New Dinosaur Finds Astonish Paleontologists   11/30/2007    
Some recent dinosaur discoveries on different sides of the world have produced amazement among scientists and the public as well.

1. Tire tracks uncover dino tracks:  ATVs and dirt bikes have ridden for years over a place that is now found to be loaded with dinosaur tracks.  Near Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park in Utah, reported the Salt Lake Tribune, thousands of dinosaur tracks were discovered in an area thought to have been a desert – “as harsh as the Sahara” – when dinosaurs roamed there.  Associated Press and National Geographic News gave short summaries of the story.
       The Tribune said that one species of carnivore was as small as a robin.  Five other species, including a 3-toed crocodile and a plant-eater 35 feet long, were found across dozens of layers of rock.  “You rarely find herbivores in a desert,” said Martin Lockley, curator of the Dinosaur Tracks Museum at the University of Colorado at Denver.  As paleontologists flock to the site, one question will be what conditions allowed these prints to be preserved in a dry desert.
       Dinosaur tracks are known in other places in the southwest, such as near Tuba City, Arizona, and Zion National Park.  Another dinosaur trove is being explored in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Park east of the Coral Pink Sand Dunes (10/09/2007, bullet 1).  And far away and down under, Science Daily reported a track site in Australia.  Dinosaur tracks have even been found in Israel (search list at Bible Places), but when they walked there, maybe only Job knows.
2. Spanish inquisitive:  Imagine more than 8,000 dinosaurs, some 65 feet long, buried together in one location.  That’s what The Times Online (UK) reported about a site between Madrid and Valencia that was discovered during excavations for a rail line.  100 titanosaurs are included in this massive graveyard that includes a wealth of other plant and animal species.
       The traditional dating of the strata, 80 million years old, represents a time when the number of dinosaur species was supposed to be sharply declining.  “Palaeontologists working in Lo Hueco, though, have been amazed to find a wide variety of dinosaurs from the period.”  No less remarkable is the manner in which they died.  “The range of species they are finding at the 80 million-year-old site and their state of conservation is virtually unparalleled in Europe and challenges long-held beliefs about the way in which dinosaurs became extinct.”  One of the excavators remarked, “Everything indicates that the dinosours [sic] were enjoying great evolutionary vigour when they suddenly disappeared.”
       Excavators are hurrying to sift through 20,000 kg of sediment so that railway digging can continue.  The site is 80 to 100 times the size of a normal excavation in terms of time and money, the report said. They expect to find dozens of smaller species.
       Surprisingly, American science news media are not reporting this story.  A report from Expatica counts 30 paleontologists and geologists working flat-out with volunteers to preserve the bones before construction resumes.  This is one of Europe’s most spectacular dinosaur finds (cf. Switzerland and Germany, 08/15/2007).  “The state of conservation is incredible,” the director of the dig said.  “There are articulated skeletons, for example, a neck that is several meters long with all its vertebrae and ribs in place.”  The article says the pit is 20 meters deep.  It appears to be in a fluvial channel, where “the animals were probably washed into it by heavy flooding.” 

The pit in Spain is a phenomenal discovery—where are the dinosaur media?  Are they afraid that creationists will jump on it?  This doesn’t look like slow, gradual evolution or uniformitarianism: it looks like a giant flood buried them all.  Maybe the same flood hit Switzerland, Germany and Norway (04/25/2006).  Toss in Australia and Montana while we’re at it.  Maybe the Utah group was running for their lives.  Maybe yes, maybe Noah.
    The Times Online article demonstrates why we don’t print unmoderated reader comments at this site.  All it takes is for a few idiots to say stupid things, and the stink spreads around.  Fortunately the comments we get are mostly thoughtful and erudite, because our readers tend to be educated and intelligent.  It’s very possible the ones who sent in those remarks are trolls just trying to make Christians look bad.  If you are prone to write responses on blogs, please think and do your homework first – and brush up on your spelling and punctuation, too.  An education with our Baloney Detector should be a prerequisite for any public writing.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

Who Knows the Age of Grand Canyon?   11/30/2007    
“In spite of over a century of work on the Grand Canyon, there are still fundamental questions about the age of the canyon and the processes that have formed it.”  Thus begins a paper in the November GSA Bulletin of the Geological Society of America.¹  To re-evaluate the date of Grand Canyon, a team dated lavas comparing argon-40 and argon-39, examined fault lines, and modeled rates of downcutting by the river.  Their result?  The canyon is half as old as previously thought: from 1.2 million years maximum, to probably less than 723,000 years – maybe even as little as 102,000 years.
    This represents another step in a long trend of falling ages for the world’s most famous canyon.  John Wesley Powell thought the canyon was 70 million years old – a date that stuck for nearly a century (source: RAE.org).  In more recent decades, 5 million years was the consensus figure.  Now it’s getting down into the hundreds of thousands (07/22/2002), with no end in sight.  Textbooks can’t keep up with the scientists, though.  This website for Utah fifth graders, for instance, nonchalantly tells the kids the canyon is 10 million years old.
    Meanwhile, creationists have long argued that the canyon is very young.  Their most popular model has a large lake upstream breaching its dam and carving the entire canyon within days or weeks.  Remarkably, some secular geologists are warming up to that idea, supplying their own variations on the dam-breach theme but putting the event farther back in time (09/30/2000, 05/31/2002, 07/22/2002, 09/16/2005).  Who knows; maybe tradition makes it hard to give up those millions of years.

Our commentary is based on analysis of this paper by a field geologist with over 28 years’ experience in the oil, gas and mining industries, who has also given presentations about the Colorado Plateau.
    The authors of this paper cherry-picked their data.  They only used 26 of 63 radiometric dating tests – that is tossing out 60% of the data.  How can we trust their results?  Even then, the spread in resulting ages is huge, but they never questioned the validity of their dating method.
    In addition, there is a large discrepancy between the dates of lavas on the Uinkaret Plateau (3.4 to 3.7 million years) and those of intracanyon flows (100,000 to 700,000 years), but they assumed that their results are immune from the flaws of earlier attempts.  Regardless, they had to admit that radioactive dating of basalt is very difficult, particularly in Grand Canyon.  They also acknowledged large discrepancies between radioactive dates and those determined by stratigraphic position: in one case, they were off by more than two standard deviations.  The way out was to use a method of “recalculating errors to better reflect scatter of the dates beyond analytical error.”  Some stratigraphic dates agreed with the radiometric dates, but the above discrepancy stuck out like a sore thumb.  What did they do?  Ignore it!
    The incision rates (downcutting of the river) they modeled would require 10 to 12 million years to carve the canyon – much older than the date they got from radiometric methods.  They tried to correlate incision rate with faulting rate, but those are two processes that have nothing to do with each other; to get disparate pieces of the puzzle together, they allowed incision rates to vary by nearly 1000%.  When needed, they added some ad hoc forces to keep things in sync: raising the whole Colorado Plateau by a “buoyant low-velocity mantle upwelling.”
    In short, our geologist concluded, “RA [radioactive] dating can give any date you would like, depending on where you sample and what method you use.  Because the evolutionists’ assumptions are wrong they are asking the wrong questions, using the wrong methods, and generating wrong interpretations.  What a waste of time and effort.”  (See 09/19/2007).
    Scouring through the jargon and numbers in this technical paper, it is apparent that these geologists were trying to piece together a lot of uncooperative data into some kind of patchwork that gave them a human sense of accomplishment.  Undoubtedly the team felt gratified for getting a paper published by their peers in the Geological Society of America.  Whether their claims have any necessary correlation with what actually happened at Grand Canyon is an entirely different question.  Here, it is publish and perish – perish the thought that their assumptions might be totally off kilter.  See 11/05/2003, 11/04/2003.

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Opportunity:  Want to see evidence for a young canyon with your own eyes?  Join us for the Memorial Day 2008 3-day rafting trip in Grand Canyon! (see sample picture).  Click here for details on this fun-filled, educational vacation package.  Don’t hesitate – the trip is expected to fill by January 2008 or before.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

These are exciting times for monumental discoveries, but Jerusalem is currently a pawn in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks (see WND).  The Israeli government showcases these discoveries to the public in beautiful archaeological parks; would Palestinians be as hospitable if the site were entirely under Muslim control?  Their treatment of the Temple Mount, Gaza and Hebron portends ominously otherwise.  And did you hear what members of the Religion of Peace are demanding today in Sudan? (Breitbart.com).
    The capricious history of archaeology in Israel shows that opportunities for exploration are volatile.  Major discoveries can be followed by decades of denied access.  Ritmeyer has experienced this firsthand.  He has had to stitch together tantalizing tidbits of information gathered from fortuitous opportunities over 30 years.  How much better it would be for the scholarly community if these historic sites were open for free and fair investigation.  This is another reason to pray for the peace of Jerusalem – and for Iraq, another country with untold archaeological treasures where scholarly access hangs in the balance.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

Although Orgel was a theoretician, he always demanded that theory be subject to rigorous experimental validation.  This, he felt, was especially true in the field of the origins of life, where “theories are a dime a dozen and facts are in short supply”.  He took great pleasure in a positive result, to the point of rooting for the pen on a graph-plotter during chromatography experiments.  But he also delighted in negative results, because they pushed him to devise new hypotheses.  This, of course, is the way scientists are supposed to behave, but Orgel was one of the few who actually did so.

Following the discovery of catalytic RNA, Orgel continued to pursue the RNA-world hypothesis as both a strong proponent and a tough critic.  He pointed out that the notion of an RNA world hardly solves the problem of the origins of life, and suggested that RNA was preceded by some other genetic material, just as DNA and protein were preceded by RNA.  Many of his later publications concerned experimental studies of possible pre-RNA-world molecules.

His theories brought him into conflict with creationists, who sometimes quoted Orgel out of context, pointing to his admitted uncertainty about life’s origins as if this were a failing of the scientific approach.  It was, of course, typical of Orgel and of the best practice of science.  He had no time for proponents of ‘intelligent design’, and avoided those prone to magical thinking.

Gerald Joyce, still smarting from the other Darwin Party wizards who used their magic against him (02/15/2007), is no one to teach us about science vs magic.  The whole RNA World scenario is nothing but a stage for magicians to entertain gullible patrons.  If he has no time for creationists, does he have time for fellow OOL researcher Steve Benner?  Benner warned about the intractable problem of getting ribose (an essential sugar for RNA, ribo-nucleic acid), and criticized those who invoke “genetic takeovers” for pre-RNA chemistry (see 11/05/2004) like some magic wand.
    The charge that creationists would quote Orgel out of context is a common dodge, like throwing a smoke bomb and running away.  Prove it.  Doesn’t this just mean that Joyce is mad creationists effectively used quotations from a hostile witness to buttress their arguments that a chance origin of life is impossible?  Prosecutors do that all the time; that is not quoting out of context, it is making your case wisely.  When a hostile witness admits a key point it doesn’t matter if he still believes his story or not; the truth is out, and the jury takes note.
    Irrespective of any noble intentions of researchers like Orgel to maintain an air of empirical rigor, at what point do investigations into impossible scenarios become indistinguishable from alchemy?  The alchemists had arguably more experimental rigor behind their hypotheses than the OOL schools.  Joyce pasted the label “best practice of science” on the modern OOL foolery but it won’t stick.  It is a logical fallacy to assume that goal-oriented research, conducted via intelligent design in modern labs, can teach us anything about what chance might have done in the unobservable past.  Joyce could use a little more intelligent discernment.  Magician, don’t fool thyself.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Dealing with Light at the Extremes   11/28/2007    
“Light is the most important variable in our environment,” wrote Edith Widder, a marine biologist.  The inhabitants of two different ecosystems have to deal with either too little or too much. 

1. Let your light so shine:  A thousand meters below the sea surface, all sunlight is extinguished.  Yet for thousands of meters more, creatures live in the perpetual darkness by manufacturing their own light.  Bioluminescence is everywhere, reported Mark Schrope in Nature,¹ “Eventually, the lightshow grows into a veritable fireworks display against an ever blacker background.”  The light comes from everything alive: bacteria, microorganisms called dinoflagellates, jellyfish, anemones, shrimp, vertebrate fish, and more.
       Edith Widder is co-founder of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association in Fort Pierce, Florida.  With a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), her team uses a deep ocean submersible craft called Eye-in-the-Sea to understand creatures who can only be studied in their own space.  The submersible is equipped with an LED flasher that tries to beckon organisms and study their behaviors.  They were actually able to get a distant organism to flash its light back.  They also got a squid to respond to their light signal, thinking it had discovered lunch.
       Possible uses of biological light include decoy, defense, camouflage, mimicry, sexual attraction and alarm.  Though red light is the first to be extinguished in the depths, and most dark-adapted organisms see in the blue-green range, some organisms appear to emit red light that could be visible only among their own.  To do this, they must transfer the blue-green light from their photophores to red-fluorescent proteins, which seems inefficient.  “My physics head says, ‘No,’” commented Justin Marshall, an Australian participant in the Deep Scope project, “But my biology head says, ‘Well, Why not?’ Biology is weird, so it could be.”
       The fact that organisms can emit light by intricate processes of bioluminescence presupposes that they also contain sensitive organs to detect it.  Many deep-sea fish have large eyes tuned to the blue-green light of photophores.
       A new version of Eye-in-the-Sea is being prepared for deployment in early 2008 in Monterey, California.  This will provide the first undersea observatory of the dark depths, “the first effective, long-term study of true deep-sea bioluminescent behaviour.”  It may shed new light on an ecosystem that communicates in the language of photons.
2. Too much of a good thing:  On topside, some organisms have the opposite problem: too much light.  Plants harvest sunlight to make nutrients from the soil, but like sunbathers know, too much can burn.  Within leaves are elaborate mechanisms to shunt away excess light from the photosynthetic factories.  Science Daily reported on a paper in Nature² where researchers from University of Sheffield and Queen Mary, University of London learned more about “photoprotection” in plant leaves: “They were able to show how a small number of certain key molecules, hidden among the millions of others in the plant leaf, change their shape when the amount of light absorbed is excessive; and they have been able to track the conversion of light energy to heat that occurs in less than a billionth of a second.”  The original paper stated, “it is experimentally demonstrated that a change in conformation of LHCII occurs in vivo, which opens a channel for energy dissipation by transfer to a bound carotenoid.  We suggest that this is the principal mechanism of photoprotection.”  The excess energy is thus shunted to a heat sink by an extremely rapid switch.
       What they are learning may help increase crop yields and improve photovoltaic cells.  Plants already know how to adjust for the dim light of a cloudy day to the scorching radiation under a midsummer sun at noon.  “Many plant species can successfully inhabit extreme environments where there is little water, strong sunlight, low fertility and extremes of temperature by having highly tuned defence mechanisms, including photoprotection.”  See also the 06/23/2006 and 01/24/2005 entries about photoprotection, “One of Nature’s supreme examples of nanoscale engineering.”  (That’s Nature as in the real world, not the artificial journal.)
3. Light just right, but que pasa?:  We humans, too, have to not only be able to harvest light, but process it as information.  The brain has a mechanism for making sense of a scene – deciding what is foreground, and what is background.  A “neural machine,” described in Science Daily, sorts this all out faster than the blink of an eye.  A portion of the visual cortex called V2 makes a preliminary judgment of what part of the field is the background, and what part is the foreground.
       Rudiger von der Heydt, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, described what happens: “What we found is that V2 generates a foreground-background map for each image registered by the eyes.  Contours are assigned to the foreground regions, and V2 does this automatically within a tenth of a second.”
       This first-pass interpretive filter helps us make instant sense of a complex scene, even though its decision can be overridden by the conscious mind, or tricked by optical illusions.  Paintings by artist M.C. Escher, for instance, owe their popularity to tricks with the mind, fooling our eyes with contradictions about which way is up, or which part is the foreground and which is the background.
       Van der Heydt continued, “Because of their complexity, images of natural scenes generally have many possible interpretations, not just two, like in Escher’s drawings.  In most cases, they contain a variety of cues that could be used to identify fore- and background, but oftentimes, these cues contradict each other.  The V2 mechanism combines these cues efficiently and provides us immediately with a rough sketch of the scene.”
       The neuroscientist commented on the wonders of this system.  “We can do all of this without effort, thanks to a neural machine that generates visual object representations in the brain,” he said.  He admitted that how it works is still a mystery to us.  “But discovering this mechanism that so efficiently links our attention to figure-ground organization is a step toward understanding this amazing machine.”

As with every natural resource in every ecological environment, light is used efficiently and effectively by a multitude of organisms well equipped to manage with feast or famine.  What other physical resources are utilized via similar feats of nanoengineering by living organisms?  Water (vapor, liquid, and solid), oxygen, nitrogen, iron, magnetism – no matter the physical resource, living things know how to harvest it for highest and best use.  Organisms daily exhibit a declaration of intelligent design; they have been endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rightly elegant constitutions.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Botany • Human Body • Physics • Amazing Facts

Just one more reason to be thankful you live on God’s green Earth, nicest place in the solar system.  Take a deep breath of fresh air, and smile.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics

That would push back the fossil record of the platypus quite a bit; the next youngest fossil is Obdurodon dicksoni from 15-million-year-old rocks in Australia.  It is also much older than current estimates from DNA of when platypuses and echidnas diverged from their most recent common ancestor.  Molecular clocks put that date somewhere between 17 million and 80 million years ago.  Rowe speculated that one reason for the underestimate may be that monotremes evolve at slower rates than other mammals do, an idea that fits with their lower diversity.

Was this platypus a transitional form?  No.  Was it evolving from a simpler animal into a complex creature with a duck bill, poison spur, electrical sensing organ, webbed feet, fur and ability to lay eggs?  No – it was Darwin’s nightmare popping up way, way back in the record, over 100 million years earlier (in their own dating scheme) than the next clear platypus fossil.  Why not consider the obvious, that there was never any 113 million years between the two fossils?
    According to evolutionary theory, most of the other mammals diversified into elephants, giraffes, lions and whales in far less time, but these Darwin-defying furry-duckmammals just lived on and on in their niche as if nothing else was going on in the world.  Rowe’s reply that they just evolved slower (and that lower diversity demonstrates this), should be seen not only as a gratuitous speculation, but as an escape from reality.
    That’s it: Darwin was the prophet of Second Life, a virtual world where any fantasy you want to dream up can come true and be called science.  Whenever their virtual fantasyland has an internal conflict, they can always dream up virtual ways to resolve it.  Science needs to kick the habit and get back to the real world – literally, not virtually.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Mammals • Dating methods

Pangea Stuck at Square One   11/26/2007    
Students in their physical science classes learn all about Pangea, the supercontinent that broke up 200 million years ago and ended up with today’s familiar continents after millions of years of continental drift.  What they don’t often learn is how scientists come up with these ideas, and how they pull their hair out when observations don’t match the story.  Here are some quotes from 2 articles on PhysOrg, #1 and #2, that reveal interesting things going on in the back rooms of the wizards.

• [Title] Dunes, climate models don’t match up with paleomagnetic records.
• “It’s a puzzle, a ‘conundrum’ is the word we like to use,” said Robert Oglesby of UNL [Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln].  “And in the Science paper, we’re not solving the conundrum, we’re raising the conundrum.”
• “I thought that was very curious,” [David] Loope said.  “It didn’t seem to fit with what we think we know about where the continents were.”
• The three geoscientists began working together, trying to find a computerized climate model that would explain the discrepancy, but they couldn’t find one that worked.  “We ran the model in any different number of configurations just to see if we could make it do something different,” [Clinton] Rowe said.... The equator is the only place you could get this large-scale arc of winds that turn from the northeast to the northwest as they moved south.  Nowhere else would you get that as part of the general circulation unless the physics of the world 200 million years ago was very different from what it is today.  And we just don’t think that’s the case.”
• “We brought Rob [Van der Voo] in to try to see if he could help us sort it out, and he’s like, ‘Gosh, guys, I don’t know.  This is a conundrum,’” Oglesby said.  “It’s important to note that we have not just a paleomag person as a co-author, but arguably the best-known paleomag person in the world—and he’s as confused as we are.”
• “The nicest thing would have been if we had a solution, but we don’t,” said Van der Voo, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Geological Sciences at U-M.  “All we can say is that we have this enigma, so perhaps our model of Pangea for the period in question is wrong or the wind direction didn’t follow the common patterns that we recognize in the modern world.  Neither seems likely....”
• ““We’ll come up with everything we can possibly think of,” Oglesby said.  “From the point of view of the climate model, the paleogeography, the vegetation, the topography, local-scale vs. large-scale, paleomag, going back and rethinking everything that the dunes tell us.  We’ll go back to square one in everything, trying to figure it out.”

It is nice when scientists stop bluffing to the press, and admit they have a problem.  But are they really going back to square one?  Sometimes the most obvious problem is staring them right in the face and they don’t even see it: the assumption of millions of years.

The team believes that a supercontinent just sat there at one location for 100 million years collecting sand dunes, from the Permian to the Jurassic, then all of a sudden it started moving north.  Is that even remotely plausible?  Take away the habit of assuming billions of years are available, and question the traditional interpretations of the data, and the idea would seem ridiculous on the face of it.

Evolutionary biologists and geologists toss around their millions of years thoughtlessly, making “reckless drafts on the bank of time” (07/02/2007) whenever they need to shield their models from lack of empirical evidence.  Without an overhaul of their presuppositions about the world, it is impossible for them to get back to square one.  Square one is outside their box.
Next headline on:  Geology • Physics • Dating Methods

It seems as though every time astronomers point their telescopes at the night sky, some weird new finding forces them to revamp their theories.  And so it is with nine newly discovered white dwarfs.  The stars defy their expected chemical makeup and by rights shouldn’t even exist.  An explanation could open up a new branch of astronomy.

This portion of the news is brought to you by the makers of Humble Pie, reminding you that moderation in science is a good thing.
    “Twinkle twinkle little star, I don’t wonder what you are; for by spectroscopic ken, I know that you are hydrogen.”  So astronomers used to say.  Always be wary when a scientist says, “I know.”  What rhymes with carbon?
    If they had only found seven of these unexpected stars, we could have spun some fairy tales about Snow White Theories and the Seven Dwarfs getting lost in the Data Mine.  We’ll show moderation, though, and not discuss which astronomers were sleepy, dopey or grumpy.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Physics

Did you know that the biological concept of a species is fraught with difficulties?  Philosophers question whether scientists are “discovering” species divisions, as if “carving nature at its joints” (Plato), or whether they are engaged in a purely human activity of imposing our own patterns on observations in ways we find useful.
    The “biological species concept” we learn in school (species are populations that can produce fertile offspring) doesn’t work for fossils, nor for the vast majority of organisms, which are asexual.  Taxonomy since Linnaeus has been a battle between the lumpers and the splitters.  There is also the reward motivation.  Identifying a “new” species can bring you fame.  You might even be able to name it after yourself.  Remember Nebraska Man?  The human ancestor tooth was named for its discoverer, Hesperopithecus haroldcookii (see original 1922 paper from Science).  Cook must have been mighty proud till the tooth was identified as from an extinct pig.
    Horner thinks the lumping makes sense according to an evolutionary pattern of declining diversity in the late Cretaceous.  But he has just undermined a criterion of diversity to do so.  One wonders just how much data are force-fitted into evolutionary stories by tweaking parameters according to flawed assumptions, based on a prior commitment to Darwinist historical geology.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

No Salt, Please: Europa Life Needs It Bland   11/23/2007    
Salt may taste good on human food, but for life trying to emerge in the sea, it is toxic.  Astrobiologists have long wondered if life could exist at Jupiter’s moon Europa, where an ocean is believed to exist miles deep under the icy crust.  They must have been presuming the water is pure, but an article on Astrobiology Magazine, a NASA website, says that Europa’s ocean could be saturated with salt.

The amount of salts in the ocean also could be stressful for life.  [Kevin] Hand [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] says the Galileo magnetometer results indicate Europa’s ocean could be nearly saturated in either sodium chloride or magnesium sulfate.
    “If you’ve got a salt-saturated ocean, that doesn’t bode well for the origin of life,” says Hand.  “Some of the processes that lead toward the generation of polymers or the stringing together of genetic base pairs are inhibited by high salt concentrations.  That said, there are terrestrial halophiles, salt-loving microbes, that could survive in the ocean we propose.”

Recall the 09/17/2002 paper that taught us to avoid salt at all costs when modeling the origin of life in a primordial soup.  Salt of any kind is very effective at dismembering fatty acids needed for cell membranes and preventing nucleotides from linking up (assuming they could even form in water; see 11/05/2004).  Monard et al had no answer, but just pointed out that this was a “crucial piece of information” for astrobiologists theorizing about how life might have formed in a random sea of chemicals.
    Yet hope springs eternal.  You can almost hear the hand-wringing in the Astrobiology Magazine article.  They just admitted that the presence of salt does not bode well for the origin of life.  They’re thinking, But... if life DID originate somehow, maybe it could get along just like the halophiles on Earth manage to do.  Foul.  It didn’t.  Salt tosses life out of the equation.  You can’t get there from here.
    While we’ve got them pinned to the floor, let’s put the squeeze on by asking another pertinent question.  What is the likelihood that the Earth’s early oceans, filled with runoff from the torrential rains and upheavals for two billion years after its hellish birth (11/01/2007), were pure and soft as spring waters?  Salt is bad for astrobiology here, too.  If salt was present, you may as well become a creationist now, because Charlie is out before he gets to the starting gate.  Sorry for the mixed metaphors of wrestling and horse racing, but you get the point.  Charlie’s horse may enjoy a salt lick, but salt licks astrobiology like a Charlie horse.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Solar System

Trilobites now filled the sea, and oxygen the air, “What say we all crawl up on land?  And have a picnic there!”
“We’ll bring amphibians and trees, and Oh, it will be fun!  And bring some extra ozone to protect us from the Sun.”
So off we went, and partied on, from cynodont to ’saur.  Time flies when one is having fun.  Then from a distant shore,
We saw a comet hit the ground, the best I’ve ever seen.  It turned the Moon a pretty blue, the Sun a shade of green.
“Now that’s a party!” we all sang, and went to mammals be.  The ’saurs became a little flock of ornithology.

The trees were great, but it was late, so onto two we strode.  And chipped some stone and built some fires to warm the cave abode....
Next—to another sun!  A galaxy to party in.  I said it would be fun!

The Imagineers at Disneyland have actually gotten together with the Darwin Party on numerous occasions.  The Magic Kingdom is loaded with reference to evolution.  Darwinists love to party there, because when you wish upon a star, anything can happen.  Prokaryotic thoughts can even arise.  Just don’t ask, “from where?”
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • SETI • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

The claim is based on a controversial theory that invokes an extremely improbable collision (01/26/2007, 02/19/2007).   It is based on unverifiable dating assumptions (09/25/2007, 08/08/2006).  The theory has many problems and is not accepted by some geologists, including Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission (11/04/2002).  Students of philosophy of science may want to examine this story as an example of an explanation so intertwined with theory, it is hard to know where the theory stops and the evidence begins.
    While it is nice for astronomers to recognize our moon is special, we didn’t need their evolutionary assumptions.  The moon’s role in stabilizing earth’s axial tilt and tides is part of a large suite of evidences that show our home planet was designed for life.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Mt. St. Helens Rebuilding Fast   11/21/2007    
Could Mt. St. Helens grow back to its pre-1980 size in just 180 years?  That’s what an article in the Tacoma, Washington News Tribune says.  The lava dome is growing fast, and so is a glacier inside the crater.  It is growing 3 feet per day.  The lava dome split the glacier because it was “growing by a pickup truckload of lava every two seconds.”

Yes, it may be growing fast now, children, but before there were scientists to observe it, it took millions and millions of years.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

Christian radio talk show host Frank Pastore reminded his listeners today that not long ago, the proponents of embryonic stem cell research were the ones calling Christians, who supported adult stem cell research (07/19/2007) but opposed ES cell research on ethical grounds, “anti-science” (09/26/2007).  Remember their tear-jerking commercials, the celebrity endorsements and the doomsday warnings that America would fall behind unless we got to the head of the ES stem cell bandwagon?  Californians should demand their $3 billion back, or demand it be redirected into these new ethical approaches.
    Pastore quoted a researcher who admitted that ES cell research has not produced one cure for anything – not one.  Adult stem cells, during the same time, have produced dozens of practical treatments.  If this new approach to harvesting stem cells succeeds in generating actual treatments, doctors will have a ready supply of easily-obtainable pluripotent stem cells without the problems of teratomas and tissue rejection inherent with ES cells.  Great days for medicine could be ahead.  No thanks to the Big Science Big Money doomsday prophets; you know, the same ones who bring you global warming socialism and the Darwin-Only Policy on Education (DOPE); in fact, a Nature editorial quizzically claimed this is the exactly wrong time to constrain research on ES cells (no reason was given).  For the rest of us, thankfully, health and beauty may indeed be only skin deep.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Human Body • Politics and Ethics • Health

Generosity may be part of the human repertoire to sustain cooperative relationships.  Several neural mechanisms likely support generosity.  OT can induce dopamine release in ventromedial regions associated with reward reinforcing generosity....
    Although we artificially raised OT [oxytocin] levels in this study to establish a causal mechanism producing generosity, OT can be enhanced nonpharmacologically in a variety of ways, including touching, safe environments, and receiving a signal of trust from another person.  By increasing OT the ability to empathize with others, and the motivation to be generous with them, are enhanced.  Indeed, mice that lack OT receptors suffer from social amnesia.  This suggests that a variety of factors we encounter in our daily lives may motivate us to be generous—even with strangers.

It is one thing to claim that generosity produces physical effects in the human brain.  It is another thing entirely to claim that generosity is merely a physical phenomenon.  The researchers are implying that elevated oxytocin levels in neurons of primates became associated with social behaviors that were selected for survival somewhere in our evolutionary past.
    This paper is a prime example of physicalism (roughly equivalent to materialism).  The authors see a moral behavior and want to reduce it to interactions between physical objects – molecules and members of a social group.  Since they think they are doing “science,” they think they inherit all the prestige and authority science has achieved in our culture.  Confident that they alone have a methodology that generates reliable knowledge, they can weave their evolutionary tale without any fear of rebuttal from those who traditionally engaged matters of the mind, society and morals.  Those people need not enter the discussion: philosophers, theologians, historians and, especially, the ones who have lost all authority in our culture: preachers. 
    If scientists like these really demonstrated the superiority of their physicalist explanatory power, the traditional parties would have to humbly bow the knee and acquiesce.  But they cannot.  The physicalists commit at least two logical fallacies that undermine their whole approach.  One is reductionism, the fallacy of assuming a phenomenon can be sufficiently represented by a summary of its component parts: i.e., morals reduces to chemistry, which reduces to physics.  This is like saying the Constitution reduces to paper and ink.  The most significant aspect is lost in the reduction.
    This leads to the second problem, the self-referential fallacy.  If generosity and altruism can be reduced to chemistry, then so can scientific explanations.  As such, they have no claims to validity; the scientists can no longer appeal to rational concepts of truth, coherence, consistency and logical inference.
    These researchers have a bad case of the Yoda complex (09/25/2006 commentary).  We cannot allow them to speak from some disembodied platform of knowledge to the rest of us mortals.  Their spirits must come back and melt into the atoms and molecules of their human bodies, where, according to their assumptions, truth and abstract concepts have no independent reality.  There is, therefore, no possible way they could know anything – including the claims made in their paper.
    You can therefore dismiss this paper as boorish nonsense, the chaff of a windy worldview that denies the existence of grain.  And that’s being generous.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Evolutionary Theory

Males on “Evolutionary Overdrive”   11/17/2007    
A press release from University of Florida claims males evolve faster than females, and suggests a reason.  It’s because males are simpler.  Some quotes:

The observation that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin noted the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with the plainness of the peahen’s.
    No matter the species, males apparently ramp up flashier features and more melodious warbles in an eternal competition to win the best mates, a concept known as sexual selection.
    Why males are in evolutionary overdrive even though they have essentially the same genes as females has been a mystery, but an explanation by University of Florida Genetics Institute researchers ... may shed light on the subject.
    “It’s because males are simpler,” said Marta Wayne....
    It turns out that the extra X in females may make answering the call of selection more complicated....
    ...“males have only one X inherited only from their mother.  This is a simple mechanism that could be working in cooperation with sexual selection to help males evolve more quickly.”
    Researchers believe this relatively uncomplicated genetic pathway helps males respond to the pressures of sexual selection, ultimately enabling them to win females and produce greater numbers of offspring.

For assuming male traits are merely products of selection, for visualizing evolution as a car engine and a recruiter, for personifying evolution as an invisible agent helping males to evolve, for considering genetic mechanisms of reproduction and inheritance as simple things, and for implying that fitness is a function of number of offspring (a tautology), this article wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.
    Once again, winning the sex game is the only virtue in evolution.  Students raised on a steady diet of Darwin can kiss good-bye to purpose, values, morals, reason, standards, service to others, and truth.  If the researchers behind this story were consistent, they would quit the science lab and just go try to distribute their genes as far and wide as possible.  But if you asked them why they were doing this, they would not be able to give any reason for it – not even a Darwinian one.  Do a very un-Darwinian thing: think about it.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

1. Venus flytrap:  Alex Crosby at University of Massachusetts was intrigued by the action of Venus flytrap, which changes almost instantly from convex to concave when triggered.  Science Daily reported how his team plans to make a variety of products that mimic this shape-snapping transition at large and small scales.  A small input of energy can produce a large change in geometry.  “Imagine paint that adheres to a surface, but releases on command or road signs that change their reflectivity with changing weather conditions,” the article began.
2. Spider web:  Imagine being able to harvest water out of thin air.  Israeli scientists, inspired by how dew collects on a spider’s web, have created a dew-harvesting device that funnels atmospheric moisture into a collection and filtration unit.  New Scientist has a picture and description of the invention.  In one day, the 10-meter wide device collected 20 liters of water.  The device won an engineering contest for fresh-water solutions for drought-stricken areas.  Improved models are expected to fit into the collection pot for portability.
       This water-collection technique may be familiar to survivalists who have used a similar approach for emergency water collection: the desert still (see Desert USA).
3. Geckos and insects:  Sticky tape inspired by gecko and insect feet is making strides.  An article on PhysOrg shows a dramatic electron micrograph of a complex insect foot.  Researchers at Max Planck Institute studied 300 insects for ideas on manufacturing the ideal, reusable adhesive.  The result is a sticky tape that stays clean, can be reused thousands of times, and is twice as sticky as regular tape.  It can be washed with soap.  The inventors put it on a small robot and it proceeded to walk right up the wall.

In ancient times, people built elaborate cisterns to collect rainwater for survival.  You can see incredible water systems Herod built at Herodium, Masada and Jerusalem.  Even more ancient systems carved out of solid rock, like those at Megiddo and Gibeon, arouse awe at the amount of work men exerted to collect the precious fluid of life in the dry climate of the middle east.  Imagine the expression on their faces if you could show them a portable invention that everyone could use at home to collect water out of thin air most days of the year, even without rain, based on the web of the lowly spider.
    These stories should warm our hearts.  Real scientists and engineers, inspired by plants and animals at our feet, are adapting the design they see into useful, practical products that can improve our lives.  These inventions owe nothing to evolutionary theory.  They owe everything to design detection, combined with the human ingenuity to observe, imagine, and create.
    Want your kid to be on the cutting edge of 21st century science?  Want him or her to improve the world and maybe make a lot of money doing it?  Take them out in the yard, looking for bugs and leaves and birds and anything natural.  Look for opportunities to ask, “How do they do that?”  When science projects are assigned, inspire them with creative ideas based on biomimetics—intelligent design at work.  Some day that aptitude to see design in nature may turn into a profitable career.  Combined with the character trait of charity you should also be teaching your kids, it might inspire them to make discoveries that could help impoverished people in third-world countries lead more productive lives without harm to the environment – taking advantage of innovations their fellow creatures have been using for millennia.
    To think that Ken Miller called intelligent design a science-stopper (11/14/2007).  Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise (03/16/2006).
Next headline on:  Plants • Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Physics • Amazing Facts

1. Island dwarfism:  Evolutionary biologists have long believed that animals trapped on islands would evolve into smaller versions of their mainland counterparts.  Not true, say researchers from Imperial College, London.  A catalog of island species shows no such trend; many factors are involved in the size distribution of island species.  The details can be found at PhysOrg and Science Daily.  (Note: the articles do not attribute the prediction to Darwin himself.)
2. Arms race:  If Darwin intended his theory of natural selection to express a law of nature that applies everywhere, it might be difficult to correlate opposite results.  Many evolutionary biologists speak of predators, prey and parasites leading to an “evolutionary arms race” that drives speciation and adaptive radiation, leading to Darwin’s branching tree of life.  An article in Science Daily, however, says that predators and parasites can drive “evolutionary stability.”
3. Parental guidance suggested:  The environment is supposed to drive evolutionary adaptation.  Offspring, facing the mean old world, should get by with the random genetic mutations that improve their survival – not a parental handout.  Taking loans from mom or dad’s genes would indicate a dependency on pre-adaptive resources, innate in the genetic information of the species.  A study at University of Virginia suggests, however, that maternal influences do help offspring adapt to their environment.
4. Birds don’t talk:  What drives speciation in birds?  It should be Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection – of which the Galapagos finches are the textbook example.  In Science last month,¹ however, Loren Rieseberg reviewed a new book by Trevor Price, Speciation in Birds, and found that even the textbook case is not open and shut:

   Of perhaps greater interest are Price’s conclusions about the roles of ecology and social selection in speciation; these remain relatively unexplored subjects about which birds have much to offer.  Closely related species of birds often differ in ecologically important traits--such as body size, habitat preferences, and feeding and migratory behaviors--that are also likely to contribute to both premating and postmating reproductive isolation.  These observations, combined with classic studies of ecologically driven speciation in Darwin’s finches and crossbills, imply that ecological selection likely contributes to most speciation events in birds.  However, Price cautions that divergence of most co-occurring bird species is too ancient to make inferences about the causes of speciation and that studies of recently diverged species, such as Darwin’s finches, highlight the fragility of ecological reproductive barriers.  He concludes that “it is unclear if ecological causes are sufficient or even important in many speciation events.”  This somewhat negative assessment of the role of ecology in speciation is tempered by speculation in later chapters that rapid ecological speciation may account for short branch lengths detected early in the evolution of many bird genera.

   That sounds like Price debunked Darwin’s speculation, only to replace it with one of his own.  “Interestingly, social selection appears to be more generally important in speciation in birds than sexual selection, despite the emphasis in the literature on the latter,” Rieseberg continued, only to accuse Price of doublethink: “Price also argues that ecological factors are a major cause of divergence in socially selected traits, an assertion that, while strongly supported, seemingly is at odds with his earlier pessimistic assessment of the importance of ecology in speciation.”
       Earlier in the review, Rieseberg also noted that Price did not put much credibility in another evolutionary hypothesis, the so-called “founder effect” (i.e., that new colonizers drift genetically into new species).  Whatever the causes of the origin of species, they appear more complex and inscrutable than Darwin had imagined.
5. Opportunity lost:  The genes of 12 species of Drosophila were compared in a massive test of evolution, published in Nature.²  How much opportunity was there for evolution since the species diverged?  The team wrote, “the evolutionary divergence spanned by the genus Drosophila exceeds that of the entire mammalian radiation when generation time is taken into account,” so for the number of generations during which mammals went from mice to giraffes and whales, these little flies should have had ample opportunity to evolve by Darwin’s theory of natural selection.  (Note: the only kind of natural selection of interest here is positive selection for functional advantage; purifying selection gets rid of harmful mutations, and balancing selection tries to offset them.)
       The paper mentions evolution and selection numerous times.  A search for innovation turns up empty, though, and examination of instances of positive selection shows no clear cut example of something new and improved arising.  The geneticists looked for markers of positive selection indirectly – fast-changing base pairs in otherwise unchanging sequences.  It is not as straightforward, however, to correlate these changes with new genetic information that provides a functional advantage for the fly.  The clearest example of positive selection they could find was for “helicase activity,” which seems like merely an adjustment in the rate of operation of existing hardware.  They said, “Despite a number of functional categories with evidence for elevated omega [i.e., an indicator of positive natural selection], ‘helicase activity’ is the only functional category significantly more likely to be positively selected.”  In other words, not only are all the 12 species of Drosophila still fruit flies, none of them seemed to exhibit a single clear-cut example of a new functional innovation – despite as many generations as the mammals had for their assumed evolutionary radiation, with all the new capabilities possessed by bats, skunks, hippos and aardvarks.  What was Darwin doing all that time?  It would seem if clear indications of innovation that would vindicate Darwin had been found, it would be the news of the decade.
       In the same issue of Nature,³ Ewan Birney commented on the Clark et al study.  “The analysis of positive selection by Clark and colleagues is undoubtedly the broadest and most detailed investigation performed in any clade of multicellular organisms.”  Two species of Drosophila in the study are as different genetically as humans are from other primates, he said.  Though he claimed that the team identified a third of fruit fly genes apparently undergoing positive selection (mostly for the existing immune system and olfactory functions), he did not identify any example of an “upward” change that gave any species a new organ, system, or innovation that would indicate Drosophila was evolving into something better than a plain old fruit fly.  Instead, he indicated that future studies on primates would be required to understand positive evolution: “Clark and colleagues’ findings suggest that, to understand the fascinating adaptive changes among primates, including those unique to humans, we probably need to sequence the genome of every extant primate (and, where possible, any extinct primates with recoverable DNA), using optimal sequencing strategies to obtain both population-level data and accurate genome sequences.”
6. Fossils to the rescue?  Is Darwin’s tree rooted in the rocks?  Gene Hunt undertook a study of “The relative importance of directional change, random walks, and stasis in the evolution of fossil lineages,” and found a lot of stasis.  After his “large-scale, statistical survey of evolutionary mode in fossil lineages,” involving some 250 sequences of evolving traits, he wrote in PNAS,⁴ “The rarity with which directional evolution was observed in this study corroborates a key claim of punctuated equilibria and suggests that truly directional evolution is infrequent or, perhaps more importantly, of short enough duration so as to rarely register in paleontological sampling.”  Darwin did not predict punctuated equilibria.  The core of his theory was that changes occurred imperceptibly, gradually and cumulatively.  In addition, he knew that the fossil record was characterized by large gaps, but predicted that the new fossil discoveries would fill in those gaps, revealing his hoped-for branching evolutionary tree.  Hunt found only 5% of fossil lineages could be attributed to directional evolution.  Of the rest that showed change over time, it was mostly for body size, not body shape.  This does not seem to be a vindication for Darwin’s prognosticative powers.  In the evolutionary rat race, if a bigger or smaller rat wins, it is still just a rat.

We have reported numerous times when Darwin predicted something and the opposite was found (e.g., 11/13/2007, 11/09/2007, 10/17/2007).  Charlie has struck out again and again, yet his fans never give up.
    The PBS Judgment Day program (11/14/2007) made a big deal about how “scientific” Darwin’s theory was.  For support, the PBS website offered an interactive feature listing 13 of “Darwin’s Predictions” that supposedly came true.  This was presented to trick students and visitors into thinking Darwin has an impressive batting average.  Let’s look at them and see if Charlie can make it to first base at least.  The PBS feature begins with a dramatic star spangled banner, asking Jose if he can see the Darwin’s early light:

Ahead of his time is putting it moderately for Charles Darwin.  The father of evolution had conjectures that were only proved, or greatly substantiated, decades after his death in 1882, in some cases not until recently.  Today, evidence that unequivocally supports his theory of evolution by natural selection, as well as other surmises he had, comes from an array of scientific disciplines, including paleontology, geology, biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, and, most recently, evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo devo.”  “The notion that all these lines of evidence could converge and give a common answer to the question of where we came from is truly powerful,” says Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller.  “This is the reason why scientific support for the theory of evolution is so overwhelming.”

A pretty dramatic overture indeed, provided there is power behind the sound system.  Here are the 13 pitches for Darwin to swing at.  Keep in mind these are all supposed to be predictions by Darwin that were confirmed by science.  Unfortunately, since the Darwin Party owns the stadium and both teams, which are sworn to make Charlie look good, all we can do is umpire from the sidelines when they break the rules.

1. Evo-devo:  “Evolution happens,” the first entry announces triumphantly.  Something else on bumper stickers also happens, but we won’t press the point.
       Right off the bat, we notice them including evo-devo in the victory circle with little more than an unsupported assertion followed by the favorite Darwin Party quote that nothing in biology makes sense except in the darkness of evolution.  Last month, however, Ron Amundson, in a Science Magazine book review (318:5850, pp. 571-572, 10/26/2007) portrayed evolutionary genetics and evolutionary embryology (of which evo-devo is the latest incarnation) as antagonists in a long tug-of-war between biologists about where the seat of evolution lies.  This is essentially the battle between saltationism and gradualism in embryo.  So for PBS to claim evo-devo is a friend of Darwin is a little like Coriolanus embracing Aufidius.  They are reluctant allies who would as soon stab one another except for the common enemy, the creationists.
   Verdict: this is not even a pitch; it’s just Darwin fans rooting in the stands.
2. Natural selection:  “Evolution happens through natural selection,” the next entry states.  We thought that was the question at issue.  Ever hear of begging the question?  This is no prediction; it assumes what needs to be proved.  There it is, right before your eyes, a totally begged question, complete with another favorite D.P. quote that natural selection is “the greatest idea anyone ever had,” followed by a Big Lie by Niles Eldredge that nothing in 175 years has contravened it (even his own competing theory of punctuated equilibria?).
   Verdict: this is a little dance on the pitcher’s mound getting applause from the Darwin fans again.  No ball has been pitched yet.  We’re getting impatient.
   For rebuttals that show natural selection does not work as advertised, and has been essentially falsified, see 11/29/2004 and, more recently, 11/13/2007 and 10/17/2007. 
3. Galapagos finches:  This was no prediction.  Darwin found the finches while a creationist, then much later worked them into his evolutionary theory.  But even if you allow a postdiction to count as a prediction, it is irrelevant, because even young-earth creationists allow for the microevolution seen in finch beaks.
   Verdict: When are you going to pitch a ball, PBS?  We want a pitcher, not a Lucy itcher.  We’re starting to boo from the sidelines while the hysterical fans go ape.
   
4. Genetics:  Finally, a pitch.  Darwin swings and misses.  His theory of pangenesis was discredited almost as soon as it hit the shelves.  He knew nothing of DNA, and did not predict anything like a code in the cell which, to him, was a simple blob of protoplasm.
   Verdict: Strike one.  For the Darwin party to give Charlie credit for DNA and molecular biology as a prediction of his theory is like giving Walt Whitman credit for the internet.
5. Antisupernaturalism:  What?  That is the very question under consideration.
   Verdict: Foul!  Illegal procedure!  This is no pitch; it is another egregious case of begging the question.
6. Embryology:  This is indistinguishable from #1.  It’s evo-devo again.  PBS failed to point out the Haeckel’s embryo hoax that sprang right out of Darwin’s own speculations.  The shared genetic toolkit is no prediction of Darwin’s theory; it is an evidence that complex design was there from the beginning.
   Verdict: No pitch.  Sending the evo-devo clown out on the field for another cheer from the fans is a distraction.
7. Sexual selection:  OK, here’s a real pitch.  Darwin did predict sexual selection would drive sexual dimorphism.  (Actually, this is just another postdiction, because peacocks were already well known in his time.)  The theory is controversial (02/26/2003), but at best, a peacock with radical tail feathers is still a peacock, not a new animal.  Sexual selection does not explain the origin of new species.
   Verdict: Ball One.
8. Common ancestry:  Ken Miller states, “Despite the extraordinary diversity of life, all living organisms share a nearly identical set of essential genes, reflecting their evolutionary development from a common ancestor.”  Yet Darwin’s view was one not of “immortal” traits, nor of anything that has “survived essentially unchanged for over two billion years.”  Darwin’s world is a fluid picture of gradual, incessant change, not stasis.
   Verdict: More evo-devo.  More begging the question.  Common ancestry is the question under debate, not a prediction!  They are not learning their lesson.  This elicits a cheer from the fans in the stands, but no ball was pitched.
9. Human evolution:  “Humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor,”  the next slide announces triumphantly, again begging the question.  As support, the slide borrows an ancient 1863 Huxley drawing, and then repeats the discredited whopper that human and chimpanzee genes are 99% similar (see 06/29/2007).  No fossil evidence is presented.  They repeat Darwin’s speculation that “the difference between the mind of man and that of a chimpanzee or gorilla is a matter of degree, not of kind.”  What did they do to interpolate this, interview Lucy or something?  It’s not like creationists have failed to notice similarities and differences between humans and apes for thousands of years; so what has Charlie done to prove his condition that we evolved from them?
   Verdict: Begged question, no evidence.  Ball Two.
10. Modern humans arose in Africa:  Evidence is presented from phylogenetic trees and alleged hominid bones, most of which were found in Africa.  This argument fails to recognize the selective effect of doing most of the digging in Africa, and the circular nature of finding Darwin trees in the genes, when unbiased analysis finds no tree (10/08/2007) and declares phylogenetic tree-building a function of assumptions (01/18/2006).
    Verdict: the ball curves chaotically through the batter’s box, making any contact with the bat a matter of luck, not skill.  Ball Three.
11. Old earth:  This was not a prediction of Darwin.  Hutton, Lyell and other geologists had already decided long before The Origin to believe in an old earth, and they began interpreting the strata through that lens.  Regardless of debates on the age of the earth, Darwin gets no credit for predicting it.
    Verdict: Strike Two.
12. Fossils:  Precambrian fossils?  Missing links?  Gaps filled in with transitional forms? (see 10/15/2007 commentary on the PBS offerings, under numbered bullets #1).  The gall of these people to use the most damaging evidence against Darwin’s theory as support for it!
    Verdict: Strike Three.
13. Moth tongue:  OK, Charlie struck out, but we’ll entertain his final little just-so story, his lucky #13, as he walks to the dugout.  He predicted a pollinator with a foot-long tongue would be found to pollinate a peculiar orchid, and by golly, one was found 40 years later.  Awesome, dude.  Cowabunga.  Way to go.  Ahem.  The moth was still a moth, not some other animal, and the orchid was still an orchid.  None of this is germane to the question of the origin of species.  Since even young-earth creationists allow for dramatic variations of traits within kinds (look at dogs), this pitch is too little, too late.
    Verdict: Don’t quit your day job, prognosticator.  Go breed some pigeons.  Be sure to use intelligent design.

So Charlie is out.  He has failed to hit a single pitch from the list of predictions.  He couldn’t even walk to first base, because the pitcher kept dancing on the mound.
    We hate to hurt a guy’s feelings when he’s down, but must point out that even if he had struck a homer, it wouldn’t have mattered.  You see, scientists and philosophers have known for a long time that predictability is no assurance of validity.  There is an inherent logical fallacy in making and fulfilling predictions, called the fallacy of Affirming the Consequent (see Wikipedia for a convenient summary): “If P then Q; Q is true, therefore P is true.”  This is a non-sequitur; there are other things than P that could have been the cause of Q.  Example: Columbus told the natives that their gods were angry because of their treatment of his sailors, and were going to punish them by turning the moon blood-red.  It happened!  Columbus was good at predicting a lunar eclipse, but the natives believed the gods were angry, and treated him with much more respect.  If you take a placebo because the experimenter tells you it will make you feel better, and you feel better, it doesn’t mean the placebo cured you.  Astrologers and pseudoscientists for centuries have used this fallacy to their advantage.
    The problem is even more serious at a deeper level.  Philosophers of science since Pierre Duhem (late 19th century) have pointed out that theories are underdetermined by facts.  No matter how many facts your theory can incorporate, or how many successful predictions it can make, there are always a nearly infinite number of other theories that could account for the phenomena.  That’s why Popper proposed falsifiability as a criterion for good science.  Many would argue that Darwinism has already been falsified, but then Popper is not the last word, either.  Philosophy of science, the attempt to give a rational justification for scientific claims and discriminate good science from pseudoscience, has undergone multiple revolutions in the 20th century alone.  There remains no consensus even today.  All agree now, however, that the ability to make predictions is neither necessary nor sufficient to claim a theory is scientific.  So even if Charlie had hit the ball, the game wasn’t valid in the first place.  There is no joy in Dudville.  Mighty Charlie has struck out.  The officials, meanwhile, had already abrogated the game and declared it nugatory.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics • Fossils