The Fruits of Two Worldviews   02/29/2008    
Of all the arenas of state-sponsored genocides of the 20th century, the Killing Fields of Cambodia were among the most disturbing.  There, in a massive social engineering project, a radical communist government systematically starved, tortured and murdered nearly two million people with the brutal efficiency of an assembly line operation.  The regime outlawed all religions.  It sought to establish a communist utopia by force, driving everyone into an instant agrarian economy, and eliminating the brightest and most skilled simply because they did not fit the communist ideal.  Simply wearing glasses was enough to be processed – i.e., photographed, catalogued, tortured if necessary, and shot or hacked in the back of the head with a hoe.  Hundreds of thousands were killed by their own countrymen in a cold, calculated operation so dispassionately merciless, Cambodians to this day are almost in denial of what happened.
    The Independent reported that Kang Kek lew, otherwise known as Comrade Duch, was taken to the killing fields as part of his trial.  Duch had overseen Prison S-21 where 20,000 people were photographed, tortured and eliminated.  Now 66 years old, Duch broke down when shown trees where children's heads were smashed and saw a pile of 8,000 skulls of victims.  The article says he “fell to his knees, hands clasped in tearful prayer for the terrible crimes committed three decades ago.”
    Prayer?  Yes; you see, long after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, after some personal tragedies, he started attending a Christian church and became a born-again Christian in 1995.  He became a lay pastor.  When he went to assist the World Vision international relief organization in 1999, he was discovered by a journalist and surrendered to authorities.
    A visit to the killing fields was part of his trial which resumed last July after eight years in detention without being charged.  It was also part of an effort to document the horrors of the regime in order to bring closure to the horrific tragedy that killed nearly a third of the Cambodian population.  Duch is one of five remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge awaiting trial and sentencing by the UN-backed Cambodia Tribunal. 

Is this entry off-topic?  Perhaps somewhat.  But it is necessary to remember intently and frequently the stakes in the battle of worldviews.  Let’s recite the obligatory disclaimers first: not all atheists are genocidal maniacs, and not all Christians are merciful saints.  Understood.
      That being the case, who can deny that the worst genocidal regimes in history were atheistic, and that most atheists are evolutionists?  Communist philosophy was built on atheism, and evolution was the scientific justification for its views.  Evolution portrayed a world of death and struggle where killing was necessary for the advancement of the race.  The fitness of the State, not the individual, is what mattered to both communists and national socialists (both, despite their differences, subsets of Social Darwinist ideology; see 02/17/2008 and 11/30/2005; also see response to criticism of this linkage by Dr. Richard Weikart on Evolution News).
    Keeping unfit individuals around, in the minds of many Social Darwinists, was sin; advancing the fitness of the State was righteousness.  These were ideas first, then ideologies, then political parties, then dictatorships.  The perpetrators of communist genocides (Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and more) sincerely believed they were acting in accordance with the “laws of science” Darwin had delineated.
    Here we see one perpetrator who underwent a radical change of worldview.  Kang Kek lew was no peasant yanked into service.  He had been head of a local college.  He joined the communist party of Cambodia willingly.  As a communist, Comrade Duch dutifully carried out the will of the State.  He even went beyond the call of “duty.”  The Wikipedia entry on him says,

Assisted by his two deputies, Comrade Chan and Comrade Pon, Duch began perfecting his interrogation techniques and the purging of perceived enemies from the Khmer Rouge ranks.  Prisoners at these camps, mostly from the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, were routinely starved and tortured to extract real and made up confessions.  Few prisoners left the camps alive.

Now with a Christian worldview, Duch weeps over his sins.  He prays for the souls of his victims.  As a lay pastor, he tried to teach others the truth.  He joined a Christian relief organization that works around the world to feed the hungry and bring relief to the vulnerable.  Only God knows the depths of his sincerity, but one thing is certain: a Christian worldview of mercy and compassion is polar opposite to the communist worldview that turned intellectuals into cold-blooded mass murderers.
    Does Comrade Duch deserve the ultimate sentence for past crimes now that he has changed?  Whatever the tribunal decides, the blood of his victims is crying from the ground for justice.  The institutions of law enforcement, ordained by God according to the Apostle Paul (Romans 13), must act impartially by the rule of law and must weigh the magnitude of the crimes.  God will take care of justice for the soul.  These matters are not the point of this entry.  Comrade Duch’s story illustrates the stark contrast in the outcomes of worldviews that begin with intellectual questions – the existence of God, purpose in life, the nature of good and evil.
    What begins in the mind can move armies: armies of tanks and bombs, or armies of relief workers.  That’s why Creation-Evolution Headlines matters.  The killing fields in Cambodia, chilling as they were, were not unique.  Each Social-Darwinist utopian regime committed similar atrocities in ways just as cold and calculated.  The body count from 20th-century state-sponsored genocides, far outstripping the number of casualties from war, is exhausting to contemplate (11/30/2005).  A proverb of Jesus, applied to science by Sir Francis Bacon, sums up in seven words what we tried to say in seven paragraphs: “By their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:15-20).
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

Movies Worth a Leap Year...:   02/29/2008    
• Expelled:  Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for release April 18.  See the trailer and other information, both amusing and disturbing, at the film website ExpelledTheMovie.com.  The film documents the persecution by the scientific establishment of anyone who dares question the ruling evolutionary paradigm, especially those who embrace Intelligent Design.  ID news sites like Evolution News have already posted several articles and interviews about Ben Stein’s latest crusade for academic freedom.  See Stein’s recent editorial on News Blaze.
• The Case for Faith:  The third installment in a trilogy of Lee Strobel films based on his best-selling books is in the works and may be released by fall.  The Case for Faith tackles some of the most difficult questions skeptics ask about Christianity: Is Christ the only way to God? and, How can a loving God allow evil and suffering?  To prepare for this third film, be sure you have already watched The Case for a Creator (10/10/2006) and The Case for Christ (09/16/2007).  The exceptional production quality of La Mirada’s films are only exceeded by the depth of their content.  The Case for Faith will likely raise the bar again.
Next headline on:  Media • Intelligent Design • Bible and Theology

Is Cosmology Getting Wimp-y?   02/28/2008    
Physics and astronomy are usually thought of as the “hard” sciences, where empiricism is king.  Read the following excerpts from a story on the BBC News science page with that in mind (suggestion: replace “dark matter” with “mysterious unknown stuff”).

The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to US scientists....
   when the Universe was still young, there would have been abundant dark matter, made of particles called Wimps: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.
    These would have fused together and obliterated each other long before nuclear fusion had the chance to start.
    As a result, the first stars would have looked quite different from the ones we see today, and they may have changed the course of the Universe’s evolution – or at least held it up.
    The theory, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, depends on particles that astronomers can’t see, but are certain exist, and physicists have never detected.  But the indirect evidence for their existence is overwhelming.

“Dark matter particles make up more than three-quarters of the mass of the Universe,” says theoretical physicist Katherine Freese from the University of Michigan.
    “In fact, billions of them are passing through each of us every second.”
    In the early Universe, there would have been even more.

The nature of the first stars has long puzzled astronomers.  Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded and cooled, so that for millions of years it was filled with dark, featureless hydrogen and helium – and perhaps Wimps.
    Astronomers can see that there were normal stars 700 million years after the Big Bang – the Hubble Telescope looking to the edges of the Universe, which is like looking back billions of years in time, can see whole galaxies of them.

It had been thought the hydrogen brought together by these dark matter haloes would collapse to make the first small stars, and would start to make inside themselves the first new elements – carbon, oxygen, silicon and other materials needed by planets and life.
    But the new paper says reactions between the Wimps, colliding and annihilating each other, would have generated enough heat to keep the protostars inflated – like hot air balloons.  And as more Wimps rained down on them the heating would have kept going.

One would almost think we are back in the dark ages, listening to wizards peep and mutter about mysterious vapors and essences and emanations that control our fate.  They haven’t found Wimps yet but are already talking about Super-Wimps (07/02/2003).  If the intellectually-wimpy believers in Wimpy dark matter don’t find it soon, or if new theories gain ground that don’t need it, these searchers are going to look very silly for having said 80% of reality consisted of superfluous nonexistent stuff.
    One would think they would look silly; actually, they will probably relish the Progress Of SciencE (POSE).  Ever since Charlie welcomed fantasy into science, all branches of modern investigation have loosened the restrictions on empiricism.  Now, it is quite fashionable to postulate mysterious unknown stuff if it MUST keep your materialistic story going.  Geology set the stage before Darwin by envisioning vast ages of unobservable prehistory.  Psychology imported mysterious unknown stuff like the Unconscious, the Id, the Ego and Superego, and Archetypes.  Political Science imported it in the form of Utopian visions that would be realized by the Class Struggle and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat over the Bourgeoisie and the mysterious Kulaks (you could be one yourself).  Physical Chemistry imported Charmed Quarks and other exotic things that are almost indistinguishable from the theories that require them.  And evolutionary biology is loaded with mysterious unknown stuff: mystical “selection forces” that cause wondrous organs and complex structures to “emerge” and “arise” and “appear” shedding light on modern man’s dark understanding.  In fact, much of the heritage of Charles Darwin is a vision of getting Known Stuff from Mysterious Unknown Stuff by a long, gradual, unobservable process called Emergence.
    If this all sounds like some ancient mystery religion, you got it.  Mysterious Unknown STuff, also known as snake oil, is rampant in science these days.  We’re long past the modern science era.  Now we are living in the era of what Francis Schaeffer called “modern modern science” – a fantasy cosmos of self-actualizing miracles.  Anything goes – except a miracle Worker.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Physics • Dumb Ideas

Tots learn from their mommies that their scratches will heal, so they don’t need to worry about being scarred for life.  We grew up accepting that as a given.  Imagine, though, having every scratch or cut from our youth a permanent disfigurement or point of blood leakage.  We would be covered head to toe in bandages as adults.  The life of hemophiliacs illustrates the point: when the blood clotting process breaks down, even a small cut is life-threatening.
    Imagine, furthermore, that clots were as hard as bone.  You would have to sit quietly for weeks till the wound was entirely healed, or else risk having changes in blood pressure rip it away from the surrounding tissue.  Instead, fibrinogen is constructed with coiled coils of amino acids to give it both strength and flexibility.  The network of fibers and proteins that form at a wound site involves multiple rounds of signaling, aggregating ingredients in the right order, and applying patches that won’t break off and cause a heart attack or stroke.
    Michael Behe argued in his classic book Darwin’s Black Box that the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex.  His argument didn’t take much convincing.  All he had to do was show a flowchart of the 25 or so components that interoperate with feedback and feed-forward procedures to ensure that the flow of blood is stopped quickly and safely.  If any one of these ingredients is missing, the system breaks.  Any question why this article here did not mention evolution?
Next headline on:  Human Body • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Today, the Burgess Shale represents a frozen sliver of life from a time when Earth and its life were completely different.
    “It dates from very early in the history of complex multi-cellular life,” [Jan] Zalasiewicz [U of Leicester] told LiveScience.  “For quite a while, it was the main window we had on the diversity of life at this time.  It’s very significant because one of the great enigmas about Cambrian life is that it seems to have started very suddenly.”
    Life existed for 3 billion years before the Cambrian Period, but almost all of it was simple life composed of single cells.
    “Then very suddenly at the beginning of the Cambrian, a whole host of life, all the major groups of animals, appeared,” Zalasiewicz said.  “That is called the Cambrian explosion.  It’s still a mystery as to how and why this great flowering of multi-cellular life took place.”

Zalasiewicz said that there were no trees or higher animals when the Burgess Shale was buried by an undersea landslide.  How would he know that?  One would not expect there to be such creatures in that environment.  Separate the interpretation based on worldview from the actual observations.  The observations show that Darwinism could not be true.  The 3-billion-year dates are part of the evolutionary tale.  Just look at the fossils: all the major animal phyla appear suddenly at the beginning of the Cambrian.  “Appear” is the operative word: they were not evolving.  There were not primitive forms of these creatures in the rocks below.  Boom!  There they are, complete with eyes, complex appendages and a functioning ecology.  That is not evolution.  It’s also true of the pliosaurs, plesiosaurs, and ichthyosaurs found at Spitsbergen.  They appear in the record suddenly and fully operational.  Extinct animals were usually larger and more diverse than their counterparts today.  If this is evolution, it is going in reverse.
    Kids, consider marine biology or paleontology as a career.  There are still remarkable discoveries to be made under the sea.  You don’t have to follow the Darwin script or swallow the evolutionary tales to discover amazing things and have an adventurous life.  Imagine making a living finding fossils of sea monsters.  Imagine finding new kinds of life in the depths of the sea.  Wouldn’t that be totally cool?
Next headline on:  Marine Life • Fossils • Dinosaurs • Amazing Facts

Prevent Drought: Hire a Beaver   02/25/2008    
“Beavers can help ease drought,” say scientists from University of Alberta.  EurekAlert published a press release about a 54-year study that showed beaver kept open water wetlands available.  They seem to even mitigate the effects of global warming.  “Climate models predict the incidence of drought in parts of North America will increase in frequency and length over the next 100 years, and beaver will likely play an important role in maintaining open water and mitigating the impact, [Glynnis] Hood said.”  In fact, maybe it isn’t climate that is driving everything.  “Beaver are helping to keep water in areas that would otherwise be dry.”  Their presence has a dramatic effect on how much open water is available in an area.  See also Science Daily.

Beaver are pests to some, and a cash cow to others.  In the early 1800s, they were coveted as a source of felt for gentlemen’s hats.  That’s what opened the West to exploration and expansion by Americans, Europeans, other nations and individual pioneers, explorers, entrepreneurs and adventurers.  We need to look at beaver in a better light.  They’re lovable, and they’re good for us.  Time to watch the wonderful IMAX file “Beavers” again. 
Next headline on:  Mammals • Amazing Facts

His campaign against pan-selectionism was in evidence.  “Evolution is not the evolution of traits but the evolution of organisms,” he said.
    But he had an even more sobering message, summed up in the title of his talk – “Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition”.  He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

1. Fossils:  “Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can’t be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us.  Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.
2. Interpretations:  “Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret.  ‘I don’t have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means,’ Lewontin confessed.”
3. Posture:  Lewontin expressed doubt that we can be sure which hominids walked upright.
4. Selective forces:  “He is also not convinced that we can use current selective forces to infer what natural selection was doing to our ancestors.”

You just saw a series of suicide bombs go off in the Darwin Party headquarters, carried in by Darwinites themselves.  Can evolution recover from the admissions these guys made?  This is not Duane Gish saying these things: they come from Mr. Can’t-Allow-a-Divine-Foot-in-the-Door himself, Richard Lewontin of Harvard, a knowledgeable, committed Darwiniac if there ever was one.  The upshot is that they are a bunch of know-nothings.  Now we have a new label for the Darwin Party: the Know Nothing Party.  Their motto is, “I know nothing but my Darwinism Storybook, my whole Darwinism Storybook, and nothing but my Darwinism Storybook.”  Their favorite amusement park is Paleofantasyland.
    Remember this entry the next time you get a National Geographic cover story of a hominid with a philosopher’s gaze.  Remember it when you are told stories about hominids walking upright, their hands now freed to scratch their chins and think.  Remember it when you are shown a chimpanzee on NOVA performing memory tricks for a banana or smashing bugs with a rock.  Remember it when a stack of erudite scientific papers on human evolution is placed on the witness table at a trial over whether students should be allowed to think critically about evolution in science class.
    You have just heard all you need to know about human evolution – from the Darwiniacs themselves.  The Darwin Party Know-Nothings, daydreaming in Paleofantasyland, have admitted they are just making up stories about the evolution of human cognition.  Their breathtaking ignorance is not limited to their answers.  They don’t even know what they mean by the question.  This is what they want to teach our students: ignorance!  Now, not only will public school students learn nothing; after indoctrination by the Know Nothings, they will know even less.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinian Evolution • Human Body

“This kind of straightforward connection is just not the way organisms are put together,” he says.  When it comes to something as complex as language, “one would be hard-pressed to come up with an example less amenable to evolutionary study.” And the specific Foxp2 connection is based on a whole chain of events, each of which is speculative, so there’s little chance of the whole story being right.
    “It’s so chaotic, it’s like weather forecasting,” he says.  “The noise overwhelms the signal.”
    Rather, language is almost certainly the result of a far more complex and subtle interplay among a variety of factors, Berwick says, and it may never be possible to connect it to specific genetic changes.  “There are some things in science that are very interesting, but that we’re never going to be able to find out about,” he says.  “It’s a sort of romantic view some people have, that anything interesting can be understood.”

Ultimately, the important thing is to understand that language is, at bottom, something that takes place inside the human mind and is independent of any particular sound, sight or motion.  The same internal mental construction could be expressed through verbal speech, through writing or through sign language without changing its basic nature, Berwick says.  “It’s not about this external thing you hear,” he says.  “It’s about the representation inside your head.”

Intelligent design theorists and cognitive neuroscientists can have a field day with this!  If language at its core is not a physical representation but a concept in the mind, then it has no basis in evolution.
    ID scientists have been demonstrating for years the common-sense idea that information, a product of intelligence, can be represented in a variety of ways independent of the substrate that conveys it.  The sentence “John loves Mary” can be represented by sand writing, sky writing, electrons (email, TV), sound waves, paper and ink, sign language, knots in rope, and a host of other ways – yet the message is unchanged.
    The “evolution of language,” therefore, would have to be a theory about the evolution of meaningful information.  You cannot get meaning out of meaninglessness, or purpose out of purposelessness.  Did you see Berwick make an irrational leap?  He just said it is unlikely that an evolutionary approach will ever figure out language, but then he went back to studying bird song and poetry for insight.  He isn’t going to figure it out till he adds in the fundamental term missing from all materialistic world views: information.
    Notice how evolutionists deceived the public (again).  They sent the Foxp2 gene up the flagpole for people to salute and sing “Darwin wins again” (example).  Now, five years later, comes the admission that their explanation cannot possibly be right.  Typical.  John may love Mary, but Charlie despises tRuth.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

Florida Wises Up and Teaches Evolution Uncritically   02/20/2008    
The Florida State Board of Education adopted, by a vote of 4 to 3, science standards that require the teaching of evolution as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology” without critical analysis or alternatives.  Evolution News said that calling evolution a “scientific theory” instead of a scientific fact represented a meaningless compromise with the minority who had argued for insertion of the statement, “Students should learn why some scientists give scientific critiques of standard models of neo-Darwinian evolution or models of the chemical origin of life.”  No proposal for teaching alternatives, such as intelligent design, were even considered.
    Decisions on these highly-charged issues typically produce a torrent of lively commentaries in the news media.  Carl Hiaasen in the Miami Herald had a particularly fun time pointing out that the vote means that Florida’s reputation for flakiness is at stake:

In a move that could endanger Florida’s flaky backwater reputation, the state Board of Education is poised to endorse the teaching of evolution as a science.
This is a dangerous idea -- not the presentation of Darwinism in schools, but the presentation of Florida as a place of progressive scientific thought.
Over the years the Legislature has worked tirelessly to keep our kids academically stuck in the mid-1950s....
By accepting evolution as a proven science, our top educators would be sending a loud message to the rest of the nation: Stop making fun of us....
Certainly that’s [i.e., evolution is] the position of every reputable academic group on the planet, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Science Teachers Association.
But forget the fossil record, OK?  Forget DNA tracing.  Forget the exhaustively documented diversification of species. This battle is about pride and independence; about boldly going against the flow, in defiance of reason and all known facts.

Entertaining op-ed piece.  Kind of like watching Groucho Marx or the Three Stooges calling smart people stupid.  Hiaasen’s skill at sarcasm is only exceeded by his ignorance of the issues.  His intellectual dysentery is the product of feeding on arguments from authority, bandwagon arguments, glittering generalities, non-sequiturs and the rest of the junk Darwin propaganda diet.  By equating Darwin’s mythology with practical science, assuming that teaching evolution will bring in high-paying jobs, and confusing observational science with fability (01/16/2007 commentary), is it any wonder he wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week?  The Discovery Institute should hire him for a sideshow, to illustrate the quality of ranting by the DODO heads (Darwin-Only 2x).  Hiaasen is doing more to ensure Florida’s ongoing flakiness than anyone siding with the Minority Report could have done.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

1. Mighty mouth:  An African theropod with massive, shark-like teeth was found in the African Sahara, reported National Geographic News and PhysOrg.  It was named Eocarcharia dinops, or “fierce-eyed dawn shark.”  Another similar individual, presumed to be a scavenger, was named Kryptops palaios, “old hidden face” had a bony horn that covered much of its face.  National Geographic posted a gallery of artist’s reconstructions.
2. Mighty duck:  In Mexico, giant duck-billed hadrosaur remains were found, reported National Geographic and Science Daily.  These specimens were said to be 35 feet in length.  Till now, dinosaur bones in Mexico have been rare.  Terry Gates (Utah Museum of Natural History) said, “The crested duck-billed dinosaurs are an extraordinary example of vertebrate evolution.”
3. Sparrowsaur:  In China, the smallest pterosaurs ever found have come to light (see National Geographic and Live Science).  These toothless flying reptiles were only about the size of a sparrow – 10 inches or so (see artist reconstruction).  Like birds, they had curved digits that probably helped them grasp the branches of trees.  Found in the rich fossil beds of China’s Liaoning province, the species was named Nemicolopterus crypticus. by the discoverers who published their findings in PNAS.¹
       Alexander Kellner (Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) pieced pterosaurs into a vision of evolutionary progress: “The general idea was at some point we had these very primitive pterosaurs – very low down on the evolutionary tree – that were living on insects.  At some point pterosaurs learned to feed on fish.”  He said the find “opens a new chapter on the evolutionary history of this group of volant [flying] reptiles.”

Some paleontologists estimate we have only found 27% of the dinosaurs that actually lived (11/22/2004).  This means that new, exotic discoveries can be expected for many years to come.  Exciting as each new unusual form is, one cannot assume that the diversity in the dinosauria exceeds that in other groups, such as insects.  Dinosaurs stand out in our minds because of their size and the fact they are all extinct.  In many groups of plants and animals, the fossil record is richer than the living inventory.
    One should remember also that classification is a very human enterprise.  Paleontologists win honors for naming a species.  This can lead to species bloat – too much splitting of similar specimens into separate species.  With fossils, one cannot know the natural amount of variation that was present due to diet, climate, development, genetic isolation or other factors.  One cannot know which ones were capable of interbreeding.  One also cannot compare the DNA of different dinosaurs (yet).  The count of dinosaur species and genera is a function of the classification scheme used.  Jones may want to name his find Magnificentosaurus jonesii but that doesn’t make it different from Majesticosaurus smithii.  Another factor leading to the impression that new dinosaurs are popping up all over is selective reporting.  “More of the same” doesn’t make news as much as something new and different.
    These finds, nevertheless, should inspire the young to realize there is still much to discover.  Join the treasure hunt.  Replace the old guard paleontologists who can’t kick the smoking habit (i.e., the addicts who exude smokescreens of fogma about millions of years, primitive forms, and new chapters in evolution).  Let the bones do the talking.  They know how to remain silent.  Evolutionists have not yet learned that anything they say can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion (09/30/2007 commentary).
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology

The measurements are indirect and highly theory-laden.  The light astronomers measure exists in the present: here at our retinas on earth.  Where it came from, and how long it took to get here, depends on theories and models that cannot be tested directly.  How are you going to recreate a big bang and watch stars form?  Are you going to wait 400,000 years to see if it happens according to your theory?
    As with fossils in evolution, spectra from space are data points that mean nothing till inserted into a paradigm.  Despite the confidence with which the theory was explained in the article, this discovery produces as many problems as it answers.  Astronomers need to explain how diffuse fog became clumpy, and condensed into a hierarchy of unlikely objects: galaxies and stars.  Astronomers appear to have the same problem as the biologists: a kind of cosmic Cambrian explosion.
    The ability to tell stories (fability, 01/16/2007 commentary) about how this all worked out somehow is not the same as knowledge.  The theory might be correct, but how would they know?  A survey of the history of scientific pronouncements that were later overturned is not encouraging.  The most significant data point in the article may, in fact, be the surprised look on their faces.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Dating Methods

For Healthy Society, Father Knows Best   02/18/2008    
Science Proves Common Sense Dept.  Swedish scientists have found that “Children Who Have An Active Father Figure Have Fewer Psychological And Behavioral Problems,” according to a report on Science Daily.  In addition, “Children who lived with both a mother and father figure also had less behavioural problems than those who just lived with their mother.”  Dr Anna Sarkadi from the Department of Women’s and Children's Health at Uppsala University, Sweden, explained:

“For example, we found various studies that showed that children who had positively involved father figures were less likely to smoke and get into trouble with the police, achieved better levels of education and developed good friendships with children of both sexes.
    “Long-term benefits included women who had better relationships with partners and a greater sense of mental and physical well-being at the age of 33 if they had a good relationship with their father at 16.”

Ask: who are the people who typically want to break down traditional marriage, confuse gender roles, and contribute to governmental policies (e.g., the welfare state, taxes that penalize marriage, promotion of alternate lifestyles) that make it harder for kids to have a father and mother at home?  Sorry to insult your intelligence with such a giveaway question.  You guessed it: liberals.  Evolutionists, who are predominantly liberal in their politics, often portray Dad as nothing but a gene donor, a biological entity selfishly seeking to pass on his own genes at any cost, married or not.  Is it any wonder a society immersed in evolutionary thinking is going to have little use for the traditional family?  As a result of sick liberal, progressive policies (see book review), we have inherited a host of societal ills: crime, drugs, antisocial behavior, a sense of hopelessness, suicide.  The kids most in need of a father – economically disadvantaged blacks, for instance – grow up predominantly in fatherless homes.
    Don’t count on this announcement making liberals slap their foreheads like in the V8 commercials and say, “Oh!  I could have had a nuclear family.”  How ironic that this study came out from that ultra-liberal society, Sweden.  Most politicians realize that fatherless homes are a ticking time bomb for societal catastrophe.  Fewer of them connect the effect to the cause: anti-family legislation and social experimentation, rooted in a materialistic, evolutionary philosophy.
    There are bad dads – abusive, alcoholic, selfish – but the exceptions prove the rule.  God designed a family to have one father and one mother.  The kids not only need the different roles of the man and the woman, the parents need the sense of responsibility that having children brings.  It’s all a system to engender health and harmony from the family unit upwards to society.  It almost looks like it was planned that way.  Should anyone be surprised at the horrendous consequences of abandoning the Master plan?
    Support the ministries that are trying to bring governmental, educational and corporate policies back from the abyss of social experimentation, and promulgate environments that encourage two-parent families: Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, and others.  Most of all, do all you can to set a good example.
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics

This is old news; they should have given up long ago.  Reports from the first year of the rovers on Mars (12/03/2004) worried about the high acidity and salinity of the water.  Mars is dead; face it.  So we can rule out one body on the list.  Since evolutionists expect creationists to prove a universal negative, they will have job security for a long time. 
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life

But we learnt how exquisitely closely ‘normal’ professors – not just the mad Nazi types – aligned their goals with the policies of the Nazi regime.  Grant applications showed, for example, how many professors took part in developing plans for expansion to the east after Germany won the war (as they assumed).  Plans that would have killed or enslaved more than 30 million people.

Does anyone think for a moment that today’s professors and academics in Big Science would not fall in line with another genocidal totalitarian regime, if the inducements were strong enough?  The herd mentality makes it more comfortable to go along to get along.  We already see the shameless ease with which they support experimentation on human embryos, the selfishness with which they demand public money for everything they want to do, and their willingness to lie openly about the evidence for Darwinism.  Many individual scientists are the most honest and noble people you would ever meet, but the record of Big Science is not encouraging.  How many of even the honest ones would risk everything to stand against incipient evil policies?
    Hitler’s regime has become such a byword for evil, we tend to overuse it and get numb to it.  Don’t let that happen.  Watch the documentaries, read the histories, remind yourself regularly just how destructive it was.  Then read up on communism and the other Social Darwinist regimes of the 20th century: ideas that generated unspeakable evil on the world, resulting in 148 million deaths and untold misery for survivors, many of whom would have welcomed death.  This story demonstrates that “normal” intelligent professors, and citizens, went right along with policies that not only killed millions, but would have killed tens of millions more had they not been defeated.
    To prevent a recurrence, it is not sufficient to know the dark side of your nation’s history.  You must know the dark side of your own heart (Romans 3).  Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).  We may not know it exhaustively, but we can know it sufficiently to demand our governments set up safeguards to prevent the success of evil ideas.  Beware especially of ideologies that build their morals on a Darwinian foundation.  The solution to the problem of evil begins one heart at a time (Romans 5).
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Oldest Bat Fossil: Was It Evolving?   02/16/2008    
A bat fossil surpassing the previous record holder for the oldest by 2 million years made the cover of Nature this week.¹  The news media immediately began saying that it provided insight into evolution.  The BBC News announced “Bat fossil solves evolution poser.”  National Geographic called it the icing on the cake, and said that “the fossils represent a breakthrough in the understanding of bat evolution.”  PhysOrg called it a missing link that “demonstrates that the animals evolved the ability to fly before they could echolocate.”
    That last statement gets to the crux of the evolution angle.  It’s not that this specimen was part bat and part something else.  It was fully capable of flight and was easily identified as a bat.  What it appeared to lack (though this point is somewhat questionable) is the ability for echolocation – the bat’s famous sonar navigation system.  Some living bats have echolocation; others do not.  The ones without it typically have a smaller cochlea (the inner ear organ that converts sound waves into nerve impulses).  Since the fossil appeared to have a small cochlea, the researchers inferred that it lacked echolocation; however, size may not be the only valid diagnostic.  We know that miniaturization can be a measure of advanced technology (e.g., iPod over cassette player).  Without the ability to observe this species in action, it would be impossible to prove that it could not echolocate with its compact cochleae.
    The evolutionary question before these scientists and reporters was not whether bats evolved – their minds were already made up on that point.  “There has been a longstanding debate,” though, “about how bats evolved, centering around the development of flight and the development of the sonar system they use to navigate and hunt for prey,” PhysOrg explained.  The majority opinion among evolutionists seems to have been that echolocation came first, then flight.  This fossil seemed to suggest the reverse.
    Echolocation or not, there was never any doubt this was a bat.  It was classified in the bat order Chiroptera, and given the name Onychonycteris.  Even though this bat is similar to modern bats that lack echolocation, it “may have been otherwise equipped for flying at night,” wrote John Speakman (U of Aberdeen) in the same issue of Nature.²  Why, then, did the discoverers call it “primitive”?  Nothing in the paper provided definitive evidence the bat was lacking in “derived” (i.e., advanced, or “highly evolved”) features.  There were only suggestions couched in tentative wording:

The shape of the wings suggests that an undulating gliding-fluttering flight style may be primitive for bats, and the presence of a long calcar indicates that a broad tail membrane evolved early in Chiroptera, probably functioning as an additional airfoil rather than as a prey-capture device.  Limb proportions and retention of claws on all digits indicate that the new bat may have been an agile climber that employed quadrupedal locomotion and under-branch hanging behaviour.

However, around the end of the 1980s, evidence accumulated, including work from my own group, that favoured the ‘flight-first’ hypothesis.  One paper showed that, for a bat hanging at rest, echolocation is extremely energetically costly.  This high cost probably explains why no terrestrial mammals have evolved full-blown echolocation systems such as those used by bats.  However, a second paper showed that when a bat takes flight these costs disappear.  This is because of a remarkable coupling of the beating of the wings with the ventilation of the lungs and production of the echolocation pulses.  When a bat hangs stationary and echolocates, it must contract its muscles specifically to generate a forceful expiratory burst, and this is where the large costs come from.  When a bat is flying, it is already contracting these muscles, so in effect echolocation when flying is free (or at least substantially cheaper).
    But what about the problem of bats flying in darkness before they could orient themselves?  A hypothesis I favour is that the earliest ancestors of bats may have been diurnal, and had visual means of orientation – but were perhaps forced to become nocturnal by the appearance of avian predators, shortly after the dinosaurs became extinct around 65 million years ago.  Some then evolved echolocation, whereas others became nocturnal vision specialists.

You see what the evolutionists do, don’t you?  You understand the modus operandi of their crimes.  Their M.O. is, simply: “assume evolution”  Evolution is their miracle worker, that appears on cue, like Tinker Bell with her miracle-mutation wand, to produce anything they need.  Since the Darwinian storytellers have usurped the institutions of science, they have no need for proof, demonstration and evidence.  Fossils and other observable things are mere props for their stories.  The basic plot is fixed in stone.  Like a counterfeit tree of life, the Darwinian story of common ancestry via unguided processes over millions of years is guarded against critical analysis by angles with flaming words (puns intended).
    You also just saw (again) the Darwin-drunk news media not only parroting the evolution angle verbatim, but even embellishing it.  The original paper worded its claims with a modicum of doubt, but the BBC News trumpeted, “Bat fossil solves evolution poser.”  But look at the fossil evidence!  The Darwinists should be ashamed.  The oldest known bat in the fossil record is 100% bat and no less advanced than living bats!  How on earth can any sensible scientist claim that this supports Darwinism?  Did any of them tell us how complex capabilities like echolocation or flight could have arisen by chance?  Did they elaborate the dozens, if not thousands, of lucky mutations that would have had to come together blindly to produce a flying mammal from a mouse?  No!  If anything, they uncovered a more astonishing thing – that the flight capabilities of bats are dynamically integrated with their sonar systems.  Did they watch 52 million years go by?  Did they watch the so-called primitive bat change into a more advanced creature?  Did they seriously entertain any of the many, many scientific criticisms that could be leveled against their tale?  No, no, no.
    If this non-stop parade of dogmatism masquerading as science makes you mad, join the campaign to expose the Darwinists.  Don’t let them get away with using this discovery as a prop for their fable.  Don’t let some evolution advocate stack papers like this on the witness stand to claim evolution is scientific.  Understand what is really going on in biology these days.  Keith Wanser stated it succinctly: “There is not one theory of evolution, but a body of opinions, speculations and methods for interpretation of observational facts so that they fit into the philosophy of naturalism.”  That, friends, is not science, and does not deserve the honor of being taught in our schools.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Fossils • Evolution

To my mind, metabolism is chemistry’s answer to the physics of convection.  It’s a way of distributing energy back into and lowering the energy levels, generating waste products – generating a little chaos if you like – because the universe is running down, and life just obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics and is just helping the planet to run down chemically.

Something like 100 years.  I’m being a bit glib, but think about what 35,000 postdocs could do, 365, 24x7, for 35,000 years.  It’s not going to take long.  It’s got to be quick, because otherwise you’re going to run out of steam, so to speak; you’re going to run out of fuel.

The earliest metabolic vehicle is a hybrid.  And now comes the vehicle’s regulator or computer.  Eventually we need the RNA to help guide these reactions so that they don’t just happen chaotically.  So we get to the RNA World.

The philosopher never asks that question... the philosopher asks of a puzzle, what does it do?  What does life do?  Life takes carbon dioxide and hydrogen, sinks the oxygen into it (it found a way of using the oxygen in photosynthesis) and makes organic molecules.  That’s what life does.  It’s a process.... It’s understanding what it does that matters.

It was sad to see an audience of fairly well-educated engineers and scientists take this all in with smiling faces and expressions of rapture.  They laughed at his jokes and gave him hearty applause.  Most of them didn’t seem to notice they were being had by a fast-talking charlatan.  Read our earlier commentary on his previous JPL talk (12/03/2004).
    This lecture was followed a couple of days later by a presentation on a more technical level by a colleague of Russell, Dr. Dieter Braun.  Braun’s goal was to explain how the concentration problem in origin-of-life studies could be solved in geothermal vents.  The concentration problem is how to get enough prebiotic molecules close enough together to interact.  Both Russell and Braun recognized this as a serious problem.  In fact, Russell was emphatic in his talk that the old Miller spark-chamber scenario was unworkable.  The early earth would have had no land, and the ocean surface would have been too turbulent for a thin film of molecules to aggregate, whether delivered by comets or by lightning.  This again illustrates how the genetics-first and metabolism-first parties falsify each other.
    Braun focused only on how thin tubes in hydrothermal vents convect and concentrate molecules – any molecules (in his experiments, he used polystyrene beads).  Like Russell, he glossed over numerous problems along the way.  When faced one-on-one with questions afterward about chirality, harmful cross-reactions, the difficulty of getting essential molecules and keeping unwanted ones out, the origin of ribose for RNA and DNA, the nature of information and information transfer, functional information, probability and other serious matters, all he could do was say he was only trying to show how molecules can be concentrated in a realistic prebiotic environment.  He was lectured that shoving off the miracles for someone else to solve (playing intellectual hot potato) does not necessarily constitute scientific progress.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Geology • Dumb Ideas

Here we have another puzzle: Titan’s methane and hydrogen are constantly being broken apart, with some fragments escaping into space while others form new constituents that condense in the cold atmosphere and precipitate to the surface.  At the present rate of destruction, all of the methane now in the atmosphere will be gone in just a few million years.  This is a tiny period of time compared to the 4.5-billion-year lifetime of the solar system, so there must be a source of methane that replenishes the atmosphere.  Could it be comets?  Volcanoes?  Underground springs?  We simply don’t know.

One can calculate how much ethane has been produced on Titan over the entire history of the solar system (it is the most abundant byproduct in the photochemical destruction of methane).  The result is that this remarkable moon could be covered by a global ocean of ethane with an average depth of up to several kilometers!

The total inventory we measure is substantially smaller than the reservoir estimated to be produced throughout the age of the solar system if methane photoloysis were to have occurred continuously at its present rate.  The apparent dearth of material (compared to these model predictions – a summary is given by Lorenz and Lunine [1996], of several hundred meters thickness, or ~10⁷–10⁸ km³) may indicate one or more of four things.  First, other undetected organic materials are present, but not morphologically distinct.  It is commonly assumed on the basis of bulk cosmological abundance that Titan’s bedrock is dominated by water ice, but the near-surface may in fact be dominated by organic material.  Furthermore, even at the low latitudes dominated by arid landforms like dunes, the Huygens probe indicated that at least some surface materials are moistened by liquid methane [Lorenz et al., 2006b; Niemann et al., 2005] so some amount of liquid is present (perhaps in very large amounts) beyond the obvious lakeforms.  Second, the photochemical models may not correctly predict the ultimate yields of surface deposits (c.f.  the relative yields of solids and liquids – see next paragraph).  Thirdly, photochemical production may have been interrupted for long periods in Titan’s past if the delivery of methane to the surface was episodic and led to occasional methane depletion.  The identification of cryovolcanic features on the surface [Sotin et al., 2005; Lopes et al., 2007] supports such a picture.  A final more speculative possibility is that some process has destroyed or subducted the deposits, such that they no longer exist at the surface.

Finally, the liquid inventory, while extending over a large enough area to permit evaporative fluxes to match photochemical depletion on short timescales [Mitri et al., 2007], is not enough in volume terms to sustain the concentration of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere on geological timescales.  Put another way, there is an order of magnitude less liquid in the lakes than there is methane in the atmosphere, and photochemical models predict that inventory to be depleted in ~10 Myr [million years].  This makes the present climatic situation somewhat precarious – the observed surface reservoir, even if mostly methane, is unable to buffer the atmospheric methane for long, and unless volcanic resupply matches methane loss at just the right rate, significant climate change is likely in the future and by implication in the past....

Why do the science reporters ignore the bad news for evolution and long ages?  Here was a falsification of a clear prediction, calculated from the laws of chemistry and physics.  The only rational solution is that Titan is not as old as claimed.  The ethane budget is monstrously short of predictions.  Only trace amounts were found in the atmosphere or on the surface.  The leading planetary scientists who wrote this paper, some of whom have been studying Titan for more than 20 years, are completely baffled and can only offer weird-science explanations that cannot be observed to salvage their long age belief.
    Is this what you hear from the popular science press?  Of course not.  They only mention the fun stuff: “Look at all the gas on Titan – hundreds of times more than earth!” as if we should go fill up our cars there.  And the angle they love most is the L-word Life combined with the E-word Evolution.  Lorenz said, “We are carbon-based life, and understanding how far along the chain of complexity towards life that chemistry can go in an environment like Titan will be important in understanding the origins of life throughout the universe.”  Happy, happy, happy.  Isn’t Fantasyland fun.  Where are you going to get the straight scoop unless you read Creation-Evolution Headlines?  Spread the word: our shortcut address is http://crev.info .
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods

Several potential criticisms need to be addressed.  First, Hunt et al. start their analysis at exactly the point in time when each armour trait begins to decrease, which favours a model of initially strong directional selection.  But this choice does not undermine their general conclusion, because the standard methods could not reject randomness even when started at these same times.  Second, the analysis of the stickleback data formally examined only one model of selection – the hybrid directional-stabilizing model they expected beforehand.  The authors are here again stacking the deck for success in confirming selection.  But then this is the point.  Their analysis is akin to a positive control in showing that a new statistical method can infer the correct evolutionary process when that process is almost certain to be acting.

The obvious next step is to apply similar thinking to a much larger array of fossil data and evolutionary models.  Doing so will justifiably accelerate the retreat from a ‘one model to rule them all’ vision.  This work will almost certainly generate additional support from fossil sequences for the action of natural selection.  Perhaps more importantly, it will become easier for biologists to accept randomness when random models still receive the most support.  This acceptance, however, needs to be tempered by the realization that selection can certainly generate patterns that look random.  Particularly valuable for all this work will be more fossil data with fine temporal resolution such as that seen in the stickleback samples, because selection can cause noteworthy changes in less than a hundred years.  Ultimately, we might hope for the emergence of general conclusions about the role of natural selection in generating the diversity of life.

And here all along you thought the Darwinists already had “general conclusions about the role of natural selection in generating the diversity of life.”  What are they doing now looking for the “emergence” of understanding?  Aren’t they 150 years too late?
    To anyone having their common-sense eyes open, and not brainwashed by Darwiniana, the admissions in this essay are astonishing.  Hendry just admitted that there is no clear evidence for natural selection (Darwin’s grand idea that made him famous and makes his disciples want to force the world to celebrate his birthday) in the fossil record.  The only way to see it is to assume it – circular reasoning.  Hendry tells critics who point this out that “But then this is the point” – we have to assume it or we won’t see it.  You have to concentrate long and hard to divine the Divine Darwin, but he is there, because we have already made up our minds that his blessed image is everywhere.  On top of that, the best case he could produce was a case of loss of structure – fish that have lost their armor.  Would you think that Leonidas is more evolved when he takes his armor off?  Incredible.
    Hendry talked about three kinds of change over time: randomness, stabilizing selection, and directional selection.  Randomness and neutral drift are certainly not going to help Charlie build an eye or a wing.  Stabilizing selection won’t help, either: it only maintains what is there.  This is the kind of selection that produces living fossils and horseshoe crabs that haven’t changed for 445 million years in the evolutionary timescale (see 01/28/2008).  But then, directional selection itself can be up or down.  It was down in the case of these stickleback fish: they lost something they had.  The only kind of directional selection that will help Charlie spin his myth is the kind that would produce an eye or a wing or other new structure by the accumulation of gradual changes caused by random mutations.  If Hendry could have pointed to an example in the fossil record, he surely would have.
    The fact is, Darwinists have known about the lack of evidence for their theory in the fossil record since the book of the bearded Buddha himself.  Darwin devoted nearly a whole chapter in the Origin about it.  He called it perhaps the biggest objection that could be levied against his hypothesis.  He told everyone to just keep looking.  Here we are in 2008 and there are still no examples (but lots of counterexamples).  In any other field of science this would be known as falsification.
    Yet the Darwinists persist.  Nothing stops them from worshiping their Buddha.  They coerce the rest of us to make their cult the state religion in their temples, the public schools.*  Creationists and even non-Darwinian evolutionist skeptics have displayed this little problem with their story for many years, to no avail.  Gish wrote Evolution: the Fossils Say No in 1978.  Many others have said no in the intervening 30 years.  If you won’t listen to a creationist, go back to Richard Owen, a contemporary of Darwin, and follow the bones.  You will find a steady path of secular, non-creationist paleontologists who knew full well, and stated publicly, that one cannot see natural selection in the fossil record: David Raup and Stephen Jay Gould are recent examples.
    When even staunch evolutionists admit this is still a problem after 150 years, why should we put up with the bluff and bluster any more?  You saw what Charlie Marshall, the master of disaster, did with the Cambrian explosion (04/23/2006), and now Hendry has done it here.  They give responses that are circular, irrational and vacuous.  The only transitional forms the Darwinists find in the fossil record are the ones they put there (Piltdown Man, Piltdown Chicken and other hoaxes) or blow out of all proportion (Tiktaalik, Lucy etc.).  The contradictions to molecules-to-man evolution, by contrast, are clear and numerous.
    The only judgment a reasonable person can make about the dogmatic Darwinists who cling to their story and force it on everyone else in spite of the evidence is that they are hardened intellectual criminals.  They should be charged with fraud and drummed out of academia and the science labs.  Replace them with honest researchers who will take an oath to obey the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
Next headline on:  Fossils • Evolution

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*Example from Science this week:

The Florida Board of Education will decide next week whether to approve new science standards that for the first time in the state’s history would require the teaching of evolution.  Nine counties have passed resolutions against the document, saying that evolution is not a proven fact, and two of the eight members of the politically appointed board have spoken out against it.  But scientists say a statewide signature campaign and an endorsement from science curriculum expert Lawrence Lerner of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C., which gave the current standards an F in a nationwide assessment, bode well for their cause.  A 19 February vote in favor of the standards would be “a great victory” in keeping creationist ideology out of public schools, says Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California.

For translation, see Evolution News #1, #2 and #3.  “First time... require the teaching of evolution” – ha!  They have always taught evolution.  What this means is that the Darwin Thought Police not only want to keep creationism out: they want to keep critical examination of the evidence for and against Darwinism out.  Nothing less than pure indoctrination into the cult of Charlie is good enough for the Darwiniacs.  Such a desperate agenda must be energized by powerful evidence, right?  Re-read this entry and hunt for it.

Fast Protein Fine-Tunes the Ear   02/13/2008    
Remember prestin?  It’s a motor protein in the inner ear, discovered in 2001 (03/27/2001), that acts so fast – within millionths of a second – its discoverers named it after the word “presto!” (02/21/2002).  Scientists have been studying its role as a volume adjuster (07/31/2007) that allows it to amplify sound 10,000-fold (09/19/2002) .  New evidence suggests that prestin also fine-tunes the pitch across the audible range.  A paper on this appeared this week in Current Biology.¹
    The human ear responds to volume differences over 12 orders of magnitude – a phenomenal dynamic range, allowing us to hear the faintest whisper of a breeze to the roar of a jet engine.  If the cochlea had the same sensitivity throughout the dynamic range, the result would be literally deafening.  The cochlea has, therefore, both fast-adaptation and slow-adaptation mechanisms to quench overpowering sounds.  An analogy might be to a sound system that instantly cuts off ear-piercing feedback then adjusts the volume level by a slider.  Prestin has been implicated in fast-adaptation.  It stiffens the outer hair cells to prevent loud sounds from blowing them over, but loosens them to respond to gentle vibrations.
    The authors began their abstract, “The remarkable power amplifier of the cochlea boosts low-level and compresses high-level vibrations of the basilar membrane.”  This means your ears have a high-tech device, familiar to audio technicians, called a compressor-limiter.  You’re not hearing what is really “out there” in its raw form.  Your ear is protecting your brain by delivering processed sound.  It automatically turns up the volume on the soft sounds, and turns it down on the loud sounds.
    The authors of this paper agreed that prestin is the prime contender for the power amplifier, but then found something even more amazing: prestin tunes the pitch, too.  They found to their surprise that mice with prestin knocked out were just as sensitive in the high-frequency range – but heard sounds a half-octave too low.  There appears to be a trade-off between volume sensitivity and pitch accuracy that prestin, somehow, solves.  To do this, the motor protein must be able to parse the frequency spectrum of the sound wave.  Here it is in their technical jargon:

We propose that the absence of prestin from OHCs [outer hair cells in the cochlea], and consequent reduction in stiffness of the cochlea partition, changes the passive impedance of the BM [basilar membrane] at high frequencies, including the CF [characteristic frequency].  We conclude that prestin influences the cochlear partition’s dynamic properties that permit transmission of its vibrations into neural excitation.  Prestin is crucial for defining sharp and sensitive cochlear frequency tuning by reducing the sensitivity of the low-frequency tail of the tuning curve, although this necessitates a cochlear amplifier to determine the narrowly tuned tip.

Whatever is going on inside your head, when it works, it works extremely well.  The mechanisms at work to provide such exquisite sensitivity to the tiniest of air vibrations are still being figured out.  This paper shows that the initial models of how prestin works are too simple.  Their experiments on mice with and without prestin “provides further indication that neural tuning is not a direct consequence of BM [basilar membrane] tuning but depends on complex interaction between the various elements of the cochlear partition,” including prestin and the arrangement of the hair cell bundles.
    Everything works as a functional unit.  Did you hear anything about evolution?  We hope not, because they never used the E-word once in their entire paper.  Their language was the lingo of auditory engineering: microphones, characteristic frequencies, amplifiers, compressor-limiters, thresholds, dynamic range and frequency response.  Ask a sound technician if he operates by random mutation and natural selection.  You are likely to get an earful.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Physics • Amazing Facts

Many wonderful and intriguing science projects remain to be performed.  These scientists did not mention evolution and had no need of it.  They saw an amazing phenomenon in present-day, observable nature and sought to understand the design behind it.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

Animals from Junk by Chance   02/12/2008    
How to build an animal: throw junk DNA at it.  That seems to be the latest idea on where higher animals came from.  A press release from University of Bristol posted on Science Daily and EurekAlert announced, “‘Junk DNA’ Can Explain Origin And Complexity Of Vertebrates, Study Suggests.”
    The basic idea, coming from scientists at Dartmouth College and University of Bristol, is that a proliferation of micro-RNAs appeared in early vertebrates like lampreys that was “unparalleled in evolutionary history.”  The scientists compared genomes of living fish (sharks and lampreys) and invertebrates like the sea squirt.
    Because micro-RNAs are implicated in higher organisms, the circumstantial evidence convinced them of a correlation: “Most of these new genes are required for the growth of organs that are unique to vertebrates, such as the liver, pancreas and brain,” said Philip Donoghue of Bristol.  “Therefore, the origin of vertebrates and the origin of these genes is no coincidence.”
    Dr. Kevin Peterson of Dartmouth put the discovery into a larger context: “This study not only points the way to understanding the evolutionary origin of our own lineage, but it also helps us to understand how our own genome was assembled in deep time.”

There you have it: the Darwin Party buzzwords necessary to make the eyes glaze over: deep time, understanding, evolutionary origin, zzzz.  While you were sleeping you didn’t see the magic tricks.  They threw junk at a sea squirt and poof!  A pancreas emerged!  then a liver!  then a brain!
    So happy Darwin Day.  Stop thinking so hard.  Join the party.  Have some fun.  Get involved in this game – blind man’s bluff.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Marine Biology • Genetics

Defending Darwin Day   02/11/2008    
Tomorrow is the 199th birthday of Charles Darwin.  The rising anticipation of a big 200th celebration next year prompts a question: why is this man worthy of such hullabaloo more than other scientists?  Why the efforts to make Darwin Day an annual event of international scope?  Kevin Padian undertook to justify all this attention in an essay in Nature,¹ entitled, “Darwin’s enduring legacy.”

Perhaps no individual has had such a sweeping influence on so many facets of social and intellectual life as Charles Darwin, born on 12 February 1809.  Of the other two of the great nineteenth-century triumvirate of European thinkers, Marx’s ideas have been distorted beyond recognition in their political execution, and Freud’s approach to the psyche no longer merits scientific recognition.  Neither man had Darwin’s impact on the structure of empirical knowledge.²

Humans are animals, one species of many on the planet, bound by common ancestry to all other species, part of an ages-old dance of reproduction, accommodation, survival and alteration.
    It is for this vision, one that liberates humans from the conceit of special creation, that Darwin was honoured by interment in Westminster Abbey.  And it is for his innumerable scientific insights, most still as valid and stimulating as the day he coined them, that we look forward to celebrating him next year.

Don’t be mesmerized by the rhetoric.  It is to be expected that the Archbishop of Can’tbury Charlie’s Corpse, Kevin Padian, rector of Bestmonster Abbey and former head of the Darwin Party KGB (i.e., the NCSE), would exude great swelling words of vanity for his bearded Buddha.  Did you notice how much of his sermon was religious in nature?  If you expected a scientific defense of Darwinism, you got a mostly anticreationist, humanistic, antitheological rant.  It was necessary to portray Darwin in bold either-or strokes: either stand with Darwin in the parade, or you are condemned as a fundamentalist heretic.  Try that on David Berlinski.
    For Padian’s pitches to count, he has to send them through the science batter box or walk out.  This is Nature after all, reputed to be a “science” journal.  Logically, he also needs to defend several propositions, not just assume them: namely, that the points are germane to Darwinism and nothing else, that Darwin alone dreamed them up, and that they are so supremely important that they are worthy of granting Darwin an international holiday above and beyond the birthdays of all the other greatest philosophers and scientists in history, none of whom, including Einstein, Newton or Maxwell, have anything like Darwin Day.  Good luck, comrade Kevin:

1. Natural selection: Darwin was co-inventor of this notion, so why no Wallace Day?  Actually, neither discovered it.  Hints of natural selection can be found in Edward Blyth (10/10/2002) and William Paley (12/18/2003) and others as far back as the Greeks.  Even young-earth creationists accept natural selection to a degree (CMI), so big deal.
       Padian admits the flawed associations with Malthus and Spencer, and admits N.S. was rejected till the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s brought it back with a vengeance.  There exists a staunch minority of biologists who do not consider N.S. the be-all and end-all of evolutionary theory (e.g., 02/16/2005).  Besides, who wins a birthday party for inventing a tautology?  If fitness equates to survival, N.S. is a vacuous idea. 
2. One tree of life:  Well, of all things.  Look at Padian give good press to Haeckel – a racist hoaxster who “developed enthusiastically” the tree icon.  Then, he assumes that the tree of life was vindicated by “the discovery of genetic structure more than a century after the Origin was published.”  That is, only if one ignores recent findings and sweeps countless difficulties under the rug (02/01/2007, 10/08/2007).  The single tree of life is not a conclusion from inductive reasoning from observation, but rather a paradigm into which all observations must be fitted.  Neither was Darwin the inventor of this ancient notion that goes back to Democritus at least and is part and parcel of some pagan religions.  You know, like Darwinism.
3. Genealogical classification: Darwin should not have expected taxonomic divisions.  His theory predicts smooth transitions between forms from top to bottom, from simple to complex.  Besides, the ability to arrange assorted items into a taxonomic scheme has no necessary correlation with natural divisions that are “out there” in the world.  Taxonomy is a human enterprise.  Taxonomists try to arrange parts (whether tools, occupations, atoms, or whatever) into compartments that are useful to them.  For Padian to claim that a genealogy-based scheme is somehow better than any philosophical, theological or pragmatic scheme, because it fits his preconceived notion of universal common ancestry, begs the question that evolution is empirical.  Say it is useful to promote materialist religion, but don’t claim it carves nature at its joints.
4. Selective extinction: Padian knocks down a straw man of the “great chain of being” then explains how selective extinction rescued Darwinism from the evidence: “the living world [i.e., the observations] is a patchwork of possible forms, with most transitional stages and features removed.”  And you thought science was supposed to be about what you could see.
5. Deep time: Darwin did not invent deep time.  Aristotle believed in an eternal universe.  Enlightenment anti-Christians before Darwin thought in terms of misty depths of prehistory: Comte du Buffon, Hutton, Lamarck and others.  Why should Charlie get credit for begging the question?  Darwin needed deep time, so he assumed it.  Look at this marvelous example of chicanery:

   True, Lord Kelvin’s calculated limits on solar duration nonplussed many supporters of Deep Time, but Darwin was not cowed by physics, because he knew the rocks.  Deep Time was absolutely necessary to his theory, in a way that it had not been for any biological theory before.  It was no longer possible to accept that Earth was 6,000 years old, as some Biblical scholars estimated.

   Stand in amazement at this admission.  Mr. Darwin was not cowed by physics.  Well, he should have been!  Lord Kelvin had him pinned and he refused to cry uncle (07/02/2007).  What kind of scientific attitude is that?  Deep Time was an escape, a hidden fortune where he could make reckless drafts on the bank of time.
       Darwin “knew the rocks,” we are told.  Ever see a rock with a date on it?  Rock ages are interpreted, students, not discovered.  Rocks were dubbed ancient, and it was no longer possible to accept a young earth, for one reason alone: “Deep Time was absolutely necessary to his theory.”  It does not follow that the Earth needed Deep Time.  By force of propaganda and group-think, Darwin and his musketeers rode a wave of Victorian materialist progressivism and rising dissatisfaction with organized religion (some of it deserved), redefined science and took over the institutions of learning.  Since then, the Darwin Thought Police have enforced their totalitarian doctrines.  That is why it is no longer possible to think outside the paradigm.
6. Biogeographical distributions: For Padian to score with this pitch, he needs to prove that nobody else with any other theory could accommodate the observations.  He simply asserts that “Only evolutionary adaptation and dispersal could account for such patterns” and that “the distributions of plants and animals are not serendipitous patterns or whims of a Creator.”  This is a collection of hot air balloons wrapped in a straw man pinata.  Maybe he should read the Creation Research Society Quarterly.  The claim that plate tectonics confirmed Darwin’s theory is like the claim that Marx predicted Al Qaeda.  Padian should read up on the philosophy of science, particularly in regard to scientific justification.
7. Sexual selection: This idea is somewhat original to Darwin, but is not without controversy (05/17/2004).  Furthermore, since it concerns microevolutionary change, it is not germane to his philosophy of universal common ancestry.
8. Coevolution: Padian discusses long-tongued moths that pollinate orchids with long corollas (11/11/2007 commentary, bullet 13), parasites and symbiosis and “many other associations that can only reasonably be explained by co-evolution through diversification over millions of years.”  We don’t need Padian to lecture us on what is reasonable.
       How does Padian know that microevolutionary changes required millions of years?  How does he know that these observations fit Darwin, the whole Darwin, and nothing but the Darwin?  He needs more research on scientific justification of theories.  Claiming that co-evolution confirms evolution is like claiming that theories of the unconscious confirm psychoanalysis or horoscopes prove astrology.
9. Economy of nature: Did Darwin invent ecology?  Certainly not.  Great thinkers and scientists from Greeks to medieval scholars were not blind to the interactions of plants and animals.  Calling Darwin the father of ecology is like calling Freud the father of dream theory – as if he were the only one who dreamt about it.  All Darwin did was change the vision: “What had been, for earlier authors, the divinely ordained balance of nature became the autocatalytic war of nature.”  If you want to believe that, worship in the mosque of Darwin, but don’t call it science.
10. Gradual change: Padian spends a lot of time defending Darwin here in a most unusual way: he tries to prove that gradual doesn’t really mean gradual.  Darwin can still be reconciled with punctuated equilibria (or punk eq, you know, the punk who goes around making gradualists squeal “Eek!”).  But in Charlie’s own blessed words, he said, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”  Aside from the fact that Charlie’s rhetorical ploy put the onus on his critics to prove a universal negative and opened the door for endless just-so stories by his disciples (12/22/2003), it is clear that by gradual, King Charles meant really gradual.

Displaying his collection of non-sequiturs and big lies and half-truths and glittering generalities and irrelevant details on the table, Padian ends by acknowledging that there have been other great scientists, but Darwin is so precious and special we should all bow down and worship:

But Darwin moved intellectual thought from a paradigm of untestable wonder at special creation to an ability to examine the workings of that natural world, however ultimately formed, in terms of natural mechanisms and historical patterns.  He rooted the classification of species within a single branching tree, and so gave systematics a biological, rather than purely philosophical, rationale.  He framed most of the important questions that still define our understanding of evolution, from natural selection to sexual selection, and founded the main principles of the sciences of biogeography and ecology.  His work is still actively read and discussed today, inspiring new students and scientists all over the world.  Few authors can claim so much.

That paragraph is so corrupted with incestuous illogic and irrelevant appropriation of concepts not unique to Darwinism, only a gullible nitwit would be convinced that Charlie deserves Darwin Day.  This reads like Party propaganda defending reasons why Lenin’s corpse is displayed in public so that the peasants can file by it in reverence, while the Party troops parade alongside the big guns with the subliminal message “Don’t stray out of line.”  This list could not stand up to critical scrutiny from scientists or philosophers not already pledged to DODO (Darwin Only, Darwin Only).
    Darwin may have been a polite English gentleman, but he was a loser who deserves to buried alongside his buddies Freud and Marx.  His ideas have inhibited real science for 149 years with endless quests for the ultimate just-so story, and have energized proponents of eugenics, abortion, racism and social Darwinism.  His disciples today have no conscience about playing God with human embryos.  Science doesn’t need him, medicine doesn’t need him, and politics doesn’t need him.  Let the dead bury their dead.  Shed some tears on Darwin Day for all the harm he and his followers caused (11/30/2005).  Then, for goodness’ sake, let’s get on into the 21st century – the century of intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Darwinism

This is the latest surprising phenomenon associated with the ice geysers of Enceladus to be discovered or confirmed by Cassini scientists.  Earlier, the geysers were found to be responsible for the content of the E-ring.  Next, the whole magnetic environment of Saturn was found to be weighed down by the material spewing from Enceladus, which becomes plasma -- a gas of electrically charged particles.  Now, Cassini scientists confirm that the plasma, which creates a donut-shaped cloud around Saturn, is being snatched by Saturn’s A-ring, which acts like a giant sponge where the plasma is absorbed.

How can this little moon, no bigger across than the British Isles, put out so much energy?  How long can it pump out so much material?  Why is it still so hot inside?  The scientists never think to question the assumed age of the Saturn system (4.5 billion years), but then struggle to deal with what they cannot deny: the observations.
    Most of the time, the press releases talk matter-of-factly about the assumed billions of years.  They get strangely silent about time issues, though, as more detail is presented about Enceladus and Titan.
    This is similar to how evolutionary biologists behave.  Evolutionary theory thrives on glittering generalities.  The more detail about the intricacy of the cell, DNA and other high-tech wonders in biology, the quieter the Darwin-talk gets.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 miles per hour covers 32 body lengths per second.  But a common pigeon flying at 50 miles per hour covers 75.  The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second.  The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second.
    Select military aircraft can withstand gravitational forces of 8-10 G.  Many birds routinely experience positive G-forces greater than 10 G and up to 14 G.

Did the evolutionary fluff give you as much a thrill as the engineering article?  Engineers are forward-thinking scientists.  They use evidence that is observable, testable and repeatable.  They are continuing the practice of the Wright brothers who were inspired by birds over a hundred years ago – and look where that science has led mankind.  We have just seen that even now, after a century of human aeronautical engineering that has taken us from awkward contraptions to the edge of space, our bird, bat and insect neighbors still have wonderful secrets to share.  Isn’t design science of much more value, inspiration and usefulness than a silly story about some lizard that held out its arms 100 million years ago (01/25/2008) and, strictly by chance, mastered pitch, yaw and roll?  Let’s get science back from flights of fancy to a wing and a prayer.
Next headline on:  Birds • Physics • Biomimetics • Evolution • Amazing Facts

Dr Dieckmann said: “It was thought that these changes would only occur over millennia.  But it is becoming clear that significant evolution can take place within 20 years if the forces driving it are strong – and in fisheries they have been.”
    Dr Dieckmann said that evolution caused by over-fishing took a longer [sic] to recover from than it did to cause: if the Barents Sea was closed to fishermen, it would take 250 years for cod to return to spawning at 10 years old.
    “This is a Darwinian debt that will have to be paid back by future generations,” he added.
    Dr Dieckmann said evolution caused by commercial fisheries had played an overlooked part in the collapse of the Northern cod off Newfoundland in 1992, the most disastrous crash yet of a major commercial fish species.
    He said that from 1985 a downward trend in the size of spawning cod was detectable off [sic] and should have led to “a more precautionary approach” in setting catch quotas.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man have at last been translated into Croatian, thanks to the work of the renowned science and theology translator Josip Balabanic.  Other European countries –including Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Sweden – had access to Darwin’s works in their mother tongue during his lifetime.  But it was not until this year that Croatian students of biology could read them in their own language.
    Religious education was introduced in elementary schools during the early years of Croatian independence, and ethics and the major world religions are now studied in high school.  At the same time, the importance of evolution for modern biology and medicine is publicly acknowledged by science academies and societies – in the spirit of your Editorial ‘Spread the word’ (Nature 451, 108; doi:10.1038/451108b 2008).
    Croatia aspires to join the group of countries in which education and science occupy prime positions in national strategies, and recognizing the influence of Darwin’s writings is an important step in that direction.  Celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth on 12 February next year, possibly at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, will have particular significance for Croatians.

You didn’t realize you owe a debt to Darwin.  Are you behind in your payments?  Better not go into default.  His collection agency is red in tooth and claw.
    If people accelerate evolution, such that things happen in 20 years that they used to think required thousands of years, great; let’s accelerate evolution on fruit flies and see if we can get them to evolve into mammals.  On second thought....
    The Croatian suck-up to Charlie is so obsequious, you’d think they be embarrassed, but no: they are proud of their shame.  Cub Scouts have Webelos, which stands for “We’ll be loyal scouts.”  The Croatians have announced a new order for young wannabees in the Darwin Party axis of evil: the Webelodos, which stands for “We’ll be loyal Darwinist operatives.”  The motto of the Webelodos is DODO! DODO! (translation: see 02/15/2006, 02/17/2006 and 02/24/2006).  OK; whatever.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Of All the Nerve: Functional Intron Discovered   02/06/2008    
An intron vital to the production of nerve cells has been discovered, reported Science Daily.  It acts as a “gatekeeper” to guide the messenger RNA for local control of gene expression in dendrites, the spindly arms of neurons.  The discovery was made by a research team at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
    “The group surmises that the intron may control how many mRNAs are brought to the dendrite and translated into functional channel proteins,” the article says.  “The correct number of channels is just as important for electrical impulses as having a properly formed channel.”
    Introns had long been assumed to be junk that the spliceosome cuts out of a transcribed messenger RNA.  The team found that knocking out the intron in this case, however, produced abnormal electrical properties in the nerve cells.  “This is the first evidence that an intron-containing RNA outside of the nucleus serves a critical cellular function,” said James Eberwine, senior author.
    Eberwine also added this comment: “Just because the intron is not in the final channel protein doesn’t mean that it doesn't have an important purpose.”  In fact, the article says, they may have hit on a general mechanism for the regulation of RNAs.
    The treasures being found in “junk DNA” are good for business.  A company named Rosetta Genomics is hoping to cash in on the new discoveries to be made about micro-RNAs (miRNA).  Noting the steep rise in articles about treasure in junk DNA, reporter Ohad Hammer said, “Rosetta Genomics’ impressive pipeline, unparalleled discovery capabilities and intellectual property make it one of the most exciting biotech companies out there.”
    Those interested in more technical detail about introns and alternative splicing may find revealing new ideas about intron function in a paper published by a team of European scientists in Nature last month,¹ “Translational control of intron splicing in eukaryotes.”  The abstract says, for example, “In multicellular eukaryotes, long introns are recognized through exon definition and most genes produce multiple mRNA variants through alternative splicing.”

They also serve who only stand and wait –John Milton.  These introns should not have been assumed to be junk, even if all they did was stand and wait.  Apparently they are doing much more than that.
    For background on the mystery of introns, see 05/27/2004 commentary, 09/03/2002 and 09/12/2002 entries and 09/12/2003 update.
Next headline on:  Genetics

The climate physics and chemistry that are best understood are mainly attuned to processes that occur at daily to interannual timescales.  Are the important factors that regulate climate over centennial and longer timescales known?  When a climate model is stepped forward, by minutes or days at a time, for hundreds or thousands of years, are the final results realistic?  Climate scientists still do not understand how the subtle shifts in insolation at the top of the atmosphere are converted into massive changes in the ice volume on the ground.

To tackle these problems, some researchers have turned to a time when glaciation seems to have been relatively straightforward.  The glacial cycles of the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene (~1–3 million years ago) were more regular than those of the late Pleistocene, typically lasting about 41,000 years (Fig. 1a), which matches the period of change in Earth’s tilt (Fig. 1b).  But how is the lack of variability with respect to precession explained?  Precession, which occurs mainly at 23,000-year and 19,000-year intervals, is the orbital component that most influences summer insolation intensity (Fig. 1c).  Indeed, precession is clearly observed in the ice-volume and sea-level records for the past 700,000 years.  The few computer models that have been used to study the climate history of the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene also show a strong precession signal in the modelled ice volume.  Are these climate models missing a fundamental piece of climate or ice-sheet physics, or are the assumptions about ice-volume proxies, such as delta-18 O[xygen], flawed?  Both are possibilities.

.... It could be that the East and West Antarctic ice sheets have had a far more dynamic history than has been thought.
    It is widely accepted that variations in Earth’s orbit affect glaciation, but a better and more detailed understanding of this process is needed.  How can the 41,000-year glacial cycles of the early Pleistocene be explained, let alone the ~100,000-year glacial cycles of the late Pleistocene?  How do the subtle changes in insolation relate to the massive changes in climate known as glacial cycles?  And what are proxy climate records actually measuring?  The field now faces these important questions, which are made all the more pressing as the fate of Earth’s climate is inexorably tied to the vestige of Northern Hemisphere glaciation that sits atop Greenland, and to its uncertain counterpart to the south.

• The remarkable growth in the study and understanding of Earth has happened in parallel with a spectacular era of planetary exploration, relevant astronomical discoveries and computational and theoretical advances, all of which help us to place Earth and its interior in a perspective that integrates the Earth sciences with extraterrestrial studies and basic sciences such as condensed-matter physics.  However, progress on the biggest challenges in understanding the deep Earth continues to rely mainly on looking down rather than looking up.
• Almost a billion bodies 10 km in diameter would be needed to make an Earth.  However, it is not thought likely that planetesimals were the actual building blocks of Earth.  A dense swarm of such bodies in nearly circular low-inclination orbits is gravitationally unstable on a short timescale.
• The picture [of the origin of the moon by an impact, followed by transfer of material between Earth and the disk] was originally motivated by a desire to understand the remarkable similarity of Earth and Moon oxygen isotopes but also finds support in tungsten and possibly silicon isotopic evidence.  However, we do not yet have a fully integrated model of lunar formation that is dynamically satisfactory as well as chemically acceptable.
• We understand why Earth’s mantle convects: there is no alternative mechanism for eliminating heat.  However, we do not understand why Earth has plate tectonics.

Ideally, we would know all of the physical and chemical processes governing the sediment-routing system.  This would be enormously gratifying in trying to understand how sediment-routing systems function generically, but we would immediately run into a fundamental problem: the long result of time.  Time transforms sediment-routing systems into geology, and like history, selectively samples from the events that actually happened to create a narrative of what is recorded.  Progress in understanding modern sediment-routing systems now leaves us poised to answer the important question: how do we simultaneously use the modern to generate the time-integrated ancient, and ‘invert’ the ancient to reveal the forcing mechanisms for change in the past?

Let us take the example of the effects of cyclic glaciation, a mode of response to cyclic climate changes that Earth has experienced in the past few million years (see page 284).  To build a numerical landscape-evolution model for times of glaciation we would need to know the sliding velocity of ice by solution of a chosen ice-dynamics equation, a proportionality constant in the ice-erosion equation that depends on the underlying rock type, a rheological law relating ice deformation to local stress, a model for ice accumulation and ablation, and knowledge of the temperature at the base of the ice.  This might work theoretically by making a large number of assumptions, but the resulting model would be impossible to use in a simulation of Quaternary landscapes.  Why?  Because the necessary parameter values to inform a long-term landscape model are not currently available, and perhaps never will be.  This humbling realization does not denigrate the efforts of modellers working at the human timescale, but instead prompts us to think afresh about what is required for success with upscaled [i.e., extrapolated] models.
    It is not immediately obvious that the factors controlling a long-term response may be different from those controlling local processes.

The textbooks don’t tell you how much of natural history is more art than science.  What are the proxy records actually measuring?  How do the orbital explanations translate to actual changes on earth’s surface?  In short, how do they know what they say they know?  It’s nice when the insiders raise the questions.
    Remember, correlation is not the same thing as causation.  Theories are always underdetermined by the data.  There could be very different causes for the observed effects.  These authors maintained a spirit of progressivism in spite of the serious questions they asked.  Earth has no obligation to abide by the current consensus.  For a shocker, read what global warming skeptic Alexander Cockburn thinks of consensus and “scientific” peer review.
    TV documentaries and textbooks often dress up the currently-favored models with glitzy visuals that convey an air of certainty.  Years later, a scientific revolution overturns the paradigm and tosses the old theory out.  So much for the visuals.
    When you watch documentaries, view museum displays or read popular science reports presenting confident-sounding dates of ice ages, etc., remember this little glimpse into the drafting room these insiders gave us.  You’re not watching reality in those programs.  You are watching paradigms.  Like glaciers, paradigms shift, melt, advance, retreat, and sometimes go slip-slidin’ away.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods • Solar System • Physics

Good; beam it into space where no one has to listen to it.  The mishmash of meaning in Lennon’s meandering lyrics is incoherent and anti-rational.  The song has nothing to do with astronomy.  It pushes Transcendental Meditation while repeating, over and over, “Nothing’s gonna change my world.”  Is this the kind of scientific attitude NASA really wants to promulgate?  What does it mean?  We no longer have to worry about global warming?  The Beatles don’t understand the second law of thermodynamics?  Saying something 12 times doesn’t make it so.
    NASA should be teaching kids physics and engineering instead of encouraging them to follow the 60's countercultural slogan, “tune in, turn on, drop out.”  The space program of the future needs sober-minded, bright students who have higher values than sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, and who believe smarter things than to chant meaningless mantras given by a charlatan guru like the Maharishi.  (Sorry, we wrote this before hearing he had just died.  There is no pleasure in the death of the wicked.)
    As for SETI in the other direction, it is interesting that Shostak (an ardent evolutionist and critic of intelligent design) acknowledges the information-bearing capacity of electromagnetic signals from unknown minds.  A natural EM wave contains no purposeful communication.  If a carrier signal is present, information can be impressed on it through amplitude modulation (AM) or frequency modulation (FM), or now by orbital angular momentum modulation.  In any case, the information is detectable if one has the key.  Without the key it looks like gibberish.  Shostak’s article exposes the lie of his December 2005 article that claimed all they were looking for is a persistent narrowband whistle.  Despite his objections, his new article has intelligent design written all over it.
    Read up on the life of James Clerk Maxwell, a towering giant among scientists, and a fervent Christian.
Next headline on:  SETI • Intelligent Design • Physics

Beat the Crowds: Go Outdoors   02/04/2008    
Fewer people are feeling close to nature, said a report on PhysOrg.  According to a study done by Oliver Pergams (U of Illinois) and Patricia Zaradic (Environmental Leadership Program, Pennsylvania), a decline in visitation at national parks corresponds to an increase in sedentary activities like playing video games, surfing the Internet and watching movies.  They see a fundamental shift away from nature and toward “videophilia” – an unhealthy trend, being associated with obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance.
    Statistics they gathered showed declines over the past 70 years in outdoor activity.  For instance, in the decade from 1981 to 1991, there was a drop of up to 1.3 percent per year in outdoor activities such as backpacking, fishing, hiking, hunting, and visits to national and state parks and forests.  Since then, the typical drop has been 18-25 percent, the article states.
    The researchers are worried about another consequence: less interest in conservation.  “We don’t see how future generations, with less exploration of nature, will be as interested in conservation as past generations,” they said.

There was never a better time to Escape to Reality than now.  While everyone else is having a mythical second life, get out into creation – you’ll have it all to yourself!
    One thing the states and the federal government could do is to lower fees.  Camping used to be a very economical activity.  For many years, park entrance fees were either $5 or even zero.  Now, it is typical to pay $20 or more, with more restrictions on where you can go and what you can do.  Campground fees used to be in the $3 to $5 range per night; now they are typically $17 to $20 and up.  National forests and wilderness areas also put steep fees and quotas on backpackers.  Fishing licenses and hunting tags are astronomical.  It becomes unattractive for would-be woodsmen to pay a high annual fee for just one or two expeditions into the wild.  America has become the land of the fee and the home of depraved video addicts.
    The high prices for recreation would not be necessary if governments would cut back on wasteful socialist programs and pork-barrel projects.  They would probably find that lower fees at parks would also attract visitors and actually increase revenues.  Governments need to realize that the land belongs to the people, not to the Capitol.  The power to tax is the power to destroy.  Taxes and fees drive away participation.  In recent years, governments have even charged fees (badly named “adventure passes”) for merely parking your car in a national forest so you can take a walk in the woods.  What on earth do they think they are doing?  If they are concerned about declining visitation to nature reserves and lack of interest in conservation, who is to blame?  The main critics of the adventure pass laws were the backpackers, hikers and fishermen who were most likely to appreciate and conserve the land.
    In their defense, park management districts are having to deal with increased litter, carelessness with fire, crime in the parks, the cost of rescues due to carelessness, and litigation from sue-happy campers.  This hurts everyone.  It becomes easier for the parks to prohibit everybody from doing anything.  In one national park, for instance, a popular swimming hole on a creek is now off limits.  The trail to it was covered, and the rangers refuse to tell anyone where it is.  Why?  Too many careless people would go over there and fool around, get hurt, require a rescue, and sue the park.  No wonder park rangers often feel they are trapped in a no-win situation.
    One solution might be for the government to certify hikers according to knowledge and ability.  The one-size-fits-all policy, essentially “if an obese elderly person in a wheelchair can’t do it, then nobody can do it,” is very frustrating to eager, fit, knowledgeable outdoorspeople.  Private conservation groups could offer courses that the government could approve, allowing the park visitor to earn a passport-like identification that would allow additional access to park resources.  Certificates could be stratified according to risk level, from beginner to advanced: day hiker to ice climbers or cave explorers.  The courses could include conservation ethics, survival skills, filing of trip plans and affidavits of personal responsibility.  This would filter out the careless but allow the knowledgeable to enjoy the freedom all Americans once took for granted.  Undoubtedly it would attract young people to learn the skills needed to get to the highest level – like the appeal to become an Eagle Scout.  The outdoors would again hear the songs of human beings in their native habitat: rational beings who love the outdoors and know how to interact with the environment without harming it.
    These are very real issues with no simple solutions.  A certification program would bring its own share of problems, for sure.  Regardless, it is still worthwhile to get into the wilderness and experience nature close up.  Camping out is still cheaper than a hotel.  Freedom is precious: use it or lose it.  So is health.  Start at your skill level and challenge yourself.  There is no substitute for a real experience in the created world: sleeping under the stars, hiking through a forest, hopping rocks along a wild stream, watching a bird or deer in its natural habitat.  These are experiences no HDTV can match.  Your body will thank you.
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics

Did Murder Evolve?   02/03/2008    
Is it appropriate for scientists to speculate on the evolution of murder?  Nature had no problem with it.  They allowed Dan Jones, a freelance writer in Brighton, UK, to publish a lengthy article on how murder and warfare evolved.  No other explanations for these scourges were mentioned except to dismiss them.  Nature has apparently incorporated political science, ethics, theology and criminology as subdomains of evolutionary biology.  “What can evolution say about why humans kill?” the article begins, ending not only with the evolution of murder and war, but claims that evolution has even provided humans with a moral sense to mitigate them.
    Dan Jones began by setting up an opposing voice to knock down:

“It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors ... that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature ... [and] that humans have a ‘violent brain’.”
    These are the ringing words of the ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, fashioned by 20 leading natural and social scientists in 1986 as part of the United Nations International Year of Peace, and later adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  It was written to counter the pessimistic view that violence and war are inevitable features of human life.
    The decades since have not been kind to these cherished beliefs.  A growing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists have accumulated evidence that understanding many aspects of antisocial behaviour, including violence and murder, requires the study of brains, genes and evolution, as well as the societies those factors have wrought.

At the same time, though, historians, archaeologists and criminologists have started to argue that in most places life was more violent – and more likely to end in murder – in the past than it is today.  The time span of this apparent decline in violence has been too short for appeals to natural selection to be convincing.  If humans have evolved to kill, then it seems that they have also evolved to live without killing, given the right circumstances.

In an intriguing turn, Raine and his USC colleague Yaling Yang have recently pointed to a link between homicidal behaviour and the capacity to follow moral guidelines.  Over the past six years, brain-imaging studies aimed at understanding moral judgements have illustrated the crucial role of the emotional feeling that comes with violating moral codes.  Parts of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala that are abnormal in violent individuals and murderers are activated when making moral judgements.  Raine and Yang have proposed that these systems serve as the engine that translates moral feelings into behavioural inhibition – an engine that has blown a gasket in the antisocial, violent and murderous.

Men are not just more likely to kill other people than women are, they are also more likely to do so in groups – and for some researchers it is in these realms that killing offers real evolutionary value.  The murder of one person by another may be almost accidental, an unlooked for by-product of aggression.  The murder of members of one group by those of another could be an adaptive behaviour that evolution has encouraged.

In cultures and societies with a recent history of warfare, children tend to be socialized to tolerate pain and to react aggressively, which prepares them for the possibility of becoming a soldier (arguably something that evolution would favour) or a potentially deadly brawler (probably something it wouldn’t).

None of this means that a tendency to kill is set in stone; if anything, it shows that humans have evolved to be much less of a risk to each other within groups than they would be if they were as bellicose as chimps.  And there is evidence that this risk is reducing further in studies of death rates from both inter-group homicide and intra-group warfare, both of which seem to have plummeted over the millennia.

A part of the answer that is consistent with an evolutionary approach is a long-term reduction in inequalities of life circumstances and prospects – the inequalities that Daly and Watson see as driving the conflict that leads to killing as a by-product.  “In places such as Sweden where every cabbie drives a Mercedes,” says Daly, “people don't bother to kill so often.”  Better provisioning of life’s necessities has also powered the decline, agrees Duntley.  When contested resources are made more plentiful, he says, conflict over resources decreases and homicide rates drop.

The evidence suggests that humans may indeed have what the Seville Statement called a ‘violent brain’, in as much as evolution may favour those who go to war.  But evolution has also furnished us with a moral sense.  The complexities of the relationship between morals and violence may prove a fruitful field for future research, in as much as they can be disentangled from the social and historical factors that clearly hold great sway over the ultimate levels of violence.  Evolution is not destiny; but understanding it could help maintain the hard-to-discern progress of peace.

At the risk of sounding redundant, the views in this paper are dumb and evil.  Dumb, because they are self-refuting and nothing but presupposition-driven conjectures.  Evil, because the fruit of such thinking puts no limits on selfish aggression.  If moral absolutes and rationality do not exist – if we are the evolutionary pawns of amoral forces – who is to abide by any claims of a “moral sense”?  Morality becomes anything one says it is.  Don’t fall for the made-up disclaimer that natural selection has lately favored cooperation.  Give a dictator this doctrine and he will define his own morality to include genocide.  If he were to succeed, his success would guarantee it was moral, because the only ones left to pass on their genes would be those he allowed to survive.
    To the Darwin Party priestly class, the rest of humanity are their pets and lab rats.  They speak flowery words of peace and morality, but they are conquerors at heart.  They say they just want to “understand” human nature, but they envision themselves as disembodied rationalities above the game that traps the rest of us.  They would presume to create the environmental conditions under which humans would be precluded from acting out their evolutionary propensities for violence, and could be manipulated for useful purposes – useful, that is, for their own utopian visions.
    Once again, Dan Jones and the other Yodas he quoted presume to sit in some ethereal oligarchy looking down on an evolved world from an intellectual platform of privilege with no pillars.  The arrogant plunderers arrogate to themselves the intellectual resources of the rest of the university.  Like modern-day Gnostics possessing higher wisdom unavailable to us boxers and soldiers, they would sit in exalted privilege above the rabble, doling out Mercedes to the cabbies to keep them compliant.  (Incorrigible non-cooperators like Christians, philosophers and theologians can be put in zoos, prisons, or otherwise disposed of so as not to jeopardize the regime.)
    What do you do with people who believe things that are dumb and evil?  For one thing, you don’t put them in positions of power, and you don’t give them control of the classroom.  Their arguments cannot withstand a moment’s reflection.  Using their own assumptions, the propositions in this article reduce to glorified chimpanzee screams as their proponents jump up and down on each other’s soulless chests.  They can’t help themselves.  Evolution made them this way.  Their arguments, therefore, carry no intellectual weight, and are self-refuting.  Remember, distinguished scholars, what happens to self-refuting propositions?  They are necessarily false.  They are not true, they cannot be true, and no amount of research or discovery or reflection will ever make them true.  They’re D.O.A., dead, finished.
    Consider that the most distinguished scientific journal in the world just gave pride of place to a self-refuting article!  The situation is desperate.  The evil dumb are threatening war against Mansoul.  For its own survival, civilization must expose through rational means that the Darwinists are their own suicidal maniacs.  By murdering mind and morality, they have demonstrated that they cannot win the game of survival of the intellectually and morally fittest.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

Did Darwinism Build the Nuclear Pore Complex?   02/02/2008    
After nine years of work, three universities including a team at Rockefeller University completed a beautiful new model of the nuclear pore complex.  The story is told by Science Daily.
    The article attributed the origin of this exquisite gatekeeper of the nucleus to evolution: “their findings provide a glimpse into how the nucleus itself first evolved,” the article says.  How can this be?  The article claims that eukaryotic cells split off from the prokaryotes “when they developed a nucleus and other specialized organelles that allowed them to compartmentalize different aspects of cellular metabolism.”
    This language suggests some kind of plan or intention – certainly not what neo-Darwinian theory allows.  Nevertheless, Michael Rout of Rockefeller continued the language of planning and purpose as he described himself visualizing an evolutionary progress from earlier structures: “We think that once the cells gained this coating complex, they ran with it and started to duplicate it and specialize it.”
    As for a mechanism that could generate complexity from simplicity, Rout invoked a kind of copying and tinkering algorithm: “Evolution is a process of duplication and divergence,” he said.  Because the nuclear pore complex contains multiple copies of similar structures arranged like a wheel, he thinks this is evidence they must have formed by gene duplication, even though wheels are usually built by intelligent agents:

He and his colleagues saw clear evidence of this when they color-coded the proteins in the pore.  One method of color coding revealed alternating stripes, like spokes on a wheel: For every protein, there was another one that looked quite similar.  Color coding a different way showed the same pattern in the pore’s outer and inner rings, one of which appears to be a slightly modified duplication of the other.  These are evidence of duplication events, Rout says, showing that the evolution of the complicated nuclear pore was a more straightforward affair than previously thought.  “It’s made of many different variations of a theme of just one unit.”

The nuclear pore is the communication device that the nucleus uses to communicate with the rest of the cell.  And if you don’t understand how that works, you don’t understand a key part of how the cell works.  And if you don’t understand that, you can’t completely understand how cancers work or how a single cell turns into a human being, or how a single grain of wheat turns into a whole crop.  You have to see the cell as a machine and understand all of its parts.

We need a new word to describe evolutionary biologists who talk like intelligent fools.  Everything they observe requires intelligent design and looks like intelligent design, but they glibly describe them as coming about from stupid, blind processes.  Somebody provide us a one-word concoction that encapsulates the apostle Paul’s description, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”  Wait: there is such a word – “sophomore.”  (Apologies to all second-year students.)  How about sophoxymoroniac?  Perfect.

Sophoxymoroniac, definition: a sophomoric (wise-fool) scientist with a mania for speaking in oxymorons (wise-foolish statements), like evolutionary design and Darwinian rationality.

    Now, we can expand our code language when describing Darwinists: you know, those sophoxymoroniacs with the fability to howl ev-illusionary mythoids in fogma.  (To decode the message, see commentaries from 05/14/2007, 05/29/2003, 07/27/2007, 12/20/2007, 01/16/2007, 05/14/2007.)
    Believing that blind duplication can produce machinery as elaborate as a nuclear pore complex (06/02/2003, 08/06/2004, 11/13/2007, 12/02/2007, bullet 2) is like believing that swirling snowflakes can produce a living snowman without a kid and a fairy godmother.  For a detailed response to the claim that gene duplication can produce new complex designs, see Jerry Bergman’s article “Does gene duplication provide the engine for evolution?” on CMI, and read Michael Behe’s latest book The Edge of Evolution – drastic measures, we know, but shock treatment is the only known cure for sophoxymoronia.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Possible implications of this study include non-fossil-fuel production of oil and natural gas, with resulting economic considerations, and changes in assumptions about dating methods.  Geologists and earth scientists may wish to pursue these leads.  For leads, look at what World Net Daily reported on the story.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

...Bhandawat et al. found that the responses of projection neurons were highly correlated with each other, as were responses within groups of ORNs [olfactory receptor neurons].  The existence of inhibitory and excitatory local neurons in the antennal lobe suggests that both competitive and associative interactions are possible.  Purely inhibitory interactions between projection neurons would tend to decorrelate their responses; in an extreme case – a fully connected network – such interactions would lead to a ‘winner-take-all’ competition, resulting in a coding capacity greatly reduced to the number of available output channels.  Purely excitatory interactions, on the other hand, would decrease the independence of channels to lower than what is available in their inputs.  Thus, the results of Bhandawat et al. suggest that the network connectivity of the antennal lobe is delicately balanced to optimize its coding capacity.

The work by Bhandawat et al. provides insights into the logic behind olfactory circuit design.  It will be interesting to analyze how these results generalize to a larger set of odorants, and to other species.  It will also be interesting to see whether these peripheral circuits play a role in insulating the neural signal-processing engine from the constant changes in the population of ORNs that occur throughout the lifetime of the animal.  These fundamental olfactory processing principles are not only important for understanding how the brain interprets odor signals, but are also necessary for engineering solutions inspired by biological computations for addressing high dimensional and non-linear problems.

Scratch that last lame, useless, dull, insipid, witless remark about evolutionary time optimizing design.  Can anyone conceive of how many lucky mutations would be required for this multi-part system to evolve?  The inputs are correlated and decorrelated, converged and distributed, filtered and amplified through a remarkable series of stages that results in a non-linear fashion to gain the maximum amount of information from the input.  If any one of these stages failed, the whole system wouldn’t work.  This is more elaborate than the famous Honda Accord commercial in which a rolling lug nut as input moved a half-ton automobile as output by passing through a finely-tuned chain reaction of alternating strong and weak energetic events.
    Don’t accept balderdash about miracles in evolutionary time brought about by random, mindless mutations that yield optimized designs by accident.  This story was about intelligent design from start to finish.  It should make us stand in awe of creation while we employ our creativity to imitate and apply the engineering for the improvement of human life.  That is the fragrance of science.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts • Biomimetics