cause a disturbance, sir.  We’re just doing our job.  And violating the laws... what laws?  The laws of logic, sir. What are you talking about?  I told you I’m a scientist.  According to the warrant, you claimed, in writing, that human behavior evolved by a material process of evolution, but then reasoned as if this represented a true account of human origins.  So?  Truth cannot evolve, sir.  According to the prosecutor, this represents a contradiction.  According to the law of non-contradiction, this is punishable by demotion to the realm of the irrational – in other words, losing your license to practice science.
    And I’m not promoting any religious agenda!  I’m an atheist!  According to the federal courts, atheistic humanism is a religion.  The prosecutor said you went far beyond the empirical evidence and taught your own personal beliefs using academic resources.  But lots of scientists are atheists!  What you believe in your private life is protected free speech, sir, but scientists are not supposed to use their academic positions to promote a narrow religious agenda, according to your own writings.  This is another one of the counts of violating the laws of logic being charged against you.  In fact, the count alleges that you yourself used this very argument to convince the dean to deprive a colleague of tenure because of his private religious beliefs.
    This is outrageous.  Nobody has ever accused me of such things.  Ignorance of the law is no excuse, sir.  Scientists have a position of high trust in our culture.  Presumably, when you took this position, you committed to abide by the laws of logic and should have received the proper instruction in the law.  But I’ve written things like that paper all my professional life.  And so have all my colleagues!  Are you confessing to collusion, sir?
    For crying out loud, I haven’t done anything that isn’t common practice among all my peers.  I realize that, sir.  The chief recognizes this is a widespread problem.  He has decided it’s time to start cracking down.  The only way to make progress is by tackling one case at a time.  Why me?  He decided to make you an example, so that others would hear, and fear, and commit no more such abomination in the land.
    What will they do to me?  Most likely, you will be given an opportunity to confess your crimes, then cease and desist.  For a probationary period, your speaking and writing will be under surveillance.  However, if you persist in irrational behavior, repeat offenses will lead to your being stripped of your credibility.  Hardened criminals might even be pilloried in public.
    And if I fail to cooperate?  You have the right to remain silent.  But remember, anything you speak or write can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.  What’s with the dog?  That’s our K9 unit; Apollos here is trained to sniff out contraband.  [Barking and a brief scuffle ensues.]

---

Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode of: Creation-Evolution Headlines, the top-rated science investigative reporting show, featuring Apollos, the wonder dog.  Brought to you by Master Plan, the universal leader in information management design technology, and by Moral Support, a global network of encouragement.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Astronomy Columnist Tackles Naturalism vs. Intelligence   09/29/2007    
Bob Berman is an unusual columnist for a science magazine.  He’s independent-thinking, unafraid to tackle big questions and criticize powerful institutions, but all the while able to keep a sense of humor.  In his monthly column “Bob Berman’s Strange Universe” in the November issue of Astronomy (p. 10), he took a moment from munching on his hot dog under the moon to think big.  “Astronomy leads us to deep issues,” he began.  “Many are so profound, we can’t even handle them.”  In “Hall of Mirrors,” he nevertheless handled, in his own whimsical way, some of the biggest: quantum theory, consciousness, perception, time, space, and intelligence.

Take the question of intelligence lurking throughout the cosmos.  This topic arises when we look for life beneath the martian surface or perform SETI searches.  We assume life is out there, but we don’t know its limits....
    Or consider nature itself, which most of us feel is smart.  Yet, it supposedly arose randomly from inert matter.  So we have this universe, which is basically as dumb as gravel.  A few billion years ago, some witless bits of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen slammed together for awhile until out popped Kobayashi – the Japanese competitive eater who devours hot dogs.  How carbon and oxygen atoms should have ever developed a taste for frankfurters is mysterious.  But there you have it, and it probably happened on other worlds, too.  We’re left with a combo plate: Some of the universe is smart, some of it is dumb.  We’re never quite sure where to draw the line.

If all this sounds far-out, well, you bet it is – although no more so than the standard model where the universe popped out of nothingness like a jack-in-the-box.  Any way you slice it, the biggest aspects of the cosmos are strange and mysterious.
    Religions push back these mysteries by one step, and science, understandably, finds this unhelpful, even if it cannot come to the rescue itself.  We’re left with the stuff no one talks about, the uncle with the facial tic that everyone tries to ignore.
    I think mysteries are among the best parts of astronomy, the perfect accompaniments to a starry night.  Scientists love ’em too, as they brilliantly chip away.  It would be nice, however, if cosmologists would put a lid on their arrogant ghetto-talk about their latest theory of everything and admit – just once in a while – that their knowledge is a single snowflake in the blizzard of the unknown.

Bob Berman is a rare columnist unafraid to stand up to the big guys in Big Science when he thinks they are a bunch of clueless loudmouths who don’t know what they are talking about (see 10/06/2004).  Bravo.
    Is it really adding another step, though, to posit God as the Author of intelligence?  Is it really unhelpful?  This common misconception needs to be put in its place.  Carl Sagan used this in Cosmos as one of his many digs at religion, saying “Why not save a step, and say that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question?”  Don’t just swallow this line and feel intimidated by it.  It’s time to go on offense:

• It begs the question that saving a step is a good thing.  Sometimes it is, but not always.  Should a pilot save a step, and skip over his flight checklist?
• It is not really saving a step.  Materialists have exactly the same problem.  They need a step to explain the origin of the cosmos, so in the place of God, they put a multiverse, nothingness, or their own imaginations.  If anything, they are adding steps if not multiplying them.
• Omitting a source of intelligence for the cosmos leaves intelligence unexplained.  It is a deficient answer.
• Supposing that intelligence can arise from non-intelligent matter (Berman’s “dumb as gravel” stuff) has no empirical support.  It is tantamount to ascribing God-like powers to inanimate objects.
• Skipping the question just because it is mysterious is a cop-out.  This is an arbitrary move in a debate, which spells death to logic.  Deal with it.  Either explain how intelligence arose spontaneously without an intelligent cause, or consider the alternatives honestly, without arrogance.
• Rational discussion is impossible in a material universe of impersonal, unintelligent particles and forces, because reasoning presupposes the existence of truth and the laws of logic – which are immaterial and unchangeable.  Deny that and your arguments become arbitrary and inconsistent; i.e., you forfeit the debate.

In a day when most science reporters and columnists just regurgitate whatever scientists say about everything, it is refreshing to see an exception every once in awhile.  Bob understands the enormity of these questions for religion and philosophy and does not endure arrogant posturing even by the inhabitants of powerful ghettos.  We applaud Mr. Berman for having the guts to call it like he sees it.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • SETI • Intelligent Design

1. Bacterial flagellum:  A paper in Nature: Molecular Systems Biology¹ juxtaposed design language with evolutionary speculation.  Rajagopala et al began with high praise for the Ferrari of the cellular world:

   Motility in most bacterial species depends on a sophisticated molecular machine called the flagellum.  The flagellar apparatus is made of dozens of different proteins and thousands of individual subunits.  The bacterial flagellum is actually a mechanical nanomachine with a rotation frequency of 300 Hz, an energy conversion rate of nearly 100%, and the ability to self assemble.

   So far this sounds like Michael Behe’s writing.  Indeed, these authors representing three countries found even more essential protein parts for the flagellum – take one away, in other words, and motion stops.  But the gist of their paper was that the variety of flagella in different species shows evolution: “Many features of the bacterial flagellum have changed over the course of evolution,” they said.  “This is reflected in the surprisingly different composition and protein interaction patterns in the flagella of different species, which may reflect adaptations to species-specific motility needs.”
       Yet their argument was based entirely on homology.  They did not explain how needs produced functional, adapting flagella.  They merely built an evolutionary tree based on similarities:

   The bacterial flagellum represents an interesting entity to study the evolution of complex biological machines.  For an evolutionary view of the flagellum on the protein level, we constructed a phylogenetic supertree solely based on flagellar protein sequences.  As anticipated, this tree closely recapitulates phylogenetic relationships identified, employing traditional phylogenetic marker molecules such as rRNAs.
       Whereas it is generally believed that the motility machinery evolved from an ancient type III secretion system, the detailed steps leading to current structures have yet to be defined....
       Similar to protein sequences and structures, interactions among proteins are often conserved in the course of evolution.  In fact, the phylogenetic relationships of different species are partially reflected by the phylogenetic interaction profile of the integrated network.

   Conservation is not evolution.  Phylogenetic tree construction, furthermore, presumes the very question under investigation: that flagella evolved in the first place.  And as any creationist would say, adaptation is not proof of evolution; it is proof of design.
       In summary, these authors could not help but marvel at the flagellum.  They found an even more amazing network of interactions among the conserved protein parts.  Their conclusions about evolution, however, were based only on arguably circular arguments from homology.  Indeed, “the detailed steps leading to current structures have yet to be defined” in their own article.

2. ATP Synthase:  A team of UK scientists publishing in PNAS investigated one detail of the other sophisticated rotary motor in all of life: ATP synthase.² (See 09/18/2003, 07/16/2002.)  They wanted to know how a regulatory protein named IF₁ inhibits the motor, like a Denver boot.  (After all, a high-performance motor usually comes with brakes.)  Stopping a spinning motor is not a simple matter.  They found it takes a complex set of protein interactions that forms an “inhibitory complex” with the machine like – well, let them explain:

   To form these complex interactions and penetrate into the core of the enzyme, it is likely that the initial interaction of the inhibitor with F1 forms via the open conformation of the {beta}E subunit.  Then, as two ATP molecules are hydrolyzed, the {beta}E-{alpha}E interface converts to the {beta}DP-{alpha}DP interface via the {beta}TP-{alpha}TP interface, trapping the inhibitor progressively in its binding site and a nucleotide in the catalytic site of subunit {beta}DP.  The inhibition probably arises by IF₁ imposing the structure and properties of the {beta}TP-{alpha}TP interface on the {beta}DP-{alpha}DP interface, thereby preventing it from hydrolyzing the bound ATP.

3. Transfer RNA:  One of the most amazing sets of machines, on which all forms of life depend, is the crew of translators that know which amino acid goes with which codon from the DNA code.  A family of 20 of these molecules, known as aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, or aaRS for short, exists – one for each amino acid.  Each one knows its own amino acid and tRNA so well the accuracy of their operation is stunning.  Even when there are cognate codons (three-letter codes that differ yet code for the same amino acid), the machines rarely make a mistake.  For instance, metRS, the synthetase for methionine, can match two cognate codons with the right amino acid every time and eject very similar ones.
       Herein lies a mystery: if you look at a tRNA molecule (which looks something like a letter t), and the synthetase that works on it, the two active sites are separated by some distance.  The anticodon on the tRNA is on the bottom of the "t", but the amino acid binding site is at the other end – a whopping seven nanometers away.  Seven nanometers may not sound like a lot, but at the molecular scale, that’s a lot.  How does one end of a blind machine communicate with the other end?
       To find out, two Indian researchers investigated metRS in detail and published their results in PNAS.³  They found that vibrations ripple through the amino acids of the enzyme along four pathways.  The strongest one overrules the others when the twist is just right.  Furthermore, they found that these communications caused conformational changes – swings like a lever arm, flips and turns – that had to match the substrate in order to work.  The amino acid would only attach if all the contact points were just right:

   Furthermore, the network analysis on these simulated structures has been carried out to elucidate the paths of communication between the activation site and the anticodon recognition site.  This study has provided the detailed paths of communication, which are consistent with experimental results.... A comparison of the paths derived from the four simulations clearly has shown that the communication path is strongly correlated and unique to the enzyme complex, which is bound to both the tRNA and the activated methionine.

Let the evolutionists speculate and spin their webs of belief; we have the observational evidence in front of our noses that shout design.  The precision of fit of these parts, and the accuracy of their performance, is beyond any theory of chance and blind stumbling in the dark.  We do not accept the circular reasoning of the Darwinists who keep saying they evolved because they have a phylogenetic tree, and they have a phylogenetic tree because they evolved.  Those dependent clauses collapse in on themselves.  Neither do we accept the merry-go-round reasoning that says they are wonderfully adapted because they evolved, and they must have evolved because they are wonderfully adapted.  No more Darwinian rhetorical tricks.  Look, behold, wonder, and use your God-given common sense.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Don’t Just Sit There; Evolve   09/27/2007    
Have you ever wondered why your body doesn’t evolve?  After all, it is kind of like a population of trillions of organisms.  Why shouldn’t it follow the rules of natural selection?  Philip Ball asked this question in News@Nature recently.  “Evolution is usually thought of as something that happens to whole organisms,” he teased.  “But there’s no fundamental reason why, for multicelled organisms, it shouldn’t happen within a single organism too.”
    So why haven’t you evolved into something else by now?  The answer is as fascinating as it is unexpected: your body works overtime to keep you from evolving:

It’s not easy making a human.  Getting from a fertilized egg to a full-grown adult involves a near-miracle of orchestration, with replicating cells acquiring specialized functions in just the right places at the right times.  So you’d think that, having done the job once, our bodies would replace cells when required by the simplest means possible.
    Oddly, they don’t.  Our tissues don’t renew themselves by mere copying, with old skin cells dividing into new skin cells and so forth.  Instead, they keep repeating the laborious process of starting each cell from scratch.  Now scientists think they know why: it could be nature’s way of making sure that we don’t evolve as we grow older.

This is too funny.  Not only did the pro-evolutionist writer Philip Ball knock off another Darwinian concept in the pro-Darwin rag Nature, he praised our “wonderfully wrought bodies” with their “near-miracle of orchestration” in language that would warm the heart of any believer in intelligent design.  My, what would Phillip Johnson think of that.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Human Body • Amazing Facts

1. ES joins the army:  An article on Science Daily claims that embryonic stem cells are being recruited in the war on terror.  A University of Georgia research claims that neural cells induced to multiply from stem cells can detect toxins in the environment, like on a battlefield.  The article fails to mention, however, why embryonic stem cells are needed, and whether adult stem cells could do the job just as well (cf. 07/19/2007).  It also begins with this misleading clause that suggests that embryonic stem cells have already produced cures: “For more than a decade, Steve Stice has dedicated his research using embryonic stem cells to improving the lives of people with degenerative diseases and debilitating injuries.”  The record shows, however, that only adult stem cells have produced therapies that can improve the lives of people, while embryonic stem cells arouse fears of a new era of eugenics (12/16/2006, 11/29/2006 08/13/2006).
2. Get over it:  The Editorial in Nature 9/27 urged Germans to get over their ethical qualms about embryonic stem cells and get with the international stem cell gold rush (cf. 12/16/2005).  Some German ethicists have pointed to the success of adult stem cells to show that embryonic stem cells are unnecessary.  In urging a change, Nature used only bandwagon arguments (cf. 07/31/2006): “The majority of scientists agree that work on both adult and embryonic sources of stem cells should run in parallel until much more is understood about their biology,” the editorial said.  “But Germany is out of step with most European countries in permitting research only on human embryonic stem-cell lines that were created before January 2002, when regulations were first laid down.”  The article admitted that the creation of new ES cell lines “involves destroying human embryos,” but urged scientists to step up their campaigns against the opponents of the controversial research – many of whom are still smarting from the bad reputation Germany inherited from human medical research atrocities of the Nazis (04/07/2005, 02/28/2006, 12/16/2006).
3. Kahuna:  In the same issue, Nature published an interview with Alan Trounson, newly appointed head of California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) – the $3 billion stem-cell center approved by California voters.  The differences in success between adult and embryonic cells were blurred in his statement, “Mesenchymal [multipotent] stem cells are already in clinical trials.  Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are coming of age....”  His ending statement was even more telling: “Adult stem cells are happening.  Embryonic stem cells will come into use, and they won’t be immediate cures for everything.  You need drugs and protocols as well as the cells, and you’ve got to work with the immune system.”  Yet California voters had been swayed by tear-jerking stories of invalids who would be cured by embryonic stem cells.  The problems from subjects’ immune systems rejecting embryonic stem cells have so far rendered them medically useless.  On top of that, Trounson made it clear that no cures are forthcoming any time soon (cf. 10/13/2006).
4. Loaded words:  Because the words “embryonic” and “cloning” are touchy with the public, the US Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry is changing its name to the Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Registry.  Monya Baker reported in Nature 9/27 that this was intended to downplay ethically-charged words.  Baker quoted a professor of rhetoric who called this “linguistic deflation of public anxiety.”  The center was reacting to an executive order from President Bush that stem cell lines be expanded “in ethically responsible ways.” 

As we have shown repeatedly before, ES stem-cell advocates are pushing their agenda past the ethical gatekeepers on selfish, pragmatic grounds, yet have no results to show for it.  The appeals are always for Nobel Prizes and staying ahead in the international sweepstakes.  Whenever an ethicist calls them on the questionable reasoning of taking one life to help another (07/11/2005), they hum and guffaw and dodge the issue.  Now they are trying to blur the language with euphemisms to pull the wool over our eyes.  Don’t let them get away with it (07/19/2007).
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Cell Biology • Health

The researchers say the finding supports the idea that natural selection molded mechanisms into our ancestors’ brains that were specialized for paying attention to humans and other animals.  These adaptive traits were then passed on to us. “We’re assuming that natural selection takes a long time to build anything anew and that ’s why this is left over from our past,” said study team member Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)....

“Having this pop-out attentional bias for animals is sort of a vestigial behavior,” said study team member Joshua New of Yale University’s Perception and Cognition Lab.

Strange that evolution did not create a fear of falling coconuts or poison mushrooms.  Evolution also must have taught us that bear cubs and tiger cubs are cute, even when the mother is snarling a few yards away.  Maybe in a few million years, evolution will finally get it right that electrical outlets are dangerous (if any people remain that survive electrocution).  Maybe then our brains will have gotten it straight that we shouldn’t step in front of speeding vehicles, and that most spiders are harmless and cute.  Long before then, Brynner and the UCSB scientists will have comfortably retired with no fear of falsification.
    Isn’t evolutionary psychology wonderful?  It can explain anything.  All you need is a good imagination and some funding.  Let’s try some intelligently-designed shame on the Darwinian mythmakers to see if they evolve any sense.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man • Dumb Ideas

1. Small clusters:  Some impactors break up in the atmosphere and produce small clusters of craters 100 to 300 meters wide, each pockmark a few tens of meters in diameter.  The breakup of weak cometary bodies on entry through the Martian atmosphere could be responsible for some of these small clusters.
2. Large clusters:  The team identified a second population of larger clusters, distinct from the small clusters.  Their models indicated that one giant impact can launch numerous fragments as big as hundreds of meters across.  Some fragments can be ejected above escape velocity, but many will remain and fall back to the planet.  On Mars, the weakened fragments tend to break up in the atmosphere into sizes 5 to 50 meters, which is why clusters with similar size distributions are not seen on our airless moon.
       Secondaries can often be identified along rays from the primary crater, but not always.  The fragments can travel long distances, flying through the atmosphere for more than an hour, “making it difficult to identify the parent crater.”  The authors explained that for fragments ejected from a primary impact, “launch at 3 km/s can distribute fragments over much of a hemisphere, and launch at 4 km/s can distribute fragments over most of Mars....”  Escape velocity on Mars is 5 km/s.
3. Martian meteorites:  The meteorites found on Earth that originated on Mars appear to require impactors 3-7 km across.  An impactor hitting at an oblique angle can produce jets nearly parallel to the surface capable of accelerating surface rocks to escape velocity.  This implies that many other fragments fail to escape.  “Clearly, if fragmenting debris is lofted to escape velocity in order to produce martian meteorites ... on Earth, then other debris is lofted to barely suborbital speeds and secondary impact pits must exist not just in near-primary swarms, but also in near-random positions scattered around Mars.”

Further constraints are possible, from crater formation rate information.  Barlow and Osborne (2001) find most clusters on Noachian and Hesperian terrain, but some of our clusters, such as the one on Meridiani Planum (Fig.  4) and others on Olympus Mons, are found on geologically young surfaces.  This implies cluster formation within the last few hundred Myr, possibly within the last 20 Myr in the case of the sparsely cratered surface of Meridiani Planum, which may have been exhumed within the last tens of Myr (based on paucity of small sharp craters; [Hartmann et al., 2001] and [Hartmann, 2005]).  These results suggest clusters accumulating on surfaces throughout martian history.  Note that it is plausible that many young clusters on Mars might be products of a single large impact.

Despite their rigorous and admirable work of calculating and estimating the physical effects of impacting bodies on Mars, the authors could not think outside the box.  Their own work casts severe doubt on the ability to use crater counts as a dating method.  In principle, if one impact can produce ten million secondaries scattered around the whole planet (see 10/20/2005), there is no way to know how old the Martian surface is.  If anything, one would think the whole planet would have been saturated with craters in short order, hinting that the surface might be young.  And think about it: we’ve already seen several global dust storms in the 33 years since the first Martian orbiter.  How much weathering of craters would be expected in tens of millions of years?  And why is bedrock still clean-swept in large areas on Mars? (06/01/2005).
    Because these scientists began their modeling with undaunted faith in the Age of the Solar System (A.S.S.), a figure (4.5 billion years) that, according to the Law of the Needs of the Darwins cannot be altered, they had to make it all work within their mythical paradigm.  Their crater cluster formation model must fit within the scheme of imaginary Noachian, Hesperian and Amazonian epochs, even though their own work undermines the assumptions that went into making the scheme in the first place (for other problems with the current scheme, see Astrobiology Magazine).  What’s in a name?  Would calling them the Washingtonian, Lincolnian and Clintonian epochs make Mars blink an eye?  Let the discerning mind understand that the fancy charts of geological time scales on Mars and Earth are human impositions on the data – not inevitable products of the observations themselves.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Physics

1. Lateral pass to the opposing team:  Building evolutionary trees by comparing genomes was supposed to be simple.  Sure, geneticists knew that some organisms could insert DNA into other organisms, but lateral gene transfer was supposed to be rare or limited to lower life-forms.  That assumption was called into question in Science on Sept. 21: a team of 20 researchers from 7 universities and genetics labs titled their paper, “Widespread Lateral Gene Transfer from Intracellular Bacteria to Multicellular Eukaryotes.”¹
       Their findings from studying the Wolbachia genome may send shock waves through biology labs: “heritable lateral gene transfer occurs into eukaryotic hosts from their prokaryote symbionts, potentially providing a mechanism for acquisition of new genes and functions.”  Their concluding paragraph calls for a complete reevaluation of basic assumptions about lateral gene transfer (LGT):

   Whole eukaryote genome sequencing projects routinely exclude bacterial sequences on the assumption that these represent contamination.  For example, the publicly available assembly of D. ananassae does not include any of the Wolbachia sequences described here.  Therefore, the argument that the lack of bacterial genes in these assembled genomes indicates that bacterial LGT does not occur is circular and invalid.  Recent bacterial LGT to eukaryotic genomes will continue to be difficult to detect if bacterial sequences are routinely excluded from assemblies without experimental verification.  And these LGT events will remain understudied despite their potential to provide novel gene functions and affect arthropod and nematode genome evolution.  Because W. pipientis is among the most abundant intracellular bacteria and its hosts are among the most abundant animal phyla, the view that prokaryote-to-eukaryote transfers are uncommon and unimportant needs to be reevaluated.

2. Gasid indigestion in planets:  Another assumption under fire has to do with gas ratios emanating from planets.  For decades, scientists have assumed that ratios of inert gases tell us something about a planet’s history and interior.  Now, a paper in Nature by Watson, Thomas and Cherniak of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, found that argon-40 is not coming out as fast as thought.²  So?  Chris Ballentine explained in the same issue of Nature³ that this has far-reaching implications on models of planetary origins.
       “We thought we knew how much gas Earth gives up, and how it does it,” he began, “but a challenge has emerged to the prevailing model.”  The implications affect models of plate tectonics, the physics of the mantle, the movement of radioactive decay products, and the origin of the terrestrial planets.  It appears now that argon and helium can be recycled into the mantle rather than being released.  Physicists measuring gas ratios at oceanic ridges, therefore, can no longer assume what they took for granted: that the rate of helium-3 and argon-40 emission reveals something about the rate of convection in the mantle.  “So does the Earth hold its breath?,” Ballentine ended.  “Someone has got it wrong.  Let’s hope we don’t have to hold our own breath too long to find out who.”
       This problem was reported in the popular press by EurekAlert and PhysOrg.  The press release made the extent of the problem of this “Argon conclusion” clear in the first paragraph:

   Geochemists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are challenging commonly held ideas about how gases are expelled from the Earth.  Their theory, which is described in the Sept. 20 issue of the journal Nature, could change the way scientists view the formation of Earth’s atmosphere and those of our distant neighbors, Mars and Venus.  Their data throw into doubt the timing and mechanism of atmospheric formation on terrestrial plants.

     Astrobiology Magazine also reported on this finding.  Watson remarked, “We can no longer assume that a partly melted region of the mantle will be stripped of all argon and, by extension, other noble gases.”  He added, “We may need to start reassessing our basic thinking on how the atmosphere and other large-scale systems were formed.”⁴

Will the researchers at top levels notice these earthquakes in their underlying assumptions?  Will they explain them away?  What about the papers, books and press releases that now have to be rewritten?  We’ll leave it to specialists to explain the extent of the damage from these announcements, but here is an example of how science works.  Anything you thought you understood is always subject to challenge.
    We don’t accept the cynical description of a scientist as a blind drunk occasionally bumping his head into the lamp post of reality.  After all, we do successfully fly probes to the planets.  But beware the scientist who says “Now we know” this or that thing, especially when it comes to questions of unobserved history and unobservable domains.  The only thing about which you can say “Now we know” is that more such challenges lurk in the future.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Solar System • Physics • Geology • Dating Methods

Thermodynamics ought to be the cornerstone of any scientist’s understanding of nature.  Forget superstrings and grand unified theories: thermodynamics is the original ‘theory of everything’.  Or perhaps the ‘theory of what everything does and how it does it’.  Thermodynamics explains the transformation of energy, and nothing happens without that.

The development of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century was the most wide-reaching and fundamental advance since Newton’s mechanics.  It underpinned (albeit some time after the event) the Industrial Revolution, and led the way to statistical mechanics (and hence to statistical quantum mechanics) and to an understanding of phase behaviour, chemical reactions, the astrophysics of stars...to everything, in other words.

Proteins do the same job for life that steam engines did for Victorian industry.  Unlike a railway engine, however, the cell is a profoundly non-equilibrium place.  And proteins are not isolated but inextricably bound to the world around them, inescapably prey to brownian motion.

Understanding the microscopic, non-equilibrium, open-system thermodynamics of these ‘life engines’ could usher in fascinating discoveries: how life works as a physical process, how we might borrow life’s technology to make our own nanoengines, and how we might transform medicine by replacing broad-spectrum chemical cocktails with medical engineering of proteins.  All this requires twenty-first-century developments in thermodynamics that are no less revolutionary than the nineteenth-century theory.

Sounds like an interesting book.  Good to see the three great Christian physicists of the 19th century still acknowledged as grandees, as indeed they were (read their stories in our online book).  Why do we need a theory of everything (T.O.E.) when we already have one?  Hawking, Susskind et al want to blend quantum mechanics, gravity and dark stuff into their Big T.O.E., but they cannot stub the T.O.E. we already have without pain (08/13/2002).
    Budding scientists should stand on the shoulders of giants and learn thermodynamics.  The 4 Laws of TD, especially the first two, show that mass-energy cannot be created or destroyed, and that energy becomes less available to do work over time (law of entropy).  These laws spell doom for theories of evolution (12/30/2005), because they show that the universe is aging and winding down, not progressing (06/08/2005).  Don’t expect Darwinists to find an escape clause in nanoscopic, non-equilibrium situations (07/05/2003).  The kind of order that they need will not come from mechanical laws (10/27/2005, 07/17/2002).  It’s not just order they need: it’s information (12/30/2003).
    If the future lies in understanding the thermodynamics of the cell, and if there are as many revolutionary inventions waiting to be discovered as Haw said by imitating cellular machines, then this may be a great field for a young physicist or medical researcher to enter.  Who will become the next Joule, Maxwell or Kelvin?
Next headline on:  Physics • Cell Biology • Biomimetics

The discovery of a bug that roamed with the dinosaurs has shown that insects were equipped with chemical weapons much earlier than thought....
    ....the beetle fired an acidic repellent at the attacker—providing researchers with a frozen glimpse of a 100 million-year-old battle for survival.
    What’s even more remarkable, he says, is that this finding pushes back the known existence of this type of beetle by about 60 million years, making it the earliest fossil record of chemical weaponry in animals....
    ....the researchers concluded that the insect was most likely a member of an extinct soldier beetle species which was an ancestor to modern soldier beetles that pack similar kinds of ammunition....
    “That this type of defense has been preserved through 100 million years of evolution is evidence that it works pretty well.”

Student Exercise:  Try rewriting the LiveScience article without the evolutionary spin.  Describe what was observed.  Include facts that are remarkable and interesting, but keep the evidence open to other interpretations that do not simply assume evolution (including the millions-of-years dates).
Next headline on:  Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Dumb Ideas

Was Velociraptor a Dragon?   09/22/2007    
As if Velociraptor, the terror of Jurassic Park, was not scary enough, some scientists are now saying it was feathered.  (This, of course, does not imply it could fly after its human prey like some movie dragon.)  The latest claim in Science is based on the apparent presence of “quill knobs” on the radius bone of a specimen found in Mongolia.  In their “Brevia” article, the authors claimed this is direct evidence that the dinosaur had quilled feathers.  Other science reporters took up the claim without a flap, among them Science Daily, the BBC News and National Geographic News, which may feel some relief after its Archaeoraptor embarrassment (11/21/2002, 09/27/2000).

Since nobody else seems to be asking the hard questions, let’s take a look at this claim.  The paper and its photos do not appear convincing to a skeptical eye.  Consider these points:

1. The evidence is circumstantial, not definitive.
2. The claim came from one bone, not from multiple samples of Velociraptor.  The first thing they should have done was examine other specimens.
3. No feathers or feather imprints were found (see 09/06/2007, footnote 2).
4. There were only 6 of the structures, and they looked like dimples, not knobs.
5. The dimples followed a curve, not a straight line as on the vulture bone shown for comparison.
6. The putative quill knobs were in the middle third of the bone but did not continue to the right or left; why would an arm have only six feathers in the middle of the arm?  The vulture bone showed the knobs all the way along the bone.
7. They did not show similar knobs on the other arm, or on any of the other parts of the skeleton.
8. Not all birds have quill knobs.  Eagles, for instance, do not.  The authors admit that lack of the knobs is not evidence for lack of feathers, but argue that presence of knobs is direct evidence for feathers.  This is an argument from silence, because there might have been non-feathered animals with knobs.  Their ending statement, therefore, is unsupportable: “Whether this feature represents retention of an ancestral function or the cooption for other purposes, the presence of quilled feathers on the posterior of the arms in a medium-sized derived, clearly nonvolant dromaeosaur can now be established.”
9. These structures might have had a different function than supporting feathers.
10. Velociraptor had no use for feathers.  The authors admit that the skeleton of the creature did not allow it to fly; the arms are too short to serve as wings.
11. The authors could only speculate what feathers would be used for: perhaps sexual display or downward lift while running.  For this they referred to Ken Dial’s ridiculous hypothesis about the origin of flight (see 05/01/2006, 12/22/2003, 01/16/2003).
12. The paper claims that Velociraptor descended from more bird-like feathered dinosaurs that might have been capable of flight.  Not only is there no evidence for this, it would represent devolution, not evolution.
13. Feathers are very different from scales.  The existence of pits along an arm bone falls far short of explaining how complex feathers could have evolved.  The authors said, “This report of secondaries in a larger-bodied, derived, and clearly flightless member of a nonavian theropod clade represented by feathered relatives is a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the evolution of feathers.”  Such a claim vastly oversteps the evidence.
14. The introduction said, “Some nonavian theropod dinosaurs were at least partially covered in feathers or filamentous protofeathers.”  But the reference was to a paper by one of the coauthors, not to an independent source.  It would have been a more solid argument to cite a critic of dinosaur-to-bird evolution as a hostile witness.
15. They said “We present direct evidence of feathers” but did not show any feathers!  The evidence, therefore, was indirect.
16. Quill knobs are usually indicative of secondary feathers, i.e., those with vanes and barbs used for flight.  None of the other “feathered dinosaur” candidates have advanced feathers like this, unless they were arguably true birds.
17. The bone was found in isolation and “possesses several characteristics” of Velociraptor.  This allows for the possibility this bone was misclassified.
18. This claim cannot be taken in isolation from the other controversies about dinosaur-to-bird evolution (see 09/06/2007 and its embedded links to previous entries; see also the four Dinosaur chain links in the Oct. 2005 page).

Paleontologists with more experience, with access to this bone, will need to weigh in on this claim.  But even if definitive evidence were to be established for feathered Velociraptors, what would this mean for creationists?  Nothing.  It would mean that extinct creatures were more varied than previously thought.  Some birds and reptiles had teeth, and some did not.  Some birds and reptiles flew, and some did not.  Some birds and reptiles had different numbers of toes.  The morphological differences within class Aves and within class Reptilia is enormous even today (picture ostrich vs hummingbird, alligator vs turtle).  The diversity was even much more so in the past.  Creationists allow for a Designer who could use His designed structures where needed.  There are many other cases where common structures are found in different groups; evolutionists explain them away with their miracle phrase, “convergent evolution.”  Feathering would just add one more example.
    Feathered Velociraptors would also mean that the scientists were wrong, and the animators of Jurassic Park were wrong.  It would not establish a link between dinosaurs and birds, because this creature was not on the line leading to birds.  Even the authors admitted that the Velociraptor lineage must have been in the process of losing its feathers (if these members indeed had any), while the ancestors (according to the story) would have had functioning feathers, with no ancestors before that showing how the feathers evolved.
    Evolutionists are in a frantic campaign to support their theory.  That’s why this circumstantial evidence is getting so much press.  But at best, it’s merely another argument from homology.  As Jonathan Wells pointed out so well in his book Icons of Evolution, homology does not prove evolution; it can just as well support common design.  Give them all the feathered dinosaurs they want; it will not prove that one kind of animal evolved into another kind.  Until then, we’d like to see a lot better evidence than this one bone.
    Notice one other thing about scientific papers in this vein.  Its authors referenced Ken Dial’s absurd just-so story suggesting that flight evolved when baby dinosaurs held out their arms as stabilizers while running uphill.   These guys used Dial’s paper for support rather than laughing at it as they should have.  This would be a good time to re-read the entry from 03/17/2006, in which a team of social scientists demonstrated that scientific papers can actually perpetuate false ideas rather than build up knowledge.
    On the History Channel tonight, a documentary was shown that illustrates how vastly different interpretations can come from the same evidence.  A 2005 program about dragons was rerun.  It acknowledged that dragon legends exist worldwide, crossing all cultures around the world: Maya, Chinese, American Indian, European.  The similarities between these legends is striking.  Also, each culture believed that these creatures really existed, and some claimed that they were witnessed in recent times.  How is this to be explained?
    Creationists have used these facts to support the idea that humans and dinosaurs coexisted till recent times, and the memory of the awesome beasts was perpetuated in dragon legends.  The secular TV program admitted that dragons bear striking resemblances to dinosaurs, but it put forth a completely different explanation.  Assuming in advance that the existence of humans and dinosaurs was impossible, the commentators made up explanations out of thin air: for instance, that humans are hard-wired to imagine dragons in their evolved brains, such that instinctive fear of predators (eagles, snakes and lions) combined into one imaginary creature, the dragon.  The program also suggested that primitive peoples found dinosaur bones in the ground and projected them into their mythology as large, fearsome monsters.  “Instincts that kept our evolutionary ancestors from being eaten,” combined with the human capacity for vivid imagination, produced dragon myths around the world, independently, with striking similarities in many details.  The program, as could be expected, claimed ownership of “science” as its superior alternative to any other explanation.  This is not about science.  It’s about the science of one world view arguing with the science of another.
    According to Dykstra’s Law, everyone is someone else’s weirdo.  Creationists will surely laugh as hard at the evolutionary explanation as the evolutionists would about the creation alternative.  This is not to say that all weirdos are equally weird, or that all weird ideas have equal validity, or that world views are arbitrary.  It does illustrate, though, that evidence does not interpret itself.  Presuppositions and biases cannot be avoided.  They need to be acknowledged and can, to some degree, be kept under control by honesty and love of the truth.  Claims about Velociraptor feathers need more control than we are seeing today.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Dinosaurs • Birds

In recent years, “water, water everywhere” might have been the motto for Mars exploration.  Shallow, salty seas ruled on early Mars, and water has been gushing down gullies in the geologically recent past, some even in the past few years.  But the tide is now receding, at least a ways.
    As highlighted in the 21 September issue of Science and elsewhere, more leisurely consideration of observations from rovers and orbiters and the unprecedented detail afforded by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)--the latest arrival at Mars--are bringing into question many earlier geologic interpretations involving surface water.  Mars has been “a desolate place for a long time,” concludes geochemist Scott McLennan of Stony Brook University in New York state.

Images of supposed ancient ocean floors and riverbeds show no obvious signs that liquid water was ever present.  Reexamination of some landforms implies that they have been formed by flowing lava, not water.  The only locations where features seem to indicate the presence of liquid water today or in the recent past are on the rims of craters and some gullies, suggesting that heat from impacts may have been the trigger for trickles rather than a revealed water table.  Radar and gravity data show that the cap on Mars’ south pole now holds the largest reservoir of relatively pure water ice on the planet, and layers there and in the north polar cap reveal seasonal oscillations in climate.

This must be a severe disappointment to origin-of-life researchers.  The motto “follow the water” has driven much of the Mars program.  Mars remains just as fascinating a geological body as it always was, but with decreasing hopes for water, and therefore life, will there be enough wind in NASA’s sails to keep going back?
    Phoenix is on its way to a polar landing next year.  The mission overview clearly states that water ice and organic compounds necessary for life are a prominent goal of the mission.  The Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to rove the planet in 2010, has even more experiments to “collect Martian soil and rock samples and analyze them for organic compounds and environmental conditions that could have supported microbial life now or in the past.”  Today’s papers in Science may begin to decrease hopes for even past life.  Will NASA scientists be able to keep Mars plans vibrant beyond MSL, when the goals stated for Mars Beyond 2009 are heavily influenced by Astrobiology?  How much will scientists want to study lava and dust in more detail?
    We hope planetary exploration will continue apace.  Here’s a replacement goal that creationists and intelligent design people (i.e., the majority of taxpaying Americans) can support: “We learn from exploring other planets and moons just how special our Earth is, and how narrow are the requirements for life that are met uniquely on the home planet.”  There’s potential for a lot of good science with that focus.  Astrobiologists can even continue to look for life.  The more they don’t find it, the more we will appreciate how special life is.  Everybody wins.  We will not cease from exploring, T.S. Eliot said.  When we come back home, we will understand the place for the first time.  That’s worthwhile.
    Scientists must face things as they are, not as they wish them to be.  Did you notice that the earlier claims of liquid water were apparently due to the eagerness to find it?  Kerr said that only after a more “leisurely” look at the observations did the dry truth begin to sink in.  That’s not all bad.  Science is often driven by the eagerness to prove or disprove something.  As long as scientists are honest when their hunches don’t bear up, worthwhile findings can result.  We’re only human, though, and emotions do get involved.  It’s a good thing Percival Lowell (Mr. Martian canals) is dead, because he would be sooooo depressed.  But look: his eagerness bequeathed to us the Lowell Observatory.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Origin of Life

This material shows that the postcranial anatomy of the Dmanisi hominins has a surprising mosaic of primitive and derived [i.e., modern] features.  The primitive features include a small body size, a low encephalization quotient and absence of humeral torsion; the derived features include modern-human-like body proportions and lower limb morphology indicative of the capability for long-distance travel.

When viewed up close, however, the Australopithecus–Homo transition has always been murky.  One problem is that we don’t know enough about Homo habilis, the putative ancestor of H. erectus.  In addition, early H. erectus fossils are quite variable, and the more we look, the more we find contrasts with later hominins (the formal term for a species in the human lineage).  For example, their rate of development was rapid and chimp-like, rather than slow and extended as in modern humans.  Also, brain size relative to body size in the earliest H. erectus fossils is not much different from that of many australopiths or H. habilis.  Finally, the earliest non-African fossils of Homo from Dmanisi, Georgia, which are dated to 1.77 million years ago, resemble H. erectus in many respects.  But they are highly variable, and more in the size range of H. habilis than of H. erectus.

Why don’t news reporters listen to the caution about drawing broad conclusions?  The reporters do it all the time, and yet the scientists never stop them.  In fact, when they talk to the reporters, they often lose all scientific restraint and tell stories like the worst of them.
Update: Now they’re at it again: while this entry was being prepared, another report came out claiming that Hobbit Man must have been non-human because the wrist bones are slightly different.  The usual suspects, like LiveScience and the BBC News, never learn.  Haven’t they seen small people before?  Rather than consider variability and the effects of disease or genetic isolation, they are pushing the primitive-to-modern human-ancestry myth again.
    Read the original paper and you will find it is a confusing mishmash of conflicting data.  They can’t decide whether these specimens were primitive, modern, or transitional.  Remember the guy in 2002 (08/01/2002) who was so puzzled by Dmanisi man, he suggested putting the bones back in the ground?  Why would the Dmanisi people have modern arches and walk like modern people, if they were less than human?  Does evolution put out certain fully modern traits in advance of others?  Was the Dmanisi tribe trying to walk out of Africa to go shopping for bigger brains, and if so, how could they do it without the brains in the first place?  Science Daily said that hominids were able to walk just as well as modern humans 3.5 million years ago.  Then, certainly they could have been physically agile to hunt down the potatoes that gave them big brains (09/11/2007).  And now that we know that so-called Homo habilis couldn’t be an ancestor, why doesn’t anyone draw the conclusion that the whole mishmash of evolution stories is pure fiction?
    The more logical conclusion is that there is more variability in the human body than previously thought.  Most thinking people realize mosaics are an art form.  Only one-dimensional Darwinian thinking tries to rearrange the pieces of a mosaic into a straight line.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils • Human Body

Geological Dates Adjust Catastrophically to Evolutionary Assumptions   09/19/2007    
Pick a date for the rise of a land mass: 3 million years or 30 million years.  Either one will work, depending on the current evolutionary assumptions, if one is to follow the logic of an article on the Discovery Channel website.  Here’s how it began:

The geologic rise of the Ethiopian Plateau may have happened millions of years later than thought, and just in time to nudge along the evolution of modern humans, say the authors of a new study.

Some previous estimates of the plateau’s age put its rise at around 30 million years ago – far too early for it to have directly affected the immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens, who arose in the valley just a few million years ago.

“So (human ancestors) had to walk across that savanna,” said Royhan Gani [U of Utah].  And walking on two feet, as independent studies have shown, is the most efficient way for an ape to cross large distances.

Using elevation data collected by the space shuttle, orbiting satellites and radioisotope dating of various rock layers found in the walls of the Nile River Gorge, the researchers believe they have narrowed down the timing of the final phase of the plateau's uplift to less than three million years ago.
    That’s just in time to cause the drying out of east Africa and the creation of the pedestrian-friendly savannas on which humans evolved.

To arrive at the more recent date, the researchers turned the question upside down.  Rather than dating the plateau’s uplift directly, they studied the effects of the one thing in the region that responds instantly to any change in elevation – the Blue Nile River.

Ultimately, they determined that the Blue Nile eventually carved out more than 22,400 cubic miles of rock from the area, not at a constant rate, but in three pulses that reflect major geologic events.  The last phase, which began six million years ago, may have been caused by foundering of a deep part of the earth’s crust, which let the plateau rise like ship losing ballast.

A simultaneous drop in the Rift Valley’s elevation also contributed to the drying, said geologist Martin Williams of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
    “The African Rift has been going down and widening,” Williams told Discovery News.  “The real drying out of Ethiopia proper began 3 to 2 1/2 million years ago.”  Just in time, perhaps, to drive the evolution of our ancestors.

Caught in the act!  You thought geologists knew about the dates of mountains, canyons and plateaus, didn’t you?  Here you just saw them make an order-of-magnitude adjustment to an accepted age just to keep the apeman-to-human myth intact.  This huge fudging operation was blessed by none other than the Geological Society of America.  Now you know why the “Related Links” at the end of the article lists a human evolution website, and “PBS explores human evolution,” and “More on hominids from the BBC.”  Do you really think for a million nanoseconds that these geologists were unbiased seekers of the truth, converging independently on the actual date of this plateau by strict adherence to empiricism?  No; Charlie is backstage calling the shots, and they’re all in this racket together.  If you don’t believe it yet, look at a summary of the GSA paper published by EurekAlert:

More than three million years ago, early hominins evolved the ability to walk upright and in doing so started us along the evolutionary path that eventually gave rise to Homo sapiens.  It was Darwin who first suggested that a change of climate, giving rise to vast, arid, savannahs, may have spurred on human evolution all those millions of years ago.  But what caused that change of climate?  Could the formation of one of Earth’s most spectacular landscapes, the Ethiopian Plateau, have been responsible for development of the great African grasslands?  And if so, what were the geological processes that led to the formation of the plateau?  To answer these questions, Nahid DS Gani of the University of Utah and colleagues turned...

There you have it.  The rest of the story is just window dressing.  We won’t even need to unpack the idiotic idea that a geologic event is somehow going to make men out of monkeys.  They had their minds made up: the human-evolution story needed a dry savanna, so the evolutionary geologists cooked one up for them on command.  It didn’t matter that they have to turn their old date upside down and shrink it to 10% of its former value.  Nothing is too costly to offer in sacrifice to Father Charlie.  The summary ended, “The timing of plateau formation coincides with and is therefore probably related to the change in climate that gave rise to the African savannahs and ultimately to human evolution.”  Charlie’s wish is their command.  “Ironically, Gani and colleagues had to turn to outer space to determine that the geological processes that spurred on human evolution lay deep within Earth’s mantle.”  They’ll ascend to the heights of heaven, or descend to the depths of the earth, to honor their idol.
    The only bright side of this article is a subtle confirmation of creationist geology.  The creationists have been saying for years that the Grand Canyon was formed rapidly by catastrophic processes.  We’ve seen the secular geology crowd slowly coming around (09/16/2005, 07/02/2002) and dropping their age estimates like a rock in free fall (from 100 million to 5 million to less than a million).  Now, this story alluded to evidence that the “Grand Canyon of Africa,” the Nile Gorge, was not formed by uniformitarian gradualism, but by catastrophism as well.  Shove aside their moyboy lingo (09/16/2005 commentary footnote), because it is worthless.  They weren’t there, they don’t know, and their ulterior motives are driving the show.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods • Early Man • Darwinism

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Exercise:  Read the following article, “The Dating Game” on EurekAlert with your Baloney Detector on.  Do you see any examples of belief leading evidence?  of crisis with evolutionary beliefs leading to creative solutions in the evidence?  of willingness to jettison prior measurements in order to save a favored belief?  Notice the last sentence: “Today, few discussions in geology can occur without reference to geologic time and plate tectonics.  They are both integral to our way of thinking about the world.”  What do you suppose is driving this way of thinking?  Does a “way of thinking about the world” have any necessary correlation to the way things really are?  Now read this article by Terry Mortenson, a PhD historian of science whose specialty is the origins of old-age geology.

Using modern amniotes as analogues, the possession of an impedance-matching middle ear in these parareptiles suggests unique ecological adaptations potentially related to living in dim-light environments.  More importantly, our results demonstrate that already at an early stage of amniote diversification, and prior to the Permo-Triassic extinction event, the complexity of terrestrial vertebrate ecosystems had reached a level that proved advanced sensory perception to be of notable adaptive significance.

The evolution of an impedance-matching middle ear within Amniota has been interpreted to have occurred in concert with the diversification of modern insects, which reached its peak in the Mesozoic, implying that the buzzing sound of flying insects would have favoured the evolution of an advanced hearing sense....

The discovery of a highly-evolved auditory apparatus in Middle Permian parareptiles even further emphasizes that the entire groundplan for the impressive evolutionary history of amniotes was already largely in place by the end of the Paleozoic; what followed was in fact only a subsequent tinkering of earlier inventions.

National Geographic swallowed the Muller myth whole, without skipping a beat, without offering any critical analysis or opposing views.  “Well shazam, isn’t evolution amazin'.  It created advanced sound systems not just once, or twice, but four times!  Then Tinker Bell took over and made 'em even gooder.”
    We’ve heard these Darwinist shenanigans so many times, it sounds like a broken record.*

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*For those born after 1980, a record was a flat piece of round vinyl that stored recorded music.  As the record rotated on a turntable, a diamond needle in a stylus at the end of a long arm picked up analog signals recorded as bumps in long, spiral grooves (groovy – get it?  That’s where that comes from).  Records were easily scratched, and when that happened, the stylus would often skip back to the previous groove, repeating the same words over and over, like They’re coming to take me away, away [click] coming to take me away, away [click] coming to take me away, away ad infinitum, till someone couldn’t stand it any more and would throw the record out the window like a Frisbee, making target shooters happy because even if they missed the bullet hole was always dead center.  Records would also warp in the sun and make Elvis Presley sound like a Muslim call to prayer.  The Chipmunks got their start when somebody discovered that playing a 33-1/3 revolutions per minute (RPM) record at 78 RPM raised the pitch of James Earl Jones into the Tiny Tim range.  Record stores were very popular till all the record companies silently swapped all the vinyl records out overnight for the newer CDs, making owners of extensive record collections very angry and still, 27 years later, trying to rip their vinyl records to MP3 files, while our spouses scream I’m going to take them away, away, and since the program notes could no longer fit on the back of the album, CD makers reduced the font to 5 points, forcing everyone to wear glasses.  That’s why your parents look mad all the time from squinting so much.  Now you iPod-generation youngsters know what a broken record is and how your parents suffered, trudging through the snow for miles just to buy the latest Beatles album and try to understand it through all the snaps, crackles and pops on rumbly turntables that challenged their impedance-matched ears.  They didn’t even have wireless downloads back then.  How they do the Chipmunks now is anyone’s guess.  Who reminded us of all these headaches?  It’s Darwin’s fault.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Evolution • Terrestrial Zoology