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Science Docudrama Biases Against Religion   12/31/2007    
On New Year’s Eve, the Discovery HD Theater re-ran the 2005 BBC science docudrama Supervolcano, which dramatizes what might happen to civilization if the volcano under Yellowstone were to unleash its pent-up magma with the fury of prehistoric eruptions.
    At three points at least, the program touched on issues of religion and ultimate meaning.

1. Two victims huddled in a bunker, imprisoned by the rain of volcanic ash, got onto the meaning of it all.  One asked the other if he believed in God.  “God?” the other smirked.  The first responded that he preferred to believe in God’s mercy.  The other man responded sarcastically that he should ask if it was merciful for the 250,000 people who died in the blast.
2. News announcers periodically made matter-of-fact statements about millions of years and evolution.
3. Near the end, one of the characters commented that disasters such as this were not only catastrophic agents of death and destruction, but, ironically, agents of life and progress.  The suggestion was that, under threat from the environment, life re-emerges to diversify and evolve, conquering death with new life.

Notice one thing: in real life, the volcano has not erupted.  The BBC used a fictional disaster story as a pretext to present an atheistic worldview, sanctified by science.  A God who would let hundreds of thousands die, and millions more to suffer, cannot really be merciful, can he?  Therefore he must not exist.  Hello... Earth calling BBC... Yellowstone is peaceful and calm today.  Millions of people visit the grand old Park each year.  Quite a few even worship there in the various outdoor amphitheaters, praising God for the beauty of creation.  Can we keep that point in mind?
    “But it could happen, couldn’t it?  Sure, and a nearby star could go supernova and fry us, a meteor could hit the earth, or the sky could fall.  True, the Yellowstone caldera is rising, and the potential is there for a massive eruption.  Until it does, and even if it does, how can the BBC draw any theological conclusions?  Maybe God in his mercy is preventing the Yellowstone volcano from erupting right now.  Try to prove from science this is not the case.  In Christian theology, God watches over his creation.  Nothing happens without his knowledge and control.  But we know that supervolcanoes have erupted in the past, right?  Clearly so, but who is to conclude those events were outside the sovereignty of God?  These are theological issues, not scientific ones.  Creationists might postulate they were associated with the aftermath of the Flood when there were no cities or people around anyway.
    And who is the BBC to tell us about mercy?  If, as the producers of this show seem to believe, the world is a product of blind evolution and dispassionate natural forces, mercy is a meaningless term.  What happens happens.  Nothing is good or bad.  In fact, evolutionists should see it as a good thing; nothing like a catastrophe to provoke the blossoming of new life (as if that is a good thing, in a world where good and evil are undefined terms).  They cannot comment on the attributes of God without assuming what they need to prove.
    A theological position must be informed by actual events, not imaginary ones.  No one is so blind as to not realize that disasters have ravaged civilization as long as man has existed on this planet.  Tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, plagues and wars have caused untold human suffering.  Voltaire was horrified at the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.  Some of the worst disasters have occurred within our lifetimes.  These do not appear targeted at the wicked, but often sweep away everything and everyone.  Want a really, really bad disaster?  How about a world-wide flood that kills everyone except those on an Ark?
    The problem of pain and suffering is as old as Adam.  The authors of the Bible knew all too well about disasters.  It did not stop them from presenting God as wise, merciful and longsuffering.  Theodicy (squaring God’s love with the reality of evil) is a complex issue, but theologians have wrestled with this problem for thousands of years.  Though “seeing through a glass darkly,” as is the predicament of mortals, most have achieved satisfactory answers sufficient to give them courage and confidence in spite of incomplete understanding.  Those interested in pursuing the issue should study the Christian theodicies from antiquity to modern times.  Read, for instance, C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain, or Lee Strobel’s book The Case for Faith (to be adapted for film in early 2008).
    The problem of human suffering is not the domain of atheists.  Only believers in the Judeo-Christian God have any grounds for making an argument for God’s mercy or lack of it.  Atheists and scientific materialists lack the moral categories to make moral judgments.  They lack the categories to even make logical judgments.  It takes a Christian worldview to even begin to argue about anything.  To assume truth and the laws of logic you must first assume the existence of intangible realities and moral qualities that are timeless, universal, and absolute.  This point should be settled at the outset when debating an atheist or evolutionist.  Once settled, it becomes an issue of imperfect humans trying to understand how God’s love and the reality of evil can be harmonized.
    We must avoid, also, the error of mischaracterizing God by focusing on His love to the exclusion of His righteousness.  The God of Scripture is wrathful and angry at sin.  The Creator is also the ultimate Judge of the universe.  If He were to let the Yellowstone volcano loose, what could any man say about it?  Shall the clay say to the potter, what are you doing?  God has already decreed that all men shall die; the only question for each individual is when and how.  Those willing to believe His word and trust Him are promised salvation for their souls, not deliverance from earthly disasters.  Sinners on a planet destined for fire should not expect anything but judgment.  The question becomes not why God sends disaster, but why He hasn’t sent it yet.  Seen in this light, the sunny days are all the more cause for thanksgiving that for another day we have not received what we deserve.  Finally, it’s not like He hasn’t told us the end of the story.  It’s not like he didn’t warn us to be always ready.
    The reason for an entry about a TV re-run is to draw attention to how philosophical and theological biases can pervade visual media, even when the subject matter is about something else.  Supervolcano, like a similar one portraying the aftermath of a comet strike, is entertaining for its special effects and human drama.  The virtue of discernment calls us to be aware of overt or subliminal influences that pretend to give knowledge without warrant.   Teach your family how to identify bias cues.  Point them out and discuss them; overcome evil with good.
    Producers have freedom of speech to present their points of view, even atheistic and materialistic ones.  Their customers have the freedom to sublimate such messages into teachable moments.
Next headline on:  Media • Theology

This interesting paper owed nothing to evolutionary theory.  The paper did not mention evolution at all.  The scientists studied a present-day phenomenon, learned something interesting by observation and experimentation, and produced results that may have practical benefits for people.  That’s the way science should be done.  In 2008, let’s sing a good-bye to Darwin: “Nevermore” by The Raven.
Next headline on:  Birds

1. A nine in time saves stitch:  Centrosomes control the orientation of chromosomes before the split.  They create a spindle of microtubules that line the pairs up at the midplane, then pull them apart.  Within the centrosomes are two motors called centrioles, oriented perpendicular to one another, that look for all the world like turbines.  The blades of the turbine are microtubules with spokes, forming a cylinder that looks like a pie with exactly nine slices.  Why nine, and only nine?
       Wallace Marshall (UC San Francisco) reviewed experiments into the mechanical basis for nine-ness in centrioles, and published a report in Current Biology.¹  Experiments with mutants show that the number is controlled by the length of the spokes that emanate from each slice.  This sets the overall diameter of the centriole, and thus the number of pie slices that will fit in the cylinder.
       “This study provides an interesting geometrical mechanism by which a length can control a number,” Marshall said.  Why was the research worthwhile?  “Understanding centriole assembly is likely to reveal many more engineering-design principles that cells use to build complex structures.”
2. Herding the chromosomes:  When a chromosome pair lines up on the spindle midplane right before splitting up, it contains a structure at the waistband called a centromere.  This belt of protein contains two attachment points, called kinetochores, used by microtubules to pull them into their respective daughter cells.  Our 03/04/2004 entry used the analogy of cowboys lassoing pairs of cattle and pulling them into separate corrals.  The yoke holding each pair of cows together is the centromere, and the kinetochores are like saddle horns the ropes can latch onto.  Opposing cowboys lasso the horns and start pulling in opposite directions.  When all pairs are lined up and accounted for, a foreman named aurora B kinase breaks the yokes, and the cowboys haul in their herds.
       The geometry of the centromere is essential for keeping this process error-free, a team from New York and Moscow reported in Nature last month.²  Once in awhile, two cowboys on the same side lasso the same pair (this is called syntelic attachment).  Unless corrected, one cell would get both chromosomes and the other would get neither; this “non-disjunction” fault could lead to genetic disorders or cancer.  Scientists had previously thought that detaching one rope (microtubule) would make the saddle horn (kinetochore) automatically spring back into position for a rope from the other side.  It’s apparently not as simple as that.  More quality-control mechanisms are involved.  “Achieving chromosome bi-orientation depends on a complex interplay between mechanisms intrinsic to the centromere and those that act externally,” they said.  After cross-attachment fibers are released, and after the lassos are disconnected, there are intrinsic properties of the centromere that come into play.  “Our findings imply that mechanical properties and the shape of the centromere play an important part in the fidelity of chromosome segregation.”  Unless everything works, the operation usually aborts.  Security engineers might call this an example of the principle of defense in depth.
3. Pinch me:  Perhaps you’ve watched movies of dividing cells, and noticed how they pinch off from each other, as if someone tied a string around a soft balloon and pulled it tight.  Since no person is around at the cell level to do this task manually, there must be an automatic molecular mechanism that makes it work.  What forms the “contractile ring” and reels it in?
       An article in Science Daily described work by scientists from Yale, Columbia and Lehigh to figure out what happens.  Cells employ the same molecular motors, actin and myosin, that make muscles work.  Actin filaments with attached myosin motors assemble along the inner cell membrane at the dividing plane, and go through a “search, capture, pull and release” operation.  Being blind, molecules “feel” their way to neighboring molecules by putting out filaments in random directions.  A myosin motor on the neighbor captures the actin filament and pulls on it.  Surprisingly, it lets go after about 20 seconds.  Why?  “The assembly involves many episodes of attractions between pairs of nodes proceeding in parallel,” the article explains.  “Eventually the nodes form into a condensed contractile ring around the equator, ready to pinch the mother into two daughters at a later stage.”
       The repeating rounds of “release and capture” appear essential to the assembly process of the contractile ring, they said.  Like pulling on a purse string, the circle tightens till the cells are pinched off and go their separate ways.
       The scientists figured this out by comparing models with observations in an iterative fashion.  The work was done on “simple” yeast cells.  “Future work will involve testing the concepts learned from fission yeast in other cells to learn if the mechanism is universal,” said Thomas Pollard [Yale].  “Since other cells, including human cells, depend on similar proteins for cytokinesis, it is entirely possible that they use the same strategy.”  An abstract of the work appears on Science Express in advance of publication.  The following week it was published in Science.³
4. Plant protection and bearing walls:  Dividing plant cells have a different problem.  They have cell walls.  What determines the exact point at where the wall between two newly-divided cells will form?  Shrink yourself down to the size of a plant cell in your imagination, and you can see the difficulty.  If you were the foreman of a group of construction workers making a house divide in two, how do you remember where the new wall between them is supposed to go?
       Clive Lloyd and Henrik Buschmann (Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, John Innes Centre, Norwich UK) wrote about this predicament in Current Biology.⁴  What was mysterious is that a structure of microtubules known to form at the dividing plane apparently disassembles right before cell division.  How does the cell “memorize” the position of the plane where the future cell wall will form?  The trick is somewhat like using a chalk line.  The microtubules attract special proteins that adhere to the exact spot, forming a ring around the perimeter.  The microtubule scaffolding, no longer needed, is then dismantled.  After the chromosomes migrate and cell division completes, a plate of cell-wall proteins grows outward toward the chalk ring.  If you can imagine wallboard that grows into position from the center of the room, attracted to the chalk line, you get the idea.  The result is a neat, flat, parallel wall, subdividing the daughter cells into their own rooms.
       Without these memory proteins, the scientists found, cell walls grew at abnormal positions.  Stay tuned, because this doesn’t explain everything about how plants determine the division plane.  It’s just an intriguing start.  “The search now continues for other components of the division ring and insights into the attractive influence they exert over the leading edge of the cytokinetic apparatus,” they said.

The views of cells you got in high school through a light microscope are about as useful for understanding what really goes on as trying to fathom a city from an airplane.  Only now, in our time, are the techniques improving to the point where we can enter the factories and offices at ground level to really begin to understand.
    Our great joy and mission at Creation-Evolution Headlines is to bring these fascinating discoveries, hidden away in abstruse journals, to the public in a timely, understandable way, so that readers can wonder at the amazing design so clearly apparent at the tiniest basis of life – the cell – and realize how utterly bankrupt is the theory of evolution to explain them.
    As is almost always the case, none of these papers dared to speculate about how these incredible mechanisms might have evolved by a blind, purposeless process of chance.  Darwin’s theory was written for a past era when the cell seemed as simple as a blob of jello.  Wave him and his theory good-bye as we fast-forward into the 21st century era of molecular machinery.  Biology of the future is reserved for those who appreciate and understand “engineering-design principles.”
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Plants • Amazing Facts • Intelligent Design

Comet Woes Lamented   12/27/2007    
Space.com posted an article on “The enduring mysteries of comets.”  The mysteries include:

• Where did earth’s oceans come from?  For a long time, scientists expected comets delivered the water, until measurements showed a discrepancy in the hydrogen/deuterium ratios.  It’s also highly improbable there was enough wet stuff in those assumed delivery vehicles.  No secular scientist knows where the water came from.  Ask how the following answer would score on a high-school science test: “Earth’s oceans are likely a mixture of water from all sorts of places, but the main-belt comets are very likely one of them.”
• Is there a comet reservoir?  The proposed Oort cloud cannot be the source of short-period comets at least.  Another high-school answer to score: “Maybe there are other reservoirs of comets yet to be discovered.”
• Why are they dirty?  Until recently, this was the expectation: “Comets were long thought to be primordial relics, pristine leftovers from the protoplanetary disk that once surrounded the newborn sun.  As such, it was supposed they might hold secrets untouched for billions of years regarding the birth of our solar system.”  Wrong.  Now that we have sampled Halley, Tempel 1 and other comets, we know they have unexpected material like carbonates, silicates and complex molecules that seem to have required high temperatures: “many of them are nearly burned-out hulks, with neither the size, mass, shape nor spin they might have had before entering the solar system.”
• How long can they bake?  How main-belt comets could have survived for billions of years is another mystery.  “Until their discovery, researchers had largely supposed no comets could have lasted that close to the sun without getting baked away after a few centuries or millennia.” 
• Where are the interstellar travelers?  Escaping comets from other stars should be coming into our solar system from all angles.  That’s a deduction from calculations that show 90 to 99% of our solar system’s comets get flung outward, never to return.  None coming in from neighboring stars’ Oort clouds have been detected.

Other mysteries were not cited in the Space.com article, such as why any comets are left after 4.5 billion years.  The solar sparklers have a short lifetime (03/27/2003).  One might ask if a hypothetical reservoir that has never been observed is worthy of scientific respectability.  To what extent is it legitimate in science to rescue a theory from lack of data?
    It’s fun to watch materialists mutter about material matters.  The committee on comet-y objects commits more comedy than comity.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Physics

The Woessners found that self-described liberals and conservatives report no difference in grades or in the quality of their education.  Yet liberal college students are twice as likely as conservative ones to pursue Ph.D.s  The main reasons, the authors conclude, are differences in values, goals, and preferences.  Liberals placed higher values on creativity; conservatives were more oriented toward raising families and making money.

Surveys and graphs have only limited credibility because of the possibilities of biased sampling and leaving out relevant causes (see Baloney Detector on statistics).  At least Science admitted that liberalism is rampant at the university (see 12/02/2004), and also confessed that liberals (and PhDs) are not necessarily smarter.  (The vulgar translations for the acronyms B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. may be apropos here.)*
    It appears that conservatives are the fittest, working hard to pass on their genes, while liberals are like parasites, advancing primarily by taking over the host (the classroom) and churning out clones to infect other cells.  A university setting is a contrived, unnatural environment where the parasites thrive.  In the open air of true academic freedom, where the parasites would have to compete in the real world, the results might be quite different. 
Next headline on:  Education • Politics and Ethics

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*No offense to those who really apply their years of hard work in study and research to a life of altruistic productivity; blessings upon you.  A PhD can be vital, indeed is a requirement, for productivity in many fields.  We need honest men and women with academic credentials.  But the list of great achievers and intellectual giants who never earned a degree would be long.  The joke just means that earning advanced degrees is no guarantee of credibility, true value to society, or personal quality of life (think Ward Churchill).  On judgment day, academic credentials will count for naught (Jeremiah 9:23-24).

NG claims they acknowledged many of the alternate readings in the footnotes of their published edition.  How many in the public saw those, compared to the millions who watched the TV special?  The fine-print excuse is no excuse.  They dramatized their Judas-hero fictional drama with seductive ads to make people think they were watching a historical documentary instead of a Gnostic sermon.  Remember?  It was presented as big news that could undermine historic Christianity.  As is so often the case, the truth comes out in the back pages later, long after the headlines have done their damage.
    In short, the article reveals that NG abandoned academic integrity in their rush to get a lurid anti-Christian message to the public, as if the late document had some historical credibility.  Hope you weren’t fooled.  Watch instead the 2007 documentary featuring former atheist skeptic Lee Strobel: The Case for Christ.  In this film, Bible scholars explain why the Gnostic gospels are much later than the canonical gospels.  Because of their late dates and roots in Gnostic cults, they cannot be trusted as reliable historical sources.
    The canonical gospels, by contrast, were written within the generation of the events described, by eyewitnesses or companions of eyewitnesses.  John was written by one of the three “inner circle” disciples of Jesus Christ; it contains lengthy discourses by Jesus, and an eyewitness account of Judas’s betrayal.  Mark, a companion of Peter, wrote the shortest, most action-packed account; it is also the earliest gospel, and apparently was used as a source by Matthew and Luke.  Matthew was written by another of the 12 disciples who traveled with Jesus for three years and knew Judas personally.  Luke, written by a companion of Paul, is highly regarded as a reliable account by a careful researcher, who continued his work in the Acts of the Apostles.  Have you read them?  What better time than right now, between the holidays?  They’re right there online, a click away.  Find out why the word gospel means good news.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Media

Your Body Says: Resolve to Exercise   12/26/2007    
Even moderate exercise can prevent health risks, an article in Science Daily says.  Want to keep the waist trim?  Reduce the bad cholesterol and triglycerides, and increase your HDLs?  Want to lower your risk of diabetes, heart attack and stroke?  Then get out and walk.  You don’t have to become a jogger or gym addict.  Studies at Duke University Medical Center showed that thirty minutes of brisk walking a day, six times a week, can reduce the symptoms of metabolic syndrome, “an increasingly frequent condition linked to obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.”
    Your body wants you to make a New Year’s resolution and keep it.  Get a head start today.  The doctor says what we have all known for a long time: “Some exercise is better than none; more exercise is generally better than less, and no exercise can be disastrous.”  Take some fish oil each day, too, so you won’t forget.  An article on PhysOrg suggests that the omega-3 in fish oil can help stave off Alzheimer’s disease.

The best walking is done in a park or out on a nature trail.  If traffic sounds can’t be avoided, put some Dan Gibson nature recordings into your iPod and feel the pleasure of connecting with your created environment as you improve your health and energy.
Next headline on:  Health • Human Body

The historic St. Nicholas of Patara, a Christian altruist, would be appalled at his nemesis being used to support neo-paganism.  Pay attention especially to the last paragraphs in the article.  Atheists cannot deny the case for cosmic design, and their empty hearts yearn for a meaning they have abandoned.
    If atheists think they should evolve their beliefs, then their beliefs are self-refuting.  It becomes possible that their beliefs might evolve toward theism – thus denying the validity of atheism.  Beliefs cannot evolve into Christianity by any means.  That requires choice based on an intelligently-designed Master plan (Romans 10:5-13).  You might find this to be the happier choice (see 12/08/2003).
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Bible and Theology

That’s nothing.  God can put 10¹⁸ bits in one cubic millimeter of DNA.  If you wrote that amount of information on DVDs, you’d have to stack them more than six times the height of Mt. Everest (08/16/2002).
    Don’t be a pinhead; be sure not to miss the message inscribed in that tiny Bible: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder, and His name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).
Next headline on:  Bible • Intelligent design • Amazing Facts

What Materialist Science Still Can’t Figure Out   12/21/2007    
Darwin called the origin of flowering plants an “abominable mystery,” but it is not the only one.  The scientific materialism that strives to explain all reality by “natural” causes without resource to a designing intelligence has a long way to go.  Occasionally, major gaps in cosmic evolution and biological evolution become evident in scientific papers and announcements.

1. A bloomin’ mystery:  Darwin was baffled about angiosperms in 1859, and so are today’s biologists – even with genome sequencing, a more complete fossil record and microscopes that are approaching nanometer resolution.  Michael Frohlich and Mark Chase wrote in Nature that “After a dozen years of progress the origin of angiosperms is still a great mystery.”¹  Less than a dozen years ago, they said, even the most basic questions about angiosperm origins were still disputed.  They surveyed a dozen alternative approaches to answering the question, but put any answer in future tense – even after nearly 148 years of searching.
2. Beetle blast from the past:  Modern-looking beetles evolved 110 million years earlier than expected, if we can believe scientists from Imperial College, London (see BBC News).  Evolutionists had thought the proliferation of beetles coincided with the rise of flowering plants 140 million years ago.  Now, they claim beetles have been around for at least 250 million years – maybe 300 million.
       There are some 300,000 species of beetles in the world today.  “The reason for this large number of beetle species has been debated for many years and never resolved,” the article stated (cf. 04/26/2002).  Why did they evolve into so many species far before flowering plants are thought to have appeared?  “We don’t have the answer to that,” said one researcher.
3. Birds and bees:  It’s hard to know whether Tim Clutton-Brock was confirming sexual selection or casting doubt on it.  In a review article in Science,² he gave material for critics and proponents to both claim victory.  “Research on sexual selection shows that the evolution of secondary sexual characters in males and the distribution of sex differences are more complex than was initially suggested but does not undermine our understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms involved,” he began.  “However, the operation of sexual selection in females has still received relatively little attention.”  That seems surprising, considering it is such an easy topic for biologists to have investigated since Darwin’s day.  Darwin himself paid little attention to secondary sexual characteristics in females, he said.
       The article shows how sexual selection can produce counter-intuitive, even opposite, results: “Recent studies show that both intrasexual competition between females and male choice of mating partners are common, leading to strong sexual selection in females and, in extreme cases, to reversals in the usual pattern of sex differences in behavior and morphology.” He concluded that sexual selection remains a “robust framework” that explains much, but “many important questions about the operation of sexual selection in females and the evolution of sex differences have yet to be answered.”  The long and short of it: “There is still much to be done.”
       Last month in Current Biology,³ three scientists at University of Exeter tried to do an experiment to see if attractiveness in males was heritable (Note: the experiments were done on fruit flies, not humans).  It would seem intuitive in a Darwinian sense that attractive males should produce more and fitter offspring.  Did it work?  They reported positive results, but admitted that their results “contrast starkly” with an earlier, similar study.  “For example, a recent hemiclonal investigation found that males with high reproductive success did not produce more attractive sons, which is very different to what we find here,” they said.  It’s hard to know if any significant conclusions could be drawn.  Their ending sentence seems contradictory: “Regardless of the net fitness outcome, however, our finding that sexy fathers sire sexy sons provides much needed evidence for a critical assumption of many models of sexual selection,” they claimed.  But isn’t net fitness outcome what Darwinism is all about?
       Sexual selection is apparently one of those ideas that sounds good in generalities, but bogs down under scientific scrutiny: “our results emphasise the fact that attractiveness is a composite trait that cannot be totally captured by simple measurements of single characters,” they explained.  “That is to say, even if individual traits that are subject to sexual selection are heritable, this need not imply attractiveness in total is heritable and can evolve.”  Perhaps beauty is in the fly of the beholder.
4. Mammal enamel:  Looking at the teeth of mammals gave Zhe-Xi Luo a non-Darwinian view of their evolutionary history.  The scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Natural History said in Nature,⁴ “Classic scenarios of mammalian morphological evolution tend to posit an orderly acquisition of key evolutionary innovations leading to adaptive diversification, but newly discovered fossils show that evolution of such key characters as the middle ear and the tribosphenic teeth is far more labile among Mesozoic mammals.”  Views of progress should be discarded: “Successive diversifications of Mesozoic mammal groups multiplied the opportunities for many dead-end lineages to iteratively evolve developmental homoplasies and convergent ecological specializations, parallel to those in modern mammal groups.”
       Luo mentioned evolutionary convergence a dozen times in his review article.  He spoke of “curious cases of convergent adaptations in extinct Mesozoic mammals” that “represent many separate evolutionary experiments,” but merely stating that something represents convergent evolution begs the question of how complex organs could have originated even once by evolution, let alone multiple times.  At one point Luo asked, “are originations of key mammalian characters singular evolutionary events, or iterative convergences despite their complexity?”
5. Champions are raised, not born:  Are race horse breeders paying high stud fees for nothing?  Nurture may be more important than nature in producing good race horses, reports Science Now.  A team from the University of Edinburgh studied records of 4500 race horse offspring between 1922 to 2003, and found only 10% correlation of champions with their parents.  If genes aren’t correlating with fitness as much the environment (in this case, good trainers), what would this mean to Darwinian theory that expects fitness to ultimately reside in the genes, where they can be passed on?
       One caution about any conclusions drawn from this study is that fitness according to the betting man yelling in the grandstands may not relate to fitness according to the horse.  But then, fitness in evolutionary terms is so vague, it can mean anything (see “Fitness for dummies: is it running in circles?”, 10/29/2002).
6. Tree Network of life:  Lateral gene transfer scrambles any hope of finding a Darwinian tree of common descent in genetic studies, admitted James McInerney and Davide Pisani in Science.⁵  “The role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution has raised fierce debate about the relevance of the Tree of Life,” they said.  Yet the Tree of Life, coming from the single illustration in The Origin of Species, is Darwin’s most-famous icon of evolution.  They concluded with a new paradigm, “When eukaryotes are included in our considerations of evolution, the phylogeny of life seems better represented by a network than a tree, making any core genes-based argument in favor of the Tree of Life essentially irrelevant.”  See also the 02/01/2007 entry.
7. Dark prospects:  Dark energy has been debated for nearly a decade, but Lawrence Krauss (Case Western Reserve University) thinks we may never figure out what it is.  As reported in Physics World, “Even with the many observations planned over the next decade, there is a real chance that we will never understand the true nature of dark energy.”

It therefore seems that we are living in a very special time, namely the only time in the history of the universe that we might actually be able to infer the existence of dark energy itself.  Perhaps, therefore, we should not feel too bad if observations in the coming decades do not allow us to untangle the mystery of the nature and origin of dark energy.  After all, it is often the mysteries themselves that keep scientists going, energizing theorists to continue to speculate about the ultimate nature of reality and motivating observers to seek out new tools to probe it.

This is just a sampling of fundamental questions that have the Darwinists stumped after nearly a century and a half.  It’s clear that their victory speeches are mere bluffing, because the unknowns overpower the knowns, and the knowns are not well known.  How much longer do you want to give the materialistic crowd time to pursue their metaphysical research program?  They‘re like the dog in the manger; can’t eat the hay, but won’t let those with the stomach for it get a bite. 
Next headline on:  Mammals • Genetics • Darwin and Evolution • Cosmology

The landmark finding represents a long-sought ‘missing link’ in the 10m-year [10 million year] journey that saw ancient land mammals evolve into modern cetaceans, a group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises.”
    Scientists have long known that whales are mammals whose ancient ancestors walked on land, but only in the past 15 years have they unearthed fossils that shed light on the creatures’ dramatic evolutionary history.  The latest discovery, named Indohyus, is the first whale ancestor known to have lived on land.

The evolutionary path of the whale is one of the most extraordinary on record.  In less than 10m years, the whale’s ancestors completely transformed as they shifted from a four-legged life on land to a life in the ocean.
    The first whales, Pakicetidae, emerged around 50m years ago and resembled land mammals rather than the giant marine creatures of today.  These evolved into large, powerful coastal whales, or Ambulocetidae, that had big feet and strong tails.  Later, whales lost their hind limbs and hair and developed powerful tail fins and flippers.

Fred Spoor, an anthropologist at University College London, said the significance of the latest find was comparable to Archaeopteryx, the first fossils to show a clear transition between dinosaurs and birds.  “For years cetaceans were used by creationists to support their views because for a long time the most primitive whales known had bodies that looked like modern whales, so there seemed to be this enormous gap in evolution.  But since the early 1990s, there’s been a rapid succession of fossils from India and Pakistan that beautifully fill that gap,” he said.
    “The tables are turned now because we have fossils that show that dramatic transition step by step.  Cetaceans are almost the only group that has made such a rapid change from a land environment to an aquatic one.  “Unlike sealions and seals, which still spend some time on land, cetaceans are completely committed to the water now, and it had an enormous effect on their physiology.  They had to change everything.”

Thewissen’s group will next study Indohyus further to learn more about its diet and habitat.  One critical change that occurred when whales took to the water involved its sense of balance and orientation.  In land mammals, this is governed by a vestibulary system in the inner ear, but whales had to adapt to moving in three dimensions, driving the evolution of a more complex system.
    “This fossil completes the picture in terms of the whales’ evolution, but what’s next is to look at these other evolutionary adaptations,” said Thewissen.

Phylogenetic analyses of molecular data on extant animals strongly support the notion that hippopotamids are the closest relatives of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises).  In spite of this, it is unlikely that the two groups are closely related when extant and extinct artiodactyls are analysed, for the simple reason that cetaceans originated about 50 million years (Myr) ago in south Asia, whereas the family Hippopotamidae is only 15 Myr old, and the first hippopotamids to be recorded in Asia are only 6 Myr old.  However, analyses of fossil clades have not resolved the issue of cetacean relations.  Proposed sister groups ranged from the entire artiodactyl order, to the extinct early ungulates mesonychians, to an anthracotheroid clade (which included hippopotamids), to weakly supporting hippopotamids (to the exclusion of anthracotheres.

To investigate the importance of raoellids in cetacean phylogeny, we excluded raoellids from our initial phylogenetic analysis of artiodactyls plus cetaceans.  Our data set differed from previous analyses by the addition of several archaic anthracotheres, and some corrected scores for pakicetid cetaceans.  This analysis found stronger support for hippopotamid–cetacean sister-group relations than the previous analysis, consistent with molecular studies.  However, the base of the artiodactyl cladogram is poorly resolved (see Supplementary Information for details on phylogenetic runs).

In a second cladistic analysis (Fig. 2), we added the raoellids Khirtharia and Indohyus as well as several archaic ungulate groups (condylarths) and found that raoellids and cetaceans are sister groups and that they are the basal node in the Cetacea/Artiodactyla clade, consistent with some previous analyses that used different character sets.  Our analysis is the first to show that raoellids are the sister group to cetaceans, resolving the biogeographic conundrum and closing the temporal gap between cetaceans and their sister.  Relations between most artiodactyl families higher in the tree are poorly resolved, and our data lack implications for the relations between these families.  Our analysis strongly argues that raoellids and cetaceans are more closely related to each other than either is to hippopotamids.

Indohyus was a small, stocky artiodactyl, roughly the size of the raccoon Procyon lotor (Fig. 5).  It was not an adept swimmer; instead it waded in shallow water, with its heavy bones providing ballast to keep its feet anchored.  Indohyus may have fed on land, although a specialized aquatic diet is also possible.

Our working hypothesis for the origin of whales is that raoellid ancestors, although herbivores or omnivores on land, took to fresh water in times of danger.  Aquatic habits were increased in Indohyus (as suggested by osteosclerosis and oxygen isotopes), although it did not necessarily have an aquatic diet (as suggested by carbon isotopes).  Cetaceans originated from an Indohyus-like ancestor and switched to a diet of aquatic prey.  Significant changes in the morphology of the teeth, the oral skeleton and the sense organs made cetaceans different from their ancestors and unique among mammals.

Will evolutionists actually tell lies to push their beliefs?  Yes—you saw it right here.  Fred Spoor told you that Archaeopteryx represents a clear transition between dinosaurs and birds, when he knows full well it appeared too late in his own evolutionary timeline to be a missing link (10/24/2005).  The big lie in the Nature article, and in the popular press, was to portray this fossil discovery as a great victory for evolution, and a step-by-step sequence showing the whole ancestry.  It is no more victory than picking up a spent lottery ticket on the dusty ground and thinking it is a missing link to riches.
    Philosophers of science could have some good banter about the logic of discovery – whether they discovered something true to nature in the data, or imposed their own experiences and preferences on the data.  Clearly, this team decided to pick and choose a few traits from a fossil they preferred over other problematical ones, and from these to weave a whale of a just-so story with which to dupe the public and shoot the creationists.  Well, their shot only hurt as much as a blast of bad breath in the face, that’s all.  You know what to expect from National Geographic, and you got it: “Whales Evolved from Tiny Deerlike Mammals, Study Says.”  The bigger the whopper, the better; have it your way, NG (10/24/2004).  Not to be left behind in the Whopper Olympics, the BBC News trumpeted, “Whale ‘missing link’ discovered.”
    This is the mess of things that Charlie Darwin left in his wake when he allowed the magicians and storytellers into the once noble halls of science (12/22/2003 commentary).  It’s time to clear house and clean up.  Send the whole lot of them back to school to learn some history and philosophy and ethics, and make them sign a commitment to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  That would solve most of the problems in the contentious creation-evolution debate.
    Bambi to Moby Dick—incredible.  PhD scientists actually believe that?  They want that taught in the schools?  We need a new word that means to laugh and cry at the same time, because this whale of a tale deserves a whopping blubberfest.  Maybe the word howl will do.  Perhaps this is why the humpback whales are howling.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Mammals • Fossils • Evolution

Visualize a hockey puck on a frictionless surface infinite in all directions, moving about in various ways.  The concepts of forward, backward and sideways lose all meaning.  The same is true in relativistic Darwinland, where an incoming asteroid can cause extinction but also a boom in emergent innovation (see Fox News).  In the overall scheme of things, does it matter which direction is forward or backward?
    For decades, most Darwinists have taught as fact the myth that eukaryotes are a more complex product that emerged from the fusion of simpler, more primitive microbes.  Progressivism is built into such a notion.  Now, if eukaryotes just appeared suddenly, then became stripped down into the other two kingdoms of microbes, then Darwinian miracles of emergence allow for anything.  Why don’t we extend Penny’s theory and conclude that bacteria are stripped-down humans?  (Sorry; that didn’t come out right.  Some people on the beach, though, do resemble amoebas.)
Exercise:  Read the following sentence aloud:

The Story of Evolution
Evolution explains more complexity, and more simplicity.  It explains why flight arose in some birds, but was lost in others.  With evolution, organs and genomes can become more complicated, or more streamlined.  Eyes emerge through evolution, but eyes are also lost by evolution.  Evolution makes the cheetah fast but the sloth slow.  By evolution, dinosaurs grow to skyscraper size, and hummingbirds grow tiny.  With evolution, peacocks grow more flashy and crows more black, giraffes tall and flatworms flat.  Evolution explains predator and prey, loner and herder, light and dark, high and low, fast and slow, profligacy and stinginess, terrorism and altruism, religion and atheism, virtue and selfishness, psychosis and reason, extinction and fecundity, war and peace.  Evolution explains everything.

Now substitute the meaningless word Gribbleflix for Evolution and read it again.  There you have it: the world’s most successful, all-encompassing theory.  Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Gribbleflix.  Don’t let the anti-Gribbleflix people sneak their dogma into the schools.  Gribbleflix is science.  Gribbleflix is a FACT!
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Cell Biology

Walking Tall: Earth Pushed Hominids Out of Africa   12/19/2007    
Why did humans evolve from stoop-shouldered apemen into tall, proud, big-brained Europeans?  Africa pushed them out.  That seems to be the idea behind a story spreading throughout the popular science media, such as on Science Daily, entitled, “Geologists Say ‘Wall Of Africa’ Allowed Humanity To Emerge.”  The idea is based on circumstantial evidence that, according to evolutionary dating, the African Rift zone was creating mountains and valleys at about the same time hominids were thought by paleoanthropologists to be emerging into manhood.
    According to the Science Daily article, the husband and wife team of Royhan and Nahid Gani claim, “Tectonics [movement of Earth’s crust] was ultimately responsible for the evolution of humankind.”  Why?  Because it dried up the trees and created grasslands.  The apes had to climb down and learn how to walk on two feet, “an energy-efficient way to search larger areas for food in an arid environment.”  The Ganis did not explain why the other mammals didn’t follow the human leader.
    The following quotes by the Ganis were gleaned from reports on Science Daily, and EurekAlert, an PhysOrg, which regurgitated a press release from University of Utah.

• “Because of the crustal movement or tectonism in East Africa, the landscape drastically changed over the last 7 million years,” says Royhan Gani (pronounced rye-hawn Go-knee), a research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.  “That landscape controlled climate on a local to regional scale.  That climate change spurred human ancestors to evolve from apes.”
• “Although the Wall of Africa started to form around 30 million years ago, recent studies show most of the uplift occurred between 7 million and 2 million years ago, just about when hominins split off from African apes, developed bipedalism and evolved bigger brains.”
• “Nature built this wall, and then humans could evolve, walk tall and think big,” says Royhan Gani.  “Is there any characteristic feature of the wall that drove human evolution?”
      The answer, he believes, is the variable landscape and vegetation resulting from uplift of the Wall of Africa, which created “a topographic barrier to moisture, mostly from the Indian Ocean” and dried the climate.
• “Clearly, the Wall of Africa grew to be a prominent elevated feature over the last 7 million years, thereby playing a prominent role in East African aridification by wringing moisture out of monsoonal air moving across the region,” the Ganis write.  That period coincides with evolution of human ancestors in the area.
• Royhan Gani says the earliest undisputed evidence of true bipedalism (as opposed to knuckle-dragging by apes) is 4.1 million years ago in Australopithecus anamensis, but some believe the trait existed as early as 6 million to 7 million years ago.
      The Ganis speculate that the shaping of varied landscapes by tectonic forces -- lake basins, valleys, mountains, grasslands, woodlands -- “could also be responsible, at a later stage, for hominins developing a bigger brain as a way to cope with these extremely variable and changing landscapes” in which they had to find food and survive predators.

Of course, these Charlietans had to include a little bit of doubt to let their sponsors know this is an important work in progress, so that the funds will keep flowing.
    The secular science reporters echo this nonsense without any critical thinking.  If we don’t expose the fallacies in these ridiculous ideas for the public, who will?  Even ardent evolutionists should be ashamed of the kind of illogic that went into this claim.  Tectonic forces and climate change make apes walk tall and think big.  Right on, dude.  It’s a shame this didn’t happen back in the Cambrian or Ordovician; we might have had written records for more time telling us how meteor impacts created brickmasons, earthquakes created architects, and tsunamis created surfers.
    Evolutionists should be the first in line to award the Ganis with Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  Instead, they give any imposters claiming to be scientists license to say any stupid things they want, as long as they swear allegiance to Darwin (e.g., 07/17/2007).  Alan Boyle listed 30 nominations for Weird Science of 2007 on MSNBC, but not one highlighted the silly claims of Darwinists.  The only one that came close was the story about redhead Neanderthals—but that was not questioning evolution.  Why didn’t the evolutionary claims in our 08/10/2007 entry make his list?  Look back through the “Dumb” entries for 2007 in these pages (e.g., 06/14/2007, 04/20/2007, 03/31/2007).  Any one of them would trounce Boyle’s nominations about radiation-proof underwear and glow-in-the-dark kittens.  Much of the evolutionary silliness would insult the intelligence of children (see 11/22/2007, 07/03/2007).  Remember the dandy display of logic from 10/14/2007?  or from 08/20/2007, or from 04/11/2007?  We should stage a contest for Stupidest Evolution Quote of 2007.
    Evolutionists are the funniest comedians on earth, and they don’t even know it.  That’s what makes them so funny.  Save the SEQOTW quotes up for the day the Darwin idol falls.  We’ll have a merry good time.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

1. Knowledge is power of assumption:  Patrick Barry wrote for Science News about “energy-converting mitochondria or sunlight-absorbing chloroplasts, which are known to have evolved from ancient, independent-living bacteria that became incorporated into the cells.”
2. Child’s play:  Since infants prefer Good Samaritans, this trait must have evolved, said Science Daily: “The presence of social evaluation so early in infancy suggests that assessing individuals by the nature of their interactions with others is central to processing the social world, both evolutionarily and developmentally,” the authors of a study proclaimed.
3. Say it is so:  The author of a new book on vertebrate paleontology called Evolution In Action said this: “All creatures alive today are descended from a population of single-celled organisms that lived some billions of years ago.  Since the first animals appeared, millions of species have been born (the majority of which are now extinct), including our own, Homo sapiens.”  This was quoted authoritatively in Current Biology Dec 18, in a book review with the title, “No bones about it.”
4. Scuttle fish:  Cuttlefish signalling can be quite elaborate, involving specialized light-emitting organs that display flashing lights in patterns.  Three scientists writing in Current Biology had an easy answer for where this ability came from: “Coleoid cephalopods, including cuttlefish, have a unique neurally controlled system for generating skin patterns, which evolved primarily for visual defence.”
5. Columbine school:  Scott Hodges and Elena Kramer had a simple explanation for certain structures on columbines (a wildflower group): “What is unique about columbines, compared to their close relatives that have not gone through an adaptive radiation, is that they have evolved nectar spurs.”  The authors used the word evolution 10 times, never once explaining how it acted—only that it did; for instance, “Aquilegia’s flowers are also of particular utility and their features may help us to understand how novel morphological traits evolve....Developmental and genetic studies of these structures will help us understand how novelties evolve.”
6. Evolution as goddess:  Did you know evolution can plan things and discover efficient ways of engineering codes?  A summary of the paper on RNA Polymerase II (see 12/17/2007, next entry) in Science Daily said this: “It would appear that, over the last 500 million years, other ways to produce highly complex organisms have evolved.  Evolution has simply found more efficient ways to use the genes already there.”
7. Fly in the eye:  The following quote is notable for its admission that evidence is lacking for evolution, juxtaposed with certainty that it occurred.  David Weisblat, an expert on leeches at UC Berkeley, explained to Current Biology Dec 4 why leech study is important:

   The most compelling scientific justification for studying leech development is its relevance to understanding the evolution of animal body plans.  A priori, changes in animal body plans – morphology – must come about by changes, over the course of many millions of years, in the developmental processes by which they arise.  We now have a decent understanding of how a very few species, chiefly Drosophila, develop, but the ancestral species from which they evolved are by definition extinct, so we cannot make any retrospective comparisons.  Thinking prospectively, waiting to see significant morphological and underlying genomic/developmental changes is an exciting long-term possibility.  Unfortunately, that will require maintaining both human society and natural populations of the species of interest for the millions of years required for significant evolutionary changes to occur, a dicey proposition at best.

Charlietans, these Darwinists.  On the one hand they exclaim that evolution is the most clearly demonstrated scientific fact on Earth that only a fool (like a creationist) would deny.  Ask them for an example, and this is what you get: bald assertions that say little more than “it evolved because it evolved” or, “the way that it evolved is that it emerged millions of years ago, and after it arose, it evolved.”  If you love science, don’t let them get away with it.  Like Michael Jackson, they’re BAD (bald assertions of dogmatism).
    For more Darwin-assuming groaners, see the 08/24/2007 entry, “Evolution Takes Credit.”
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Marine Biology • Plants

The biological role of CTD phosphorylation remains to be fully elucidated, but the emerging picture is that the pattern of CTD phosphorylation changes during RNA synthesis, allowing dynamic modification of the DNA template and processing of the nascent RNA transcript.  The studies by Chapman et al.² and by Egloff et al.³ provide both the tools to fully document CTD phosphorylation patterns and the best evidence to date that these patterns constitute a code that intersects, at the most fundamental level, with the regulation of different classes of eukaryotic genes.

The situation just keeps getting worse for the evolutionists.  None of the three papers even mentioned evolution.  Who would dare?
    Apparently, Science Daily dared.  Summarizing these papers, it said, “It would appear that, over the last 500 million years, other ways to produce highly complex organisms have evolved.  Evolution has simply found more efficient ways to use the genes already there.”  You may now utter a long, sarcastic groan.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Amazing Facts

Godless: Is Psychiatry Science or Religion?   12/16/2007    
“Ever since Freud described religious faith as an illusion and a neurosis there has been tension and at times hostility between religion and psychiatry,” reported EurekAlert.  “Psychiatrists are less religious on average than other physicians, according to previously published data from the same survey, and non-psychiatrist physicians who are religious are less willing to refer their patients to psychiatrists.”
    This does not mean psychiatrists are hostile toward the religion of their clients.  In fact, they seem more interested in discussing it with clients than other medical doctors.  Many are also changing from linking religion with mental illness, the study says.  Some are even finding religious behaviors beneficial to clients’ mental health.  Medical doctors, by contrast, are far more likely to be religious themselves and view religion as important to their patients, according to an earlier survey by Brandeis University published on EurekAlert 11/14/2007, “A dose of God may help medicine.”
    The statistics about psychiatrists come from a survey published in the December issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.  Farr Curlin, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, thinks the gap between religion and psychiatry is narrowing.  “In aggregate,” he said, “although psychiatrists may not agree with the claims of religion, they often witness its powerful effects on patients’ mental health, both for good and for ill.”

Studies like this border on the meaningless.  To lump Scientology, animism and Christianity into one bin called “religion” almost guarantees that any conclusions will be invalid from the start.  It would be like trying to discuss anything meaningful about politics after lumping Democrats, Republicans, communists, fascists and anarchists into one group.
    Psychiatrists are psychologists with medical degrees.  That gives them one leg up from psychologists, a sorry lot within “science” if there ever was one.  The one who needed his head examined was Freud.  He pulled science down a blind alley as much as Mesmer did.  Psychiatry has value only in so far as it diagnoses purely medical conditions that have a physical basis.  When it tries to explain the “psychological” cause of your problems, and prescribe a drug to cover up the consequences of your sinful behavior, save your money and go to a good church.
    The only take-home lesson from this article is the bias of the pseudoscience of psychiatry against religion based on its Freudian roots – and Freud was a Darwin-loving apostate.  Psychiatrists have since evolved from calling religion a mental illness to calling it an evolved behavior that seems to confer some fitness benefits.  In other words, religion is still superstition in their view, but might be more healthy than they supposed.  How come no preachers or theologians were consulted to give their views on this subject?  While psychiatrists call preachers deluded or mentally ill, the preachers can turn around and call the psychiatrists sinners and spiritual counterfeits who proclaim false teachings as science falsely so called.  Whom can you trust?
    Don’t think for a minute it’s the psychiatrists.  Their anti-religious views cannot possibly be true, because they are self-refuting.  If they wish to restrict all behaviors to physical causes, they must include their own beliefs about psychiatry and religion.  This makes the teachings of psychiatry nothing more than chemical reactions in a physical brain.  Who could say their chemical reactions are like yours or mine?  Who could possibly know that their reactions are more valid than anyone else’s, without reference to some external standard of truth that is universal, timeless and certain?  Their belief system dissol