Wet Cave with Fossils Found in Dry Desert   07/31/2008    
July 31, 2008 — The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest places on earth – it gets about 1mm of rainfall per year, if that – but scientists just discovered a wet cave there.  Robert Roy Britt reported for Live Science that these desert caves can contain water, and at least one is loaded with fossils – indicating a moist climate for the region in the past.
    The discovery was totally unexpected, the article says.  There is even evidence of prehistoric human activity.  Hundreds of thousands of bones in one of the Atacama caves, mixed with tree branches, were found eroding out of cave walls.  The article contains a link to a photograph of ungulate bones seemingly jammed together in the wall in a haphazard manner.  Ungulates (grazing animals that chew the cud) must have enjoyed a wealth of grass here at one time.
    The team led by J. Judson Wynne of the SETI Institute was exploring the desert for caves that might resemble those on Mars, in hopes of finding likely places to look for life.  Mars is still a question, but there was apparently plenty of life at this location in the past.  The team is seeking to determine whether the bones were “dumped into the cave by prehistoric people or if perhaps they were trapped by a flood.”  One of the team members was “marveling over the extent of this deposition as well as discussing what could have possibly led to the deposition of these bones.”  Readers may want to follow the adventures of the expedition on Wynne’s blog.
    Speaking of caves, another amazing underground feature has been exciting cavers since its discovery in New Mexico in 2001.  A large passageway in old Fort Stanton Cave sports a river of crystal running for over four miles – the longest known cave formation in the world.  See Live Science for the story.  Named the Snowy River by its discoverers, it is unique and beautiful.  They still have not determined how far it goes.  The Bureau of Land Management tells about its discovery and has a photo gallery of the river and the cave.  In a return trip last year, cavers were surprised to find water flowing over the crystal.  It had been dry on previous surveys.  Apparently new layers of calcite are deposited each time the underground river periodically flows.

What a planet we live on.  There are still phenomenal discoveries to be made.  Imagine hundreds of thousands of fossils and tree branches buried in one of the driest places on earth.  What does that suggest?
Next headline on:  Geology • Amazing Facts

What’s SETI Got to Do With It?   07/31/2008    
July 31, 2008 — The science news outlets are all posting a story from Space.com about how you can adopt a scientist.  Mark Showalter is an interesting guy – astronomer, scuba diver, amateur naturalist, award-winning photographer, and specialist in planetary rings.  But why was this story posted in the SETI column?
    There doesn’t seem to be anything Mark has done to find intelligent life in space.  It appears that the SETI Institute, with its “Adopt a Scientist” program, hopes that getting people to follow a scientist around will end up transferring his passion for science onto the search for life in space.  “When you adopt a scientist, you help lead the way towards answering profound questions regarding our place in the universe,” the article says.
    Another story from Live Science talks about a cave explorer adventuring in Chile who is also a member of the SETI Institute (see previous entry).  His work is aimed at comparing habitats on Earth that might compare to those on Mars where life might be found.  Again, though, the search for microbes has nothing to do with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

This is an example of the propaganda tactic of transfer or association.  The positive vibes you receive by getting to know an interesting person are supposed to transfer over into making you think that SETI is science, not religion.  Anybody can play the association game.  Mark is a nice guy with a lot of abilities and interests, but his personality does not put SETI in the Science column.  Science needs data.  SETI will become a science when Mark finds an alien in his viewfinder, on his next dive, or in the rings of Saturn.  Good luck.
Next headline on:  SETI • Solar System

Here is a science project crying out for some mathematically-minded person to work on.  It can be done right at the desk without special equipment – just a literature search and a calculator.  Figure out how long it would take to get the observed lakes on Titan.  Inputs are conservative rates of ethane production in the atmosphere and the most optimistic estimates of lake volume.  The result should place a severe upper limit on the age of Titan.
    Scientists have downplayed the severity of this problem.  They usually mention it in passing only to change the subject.  Usually, they jump to the possibility that Titan’s organic chemistry might have something to say about the origin of life (07/26/2005) – a foolish distraction.  Where is the ethane?  There should be a huge ocean of it by now, according to their belief in billions of years.
    Their only escapes now are less credible.  They have to claim the chemical process started recently, or that the ethane remains in the atmosphere (how long could that last?), or that the ethane went underground.  They never, ever question the billions-of-years age!  Their problem would be solved by reducing the age of Titan (and Saturn, and the solar system) by a few orders of magnitude.  That would fit this observation and many others (e.g., 04/08/2005, 06/29/2008, 05/05/2008, 03/10/2008, 12/03/2007, 08/04/2007, 07/18/2007, 05/04/2007, 03/31/2007).
    So here is a challenge.  The long-age believers made a prediction that appears to have been falsified.  We want to know what they are going to do about it.  Don’t let them sweep this problem under the crust.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Bridged trails observed in biofilms indicate that a previously viscous film was populated with swimming bacteria.  Carbon dating of the film points to its relatively modern origin.  A comparison of infrared spectra of modern biofilms with modern collagen and fossil bone coatings suggests that modern biofilms share a closer molecular make-up than modern collagen to the coatings from fossil bones.  Blood cell size iron-oxygen spheres found in the vessels were identified as an oxidized form of formerly pyritic framboids.  Our observations appeal to a more conservative explanation for the structures found preserved in fossil bone.

A turtle carapace from the Hell Creek formation was selected for spectroscopy because of its proportionally large chambers in the trabecular bone that allowed scraping the coatings loose.  Two milligrams of material was ground with 450 milligrams of potassium bromide (KBr) and pressed into a pellet using 8 tons pressure.  Modern biofilms grown on microscope slides in pond water were allowed to desiccate for 7 days and 2.5 milligrams were pressed into a KBr pellet as above.  A 2.5 milligram sample of desiccated tendon from a chicken was ground with KBr and pelletized.  Spectrums were taken on a Nicolet 510P bench at 1 cm^-1 resolution with a minimum of 15 scans.  Infrared flux was matched within 5% for all specimens and a clean KBr pellet used for background subtraction between specimens.  Excel cross correlation routines were used to determine percentage of similarity for spectrums.

A biofilm would coat the voids of vascular canals and lacunae, producing an endocast of the structure.  Once the bone is dissolved, these biofilm endocasts would closely mimic pliable vascular structures.  The results presented here suggest that the tubular structures and osteocytes are formed by this process.  The lack of observed cell structure in the transparent tubes is inconsistent with preserved tissues.

We agree with Kaye that “You have to go where the science leads,” and if Schweitzer ever retracts the claim (based on the best evidence and further study) that these represent (at least in part) original soft tissues from the dinosaur, then so be it.  We’ll have to concede the point.  However, a number of questions arise from the new interpretation.  For one thing, as some observers noted in the New Scientist write-up, the structures could still be a composite of original tissue and biofilm.  And why did Schweitzer get a match of collagen in the dinosaur bone with that of chickens, while using the same techniques, got the collagen in mastodon bone to resemble that of elephants?  What about Schweitzer’s discovery of fragile medullary bone in the same dinosaur fossil? (see 11/11/2006).
    We asked a dozen follow-up questions in the 11/11/2006 entry when the slime interpretation was first raised.  More questions come to mind now.  Why was biofilm inside fossilized bone discovered now, after centuries of collecting fossils?  Is there something in common with the environments displaying this phenomenon?  What did all the scraping, grinding and pressing do to the original material?  Maybe less destructive techniques need to be used for corroboration.  Even if biofilms can conform to original tissues and persist after they decay away or fossilize, is it reasonable to believe they would remain unaltered for 68 million years?  If the biofilms date modern by radiocarbon methods, and bacteria are still seen swimming around, it would have to imply the bacteria have been sitting there all this time, incorporating carbon-14 as they grow and divide millions of times.  What did they live on after the original tissue was all gone?  Wouldn’t there be evidence of millions of generations of biological growth in the bacterial colony?  How reasonable is it to assume that for 68 million years, a biofilm would maintain such a good mimic of original dinosaur tissue (now long gone) that it would fool careful researchers in the lab?
    So even granting victory to the Kaye team’s interpretation would seem to still argue these bones aren’t that old.  Evolutionists tell us the world underwent drastic changes since this fossil was deposited.  A meteor nearly destroyed all life on earth.  Mountains rose, valleys sank, floods came, tectonic plates mashed against one another while others drifted apart, climates warmed and cooled, ice sheets blanketed continents and animal life was evolving like crazy.  Cows evolved into whales and shrews evolved into giraffes.  All that time, we are asked to believe, the bacteria in that bone held hands to maintain the shape of long-gone soft tissue for millions of generations, till in 2005 a team of scientists found it so perfectly matching collagen and blood vessels they announced to the world the discovery of original soft tissue.  How credible is that?  The fact that Kaye et al found similar biofilms in ammonite and turtle might just suggest those fossils aren’t millions of years old, either.
    This is a scientific controversy in progress.  It illustrates the tentative nature of scientific announcements.  The biofilm advocates might argue that Schweitzer’s soft-tissue interpretation is the extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary evidence.  One should take a conservative, guarded attitude about it till more observations can test it.  Fine; creationists were going strong without dinosaur soft tissue.  Their views do not require it.  It would be very interesting to them if the soft-tissue interpretation wins out, and they could employ it as additional evidence falsifying millions of years.  Even so, their claims were no less robust before the surprise announcement in 2005.  Creationists don’t need the soft tissue, but evolutionists need their millions of years.  As we have argued, the biofilm interpretation, even if it wins out, does not get rid of their difficulty.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Dinosaurs • Dating Methods

Leaf Assumption Challenged: Affects Climate Modeling   07/29/2008    
July 29, 2008 — A reasonable-sounding assumption has been overturned, leaving climate models in upheaval.  The assumption was that leaf temperature stays in equilibrium with air temperature.  It doesn’t.  Leaves are hotter than assumed during active periods of growth, such as at midday in the growing season.  They maintain a relatively constant temperature through their own biological air conditioning, regardless of what the weather is doing.  This affects the interpretation of oxygen isotopes in wood extracted from tree rings, which in turn affects inferences about past climate.  The story came unraveled in Nature last week.¹
    Scientists have used the ratio of oxygen-16 to its heavier sibling oxygen-18 as a proxy for climate variations.  The interpretation, however, assumed that leaves are in equilibrium with ambient temperature.  Helliker and Richter (U of Pennsylvania) found that leaves can be 10° C hotter than air temperature, and were almost uniformly warm across a wide range of habitats.  This also affects calculations of relative humidity – a function of temperature.  “Our results explain this observation over a broad climatic range and further suggest that the overarching trend is to maintain leaves at an optimal temperature irrespective of mean climate,” they said.  F. I. Woodward (U of Sheffield, UK), commenting on this paper in the same issue of Nature, ² explained, “During the growing season, with photosynthesis at its peak, leaf temperatures remain constant over a wide latitudinal range.  This is a finding that overturns a common assumption and has various ramifications.”
    One key ramification relates to climate models.  Scientists have built models of past climate on the assumption that the oxygen ratios they measured in wood reflected the air temperature during the growing season.  Now, it appears that assumption is misguided.  Pine needles, for example, cannot be modeled in isolation, because they usually are in tight clusters.  It seemed reasonable that a pine needle, exposed on all sides to the air, would be the same temperature as the air.  But in the dense forest canopy, clusters of densely-packed needles create their own microclimate as the needles actively expend energy manufacturing sucrose in response to photosynthesis.  Leaf temperatures, therefore, can be much higher than air temperature – and relative humidity correspondingly lower.  This affects the rates at which oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 diffuse and become incorporated into the cellulose in tree rings.
    Woodward summarized the potential impact of this finding on climate models: “The fact that vegetation canopy rather than leaf morphology dominates temperature control in the forests sampled by Helliker and Richter suggests the need for greater emphasis on understanding how the canopy responds to climate change, and to global warming in particular.”  The authors also suggested that the finding will force researchers to modify estimates of water loss in the forest canopy.  In addition, theories about how climate affects leaf evolution have been called into question.

Do you see how unquestioned assumptions become weak links in chains of reasoning on which politicians and societies put their trust?  Maybe the modifications to theory required will not be dramatic in this case, but they could be.  Scientists had treated oxygen ratios in tree rings as bona fide scientific evidence of past climate conditions.  Scenes of scientists measuring isotope ratios to high precision in labs make for impressive visuals in documentaries.  The lay public becomes persuaded that scientists have a virtual crystal ball into the past.  All the while they were not measuring climate – they were measuring local microclimates right at the leaf surfaces, which can be significantly warmer than the air just a meter away.  Plants have a thermostat of their own that maintains near-constant temperatures during the growing season.  These temperatures are the ones recorded in the wood – not the climate conditions.  This little “whoops” discovery should teach us a healthy caution and skepticism about proxy measurements employed matter-of-factly by scientists.  We can all learn, furthermore, to question our own assumptions, as reasonable as they may seem to us.
Next headline on:  Plants

They are one of evolution’s most useful and prevalent inventions.  Ninety five percent of living species are equipped with eyes and they exist in many different forms.  Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells.  Discover how dinosaur’s evolved eyes that helped them become successful hunters.  Finally, learn how primates evolved unique adaptations to their eyes that allowed them to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.

Evolution thrives on visual propaganda and the power of suggestion.  Animation fills in the holes in their story.  Don’t be fooled.  Carl Sagan weaved animation tricks decades ago in the Cosmos TV series.  In one of the most egregious cases of visual propaganda for evolution ever shown, his animators depicted a single cell morphing into one animal after the other, till the final output was upright-walking man.  The number of conceptual, evidential and philosophical obstacles he leaped over in a single bound makes Evel Knievel look like a pogo-stick rider.  OK, Carl, if you want to play the Imagination game, even Homer Simpson can do a better job evolving than that.  And Guinness Beer at least got the direction of evolution right.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Media • Intelligent Design • Bible

How do wild ideas get such good press?  If you need a refresher course on why crystals are not templates for information, read the 02/19/2004, 02/15/2004, and 06/08/2007 entries.  Progress will be measured in some future day by the decibel level of laughter such conjectures evoke among thinking people.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Can Worms Outsmart Humans?   07/27/2008    
July 27, 2008 — Worms may seem creepy to some people, but they possess some amazing abilities.  How many of you had to struggle through calculus class, for instance?  Worms know it by heart, reported Greg Soltis at Live Science.  Their brains instinctively apply the logic of calculus to input signals from sensory inputs.  A University of Oregon biologist found that when a roundworm is sensing the presence of food, it essentially takes a derivative to arrive via the shortest possible path.
    In other worm news, engineers may have found a source for “super-strong, lightweight materials for use as construction and repair materials for spacecraft, airplanes, and other applications.”  It’s in the fang-like jaws of a common marine worm, reported Science Daily.  A unique histidine-rich protein identified in the jaw and pincers of this worm “rivals that of human teeth and exceed the hardness of many synthetic plastics,” yet is as lightweight as it is strong.  Nereis virens (sandworm or ragworm; see description), a marine worm prized as bait by Maine fishermen, uses the jaws to capture and cut up its food.

Maybe dogs learned calculus from worms (05/20/2003).  If an evolutionist tries to call this a case of convergent evolution, debate him.  It’s funny to watch them squirm and bark when challenged.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Marine Biology • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

If you have been grossed out by the sight of an animal licking an open sore, maybe you should respect the animal for having tacit knowledge that scientists are just discovering.  How would evolution explain this?  How many animals had to die of infection before the right compounds emerged by chance?  How did the animal learn to lick the wound once the antiseptic did emerge?
    The creation perspective makes sense.  We are equipped with the substances needed to flourish in the environment that was created for our enjoyment.  This includes tools for handling routine exigencies that might arise from our curiosity.  You have an effective healing ointment right there in your mouth.*
     The shame is that modern science took so long to think about this cue from nature.  Sometimes civilization seems to train us away from the tacit knowledge we need as part of our design.  Will the Red Cross start teaching licking one’s wounds in First Aid class?
Next headline on:  Health • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts
*As the “Eden Principle” advises,** things are not necessarily the same now as in the original creation.  This finding about histatin should be modulated by the possibility of risks in human saliva offsetting some of the benefits; it does not, therefore, render unnecessary the proper application of modern antiseptics.
**Eden Principle: examination of the original interoperations of natural phenomena should provide our default understanding of their current optimal interoperations, unless historical changes indicate otherwise.  Corollary: the burden of proof is on the proposer of a health treatment if it was unnecessary in Eden.  Examples: (1) Vegetarianism was the prescribed diet in the Garden of Eden, but subsequent events permitted the eating of meat.  (2) If coffee enemas were not prescribed as routine health treatments in Eden, they are probably not needed today.

In order to obtain a well-resolved tree, we undertook some post hoc taxon pruning where poorly constrained species, producing unacceptably high numbers (more than 5000) of equally probable supertrees, were removed.  Choosing a tree for diversity analyses was based on overall supertree support.

Phylogenetic shifts in diversification were detected using SYMMETREE v.  1.0 (Chan & Moore 2005).  Analyses of tree shape are biased when a group is paraphyletic [composed of some but not all members descending from a common ancestor], as a particularly speciose clade (in this case, birds) is represented by a single terminal (Archaeopteryx).  A modification was thus required in order to account for the absence of birds.  Although it was not feasible in the present contribution to include all birds, a hand-drawn phylogeny of the better-known Mesozoic taxa (72 species in total) was inserted at the node subtending Archaeopteryx +Jinfengopteryx, effectively making the tree a Mesozoic time slice.  (This placement of Jinfengopteryx is based on the original description (Ji et al.  2005), but more recent analyses, e.g. Turner et al. (2007), have placed it within Troodontidae.)  Polytomies [divisions into three or more parts] were treated as soft, with the size-sensitive ERM [equal-rates Markov] algorithm set to perform 10000 random resolutions per individual node and 1000000 random resolutions for the entire tree.  Internal branches within the phylogeny on which diversification shifts are inferred to have occurred were identified using the Delta-2 shift statistic.  This process was repeated for time slices of the whole tree as described in Ruta et al. (2007) to avoid violating the ERM model.

Ghost ranges, minimal basal stratigraphic range extensions implied by the geometry of the phylogenetic tree, indicate missing fossil data, and allow us to correct diversity profiles for the group through the Mesozoic and to compare diversification rates, the proportional change in observed species richness as a function of time, at different points (figure 2b, solid line): note how the addition of ghost ranges smoothes the curve.  In particular, peaks in observed diversification rate in the Norian and Campanian-Maastrichtian (bins 3 and 12) are greatly reduced when ghost ranges are introduced.  This is a minimal correction that does not take account of unknown taxon ranges before the first appearance of the older of a pair of sister groups.  In addition, this correction does not address possible upward range extensions.  However, peaks in the earliest, Middle and Late Jurassic are still observed after introduction of ghost ranges (figure 2b, dashed line).

You have just watched professional divination in action.  What these scientists did has no more relation to the true history of the world than the tea leaves in a fortune-teller’s bowl reveal about the origin of tea plants.  This is pure hocus, foisted on a gullible public under the guise of science (i.e., knowledge).  We provided detailed quotes from the paper to reveal how the trickery is done.  You don’t have to understand the jargon.  Just look at how subjective it is.  Why do the popular media publish the bottom-line claims of these wizards as if knowledge has just been gleaned from the world?  This is nothing but Darwinist imagination masquerading as scientific research.
    Notice how the project was saturated with evolutionary religion from start to finish.  The fossils (admittedly scanty) were first placed into the millions-of-years evolutionary story.  This step has already been falsified by the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bone, bringing the millions-of-years assumption crashing down (see 04/26/2008).  Unabashed by that inconvenient fact, the authors continued their vision quest by borrowing other published evolutionary-diviner chants and spells.  It’s only polite, after all, to reference one’s sources.  Then they used Darwin-divination software.  They selected only the tea leaves and lighting guaranteed to support their story.  They published their resultant horoscope in a Darwin-divination journal, then handed it to the Darwin-inebriated press to herald to the unwashed masses.  A colorful image of the Magic Supertree Diagram was displayed to lend an air of mystical authority to the announcement.
    All these shenanigans are designed to create a sense of numinous awe in the public consciousness.  Readers are supposed to bow down and confess that the diviners possess The Wisdom of The World, and that they are to be heeded instead of those wicked, nasty, evil, insane Creationists who proclaim a different message: that the complex bodies of birds, mammals, dinosaurs and insects reveal design, not chance, and that mythical “Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolutions” are incapable of forcing undirected matter to invent complex organs and functions.
    Get wise to the tricks of the wizards.  This is not science.  It’s not even magic.  It’s deception.  The deceivers who believe their own lies are the most to be distrusted.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Evolutionary Theory

Did Lyell Lie a Little?   07/25/2008    
July 25, 2008 — Science is supposed to be a collective process involving presentation of arguments by many people making reference to observational data.  Ideally, no one person’s world view should dominate what other scientists think.  Yet in the history of geology, the figure of Charles Lyell has loomed large as a guiding influence.  With rare exceptions, his principle that geological phenomena should be explained with reference to current processes at current rates (uniformitarianism) dominated geological practice for over 150 years.  Did Lyell “discover” this principle in the data, or impose it on the data?  Indications are coming to light that he not only pre-selected uniformitarian thinking as his own guiding principle, but through force of his writings and personal prestige succeeded in marginalizing opposing views.  His influence channeled generations of geologists to look at evidence through the lens of “slow and gradual” processes.
    Geologist Victor R. Baker had little good to say about Lyell in a book review in Nature.¹  “Geological history turned upside down” is how he titled his review of a second book on the history of geology by Martin J. S. Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2008).  Baker began by stating that “geology also has its own set of attitudes that have accrued during the discipline’s long history.”  Attitudes can be taken as synonymous with presuppositions – those ways of looking at the world that precede actual investigation of the facts.
    Lyell was, of course, preceded by notable figures like Cuvier (a catastrophist who invoked multiple earth-changing events), and gradualists like Comte du Buffon, Werner, Hutton and others who had laid the groundwork for viewing earth history in terms of vast ages of gradual change.  Rudwick had discussed these in his prior work, Bursting the Limits of Time (U of Chicago Press, 2005).²   

Worlds Before Adam looks at how the ideas generated by Cuvier and others came together with more theoretical concepts between 1820 and 1845.
    Rudwick’s books are myth-busters, of which writers of introductory geology texts and popularizations should take note.  In both volumes he counters the Anglocentric view that James Hutton, William Smith and Charles Lyell were the founders of modern geology who shone their British intellectual light onto the darkness of continental musings.  To a large degree, he argues, the reverse was the case.
    Controversially, Rudwick challenges the view that geology’s development is a story of secular progress.

If contemporary lists of the greatest scientists feature a geologist at all, it is usually Lyell, a central figure in Worlds Before Adam.  Lyell intended the title of his great multi-volume opus Principles of Geology (first published in 1830–1833) to recall Isaac Newton’s Principia.  He sought to recast geology on firm foundations, just as Newton had done for physics.  Following his geologist contemporaries and predecessors, Lyell used the understanding of present-day causes to interpret the deep past – a principle termed actualism.  Rudwick explains that Lyell’s excellent descriptions of current geological processes, embellished with observations from his own geological excursions, derived from an original listing by the eighteenth-century German scholar Karl Ernst Adolf von Hoff.  Lyell greatly extended the actualistic method by making pronouncements about how the complex geological processes of the past occurred through the progressive action of small-scale procedures that were still in operation, and by prescribing how geologists should reason about these past processes.

Rudwick shows that Lyell’s ideas met with almost universal criticism.  This was not caused by his advocacy of actualism, which was widely used, nor was any serious denunciation forthcoming from the biblical literalists, who were considered anti-scientific by Lyell and by his critics.  Instead, the geological facts themselves seemed contrary to Lyell’s vision of uniform action by small-scale processes operating over a long time.  Examples include evidence for sudden mass extinctions from records in various ‘bone caves’, the existence of huge blocks sitting erratically out of geological place in the Alps and northern Europe, and deep U-shaped valleys containing streams too small to account for their excavation.  Lyell’s critics held that one should inquire into nature through evidence, rather than through privileged reasoning.

It is an irony of subsequent developments in geology, and a testimony to the success of Lyell’s advocacy, that catastrophism came to be regarded as unconventional.  This perverted Whewell’s original intention, which was to show that the uniformitarians and Lyell were extreme in thinking that geologists should say in advance how nature works, through slow and uniform processes, before interpreting the evidence.

As Terry Mortenson documents in his detailed treatise on the Scriptural geologists, The Great Turning Point, the uniformitarian view was an agenda-driven worldview choice, not a requirement of the evidence.  Many of the Scriptural geologists were at least as qualified (if not more so) than the long-age advocates who wanted to compromise Christianity with the ancient-earth ideas of Hutton.  Lyell himself stated clearly in his letters that his agenda was to divorce geological inquiry from any and all consideration of the Mosaic record in Genesis.  He succeeded uniformly with catastrophic results for free inquiry.  A perusal of the abstracts from Geology any given month reveals Lyell’s paradigm nearly unchallenged.  Article after article is consumed with fitting this or that formation into its presumed place in the billions-of-years geological timescale.  The categories, names and dates are never questioned.  Out-of-the-box thinking plays second fiddle to keeping the story going.
    The Scriptural geologists argued that this approach was as doomed as trying to understand the Roman Empire by choosing to study only the monuments of Rome without reading any contemporaneous eyewitness testimony.  They had strong scientific justifications for evaluating the evidence within a creation and Flood framework.  They argued with scholarship and finesse, showing how the data fit with a global catastrophe as described in the Genesis Flood but did not fit with long ages and gradualism.  Flood geology died out around 1840 for reasons Mortenson gives in the conclusion of his book.  Among them was the fact that the Scriptural geologists acted alone and did not raise up a school of thought or society that could carry on their work.  The uniformitarians won by default and continued through sheer dominance of academia, till Flood geology emerged again (essentially independently from its 1830 predecessor) with the publication of The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris in 1961.  The secular geological societies continue to pay them no attention.  True to the Lyell playbook, they label them “anti-science” only to dismiss them.
    It is apparent from Rudwick’s book that the marginalization of the “biblical literalist” view was an example of a category error in science.  Lyell, Sedgwick, Buckland, Phillips and the other uniformitarians who captured 19th-century academic geology departments did not have to listen to the Scriptural geologists, review their books, answer their arguments or evaluate their evidences.  Why?  Because they had decided, in advance, that the Scriptural geology position was “anti-science.”  Sound familiar?  That is exactly what the Darwinians do to the creationists today.  How convenient it is to rule your opponent out of a debate by definition.  “I don’t have to listen to you; you are a fool.”  The real fool is often the one calling the other one a fool.
    Today’s entry fits well with the yesterday’s on philosophy of science.  What can science know?  Surely it is hard enough interpreting the causal thicket for things that we can observe and repeat in a lab.  Geology is a science necessarily historical in nature.  Is there any good reason for rejecting historical accounts a priori that speak of processes germane to one’s subject matter?  Much less so when the written records show a good fit to the evidence.  What the Bible described as a real event fits what we see: billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth, to borrow Ken Ham’s pithy phrase.
    So did Lyell lie a little?  In view of his negative influence on geology for 150 years, he lied a lot.  He pretended to be promoting objective science but really was imposing his own theological views on geological practice.  The Charlie & Charlie Company (Darwin and Lyell) are partners in crime – defining science so as to downplay the priority of evidence.  Now that we have seen that Lyell had an agenda, and that his “epistemological project” outran his respect for the evidence, it’s time we toss his ideas overboard and let them experience a little catastrophism up close.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods • Theology and Philosophy

It is common ground between Wimsatt and his targets that these ideas about science are idealizations, perhaps even extreme ones.  But Wimsatt argues that they are unhelpful idealizations.  For they idealize away from what we most need to explain: the cognitive success of limited beings.  Treating science as ideally rational is like a developmental biologist using preformationism to model development: the subject matter of the discipline has been idealized away.

The world is messy.  We are fallible and bounded.  Yet science progresses with great reliability.  Wimsatt’s conception of science is organized around these three facts.  Like science itself, his account is partial and incomplete, an approximation organized around the idea of a heuristic.  Many questions are left open, and much could be challenged.

As these book reviews show, it’s overdue to dispense with the triumphalist, progressivist view of science.  None of these factors guarantee science has a grip on truth: (1) it gets a lot of money, (2) a lot of smart people practice it, (3), it appears to be successful, (4) the textbooks portray it as victorious over superstition, (5) it wins Nobel Prizes, (6) it has a “scientific method” (whatever that is), (7) geeks major in it at school, (8) it’s hard and uses a lot of math, (9) it explains things, (10) it uses a peer review system, (11) it has big organizations and publishes impressive journals, or (12) it owns lots of big buildings and museums.
    Clearly science seems “on to something” because of its practical successes in medicine, electronics and the space program, but even then, how much of the success is due to trial and error?  How much is due to practical engineering?  How much do we assume is true simply because it works according to the best theories of the day?  One only need look at history to see many examples of practical success using theories we now believe are wrong.
    The “hard sciences” like physics and chemistry arguably have the best case to make.  They give us practical benefits like lasers, computers and robotic spacecraft that arrive at distant planets on schedule.  But arriving at Saturn and taking pictures of its rings is different from explaining how Saturn got there in the first place.  Even physics gets pretty far out when it comes to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the many-worlds interpretation, or cosmology.  How much more the storytelling that goes on in psychology and evolutionary biology and uniformitarian geology?  It’s not beyond belief to foresee today’s leading theories being tomorrow’s pseudosciences.
Look at how many of science’s claims to epistemic priority have been undermined by philosophers of science:

1. There is no one scientific method.
2. Even if there were a scientific method, exercising a method cannot be done without making assumptions and judgments.
3. There are no demarcation criteria between science and pseudoscience that can reliably keep the good stuff in (physics) and the bad stuff out (e.g., astrology).
4. Scientific discovery follows no rules: it can come from hard work, tacit knowledge, accident, or even dreams.
5. Scientific hypothesis-making follows no rules.  Few scientists arrive at a hypothesis out of raw data without some hunch or intuition of what to look for.  Many scientists have their hypothesis before looking at any evidence at all.
6. Scientific explanations are fraught with logical pitfalls.  Reducing a complex phenomenon into simple principles runs the risk, for instance, of “explaining away” the very thing to be explained. 
7. Induction is subject to serious criticism.  It begs the question that patterns in past experience will continue in the future.
8. Prediction is no reliable guide to good science.  Astrologers and other pseudoscientists often succeed at predictions.  Predictive success runs the risk of affirming the consequent: a logical fallacy.  That’s why Karl Popper denied predictive success has any role in scientific justification.
9. Falsification rarely succeeds in overcoming a paradigm’s web of belief.
10. Scientific reasoning may differ in diligence but not in substance from other kinds of reasoning.
11. The requirement for natural laws is fraught with pitfalls.  Are laws descriptive or normative?  Statements that sound like laws may be nothing more than accidental generalizations.  Laws also make claims that far outrun experience; on what basis can they be justified?  Should natural laws be permitted that have zero instances?  Newton’s did – e.g., “A body in motion acted on by no external forces will continue in a straight line forever.”  Some legitimate sciences, like biology, employ few natural laws, and the ones they do employ are often plagued by exceptions.
12. Science is a vague term with wannabees trying to latch onto the prestige of the word.  Where does one draw the line?  At social science?  political science?  economics?  Christian Science?  Scientology?  The speculations even within a “hard science” like physics are arguably just as unproveable as those of a “soft science” like psychology.

What are you left with?  “What works for our needs right now.”  We call something scientific if it gives us some nice feelings with its explanations, allows us to make useful predictions, or gives us some practical control over the world.  Its grip on reality or truth is tenuous at best.
    Once we get past triumphalist science, we should take a more informed look at other avenues of human knowledge.  History and the humanities might want to re-assert some of their claims in the marketplace of ideas.  Likewise, philosophy and theology have been footstools of imperial science for too long.  Provided that scholars in other fields apply sound principles of reason, use thorough research methods, interact where theories are analyzed and different points of view are considered, and build on prior knowledge, are their methods really so different from those of science?  Aren’t these good practices for any kind of research?
    At the end of the 19th century, science was king.  Two world wars later, and a century of revolutions in philosophy of science later (with no clear winners), it’s time to re-evaluate science’s claims to special epistemic status and cultural priority.  Take another look at that quote by Dr. Daniel Robinson at the top right of this page.
Next headline on:  Education • Theology, Philosophy, or History • Politics and Ethics

Among individual OTUs [operational taxonomic units], Homo sapiens had the maximum support value of 293.9, but the distribution of scores had a long tail leading to 6402 OTUs with no support at all (most of which, 6079, simply were not found in any phylogenetically informative clusters).  The top 10 were all mammals; the top 25 were mammals, angiosperms (tomato, potato, tobacco, rice, and wheat), Drosophila melanogaster, and Drosophila simulans, all with support scores above 60 units.  Of the 171,703 OTUs for which scores were calculated, only 12% achieved minimal phylogenetic support.  The mean support was 0.84, less than the equivalent of each taxon being found in at least one well-resolved and -supported phylogenetic tree.

Charlie’s hanging from his own tree.  Why give him more rope?  It will only make the carcass horizontal instead of vertical.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Genetics

Mangrove as Metaphor   07/22/2008    
July 22, 2008 — The mangrove – that shoreline tree with the salt-tolerant roots that grows into dense thickets – is the fulcrum of two unrelated news stories.  It never met a force it couldn’t handle.  It also provides metaphors for evolution and creation.
    PhysOrg reported that the mangrove is a key to saving lives.  “The replanting of mangroves on the coasts of the Philippines could help save many of the lives lost in the 20-30 typhoons that hit the islands annually,” the article said.  Mangrove forests help people in two ways: they create rich ecosystems that benefit local fisheries and the economy, and they absorb the energy of typhoons and tsunamis (02/18/2005).  Tragically, many of the native mangrove forests have been depleted.  In Mexico, National Geographic reported, mangrove forests are being destroyed by resort development.  This is dooming fisheries and ravaging the local economy.  “The government has overvalued such development and grossly undervalued the vital role mangroves play” in the ecology that benefits humans, a report found.  Asian governments are beginning to understand the value of mangroves.  The PhysOrg article showed that expensive rehabilitation projects are not required.  Often, locally-led, low-budget attempts work best.
    On a completely different topic, science writer Carl Zimmer considered the mangrove as one possible metaphor for what has happened to Darwin’s tree of life.  Its appearance of a tangled thicket represents a little closer the kind of relationships among microorganisms that recent research has discerned, contrary to the sketch of a branching tree Darwin produced in his early notebooks.  Writing for Discovery Magazine, in “Festooning the Tree of Life,” Zimmer illustrated concepts from a paper by Tal Dagan (U of Dusseldorf) in PNAS.¹  Dagan and colleagues analyzed 181 microbe genomes and determined that lateral gene transfer has been a major contributor to the diversity of microbes.  This means that “much of the history of life may not fit the tree metaphor very well any more,” Zimmer said.
    Zimmer produced a series of illustrations of the original Darwinian branching tree getting all tangled up.  He showed that lateral gene transfer produces cross-connections that scramble the data so thoroughly, the tree pattern is no longer discernible.  After crossing out tree, bush and mangrove thicket, Zimmer selected “Gordian Knot” as the best metaphor for the result.  “This new picture is a far cry from Darwin’s sketch, and thank goodness for that,” he ended.  “A science that doesn’t move forward for 150 years isn’t much of a science at all.  But we may need some new metaphors to help us catch up with it.”

Science has moved forward, all right.  It has moved so far forward since Darwin’s time, his speculative worldview of design without a designer has been thoroughly scrambled.  A Gordian knot is not the illustration Darwin projected about how life changes.  Look at Zimmer’s last diagram.  It requires faith to see any tree at all.  Why even maintain the metaphor?  Zimmer’s own reasoning has falsified the original tree diagram and made it superfluous.
    A mangrove thicket, by contrast, is a tightly-knit community of trees, birds, fish, insects and animals all living together simultaneously and harmoniously as a system.  Who really needs to believe they evolved from one another’s microbe ancestors over mythical millions of years?  If you want a worldview that has withstood wave after wave of scientific discoveries, think creation.
Next headline on:  Plants • Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

Watch the two videos in order.  They communicate to the heart.  Where else in the universe could conditions exist for such behavior?  What impassionate physical laws brought about the happy dance?  Think – and then thank (Acts 14:17).  The Creator has not left himself without witness, Paul said.  Turn away from worthless things.  The Creator has given us blessings that fill our hearts with joy in order that we would seek Him, though He is not far from each one of us (Acts 17).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Stars

Praise God for progress on all debilitating diseases regardless of how scientists find them, but this one has special significance for those who have been watching the debate over embryonic stem cells.  It illustrates the disconnect between the researchers actually finding cures and the scientific establishments who keep pushing embryonic stem cells (ELS cells), which require the killing of fertilized human embryos.  Adult stem cells cause no ethical concerns.
    Here is another tremendously hopeful example of a potential cure from the use of adult stem cells.  The list of near-miraculous cures has been growing for years now.  Big Science keeps pushing ELS cells, tricking voters into spending billions of taxpayer dollars on stem cell research centers, yet still have nothing to show for it.  They even admit that any treatments usable by doctors may be over a decade away – or more.  As a citizen and voter, don’t expect scientific institutions, with eyes on Nobel Prizes and international prestige, to do the right thing.  Doing the right thing has to start with you and me.
Next headline on:  Health • Politics and Ethics

Cellular Trucks Use Moving Highways   07/18/2008    
July 18, 2008 — Imagine how cool it would be to get in your car and have the road do the driving.  The highway would stretch or shrink, moving this way or that, till you saw your destination and hopped off.  That appears to be what the cargo-bearing motors do in the cells in your body.  A new paper by a team of American biophysicists published the hypothesis in PNAS this week.¹
    Cell biologists have known for a long time that molecular motors move cargo around on long strands of protein, called microtubules, that form an intracellular highway network (12/04/2003) called the cytoskeleton.  One observation that has been confusing, though, is why the motors seem to just move back and forth (bidirectional transport) instead of making progress toward a destination.  It doesn’t seem to make any sense.  Would a car that has to get somewhere just keep shifting between forward and reverse gears?  It starts to make better sense when you consider that the road is also doing the moving.
    The situation in a cell is much more complex than suggested above.  The cell is a crowded environment, with enzymes and parts moving about rapidly.  In addition, there is thermal motion adding to the hustle and bustle.  Microtubules grow and shrink as their molecular components are added and removed constantly.  Cargo-carrying motors, like dynein and kinesin, attach and detach from their freeways all the time.  It seems chaotic, but the cell works.  Somehow it is a powerhouse of organization and function.
    The authors of this new idea proposed that any given cargo vesicle has multiple motors attached to multiple tracks at a time.  These motors can work in concert, tugging on the microtubul