Plant Perfume Manipulates Pollinator Behavior   08/31/2008    
August 31, 2008 — You’re a plant, stuck in the ground.  Around you are organisms with wings flitting freely about.  You need to get them to land on your flowers, but not linger too long.  How do you do it?  Attract them with sweet smells, but send them away with a bitter aftertaste.  That’s how the tobacco plant manipulates its pollinators (hawkmoths and hummingbirds), according to Science.¹  The aftertaste of nicotine is intended to discourage the pollinator from lingering, so that it will be more likely to spread pollen among different plants.
    The scientists found that birds and moths tended to linger too long around the sweet nectar when the nicotine was absent.  Making them drink and move on spreads the plant’s genes around, which helps the plant prevent inbreeding, and forces the pollinators to visit more flowers for their nutrition needs and so get more exercise.
    Robert R. Raguso (Cornell), commenting on a paper in the same issue,² said, “This study adds to a growing list of ruses by which plants manipulate pollinator movement to optimize gene flow.”  He also noted that the seeds of the tobacco plant, a Mojave desert resident named Nicotiana attenuata, read smoke signals.  “It is a fire-adapted desert annual that can spend decades as a dormant seed, awaiting a smoke signal that will trigger germination.”
    Raguso noted that this subtle interaction between plant and pollinator would not have been noticed without attention to the plant perfumes.  “Through the ‘invisible hand’ of floral volatiles, the self-interests of tobacco plants and their pollinators are mediated with an apparent net outcome of mutual benefit.”
    Neither the paper or the review mentioned how evolution might have brought about this mutual interaction.  A review of the paper on Science Daily, however, attributed the success of the plants to “the dictates of their Darwinian fitness.”

The authors presumably presume that Darwin’s mechanism could achieve the mutualistic symbiosis.  Creationists might agree that natural selection could intensify the symbiosis, leaving behind only the most capable at it in the harsher post-Flood environment, but how the symbiosis arose in the first place is a different matter (cf. 02/26/2007).  Plants possess an astonishing chemistry set.  They can produce hundreds of complex organic molecules with finely-tuned signals for the animals they need (see 02/21/2006).  Other molecules “talk” to nearby plants or deter predators (see 04/26/2007).  Organic chemists would have a major challenge duplicating this feat.  These molecules don’t just “emerge” or “arise” (favorite Darwinist words) by undirected processes of chance.  They are coded in the genes.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.*
Next headline on:  Plants • Birds • Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Facts

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*Astute readers will notice that nicotine was designed as a deterrent.  Hummingbirds and hawkmoths don’t perch on the plant and smoke the disgusting stuff.  They flee from it.

Describing Star and Galaxy Growth Without Looking   08/30/2008    
August 30, 2008 — Astronomers seem to know a lot about star birth and galaxy growth.  This is a strange thing, since no one has watched the process from start to finish.  Stars and galaxies are clearly observed in various shapes, sizes, and patterns.  How reliable is it to arrange them into an evolutionary sequence?
    One way is with computers.  National Geographic News reported on work by astronomers at University of Edinburgh who got their computers to generate stars as spin-offs of black holes.  Imagine a gas cloud approaching a black hole.  “It begins rotating, and gas at the leading edge experiences a kickback of energy that flings it outward from the black hole and forms new stars.”  One astronomer outside the study had this to say: “As satisfying as the new results are, the case for disk fragmentation as the origin for the disk stars remains unproven.”  He pointed out that no such clouds are seen coming anywhere near the supermassive black hole assumed to exist at the center of the Milky Way.
    How do galaxies grow?  That was the question asked by the title of an article on PhysOrg.  More audaciously, Science Daily added the line, “Massive Galaxies Caught in the Act of Merging.”  It seems that the European Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Hubble Space Telescope found some cluster members 4 billion light-years away that show peculiar arrangements that suggest mergers are happening.  “This discovery provides unique and powerful validation of hierarchical formation as manifested in both galaxy and cluster assembly,” the article claims.  Not only that, the astronomers claim that the stars were born 3 billion years earlier and were not affected by the mergers.

Science should thrive on controversy and alternative models.  It is disturbing to see astronomers make statements that go far beyond the evidence with impunity.  Imagination may roam free among the stars, but the fact is, our bodies are stuck on Planet Earth.  Our theories should be grounded in that reality.
Next headline on:  Astronomy

These are egregious examples of pronouncements made as fact when they are indistinguishable from theory.  They observed a bright cluster at a certain distance, that’s all.  The others observed dwarf galaxies in orbit, that’s all.  This does not justify appealing to imponderable substances and occult forces.
    Cosmologists today have lost all shame.  They make theoretical pronouncements as statements of fact.  It would be an improvement if they began each statement with “According to our belief system, such and such is suggested by certain obscure and indirect observations.”  But no; they feel empowered to speak ex cathedra on things they cannot possibly know.  This is what happens when you let scientists, who put their pants on the same way as the rest of us, promote themselves to guru status.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Dating Methods

Plasticity is not only associated with self-organization.  Molecular self-assembly can also be plastic.  It is now recognized that many proteins have no intrinsic three-dimensional structure – their forms and functions change depending on their microenvironment, including other proteins that may or may not be present.  The structure and function of macromolecular complexes can therefore change dramatically over the course of evolution with minimal genetic change, or as a side-effect of other changes, not driven by adaptation.  This is quite relevant to the evolution of highly complex structures like the bacterial flagellum, a problem constantly harped on by advocates of “Intelligent Design.”

The National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott told me that her organization does not support self-organization because it is confused with intelligent design, i.e., “design-beyond-laws” – as Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University describes it.  NCSE also pays lucrative fees to conference speakers who keep the lid on self-organization by beating the drum for Darwinian natural selection.  NCSE and its cronies completely demonize the intelligent design community, even those who agree evolution happened.  Religion is not the target since even the National Academy of Sciences embraces religion.  So it seems the real target is those who fail to kneel before the Darwinian theory of natural selection and prevent the further fattening of the Darwinian industry tapeworm.
    NAS and NASA/NAI in their respective publications Science, Evolution and Creationism, and Astrobiology Primer have also kept out any discussion of self-organization. What is your response to this? Why do you think such organizations continue to feed unenlightened information to the public at public expense?

This is not at all valid and I think it’s a big mistake because we know there are non-linear and what I call saltational mechanisms of embryonic development that could have contributed -- and I’m virtually certain they did -- to evolution.  It was Darwin who said that if any organ is shown to have formed not by small increments but by jumps, his theory would therefore be wrong.  [Emphasis in original].

Won’t it be fun if Darwinism collapses just in time for Darwin Day?  There was going to be a big celebration in 1992, remember, for Columbus on the 500th anniversary of his voyage to the New World.  The party fizzled, however, when activists got all untied about his supposed links to racism, exploitation, disease, and slavery.  (Whether this was true to history or not is beside the point.)  Maybe that’s the secret.  Hire a bunch of live-at-home dropouts and history professors who have nothing better to do than protest things.  Convince them that Darwin brought racism, sexism, genocide and a host of other evils.  (That this is true to history is the point.)  Turn them loose, get the media focused on them, raise a ruckus and watch Darwin become very politically incorrect on campus.  What a surprised look we will see on Eugenie Scott’s face when the people chanting “Down with Darwin!” are not religious creationists, but a motley mix of radicals, liberals, progressives, diversity departments and evolutionary biologists like Stuart Newman.
    This is not the first time the saltationists have attacked the gradualists.  It’s part of a repeated tug-of-war that resurfaces every decade or two, because insiders bred on Darwinism know that gradualism via natural selection is “implausible and incorrect.”  The Darwin Party hangs on for dear life because they know all is lost if gradualism goes.  No matter what you call saltationism, whether punctuated equilibria or phenotypic plasticity or self-assembly, it is tantamount to naturalistic miracles.  Can anyone really believe an outboard motor of 40 essential parts just self-assembled without design?  Such faith conjures up visions of tornados in junkyards and explosions in print shops.  The Darwinians know that intelligent design people and creationists love this stuff.  It makes their job so easy.  A dinosaur lays an egg and a bird hatches out.  Yeee-haw!
    Join the resistance!  Don’t kneel before the Darwinian theory of natural selection.  Prevent the further fattening of the Darwinian industry tapeworm!  (Thank you, Susan, for that picturesque metaphor.)  For those of us outside the Church of Darwin, who think with our brains instead of our imaginations, we’ll get our miracles, thank you, from the intelligent Designer who has both the purpose and the power to execute them.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

Angry Atheists Arrogate Authority in Science   08/28/2008    
August 28, 2008 — Can science contribute to religious studies?  Only to destroy it, think some atheistic scientists.  “In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism,” announced Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne in a letter to Nature.¹
    Cobb and Coyne were taking issue with Nature’s editorial July 17 about John Templeton’s legacy.²  Though the editorial had stated that “This publication would turn away from religion in seeking explanations for how the world works, and believes that science is likely to go further in explaining human moral impulses than some religious people will welcome,” and “Thus it shares a degree of suspicion with many in the scientific community at any attempt by religiously driven organizations to fund science,” this was not enough for the correspondents, because at the end, Nature said, “critics’ total opposition to the Templeton Foundation’s unusual mix of science and spirituality is unwarranted.”
    Nothing short of total opposition was good enough for Cobb and Coyne.  “Surely science is about finding material explanations of the world,” they asserted, drawing a comparison that spirituality is to religion as intelligent design is to creationism.  “There is a fundamental conflict here, one that can never be reconciled until all religions cease making claims about the nature of reality.”  In their view, science can study what makes people religious, but religious people have nothing to say about the external world.  They made suggestions for scientific research projects of religion.  “One could consider psychological studies of why humans are superstitious and believe impossible things, and comparative sociological studies of religion using materialist explanations of the rise and fall of the world's belief systems.”
    Over at CERN in Switzerland, the search for the “God particle” is beginning with the commencement of the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  The LHC sets a new record for energy in its particle collision capabilities.  Scientists hope to catch the theoretical Higgs boson, a particle alleged to have emerged in the Big Bang that holds matter together.  Peter Higgs, 79, who predicted the particle, will be very puzzled if it doesn’t exist.  News Daily said that, as an atheist, he angrily rejects the designation “God particle” for his theoretical entity.  Even the name of God seems to rub him the wrong way.
    It would be hard to find a religious person with as much antipathy for science as some scientific atheists have for religion.  Evolution News reported that P. Z. Myers, author of the anti-creationist blog Pharyngula, wanted to desecrate the Eucharist in his latest hate campaign against all things religious.  Commentator Michael Egnor pointed out that Christians typically grant free speech rights to such people, no matter how repellant their views, while Myers seeks to legally coerce those on the other side, such as Christian doctors unwilling to perform abortions, to violate their moral convictions.
    Some atheistic evolutionists are less bellicose, but just as stalwart.  An example is David Sloan Wilson, who was interviewed for the River Cities Reader.  His “Darwin Project” is out to convince everyone that evolutionary theory is the best explanation for all things natural.  Whether there is anything outside of material nature, he was clear.  Religion has a horizontal component and a vertical component, he said, but the vertical component (man’s relation to God) is “100% social construction.”  In other words, the self-admitted atheist holds out no space for arguing about the possible existence of God.  Rather than fight religion directly, though, Wilson tries to defuse concerns by stressing that most of religious activity involves the horizontal component, which he thinks evolutionary theory explains nicely.  Wilson doesn’t use his atheism as a battering ram.  He calls atheism a “stealth religion,” something to sneak into people’s minds while disarming them with illustrations of the explanatory elegance of evolution (see 12/21/2005).  Whether the tactic be hardline or diplomatic, though, the results are the same: evolutionists view religion as an evil to be conquered by a “scientific” worldview that only admits atheism.
    Maybe science can study religion in a non-combative way.  News Daily reported that the Dead Sea Scrolls are going online for the first time.  Unreadable fragments are becoming decipherable thanks to NASA technology developed by a JPL retiree that can image previously unreadable fragments with spectral analysis.  Bible Places Blog quoted a portion of a New York Times report.  The most famous of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the complete Isaiah Scroll, copied well before Jesus was born, with its well-known and detailed Messianic prophecies such as those in Isaiah 9 and Isaiah 53.  Lee Strobel recounts in the film The Case for Christ that the chance of one person fulfilling just 48 of the dozens of specific Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament is one chance in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.  Mathematics is, they say, the language of science.

Historians of science know, sadly, that the “warfare thesis” that science and religion are hopelessly at odds is a mistaken and indefensible myth propagated by a vocal minority of religion-hating dogmatists in the late 19th century (01/06/2008 commentary).  Too bad leading scientists today haven’t learned their history.
    Remember that some communist prison guards converted when they saw how patiently Christians endured inhumane treatment.  Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers are playing a useful role.  Their rhetoric is so over the top, out of control, hateful and irrational, it makes great advertising for their opponents.  Consider some of the gems Coyne has given us in the past.

Coyne said evolution was useless (08/30/2006).  He argues with his evo-devo opponents but oversimplifies natural selection (06/29/2005).  He said his job was to fight creationism (10/05/2004) but even he was startled by the amount of vitriol Dawkins had against religion, calling him a fierce advocate of scientism (04/23/2003).  Later, though, he teamed up with Dawkins to call creationism laughable (09/02/2005).  Yet his own book on Speciation could not explain the origin of species (07/30/2004).  He admitted that evolution is a “science of generalizations” with few specific “laws of evolution” (12/18/2007).  He said “Like evolution itself, there are no general rules that apply to the origin of species” (11/13/2003).  Most recently, he fought in the Dumb vs Dumber brawl between evolutionists while wearing a CISsy T-shirt (08/11/2008).  Now he is backed into a corner trying to defend the claim that evolution is science, yet he has the gall to claim religion is superstition.  This is the guy who was as shook up at the collapse of the Peppered Myth as a boy finding out that Santa Claus was his dad (07/05/2002).

Yes, Jerry, keep talking.  Bystanders are beginning to wonder.  Meanwhile, CEH will silently continue citing infractions for impersonating a scientist (09/30/2007 commentary), and politely rapping the knuckles of those who filch from the smorgasbord of Christian presuppositions without paying the bill.
Next headline on:  Physics • Bible and Theology

Natural selection wants us to be crazy – at least a little bit.  While true debilitating insanity is not nature’s intention, many mental health issues may be byproducts of the over-functional human brain, some researchers claim.
    As humans improved their gathering, hunting and cooking techniques, population size increased and resources became more limited (in part because we hunted or ate some species to extinction).  As a result, not everyone could get enough to eat.  Cooperative relationships were critical to ensuring access to food, whether through farming or more strategic hunting, and those with blunt social skills were unlikely to survive, explained David C. Geary, author of “The Origin of Mind” (APA, 2004), and a researcher at the University of Missouri.
    And thus, a diversity of new mental abilities, and disabilities, unfurled.

Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose.
    For example, the first of our ancestors to empathize and read facial expressions had a striking advantage.  They could confirm their own social status and convince others to share food and shelter.  But too much emotional acuity – when individuals overanalyze every grimace – can cause a motivational nervousness about one’s social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.

Certain types of depression, however, Geary continued, may be advantageous.  The lethargy and disrupted mental state can help us disengage from unattainable goals – whether it is an unrequited love or an exalted social position.  Evolution likely favored individuals who pause and reassess ambitions, instead of wasting energy being blindly optimistic.
    Natural selection also likely held the door open for disorders such as attention deficit.  Quickly abandoning a low stimulus situation was more helpful for male hunters than female gatherers, writes Nesse, which may explain why boys are five times more likely than girls to be hyperactive.
    Similarly, in its mildest form, bipolar disorder can increase productivity and creativity.  Bipolar individuals (and their relatives) also often have more sex than average people, Geary noted.
    Sex, and survival of one’s kids, is the whole point – as far as nature is concerned.  Sometimes unpleasant mental states lead to greater reproductive success, said Geary, “so these genes stay in the gene pool.”

That scientists and science writers can continue to write such self-refuting nonsense with audacity is a sign that we have much work to do.  Darwinian thinking is a blight on rationality and a force for wickedness (see recent example on Evolution News).  It excuses everything that is evil as the inevitable consequence of forces beyond our control.  But then it turns around and engages in rational discussion as if rationality had any meaning.  It’s like vacuuming out a skull and filling it with gravel, and expecting it to still think.
    This hypothesis is crazy on multiple levels.  If everyone is crazy, then rationality is what is truly crazy.  On what basis could anyone claim that mental illness is “abnormal”?  Why would anyone have a longing for joy?  From whence did “social lubricants” arise?  And if natural selection favored bipolar nuts by making them promiscuous, then the eugenicists were nuts to interfere.  Obviously, you are more fit if insane.  The eugenics advocates should have sterilized the philosophers instead of the imbeciles.
    Darwin put the inmates in charge of the science asylum.  The nature in human nature is to be rational and moral.  Rationality and morality refer to things that are true, universal, necessary and certain – the opposite of natural selection’s contingency and purposelessness.  The Starving Storytellers, under the banner of Charlie, their patron saint, have made a mess in the halls of science (12/22/2003 commentary).  A complete housecleaning is in order.
    For those of you who still think and think that thinking matters, fight back against nonsense.  Enlighten these poor fools who insist on shooting their own brains out.  Help them understand that they cannot say such things.  Give them shock therapy for their Yoda complex (09/25/2006 commentary).  Help them off their pedestals as self-styled rational scientists, and welcome them into the pool of crazy, selfish, hypocritical, sex-crazed objects of natural selection.  After a few minutes of grunting and scratching their armpits, maybe they will get the message: “This is crazy.”
Next headline on:  Evolution • Human Body • Dumb Ideas

Our research disputes a major pillar holding up the long-held assumption that Homo sapiens were more advanced than Neanderthals.  It is time for archaeologists to start searching for other reasons why Neanderthals became extinct while our ancestors survived.  Technologically speaking, there is no clear advantage of one tool over the other.  When we think of Neanderthals, we need to stop thinking in terms of ‘stupid’ or ‘less advanced’ and more in terms of ‘different.’

Are you angry at the evolutionists who misled generations of impressionable students with their myth of the stupid Neanderthal caveman?  Why not?
    Look at another atrocity stemming from evolutionary doctrine.  Read this entry on New Scientist about the “forgotten scandal of the Soviet apeman.”  Ilia Ivanov, wanting to vindicate Darwin by demonstrating that humans were closely related to apes, tried to breed them together.  Notice the line: “When Ivanov approached the government, he stressed how proving Darwin right would strike a blow against religion, which the Bolsheviks were struggling to stamp out.”
    Don’t think for a minute that today’s evolutionary doctrine has now been purged of all its pernicious motivations.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Education • Politics and Ethics

Use Your Cow Compass   08/25/2008    
August 25, 2008 — Cattle and deer seem to align themselves to magnetic north.  German and Czech scientists, reporting in PNAS,¹ used aerial observations to detect the tendency of grazing herds to line up in north-south directions.  The alignment was to magnetic north, not true north—indicating a sensitivity to earth’s magnetic field, as known to exist in migrating birds, lobsters and sea turtles (03/23/2004).
    They did not have an explanation for this apparent sixth sense in mammals, but remarked that “It is amazing that this ubiquitous conspicuous phenomenon apparently has remained unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.”  They speculated that it might be involved in predator avoidance or some physiological function such as temperature regulation.
    The correlation may just be a statistical fluke.  About two-thirds of the herd members appeared to line up on a magnetic north-south orientation.  If established, “Our findings open horizons for the study of magnetoreception in general and are of potential significance for applied ethology (husbandry, animal welfare),” the authors said.  “They challenge neuroscientists and biophysics to explain the proximate mechanisms.”
    The BBC News also reported the story.  PhysOrg asked whether this “surprising discovery” of a magnetic sense might also be detected in humans – at least those who follow the herd.

What this means is that you will have a statistically better chance of getting your buck trophy if you look east or west.  And cowboys will never look the same with large electromagnets on the backs of their saddles.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Amazing Facts

Did they find a sequence from positive-ion neutralization to histone neutralization?  No; their evolutionary belief dictates that they use imagination and speculation to invent stories to link different organisms with common ancestry.  There are puzzles to solve here, for sure.  Why would a marine alga have so much more DNA than a human?  Why would it use a different method of neutralizing the DNA?  Don’t let these puzzles overshadow the major question: how genetic information arose that could be systematically and accurately copied, then condensed by orders of magnitude into a tiny space.  If you ever figure out how to compact your wardrobe into a shoebox, one thing is certain: you will not have done it by an evolutionary process.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Cell Biology • Marine Biology • Amazing Facts

Flatlife Has More Genes Than It Needs   08/23/2008    
August 23, 2008 — The genome of a placozoan (“flat animal”) shows more complexity than one would expect for a simple life form.  According to evolutionists, it shows that even a barely-differentiated animal presumably ancestral to complex animals had the genetic toolkit of its more-advanced descendents.
    Trichoplax adhaerens is a slimy-looking thing that sticks to aquarium walls.  Science Daily has a picture of it.  The article says the genome is “confounding [the] array of complex capabilities” because it “appears to harbor a far more complex suite of capabilities than meets the eye.”  Although the organism only has 4 or 5 cell types and no organs or gut, its genome “encodes a panoply of signaling genes and transcription factors usually associated with more complex animals.”  This includes genes for neurons even though it has no nerves, and hints of genes for sexual reproduction even though it usually divides by fission.  It even has a “parts list” for embryo formation but has not been observed to go through an embryo stage.
    Another surprise is that T. adhaerens contains 80% of the same introns as humans – in much the same arrangement.  Introns have been considered genomic “junk” that must be removed during translation.  That these parts are “conserved” (unevolved) from a primitive animal to a human being seems to point to a function for introns and their specific arrangements.  Fruit flies and other advanced life, though, have far fewer introns.
    The original paper in Nature¹ summarized the surprises:

The compact genome shows remarkable complexity, including conserved gene content, gene structure and synteny [i.e., conserved linkage without requiring colinearity] relative to human and other eumetazoan genomes.  Despite the absence of any known developmental program and only a modest number of cell types, the Trichoplax genome encodes a rich array of transcription factors and signalling genes that are typically associated with embryogenesis and cell fate specification in eumetazoans, as well as other genes that are consistent with cryptic patterning of cells, unobserved life history stages and/or complex execution of biological processes such as fission and embryonic development in these enigmatic creatures.

• It’s a puzzle why Trichoplax, a seemingly primitive animal, has such a complex genome.
• Biologists had once assumed that complicated body plans and complex genomes went hand in hand.  But T. adhaerens’s genome ... “highlights a disconnect between molecular and morphological complexity,” says Mark Martindale, an experimental embryologist at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.  Adds Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, “It is now completely clear that genomic complexity was present very early on” in animal evolution.
• Despite being developmentally simple--with no organs or many specialized cells--the placozoan has counterparts of the transcription factors that more complex organisms need to make their many body parts and tissues.
• “Many genes viewed as having particular ‘functions’ in bilaterians or mammals turn out to have much deeper evolutionary history than expected, raising questions about why they evolved,” says Douglas Erwin, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C.

The predictions of evolutionists that they would find Darwin’s tree of life in the genomes of organisms has been falsified.  Genomes do not show a straightforward progression from simple to complex, with gradual acquisition of new function over time.  The evo-talk in the article and paper sounds forced and superfluous.  It may be “tempting” to “think of it” as a primitive evolutionary thing, but moral philosophy admonishes us to overcome temptation.
    The genetic toolkit appears established early on.  In addition, gene count, chromosome number, and intron content appear indifferent to evolutionary relationships.  Trichoplax shows that simple organisms can have complex genes they don’t use – another contradiction with evolutionary expectations.  The relationship between genotype and phenotype appears much more elaborate than any evolutionary biologist expected.  Whatever is going on, it is time to think outside Darwin’s black box.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Evolution

One other interesting detail in the article is that the humans who made the paintings apparently shared the cave with large, dangerous predators: cave bears.  Hundreds of cave bear bones were found in the cave.  Who were the hunters and who were the huntees?  Maybe they took up residence in different seasons.
    This article is a humorous look into the dogmatism of certain evolutionists who want to maintain their beliefs in spite of the evidence.  Throw out the evidence, says one; it is leading to a “gross distortion” of the “cognitive abilities” of early man.  Being interpreted, this must mean that what provides an accurate picture of human history is the fact-free tenacity of imagination.
    None of this grants an inch to the grossly distorted dating methods of evolutionary anthropologists.  Despite their bluff about calibration, radiocarbon dating is only as “accurate” as its untestable assumptions.  A global event like a Flood (based on written records) would have drastically changed the calibration curve and put all this art well within a Biblical timeframe.  A creationist would expect man’s cognitive abilities to be complete from the beginning, just as revealed by the Chauvet data.
    If you don’t buy that, then we ask again (01/19/2001): do you buy the notion that for tens of thousands of years – multiple times the length of all recorded human history – people physically and mentally our equals (or superiors) drew pictures of horses on cave walls, but never figured out one could get a lot more done by hopping on their backs and taking a ride?
    For as far back as we have records, men have ridden horseback for travel, hunting and warfare.  Native Americans introduced to horses quickly became expert riders.  They could fire arrows in all directions at a full gallop, bareback, using primitive bridles.  Yet we are expected to believe that the master artisans of Chauvet cave, very familiar with all the mammals in their environment, drawing magnificent steeds to perfection, never thought about that?  How plausible is it that at least 25,000 years passed, brave men hunting all kinds of large animals the whole time, before someone got daring enough to leap onto Old Paint and shout, “ride ’em cowboy!”?  It’s downright aurignacious to imagine such a thing.  Even a Magdalene would think it silly.
    Including the Chauvet Cave data does not lead to a gross distortion of early man’s cognitive abilities.  Believing the evolutionary story with its horseless economy leads to a gross distortion of the cognitive abilities of modern Homo gullibilis.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

This is an intriguing discovery.  The team did not find a mixture of dinosaur bones and human bones in the same strata, but the close juxtaposition calls for explanation.  Evolutionists would have us believe 65 million years separated the Cretaceous and Holocene deposits.  The strata are classified, and their ages are inferred, however, by the bones they contain, and their presumed position in the evolutionary story.  Where are all the intervening epochs between the two deposits?
    These deposits could be fit into a Biblical context.  For one thing, notice that no one is claiming the human remains are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years old.  Given uncertainty, they fit within the post-Flood world.  The dinosaur-containing strata may have been Flood deposits.  As people separated in the decades and centuries after the Flood (especially after the Tower of Babel), a people group found this rich area of greenery, lakes, fish and wildlife – the next best thing after Eden.  (If any post-Flood dinosaurs were around, the humans could have killed them off as a nuisance.)
    Centuries of successful human habitation could have taken place here before the Egyptian civilization began.  After the Flood, many large lakes remained inland.  They eventually dried up, forcing the inhabitants who left these burial plots and artifacts to look for greener pastures.  The researchers believe a thousand-year period of dry conditions intervened between the two populations who came here.
    This is a discovery that deserves watching.  The paper says, “We are just beginning to understand the anatomical and cultural diversity that existed within the Sahara during the Holocene.”  There appears to be nothing here that rules out a Biblical post-Flood scenario, and a number of things that suggest it.  The dinosaur fossils are in good condition.  Can the 65-million-year hiatus between the adjacent strata really be supported?  Let’s watch for more surprised looks on the faces of the scientists, and not take their Darwin-drenched dating assumptions for granted.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Dating Methods • Early Man • Bible

The average Western adult metabolizes hundreds of grams of carbohydrates per day, half of which is used as an energy source for the brain.  To benefit from these ingested carbohydrates, they must first be broken down into simple sugars, such as glucose, and absorbed through the epithelial cells of the intestine.  The glucose must then be reabsorbed in the kidneys.  On page 810 of this issue, Faham et al. report a major advance in elucidating the molecular mechanism by which this highly effective absorption is realized.

Riddle: where would Darwinism go if it entered a cell by one of these transporter machines?  Answer: first, it would be tagged as foreign and dangerous contraband.  Then, a kinesin would carry it down a microtubule to a proteasome, where it would be cut up into little bits, then ejected outside where it belongs.  Where would Intelligent Design go?  It doesn’t need the transporter, because it’s already in the nucleus, encoded as DNA.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Does Cancer Illustrate Fitness?   08/13/2008    
August 13, 2008 — Most people think of health and vitality when they hear the word “fitness.”  Why, then, does an article on Science Daily apply the word to one of the biggest scourges of mankind?  “Scientists from The Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and the University of California discovered that the underlying process in tumor formation is the same as for life itself—evolution.”  The article even applies Spencer’s notorious phrase to the evolution of cancer: “Survival Of The Fittest: Even Cancer Cells Follow The Laws Of Evolution.”

After analyzing a half million gene mutations, the researchers found that although different gene mutations control different cancer pathways, each pathway was controlled by only one set of gene mutations.
    This suggests that a molecular “survival of the fittest” scenario plays out in every living creature as gene mutations strive for ultimate survival through cancerous tumors.

Good grief, cancer is not fitness.  Evolutionists (at least those who think consistently) have to believe that everything destructive is just as worthy of our respect and admiration as everything good and beautiful, because it is just another manifestation of the mindless, senseless, directionless, purposeless “laws of evolution” (which are not laws at all in the classical scientific sense: where are the equations?)
    So while millions of their fellow humans are suffering from cancer, looking to science for treatments and cures, there are a few researchers who call themselves fellows of the “institute of advanced studies” who have nothing better to do than tell jokes about On the Origin of Tumors by Natural Selection, and the Preservation of Favored Mistakes in the Struggle for Death.  Get a life.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Catch the thrill of discovery.  Read some of the responses of space enthusiasts to these pictures at Unmanned Spaceflight, and learn more about them on the Planetary Society blog.  Pictures like this are hard to come by: it takes a spaceship costing billions of dollars, and years of flight and planning.  Soon we will have more to say about Enceladus.  For now, enjoy history in the making.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Amazing Facts

[Sean] Carroll [U of Wisconsin] argued that mutations in cis regions were a way to soft-pedal evolutionary change.  Genes involved in establishing body plans and patterns have such a broad reach--affecting a variety of tissues at multiple stages of development--that mutations in their coding regions can be catastrophic.  In contrast, changes in cis elements, several of which typically work in concert to control a particular gene’s activity, are likely to have a much more limited effect.  Each element serves as a docking site for a particular transcription factor, some of which stimulate gene expression and others inhibit it.  This modularity makes possible an infinite number of cis-element combinations that finely tune gene activity in time, space, and degree, and any one sequence change is unlikely to be broadly disruptive.

But Hoekstra and Coyne say this enthusiasm doesn’t rest on solid evidence.  In their Evolution article, they picked apart these examples and the rationale behind them.  They pulled quotes from Carroll’s work to criticize his fervor and berated the evo-devo community for charging full speed ahead with the cis-regulatory hypothesis.  “Evo devo’s enthusiasm for cis-regulatory changes is unfounded and premature,” they wrote.  Changes in gene regulation are important, says Hoekstra, but they are not necessarily caused by mutations in cis elements.  “They do not have one case where it’s really nailed down,” she says.

“I am not trying to say that regulatory sequence is the most important thing in evolution,” he told Science.  But when it comes to what’s known about the genetic underpinnings of morphological evolution, “it’s a shutout” in favor of cis elements, he asserts.

With so much unknown, “we don’t want to spend our time bickering,” says [Gregory] Wray [Duke U].  He and others worry that Hoekstra, Coyne, and Carroll have taken too hard a line and backed themselves into opposite corners.  Coyne doesn’t seem to mind the fuss, but Hoekstra is more circumspect about their Evolution paper.  “I stand by the science absolutely,” she says.  “But if I did it over again, I would probably tone down the language.”

The vast majority of the public, including high school students, never sees the bickering between Darwiniacs over the most fundamental aspects of their theory.  That’s why you need to see it exposed here.
    The lesson in this story is that almost nothing is understood in their tale at a scientific level.  Evolutionists want us to believe that humans have bacteria ancestors.  All the amazing structures in all of life had to emerge from a simple, primordial cell by some undirected biological process at the genetic level.  When it comes to positive evidence for such a fantastic, astonishing claim, the paltry best these true believers could exhibit were inconclusive effects of mutations or regulatory elements on existing complex species: reversible changes to the amount of armor on stickleback fish, bristles or the lack of them on fruit flies (with no idea whether they provide any adaptive advantage), slightly longer digits on mice, and other trivia.  When it comes to negative evidence, look at how both sides falsified each other.  The charges and counter-charges were hilarious.  They go like this:
“You have no evidence.”
“Oh yeah?  Well, we have a lot more than you!”
This is like the Dumb and Dumber T-shirts you see friends wearing at amusement parks.  We’ve taken off the Darwiniacs’ white lab coats and shown you their T-shirts: not just Dumb and Dumber, but Fussy and Fussier, and Deceived and Deceiver.  Should such people be “preaching to the general public” that “they know how evolution works, based on such thin evidence”?  Look under the T-shirt and you see just a skeleton with no scientific fitness.  “Where’s the beef?” indeed.  These Popeyes (05/31/2005) will find no salvation in spinach (01/24/2005).  Their ID nemesis, already fit to the hilt, has already eaten it all.  Skinny lightweights only win in the cartoons.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Media • Genetics

These Bugs Have the Right Stride   08/09/2008    
August 9, 2008 — If there were an Olympic event for walking on water, the water strider would lead the pack.  Science Daily reported on work by European biologists that show the water bug has perfectly proportioned legs for being able to balance on the surface tension of water: “Long enough to provide maximum weight support but not long enough to bend and hinder the insect’s movement,” a mathematical model showed.  See also the 08/07/2003 and 11/04/2004 entries about water striders.

We’ll ignore the brief Darwinist nonsense thrown into the lead paragraph, since it appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific work:

The amazing water strider – known for its ability to walk on water – came within just a hair of sinking into evolutionary oblivion.

Actually, that was too funny not to award Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  Evolutionary oblivion; what a suggestive term.  It has possibilities.
Next headline on:  Zoology • Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

Shostak is a favorite SETI researcher to engage in civil discourse and respectful debate, because he so honestly opens himself up to judgment by his own standards.  OK, then, can outsiders express opinions about SETI?  Can the opinions of a SETI critic or Darwin doubter with strong academic credentials and good presentation skills be valuable and worth hearing?  Is the burden of proof on the SETI researcher to back up his belief that ETI is a common occurrence in the universe?  Obviously he has no way out, and would have to say yes.  So thank you, Dr. Shostak; we’ll take you up on it.
    Let us be among the first to join you in denouncing bullies, like those dogmatic Darwinists who eviscerate the careers of Darwin-doubters like those highlighted in the movie Expelled.  Surely you are not among those types.
    We appreciate your honesty about lack of evidence in your craft (01/24/2007).  May we respectfully ask that you review our critique of your rebuttal of intelligent design back in 12/03/2005?  That you credit your sources, as we recommended in 05/04/2006?  Will you review our analysis of your reasoning about science, religion and evolutionary theory back in 02/20/2007?  Will you honestly consider the possibility that SETI is imagination masquerading as science, like we demonstrated in April this year?  Could you share a brief chuckle with us at the thought of a poor misguided student in cowboy country, with SETI Institute blessing, sending a poem about menstruation to aliens? (See the 05/29/2008 entry that analyzed an article that reported this incident with pride).
    No ad hominems from us.  In fact, we called you a highly intelligent individual, and said it sincerely.  We just wonder why you use detection methods that imply intelligent design while consigning ID to the pseudoscience bin, and ascribe the universe and life (and your own rationality) to non-intelligent causes.  We just want you to think about it.  Fair enough?  Are you searching for ETI in the right places?  Have you done a fair investigation, as did former atheist Lee Strobel, of the claims of a Man who said He came from heaven (John 14-16), and provided empirical evidence for it (Acts 1-2, I Corinthians 15), in ways that can be studied by scientific and historical methods?  If not willing to go that route, if you choose to persist in looking into the stars for divine guidance, can you at least admit that you are practicing and advocating a pseudoscientific religion in the place of Christianity?  Can you admit that Christianity, at this point, has more evidence going for it than SETI?  Are you willing to call SETI a kind of religion?  Then can we lobby for Separation of Search and State (01/24/2007)?
    Readers, be nice.  Don’t fling these questions at the likes of the honorable Dr. Shostak with pride and arrogance.  Let any hot air come at us, not from us.  If he repents of his sins (logical and theological), and discovers extraterrestrial omnipresent Intelligence that was there all along, we wish to share with him in that moment of surprising joy, and embrace him with open arms as good Christians are commanded to do (like Paul was treated in Acts 9, who later wrote Romans 12).
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Solar System • SETI • Bible and Theology

The human eye is a remarkable imaging device, with many attractive design features.  Prominent among these is a hemispherical detector geometry, similar to that found in many other biological systems, that enables a wide field of view and low aberrations with simple, few-component imaging optics.  This type of configuration is extremely difficult to achieve using established optoelectronics technologies, owing to the intrinsically planar nature of the patterning, deposition, etching, materials growth and doping methods that exist for fabricating such systems.  Here we report strategies that avoid these limitations, and implement them to yield high-performance, hemispherical electronic eye cameras based on single-crystalline silicon.... In a general sense, these methods, taken together with our theoretical analyses of their associated mechanics, provide practical routes for integrating well-developed planar device technologies onto the surfaces of complex curvilinear objects, suitable for diverse applications that cannot be addressed by conventional means.

How much did this discovery owe to the theory of evolution?  Zip.  The word was absent in all the papers and articles about it.  How much did it depend on intelligent design (i.e., reverse-engineering a contrivance with “attractive design features”)?  That was the whole point.
    Now, if they can get their silicon eyes to work for 90 years, clean themselves, repair themselves, focus themselves, adjust themselves, point themselves, automatically process images, automatically concentrate on useful information, perform at 126 megapixel resolution with motion imaging and reproduce themselves, they will begin to approach the engineering your Creator installed in your eye sockets.  Let’s give credit where it’s due.  Speaking of long-lasting performance, Methuselah’s eyes apparently lasted 969 years.
Footnote:  The prior week, Nature allowed the foul-mouthed, profane blooter for evolution, PZ Myers, to rant about the “scourge of creationism” in his review of a pro-evolution book by Ken Miller (07/31/2008 issue.)  Having eyes, they see not.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Adult Stem Cells Race Ahead; Embryonics Falter   08/07/2008    
August 7, 2008 — Major advances are being made with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), stem cells reconstituted from adult tissues, while interest in embryonic stem cells (ES) seems to be drying up.
    Both Nature and Science reported advances in iPS technology last week.  Nature reported that the number of factors needed to reconstitute pluripotent stem cells has dropped from four to two.¹  Science,² reporting on another iPS study, said that the factors can be delivered without the need for retroviral insertion – one of the risks of the initial process announced last year (06/06/2007, 01/10/2008).
    Meanwhile, things are looking bleak for embryonic stem cell labs.  Just a few years ago, all the major scientific organizations were pushing the US government to ease restrictions on human cloning so that America could keep up with the world’s gold rush of ES research.  Now, Andrea Gawrylewski blogged on The Scientist July 23 that biotech companies appear to be bailing on ES cells.  At first, investors jumped on the bandwagon.  “But with almost no therapeutic advances to show for the cash, the hype has died down.”  Now, investors are eyeing the iPS technology.  One analyst was quoted: “We’ve had advances in adult stem cells and [FDA] approvals.  Where do you think Wall Street money is going to go?”  Advanced Cell Technology, one of the early ES startups, is struggling to stay in business.
Update 08/11/2008: Twenty lines of diseased cells have been created using iPS technology, reported Science Daily, making it possible for scientists to examine genetic disorders.  Science Daily also reported on the new ability to create iPS cells without the need for the cancer-causing retrovirus used in earlier methods.  The article said, “Researchers hope that such embryonic stem-cell-like cells, known as induced pluripotent (IPS) cells, eventually may treat diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and diabetes.”  In addition Nature News reported that skin cells from an elderly patient were transformed into nerve cells with iPS.  “It is the first time that an induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell line has been created from a patient with a genetic illness,” Monya Baker reported.  “Like embryonic stem cells, iPS cells have the potential to develop into almost any of the body’s cell types and offer new disease insights.”
    Meanwhile, Science³ reported new ethical worries about embryonic stem cell lines made available by the National Institutes of Health.  Egg cells were collected from donors without proper information and consent, the article explains: one firm told donors that cells “might be used in research,” and another told donors that the cells would be destroyed after a research project.  “Other forms failed to mention that embryos would be destroyed and that cells derived from them could end up in experiments around the world.”  One neurologist said “I was shocked” when she heard about the ethical lapses.  Most researchers “just assumed that the consent had been taken care of.”  Proposals to get retroactive consent from donors, though, will probably go nowhere.  The article ended by indicating that iPS technology might make embryonic stem cells superfluous, even though both presidential candidates (Obama and McCain) support expanding embryonic stem cell lines, as does Congress.

Don’t forget how the Big Science community held President Bush hostage with claims he didn’t care for the disabled when he twice vetoed Congressional attempts to expand embryonic stem cell research.  Don’t forget how Hollywood tugged at our heartstrings with disabled celebrities begging for cures that could only come from ES cells.  Let this be a lesson about the trustworthiness of Big Science to make right choices on political and moral issues.  Meanwhile, can Californians get their $3 billion back after they were deceived into splurging on this morally-corrupt, dishonestly-hyped boondoggle? (11/03/2004, 02/08/2005, 10/13/2006).  Maybe after they get the Lottery removed.  Good luck.  The Lottery was similarly sold to voters as desperately needed for education.  Multiple editorials since have admitted that Lottery money doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the school budget.  Meanwhile, a few lucky individuals get filthy rich for no admirable reason on the backs of millions of gullible individuals (who never learned math at public school) who are the least able to throw their money away.
    Baloney detecting should be a prerequisite to entering a voting booth.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Politics and Ethics • Health

When pandas split off from the bear lineage about 3 million years ago, tasty and nutritious cuisine like meat, fruit, and nuts may have been difficult to obtain while bamboo was ubiquitous—a wide-open ecological niche.  So there were two choices: Exert some serious effort to get the good stuff, or munch away on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of woody grasses.

Here we have malicious jokes against creationists and slanders against intelligent design, propped up with the Gribbleflix theory of evolution (12/19/2007).  Somehow Buchen’s ability to tell an evolutionary tale gives her the privilege of misrepresenting her opponents and impugning the character of God.  Evolutionists should disown her for bringing up a very Lamarckian view of evolution.  The purpose-driven panda made a choice: munch away on inexhaustible bamboo instead of work hard for meat – as if pandas are capable of choice, or their offspring would inherit an acquired taste.
    To ridicule ID, Buchen set up a straw man argument.  Intelligent design theory does not teach that all parts are optimal.  Rather, it teaches constrained optimality: good design achieves the best combination of trade-offs between competing requirements.  Buchen herself debunked the myth that the panda is a poor reproducer.  That gets rid of much of its bad rap for dysteleology (bad design).  It appears that the panda’s reputation for bumbling breeding habits could well be a product of zookeeper interference; the panda actually seems to do a fair job of mating in the wild.
    As for evolution opting for the easy solution over the difficult one, as claimed by the U of Texas folk, that’s exactly the point Michael Behe made in The Edge of Evolution for a different conclusion.  He demonstrated that under the most ideal circumstances, in the best-studied cases in the world, natural selection acting on random mutations is extremely limited in its creative ability.  It is certainly not up to the task of creating a panda from a pre-panda ancestor.
    What Buchen doesn’t say is that creationists would probably agree that natural selection has devolved the modern panda from its created-kind ancestor.  And what she and the U of Texas crowd should notice is that any theory of evolution that can explain anything explains nothing (04/23/2001).  Furthermore, now that evolutionists are admitting that their theory does not produce fitness, how should they apologize to the millions of victims of Social Darwinism who suffered and died over the absolute fact, proved by Darwin, that superior individuals have the right by law of “survival of the fittest” to exterminate the weak?  Send the reparations-activists knocking on the door of Down House.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

Natural systems do not do their own science and engineering.  The engineering is embedded in their DNA.  The conference attendees will hear from experts on alleged self-organizing structures and “embedded, embodied, evolving and adaptive systems.”  This is code for intelligent design.  Embedded instructions require design.  Embodied adaptive systems require pre-programmed design by intelligent agents (as in robotics).  Evolving systems that perform such feats without intelligent help, however, exist only in the vivid imaginations of secular evolutionists.  Their best example so far is a tornado in a junkyard.
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Human Body

Phoenix Did NOT Find Mars Life   08/04/2008    
August 4, 2008 — A media snafu has NASA spokespersons rushing to deny that life has been found on Mars, reported Space.com.  For example, Live Science reporter Leonard David said that the White House has been alerted to the potential for new information about life on Mars based on findings from the Phoenix Lander.  The apparent secrecy has teased the press into thinking life has been found, when all an Aviation Week reporter had said based on his own inside sources was that instrument data has found something that “is increasingly compelling as another piece in the puzzle of life.”  The vagueness of the statement could imply good news or bad news.
    The Space.com damage-control article hastened to explain that Phoenix is incapable of finding life.  The instruments can detect organic molecules, but not life itself.  The reason for caution at the NASA press briefing last week that announced the discovery of water ice (see U of Arizona press release) at the northern latitudes of Mars, where Phoenix set up base camp, is that the scientists want their findings to go through peer review and get published before getting scooped by the popular press.  It is normal procedure for findings to be embargoed by the press till formal publication.
    Another Space.com article by Andrea Thompson explains what Phoenix is capable of detecting.  Organic molecules have not been found at equatorial latitudes because of strong oxidizing processes at work there.  One of the main reasons for putting a lander in the polar regions was the hope that organics could survive there.  Organics are not a sufficient condition for biology, explained a Johns Hopkins scientist.  “Just because there are organic compounds, doesn’t mean that that’s life,”
    Leonard David said this reminded him of the 1996 to-do about a Martian meteorite that some scientists said appeared to show evidence for fossilized microbes.
Update 08/05/2008 morning: Space.com and PhysOrg are now reporting that the chemical found may be perchlorate, a highly reactive oxidant that would be bad news for life.  The tests are inconclusive at this point.
Update 08/05/2008 afternoon: In order to stem “speculation that has become rampant on the web,” reported Space.com, the Phoenix team is admitting perchlorate has been found, but spinning the story to say that it “may not be harmful to any potential life there and could in fact be a boon to it.”  The highly-oxidizing substance could be an energy source, for instance, and some life survives in Earth’s Atacama Desert in spite of the presence of perchlorates.  There is a slim possibility the perchlorate came from a solid rocket booster, but the team feels their readings from the Phoenix instruments show it was present in the soil samples.  PhysOrg printed a brief report, and later, BBC News and Science Daily denied a NASA cover-up.  They reiterated the latest spin that the discovery of perchlorate “was fascinating but made ‘life on Mars’ neither more nor less likely.”

So they did not claim to find any organics, and they found a highly-oxidizing substance that would normally be toxic to life.  You’d think after so many years of bad news from Mars (02/18/2008, 01/09/2007, 01/28/2005) that Martian fever would be dead, but look at faith of the believers.  Phoenix could find one molecule of tailpipe soot, call it organic, and the press would go bananas.  Even if the soot turned out to be residue from the lander’s own thrusters, by then the media will have soaked it for all its evolutionary worth.  The Martian Meteorite story launched NASA’s revitalized Mars program and started the new “science” of astrobiology (04/17/2006).  Only later did we realize it was scientifically unfounded.  We’re all for exploring Mars but NASA had better find better reasons for going than titillating the public with false hopes and dubious inferences from questionable data.
    Organics are to life what letters are to a book.  It’s not the presence of the letters, but the way they are put together, that signifies life.  When looking for life, don’t just follow the water.  Follow the instructions (12/30/2002).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Media

Remember, this is the culture announcing to you that Darwinism is a fact of science.  Tell us, Mr. Darwin, where integrity evolved from.  Science needs Biblical morality whether it acknowledges it or not.  Let him who is without sin cast the first stone at the despised outcast accused of prostituting science with religion.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

When Manhattan froze in a day in the movie The Day After Tomorrow as a result of an abrupt change in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, scientists emphasized the physical impossibility of this scenario.  Now some might be stunned by how quickly climate can change.  On page 680 of this issue, Steffensen et al. zoom in on three climatic shifts recorded in the NGRIP ice core from central Greenland... and show that the atmospheric circulation at mid to high northern latitudes changed within just 1 to 3 years.

Global coupled climate models provide one way to study the complex mechanisms that underlie climate shifts.  Simulated climate shifts are, however, considerably slower than the observed ones, lasting a hundred to a few hundred years.  This might be due to missing feedbacks, the wrong forcing of the abrupt shifts, or a misguided focus on changes in ocean circulation or temperature, rather than other aspects of the climate system.  A closer look at wind patterns and atmospheric circulation in models will either reveal faster shifts and help clarify the underlying mechanisms, or tell us that better models are needed to study that question.
    We should keep in mind that we only know the relative timing for three events so far, and that each of them looks somewhat different.  Greenland ice cores offer the opportunity to study the 24 Dansgaard-Oeschger events of the last glacial period at a similar resolution.  The data from all events, in combination with annually resolved records from other archives and improved models, will help to elucidate the dynamics of these events, revealing what they have in common, and what parts of the shifts are random.
    The data reported by Steffensen et al. underscore the fact that the atmospheric circulation may shift from one state to another within just 1 year.  With ongoing global warming, the climate system might therefore hold some surprises.

One of the scientists in the Antarctic-moss story quickly used the data for a global warming sermon: “You have to understand where these thresholds are, because, if human beings are unfortunate enough to push climate over one of these thresholds, it could be a total catastrophe.”  Instead of repenting over his evolutionary timeline have just been falsified, he got self-righteous about what humans should do.
    One thing you learn pretty quick in the science reporting business (that is, if you think independently and don’t follow the Darwiniac parade) is that the same people pushing evolution-only in the schools are the ones pushing ruining the economy over global warming in the UN: i.e., leftist radicals and secular-progressive liberals.  These, furthermore, are the same people with a high-and-mighty attitude about their scientific consensus being too urgent for free speech and democracy.  Their views must be imposed on the public by the elite, through the World Court if necessary.
    A number of ironies appear here.  Witkowski rightly accused Stalin of politically-motivated policies that killed millions based on bad science, but thinks killing millions today based on bad science is rational and good.  (Global warming is typically off-topic in these pages, but if countries implement what the IPCC and Kyoto recommend, the consequences will be brutal on the most vulnerable people in the world.)
    Another irony is that he knows humans could not have caused the global warming that supposedly occurred 14 and 40 million years ago, but we must slash our wrists today over our ecological sins.  (The papers above reveal that drastic climate change has apparently occurred surprisingly fast without man’s help, enough to melt the poles, and life got by in spite of it.  That includes all the mammals, birds, Galapagos tortoises, penguins, tuataras and other endangered species that apparently got through the warm periods just fine.)
    A third irony is that Witkowski (with Nature’s blessing) called us to make rational decisions drawn from the best data available.  But the book he was reviewing was about genetics and farming, not climate change.  You can grow plants in real time in the lab.  You can test what makes plants and crops grow best and watch the results in weeks or months.  Climate modelers, however, have to deal with chaotic and complex inputs, using proxy measurements, based on questionable assumptions, with unknown numbers of factors with unknown dynamics and unknown relative importance, confounded by feedback effects that are poorly understood, about prehistoric phenomena that cannot be directly observed.  Indeed, their models look more like the convoluted theories of Lysenko than the experimental science of Mendel and Vavilov.
    If Witkowski meant to impugn today’s communist countries instead of Washington, we forgive him, but experience teaches us that when Nature and Big Science accuses “politics” of trumping “good science” it means another conservative-bashing party is in progress.  Let the reader beware (see previous entry, 08/02/2008).
    Our readers know that good science is highly regarded here.  We are unmerciful, though, against dogmatists employing the good name of science wrongfully.  It’s hard sometimes to look past the arrogance in the papers for the kernels of truth in raw data, but respect for science demands it.  The rare scientist who shows humility, who recognizes he could be wrong, who shows honesty and integrity and a desire to serve humankind through science, and a willingness to be corrected and learn from other points of view, is like a ray of warming sun in a blizzard of fogma.*
*See 05/14/2007 commentary.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods • Fossils • Politics and Ethics