Paley’s Watch Found in Bacteria   10/31/2008    
Oct 31, 2008 — A clock with cogs, gears and ratchets that keeps accurate time – what more could William Paley wish for?  The 18th century natural theologian used the illustration of stumbling upon a watch in a heath as an example of reasoning from design to a Designer – as from watch to watchmaker.  Skeptics like David Hume challenged such reasoning of the natural theologians as a mere argument from analogy: living things are very different from mechanical machines, he argued.  One can only wonder how their debate would unfold with the discovery of a ticking watch inside one of the simplest forms of life.
    Scientists have long wondered how living things keep time.  We are all aware of our own natural cycles throughout the day.  Organisms without eyes and ears, though, like bacteria, also keep time with diurnal cycles.  How do they do it?  The secret has only been coming to light in the last few years (see 05/17/2005)  Johnson, Egli and Stewart wrote a review article in Science this week that describes what is currently known about the circadian clock present in cyanobacteria.¹  They could not help but use mechanical terms for this biological machinery.  It began right in their opening paragraph:

An endogenous circadian system in cyanobacteria exerts pervasive control over cellular processes, including global gene expression.  Indeed, the entire chromosome undergoes daily cycles of topological changes and compaction.  The biochemical machinery underlying a circadian oscillator can be reconstituted in vitro with just three cyanobacterial proteins, KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC.  These proteins interact to promote conformational changes and phosphorylation events that determine the phase of the in vitro oscillation.  The high-resolution structures of these proteins suggest a ratcheting mechanism by which the KaiABC oscillator ticks unidirectionally.  This posttranslational oscillator may interact with transcriptional and translational feedback loops to generate the emergent circadian behavior in vivo.  The conjunction of structural, biophysical, and biochemical approaches to this system reveals molecular mechanisms of biological timekeeping.

The benefit of a clockwork that is imperturbable even when buffeted by the massive intracellular changes of cell division could have provided an evolutionary driving force for convergent circadian clock mechanisms among diverse organisms.
    We now recognize KaiABC as a dynamically oscillating nanomachine that has evolved to precess unidirectionally and robustly. 

Oh, for the sight of David Hume and Charles Darwin being confronted with a ticking clock inside a “simple” cell.  We can get an idea of their reaction, though, by looking at the fact that the three authors of this review, after having described an intricate mechanism of oscillators, ratchets and feedback loops, attributed it all to evolution.  The many biochemists aware of these and other exquisite molecular machines follow suit.  In spite of overpowering evidence for design, their minds are made up: they will follow Charlie to the bitter end and die with him rather than acknowledge design.
    The Apostle Paul said in Romans 1 that the evidence for God and His attributes is clearly seen in creation, so that men are without excuse.  Each generation has evidence of sufficient clarity for its knowledge base.  For the Romans and Egyptians, the diurnal cycles of the sun, moon and stars have been more than sufficient to remove their excuses for unbelief and mistaken belief.  For today’s scientists, the diurnal cycles of nanoscopic protein clocks throughout life is more than sufficient.  The true challenge ahead is not just to delve deeper into the molecular nature of the design we already see, but to hold it up for display and preach the implications, so that it takes effect in the human mind – as Paul said, “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God” (II Corinthians 10:5; cf. 01/17/2007).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

FrankenTitan Comes to Life   10/30/2008    
Oct 30, 2008 — There’s electricity at Titan, the large moon of Saturn.  That can only mean one thing: life!  “Electricity Found on Saturn Moon--Could It Spark Life?” asked a headline on National Geographic News by Rebecca Carroll.  Visions of spark discharge tubes in a mad scientist’s lab arise in the imagination.  “Recently identified electrical activity on Saturn’s largest moon bolsters arguments that Titan is the kind of place that could harbor life.”
    Carroll quickly pointed out that at -350° F, any Titanian life would not resemble “life as we know it.”  Initial indications of electrical activity in the thick atmosphere of this unusual moon have been confirmed in data from the Huygens Probe that landed in 2005 (see 01/15/2005, 01/21/2005).  With that spark of imagination, the L-word leaped up from the reporter’s table:

But a new study reports faint signs of a natural electric field in Titan’s thick cloud cover that are similar to the energy radiated by lightning on Earth.
    Lightning is thought to have sparked the chemical reactions that led to the origin of life on our planet....
    Jeffrey Bada, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, believes the process that allowed lightning to spark life on Earth is universal and could happen in many environments—including on Titan.
    Confirmation earlier this year of Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes makes the Saturnian moon the first place other than Earth where open bodies of liquid have been found.
    Hydrocarbons are organic molecules, and the fact that they exist in large quantities on Titan suggests that life could take root there under the right conditions.

Titan’s water is currently frozen into chunks as hard as granite.  If those ice “rocks” were to melt, however, the environment could become more hospitable to the building blocks of life.
    With liquid water, the planet could host the formation of amino acids and then full proteins, which drive all biochemistry and set the stage for more complex molecules.
    “I look at Titan as a big, frozen, prebiotic casserole,” Bada said, referring to the state before the emergence of life.
    “The idea that life could be widespread in the universe, I think, is very credible.”

Creepy.  To learn about the real Frankenstein, listen to this podcast.  Truth is stranger than fiction.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

1. Words demean things:  Apparently the editors of Nature have had it with certain clichés.  One editorial, published also on Nature News, pointed out the ambiguity of popular words and phrases used in scientific papers and by science reporters.  The editorial began,

   To a great extent, science is about arriving at definitions.  What is a man?  What is a number?  Questions such as these require substantial inquiry.  But where science is supposed to be precise and measured, definitions can be frustratingly vague and variable.

   As examples, the editorial reviewed the terms paradigm shift, tipping point, race, epigenetic, complexity, stem cell, consciousness and significant.  Those terms may seem intuitively obvious but in fact have multiple definitions. For the word consciousness to have meaning, for instance, there must be a physical basis for it – but none has been found.  And significant is in the eye of the beholder, despite mathematical crutches like p-values that lend a false air of confidence in scientific results.  Scientists often use a 5% confidence level as a measure of significance.  That number, though, is an arbitrary convention – and often a useless one:

   Even if a result is a genuinely statistically significant one, it can be virtually meaningless in the real world.  A new cancer treatment may ‘significantly’ extend life by a month, but many terminally ill patients would not consider that outcome significant.  A scientific finding may be ‘significant’ without having any major impact on a field; conversely, the significance of a discovery might not become apparent until years after it is made.  “One has to reserve for history the judgement of whether something is significant with a capital S,” says Steven Block, a biophysicist at Stanford University in California.

2. Class warfare:  What do we mean by a class of objects?  Take terms like species and planet: which objects belong in the class, and which are excluded?  It’s not always easy to decide, said Jeffrey Parson and Yair Wand in an essay in last week’s Nature.¹  The authors illustrate problems with these two examples.  Look at the conflict over Pluto: is it a planet, a minor planet, or a plutoid?  Depending on which properties of objects in space are considered useful to humans, it could be any one of these things – yet Pluto itself hasn’t changed.  “Plutoid” is a recently made-up word about a class of objects of which Pluto is the best-known example.  Just because the International Astronomical Union declares that from henceforth and forevermore Pluto is a plutoid, that does little more than provide a consensus for human beings and their nomenclature.  Similarly, the term species contains considerable uncertainty, as even Ernst Mayr realized when he tried to define a species as a class of organisms that can produce fertile offspring (the “biological species concept”).  Too bad that doesn’t work for the vast majority of organisms – asexual microbes and fossils.
       Some classifications can lead to false and even fatal results.  Consider the word disease, which originally just meant discomfort – or “not at ease.”  The classification of diseases has usually been centered on etiology, or causes of disease.  These fall into 3 subclasses: genetic, environmental or pathogenic.  For nearly 40 years, the authors said, doctors misdiagnosed ulcers because they could not bring themselves to believe that a bacterium, H. pylori was capable of living in the acidic environment of the stomach.  “When considering the reasons why the bacterial hypothesis was missed for such a long time (and then not readily accepted), the main problem was the misattribution of the property ‘cannot grow in the acidity of the stomach’ to the class of bacteria,” they explained.  “Re-evaluating this fundamental property involved a major mind-shift that was difficult to accept.”
       Classification is a human enterprise.  The authors gave an evolutionary spin on this skill: “Classification ... is recognized as an evolved mechanism that supports survival.”  Supposedly it helps humans get food and shelter.  They did not ask whether lions and lizards needed to evolve the mechanism to sort out their food and shelter, too.  They tried to distinguish between “categories” and “classes” by defining the former as a group of objects with shared properties, and the latter as a category that allows humans to “infer further information” consistently “over a reasonable time period.”  A little reflection, however, shows that they have simply substituted the word class for a meta-category with the same difficulties.  The information that can be inferred from a class is simply a collection of objects with shared properties – things that humans find useful.  Their final paragraph, though, revealed that they are aware of the main pitfall of classification: it happens in the mind, not in the external world.

   Taking a classification perspective on scientific discourse suggests a sequence of questions to ask when studying a domain of phenomena.  What are the properties of interest of these phenomena?  Are there stable sets of properties common to these phenomena?  Are there stable relationships in some of these sets?  And finally, and most importantly, what is the evidence or rationale that these relationships reflect the true nature of the phenomena?  This perspective has two important implications.  First, scientists should make every effort to ensure that the assumed relationships among properties are indeed correct.  Second, rather than arguing over which of several classification schemes is preferable, researchers should recognize that several correct and useful schemes can coexist.  And overall, scientists should recognize that classification happens in the mind and, as a result, it can be influenced by beliefs and emotions.  This is where science can go astray.

3. The human element:  The lead editorial in Nature last week brought these lessons home to the human species.  What does it mean to be human? the editors asked.²  The Delphic oracle may have advised Know thyself, but that is often hard to follow, they said.  Watch the editors balance their confidence in Darwin’s ability to help us know ourselves with doubts about the evidence:

   Modern science can help, but using it to uncover truths about ourselves can also be fraught with difficulty.  Consider, for example, that an important first step towards understanding contemporary human behaviour – establishing the evolutionary context in which it emerged – means piecing together odd scraps of evidence left by our hunter-gatherer ancestors tens of thousands of years ago.  The paucity of data makes it all too easy to come up with untested, and even untestable, Darwinian versions of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.

   After acknowledging that science’s just-so chickens have come home to roost, the editors resurrected an old conflict that illustrates the impossibility of speaking objectively about ourselves without wandering into politics:

   Another major challenge for researchers is being objective about a topic as philosophically, politically and ethically charged as human nature.  Take the sociobiology wars of the 1970s and 1980s.  Left-wing scholars rejected biological explanations for phenomena such as gender roles, religion, homosexuality and xenophobia, largely because they feared such explanations would be used to justify a continuation of existing inequalities on genetic grounds.  The resulting debates became hugely political.
       The combustibility of the interface between science and society is one major reason for the extraordinary fragmentation of research that tackles human behaviour.  In part because of the sociobiology battle, most social scientists still steer clear of using evolutionary hypotheses.  And even researchers who do work under the unifying framework of evolution tend to fall into distinct camps such as gene-culture co-evolution or human behavioural ecology – their practitioners divided by differences of opinion on, say, the relative importance of culture versus genes.

   The editors clearly think that evolutionary theory deserves to be a unifying theme, but have just cast doubt on the evidence behind it and the pragmatics of using it.  They attribute the problems to the complexity of our species and the lack of interdisciplinary communication.  In a belief that their magazine can help, they said they are starting a series of essays which, though they might make for “uncomfortable reading,” will try to draw lines between human evolutionary prehistory and the complex societies we live in.  The first was by Pascal Boyer about the evolution of religion.  Did it accomplish its purpose?  See our review in the 10/26/2008 entry.

It was good for Nature to point out these problems with scientific terminology.  Unfortunately, their brains are so completely sold out to Darwin they are incapable of looking in the mirror.  That’s why one moment they can be admitting the evidence is so scanty it gives ease to untested, untestable Just-So Stories about human evolution, then the next moment they give their editorial blessing to a stupid Just-So Story about the evolution of religion (10/26/2008).
    Philosophy of science is a vital topic for anyone interested in science or apologetics or both.  In philosophy of science you learn to ask questions that scientists themselves rarely ask.  Consider the important topic of classification, brought up in bullet 2 above.  Scientists too flippantly invoke class terms that are totally subjective when scrutinized.  For instance, what is a predator?  We think we understand the term, but in the class of predators you can find snails, tigers, and even the Venus Flytrap.  The differences between these objects in the class predator seem more significant than the property they share: that they eat animals.  In addition, each object belongs to multiple other classes that either distinguish it or include it: organism, vertebrate or invertebrate, plant or animal.  The class you focus on is the one that is useful at the moment.  If you are playing “Twenty Questions,” for instance, the categories initially useful to you are animal, vegetable or mineral, where animal could be anything from a flatworm to a giraffe, vegetable could be anything from algae to a redwood tree, and mineral could include diamonds and space stations.  A corollary of this idea is that classes are merely human constructs – not necessarily ways of dividing up the world as it really is, or as Plato is said to have worded it, “carving nature at its joints.”
    In his excellent lecture series on philosophy of science for The Teaching Company, Jeffrey L. Kasser used a humorous illustration.  He invented a word broccosaxodile, which he defined as “anything that is broccoli, a saxophone, or a crocodile.”  While one might question the usefulness of such a composite classification, he asked if it is any less meaningful than predator which, as we said, includes things just as diverse.  “Predator” is just a shorthand word for a composite category that we could just as well call a “snail-tiger-VenusFlytrap.”  Let’s add another example: what is a fossil?  If you immediately picture bones in rock, you are ignoring the fact that fossils can include whole insects in amber complete with their soft tissue, footprints, petrified wood, and mere impressions of jellyfish or leaves, like shadows, without any bones at all.  Fossils are not permanent, either: the dinosaur trackways in the entry below (10/28/2008) are eroding and will eventually disappear.  In that sense, a corpse in a morgue is a fossil, or the ashes of a cremated person sitting in a bottle in the heartbroken spouse’s bedroom.  (Not to be morbid, but it is almost Halloween.)
    A classification is meaningless without a context in which the term is useful to some human being for a subjective purpose.  There is nothing objective about a class if you want to think of it as referring to something that is “out there” in the world which scientists “discover” without bias.  This should be a lesson to evolutionists who think they are talking objectively when they use class terms like missing link, transitional form, ancestors, phylogenetic tree, homologous traits or innovation.  Such terms are employed for their utility – in this case, the utility of making evolutionary theory appear scientific.

Application.  Let’s apply what we’ve learned to a Biblical example some find embarrassing.  Many skeptics have ridiculed the Bible for classifying bats with birds in Leviticus 11:13-19 (see EvidentCreation.com).  OK, their point is?  This classification was amply useful to Moses, who was helping the Israelites distinguish what they were allowed to eat.  The property apropos to their circumstances was clean and unclean edible animals.  Moses, or God for that matter, was under no obligation to use modern scientific taxonomy for the purpose.  In fact, it would seem much more helpful to Israelites wandering in the wilderness to point out which of those things flying around in the dark was safe to eat.  Those of you who have camped in the desert know that swifts and bats can look very similar in the way they dart about.  Formally, we can say that the property at issue in the class being defined was “flying things” – call them “volant vertebrates” if it makes you feel better – not whether the things had fur or feathers or laid eggs.  Moreover, it would be an unfair disparagement of the mental capabilities of people who grew up in the advanced Egyptian civilization and their well-educated leader to assume they didn’t know the difference between birds and bats.  We mustn’t be chauvinistic.  They probably possessed more savvy about nature than the typical modern couch potato.

Exercise.  Teachers and home-school parents: here is an opportunity to introduce your precocious young thinkers to some philosophy of science.  Have them invent categories similar to broccosaxodile (above) and make lists of objects that fit.  Is the category useful in some way?  Does it allow inferring additional information?  Which members belong to other categories?
Silly categories: Make up your own silly category and defend its usefulness: vege-toy-mobiles, dirt-bike-chocolate, sister-TV-cotton (anything that is either a sister, a television, or made of cotton), etc. 
Trivial categories: Round things, small potatoes, friends, food, containers, pets, creeping things, rhyming words, oxymorons, shapes, etc.  Think of more.  In what circumstances are these useful categories?  What are examples of extremely different things that can fit in the same category?  Can you dream up a story to explain how the category evolved?
Scientific categories:  omnivore, migratory species, gene, hybrid, moon, cloud, field, particle, wave, force, reagent, network, factor, family, biome, ecosystem, riparian dweller, marine invertebrate, intelligent life, sentient being.  List some extremely different objects that fit into the same category.  Pick an object in the category and list what other categories it belongs to.  How well does the category reflect distinctions in the external world?  What kinds of observations are required to make the distinction?  Who does the observing?  When is the category useful and not useful?  Are the evolutionary stories told about these classes the only possible ways to understand them?  What does “understanding” mean without the preconditions of immaterial concepts, reason, truth, and mind?
Next headline on:  Early Man • Philosophy or Theology • Evolutionary Theory

1. Publication of the Origin was not a sudden (“revolutionary”) interruption of Victorian society’s confident belief in the traditional theological world-view.
2. The Origin did not “revolutionize” the biological sciences by removing the creationist premise or introducing new principles.
3. The Origin did not revolutionize Victorian public opinion.  The public considered Darwin and Spencer to be teaching the same lesson, known today as “Social Darwinism”, which, though fashionable, never achieved dominance.
4. Many biologists expressed significant disagreements with Darwin’s principles.
5. Darwin made little or no contribution to the renovation of theology.  His public statements on Providence were inconsistent and the liberal reform of theology was well advanced by 1850.
6. The so-called “Darwinian revolution” was, at the public opinion level, the fashion of laissez-faire economic beliefs backed by Darwin and Spencer’s inclusion of the living world in the economic paradigm.

What, exactly, are we supposed to be celebrating next year?  Ineptitude?  The gullibility of the public?  The power of fashionable ideas to distort history?  The inability of reasonable scientists with their significant disagreements to stop bad ideas at their onset?  Darwin Day can still be a worthy holiday if we make these the lessons.  We agree with Caton; first, we have to get the facts right.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Education

Monster Mash   10/28/2008    
Oct 28, 2008 — Just before Halloween, it’s time for tricks and treats about monsters in the fossil record.  Here’s a list of recent stories about scary beasts:

1. Dino Dance:  Are these potholes tracks or weathering marks?  PhysOrg and Science Daily were among news outlets reporting a new interpretation of formations by a grad student at the University of Utah in Navajo Sandstone near a popular photographer’s locale called The Wave.  Winston Seiler claims the round holes represent tracks of three different kinds of dinosaurs, complete with tail drag marks.  Other dinosaur tracks are known in the area; this one is unusual for the number and density of tracks, what Seiler calls a “trample surface.”  National Geographic also joined the dance party.
   Update 11/10/2008: The party dispersed when some science cops showed up.  PhysOrg reported that “A group of paleontologists visited the northern Arizona wilderness site nicknamed a ‘dinosaur dance floor’ and concluded there were no dinosaur tracks there, only a dense collection of unusual potholes eroded in the sandstone.”  One of the co-authors of the dance floor thesis agreed to work with the skeptics: “Science is an evolving process where we seek the truth,” she said.  So she turned around and changed the dance to The Shake: “This is how science works, and we’ll have to see how it shakes out in the end.”
2. Hornblower:  The unusual head crests on duckbill dinosaurs were used for shouting, claim scientists in a report on Live Science and PhysOrg.  The nasal passages on lambeosaurs and corythosaurs connected with passages in the head crest to produce resonant, bellowing calls (see diagrams on Science Daily).  The pitch of the calls probably deepened as the dinosaurs aged.  Perhaps they had a tonal language for communication, with special calls for Run for your lives!  A T. rex is coming!  Veteran dinosaur hunter Jack Horner (Montana State) noted that, “It’s difficult to infer the function of structures in an extinct dinosaur when there is so little resemblance to any living animal.”
3. Taking the plunge:  How do you interpret dinosaur tracks that gradually fade away?  The track-maker must have gone for a swim, reported Science Daily.  Debra Mickelson of University of Colorado even thinks she knows what they were doing – going out to sea to feed, 165 million years ago.
4. Migrants:  Dinosaurs weren’t the champion migrators of the ancient world, contrary to the usual view, said Phil Bell (U of Alberta) in a report on Science Daily.  How could he and colleague Eric Snively figure that out?  They calculated the energy requirements for a herd of herbivores like Edmontosaurs, and believe it would have limited their travel to 3000 km round trip – half the previous estimate.
5. Microsaur:  We tend to think of dinosaurs as mighty tyrants of the early earth, making the ground shake with every step.  Science Daily reported the finding of the smallest dinosaur ever seen.  The juvenile Heterodontosaurus (mixed teeth) had a skull less than two inches long and would have weighed less than two sticks of butter.  “It’s likely that all dinosaurs evolved from carnivorous ancestors,” said co-author Laura Porro (U of Chicago); “Since heterodontosaurs are among the earliest dinosaurs adapted to eating plants, they may represent a transition phase between meat-eating ancestors and more sophisticated, fully-herbivorous descendents.”
6. Megasaur:  A dinosaur graveyard has been found in Utah, reported Live Science.  Remains of a large number of herbivores were found, including one well-preserved skeleton and a 5-foot humerus from a brachiosaur, one of the largest dinosaurs known.  Tracks have also been found.  Another surprise was a Deltapodus stegosaur – previously known only from Europe.  How did brachiosaurs get so huge?  Another story on Live Science claims they ate high-energy foods whole, without chewing.
7. Sniffer rex:  Halloween wouldn’t be quite the same without mention of everyone’s favorite dinosaur nightmare: the Tyrannosaurus rex.  A report on Live Science claims the monsters had a good sense of smell – vital for hunting down prey.  They believe this based on the size of the opening in the skull where the olfactory bulb – an organ of smell – was located.  The article speculated on evolution of birds from dinosaurs: “Most of today’s birds have keen eyesight but lack a good nose, suggesting smell became less important at some point in birds’ ancestral history, the researchers said.”

Dinosaurs are for kids – including the grown-up kind.  Who doesn’t enjoy learning about this large and varied class of extinct animals that roamed the whole earth?  Imagining things is fun, too.  Just don’t confuse it with science.  There are limits to how much can be known about dinosaurs from their tracks and bones.  We don’t know, for instance, their favorite dance steps, to say nothing of how they decided to give up meat, reduce their noses and fly like Tweety rex.  The beasts are scary enough without the evolutionary monster tales around the campfire.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Evolution

In 1940, the American archaeologist Nelson Glueck summarized his extensive 1930s archaeological surveys in Transjordan in his book The Other Side of the Jordan, asserting that he had discovered King Solomon’s mines in the Faynan district (the northern part of biblical Edom), ~50 km south of the Dead Sea in what is now southern Jordan.  The period between the First and Second World Wars has been called the “Golden Age” of biblical archaeology when this subfield was characterized by an almost literal interpretation of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible, HB) as historical fact.  Archaeologists such as Glueck metaphorically carried the trowel in 1 hand and the Bible in the other, searching the archaeological landscape of the southern Levant for confirmation of the biblical narrative from the Patriarchs to the United Monarchy under David and Solomon to other personages, places, and events mentioned in the sacred text.  Beginning in the 1980s, this paradigm came under severe attack, primarily by so-called biblical minimalist scholars who argued that as the HB was edited in its final form during the 5th century (c.)BC, any reference in the text to events earlier than ca.  500 BC were false.  Accordingly, the events ascribed to the early Israelite and Judean kings from the 10th-9th c. BCE were viewed as concocted by elite 5th c. BCE editors of the HB who resided in postexilic times in Babylon and later in Jerusalem.  Some of the casualities [sic] of the scholarly debate between the traditional biblical scholarship and biblical minimalists has been the historicity of David and Solomon—the latter of which is traditionally cross-dated by biblical text (1 Kings 11:40; 14:25; and 2 Chronicles 12:2–9) and the military topographic list of the Egyptian Pharaoh Sheshonq I (Shishak in the HB) found at the Temple of Amun in Thebes and dated to the early 10th c. BCE (5).
    ....The ¹⁴C dates associated with smelting debris layers from Faynan reported here demonstrate intensive 10th–9th c. BCE industrial metallurgical activities conducted by complex societies.
    The analytical approach advocated here argues for an historical biblical archaeology rooted in the application of science-based methods that enables subcentury dating and the control of the spatial context of data through digital recording tools.

Bible scholars will surely find this paper interesting.  There’s something satisfying about debunking the debunkers.  Congratulations to National Geographic News, usually a Darwinist propaganda bullhorn, for giving a fair report on the story without disparaging the Bible in the process.  Time to minimize minimalism in Biblical archaeology.  Minimalists?  Don’t need ’em in Edom.
Next headline on:  Bible • Dating Methods

Quiz question: what is an evolutionist’s favorite word?  Oh, you want a free hint?  Maybe, baby.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Stars

Snails Walk on Water   10/27/2008    
Oct 27, 2008 — Why is that scientist staring at a snail?  He’s watching a miracle: walking on water.  This is not our exaggeration: Matt Kaplan on National Geographic News entitled his article, “How Snails Walk on Water Is a Small Miracle.”  If we can figure out the trick, we might be able to make little robots do it – even if we don’t know why we would want to yet, other than it would be cool.
    Snails are small enough to be naturally buoyant, but needless to say, getting traction on water is a challenge.  The snail apparently does this by making small ripples.  The ripples are just the right size to give the snail traction without breaking the surface.  It’s a unique method of propulsion unknown till Eric Lauga, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, San Diego, decided to investigate.
    For a human to do this would require shoes as big as a football field, the article said.

  Many capabilities of animals and plants seem miraculous to us, but we sometimes use the word too carelessly.  Jesus walked on water barefoot or on sandals.  That’s a real miracle.
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Terrestrial Zoology • Physics • Amazing Facts

Is religion a product of our evolution?  The very question makes many people, religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons.  Some people of faith fear that an understanding of the processes underlying belief could undermine it.  Others worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable.  Still others, many scientists included, simply dismiss the whole issue, seeing religion as childish, dangerous nonsense.
    Such responses make it difficult to establish why and how religious thought is so pervasive in human societies – an understanding that is especially relevant in the current climate of religious fundamentalism.  In asking whether religion is one of the many consequences of having the type of brains we come equipped with, we can shed light on what kinds of religion ‘come naturally’ to human minds’

The findings emerging from this cognitive-evolutionary approach challenge two central tenets of most established religions.  First, the notion that their particular creed differs from all other (supposedly misguided) faiths; second, that it is only because of extraordinary events or the actual presence of supernatural agents that religious ideas have taken shape.  On the contrary, we now know that all versions of religion are based on very similar tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.

Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems.  By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions – hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.

How otherwise intelligent people can continue to be so blind to their own biases after decades, nay centuries, of philosophers and theologians and logicians pointing them out, is stunning.  Nature has just published another in a long series of self-refuting essays.  A freshman CEH reader can probably refute this article in a sentence or two.  If not, you need to apply yourself to stopping by here more often.
    What is it about their brains that predisposes evolutionists to think this way?  You notice that we put the shoe on the other foot.  That’s fair, because to him, we are all equally evolved.  By what standard of measure can he insist that his tacit assumptions are better than anyone else’s?  By the standards of science?  Ha!  Only if he is a logical positivist – another self-refuting belief system.  If this is not obvious, go back and read Wolpert’s ideas from the 10/16/2008 entry and the commentary on logical positivism from 05/10/2007 before continuing.  If Boyer assumes that “testable predictions” render evolutionary psychology scientific, he has not learned about the dubious logic of predictive success in science.  It’s the main reason Karl Popper rejected predictive success as a criterion of science, and promoted falsification instead.  (Falsification, alas, was also later rejected as a foolproof criterion.)
    Boyer came close to recognizing the self-refuting nature of his beliefs by mentioning people who “worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable.”  (For elaboration on that point, see the 05/09/2006 commentary, bullet 5.)  He should be worried.  To what universal standard could he appeal to decide that religion is an emergent property of the brain, but science is not?  And why would he lament that atheism is hardly the easiest ideology to propagate?  At least he admitted it is an ideology.  But to what universal moral standard would he appeal to say that propagating his atheistic world view would be a good thing?  He said that science may one day find that religion contributed to fitness in ancestral times.  On what grounds, then, can he say it hijacked man’s cognitive abilities?  If it produced fitness, it is just as much an intrinsic benefit to human evolution as the brain itself.
    Boyer’s essay is plagued with other fallacies.  For one, he generalizes all religions, no matter how opposite, in a highly simplistic manner: he puts the witch doctor and the Oxford Scholar into the same “fundamentalist” bucket, also a form of ridicule.  By excepting his own reasoning from those of religious nuts, of course, he has also divided the world into us-vs-them, the either-or fallacy: i.e., you either belong to the People of Science or to the “People of Faith” (whatever that broad-brush category means).  Students want extra credit can hunt for begging the question fallacies, non-sequiturs, the post-hoc fallacy, misuse of circumstantial evidence, reductionism, subjectivity and other fallacies.
    The card-stacking fallacy is notable in this article.  He only offered three responses to the idea that religion evolved: (1) Worry by religionists that it will undermine their beliefs.  (2) Worry by evolutionists that religion, if part of our evolutionary heritage, will be seen as “good, true, necessary or inevitable.” (3) Disgust by scientists that religion is “childish, dangerous nonsense.”  Why did he not consider the possibility that theologians and knowledgeable scholars will consider his evolutionary theory or religion to be regarded as childish, dangerous nonsense?  Is that not what we have just illustrated?
    Another example of his card stacking was to list only things like ritual, metaphysical beliefs, social identity and moral codes as the characteristics of religion.  Why didn’t he mention evidence – and apologetics?  Those things may be lacking in the cultic or ritualistic religions, but the Bible is filled with historical references that can be cross-checked, and appeals to remember what the people knew to be true from evidence, reason and eyewitness testimony.  Paul and Peter claimed to be eyewitnesses of the risen and glorified Christ and emphatically denied that they were following cleverly devised fables.  They also warned people against falling for fables.  If Boyer likes prediction so much, he should consider the prediction Paul made in II Timothy 4:4 that in the last days people will “turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths,” of which evolution is a prime example, because the evidence for God is clear from creation (Romans 1:18-20).  Peter, similarly, predicted the coming of belief in uniformitarianism.  He predicted that mockers would deny the evidence for creation and the flood (II Peter 3:3-9).  Do those predictions count?  Must be consistent.
    Boyer and his fellow atheistic evolutionists arrogate to themselves the chair of science, but have no floor to put it on: not a scientific floor, or a philosophical floor, or an evidence floor.  He needs the Judeo-Christian floor to be able to reason about truth, morals, and evidence at all.  Like Yoda, he speaks ex cathedra from some exalted plane above the rest of humanity, telling us about our tacit assumptions while ignoring his own (08/13/2007).  He tells others what makes them tick without understanding that what makes him tick is rebellion against his Creator.  He couldn’t slap his Father’s face without first sitting in His lap.  Pascal Boyer should sit quietly like a good boy and read Pascal.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Human Body • Theology

The overwhelming source of O₂ on Earth is photobiological oxidation of water; neither the evolution nor the mechanism of this process are completely understood.  Apparently it arose once in a single clade of bacteria and was then appropriated via a single event, in which one cell engulfed another (endosymbiosis) to form a new symbiotic organism.  The latter became the progenitor of all photosynthetic eukaryotes, including algae and higher plants.
    The core of the oxidation machinery is photosystem II, a large protein complex containing four manganese atoms that are photocatalytically oxidized to create electron holes upstream.

On time scales of years to millennia, these reactions are closely coupled to the reverse process of respiration, such that net production of O₂ is virtually nil.  That is, without burial of organic matter in rocks, there would be very little free O₂ in the atmosphere.  Hence, the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis was a necessary but not a sufficient condition to oxidize Earth’s atmosphere.

OK; how convinced are you that the evolutionary storytellers are compelled by the evidence to embrace their billions of years saga of a history they cannot observe?  It’s a magical history, in which complex oxidation machines “arise” by some unspecified natural magic.  (Note that if something “arose once,” it is not following a natural law).
    Lacking evidence, they can build models that include the natural magic built-in.  By tweaking parameters here and there, and trying to debunk contrary evidence, they can get it to work – sort of.  It continues to amaze them how finely balanced it is.
    So much for this space fantasy.  The atmosphere on Darwin’s imaginary world is too rarefied to breathe.  Let’s head back to the real world.
Next headline on:  Geology • Physics and Chemistry • Origin of Life • Dating Methods

Minding the Brain, or Braining the Mind?   10/23/2008    
Oct 23, 2008 — There’s a battle brewing over who controls your brain: nature or your mind.  Materialist scientists are recognizing that creationists are getting a foothold on this hill and “declaring war over the brain,” according to an article in New Scientist.  Psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz fired this salvo: “Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.”
    Amanda Gefter, author of the article, also took note of the book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul by O’Leary and Beauregard.  Schwartz and Beauregard were among the speakers at an international symposium in Manhattan called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness.  Gefter listed several fronts in the war to reclaim the mind: “Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing ‘non-material neuroscience’ movement,” she explained.  “They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial – in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul.”
    After giving adequate white space for proponents of the non-materialist view (including Angus Menuge, J. P. Moreland and the Discovery Institute), Gefter clearly wanted to throw her vote to the reigning materialist paradigm on this matter of mind.  She commented on an experiment Schwartz used to support the independent existence of mind, saying, “these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.”
    In the middle of her article, Gefter got really serious:

Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools.  But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, emphasises: “This is real and dangerous and coming our way.”
    He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons.  “Progress in science is slow on many fronts,” says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley.  “We don’t yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn’t mean cancer has spiritual causes.”
    And for Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, “it is an argument from ignorance.  The fact something isn’t currently explained doesn’t mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics.”

The attack on materialism proposes to do just that, but it all turns on definitions.  “At one time it looked like all physical causation was push/pull Newtonianism,” says Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, North Carolina.  “Now we have a new understanding of physics.  What counts as material has changed.  Some respectable philosophers think that we might have to posit sentience as a fundamental force of nature or use quantum gravity to understand consciousness.  These stretch beyond the bounds of what we today call ‘material’, and we haven’t discovered everything about nature yet.  But what we do discover will be natural, not supernatural.”

Apparently the irony of this article was completely lost on Amanda Gefter and her materialist experts.  They were all using their minds to argue and debate about immaterial concepts.  If nothing more was happening than molecules bouncing around in their skulls, how could they even know what they were saying?
    Remember when Mom, Dad, or some other childhood mentor showed you that when you point an accusatory finger at someone else, three other fingers are pointing back at you?  Clark just lectured us on logic.  Flanagan just lectured us on definitions.  Gefter just lectured us on God-of-the-gaps arguments.  All three have just shot their little finger-guns right back into their own skulls.  Example: Gefter dismissed Schwartz’s empirical evidence that the mind can change the brain by saying, “the material brain is changing the material brain.”  OK, class, what’s the next question?  Think about it (yes, think), [Jeopardy tune plays], and the bell rings – Aha!  Who is making the material brain change the material brain?  And who is observing the change?
    Now, if you think that is just a logical trick, you have to realize that without a person doing the changing, no one would ever know a change had occurred.  This is a mind-body problem that cannot be so easily swept away.  If you could shrink yourself to the size of a cell and wander through the brain, you would no more see thought than if you wandered through Big Ben could you see time.  Time and thought live in the conceptual realm, not the material realm.  Suppose you walked through a computer chip like a pedestrian on the streets of London.  Would you see Boolean logic?  Oh, you might see certain switches light up, and perhaps you could perceive electrons in a diode or transistor junction flowing one way instead of the other.  But it is not the chip that would be sensing that logic is occurring: it would be you, the Observer.  The operation of a physical system is not the same as concept behind the system.  A system cannot tell itself the purpose of the system in a way that brings understanding.  That takes a Person.  Consider: if Amanda’s mind is not directing her argument, how could she have any free will to believe that her argument is true, and that ID is so false it should be pre-empted?  And to what is the pre-emptive strike referring, if not some well-intentioned but misguided appeal to immaterial truth and morals?
    Gefter and Flanagan dismissed this all as quibbling over definitions.  But look at the fingers pointing right back at them: they suggested that any possible concept might be enveloped within the words material or natural – even things like sentience, a quantum-gravity theory of consciousness, or any future discovery of science.  “These stretch beyond the bounds of what we today call ‘material’, and we haven’t discovered everything about nature yet.  But what we do discover will be natural, not supernatural.”  This is a rescuing device to end all rescuing devices.  No matter what the evidence, they can envelop it, like The Blob, into their materialistic worldview.
    OK, let’s push that envelope.  Suppose they find irrefutable evidence for angels.  Will they call them material?  Will they be a part of the “natural” universe?  Even God has a divine “nature.”  The word nature or natural is so slippery it can mean a dozen different things – including immaterial things like natural laws (Note: material things may obey natural laws, but laws are not material).  Materialists constantly invoke non-material things in their reasoning: mathematics, abstract logic, scientific methods to name just a few.  They also frequently make reference to unobservable entities – information, feedback, signal transduction, classification, reason, honesty and much, much more.  They help themselves to immaterial concepts and stuff them into their materialist bag, oblivious to who is doing the classifying.

God-of-the-Gaps:  J. P. Moreland, who was mentioned in Gefter’s article, has three comeback arguments to the perennial charge that Christians fill gaps in scientific knowledge with appeals to God.  Paraphrasing, he says, (1) Christians would not expect there to be many gaps.  The Biblical worldview indicates that the world runs according to predictable patterns (natural laws) most of the time.  In fact, it is only the Biblical worldview that makes sense of the concept of natural laws.  (2) Some gaps are getting wider.  Scientific discoveries about the cell and the origin of life and the fine-tuning of the universe are resisting all attempts at materialist explanations.  We should follow the evidence where it leads.  If that evidence is pointing to design, so be it.  (3) Materialists are just as guilty of the charge.  Whenever some incredibly-complex mechanism is discovered in a cell, for instance, they assume that natural selection produced it, or assume that some day in the future, a material cause will be discovered.  This is nothing more than naturalism-of-the-gaps.

The material/spiritual and natural/supernatural distinctions are false dichotomies.  They cannot stand up to a half-hour of scrutiny by a skilled philosopher.  What it boils down to is this: naturalism is anything and everything that allows a scientist (or a party animal on drugs) to avoid responsibility to their Maker.  That’s the real argument from ignorance.  They can believe in space aliens or unobservable multiverses – anything, no matter how crazy, as long as they never have to bow the knee and confess, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for Thou hast created all things, and by Thy will they exist, and were created” (Revelation 4:11).
    You can put a brain into a jar of formaldehyde, and you can throw a used computer onto a junk pile, but the concepts of mind and design, like Halloween ghosts, will always find the materialist’s haunted house and come back to join the party.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Intelligent Design • Theology, Philosophy or Religion

1. None of the structures were pennate feathers, that is, with barbs and barbules from a central vane.  The integumentary structures fell into two categories:
   1. “Shafted feathers” – Connected to the last ten tail vertebra were found two “membranous structures” consisting of parallel shafts that each branch once.  Each shaft has a thin unbranched vane of material, like a coating, along a central rachis.  The result appears as four long nearly-parallel rods that join at the base.  Collectively they are nearly as long as the skeleton of the creature.  Mark Norell (American Museum of Natural History) commented, “These seem to lack that main shaft down the middle and are just a really long collection of very long, filamentous-like structures.”
   2. “Non-shafted feathers” – These are rows of integument found outside the outline of skeleton, presumably from the skin.  They all end in parallel rows of barbs, nothing like the cross-cutting structure of bird feathers; the BBC article calls it a “fluffy, down-like covering.”  The authors stated, “the free distal barbs of Epidexipteryx arise from the edge of a membranous structure (Fig. 2b, c, d, d'), an arrangement that has never previously been reported.”
2. Some of the structures bear similarities to those on Jeholornis, a creature interpreted as being capable of powered flight (see 07/24/2002).
3. The authors allowed for the possibility that this creature was “secondarily flightless” – i.e., that it once had feathers like a bird, but lost them; if so, it was not evolving from a dinosaur into a bird.
4. The authors suggested that the feathers on Epidexipteryx were used for display, not for flight, but the LiveScience article hypothesized they “likely helped the creature balance on tree branches.”
5. The animal had a curious mosaic of traits.  National Geographic remarked, “Epidexipteryx’s anatomy seems to be a hodgepodge of features taken from a variety of animals.”  It seems to have been the “platypus” of the Jurassic – an improbable mixture of traits from different groups.
6. Since the creature had a “surprising combination of physical features” (BBC News), it should not be envisioned as a transitional form from one lineage to another.  The BBC News article complicated the evolutionary story by stating, “The discovery adds yet more complexity to the early history of the era when small meat-eating bipedal dinosaurs evolved into birds.”  The evidence, therefore, makes the explanation more complex, not simpler, in contradiction to Occam’s Razor.
7. The evolutionary date is too late to represent a pre-bird.  The BBC article said, “whereas other feathered dinosaurs [sic] date from after the appearance of the first known bird, this fossil appears to be much closer in age, so it opens a new window on the evolutionary events at the critical transition from dinosaurs to birds.”  Live Science says that the dates are uncertain; at best it was “slightly older” than Archaeopteryx.  If it was nearly contemporaneous with a fully-feathered bird that was most likely capable of powered flight, it could not be a pre-bird, bird ancestor or missing link.
8. The evolutionary link to birds is only inferential.  Live Science quoted one of the authors saying, “Although this dinosaur cannot be the direct ancestor for birds, it is one of the dinosaurs that have the closest phylogenetic relationship to birds.”
9. Mark Norell hinted that this fossil has more to say about diversity, not evolution.  “Things more primitive than this have fully formed feathers” he said.  “This is just some weirdo kind of thing this animal has.”

As scientists and others discover more and more dinosaur fossils with bird-like features, the picture of such creatures is becoming more complex, said Norell, who was not involved in the current study.
    “Just like the bird diversity we have living today goes all the way from hummingbirds to ostriches to toucans, it’s incredibly diverse,” Norell said during a telephone interview.  “Now we’re starting to see that sort of diversity extends not only in birds but also in the close bird relatives [which] were just as physically diverse as modern birds are.”

The artists’ renditions go far beyond the evidence: they’ve put vibrant colors on the alleged feathers and given the creature a whole life and personality.  The structures cannot be called feathers except by stretching the definition of the term.  The tail structures look like long rods.  The “down-like coating” could be flayed skin, given that the creature was exceptionally well preserved.  It may represent a mutant dodo-line of ancient birds that went extinct, or a member of a subclass of dinosaurs that shared the most similarities with birds without being related to them.
    Scientists should be very careful about making inferences about any complex set of data.  The bones do not jump up and announce that they were evolving into birds.  The supplementary data in the paper show nearly 300 traits that had to be compared to make a cladistic analysis.  The significance of any one of them requires a human judgment.  Which traits are you going to focus on?  Humans share traits with this fossil, too: vertebrae, teeth, radius and ulna, and many organs not visible from the bones.  It is conceivable that the scientists in another civilization might consider size, habitat, lifestyle or some other characteristic to be the overriding concern in their way of classifying things.  What kind of inferences would they draw?  Complexity, diversity and “mosaics” of traits throw simplistic schemes into disarray.  How would you rearrange your Evolutionary Tree of Tools if somebody handed you a Leatherman tool with a knife, screwdriver, pliers and scissors in a leather pouch?
    Even granting, for the sake of argument, the most generous leeway to the evolutionists and calling the structures on this thing feathers does not help their story.  Other feathered birds were nearly contemporaries.  If this was an “evolutionary dead end,” where is the highway?  A collection of dead ends may keep you busy, but is not going to get you anywhere.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Birds • Fossils

Good question. In part, it was the way I was taught biology in high school.  My teachers refused to teach anything about evolution.  In fact, the only time I remember hearing the ‘E’ word in high school was when we dissected frogs.  After explaining to a room full of queasy kids how understanding the anatomy of a frog could help us understand the basics of human anatomy, the teacher paused thoughtfully and said, “Now I’m not talking about evolution here, so don’t go home and tell your parents that I’m teaching evolution”.  And that was it.  The rest of high school biology was just a collection of evidence supporting Dobzhansky’s claim that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution”.  We collected insects and looked at pine cones, and we had a hamster that we taught to go to the bathroom through a hole in the side of its cage.  That was pretty much it.  Biology seemed more like an eccentric hobby than a coherent body of knowledge.  Mercifully, we were spared any discussion of ‘Intelligent Design’....
    I started reading more deeply in biology and realized just how flawed my early education had been.  I read Darwin and I discovered T.H. Morgan and Max Delbrück and the Phage Group.  The only advantage of coming to biology so late was that I found almost everything that I learned new and exciting.  Reading about solving the genetic code, thirty years after the fact, made me as excited as if it was happening at that moment, in a lab down the hall.  I was astounded by the calcium ATPase: a single molecule that can discriminate, with remarkable specificity, between similar divalent cations and use chemical energy to pump calcium against a 10,000-fold concentration gradient.

To my engineer’s mind, a living cell was now just a complex, feedback-controlled system.  I could imagine writing equations to describe biochemical pathways, cellular functions, and, eventually, entire living cells.  Nowadays this kind of thinking would be called ‘systems biology’.  And while it is not exactly the way I approach biological problems in my lab now, it was the kind of thinking that made biology intelligible to me.

Biology teachers should have constant sorrow, too after reading this story.  This is how to turn a bright young inquiring mind into a self-contradicting smart aleck.  Can’t this blues boy realize that complex, feedback-controlled systems don’t just happen?  This man of constant sorrow can stare at intelligent design right in front of his face, like that biological machine that “can discriminate, with remarkable specificity, between similar divalent cations and use chemical energy to pump calcium against a 10,000-fold concentration gradient,” and turn right around and praise Darwin and Dobzhansky.  Step back a second and realize how insane this is.  This same dude would never step into a computer room and insult the designers, but can stare at even more complex systems and call them cobbled jumbles of time and chance.  It’s enough to make you want to yank his beard and knock on his skull and ask, “Anybody home?” (Caution: Do NOT do that to anybody except yourself, women and obsessive shavers excepted.)  The interviewer, as usual for Current Bilge, just slurps it all up like fine whine.
    Teachers: pay attention.  You cannot solve the creation-evolution controversy by ignoring it.  This does more harm than good.  Students want answers.  They are curious about evolution.  Those from religious homes may be worried about it, while those from secular humanist homes may have moms and dads ready to sue.  You cannot push this subject off.  One cannot understand modern history or science without understanding Darwin.  The next Dyche Mullins in your classroom will remember how you sloughed off the subject as if it were taboo, then a Darwin dogmatist in college will sweep him off his feet with visions of the alluring explanatory power of evolution.
    In private or home schools, the solution is simple: teach all about Darwinism – all its strengths and weaknesses, the stuff the textbooks leave out.  In public schools, the courts and the school boards have often become so paranoid they will try to persecute or dismiss any teacher who teaches scientific facts about Darwin, like they did to Roger DeHart.  Sometimes the thought police go after not what you say, but what they think your motivation is.  You have to know your principal, your state, and your school board.  Thankfully some states are passing academic freedom laws.  Many teachers have found the right way to present Darwinism honestly without dogmatism.  Who could fault that?  Science is supposed to be the opposite of dogmatism!  Don’t expect all parents and school boards to be rational, though, on this hot topic; the Discovery Institute can provide valuable help for negotiating the fine legal lines involved.  Whether public or private or home school teacher, your goal is to help students become familiar with the evolutionary theory in its historical, political and scientific contexts; to understand the arguments Darwin and his critics have made, and while at the same time to develop critical thinking skills to be able to separate dogmatic claims from scientific evidence.
    Let’s use this entry also to cogitate on the nature of science.  We tend to pigeonhole subjects into watertight categories: a scientist is someone who does science, and science is what scientists do.  Is that necessarily the case?  When Mullins is clowning around with the country band, is he doing science then, just because he is a scientist by profession?  Obviously not.  All right, then; is