Go to the Ant, Thou Farmer   11/30/2008    
Nov 30, 2008 — We humans boast too much.  Agribusiness?  Ants have it down to a science.  “One of the most important developments in human civilisation was the practice of sustainable agriculture,” stated Science Daily.  “But we were not the first – ants have been doing it for over 50 million years.  Just as farming helped humans become a dominant species, it has also helped leaf-cutter ants become dominant herbivores, and one of the most successful social insects in nature.”
    The article discusses how ants have not only perfected the art of growing crops in their nests, but keeping them pest-free.  They have symbioses with fungi and bacteria that produce antibiotics, preventing the spread of diseases that would destroy their colonies.  Their disposal system is also very elegant.  “So how exactly does an ant go about forming partnerships with a fungus and a bacterium?” the article asked.  Answer: “No one really knows.”
    What they do know, in their own minds, is that evolution explains everything.  “Darwin was right about how evolution can affect the whole group” stated another article on Science Daily decorated with a photo of marching ants.  They get bad Marx, though, for their opening line:

Worker ants of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your fertility.  The highly specialized worker castes in ants represent the pinnacle of social organization in the insect world.  As in any society, however, ant colonies are filled with internal strife and conflict.  So what binds them together?  More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin had an idea and now he’s been proven right.

The existence of sterile castes of ants tormented Charles Darwin as he was formulating his Theory of Natural Selection, and he described them as the “one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my theory.”  If adaptive evolution unfolds by differential survival of individuals, how can individuals incapable of passing on their genes possibly evolve and persist?
    Darwin proposed that in the case of ant societies natural selection applies not only to the individual, because the individual would never benefit by cutting its own reproduction, but also to the family or group.  This study supports Darwin’s prescient ideas, and provides a molecular measure of how an entire colony can be viewed as a single or “superorganism.”

The ant farm was fun till Charlie and Tinker Bell showed up (03/16/2006).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Facts • Darwin and Evolution

Although this evolutionary scenario is plausible, we are particularly excited by an alternative interpretation and its evolutionary consequences.  We interpret the condition seen in Odontochelys differently — that a carapace was present, but some of its dermal components were not ossified.  The carapace forms during embryonic development when the dorsal ribs grow laterally into a structure called the carapacial ridge, a thickened ectodermal layer unique to turtles.  The presence of long, expanded ribs, a component of the carapace of all turtles, indicates that the controlling developmental tissue responsible for the formation of the turtle carapace was already present in Odontochelys.  The expanded lateral bridge that connects the plastron to the carapace in other turtles is also present, implying that the plastron was connected to the laterally expanded carapace.  Thus, an alternative interpretation is that the apparent reduction of the carapace in Odontochelys resulted from lack of ossification of some of its dermal components, but that a carapace was indeed present.
    This interpretation of Odontochelys leads us to the possibility that its shell morphology is not primitive, but is instead a specialized adaptation.  Reduction of dermal components of the shell in aquatic turtles is common: soft-shelled turtles have a greatly reduced bony shell and have lost the dermal peripheral elements of the carapace.  Sea turtles and snapping turtles have greatly reduced ossification of the dermal components of the carapace, a condition similar to that seen in Odontochelys.

Regardless of the primitive or derived nature of its shell, Odontochelys is in evolutionary terms the most ‘basal’ turtle yet found.  Its discovery opens a new chapter in the study of the origins and early history of these fascinating reptiles.  Both interpretations alter our views of turtle evolution: Odontochelys either represents the primitive ecology for turtles, consistent with the hypothesis that the turtles’ shell evolved in aquatic environments, or it represents the earliest turtle radiation from terrestrial environments into marine habitats.  Either way, these ancient turtles demonstrate yet again the value of new fossil discoveries in changing our understanding of vertebrate history.

Aren’t animals with a full set of teeth more advanced than those with just a beak?  Teeth are extremely complicated structures that must develop according to a strict timeline and fit on the top and bottom.  The beak on most turtles works well for them, but how can they say that this is evolution?  Look at all the problems that remain: they don’t know if turtles evolved as land animals or aquatic animals (see the 11/22/2008 story last week).  They don’t know if this fossil was primitive or advanced.  And they wonder why turtles have not changed significantly since the age of dinosaurs.  Where is the evolution?
    They confess, as the authors of the original paper stated, that “The origin of the turtle body plan remains one of the great mysteries of reptile evolution.”  One proposed intermediate that is subject to multiple interpretations is not going to help.  The fossil record should be filled with intermediates.  This species was apparently happily playing in the water, fully adapted to its habitat, not evolving like the evolutionary story you just heard.
    Evolutionists arrange their scientific explanations so that they can’t lose.  Why do they always get their explanations published?  Their controversies can consist of opposite stories: It’s a transitional form!  No it isn’t – it’s an advanced, specially adapted animal!.  No matter what, alternative explanations are never even heard.  Why do they always shut out their critics?  Because they have mastered the art of Calvinball: change the rules dynamically so that Charlie always wins.  Gag if you think this is a bad way to do science.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Biology • Evolution

Knowledge of Light Is Power   11/28/2008    
Nov 28, 2008 — Now that engineers are becoming adept at manipulating materials at the scale of billionths of a meter, they are taking first steps toward using a power source familiar to plants: light.  Science Daily described the first humble attempts to get light photons to drive nano-sized machines.
    The article did not mention whether photosynthesis provided any inspiration for the research, but it is well known that plant chloroplasts are able to harvest single photons for energy with optimal efficiency.  These engineers realize their first attempts have a long way to go.  The light intensity they are using is a million times stronger than sunlight.  “It took more than 60 years to progress from the first transistors to the speed and power of today’s computers,” the article stated.  “Creating devices that run solely on light rather than electronics will now begin a similar process of development, according to the authors.”

More power to them.  How about a little humility, though, considering that their technology can’t hold a candle to the light-harvesting abilities of blue-green algae?  The paradigm of our time is that time and chance accomplished a feat that is taxing the design capabilities of the human brain, the most complex arrangement of matter in the universe.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Biomimetics

This article is typical of how many press releases go far beyond the evidence to pretend scientists understand something.  They know, we are led to believe, when star formation turned on and off, how galaxies moved around over billions of years, and into which pigeonhole in the classification scheme each galaxy fits (see the problems with classification schemes in the 10/29/2008 commentary).  “The next step for both teams is to find out exactly what shuts off the star formation, by looking inside the galaxies themselves,” the article ends.  Didn’t we see astronomers playing this game back in the 1930s, with completely different results?  When data are hard to come by, and when processes exceed the lifetime of human civilization, scientific hubris becomes indistinguishable from myth.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Astronomy

The first thing that [Evie] Vereecke noticed was that the animals don’t hit the ground with their heels at the start of a stride.  They move more like ballerinas, landing on their toes before the heel touches the ground.  Analysing the gibbon foot computer model, Vereecke realised that by landing on the toes first they were stretching the toes’ tendons and storing energy in them.  According to Vereecke, this is quite different from the way that energy is stored in the human foot.  She explains that our feet are built like sprung arches spanned by an elastic tendon (aponeurosis) along the sole of the foot.  When we put weight on our feet, the arch stretches the aponeurosis, storing elastic energy to power the push off at the end of a stride.
    And there were more differences between the gibbon and human walking patterns at the end of a stride.  Instead of lifting the foot as one long lever, the gibbon lifted its heel first, effectively bending the foot in two to form an upward-turned arch, stretching the toes’ tendons even further and storing more elastic energy ready for release as the foot eventually pushes off.

The human foot is a miracle of evolution.  We can keep striding for miles on our well-sprung feet.  There is nothing else like them, not even amongst our closest living relatives.  According to Evie Vereecke, from the University of Liverpool, the modern human foot first appeared about 1.8 million years ago, but our ape-like ancestors probably took to walking several million years earlier, even though their feet were more ‘floppy’ and ape like than ours.

A miracle of evolution.  It’s a miracle an evolutionist could say something that stupid.  (On second thought,...)  Darwinists stumble all over their own feet because their foundation is floppy.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mammals • Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Far-Out Science   11/25/2008    
Nov 25, 2008 — The following list of bizarre stories coming from science news outlets is jarring on two fronts: it shows how little scientists understand, and calls into question what counts as science these days.  Some stories illustrate one or the other; some both.

1. Roar of the aurora aura:  Both Saturn and Mars turned up auroras that are mystifying scientists.  Electromagnetism was pretty much figured out in the 19th century – so they say, but theory did not predict an aurora this large in the area where it was found on Saturn’s north pole.  It didn’t predict the perfect geometric hexagon of cloud formations there either.  On Mars, physicists did not expect the planet’s patchy magnetic field to be strong enough to generate an aurora.
2. Grape big puzzle:  If the BBC News story is correct, the Cambrian Explosion problem just got worse.  Fossil trackways previously thought to be evidence for Precambrian worms might have been made instead by grape-sized single-celled protozoans moving millimeters per day.  If so, that means there were no bilaterian organisms lighting the fuse for the explosion of life forms to come.
3. In the beginning, hydrogen:  If atomic hydrogen was the most abundant element coming out of the big bang, why is there so little of it at 11.5 billion light-years?  PhysOrg puzzled over that: “If anything, hydrogen was expected to be more abundant so early in the life of the Universe because it had not yet been consumed by the formation of all the stars and galaxies we know today.”  Was it all plasma back then? the article asked.  If so, what would that do to theories of galaxy evolution?
4. Wild wild web:  Orb-web spiders go nuts in space, spinning webs in chaotic patterns.  Space.com shows a picture. 
5. Gut feeling:  There are 10 times more species of micro-organisms in your colon than scientists thought, Science Daily reported.
6. Secret network:  New Scientist reported on “previously unknown way in which animal cells can communicate with each other.”  A nano-network of tubes apparently provides a path for proteins to move from cell to cell. 
7. Fuel economy:  Oil may not come from squishing dinosaurs, but from a fungus acting on biomass, reported Live Science about a fungus that is highly efficient at making biofuel directly.  “In fact, it’s so good at turning plant matter into fuel that researchers say their discovery calls into question the whole theory of how crude oil was made by nature in the first place.”
8. Paranoia:  They’re out to get us.  The aliens are everywhere.  The universe is teeming with them.  That was not printed in New Schizophrenic; it was printed in New Scientist.  You don’t even need a habitable zone any more.  Just add water, a little heat, and presto: life.  It doesn’t seem to bother these scientists that there is no empirical evidence for it.
9. Cool your GW jets:  One of the most forward-looking and futuristic scientists of our age, who has had no trouble imagining life on frozen worlds and aliens able to harvest all the light of their dimming stars in huge spheres, doesn’t buy global warming.  Freeman Dyson, who taught physics for 41 years at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and has received 21 honorary degrees, is unimpressed by the models and methods of the Global Warming consensus, reported Town Topics, a Princeton newsletter.  Dyson thinks the proponents of anthropogenic global warming are “tremendously dogmatic.”  The self-styled rebel warned an audience that “When science gets rich it becomes political.”
10. What’s yanking on my spacetime fabric?  Something’s out there.  We can’t see it and don’t know what it is – but it’s tugging on the universe, said National Geographic News.  The culprits could be anything: “As bizarre as you could imagine—some warped space-time,” the protagonist said.  On the other hand, though, it could be “something dull.”  Whatever it is, finding it was a “great surprise” and would require “explaining the unexplainable.”  There’s hope, though; “Not everyone is ready to rewrite physics just yet.”
11. An unexpected link?  Are the half-lives of radioactive elements constant?  Science News spent four pages last week examining the possibility that decay rates are influenced by the sun.  The editor even commented on the article; “Maybe radioactivity hasn’t revealed all its mysteries,” he said.  He recounted several instances in the 20th century when consensus views about radioactivity were overthrown.  “To be sure,” Tom Siegfried said, “there’s no reason yet to throw out the nuclear physics textbooks.”  Human error is often the problem – not the laws of physics.  “But you never know.  Radioactivity has a way of revealing some of nature’s best-kept secrets.”
12. Quantum indeterminism:  Is the whole edifice of quantum physics about to come unglued?  PNAS published a paper by Aage Bohr, the fourth son of Niels Bohr, who with two colleagues is upsetting the atomic world view.  In its place, they offered a geometric world view, “which recognizes the occurrence of events, clicks in counters [as in radioactive decay], coming without a cause, referred to as fortuitous.”  They hastened to explain why this is not the death of science.  But what would a traditional cosmologist or historian of science think of the following:

    Through fortuity, space–time invariance itself thus acquires a hitherto unrecognized role.  Departing from the norms of physical theory, the uncaused click is not a measurement of something, and the reality mirrored in the distributions is the geometry of space time itself, and not a property of an imagined object.  The geometric world view involves only the dimensions of space and time, and the absence of an irreducible dimension of mass is seen as the result of the discovery of new physical phenomena.  Accordingly Planck’s constant has no place in fundamental theory and is seen as a relic of dimensions that have become superfluous.

What makes Shapin’s attention to industrial and entrepreneurial research so compelling is how different today’s technoscience looks when contrasted with histories in which pure science in universities becomes the gold standard.  In these other sites of science, Shapin finds the paradox that gives the book its spring.  Research managers at Bell Labs or General Electric judge scientists not only on their impressive credentials and technical skills but also by their personal dispositions for working well in large, variegated, transient, and loosely organized teams.  Venture capitalists must, in the face of massive uncertainties about whether an invention will yield profits, rely on character judgments about the personal trustworthiness and dedication of this particular scientist or engineer, who may differ little from a thousand others in terms of bench skills or academic achievements.  The Scientific Life provokes us to discard worn-out understandings that science outside universities is necessarily aberrant and that the credibility of scientific knowledge no longer depends upon moral judgments about the experts who make reality claims.  In that task, the book succeeds masterfully.

Last month we saw Dyche Mullins say that what sets a good scientist apart is intuition – trusting one’s instincts (10/21/2008).  And then we asked why that makes science any more special than football coaching or prosecuting a case or hunting.  Notice that Gieryn just referred to “experts who make reality claims” (i.e., scientists), but are you convinced by the reality claims in the 12 stories above?  Some of these scientists wouldn’t know reality from Reality TV.  If asked to define reality philosophically, it is doubtful they could defend what they believe as being really real.  They couldn’t tell us where their presuppositions stop and their empiricism begins.  If what they told us yesterday was scientific fact is now obsolete, how are we to trust what they are telling us now?
    A common tactic of the leftist secularist Darwin-worshiping crowd is to call their critics “anti-science.”  That mud won’t stick.  If by science they mean its original intent of “knowledge” gained by honest pursuit of the truth, following the evidence where it leads, then no one could be more pro-science than the Darwin doubters.  They are willing to risk reputation and even livelihood for standing up to dogma masquerading as scientific knowledge.  But if by science the Darwinists are talking about the institutions of ivory-tower elitists who enforce consensus with punishment, then any honest citizen should be anti-that.  Michael Crichton, the best-selling author who died this month, bravely told a group of scientists in 2003 what one of their own would be afraid to say: “There is no such thing as consensus science.  If it’s consensus, it isn’t science.  If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.  Period.”  This lecture, available from Stephen Schneider at Stanford, was a refreshing break from the herd mentality of the academic environment.
    Gieryn and Shapin did not describe good science in terms of its methods, its institutions and its libraries.  They boiled it down to character: personal trustworthiness, honesty, and the ability to make moral judgments.  Doesn’t that apply to every scholarly endeavor?  The same character requirement should apply to the historian, the lawyer (don’t laugh; there are some honest lawyers), the philosopher, the theologian, the architect, the teacher – indeed, to everyone.  Each of us makes truth claims sometimes.  By definition, one cannot pursue truth without honesty.  Did you ever find honesty mentioned in the scientific method?
    Science’s claim to privilege is supposed to depend on its way of acquiring knowledge of the natural world.  As we have seen, though, the word “natural” is slippery and ill-defined (11/09/2008).  Science overlaps with many other fields of inquiry.  The word is broadly applied in areas where it probably does not belong.  The institutions that encapsulate science encapsulate other things, not all of them savory, and some true science occurs outside the capsule.  For instance, when you find a scientist positing entities that cannot be detected even in principle, or punishing a colleague who doesn’t go along with the consensus, or appealing to the Stuff Happens Law to explain something, is that person doing better science than a citizen researcher, just because he or she wears the scientist label or has a degree in science?  A dishonest scientist does not deserve any more respect than a devious lawyer or a shaman.  To be really pro-science, you must be pro-honesty.  Since honesty does not emerge from matter in motion, that rules out many scientists-so-called who have excluded the Source of honesty from their world view.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Fossil • Terrestrial Zoology • Human Body • Cell Biology • Politics and Ethics

It’s not often you get the opportunity to hang out with a legend!  Spend some quality time with Frank Drake, the founder of modern SETI, and author of the Drake Equation.
    At a donor level of $50,000 - 100,000, you can spend one to two days with Frank, as he takes you behind the scenes to the optical SETI experiment at Lick Observatory, and explains both the science and the technology.  A personalized tour of this observatory would be special in itself.  Doing so in the company of Frank Drake is not just a rare opportunity: it’s unique.

The Drake Equation is a joke.  It’s nothing more than a propaganda tool for atheistic cosmology, using visualization to give an air of scientific authority to ignorance.  He left out the only term that can bring the possibility of life above absolute zero: intelligent causation.  Only a fool would throw good money at ignorance (10/12/2007).
    The most egregious thing in Drake’s know-nothing resume (08/22/2008, 05/01/2008, 08/17/2007, 02/11/2007, 01/24/2007) has been the founding of a society that is dead-set against intelligent design (02/20/2007), while employing intelligent design principles in its core strategy (12/03/2005).  SETI should be renamed the Search for Evolutionary Tricks of Imagination (04/17/2008, 04/01/2008, 03/17/2008).  Thanks to Brett Miller for illustrating this in another clever cartoon.
Next headline on:  SETI • Intelligent Design

Nature Can’t Wait for Darwin Day   11/23/2008    
Nov 23, 2008 — Darwin Day (Feb. 12, 2009) is months away, but Nature devoted a special issue to it this week.  The cover story, Darwin 200, includes 15 articles and features, some of which are available to the public.  Features include a list of celebrations and exhibitions around the world, including a re-enactment of Darwin’s voyage on a “modernized replica” of the HMS Beagle.  The voyage will be a floating field trip beamed to classrooms worldwide.
    The lead Editorial, “Beyond the Origin,” contained the expected creation-bashing and touting of Darwin’s theory as the greatest idea in history, but it ended with a curious theme: synthetic biology will allow the origin of life by intelligent design, though Darwin’s law of natural selection will continue to rule biology. 

By the time the 200th birthday of On the Origin of Species is celebrated, the life under study by science may well no longer be united by common ancestry in the way that all life is today.  In that sense, Darwin’s view of the world will have been superseded.  But whether that life exists around another star or in a bioreactor, it will still evolve, if given leave to, according to the simple and awe-inspiring algorithms of natural selection.
    The essay of Dobzhansky’s quoted earlier bears the now-famous title “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”.  That is so close to being an analytical truth – a necessary implication of what life itself is – that we can be certain it will continue to be true into the future.  But that certainty in no way limits the diversity and sheer wonder of what we will find on the voyage that Darwin began.

1. 1882:  When Darwin died, his supporters used his “funeral as propaganda.”  Concerned at the time over criticisms that Darwin’s views were hostile to religion, Thomas Huxley and crew hastened to get him buried in Westminster Abbey.  Why?

   The funeral service and many obituaries stressed that Darwin was not an atheist.  He was instead described as a good man, committed to truth and honesty.  This was true, but it was also valuable propaganda at a time when relations between science and religion were intensely fraught.  The men of the Royal Society used Darwin’s funeral as a way to reassure their contemporaries that science was not a threat to moral values, but rather was becoming increasingly important in the modern world.

2. 1909: The 50th anniversary of the Origin found Darwin’s theory in decline.  New views on genetics, fossils and orthogenesis were undermining his views on gradual change, implying instead a goal-directed path of descent and even teleology.  “The 1909 commemorations, organized by a small group of naturalists and Darwin family members from the University of Cambridge, provided a way to reassert the primacy of natural selection against other evolutionary rivals,” Browne said.
3. 1959:  The bombastic Darwin Centennial hosted by the University of Chicago in 1959 was another attempt to whitewash Darwin, Browne argued. 

   This Darwin anniversary was held at the University of Chicago in Illinois, in a symposium that pointedly celebrated the integration of genetics and population statistics with selection theory.  Ten years earlier, this integration had almost taken the form of a political treaty.  Putting it bluntly, field naturalists were eager to re-establish their value in an increasingly laboratory-based world.  Prominent naturalists such as Ernst Mayr managed to get geneticists and statisticians to agree that evolution could take place on three levels: in molecules; in the flow of genes through populations; and in the environmental world of organisms undergoing competition and natural selection.  In 1942, Julian Huxley invented the phrase ‘modern synthesis’ to combine genetics with natural selection, and Mayr’s key work within this synthesis, Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (Columbia Univ. Press), was published.

   In addition, the Darwinites “in effect created modern Darwinism by emphatically rejecting any form of Lamarckism” in the context of the cold war:

   In 1959, socialist Russia had only recently withdrawn from Lamarckism in genetics, and the idea was strongly associated in US minds with the cold-war struggle.  The delegates also rejected the idea that the fossil record shows signs of directed evolution, and expanded Darwinian thought to cover the evolution of mind and behaviour.  During the conference, Julian Huxley, the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, gave a secular sermon in the style of his grandfather, and provocatively declared that religious belief was merely a biological feature of evolving mankind.

   This was about the same time, contrary to many people’s impressions, that the Darwin Finch story became a prop for evolutionary theory.  Mayr and Huxley had encouraged David Lack to spend time in the Galapagos observing the finches.  “It was only after this ... that the finches sketched by Darwin became collectively known as Darwin’s finches, and were held up as the first and most remarkable evidence of evolution in real organisms in a natural setting.”
   

But biologists will also surely use the occasion, once again, to affirm the truth and elegance of Darwinism in the face of criticism, this time from those who prefer a creationist view of the world.  Evolution by natural selection has suddenly become a highly contentious idea, especially in the United States.  Creationist proponents abound in the US school-board system, opinion polls highlight the public’s belief in a divine origin for humankind, and ideas about intelligent design are widely circulated.  Against this, Darwin has become the figurehead for rational, secular science, and Darwinism the main target of the fundamentalist movement spreading across the globe.  Attacks extend beyond arguments over the Bible.  To criticize Darwinism is a forceful way to express anxieties about the growing power of modern science and the perceived decline of moral values in society.  To try to poke holes in Darwin’s argument is to express dislike not just for evolutionary theory but also for science itself.
    There is some irony in this situation.  Looking back to Darwin’s funeral in 1882, Darwin’s Christian qualities, his stature as a man of truth and honesty, were brought to the fore.  He was celebrated as a man whose religious doubts were an integral part of his wisdom and insight; few critics made personal attacks on his social virtues.  Now, his heroism in modern science is seen by many as an offence to religious values.  It goes to show just how diversely Darwin and his theory have been perceived and used over the years. 

Expressing anxieties?  Expressing dislike for science itself?  Moi?  Au contraire; we are just helping shed light on evolution.  Thanks to Brett Miller for this cartoon exposè that illustrates our 12/22/2003 commentary so well (click on the icon at right for the full cartoon).  It will come in handy often, every time the Darwin Party uses some piece of contrary evidence to claim it is “shedding light on evolution” – their favorite big lie (e.g., 09/18/2008, 09/03/2008).  We love light at CEH.  Celebrate Darwin Day in style – turn on the floodlights, and shed the light all around.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Theology • Politics and Ethics • Media

Turtle Vaults Over 65 Million Year Evolutionary Hurdle   11/22/2008    
Nov 22, 2008 — The Scots are bragging about their latest missing link – a swimming turtle.  The BBC News could hardly contain the excitement over this claim to evolutionary fame: “The new species forms a missing link between ancient terrestrial turtles and their modern, aquatic descendants,” the article said.  But along with celebration, there were admissions of ignorance:

“Why did turtles enter the water?  We have no idea.  It’s a mystery – like asking why cetaceans went back into the sea,” said Jérémy Anquetin, of the department of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum.
    “Little by little, we are filling the gaps.
    “Now, we know for sure that there were aquatic turtles around 164 million years ago.
    “Eileanchelys may represent the earliest known aquatic turtle.
    “It is part of a new revision we are having about turtle evolution”....
   “This new turtle is very exciting”, said Dr Walter Joyce, an expert in turtle evolution, formerly of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University.
    “Keep in mind that a 65 million year gap used to exist in the fossil record between the oldest known turtles from the Late Triassic and basically modern turtles in the Late Jurassic.”

The BBC got one thing right: the gap was in the evolutionary story, not in the real world.  A turtle found exceptionally preserved in sediments along with other creatures – a turtle so similar to modern freshwater turtles it looks “like the ones you can buy in the pet shop” with only minor differences in the internal cranial structure; a few samples stuffed into a 65 million year gap in the evolutionary fable that is undergoing revision anyway – why are we supposed to believe the spin that this helps explain turtle evolution?  This proposed “missing link” does not help fill the Credibility Gap.  About the only thing you can believe in the story is Anquetin’s confession, “We have no idea.”
Next headline on:  Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Dinosaurs • Evolutionary Theory

  In evolutionary terms, this trend is self-perpetuating: variation begets more variation, increasing the gap between those who trusted and co-operated, and those that exploited trusting individuals....
    Although the model focuses on individuals, the findings have implications for understanding whole societies  They are also significant because they offer an explanation as to why variation has evolved in human beings and other social species.

OK, let’s play their little game.  Let’s punish these non-cooperators for exploiting the gullibility of individuals.  How could they complain?  We’re just more clever at the game than they are.  While they are scratching their heads about our strategy, we move in for the checkmate: pointing out that, by sacrificing their own queen of rationality, they have exposed King Darwin to self-refutation.  For more detail, read the entries from 10/02/2008, 06/03/2008, 05/02/2008, 04/23/2008, 03/21/2008, 03/12/2008, 02/03/2008, and 01/20/2008 – and that’s just from this year.  It gets so tiring to beat the evolutionists at their own game all the time when we’re trying to get some work done.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Politics and Ethics • Dumb Ideas

Certain visions of nature, as sacred creation, as precious patrimony, as optimally functioning system, or as aesthetics, all of which are static visions, may justify all-out systematic conservation.  On the other hand, evolutionary biology gives a radical lesson of utmost modesty not only to mankind, but also to the concept of nature itself.  Chaos, historical haphazards, tinkering, heterogeneity, random processes, and erratic fluctuations have resulted in the chemistry of molecular reproduction as a mechanism that has generated a myriad of life forms, known or unknown to us, emerging and disappearing, competing or sharing, essential or redundant for ecosystem functioning.  A fundamental consequence of evolutionary biology may be that, stricto sensu, biodiversity and conservation are oxymoronic words, which is likely to result in real confusion in the public.  Evolutionary biology should therefore be taken into account to a much greater extent in order to be much more cautious with words such as “conservation” and to develop a dynamic approach to biodiversity management.

For example, the implementation of plans for corridors and networks that link local populations of plants and coral reef species are practical solutions based on evolutionary principles, mindful of the reality that we cannot preserve all regions, all habitats, and all species.  Not all factors are known or outcomes predictable with precision.... Evolution entails randomness, heterogeneity, and other factors that Couée mentions that frustrate our forecasts of Earth’s environmental future.  Still, urgency dictates a straightforward effort to mitigate the current massive destruction of biodiversity.  The word “conservation” may have problematic connotations, but by any other name there remains an acute need for a broad public as well as scientists to recognize the biodiversity crisis and to do something about it.

You know what the real oxymoron is: “consistent evolutionist.”  The concept of evolution (random, directionless, eternal change) is the opposite of consistency.  These letters reveal that evolutionist cannot live with the implications of their beliefs.  When you hear their urgent moral imperatives rising above their Darwinspeak, the choked voice of the imago Dei within them is struggling to be heard.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Creation and Theology • Evolutionary Theory

Sponges Use Fiber Optics for Interior Lighting   11/20/2008    
Nov 20, 2008 — Sponges are among the simplest of multicellular organisms, but they contain an advanced human technology: fiber optics.  In a case of reverse biomimetics, scientists have determined that one of the products of proud human engineering was already at work in a lowly sponge.
    Fiber optical properties of sponge spicules was already known, as in the case of the Venus flower basket sponge (04/05/2006, 07/08/2005, 03/01/2004).  But that was found by transmitting laser light along the spicules of dead sponges.  Now, reported Science Daily, Italian scientists have demonstrated that living sponges indeed transduce light with their spicules.  This presumably provides illumination into their dark interiors where photosynthetic organisms harvest the light to produce energy.
    A photo accompanying the article shows fibers grouped into bundles that widen into trumpet shapes on the exterior.  These appear to gather as much light as possible to funnel inside.

A spicule is a small, needle-like crystal.  I expect you’ll agree it’s peculiar that spicules pick Yule colors to transmit.  Find spicule four times in the previous sentence.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

• Understanding the molecular events that underlie the evolution of morphological diversity is a major challenge in biology.
• Our data indicate that novel genes may play a role in the creation of novel morphological features, thus representing one way how evolution works at the genus level.  Appearance of novel genes may reflect evolutionary processes that allow animals to adapt in the best way to changing environmental conditions and new habitats.
• Models for evolution of TRGs [taxon-restricted genes] have been proposed and the significance of their evolutionary contribution to ecological adaptation has been postulated.  Despite this, TRGs are poorly studied and little understood, in large part because the lack of homology confounds attempts to determine the putative function of the protein.
• Thus, although progress has been made towards understanding the molecular mechanisms controlling the evolution of morphology, many questions remain to be addressed: What genes are differentially expressed in two closely related species and how many?  Do the differences occur predominantly in structural or regulatory genes?  Do novel genes play a role in generation of morphological novelties?  And, ultimately, what is the genetic basis of species-specific morphologies?
• Our data show that morphological diversity at the genus level can be generated through changes in the spatial and temporal deployment of genes that are not highly conserved across long evolutionary distances.  We also propose that losses and duplications of those novel genes among closely related species may be one of the driving forces leading to morphological diversification in the genus Hydra.
• So far, the evolutionary significance of TRGs has not been widely recognized.
• The data provide experimental support for the hypothesis that novel genes are involved in specific ecological adaptations that change over time and that such genes serve as the raw material for microevolutionary divergence.
• The observations show that regulatory evolution may act not only by modifying expression domains of conserved genes, but also by spatial and temporal changes in the deployment of TRGs, and that TRGs can be integrated with conserved developmental regulators to form functional signaling cascades.
• Therefore, future research on these species may provide novel insights on how TRGs are involved in the evolution of the corresponding adaptive traits.  Although it is difficult to generalize from this example, comparing morphogenetic processes in different Hydra species seems to promise new perspectives on how nature fine-tunes morphogenesis [the origin of body plans].  Discovering not only the similarities but also the molecular differences between different organisms might yield intriguing clues in the mechanisms responsible for evolutionary changes.

There is, however, one much less appreciated source for the creation of morphological novelties.  All genome and expressed sequence tag (EST) projects to date in every taxonomic group studied so far have uncovered a substantial fraction of genes that are without known homologs.  These “orphans” or “taxonomically restricted genes” (TRGs) are defined as being exclusively restricted to a particular taxonomic group.  For example, analysis of the phylum Nematoda [roundworms] has identified more than 20% of genes that were nematode-unique TRGs.  The draft genome of Ciona intestinalis revealed that nearly one-fifth of the genes were orphans.  A comparison between the genome sequences of Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Saccharomyces cerevisiae [yeast] showed about 14% of the predicted proteins to be unique to Sc. pombe and 19% unique to Sa. cerevisiae.  In Drosophila, [fruit fly] TRGs include indispensable regulators of development such as bicoid and spatzle.  Recent comparative data on the genomes of 12 Drosophila species revealed that about 2.5% of genes are not present outside of the genus Drosophila and, therefore, have most likely arisen de novo.  An even larger proportion of lineage-specific genes have been detected in the genome of Tribolium [a beetle].  In bacteria, the cumulative number of orphans identified does not appear to be leveling off, although hundreds of complete genome sequences have been already analyzed.

If you are not yet convinced that evolutionary theory is a mishmash of bluffing and obfuscation, in which scientists play mind games with word games, then please read this paper and explain how evolution was of any help at all in understanding this phenomenon.  While they were busy finding homologies (good grief, even these authors referred to Darwin’s finches), a major obstacle to evolution was right there in front of them, but they ignored it: orphan genes are “poorly studied and little understood,” they said.  Well, go study them, for crying out loud!  Here is a finding that amounts to falsification of Darwinism and confirmation of creationism (limited variation within created kinds), and these authors tiptoed around the bad news with carefully-crafted passive verbs built on the assumption that evolution might explain it somehow, provided you are willing to wait for the vaporware and futureware that is perpetually on back order.  “Their functions and origins are often obscure,” we are told.  They “emerged” somehow.  We need an emerge-ncy end to obscur-antism.
    Their passive verbs most likely originated, have arisen and might have been acquired are nothing more than appeals to miracles.  Our online book shows that the chance origin of genes and proteins cannot happen, and will not happen, any time or place in this universe or any other.  The miracle of creation seems almost natural by comparison.  Evolutionary theory needs to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy, because no scientific bailout is forthcoming.  The creationist creditors, who founded modern science, want their assets back.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Evolutionary Theory

The alpha/beta-knot methyltransferases (MTases) are a family of homodimeric proteins that exhibit an unusual trefoil knot deep within in their native structure.  Such knots are particularly impressive because they are defined by the path of the polypeptide backbone alone and therefore require that a considerable segment of protein chain (at least 40 residues) has threaded through a loop.  The question of how such complex topologies arise during protein folding is an intriguing one, and is of growing importance with the increasing number and complexity of knotted structures observed.  In addition to trefoil knots, a highly intricate figure-of-eight knot and a knotted structure with 5 projected crossings have been observed.  Consequently, when contemplating how a given polypeptide chain might fold, the possibility that it might knot must also be considered; if a global solution to the protein-folding problem is to be found, the puzzle of how such knotted structures form must be solved.

A protein that can tie a figure-of-eight knot (picture) blindfolded with no hands: amazing.  The Darwinians can’t even do that eyes-open with their baloney.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Desperately Fleeing God in Cosmology   11/17/2008    
Nov 17, 2008 — Does the fine-tuning of the universe require belief in God?  Or will multiverse theory allow for a self-perpetuating, eternal, godless cosmos?  Tim Folger explored this topic in an interview with Andrei Linde, a cosmologist currently at Stanford, in Discovery Magazine.  The opening line sums up the controversy: “Our universe is perfectly tailored for life.  That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many.”
    Folger and Linde stated repeatedly and emphatically that our universe appears designed.  They discuss the multiple fine-tuning coincidences, like the mass of protons, that would rule out stars and life if they were just 0.2% more massive than they are.  “We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” Linde says.  Folger asserted that physicists dislike coincidences.  To avoid them, some cosmologists have been driven to postulate that our universe may be just one of many.  We just inhabit one of the very, very rare lucky ones where the constants of physics came together by chance to permit life:

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle.  Or call it the biggest problem in physics.  Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi­verse.  Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.
    The idea is controversial.  Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved.  Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”–the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.
    “For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility,” Linde says.  “You might say, ‘Maybe this is some mysterious coincidence.  Maybe God created the universe for our benefit.’  Well, I don’t know about God, but the universe itself might reproduce itself eternally in all its possible manifestations.”

The prophet Amos teased those in his day thinking wrongly about the day of the Lord’s judgment: “It will be as though a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him!” he said.  “Or as though he went into the house, leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him!” (Amos 5:19).  If Linde thinks he can escape God by running toward naturalistic cosmology, the bear of ultimate questions will gnaw on the bones of his speculation.  If he runs into the house of the multiverse, the serpent of ultimate causation will bite his circular reasoning.  The multiverse cannot escape from the question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”
    The multiverse conjecture abandons science and reason.  It throws up its hands and puts faith in the Stuff Happens Law: anything can happen, anywhere, anytime, without any reason, and we can never know why (see 09/15/2008 commentary).  Linde may feel comfortable that this law fits in with his own Hindu background, but he cannot call it science.  See the 10/23/2008 commentary about the “naturalism-of-the-gaps” fallacy.
    A feeling of desperation runs through the article: isn’t there some way we can escape the obvious that God created this fine-tuned universe?  Their cure is worse than their ailment: stuff happens.  May as well give up on rationality altogether with that kind of explanation.  The Stuff Happens Law may disqualify as a scientific law, but the Law of Human Depravity has 100% predictive success.  Paul explained, “there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.  All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Romans 3:11-12).  Without God providing a way back to reason through His Son Jesus Christ, (Romans 5), we would be running from God from one fantasy to another forever.
    If you have never read Paul’s treatise to the Romans, you should see how very modern it sounds in light of this article.  Notice especially Romans 1:18-24.  Send your local multiverse cosmologist a “No Excuses” T-shirt.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Theology • Intelligent Design

1. Teaser: will David sling the critics?  Near the traditional spot where David slew Goliath, a piece of pottery was found with writing on it.  It dates from the time of David and Solomon, making it one of the earliest inscriptions in Israel ever found in situ.  What will it reveal?  Nobody knows for sure, but one archaeologist has teased everyone by exclaiming, “This is going to be VERY EXCITING!!!!”
       News media caught wind of this in late October (see BBC News and National Geographic) and wondered if it will provide proof that King David really existed (see NG video).  David has been under attack – not by Goliath or Philistines, but my minimalists who have claimed the Bible stories about him are mere legends.  The site where the pottery shard was discovered was apparently a fortress overlooking the Valley of Elah.  Called by the modern name Khirbet Qeiyafa, it might have been the Ephis Dammim mentioned in II Samuel 17:1.  See Arutz Sheva for picture of the ostracon and the discovery site.
       Translation of the inscription is expected to take months.  In the meantime, the scholars are sworn to secrecy.  Todd Bolen on Bible Places has provided the most detail and best balanced reporting about the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription.  He blogged about it Sept 15, Oct 21, Oct 29, Oct 30 and Oct 31.  Bolen is a professor in Israel who has extensively photographed the country and knows the site and excavators.
2. The King speaks:  Did King Jehoash of Judah speak to the world on a piece of pottery?  or was the inscription a clever forgery?  Controversy has surrounded the Jehoash inscription for over 5 years (06/19/2003, 04/21/2003) because it was found in the shop of an antiquities dealer.  Todd Bolen reported on Bible Places Blog for Nov. 14 that five scholars have now declared it authentic.  For details on the evidence behind their conclusion, see BibleInterp.com; the page has a translation of the message carved in Hebrew on the pottery shard that celebrates the offerings for repair of the Temple (see II Chronicles 24).  More information about the inscription controversy can be found at BibleInterp.com.
3. James was here:  Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Society is crowing that the trial alleging the James Ossuary is a forgery is falling apart.  The ossuary inscribed with “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” was found in 2002 (10/21/2002), but its authenticity has been on trial ever since.  The official position of the IAA (Israeli Antiquities Authority) has been that it is a forgery, but supporters feel the analysis has been incomplete and their views have been marginalized.  Shanks has not let go of the story for years in Biblical Archaeology Review and has repeatedly criticized the IAA for its refusal to heed the conclusions of scholars for the defense.  Now that the IAA’s forgery trial is collapsing, the supporters of the ossuary’s authenticity have been vindicated, Shanks said.  Read his report and decide.  Bible Interpretation also has the latest news.
4. If I had a Hammer:  A segment of a wall in Jerusalem dating from the time of the Hasmoneans, descendents of Judas “The Hammer” Maccabeus (of Hannukah fame), has been brought to the daylight after 20 centuries.  See Science Daily for picture and story.
5. Hearing and earring:  Sometimes archaeology happens by accident.  A beautiful earring of gold, pearl and emerald that looks like it was picked up at a modern Jerusalem fashion store was found in a parking lot – but it’s at least 1600 years old.  National Geographic has a picture of it.  It once graced the ear of some wealthy Roman-era noblewoman.  Bible Places has links to other articles about the find.
6. Post-Babel apostasy:  A burial site from a cave in Galilee, said to be that of an elderly female shaman from the Natufian period, was reported by several sources including Science News and National Geographic.  The articles date the Natufian culture from 15,000 to 11,000 years BCE, but dating becomes increasingly uncertain prior to the first written records.  If people were already opposing the true God at Babel after the Flood, it is conceivable that cults and shamans arose quickly as people dispersed into the regions described in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10).  Secularists who deny that interpretation must nevertheless face the fact that from earliest times humans show a propensity for spirituality.  As Craig Hazen of Biola quipped on the new DVD The Case for Faith, humans should not be labeled Homo sapiens, the wise man, but rather Homo religiosis – the religious man, because in every culture throughout history, people have shown a need for reconciliation with the gods or God, sensing a spiritual vacuum in the heart.

The Khirbet Qeiyafa pottery shard is bound to be significant already for three reasons: it dates from the time of David, it was found in situ, and it bears an inscription – a rare treasure in Biblical archaeology.  It would be inappropriate for CEH to speculate on the significance of the inscription for corroborating the historical David till it has been translated and published, but when that happens, we will be quick to measure it on the exciting-o-meter.
    Those who think all religions are the same should ponder the wealth of historical detail supporting the Bible.  The Bible is not just a book of aphorisms emanating from the imagination of a guru.  It is a work by 40 diverse authors covering a span of 15 centuries, yet it maintains one theology, one morality, and a unified story of redemption from creation to the final judgment and eternal blessing.  It contains a wealth of narrative history that can be cross-checked against independent sources.  The Bible contains hundreds of place-names from Iran to Spain, many described in detail that can be seen today: the Gibeon Pool, Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the sacred precinct at Dan, the synagogue at Capernaum, Lachish, Megiddo, Hazor, Jezreel and Jericho to name a few.  Jerusalem itself is filled with historical sites described in the Bible from the time span of Abraham to Paul – almost 2200 years.
    Debates continue about interpretation of the evidence, but the fact that so much evidence exists, and that a good deal of it has outlived the skeptics, should factor into one’s evaluation of the Bible’s trustworthiness compared to other religious writings.  Josh McDowell in Evidence That Demands a Verdict, citing Sidney Collett’s book All About the Bible, quoted M. Montiero-Williams, a professor of Sanskrit, who said this about Eastern religious texts which he had studied for 42 years: “Pile them, if you will, on the left side of your study table, but place your own Holy Bible on the right side—all by itself, all alone—and with a wide gap between them.  For, ... there is a gulf between it and the so-called sacred books of the East which severs the one from the other utterly, hopelessly, and forever ... a veritable gulf which cannot be bridged over by any science of religious thought.”
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Dating Methods

In the absence of SP [substrate protein inside the cavity], the chaperonin machine idles in the resting state, but in the presence of SP it operates close to the speed limit, set by the rate of ATP hydrolysis by the cis ring.  Thus, the conformational states [i.e., twisting motions] of the trans ring largely control the speed of the complete chaperonin cycle.

The picture of the chaperonins that emerges from our work is that of a machine equipped with a timer, the trans ring, poised to respond to the appearance of SP [substrate protein inside the cavity] but otherwise idling in a quiescent state.  We note that Nature’s design of this 2-speed protein machine minimizes the hydrolysis of ATP in the absence of SP.  However, it maximizes the number of turnovers and minimizes the residence time available to the encapsulated SP to reach the native state, design principles well suited to the operation of an iterative annealing device.

Don’t get too mad at Dr. Grason for putting the E-word into the paper.  If he hadn’t paid homage to Charlie’s Totalitarian Regime, he might have been Expelled.  At least there is progress: the D-word outscored the E-word two to one.  What a great day it will be when scientists are free to express joy at the designs they explore without having to say stupid things like “it evolved” (05/25/2005 commentary).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Poison Planet Was Life’s Training Ground   11/14/2008    
Nov 14, 2008 — Navy Seals go through “Hell Week” in their training to become warriors.  The radical hardships they endure help prepare them for missions that will call on their deepest resources of courage and determination.  These men of the elite special forces also become experts in dealing with explosives.  Can molecules do the same, with a little training?  Dr. Friedemann Freund of the SETI Institute believes that deadly poisons in the early earth gave emerging life a Hell Week of billions of years to prepare them for existence with the most reactive element in the air: oxygen.
    Dr. Freund’s article for SETI Thursday on Space.com, might turn off the casual reader due to the chemical equations and the technical analysis of hydroxyls, peroxides and banded iron formations.  He did start it with a teaser line, though: “Living on a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere we tend to forget that our planet is an anomaly.”  The chemistry details were provided to demonstrate that early life would have had to deal with reactive oxygen species (ROS), including peroxides.  These energetic molecules rip and tear into biological molecules like DNA and protein.  Many readers may have quit before the interesting part at the end.  That’s where Dr. Freund intimated that a little Hell Week training gave life the ability to deploy oxygen in metabolism – without getting blown up in the process.

Thus we come to the tentative conclusion that, through weathering and electrochemistry, peroxy in rocks provided enough oxidation power to change the course of our planet’s history.  Over the course of 1.5 to 2 billion years, peroxy forced the early Earth to slowly but inextricably become ever more oxidized.  Along the way dangerous Reactive Oxygen Species [ROS], constantly produced at rock-water interfaces and during peroxy hydrolysis, challenged the early microbes, archaea and bacteria.  As Dr. Rothschild so aptly put it, the ROS might have provided a “training ground” for those early micro-organisms to learn how to deal with oxygen.  They developed the basic enzymatic defenses, which our bodies still use today to fend off the detrimental side effects of our oxygen-based metabolism.
    Thus, while the Earth was still overwhelmingly reduced [i.e., oxygen-depleted], eukaryotes joined the archaea and bacteria.  Under the onslaught of those ROS, the eukaryotes “learned” how to survive in an oxygen-spiked environment long before free O₂ gas appeared in Earth’s atmosphere.  At some point the eukaryotes learned how to take advantage of the large chemical energy that oxygen can provide.  They adapted to do oxygenic photosynthesis, to tap the energy in O₂.  This lead [sic] to the Great Oxidation Event and to plenty of free O₂ in Earth’s atmosphere that made our planet livable for us...and it all started with water and a little-known solid state reaction in the rocks.

Sometimes the comments in an article do all the work of commentary for us.  You didn’t realize that simple cells have all the courage, determination and ingenuity of elite special forces, did you?  Sure; they face their challenges, adapt, learn and develop protocols for handling explosives, all without a brain or a purpose.  Maybe the SETI Institute people need to search for a little extra-terrestrial intelligence about five feet above the terrestrial surface they are standing on.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Geology • Solar System • SETI • Dumb Ideas

1. Peppered moths:  The peppered-moth story just about collapsed when investigators realized that the famous pictures that adorn textbooks were staged, because the moths do not normally reside on tree trunks, but in the branches.  Other critics pointed out that no evolution occurred – just shifts in abundances of existing varieties of the same species.  Moreover, it was never proved that changes in coloration were related to predation by birds.  Seeing this icon under assault was enough to make staunch evolutionist Jerry Coyne feel like discovering Santa Claus was really his dad (07/05/2002).
       Nevertheless, another peppered-moth paper appeared in PNAS recently.¹    The authors did not add anything of substance; they only provided evidence that a shift in populations across a region requires many generations.  The notable aspect is what was lacking: no mention of the controversy, no mention of the critics who found flaws in the previous studies (like Judith Hooper, 06/25/2004), and no indication that the peppered moth evidence is useless for evolution anyway.  Quite the contrary.  Kettlewell (who glued moths to tree trunks) was cited favorably, and the article began triumphantly, “Historical datasets documenting changes to gene frequency clines are extremely rare but provide a powerful means of assessing the strength and relative roles of natural selection and gene flow.”
2. Darwin’s finches:  The Galapagos finches are to Darwinism what the Statue of Liberty is to America: the leading light of evidence for natural selection.  What they are not, Jonathan Wells argued in Icons of Evolution, is evidence for macroevolution, because the changes oscillate back and forth with no real trend either way.  Furthermore, after all the flutter of scientific papers, the finches are still finches.  Most varieties on the islands are still interfertile.
       It seems it would be hard to add anything to the work of David Lack and Peter and Rosemary Grant, work that covers decades of observations (03/04/2008 bullet 4, 07/14/2006).  Nonetheless, PhysOrg reported on work by a team from University of Massachusetts at Amherst that “Offers Rare Glimpse Into How Species Diverge.”  What else is new?  Previous researchers had already shown that environmental changes can trigger adaptive changes, primarily in beak size and shape.  The team must have had fun figuring this out again, because one said, “Witnessing this dynamic tug of war among environmental factors is very exciting.”
       The punch line that deflates the excitement came at the end of the article:

   The behavioral ecologist points out that this process has been known to change in the other direction; one species can emerge where once there had been two, if environmental factors press in that direction.  Thus Podos and colleagues have not necessarily witnessed the birth of a new finch species at El Garrapatero.  In wetter years with more abundant food, selection may be less intense and medium-beaked populations may rebound.  But the researchers suggest that understanding the relative strength of disruptive selection in different environmental directions could provide key insights into the speciation process.

   They speak of “key insights” in future tense.  What, exactly, was demonstrated that was not already common knowledge?  Finch beaks change slightly depending on the food available.  That claim is not controversial even to creationists.  This team just stated two conclusions unhelpful to Darwin: that they didn’t observe any new species coming into being, and that two species can merge into one.  How did finches arise in the first place?  No researcher at the Galapagos has answered that question.  But that was Darwin’s question: the origin of species.
3. Tiktaalik again:  Among the alleged transitional forms demonstrating “great transformations” in evolutionary history, Tiktaalik is a relative newbie.  Neil Shubin’s 2006 discovery of an alleged tetrapod ancestor made a splash on TV and became the centerpiece of his book, Your Inner Fish.  This fossil, however, is only one contender for the title (e.g., 10/20/2006).  Shubin’s pet fish-a-pod is not wholeheartedly endorsed by other paleontologists; nor do paleontologists look for a straight-line series leading from one body form to another as they did in the days of belief in orthogenesis.  As with other alleged transitional forms, Tiktaalik contains a confusing mosaic of features evolutionists consider primitive and derived.  Casey Luskin on Evolution News showed reports of other scientists claiming that the quality of this evolutionary icon is poor in retrospect.
       Last month’s paper on Tiktaalik in Nature² did not make as much of a splash.  Shubin and team claimed more transitional features in the cranium.  National Geographic endowed it as the fish with the first neck, and Science Daily dressed it up in a series declaring the hyomandibula is shrinking toward becoming an ear bone (cf. 03/19/2007).  Other than that, very few mentioned this latest claim.  We’ll have to wait and see if the quality of the icon has improved.

Leftovers again.  High-profile criticisms, not just from creationists, have been leveled at these so-called proofs of evolution.  It would seem in the interest of publishers to air the controversies and deal with them, rather than present the icons as news.
Next headline on:  Birds • Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Evolution

It’s important to understand the significance of reports that show features much younger than expected.  Evolutionists and old-earth creationists (OEC) are quick to retort that the data “still” show the earth to be far older than Biblical estimates.  Granted; young-earthers cannot, and do not, claim that things like the younger moon lavas prove the moon is young in the range of 10,000 years.  Is this a stand-off, then, where both sides have problems?  No: it opens up new questions we should be asking.
    What the astronomers and OECs fail to notice is that dates as young as even 100 million years cause the whole evolutionary yarn to unravel.  Creation does not require 6,000 years – many Bible-believers have learned to be comfortable with billions – but evolution absolutely requires vast ages.  If it becomes evident that the earth, the moon, and the solar system cannot be as old as claimed (notice this says cannot be as old rather than is younger), then evolution is dead.  The dating methods that evolutionists have relied on are also dead.  Dead, also, are the props that support the OEC comfort zone.
    To visualize how serious this is, imagine a rope 45 feet long that represents the assumed age of the solar system (4.5 billion years).  How long is 2.5 billion years, the estimated dates of the lavas on the lunar far side?  Half of that length.  Do the believers in vast ages really expect us to believe that a solid body like the moon, which should have cooled to inactivity long ago, was erupting that recently?  The problem is exacerbated by orders of magnitude when considering that other reliable reports have found evidence the moon is still active today (08/28/2007 bullet 6, 08/04/2007 bullet 1, 07/12/2007 bullet 5, and especially 11/09/2006).
    As we have stated before, it is easier to set upper limits than lower limits when dealing with ages.  To set an upper limit, you can look at a known process and extrapolate it back in time a reasonable amount.  You can take the known rate of mass loss on a comet, for instance, and calculate how long it would take to disappear.  The comet could be a lot younger – but you would be reasonably confident it could not be much older.  How can anyone set a lower limit?  It would require knowing all the possible histories for a phenomenon – something humans can never know.  It used to be commonly assumed, for example, that the formation of giant planets required millions of years.  This was touted as refuting young-earth beliefs.  Then, lo and behold, other scientists postulated that giant planets could form in a few hundred years (05/07/2001, 05/16/2003, 03/21/2006).  In any case, setting upper limits is more scientifically justifiable, because the observation to assumption ratio is lower (05/14/2003).  It avoids the “reckless drafts on the bank of time” that annoyed Lord Kelvin (07/02/2007).
    If the moon lavas were an isolated instance, perhaps the old-earthers could come up with a rescuing device.  They could suggest there was more initial radioactivity in the core than previously thought.  But the solar system is filled with phenomena that call the consensus date into serious question (e.g., 07/31/2008, 06/19/2008, 05/21/2008, 05/05/2008, 02/15/2008).   If the age of the moon were significantly reduced, even if just by half, it would ripple like dominoes throughout geology, planetary science and biology.  The evolutionary edifice at the end would topple over.  It would sweep the field clear of naturalistic, evolutionary explanations.  It would require a serious look at creation.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Lizard Hair and Other Fables   11/12/2008    
Nov 12, 2008 — In some science reports, it’s hard to tell where the data stops and the speculation begins.  In any case, evolutionary theory usually arrives in time to take credit for whatever happened in the unobservable past (cf. 08/24/2007).

1. Bad hair joke:  Live Science wants you to blame your bad hair days on lizards.  Why?  Because according to Jeanna Brynner, the origin of bad hair was “discovered” in our evolution from reptiles: “hair has its origins in stuff that used to make just claws.”  A frustrated female having a bad hair day adorns the article.
       A scientist at the Medical University of Vienna claims that he found genes for keratin in reptiles and birds.  Hair is also made of keratin.  “Our results suggest these components, the hair keratins, had an original role in the claws,” said Leopold Eckhart.  “We think this common ancestor of reptiles and mammals formed claws, and these claws were made of these keratins, which only later in mammals acquired an additional role in forming hair.”  Why human claws (fingernails) are not forming hair was not explained, or why a protein with multiple functions demonstrates evolution.  National Geographic News joined the act by saying, “Lizards, Birds Have Hair Genes.”  Its reporter, James Owen, confused cause and effect by claiming that hair was “one of the main evolutionary innovations that led to the rise of mammals.”  The first mammals already had hair, and no lizard with hair has been discovered except in imagination: “The very first whiskery hairs may even have sprouted on reptiles, Eckhart said, ‘However, I don’t think it very likely,’ he added,” maybe because the thought of a whiskered lizard next to a portrait of Charles Darwin might be too much.  In a more restrained moment, he said, “Actually, it may be more appropriate to call these proteins claw keratins, which later acquired an additional role in hair.”  Indeed, the abstract in PNAS suggested that “the evolution of mammalian hair involved the co-option of pre-existing structural proteins.”  Whether or not reptiles ever had “bad claw days,” the headline writers got their catch-lines anyway.
   
2. Nonleaping lizards:  Speaking of reptiles, Science Daily spoke of “blisteringly fast” evolution in legless lizards.  Small skink lizards have rudimentary legs but mostly slither around in habitats where legs don’t help.  “It is believed that skinks are loosing [sic] their limbs because they spend most of their lives swimming through sand or soil,” said Adam Skinner of the University of Adelaide; “limbs are not only unnecessary for this, but may actually be a hindrance.”  Evolution was brought in for explanations: Skinner told the reporters that “evolution of a snake-like body form has occurred not only repeatedly but also very rapidly and without any evidence of reversals.”  He estimated complete limb loss in just 3.6 million years.  These “extensive changes in body shape over geologically brief periods” struck Science Daily as “blisteringly fast” even though it is not clear if loss of a functional part should be considered evolution in the Darwinian sense of innovations arising from a common ancestor.
   
3. Dance of the veils:  Scientists in Flanders have been busy “raising the veil on evolution” by showing that a lab plant could be converted from an annual to a perennial.  Science Daily shared a press release from the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology where they deactivated two genes in Arabidopsis, a favorite lab annual, and got it to grow like a perennial, complete with secondary growth and wood formation.  These “late bloomers” show that only two genes separate annual growth habits from those of perennials, which the article said have “more evolved life strategies for surviving in poor conditions.”  Evolution got more credit at the end of the article: “Researchers have been fascinated for a long time by the evolution of herbaceous to woody structures,” it concluded.  “....This has probably been going on throughout the evolution of plants.  Furthermore it is not inconceivable this happened independently on multiple occasions.”
4. Tentacles of evolution:  Scientists think they have found the common ancestor of all octopus species.  A simple-looking thing with eight tentacles adorns a BBC News report that starts, “Many of the world’s deep-sea octopuses evolved from a common ancestor that still exists in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean.”  This shows that the founders of the English language do not feel it necessary to latinize the plural into “octopi.”
       Why did octopuses evolve?  The tale is told: “Researchers suggest that the creatures evolved after being driven to other ocean basins 30 million years ago by nutrient-rich and salty currents.”  But can salt water really produce the specialized organs and behaviors of the octopus from a pre-octopus, whatever it was?  Don D’or of the Census of Marine Life project apparently thinks so.  He came up with an idea that the fresh-water contact with salt water created a “thermohaline expressway” that brought oxygen into the depths and allowed octopuses to evolve.  Jan Strugnell of the British Antarctic Survey looked at the deep-sea octopus and living species and “has been able to trace the timeline for their distribution back 30 million years to a common ancestor.”  More findings from the Census of Marine Life project were reported by Science Daily.

There’s a message in the alternating entries about Darwinian storytelling and real discovery science.  Can you see it?  Read the next two entries.  If you find it, you will see it throughout eight years of reporting evolutionary antics in Creation-Evolution Headlines.  Not that it started eight years ago: it started in 1849 – and even before – whenever seekers of knowledge, tricked by Vain-Confidence, decided to take the shortcut through By-path Meadow.  So begins the woeful tale of Pilgrim’s Regress.
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Terrestrial Zoology • Birds • Plants • Marine Biology • Dumb Ideas

1. The ultimate:  Man-made catalysts can’t match natural ones, said Anthony J. Kirby and Florian Hollfelder in Nature.¹  One enzyme another team had measured, ketosteroid isomerase, is so precisely fitted to its substrate that a change of 10 picometers (where a picometer is 10^-12 meters) is enough to decrease its efficiency.  The active site holds onto the substrate while another molecular switch transfers a single electron.
       “Available tools for protein engineering clearly lack the subtle touch that is required to prepare effective designer enzymes,” they said.  Our fumbling attempts at engineering protein catalysts are like trying to thread needles with boxing gloves on.  The best reaction rates of artificial enzymes we have designed, they said, are “still tens of billions of times smaller than those of many enzymes.”
2. Gate police:  The ribosome, where proteins are assembled from RNA, is a kind of super-enzyme: a molecular machine where systems of enzymes work together to build proteins.  A paper in PNAS² discussed the guard at the exit gate: how proteins coming out the exit tunnel are recognized and authenticated.
       First, a word about why this matters: “The ribosome is a large complex catalyst responsible for the synthesis of new proteins, an essential function for life,” they began.  They determined that the exit tunnel contains sensitive probes that “feel” the side chains of amino acids on the emerging protein.  There are little binding crevices and barriers that the substrate must pass by.  The transport experience coming out the tunnel could be different for different amino acid species, they said.
       One thing they found involved moving parts.  There is a kind of gate and latch mechanism; a turnstile, perhaps?  They tried to describe it: “we find rare events in which most of helix 24 [the gate] sways away from the tunnel’s entrance for a few picoseconds [trillionths of a second], leaving the exit clear, and promptly returns to its capping state as a valve that is closed but momentarily opens.”  Maybe this is doing a final checkout or keeping contraband from getting inside.  Whatever is going on, they thought it must be important: “we propose that ribosomal features at the exit of the tunnel can play a role in the regulation of nascent chain exit and ion flux.”  This exit tunnel is no concrete tube: it’s a “protein-sensitive channel” that aids in ensuring the product comes out right.
3. Super slo-mo:  One enzyme reported in Science Daily can speed up a chemical reaction by 12 orders of magnitude.  On its own, the reaction would take 2.3 billion years³ – a good part of the assumed age of the earth.  With the enzyme it happens in milliseconds.  This sets a new record for enzyme efficiency: their previous record-holder, an enzyme “absolutely essential” for binding RNA and DNA, speeded up a 78-million year reaction into thousandths of a second.
       The current enzyme under study is “essential for both plant and animal life on the planet,” Richard Wolfenden [U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] said.  “What we’re defining here is what evolution had to overcome, that the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction half-life of 2.3 billion years.”
   

“Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans,” he said.  “It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction.”

This is such wonderful science – it is astounding that scientists can even measure such tiny structures working at such infinitesimal speeds – and to think that these molecular machines have been there all this time with their jaw-dropping performances is a great thrill.  You can just feel the evolutionists’ pain, can’t you? (or gullibility; see 01/12/2004).  Wolfenden struggles to imagine how natural selection could have produced an enzyme for an essential biological reaction vital to all life that speeds up a reaction from 2.3 billion years to milliseconds.  He can’t imagine how the protein “got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction.”  One thing we know about the ground: things fall down onto it; they don’t spontaneously get up from it and go to work without directed energy and purpose.  At this stage of chemical evolution, remember, there is no natural selection (see 01/26/2008).  NS requires replication – accurate replication.  Without intelligent design, Wolfenden and other evolutionists have no recourse but chance.
    The movie Expelled has a funny cartoon showing Richard Dawkins trying to win the cell lottery.  He’s at a slot machine that he can’t get to come up with the winning combination to create life.  As he is kicking the stupid machine in frustration, the camera pans out to a room filled with hundreds of slot machines vanishing into the distance where, to win, he must get them all to succeed together.  As our online book shows, that cartoon is an understatement!
    So pity the evolutionist.  Not only will he never win, he can’t really enjoy the wonderful feeling of appreciation that comes from honoring the Creator of technologies like these.  Do you?
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Origin of Life • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

1. Evolution, the Learner:  Evolution learns from past environments, we are told by Science Daily.  Scientists at the Weizmann Institute believe that evolution learns its lessons so well it can parry them into inventions by digging into its bag of mistakes.  The article states nonchalantly, “evolution can learn the rules of the environment and develop organisms that can readily generate novel useful traits with only a few mutations.”
       The scientists admitted, however, that “The ability to generate novelty is one of the main mysteries in evolutionary theory.”  They came up with an idea of “facilitated variation” that supposedly brings useful inventions out of random changes.  At this point, though, their metaphor switched from evolution being the learner to the organism being the learner.  “They proposed that organisms can learn how previous environments changed, and then use this information for their evolutionary advantage in the future,” they said.  “For example, if the available seeds tended to vary in size and hardness along history, then bird species might have learned to develop beaks with an easily tunable size and strength.”  It got a little confusing: who’s doing the learning and inventing by chance?
       Computer software came to the rescue.  The scientists sprinkled “computational organisms” into an environment that changed randomly and one that changed systematically.  “The organisms evolved under varying environments stored information about their history in their genome and developed a special modular design.”  It was still not clear who earned the prize for the inventions: Evolution or the organism.  They felt confident, though, that their work will “bring us another step forward towards understanding how the ability to generate useful novelties evolve [sic].”
2. Evolution, the aged sage:  Evolution’s got wrinkles.  This can only mean that it has grown wiser with experience through its many years of inventing.  “Evolution’s new wrinkle: Proteins with cruise control provide new perspective,” began an article on PhysOrg.  This article, though, spread the personification around even more.  Evolution, the organism, proteins, species and nature all were described in personal terms.  Princeton biologists elaborated on a suggestion by Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858 that species can put a “governor” on their own engine of evolution that can “steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness.”  Their joy at this insight knew no bounds: “The data just jumps off the page and implies we all have this wonderful piece of machinery inside that’s responding optimally to evolutionary pressure.”
       Part of their support for this idea came from a realization that must be disturbing to traditional Darwinists: “Standard evolutionary theory offered no clues” about the “underlying cause for this self-correcting behavior in the observed protein chains.”  Personifying proteins helped overcome this difficulty: “proteins had developed a self-regulating mechanism, analogous to a car’s cruise control or a home’s thermostat, allowing them to fine-tune and control their subsequent evolution,” they said.  Developing a control mechanism might seem the opposite of chance, but the purposeful language is justified, they felt, appealing to Wallace contra Darwin for authority: “Unlike Darwin, Wallace conjectured that species themselves may develop the capacity to respond optimally to evolutionary stresses,” the press release states.  Some might be surprised that after 149 years of detailed evolutionary research, “Until this work, evidence for the conjecture was lacking.”
       Are they overthrowing Darwin, then?  Certainly not: “Such principles are fully consistent with the principles of natural selection,” they said.  “Biological change is always driven by random mutation and selection, but” – and here is where personification enters the picture again – “at certain pivotal junctures in evolutionary history, such random processes can create structures capable of steering subsequent evolution toward greater sophistication and complexity.”

“The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a ‘blind watchmaker’?” said [Raj] Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton.  “Our new theory extends Darwin’s model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness.”

The second article contains this incredible piece of absolute balderdash:

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.

Darwinist arrogance knows no limits.  They not only define ID wrong, setting up a straw man to knock down, they hide their ignorance behind emphatic bluster.
    If you took the personification fallacy out of both these articles, the claims would collapse like a paper tower without scaffolding.  If you rapped the knuckles of these scientists every time they applied personal terms and ideas like steering, goal-directed behavior, learning and control to inanimate objects, they would have nubs instead of hands by now.
    Natural selection has become a “Designer substitute.”  It may not be God anymore, but it retains many of His attributes.  No one can be a consistent materialist.  That is why Evolution is really a re-packaged form of pantheism – an “age-old” religion that should not receive preferred status in science or education.
Exercise:  Re-write the two articles, but purge them of all personal and teleological language.  Can they stand on their own?  If they seem to, inspect the revised articles again.  Make sure you didn’t omit any subtle references to personality, purpose, or planning.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Defining Nature Produces a Dilemma   11/09/2008    
Nov 9, 2008 — The evolution wars often revolve around the word “nature.”  Evolutionists insist that science must use natural instead of supernatural explanations.  It seems obvious that before arguing such issues, one must first define nature.  That is not easily done, wrote a scientist at the University of Bergen in a letter to Nature.¹
    Fern Wickson’s point was closer to the mundane than to any realm of angels.  She asked how we define nature for purposes of environmental stewardship.  Specifically, what role do human beings play?

Your Editorial ‘Handle with care’ (Nature 455, 263–264 2008)² notes that many people define ‘nature’ as a place without people, and that this would suggest that nature is best protected by keeping humans far away.  You question the value of this negative definition, arguing that “if nature is defined as a landscape uninfluenced by humankind, then there is no nature on the planet at all”.
    This may be true.  However, if we define nature as including humankind, the concept becomes so all-encompassing as to be practically useless.

In this case, an atom bomb becomes as ‘natural’ as an anthill.
    A dilemma therefore arises.  If nature is somewhere that humans are not, we lose sight of the fact that we are just another species intimately intertwined in the complex web of biological systems on this planet.  However, if we place ourselves within a definition of nature, the definition then becomes essentially meaningless by extending to everything on Earth.

How about “Nature is everything that God created.”  For a word that gets bandied about recklessly assuming intuitive comprehension, for a word that forms the crux of debates about whether creationism should be excluded from schools, “nature” is as slippery as an eel in greased hands.  Wickson has pointed out a delicious dilemma that undermines not only the environmental movement, but materialism itself.  What is the place of the human observer?  If nature is what humans are not, this destroys evolutionism, because it makes humans somehow special.  If nature is what humans are embedded in, then nothing in the universe is “un”natural.  We would have no choice but to accept the evil humans do.
    Do you see how this dilemma can be extended all the way into the so-called supernatural realms?  Excluding humans from nature puts our concepts and philosophies into a higher plane than mere existence: the realm of the intellectual, spiritual and eternal – things that cannot be circumscribed by matter in motion.  But including humans in the definition of nature washes away all moral categories.  This frustrates the daylights out of the environmentalists and anti-nuclear protestors who want to chasten humans for their transgressions.  What meaning would such protestations have if not to an immaterial conscience?
    Genesis has the solution.  We were created along with all of nature and given physical bodies like the animals, but God breathed into mankind the breath of life, and man became a living soul.  That is why only humans even think about environmentalism, stewardship, right and wrong.  To the materialist we say: you will never escape the horns of your dilemma without acknowledging your Creator.  Stewardship implies moral categories like understanding and responsibility.  Submit to God; then, and only then, we can rationally discusses how best to fulfill our responsibilities to Him and His creation.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Theology or Philosophy • Human Body

1. Well duh:  Science Daily reported that serial cohabiters are less likely to marry.  The article contained highfalutin jargon and ended in a moral appeal: “Understanding the myriad motivations of cohabiters may be more important than ever, especially if cyclical serial cohabiting couples with children have increased among recent cohorts as a percentage of all cohabitations.”  Maybe they just need to go to church.
2. Bully pulpit:  Bullies seem to get pleasure out of seeing others in pain, another article in Science Daily reported.  In case you didn’t know that, researchers at the University of Chicago produced fMRI scans to prove it.  One fMRI image not taken was when the bully saw the principal coming with a big paddle.
3. Male egos:  Guys tend to become body-conscious when looking at fashionable women, a communications expert at University of Missouri discovered.  One can only wonder what her college-age male subjects were thinking when she showed them various magazines of sexy women as part of her science project.  All in the name of science; she even had a control, watching their reactions when they looked at magazines of male models.

What is the message you give a serial cohabiter when you study his behavior in sterile laboratory terms?  That it is normal; he’s just born that way.  A bully getting his brain waves photographed gets no punishment.  Should our dear female researcher at U Mo be allowed to extend her research into the male response to porn?
    Let’s think about pure research.  Pure research is often justified passionately by scientists, and for good reason: some of our most valuable discoveries have come when researchers did not have a goal in mind.  There are many historical cases of this.  A typical example offered is that a researcher studying some fungus in a rain forest might discover a cure for cancer.  This is all fine and good, but is it a license to study anything and everything?  A little reflection shows that this can become absurd.  Scientist Sam, let’s say, has spent 20 years studying the cries of animals when he steps on their feet.  He’s catalogued the cry of the sheep, goat, beaver, muskrat, hedgehog, guinea pig, human child and truck driver (and he has the scars to prove it).  For each of these observations, he has recorded the voiceprint on a sonogram and taken measurements in decibels.  Next, he wants to add the lion, bear and alligator to his growing collection.  He also has plans to compare the responses on different continents and do each animal again as a juvenile and an adult.  Researcher Ralph, meantime, is cataloguing every sand grain in the Sahara with calipers and a mass spectrometer.  You get the point.
    The silly stories above beg numerous questions.  Do we really need a scientist to tell us the obvious?  Can scientists sometimes miss the most important causal factors?  Is sterile science the only way, or the best way, to gain understanding?  Can scientific explanations become absurdly simplistic?  Does research on human subjects carry an implied moral message?  When does research on human subjects transgress the boundaries of propriety?
    Pure research is valuable, but don’t fall for the fallacy that it should be unrestricted.  No scientist ever approaches a body of data without assumptions.  Every research project implies a motivation.  And not everything doable is worth doing.  A good sermon on faithfulness is worth a ton of “scientific” papers about cohabitation.  Good parenting is worth a decade of “scientific” research on bullies.  And sometimes sexual attraction in a test tube just loses something essential.  “What is this thing called love?” may be one of those questions science can never answer without destroying it.
Next headline on:  Dumb Ideas • Human Body • Ethics or Politics

1. Junk DNA:  The term “junk DNA” sounds so last-millennium these days.  An article on PhysOrg is one among many that have claimed “‘Junk’ DNA Proves Functional.”  Repetitive strands, seemingly lacking in information, have been shown to be crucial either in regulating genes or providing binding sites for RNA transcription machines.
2. Junk Brain Cells:  Glia cells outnumber the more fashionable neurons in the brain.  They have been relegated to junky roles like scaffolding.  Not any more: Science Daily reported that “Without Glial Cells, Animal Lose Their Senses.”  It appears that glial cells pull the strings behind the scenes like a skilled marionette artist.  This effect is even seen in little bitty roundworms.  Subjects without glia lost the ability to maintain their shape, respond to odors and absorb certain dyes.  “The results were striking,” when glial cells were removed from a worm’s amphid, a sensory organ containing glia and neurons.  “The absence of glia affected at least one of these three properties in each of the neurons, suggesting that glia not only regulate all of these properties but that they specifically regulate them in different neurons.”

Hang on to your stuff they’re calling junk – some day they may change their mind and call it good stuff.  The default position in biology should be that if it’s there, it’s needed.  That position fits perfectly well with intelligent design.  Considering that evolutionists once thought your pituitary gland, coccyx and tonsils were vestigial organs, their position can be considered dangerous.  Their latest entries in the evolutionary junk bin, glia and non-coding DNA, have now been relabeled as functional.  ID has had a steady winning streak in this game.  Wiggle your ears if you agree.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Human Body • Intelligent Design

Serving Up Life on the Rocks with a Twist   11/06/2008    
Nov 6, 2008 — We’ve heard theories life arose in a primeval soup, around hot deep-sea vents, around volcanoes and other hot spots; why would anyone consider the origin of life in ice?  A scientist in Spain has suggested life may have started in ice.  The title to the Science Daily write-up finds this to be the ultimate divination: “Could Life Have Started In Lump Of Ice?  Very Cold Ice Films In Laboratory Reveal Mysteries Of Universe.”
    Julyan Cartwright, a researcher in Spain, has taken beautiful pictures of ice structures.  Colleagues have been impressed.  Beautiful or not, what does ice have to do with life except for sharing two letters of the alphabet?  The article diverged briefly onto a discussion of thin films for industrial applications, then came back to the L-word.  Ice films on dust particles may be abundant in space.  Ice has water, which is necessary for life.  But even more strange, ice can “look” biological.  Shapes that resemble worms and palm leaves can emerge from amorphous ice if it quick-freezes onto rock under certain conditions.
    After first cautioning scientists not to conclude from these shapes that they are evidence of life, Cartwright then proposed a connection anyway:

On the other hand the existence of lifelike biomimetic structures in ice suggests that nature may well have copied physics.  It is even possible that while ice is too cold to support most life as we know it, it may have provided a suitable internal environment for prebiotic life to have emerged.
    “It is clear that biology does use physics,” said Cartwright.  “Indeed, how could it not do?  So we shouldn’t be surprised to see that sometimes biological structures clearly make use of simple physical principles.  Then, going back in time, it seems reasonable to posit that when life first emerged, it would have been using as a container something much simpler than today’s cell membrane, probably some sort of simple vesicle of the sort found in soap bubbles.  This sort of vesicle can be found in abiotic systems today, both in hot conditions, in the chemistry associated with ‘black smokers’ on the sea floor, which is currently favoured as a possible origin of life, but also in the chemistry of sea ice.”

We may have to go for “Stupid Evolution Quote of the Day” at this rate.  Look cross-eyed if you have heard anything dumber in the last week from a scientist.  How do we dumb thee?  Let us count the ways.

1. Miracles:  The article uses the emerge-ncy miracle word all over the place.  Give physics “a suitable environment for prebiotic life to have emerged,” and scientists can study “when life first emerged.”
2. Find the ID:  The article said that “nature may well have copied physics.”  And you thought physics was natural.  Apparently not; physics is now the designer, and nature needs to copy it.  In biomimetics, scientists copy life’s designs.  Here, they have turned it inside out: “On the other hand the existence of lifelike biomimetic structures in ice suggests that nature may well have copied physics.”  Check out the self-referential fallacy.
3. Ana-logic:  Shapes in amorphous life looks like worms and palm trees, they tell us.  Well obviously, then, since ice and biology both use physics, the ancestors of palm trees and worms must have emerged from the physical shapes in ice.  This is a non-sequitur wrapped in an analogy.
4. Icy gloss:  To consider vesicles in ice and soap bubbles as containers for prebiotic life is a flamboyant generality that sidesteps the problem of active transport.  Containers, you recall, are death traps to prebiotic molecules unless the happy molecules can be protected and the angry ones kept out (01/17/2002, 04/11/2006). 
5. Blind faith:  The article uses could and may seven times.  Is this science?  We have thirty seconds; tell us what you know.
6. Lukewarm ideas:  Vesicles may have formed at hot black smokers, we are told, and they may have formed in ice, too.  Take your pick.  Don’t you remember your physics?  Ice floats.  How is the ice container going to get to the black smoker at the bottom of the sea, or vice versa?  But then, when the ice container touches the hot water, guess what?  Entropy.  If biology uses physics, as you say, this could be a problem.

These and other fallacies easily earn this story the SEQOTW prize.  We are told that Cartwright’s fantasies put “a new twist to the idea” that life arrived from space or by some other physical process without design.  It must be a blast being an astrobiologist in Europe.  You get to dance The Twist, play Twister, and sip your Darwine Twister cocktail.  Simultaneously.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Physics • Dumb Ideas

What an Obama Presidency May Mean for Origin Science   11/05/2008    
Nov 5, 2008 — Needless to say, the scientific institutions are thrilled that their favorite candidate won.  Editorials in both Nature and Science showed little objectivity about politics in the last few weeks.  Part of this is due to Obama’s promises to fund science heavily, including $150 billion to fight global warming with alternative energy (see Nature News).  Another reason for their support is that Joe Biden referred to intelligent design as “this malarkey” (09/01/2008) while both John McCain and Sarah Palin have made statements, albeit weak and non-specific, in favor of giving students opportunities to hear alternatives to evolution.
    The Nature News article also took note of the narrow passage of California’s Proposition 8, which put into the state constitution the statement “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”  What this has to do with science, or how this will “affect the nation’s research” (the stated purpose of the article) was not explained.  The stem-cell initiative in Michigan also passed 52-48% (see 10/15/2008).  According to New Scientist, Obama has promised to lift the ban on embryonic stem cell research anyway, whether or not it is necessary.  A recent article on Live Science indicated that current techniques can “reliably reprogram adult cells into iPS [induced pluripotent stem cells] rapidly and can forego the need to rely on mammalian embryos to generate pluripotent stem cells.”
    Most initiatives to restrict abortion failed, such as California’s Proposition 4 which would have required parental notification for abortions on minors (defeated narrowly) and Colorado’s Amendment 48 which would have defined someone a ”person” at the moment of conception (defeated overwhelmingly).  Obama is a strong supporter of Planned Parenthood and has never voted for any abortion restrictions, including partial-birth abortion.  Late Republican ads criticized him for supporting infanticide by voting three times against bills that would provide health care to babies surviving botched abortions.  Backed by a Democratic Congress, it is likely Obama will sign a Freedom of Choice Act that will remove all restrictions on abortion, including partial-birth abortion.  This will sweep away decades of pro-life efforts to protect the unborn.  If Obama is able to put liberal judges on the Supreme Court and other federal courts, Roe vs Wade is likely to stand, and maybe even expand, for decades to come.
    Many decisions hostile to intelligent design, or supportive of unlimited abortion and gay marriage, have come from the courts.  Republicans in the past have tended to rubber-stamp liberal judges appointed by Democrats (such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg), while Democrats have tended to “Bork” conservative nominees (as Joe Biden did to Robert Bork) or delay their hearings, sometimes for years.  If this happens under a Democrat-controlled Congress and Presidency, the courts could turn even more liberal than they are now.
    Most education reforms are debated at the state level in school boards and legislatures.  Opponents of intelligent design will have strong presidential and congressional advocates in Washington, though, along with the backing of empowered scientific institutions.  It may become increasingly difficult for Darwin-doubters to get a hearing.  Emboldened scientific institutions and academies may also “expel” Darwin-doubters with increased fervor and less opposition (see the movie Expelled, now on DVD, and Slaughter of the Dissidents).
    The popular vote for Obama was not overwhelming, though, and many may have voted for the novelty of seeing a person of color elected President for the first time.  Some may have been so disgusted with Washington-as-usual, or with the war in Iraq, or were fearful of the economic collapse, to grasp at anyone who could promise “change we can believe in.”  Their votes for Obama may not translate into support for unlimited abortion, gay marriage, socialized health care, embryonic stem cell research or expensive global warming programs that could cripple the economy.  Often the realities of the world temper a candidate’s promises once in office.  Disillusionment among the electorate often quickly sets in after the euphoria of victory has passed.  Obama promised to be the president also of the large minority who voted for McCain/Palin.  He promised to listen to them.  Good intentions or not, he may have no choice but to move toward the center on some issues.  As a newcomer he cannot afford to ignore the advice of military chiefs and seasoned Republican advisers.  The economic crisis may force him to back off on some of the expensive programs he promised.  An international crisis, as his running mate Joe Biden predicted, could change everything.  How this all plays out remains to be seen.

This is a nation where citizens are king.  Those of you who want a culture of life and a nation of free speech in science will have to speak out and work harder than ever before.  Many times in history have been far worse than this.  It is never a time for despair in God’s kingdom.
    Take a breather now that this emotional roller-coaster ride is over.  Take a walk in the woods.  Calm your soul with the beauty of creation.  The birds, animals and plants still know their Maker and do His bidding.  The Earth still orbits in its privileged life-giving zone in space.  Your molecular machines, genetic code, organs and senses still are fearfully and wonderfully made.  Take confidence in the fact that the facts of nature are impervious to lies and distortions.  The evidence will still be there.  We still have free speech.  CEH is not going away.  You can still gather evidence, think, reason, debate and exercise your citizen’s right to have an influence.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Education • Health

VOTE!  HELP RIGHTEOUSNESS PREVAIL (November 4, 2008)
When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices;
And when the wicked perish, there is jubilation.
By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted,
But it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.
Proverbs 11:10-11

Biologists today are doing what Darwin thought impossible.  They are studying the process of evolution not through fossils but directly, as it is happening.  Now, by modeling the steps evolution takes to build, from scratch, an adaptive biochemical network, biophysicists Eric D. Siggia and Paul Francois at Rockefeller University have gone one step further.  Instead of watching evolution in action, they show that they can predict its next best move.
    In Darwinian evolution, even the slightest, infinitesimal beginnings can lead to tools as complex as the human eye.  But how do innovations like these get started and propagated by natural selection when their raw material is merely individual random genetic mutations?  By looking at the series of mutations in evolutionary space, Siggia, head of the Laboratory of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics and Paul Francois, a postdoc in his lab, now provide a computational answer to one of Darwin’s biggest questions.

Francois and Siggia found that certain mutations automatically increased a network’s fitness and thus were immediately selected.  “When you look at systems like the eye or structures like the human spinal cord, you think how could these have evolved from a simple network,” says Francois.  In their current study, Siggia and Francois looked at how a complex biochemical network could evolve, and an answer came together: It is built through a specific series of mutations that is repeated over and over again, from scratch, every time they restart their simulations.
    “So this is really the idea,” says Francois.  “From one step to the next, you know, more or less, evolution’s next best move.  In our simulations, that’s what we see.”

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week would not do justice to the insanity of this article, so this new original cartoon of the Bearded Buddha, drawn for CEH by Brett Miller, is awarded for a more appropriate level of disgrace (click cartoon for larger version, complete with sacrifices).  If Obama and Biden get their way, public school students will line up at the shrine and make their offerings.  Now, quickly, for your mental health, read the next entry (11/03/2008).
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Biological Complexity Continues to Astound   11/03/2008    
Nov 3, 2008 — There’s more going on in your thinking apparatus than you think.  New scientific discoveries continue to unfold new layers of complexity and control.  Here are a few examples:

1. Meta-code:  Your body has codes directing codes.  Geneticists were initially dismayed to find only 20,000 to 30,000 genes in the human genome.  “We were expecting that something as sophisticated, complex and intelligent as ourselves would have about a hundred thousand genes at least,” said one geneticists quoted in Nature News.  Something has happened since, “restoring the dignity of complexity to the human genome.”  It’s called alternative splicing.  A given gene can produce multiple RNA transcripts, depending on how the pieces are assembled.  These, in turn, can produce vary different protein machines: “This process, called alternative splicing, can produce mRNA molecules and proteins with dramatically different functions, despite being formed from the same gene.”  The report on Science Daily that two proteins coming from the same gene can have opposite functions, depending on how they are spliced and in what cells they are expressed.
       The potential for expansion of the DNA code is huge; one gene in fruit flies, reported Nature News, is thought to generate over 38,000 protein products.  Only about 6% of human genes, it turns out, produce a transcript from a linear strand of DNA.  Most others put together parts from different locations on the chromosome.  With alternative splicing, it’s possible that dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of different products can be produced from the same gene.  This begs another question: what code is directing the assembly of these pieces of DNA code?
2. Motor memory:  Your long-term memory may depend on little cellular trucks that run on cellular highways.  These trucks haul neurotransmitters to the junctions between neurons, keeping the junctions active.  Read all about Science Now.  This begs a question: who is the dispatcher?
3. Rewind repair:  Another molecular machine has been discovered that fixes unwound DNA.  “When your DNA gets stuck in the unwound position,” an article on Science Daily says, “your cells are in big trouble, and in humans, that ultimately leads to death.”  This “rewinding machine” takes a damaged portion of DNA and rewinds it into the familiar double helix.  In effect, it does the opposite of the helicase machine that unwinds DNA for transcribing.  The machine, named HARP, uses ATP, the universal energy currency of the cell.
       The UCSD scientists were “astounded” to find out how this little machine works.  “It didn’t occur to us that such enzymes even existed,” they said.  “In fact, we never knew until now what happened to DNA when it got stuck in the unwound position.”  Good thing the machine knows what to do.  Failure to heal unwound DNA leads to fatal diseases; yet it cannot interfere with the other helicases that legitimately unwind DNA for transcription.  This begs another question, though: what tells this machine where the damage is and how to fix it?

None of these articles needed, referred to, or owed anything to evolutionary theory.  This was the good old science at work: uncovering the mechanisms of the world, as if it were designed, and seeking to understand the workings of nature.  In fact, the third article says this: “The discovery represents the first time scientists have identified a motor protein specifically designed to prevent the accumulation of bubbles of unwound DNA.”  If that does not presuppose intelligent design, what does?  And how did cells get along before chance found a way to invent a powered repair machine for DNA?
    Earlier scientists like Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur would have been pleased and thrilled to learn about the levels of complexity being revealed in the cells they only knew as black boxes.  There is plenty of work for design-motivated scientists to discover.  We will all benefit from their grand openings of the black box.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Genetics • Cell Biology

I think it is fair to say that at one popular level the expression natural selection serves as a kind of mantra, an almost magical utterance that quickly allays any doubts a skeptic might entertain.  It is uttered with power and authority when any kind of biological achievement required to be explained, and in the currency of a wholly material world.  My argument is that the claim that natural selection explains the extraordinary (read life processes) while drawing only on the ordinary (read material processes), is not only bad science, it is also contradicted by the very narrative the materialist seems compelled to employ to present his or her story of life.

1. Mercury:  Results from the second flyby of Mercury on Oct. 6 by MESSENGER were announced Oct 29.  This pass covered more “hidden” territory that had never been seen before, bringing the coverage to 95%.  According to Space.com and Science Daily, the spacecraft uncovered several “oddities.”
       For one thing, the western side seen for the first time is 30% smoother than the eastern side.  One crater was buried in solidified lava 12 times the height of the Washington Monument.  Reactions from scientists: “We need to think hard about why that’s actually the case,” said one.  “That’s an awful lot of volcanic material in one place for such a little planet.”  The laser altimeter measurements will help quantify the topographic relief scientists observed.  National Geographic News elaborated on why “huge volcanic eruptions” is surprising for this planet smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede and Saturn’s Titan.
       Another “knock-your-socks-off” observation was that Mercury’s magnetic field has a strong interaction with the solar wind, casting a long tail on the night side.  For a world that was thought to be too small and dead to possess a magnetic field at all, Mercury was shown to have a symmetric dipole field.  Furthermore, it is closely aligned with the rotation axis – another difficulty for theory.  In addition, atoms of magnesium, sodium and calcium were detected in the planet’s tenuous atmosphere.
       For more interpretation of the new images, see the Planetary Society report.
2. Enceladus:  The little moon of Saturn that creates its own ring around the planet by erupting ice particles out of its interior just got another visit on Halloween.  Cassini performed another tricky “skeet shoot” operation to image the surface while rotating during the fast flyby.  A blog by the team allows you to share the anticipation and relief of another successful pass.
       Pictures arriving Saturday show the best-ever views of the fissures at the south pole.  They have been posted at JPL and at Ciclops, the imaging team’s website.  Locations of known geyser plumes are circled on the snapshots.  One particular hi-res image shows that the surface is peppered with boulders and criss-crossed by fine fractures.  Are the ice blocks lobbed out of the fissures by eruptive activity?  Why is one plume not aligned with the tiger stripes?  As of this posting, very few interpretations have been posted.
       Cassini has additional flybys planned (the next is a year from now), but because of seasonal orbital characteristics and illumination, it will be a long, long time before any spacecraft can get images this good of this “fabulous place,” ISS team leader Carolyn Porco said.  A blogger on Unmanned Spaceflight calculated that to be around the year 2025.  In the meantime, these images and the data from the other 3 flybys of 2008 are sure to be featured in many scientific papers to come.

Those who realize just how difficult it is to get images like these will appreciate more than ever the privilege of being among the first human beings to see such wonders from distant lands.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Amazing Facts

Even if they did find antimatter, it would not tell them anything about inflation.  Remember the skeleton that Sean Carroll let out of the inflationary closet? (05/11/2006).  He said that inflation does not get rid of the fine-tuning problems it was invented to solve: “the conditions required to start inflation are less natural than those of the conventional Big Bang.”
    It’s time for cosmologists to call off the search for missing dark matter, missing dark energy and missing antimatter, and to start searching for antimaterial explanations for the fine-tuned cosmos we have found.
Next headline on:  Cosmology