New Baloney Detector cartoon by Brett Miller!
Subject this time: RED HERRING.  Click “funnies” and enjoy.
Then visit Evident Creation for his Cartoon of the Week!
 

The Elephant Explosion   06/30/2009    
June 30, 2009 — The title is not intended to suggest pieces of pachyderm flying all over the place, but rather one paleontologist’s theory about the rapid pace of elephant evolution 60 million years ago.  He bases his ideas on a small fossil he found in Morocco.  According to him, the primitive ancestor of all elephants (order Proboscidea) lived 5 million years earlier than thought, and gave rise to “one of the most spectacular examples of morphological evolution known in Mammalia” that occurred in “a rapid and basically explosive placental radiation.”
    Emmanuel Gheerbrant, a paleontologist in Paris, described his fossil Eritherium azzouzorum in PNAS.¹  His evolutionary story was picked up by Jeanna Bryner at Live Science who wrote about the “oldest elephant relative found.”  Elephant?  Bryner admitted, “the animal would not have looked much like an elephant.  It was just 1.6 to 2 feet (50 to 60 cm) long and weighed 9 to 11 pounds (4 to 5 kg).”  That’s compared to a modern elephant standing 11 feet tall at the shoulder and weighing 5 tons.  New Scientist joined in, saying that “You wouldn’t have recognized Eritherium as an elephant when it was roaming Morocco 60 million years ago... But detailed study of the newly discovered fossil’s teeth, jaws and skull shows it to be the oldest member yet found of the order Proboscidea, of which elephants are the only living survivors.”  New Scientist hoped that “The new find may shed light on the origins of elephants and other mammals... It shows elephants were making evolutionary progress 5 million years after the dinosaurs died out.”
    Since pachyderms didn’t evolve till 34 million years ago, Darwin apparently shipped the trunk 26 million years late.  How, then, could Gheerbrant call this an ancestor of the gentle giants we know and live in the local zoo?  Bryner explained, “The animal’s relation to elephants was determined via analysis of the specimen’s teeth and skull.  While it lacked a trunk, the animal had an enlarged first incisor, which researcher Emmanuel Gheerbrant of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, says represents a primitive tusk.”  It is doubtful that this little animal used a tooth enlarged by millimeters to pull down trees.
    That word “primitive” was indeed found all over Gheerbrant’s paper (used 19 times).  Yet for the animal itself, its features would have seemed well adapted for its own environment.  Is not the word “primitive” a judgment call by the paleontologist assuming it was “making evolutionary progress” from primitive to advanced?  That idea would be guilty of circular reasoning.  Another kind of circularity was revealed in the dating of the fossil.  The estimate of 60 million years was based entirely on index fossils and stratigraphy – both of which assume the evolutionary dating scheme the author was trying to use to establish the fossil’s time and place in evolutionary history.
    A look through the scientific paper reveals other statements that cast doubt on the author’s confidence that this fossil has anything to do with the evolution of elephants.  For one thing, the photo of the fossil pieces shows no postcranial anatomy.  His judgment was made entirely on pieces of skull and jaw and five teeth.  None of the teeth looks anything like a primitive tusk – nor did he claim so in the paper, regardless of what he told the press.
    For another, placement of this fossil in a phylogenetic position with the Proboscidea involved numerous human judgment calls on his part.  He had to juggle which pieces of evidence, based on tiny measurements from the fragmentary fossil, represent plesiomorphies (traits present before the common ancestor), synapomorphies (traits present in the common ancestor), and homoplasies (unrelated but similar traits attributed to “convergent evolution”).  Of the latter, his table listed 11 homoplasies with other unrelated groups.  The factors he considered worthy were then plugged into computer software that tried to build an evolutionary tree out of them.  The outcome of tree-building software, however, can vary widely depending on the criteria inserted or left out, the relative weighting of factors, the algorithm used, and the outgroup selected (see 07/26/2008, 06/26/2008, 10/15/2003, and especially 10/01/2005 and 07/25/2002).
    The following quotes reveal something of the contradictory data, the gaps in empirical data from fossils, and the juggling involved in reaching a conclusion.  Notice how his best fit was obtained with his own previous work – raising additional questions about objectivity:

The TNT unweighted parsimony analysis including Eritherium yields a very poorly resolved consensus tree mainly resulting from the unstable position of Khamsaconus.  Analysis without Khamsaconus shows that, besides the robust proboscidean relationships of Eritherium, basal relationships among paenungulates remain unstable, as illustrated by the basal polytomy in the consensus (Fig. 3A).  This polytomy is basically related to our poor fossil knowledge of the ancestral morphotype of several orders such as Embrithopoda, Desmostylia, and Anthracobunia.  Our analysis supports a Sirenia-Desmostylia clade sister group of Proboscidea within Tethytheria.  The standard TNT “implied weighting” analysis yields a topology (Fig. 3B), which is nearly identical to that of Gheerbrant et al.

The bunodont incipient lophodont morphotype is derived relative to the eutherian condition, and it is distinct from the perissodactyl pattern.  This morphotype is an additional morphological character and one of the most remarkable dental characters reported for close relationships of paenungulates, macroscelideans, and louisinines.  However, our parsimony analysis does not formally support sister-group relationships of the Macroscelidea plus Louisininae and the Paenungulata by contrast to molecular and recent morphological analyses advocating the Afrotheria clade.  The recovered topology (Fig. 3) shows a sister-group relationship of Laurasian lophodont ungulates such as perissodactyls to paenungulates, instead of the macroscelideans (and louisinines).  Similarly, our analysis does not discriminate clearly Laurasian (e.g., phenacodontids) and African (e.g., Ocepeia) “condylarths” as possible early ungulate representatives of molecular laurasiatherian and afrotherian clades.  Fossils gaps, and especially for African taxa, most probably explain poorly resolved cladistic basal relationships of the Paenungulata in our tree (Fig. 3).  These gaps are illustrated by our poor knowledge of the ancestral morphotype of several key paenungulates orders; for instance, the ancestral relative size of the last molar in paenungulates is challenged by Eritherium (M³₃ not enlarged).  At lower level in the tree, the morphological and fossil gap is even worse for the phylogenetic analysis of the superordinal clade Afrotheria including Tenrecoidea and Tubulidentata, which are excluded from this study because of the lack of Paleogene data.  In this respect, the cladistic study of Eritherium does not help to test the question of the macroscelidean position within Afrotheria.  However, Eritherium dental morphology argues for a bunodont-lophodont, i.e., ungulatelike, ancestral morphotype for the Paenungulata, Louisininae, and Macroscelidea, within putative Afrotheria.

Day by day, we expose the unscientific divination practices of the Darwin sooth-slayers.  Don’t be intimidated by the jargon.  You can look it up.  Learn to perceive the methods, omissions, assumptions and philosophy that makes these modern-day shamans pretend to be doing science, when they are really practicing divination to conjure up the Will of Darwin.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Mammals • Evolution

Note: As far as we know, there is no fossil evidence for Neanderthal credit cards.
 

This story underscores the precision and specificity of proteins.  The sequence of amino acids that leads to a protein’s folded shape is absolutely critical to its function.  Proteins are often hundreds of amino acid links long.  The authors said that mutations to even one of the eight members of the BBSome complex result in death or severe disability.  If the origin of one protein is beyond the reach of chance (see online book), how much more a complex of 8 or more proteins working together?  This does to chemical evolution theory what another H-bomb would do after global nuclear devastation: it just makes the rubble bounce.
    The answer evolutionists give that some genes are “highly conserved” because they “perform fundamental functions” is a form of the dodge explanation that says, in effect, “if it were not that way, we wouldn’t be here” (see next entry commentary).  It fails to explain where the design came from.  If the origin of a complex system is beyond the reach of chance, what are the alternatives?  Natural law or design.  Natural law, however, produces predictable, repetitive patterns on a simple level – not complex specified information.  That leaves design as the most plausible explanation.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Amazing Facts • Intelligent Design

How Cells Proofread DNA Is Still Mysterious   06/29/2009    
June 29, 2009 — An amazing fact about DNA transcription is that the machinery not only copies DNA onto RNA, but checks it for errors.  A story in Science Daily says that researchers would expect 100 times more errors statistically than the actual results of transcription in the cell.
    One of the mechanisms revealed in more detail by researchers at University of Bristol and University of Leeds is a linear stalling process akin to an old-style typesetting machine.  DNA “letters” are transcribed single-file by a machine called RNA polymerase.  When a wrong letter is inserted in the RNA transcript, the machine stalls and backs up.  It then has a tiny “molecular scissors” that snips out the incorrect nucleotide and inserts the correct one.
    This is only part of the proofreading process, however.  The article ended, “there is more than one identified mechanism for ensuring that genetic code is copied correctly.  The challenge now is to find out – through a combination of experimental biology and modelling – which mechanism is dominant.”  One can expect that their analogy to a typesetting machine will develop over time into something more sophisticated: perhaps an office full of specialists using computerized error correction technologies.

Stephen Meyer’s new book Signature in the Cell (see Resource of the Week) explains why these discoveries are undermining evolution at its base.  In chapter two, he recounts the history of discoveries about DNA.  It reads like a detective story.  Since the mid-19th century, biologists and chemists tried to understand what was going on in the cell, then in the nucleus, then in the chromosomes, then in the bands within the chromosomes, then in the nucleic acids and their bases, then in the structure of the double helix.  It took a century to uncover the answer.  The reality turned out to be far more astonishing than anything they could have imagined.  In Darwin’s day, who would have thought that the cell has computer codes that are transcribed and translated, and proofread with multiple levels of error correction?
    Evolutionists have few options for responding to these discoveries.  One method they use is to say, “Well, if these mechanisms weren’t there, we wouldn’t be here.”  How satisfying is that?  If the universe weren’t finely tuned for life, we wouldn’t be here.  If life had not emerged, we wouldn’t be here.  If complex life had not emerged, we wouldn’t be here.  If DNA proofreading didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be here.  That’s not an answer; it’s a dodge.  If sensible people weren’t so tolerant of the Darwinists and their nonsense, they wouldn’t be here.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Amazing Facts

OK, so who wrote the software in the human eye that these guys reverse-engineered?
Next headline on:  Human Body • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Bio-Darwinist Beats Up On Psycho-Darwinists   06/26/2009    
June 26, 2009 — Evolution of rape?  No way.  Sharon Begley won’t let the evolutionary psychologists get away with their tales about how rapists, molesters, and cheaters can’t help themselves because evolution made them that way.  The Science Magazine blog Origins seems to be cheering her on.

Science writer Sharon Begley, who in 2007 returned to her old job at Newsweek after 5 years of writing the “Science Journal” column for The Wall Street Journal, has long reported skeptically about anything smacking of biological determinism.  In the 29 June issue of Newsweek, she pens a 4300-word critique of evolutionary psychology, the theory that modern human behavior—including everything from mate choice to child abuse to warfare—is the result of evolutionary adaptations that took place 100,000 or more years ago.  Her piece, titled “Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?” concludes, as the subtitle puts it, “The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.”

You can’t fight Darwin with Darwin.  It’s Darwin all the way, dregs and all.  If you believe bio-Darwin made us, you’re stuck with psycho-Darwin as part of the package.
    If Ms. Begley wants to teach men to behave themselves, it won’t work to tell them that their ape-man past favored gentlemen.  Tell that to the jerks in prison.  Will that make them repent?  Teach that to young boys in biology class and see if it motivates them to be nice to girls.  The idea is laughable.  Evolutionists publishing in Science and Nature routinely use game theory to teach that populations tolerate cooperators and cheaters.  Begley’s sermon will have no force against the boy who chooses to go the cheating route, because it’s an evolutionarily stable equilibrium with no moral consequences.  In fact, we could cast Ms Begley as the cooperator and the evolutionary psychologists as the cheaters in an explanatory game devoid of epistemological anchors.  That means her story just refuted itself.
    Selfish, immoral behavior is not a bottom-up problem of evolution, but a top-down problem of rebellion against our Maker.  Men need the fear of God.  They need salvation.  People know what is right.  It’s not Darwin in their genes, but true moral evil in their souls that causes them to violate their consciences.  Done often enough, it turns men into beasts.  “The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.”  A Bible preacher could say that, but on what basis will Begley justify her anchorless moral platitude?
    Dear Darwin.  Sounds like what the poor, starving, duped North Koreans call their selfish, cheating, molesting, raping, torturing, murdering, world-threatening dictator as they treat him like a god.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Politics and Ethics • Theology

Science Reporters Need to Bark More   06/25/2009    
June 25, 2009 — “Cheerleader or watchdog?”  That’s the title of this week’s editorial in Nature¹ opening a feature on science journalism.  Science reporters are an aid to scientists, the editors said, but not just when they convey their findings to the public or help shape public understanding on matters of policy.  They are also an aid when they are skeptical:

And a minority, moving beyond perceived self-interest, will point to the deeper value of journalism, which is to cast a fair but sceptical eye over everything in the public sphere – science included.  This kind of scrutiny is easy for researchers to applaud when a news report questions dodgy statistics, say, or dubious claims about uncertainties in evolution.  It is not so easy when the story takes a critical look at sloppy animal-research practices, overblown claims about climate change or scientists’ conflicts of interest.  But such examinations are to the benefit of the enterprise as a whole: society needs to see science scrutinized as well as regurgitated if it is to give science its trust, and journalists are an essential part of that process.

This perception is reinforced when you compare our role with that of other journalists.  Political journalists, for example, take an active part in the political debate.  They produce expert commentary on the subtleties of the political process, highlighting strengths, weaknesses and potential pitfalls of policy ideas.  They interview politicians as equals, challenging them to explain their ideas and, crucially, picking them up on inconsistencies, contradictions and mistakes.
    These journalists are active participants in the process of knowledge creation in a way that science journalists cannot be, given the qualifications needed to act as an equal in scientific debate.  Although science news reporting can influence science funding and research priorities, science journalists are not players in the scientific process.  Again this is like a priest, who has little or no effect on the activities of the deity itself and who is not actually needed for the deity to continue.
    The ‘priesthood’ model of science journalism needs to be toppled....

More than that, according to Bruce Lewenstein, a historian of science journalism at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the handful of science journalists at US newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s believed that it was their job to persuade the public to accept science as the salvation of society (B. V. Lewenstein Public Underst. Sci. 1, 45–68; 1992).  This was a vestige of the Progressive Era in American history that spanned the 1890s to the 1920s, in which intellectuals of all stripes believed that society was perfectible and that the wonders of science and technology would lead civilization towards this ideal.

We wish to thank Nature for justifying the existence of Creation-Evolution Headlines.  Other than the Editorial hit-and-run sideswipe at those who report “dubious claims about uncertainties in evolution,” which our astute readers surely saw right through, most of the opinions expressed in this feature were congruent with analyses we have been making for almost nine years: that the major science reporting sites often act like obsequious, fawning toadies for the Darwin Party Establishment.  They regurgitate undigested press releases and fail to ask the kinds of hard questions their colleagues in the Beltway throw at conservative politicians (not at liberals, because there is an unmistakable double standard, especially now, with the mainstream media absolutely euphoric over Obama).  “The ‘priesthood’ model of science journalism needs to be toppled,” Murcott said.  Amen!  Where can you find no-nonsense, bold, critical analysis of the claims emanating from the manufacturers of scientific “knowledge” in near real time?  Right here – and, sadly, few places else.
    The glimmer of hope from LiveScience today (next entry) and the expressions of disgust by journalists about the Missing Link hoopla last month (05/19/2009) need to be fanned into flame.  Hug a reporter who finally gets it, that his or her job is to analyze and critique all truth claims, praising those who are praiseworthy, but unabashedly standing up to any human being, scientist or not, who thinks to tell us what we are, where we came from, and what we should be doing.  The reporter should be shouting, “Prove it!  Where is your evidence?”  Sadly, reporters for a long time were delivering The Word from the authorities without question.  The shabby record of Darwin-licking media that continues today shows there is still a long way to go.  Hopefully after the next surge of Charlie worship in November, after the Origin 150th anniversary celebrations come and go, a period of clear thinking will become possible.
    Did you catch the fact that Murcott and Rensberger described most science journalists as a priesthood?  Did you pause to consider that these are the very reporters who present themselves as unbiased, secular reporters?  Did you also notice that they said that scientific knowledge is “crafted,” not discovered, and that “knowledge creation” is the work of fallible human beings, not a church-like process of delivering pronouncements from unquestionable authorities as if they are the only people able to comprehend the objective facts of nature?  Did you notice that they were complaining about the sad state of affairs in much of science journalism to this day?  It should begin to dawn on you that having a Judeo-Christian worldview as a foundation is not the only position that could be described as religiously motivated
    Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, where did we come from? and how did this amazing universe come to be?  Everybody cares about that question.  Everybody has an answer to it, and a world view that answer is based on.  Even if the answer is “I dunno” or “I don’t care” or “Nobody knows,” that’s an answer with a world view underlying it.  So if you are being swayed by the DODO blogs (Darwin-Only, Darwin-Only) to believe Darwin-doubters alone are pushing a religious agenda, think about it.  Who isn’t?  Who is perfectly unbiased about origins in the media—or in the whole population of humans?  The issue should not be anyone’s agenda, but the quality of their evidence and reasoning, and their ability to argue that evidence with sound rhetoric and logic.  The evolutionists arrogate to themselves the aura of epistemic privilege due to their assumed tie-in with “science.”  Anyone swayed by that has not been studying Darwinism for very long, nor philosophy of science, either.
    The only ones you should distrust are those who pretend to be neutral – who fail to give you both sides, who misrepresent those with whom they disagree, who fail to reveal their biases, and fail to use critical thinking skills when analyzing the claims they are reporting.  At CEH, you don’t have to take our word for anything.  We give you internet-fast hot links to all the original sources.  We are fiercely independent and intolerant of bluffing.  We receive no funding from the government, scientific institutions, or technology companies.  With our specialty on news related to origins, we do our best to separate the reporting from the commentary.  We try to convey sufficient understanding of scientific and philosophical issues to report them accurately and stimulate your own critical thinking skills.  We’ve got our watchdog Apollos to bark at any baloney he sniffs.  We’re just doing what Nature said science journalism should be doing in this Digital Age.  No membership in the NASW is required (and it would be a sin to follow in the footsteps of those self-serving sycophants).  Hopefully, we have earned (see our Feedback column), and are continuing to earn with each new entry, your continuing trust and support.
Next headline on:  Media • Politics and Ethics

Hallelujah!  LiveScience got it right.  The normally Darwin-worshipping, creation-ridiculing site said the right things this time: just because water is found, that does not mean life will be found, and no life is known beyond earth.  This should be patently obvious to anyone with common sense, but in this day of Darwin-drunk media, we must be grateful for small signs of progress.  National Geographic also stayed on subject.  They did not swallow Postberg and Spencer’s lure about conditions for life.  They realized that the empirical evidence relates only to the possibility of liquid water under the surface of an icy moon.
    For the rest of you science reporters out there, wise up.  We’re onto your propaganda tricks and they don’t work any more.  The titillating distractions about life are not going to sell papers and fund space missions.  Show your scientific integrity.  Maybe, then, we’ll give you a moment’s attention out of our busy lives on this life-blessed planet.
Update 06/26/2009:  Next day, Space.com posted another story about life on Titan.  “If there is life on Titan it would be very different from that on Earth.  And we don’t know if such life is possible at all.  It’s just speculation,” the speculator said.  How come Darwin Party speculations get published on science news sites, and those of sensible people do not?  Speculation is cheap.  Try ours: “If there is common sense in a Darwinist it would be very different from that in normal people.  And we don’t know if such sense is possible at all.  It’s just speculation.”  Publish that, DODOs.
Next headline on:  Media • Solar System • Origin of Life

Previous ideas for Colorado Plateau rock and/or surface uplift fall into four categories: early- to mid-Cenozoic Laramide-orogeny-related shortening; mid- to late-Cenozoic epeirogeny; stream incision, and isostatic responses; and dynamic uplift.  Here we show that even if the contributions from minor Laramide deformation and flexural isostatic responses to extension at the plateau margins and to net Cenozoic erosion are removed, there is >1.6 km of residual rock uplift that must be explained by post-Laramide tectonic processes.  Dynamic uplift mechanisms can drive only 400–500 m of this residual amount, leaving approx 1.2 km of unexplained rock uplift.

We propose thermal perturbation and re-equilibration as a general mechanism for driving rock uplift within plate interiors, particularly in regions of thicker, more depleted lithosphere adjacent to zones of extension, such as the Colorado Plateau.  Our model differs from previous ideas of thermal modification of the Colorado Plateau in that it relies on a post-Laramide process that is triggered by the removal of the Farallon slab and the onset of thinning in the Basin and Range and Rio Grande rift provinces.  We show that thermal perturbation following mid-Tertiary removal of the Farallon slab can account for the majority of the observed rock uplift of the Colorado Plateau and, additionally, that this mechanism explains the observed rates of encroachment of the onset of Cenozoic magmatism onto the plateau.

One of the things CEH wishes to educate its readers on is how to be a good skeptic.  Laypeople tend to exalt anything published in a scientific paper as something to honor just because it is found in a scientific journal.  You wouldn’t give a politician unqualified honor, so don’t give it to a scientist.  He needs to prove his case.  Learn to be bold.  Examine, test, reason, and question.  Even if you don’t understand all the jargon, you can learn to discern baloney and flawed reasoning.
    Skeptics will find many reasons to doubt this model.  For one, it is married to the geologic column and evolutionary timescale.  This forced them to tie phenomena to an artificial system rather than let the data speak for themselves.  They could not dare to stray outside the paradigm.  Getting something to fit within a paradigm, however, is not the same thing as explaining it in the real world.
    Another problem is that they employed question-begging terms masquerading as scientific explanations.  For instance, look at the term orogeny (mountain-creating).  What made the Rocky Mountains?  Answer: the Laramide Orogeny.  This is equivalent to answering a child’s question about why a ball falls by saying “because of gravity.”  What’s gravity?, the child asks.  Answer: A force that makes balls fall.  Should the kid be satisfied to learn that the ball falls because it falls, or mountains form because mountain-building forces formed them?  But that is how a previous model explained it: the plateau lifted up dynamically because of “dynamic uplift.”  Even a kid would know that’s a dodge.  Giving it a proper name like Laramide doesn’t help.  Example: What ancient people built this cliff dwelling?  Answer: the Anasazi.  Well, since the word Anasazi means “ancient ones,” the answer provides no information, even though it sounds sophisticated.
    Another cause for skepticism is the ad hoc nature of the model.  The scientists imagined a plate slipping under the middle of another plate, that caused heating, and then the whole region rose 2 kilometers.  How convenient.  Have they really explained it, or did they just make up a story to get their model to work?  Another ad hoc speculation not mentioned in this paper but stated in many Grand Canyon guidebooks is that huge time periods are missing between the layers.  The entire Ordovician and Silurian systems are not found in Grand Canyon, for example.  You can take one step on the Bright Angel Trail between conformable layers and they will tell you that you just stepped across 100 million years of “missing” geological time.  What?  The explanation does not rely on empirical evidence, but on the absence of evidence!  There are several places where strata are missing.  Almost a billion years is missing between the Great Unconformity and the overlying Tapeats Sandstone.  No evidence for the erosion that would be expected over such vast periods of time can be found.
    Perhaps the biggest cause for skepticism, though, is the ignoring of important details of the Colorado Plateau that would falsify the theory (see Glittering Generalities).  Their model explained nothing about the lack of deformation.  How could these layers be lifted up 2 kilometers without buckling?  Many strata in the Grand Canyon cover hundreds of square miles – some of them, indeed, extend across much of North America.  This is comparable to a sheet of paper several miles in extent being lifted up without tearing or tilting.  Explaining how these layers could rise and fall over and over without deforming is arguably more important than explaining how they rose at all.  Isn’t that the question they should be asking?  In addition, the lack of erosion between many of the layers should falsify the belief that they were laid down over millions of years.  And the fact that faults and folds extend through all the layers, but don’t stop halfway up, makes the hypothesis of vast time periods implausible.  Numerous other evidences indicate that the strata in the Colorado Plateau must have been laid down rapidly and catastrophically, but these were all completely ignored in their effort to present a model that comports with the secular evolutionary paradigm, only because Charlie & Charlie (Darwin and Lyell) needed lots of time for their slow, gradual processes to build scientists out of slime.
    When reading details of a scientific paper, don’t lose sight of the belief system that generates the explanation.  This explanation was restricted to the secular evolutionary paradigm.  It has no necessary correlation, therefore, to the true history of the world.  Moreover, it did not honestly deal with the alternatives and with many falsifying details.  It ignored voices of anyone outside the paradigm.  Jargon or not, math or not, such self-fulfilling, paradigm-preserving projects should not be honored with the noble name of science.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

1. Cutting dinosaurs down to size:  Dinosaurs may have been half as heavy as thought, said Science Daily.  Some paleontologists are claiming that widely-used methods for estimating their mass are flawed.
2. Life as old as the universe?:  Evolutionists typically date the origin of life on earth after the planets formed, but a story on Space.com asks, “Could Life Be 12 Billion Years Old?”
3. Weak point:  Microsoft PowerPoint has revolutionized presentations.  The assumption is that it helps communicate.  Not so fast, reported Science Daily.  It might do the opposite and stifle learning.  Experiments showed students learned better without all the fancy graphics.
4. Ultrahuge lightweights:  Neutrinos are supposed to be among the fleetest, tiniest particles in the particle zoo, but New Scientist reported on conclusions by some UC San Diego astronomers who postulate they could have been stretched in the early stages of the big bang.  Conclusion: some neutrinos might span the universe.
5. Gravity of the situation:  One would think gravity to be the best-established concept in physics.  New Scientist, though, published a list of seven things about gravity that don’t make sense.
6. Lawless and timeless:  A cosmologist pondering the ramifications if there is only universe is questioning natural laws and time, according to PhysOrg.  Lee Smolin is the author of The Trouble With Physics.  You may not have thought physics was in trouble, but “Smolin points out why a timeless multiverse means that our laws of physics are no longer determinable from experiment and how the connection between fundamental laws, which are unique and applicable universally from first principles, and effective laws, which hold based on what we can actually observe, becomes unclear.”
7. Imagining things:  One of the craziest headlines on Live Science recently was this one: “Is the Universe All in Your Mind?”  It probably is for some people, but a quantum physicist reasoned that “reality works the way it does because that’s how our senses and neurons are structured to perceive it.”

Better knock on your skull and see if you are really there.  Then knock on a Darwinist’s skull and ask him why he is so sure evolution is a fact.  Hit hard enough to make a power point without being micro-soft.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Dinosaurs • Origin of Life • Education • Physics

Leading Darwinists Pool Their Speculations   06/22/2009    
June 22, 2009 — The Darwin Bicentennial continued this week with a series of articles in PNAS by leading Darwinists.  The Sackler Colloquium, called “In the Light of Evolution III,” explored the history and impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and prospects for the future.  The lead paper said, “Our intent in this Sackler Colloquium has not been to idolize Charles Darwin, but rather to celebrate the field of evolutionary biology that he played such an important role in developing nearly 2 centuries ago.”  The papers are available online without a subscription.  Summaries of certain selections follow.

1. Avise and Ayala: Two Centuries of Darwin.¹  John Avise and Francisco Ayala (UC Irvine) introduced the series with an overview of Darwin’s major ideas (natural selection, artificial selection, and sexual selection) and a perspective on his legacy 150 years after the Origin.  A flavor of their opinion can be found in the first sentence, where they said Darwin’s theory of natural selection “stands as one of the grandest intellectual achievements in the history of science.”  From there, they portrayed him as the Copernicus, Galileo and Newton of biology and the conqueror of the old argument from design for the existence of God.  Then, they introduced the other papers in the colloquium.  They ended on the question of whether evolution should be called Darwinism.  “Our intent in this Sackler Colloquium has not been to idolize Charles Darwin, but rather to celebrate the field of evolutionary biology that he played such an important role in developing nearly 2 centuries ago.”
2. Ayala: Darwin and the Scientific Method.²  Francisco Ayala explored Darwin’s intersection with trends in philosophy of science.  One theme he emphasized was the “contradiction between Darwin’s methodology and how he described it for public consumption.”  Darwin presented his findings as if they were inductive conclusions in the Baconian tradition.  In fact, Ayala showed, Darwin amassed evidence to support his already settled views.  Darwin claimed in his autobiography that he proceeded “on true Baconian principles and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale,” but Ayala argues that the facts are very different from these claims.  Darwin entertained ideas on transmutation of species early after the voyage of the Beagle.  Between then and the publication of the Origin, some 23 years, “Darwin relentlessly pursued empirical evidence to corroborate the evolutionary origin of organisms and to test his theory of natural selection,” Ayala said.  Why the contradiction?  Ayala claimed that one reason was the bad reputation of the word hypothesis in the 19th century.  It conveyed metaphysical speculations without empirical evidence.  Darwin wished to avoid portraying himself operating on a metaphysical foundation.  He wanted to look like the unbiased scientist coming to his conclusions out of the observations alone.  That’s not all:

   There is another reason, a tactical one, Darwin claimed to proceed according to inductive canons: he did not want to be accused of subjective bias in the evaluation of empirical evidence.  Darwin’s true colors are shown in a letter to a young scientist written in 1863: “I would suggest to you the advantage, at present, of being very sparing in introducing theory in your papers (I formerly erred much in Geology in that way); let theory guide your observations, but till your reputation is well established, be sparing of publishing theory.  It makes persons doubt your observations” (ref. 5, vol. 2, p. 323).  Nowadays also, scientists, young or old, often report their work so as to make their hypothesis appear as afterthoughts, conclusions derived from the observations or experiments made, rather than as preconceptions tested by empirical observations designed precisely, as it is most often the case in many scientific disciplines, for the purpose of testing a particular “preconception,” a hypothesis.

   Ayala defended this contradictory behavior of Darwin by explaining that it really is impossible to do any science without preconceptions.  No scientist works by collecting facts without any bias, he said.  Scientists usually have a hypothesis in mind before they collect facts.  They also tend to focus on questions that interest them.   He explored the history of philosophy concerning induction, focusing on Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill, its biggest promoters.  Ayala showed how induction can never prove a statement or lead to universal truths.  Science must include more than induction.
       From there, Ayala discussed other philosophies of science that competed in the 19th and 20th century.  He explored demarcation criteria that separate science from pseudoscience.  He discussed the fallacies of predictions and the benefits of Popper’s criterion of falsifiability.  Strangely, however, he stopped before Thomas Kuhn, as if philosophy of science ended with the logical positivists.  Ayala ended by portraying Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a triumph of the hypothetico-deductive method.  Darwin presented a theory that was empirically testable, and therefore scientific.
3. Dennett: Darwin’s “Strange Inversion of Reasoning”.³  Daniel Dennett (Tufts U) began by claiming that the “scientist who made the greatest contribution to philosophy is Charles Darwin.”  He continued with something he has said often, “If I could give a prize for the single best idea anyone ever had, I’d give it to Darwin.”  Thus he made it clear right off the bat this was not going to be a serious critique.  Instead, the crescendo rose to an allargando maestoso:

   In a single stroke Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection united the realm of physics and mechanism on the one hand with the realm of meaning and purpose on the other.  From a Darwinian perspective the continuity between lifeless matter on the one hand and living things and all their activities and products on the other can be glimpsed in outline and explored in detail, not just the strivings of animals and the efficient designs of plants, but human meanings and purposes: art and science itself, and even morality.  When we can see all of our artifacts as fruits on the tree of life, we have achieved a unification of perspective that permits us to gauge both the similarities and differences between a spider web and the World Wide Web, a beaver dam and the Hoover Dam, a nightingale’s nest and “Ode to a Nightingale.”  Darwin’s unifying stroke was revolutionary not just in the breadth of its scope, but in the way it was achieved: in an important sense, it turned everything familiar upside down.

   From there, Dennett attacked those who believed in God and design.  What about this “strange inversion of reasoning” in his title?  The line comes from MacKenzie, a critic of Darwin, who spoke of “Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all of the achievements of creative skill.”  MacKenzie had just complained that Darwin seemed to say that “ in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it.”  Dennett proceeded to defend that sentence.  He drew on Turing’s theory to argue that you can get design from the bottom up, without an intelligent “skyhook” providing the design from the top down.
       Dennett next began trying to dismantle the arguments of top-down theorists.  “Many people can’t abide Darwin’s strange inversion.  We call them creationists.  They are still looking for skyhooks— “irreducibly complex” features of the biosphere that could not have evolved by Darwinian processes.”  He quickly dismissed the traditional creationists and the “mind creationists” (like John Searle and Roger Penrose) who, though accepting Darwinian theory, believe the mind lies outside its scope.  Dennett gave more attention to the arguments of Jerry Fodor, Thomas Nagel and Alvin Plantinga.  Fodor and Nagel only got a quick treatment for their non-religious critiques of evolution.  Plantinga’s “reductio ad absurdum” critique (that we cannot trust our reason if evolutionary naturalism is true) got lengthier treatment.  Dennett dismissed the premise, though, that our reason is unreliable under Darwinian theory.  The reliability of various organs, he argued, suggests that our minds are also reliable.  “Animals that get it right in general fare better than those whose senses deceive them,” he said.  Next came the heart of his argument that one can rely on the products of natural selection:

   This is adaptationist reasoning, of course, and it is not surprising that creationists of both kinds [full creationists and mind creationists] have typically taken aim at adaptationist thinking in biology, for they see, correctly, that if they can discredit it, they take away the only grounds within biology for assessing the justification or rational acceptability of the deliverances of such organs.  We need to put matters in these “reverse engineering” terms if we are to compare organs with respect to their reliability—and not just their mass or density or use of phosphorus, for instance.  Such an appeal to the power of natural selection to design highly reliable information-gathering organs would be in danger of vicious circularity were it not for the striking confirmations of these achievements of natural selection using independent engineering measures.  The acuity of vision in the eagle and hearing in the owl, the discriminatory powers of electric eels and echolocating bats, and many other cognitive talents in humans and other species have all been objectively measured, for instance.
       It might seem that the skeptics could short-circuit this defense of our natural reliability as truth-trackers by showing that there can be no gradualistic path to truth-tracking.  They could claim that there are no quasi-believers, proto-thinkers, hemisemidemi- understanders; you either have a full-blown mind or you don’t.  This is where Turing’s strange inversion comes usefully into play, for his insight has given us a wealth of undeniable examples of just such partial comprehension: devices that can do all manner of impressive discriminative, predictive, and analytic tasks.  We may insist on calling this competence without comprehension, but, as the competence grows and grows, the declaration that there is no comprehension at all embodied in that competence sounds less and less persuasive.  This is made especially vivid when we reflect that, as we learn more about the nano-technology within our cells, we discover that they themselves contain trillions of protein robots: motor proteins, proof-readers, snippers, and joiners and sentries of all kinds.  It is undeniable that the other necessary competences of life are composable from unliving, uncomprehending parts; why should comprehension itself be the lone exception?

   Dennett argues that living things share their innovations with each other.  He argues for a “crane” (technology sharing) instead of a “skyhook” (a designing intelligence) for the adaptations in life.  He includes humans in his system:

   Is it “metaphorical” to attribute beliefs to birds or chimpanzees?  Should we reserve that term, and many others, for (adult) human beings alone?  This lexical dearth helps to sustain the illusion that there is an unbridgeable gulf between animal minds and human minds—despite the obvious fact that similar quandaries of interpretation afflict us when we turn to young children.  Just when do they exhibit enough prowess in one test or another for us to say, conclusively, that they “have a theory of mind” or understand numbers?  How much do we human beings need to know to understand our own concepts?  There is no good, principled answer to this question.

   So, dodging questions about necessary and sufficient conditions, Dennett feels we can just argue from analogy with endosymbiosis.  The first eukaryotes imbibed their microbe neighbors and a major transformation occurred.  Similarly, “along the path from amoebas and cuckoos to us, there was a major transition with powers to rival the endosymbiotic birth of the eukaryotes: the evolution of language and culture, one of the great cranes of evolution,” he said.  “In both cases, individual organisms were enabled to acquire, rapidly and without tedious trial and error, huge increases in competence designed elsewhere at earlier times.”  He neglected to specify when or where that transition occurred on the path from amoebas to cuckoos to us.  It must have been late in human evolution, because language and culture appeared suddenly (according to evolutionary anthropology) among beings who were anatomically equal or superior to ourselves.  When it occurred, though, it made the “biologically ‘sudden’ Cambrian explosion” look gradual.  Within 10,000 years, the ratio of humans + pets + livestock went from 0.1% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass to 98% (as calculated by MacCready).  Dennett attributed this incredibly rapid explosion in knowledge to “cultural evolution.”  Since then, we got the internet, spam, and all the good things that language enabled.  It’s all part of the evolutionary toolkit that makes itself from the bottom up.
       The grand finale section of Dennett’s paper takes it to the extreme: “Bootstrapping Our Way to Intelligent Design, and Truth.”  Just like man’s ability to improve the straightedge has evolved over time, “Such representations make possible highly efficient, guided, foresighted trajectories in design space.”  From there, Dennett declares victory over Plantinga’s challenge:

   And our indefinitely extendable recursive power of reflection means that not only can we evaluate our progress, but we can evaluate our evaluation methods, and the grounds for relying on evaluation methods, and the grounds for thinking that this iterative process gives us grounds for believing the best fruits of our research, and so forth.  Science is a culturally transmitted and maintained system of truth-tracking that has identified and rectified literally hundreds of imperfections in our animal equipment, and yet it is not itself a skyhook, a gift from God, but a product of adaptations, a fruit on the tree of life.  That is, in outline, the response to Plantinga’s premise.  We have excellent internal evidence for believing that science in general is both reliable and a product of naturalistic forces only—natural selection of genes and natural selection of memes.  An allegiance to naturalism and to current evolutionary theory not only doesn’t undermine the conviction that our scientific beliefs are reliable; it explains them.  Our “godlike” powers of comprehension and imagination do indeed set us apart from even our closest kin, the chimpanzees and bonobos, but these powers we have can all be accounted for on Darwin’s bubble-up theory of creation, clarified by Turing’s own strange—and wonderful—inversion of reasoning.

   A corollary is that we are not perfect truth-trackers, he ended, “but we can evaluate our own shortcomings by using the methods we have so far devised, so we can be confident that we are justified in trusting our methods in the foreseeable future.”  And here’s his stinger at the end of the march of progress begun by Charles Darwin: “It took Darwin to discover that a mindless process created all those reasons.”  The intelligent designer is us.  “We ‘intelligent designers’ are among the effects, not the cause, of all those purposes.”
4. Ruse: The Darwinian Revolution.⁴  Michael Ruse (Florida State U) evaluated the “meaning and significance” of the so-called Darwinian Revolution.  How revolutionary was it?  Was there a revolution at all, and was it a Darwinian revolution?  The short answer is in the abstract: “I argue that there was a major change, both scientifically and in a broader metaphysical sense; that Charles Darwin was the major player in the change, although one must qualify the nature and the extent of the change, looking particularly at things in a broader historical context than just as an immediate event; and that the revolution was complex and we need the insights of rather different philosophies of scientific change to capture the whole phenomenon.  In some respects, indeed, the process of analysis is still ongoing and unresolved.”
       Unlike Ayala, Ruse discussed Thomas Kuhn and many other recent thinkers in the history of science – a relatively new discipline sparked by Kuhn’s “engaging and influential” book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).  Ruse’s article is a back-and-forth romp through the debates about Darwin’s influence and whether or not his ideas should be called revolutionary.  His knowledge of history adds the expected nuances and controversies without coming to much of a firm conclusion.  There’s a lot of “on the other hand” qualifiers for every strong statement.  This example paragraph discusses religion:

   In the Darwinian case there are 2 levels of activity and interest.  Without pretending that the divisions are completely simon-pure, there is the level of science and the level of metaphysics (recognizing that this includes things that might be considered scientific at one end and religious or otherwise ideological at the other end).
       On one hand, there is the scientific theory of evolution through natural selection, the central topic of the Origin.  On the other hand, there is what scholars like Robert M. Young, borrowing a title from Thomas Henry Huxley, used to refer to as the debate over “man’s place in nature.”  While today we would never dare to use that kind of language, in essence they got it absolutely right.  At some level, the Darwinian revolution destroyed forever the old picture of humans as somehow miraculously special, symbolically and literally as touched by magic.  Admittedly, to this day Christian fundamentalists (and those of other religions) refuse to accept this, but it is true.  Even if you think that you can still be religious, a Christian even, you have to rethink dramatically, emotionally even more than intellectually, what it means to be a human.  Starting with a certain modesty about ourselves.

   Why should not said modesty include intellectual modesty about our ability to figure out where we came from?  Ruse did not ask that question.  He did raise a number of other things to consider, though: such as how much credit to give to Darwin for the revolution, as opposed to Alfred Russell Wallace, Edward Blyth,⁴ Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer and other contemporaries of Darwin.  Ruse agrees that Darwin was the primary influence.  He qualified that, though: “Clearly some nuanced thinking is needed, starting with the fact that there was 150 years of evolutionary thinking before Darwin, including speculations by his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin.”
       Ruse does a lot of name-dropping in the article.  If you want to see vignettes of Cuvier, Hegel, Malthus, Huxley, Owen, Sedgwick, Kelvin, Wilberforce, Dobzhansky, Kuhn, Elliott Sober, Robert Richards and a host of others dead and alive with snippets of their opinions about evolution, the Darwinian Revolution, progressivism, and the debate between formalism and functionalism, they’re all here.⁵
       But what does Ruse himself think?  In his conclusion, he makes the study of these subjects sound like an open-ended hobby for him: “let us say that a complex phenomenon like the Darwinian revolution demands many levels of understanding.  Blunt instruments will fail us as we try to understand scientific change.  It is necessary to tease strands apart and consider them individually as we try to understand and to assess what is going on.”  Decisiveness is not one of his virtues.
5. Sober: Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?⁶  Elliott Sober (U of Wisconsin, Madison) made a case that Darwin should have emphasized common ancestry first and natural selection second, rather than the other way around. 

   I argue that common ancestry has evidential priority.  Arguments about natural selection often make use of the assumption of common ancestry, whereas arguments for common ancestry do not require the assumption that natural selection has been at work.  In fact, Darwin held that the key evidence for common ancestry comes from characters whose evolution is not caused by natural selection.

   Sober argued that evolution by natural selection is a poor characterization for Darwin’s theory.  For evidence, he pointed to the one illustration in the Origin: the famous branching-tree diagram.  That’s an argument for common ancestry, he said.  Natural selection is incidental to it.  Historically (as Ruse also explained), many early evolutionists leapt onto common ancestry without agreeing that natural selection was the primary explanation, or even a factor at all.  To be a true Darwinian, ignore the evidential priority he gave to natural selection.  Just think like a tree:

   Tree-thinking is central to reasoning about natural selection, both for Darwin and for modern biology.  The reverse dependence is not part of the Darwinian framework, as we learn from Darwin’s Principle.  You do not need to assume that natural selection has been at work to argue for common ancestry; in fact, what Darwin thinks you need to defend hypotheses of common ancestry are traits whose presence cannot be attributed to natural selection.  This is the evidential asymmetry that separates common ancestry from natural selection in his theory.  So, did Darwin write the Origin backwards?  The book is in the right causal order; but evidentially, it is backwards.

6. Richards: Re-evaluating Darwin’s place in the history of thought.⁷  The one paper that threatened to diminish Darwin’s glory in his bicentennial year is this one by Robert J. Richards.  Avise and Ayala warned, “Richards presents a revisionary argument that seems likely to be highly controversial.”  His thesis is that Darwin wanted to present a picture of man progressing toward a pinnacle of morality.  That seems opposite the usual picture of Darwin turning man into a natural ape.  Didn’t he turn the tables on the teleology of William Paley and the natural theologians?  Quite the contrary, Richard argues: “Darwin accomplished this revolution, however, not so much by discarding the older framework as by reconstructing from within it.”  He introduces this theme:

   The danger of Darwin’s ideas resides in the extraordinary way he used rather traditional conceptions.  The usual assumption is that Darwin killed those barren virgins of teleology and of purpose, scorned moral interpretations of nature, and strode into the modern world escorting the stylish concepts of modern materialism and secularism.  I believe, on the contrary, that Darwin’s theory preserved nature’s moral purpose and used teleological means of doing so.  Darwinian evolution had the goal of reaching a fixed end, namely man as a moral creature.  This is something Darwin implied in the peroration at the end of the Origin, when in justifying the death and destruction wrought by natural selection, he contended that “the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving” is “the production of the higher animals”.

   To Richards, Darwin thought of natural selection as an “intelligent and compassionate force.”  He took that cue from the guiding hands of animal breeders, who culled the unfit from their herds for the health of the whole.  If man could do this in a short time, could not nature achieve even greater ends over long ages?  “The model by which Darwin attempted to explain to himself the operations of natural selection was that of a very powerful, intelligent being that manifested “forethought” and prescience, as well as moral concern, for the creatures over which it tended,” Richards said.  “Thus, as Darwin initially conceived natural selection, it hardly functioned in a mechanical or machine-like way; rather, it acted as an intelligent and moral force.”  It was a way out of the brutality of nature.  Those that survive the struggle are happy: “the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply,” Darwin wrote.
       Did Darwin say such things to assuage the concerns of those who wanted to retain some religious faith with their evolution?  Probably not, but “For Darwin, the conviction of progress was a deeply embedded part of his theory.”  This included the idea (contra Michael Ruse and Stephen Jay Gould) that evolution had a trajectory toward a goal.  Darwin wrote, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals directly follows.”  What higher goal than the human mind?  Richards sees in Darwin a mirror image of Milton who, in Paradise Lost, justified suffering as the path to a higher good.  Evil had an exalted object.  “That most exalted purpose could only be human beings with their moral sentiments,” Richards argued.
       What does that mean for 21st-century Darwinians?  Alas, it seems to be only a historical anecdote.  After the Origin entered the public arena, his friends deflated any exalted notions of progress.  “Darwin gradually came more and more to view the operations of natural selection much as did Huxley and Haeckel [i.e., as purely mechanistic], and in friendly opposition to Gray and Wallace [i.e., as goal-directed],” Richards said.  “At that point, Darwin became a neo-Darwinian.”
       Richards’ controversial thesis about Darwin’s early teleology-tinted selectionism, when all is said and done, won’t leave any sermon echoing through the years for today’s evolutionists.  From the 1860s onward, Darwinism would represent materialism, mindlessness, undirectedness, and purposelessness.

Well, they tried.  This gathering of hard-core Darwinists patting themselves on the back was a hubristic show of farce.  “Our intent has not been to idolize Charles Darwin...”  Too late.
    Dennett tried really hard to wrestle out of the Plantinga hammerlock (see 04/14/2008).  He tried with all his fluff to show that mindless nature can do it all.  He grabbed his bootstraps and pulled with all his might.  He was floating in the air – in his dreams.  Reality check: Dennett didn’t reach back far enough into presuppositional space.  His argument relied on fallacies of analogy and extrapolation, but worse, he didn’t realize he was relying on metaphysics for his explanation.  He was helping himself to all kinds of choice metaphysical concepts by engaging in the very act of explanation: laws of logic, the correspondence theory of truth, sensation, observation, interpretation, explanation, and much more.  In effect, he was building his crane while hanging from the skyhook.  Since his case is hopelessly circular despite his denials of circularity, it carries no more juice than an extension cord plugged into itself. 
    Ayala was guilty of card stacking the history and philosophy that suited his case, but ignoring the many revolutions that occurred after logical positivism collapsed.  Ruse, jovial fellow that he is, has all the nuance of a jellyfish, and all its backbone, too.  He rambles on and on, dropping names everywhere to show he is well-read, but in the end revealing little more than the sophistication of his ignorance.  He will criticize Darwinians to a point but never to endanger his membership in the Darwin Party Cocktail Lounge, where Sober is having a hangover on Dar-wine, rearranging the sequence of two myths as if they will produce a truth.  And Richards?  He played shake a spear at Darwin, but couldn’t throw it.  His final act was “Little Ado About Nothing.”
    In no case did this scholarly colloquium of intellectuals admit to the usual academic requirement for an open marketplace of ideas.  They did not invite Plantinga, Behe, Dembski, or Meyer.  No; they just stayed in their little Darwin Party smoking parlor, inhaling each other’s hot air, convincing each other that their smoke rings were better designed than those of their yawning colleagues.  If these self-congratulating Darwin Cigar aficionados would just stay put in their smoke-filled room, they could all enjoy their lung cancer together.  Unfortunately, their poison leaks out into the media, politics, law, and culture as second-hand smoke, inhaled by the unsuspecting as scientific incense.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Religion, Morality and Theology

1. I sometimes feel as if I’ve done all there is to do in life.
2. I used to set goals for myself, but that now seems like a waste of time.
3. My daily activities often seem trivial and unimportant to me.

It’s very difficult to account for all the factors in statistical surveys such as this, but it stands to reason that a will to live for a purpose is a healthy attitude.  It doesn’t mean your cancer will not kill you, or that you will necessarily outlive a depressed person, but we should employ all the strategies we can for healthy living.
    A weakness of studies like this is the lack of accounting for the object of purposefulness.  It’s like saying that having faith is good.  Faith in what?  Not all faith is healthy or wise.  Some faith is stupid.  Some is dangerous.  Should we have faith that when we leap out the window we will fly?  The key to healthy purposefulness is having the right object for it.  For a negative example, what if your purpose was to hurt as many people as you can before you die?  or to indulge in all the vain pleasures you can, like some Hollywood movies portray the good life of a terminally ill patient?  It would be hard to consider one’s last breath satisfying if that is all there is to life, and there is no hope beyond.
    How would a sense of purpose evolve?  This study would make no sense in a Darwinian world view.  An evolutionary biologist would have to pity an elderly person believing he or she has purpose.  Why?  Because to an evolutionist, such things are an illusion.  But if that were true, why have a purpose to be a scientist?  Evolutionary “purpose” defeats itself.
    There’s only one purpose that matters: to know Who put you here, and to please Him.  He alone knows what makes us tick.  He wrote the Operations Manual.  He revealed how He is to be found, and what we are supposed to be doing in life.
    Before we can live a healthy purpose-filled life, we have to realize that we have the wrong purpose by default.  We all desire to please ourselves.  We have an innate tendency to choose the wrong path.  We have to turn around, admit our lostness, and receive His pardon purchased by Christ on the cross.  Then we can have confidence that our lives matter.  Paul wrote about this eloquently in I Corinthians 15 (a very appropriate passage for this entry).  This chapter is all about purpose and the justification for purpose.  If Christ did not rise from the dead, Paul said, then we are of all men most pitiable – we should eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, if the dead are not raised.  But because Christ died and rose again, He can raise us to eternal life with the same power He had in his resurrection.  That eternal life doesn’t start when you die; it begins the moment you trust Him for it.  What’s more, it begins a relationship with your Maker in which you can join in His purpose for the world.  The purpose He gives is not just an emotion or illusion.  It really matters.  Paul concluded, “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”  When you know your labor is not in vain, you have joy!  You can go at your work with enthusiasm.  That’s healthy.
    Are you elderly and feeling worthless?  Maybe not yet (but see Ecclesiastes 12).  Are you agreeing with those three fatalistic questions the researchers asked?  Consider the Creator’s purpose for you.  Your life matters to him.  Don’t waste your life on earthly things that don’t satisfy (read the book of Ecclesiastes for the ultimate example).  You were made on purpose for purpose.  Even if you are old or infirm, there is always something you can do.  You can pray, for instance.  You can be an example of endurance.  You can encourage others.  Read our online book for a real-life testimony.  When your prayer includes Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, you have solid ground for a meaningful, joyful purpose that will help you flourish in life, and that will outlast the grave.
Next headline on:  Health • Bible

Fishing for Darwinian Stories   06/20/2009    
June 20, 2009 — Stickleback fish can learn from each other where the best food sources are.  This proves you brain’s remarkable learning abilities have their roots in fish heads, according to science news sources this week.  Science Daily said the findings by UK scientists “show that the cognitive mechanisms underlying cumulative cultural evolution may be more prevalent in nonhuman animals than currently believed.”  Live Science used the E-word evolution three times in its coverage.  And the BBC News told its readers that “the findings contribute to the understanding of brain evolution and the types of brain required for certain cognitive functions, both in humans and animals.”
    The Science Daily entry said something that may cast doubt on the common assumption that brain size matters.  “The findings show that big brains, like those in humans, are not necessarily needed as a pre-requisite for cumulative culture.”  What does that say about human evolution research?
    However that controversial question shakes out, the three articles were overcome with awe at how these fish mimic human intelligence.  The BBC News called them the geniuses of the fish world.  Live Science quoted Jeremy Kendal [U of Durham] claiming that with evolution, pressure alone can give rise to wisdom: “What we’re finding is that it’s not necessarily how closely related a species is to the human [that’s the] defining feature of how cognitively complex you might be; it can also be your local ecological circumstances which provide selective pressures favoring evolution of these cognitive facilities.”

If what Kendal said were true, fire would become more intelligent when water is sprayed at it.  Or is he claiming that matter in motion acts differently in life than it does in fire?  On what basis would he propose the distinction?  Vitalism is out in their philosophy.  You can’t produce cognition by putting pressure on atoms and molecules.  You can select out all the non-intelligent atoms you want till the cows come home, putting “selective pressure” on them, and you won’t ever get intelligent molecules.  All you will prove is that it takes intelligence to select things.
    How long will it take before the Darwinians realize they are making utter fools of themselves with their continued storytelling about selective pressures producing all the wonders of biology?  It doesn’t “contribute to the understanding of brain evolution” unless you are already drunk on Dar-wine and having hallucinations.  Drunkards are convinced they are the smartest people in the world.
    Zechariah wrote of a time when false prophets would be too embarrassed to show their faces in public (Zech. 13:2-6).  They wouldn’t wear a prophet’s robe, and they would lie about what they did for a living.  Would that day would come for the Alumni Association of the Darwin Fake Science University.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Cells Use Cloud Computing   06/19/2009    
June 19, 2009 — “Cloud computing” is the up-and-coming trend in information technology.  It allows processes to run in parallel on multiple networked processors with more robustness, because other processors can pick up the slack if a major server fails.  Scientists are finding that cells have been using this technology all along.
    Science Daily reported on work by biologists in Spain and Israel working with Carnegie Mellon University.  “Gene regulatory networks in cell nuclei are similar to cloud computing networks, such as Google or Yahoo!, researchers report today in the online journal Molecular Systems Biology,” the article began.  “The similarity is that each system keeps working despite the failure of individual components, whether they are master genes or computer processors.”  Later, the article brought in another internet giant: “We now have reason to think of cells as robust computational devices, employing redundancy in the same way that enables large computing systems, such as Amazon, to keep operating despite the fact that servers routinely fail.”
    Cells have master control genes that turn on other genes.  Researchers have been puzzled by experiments in which de-activating these genes one at a time did not interrupt the cell.  It turns out that parallel copies, called paralogs, are able to step in.  Paralogs have more or less sequence similarity to the master genes.  The more similar they are, the more they can fill in for the master gene.  The article explained, “if one of these genes is lost, other ‘parallel’ master genes with similar sequences, called paralogs, often can replace it by turning on the same set of genes.”
    Scientists estimate that 5 to 10 percent of genes are in this master-gene category.  Many diseases are associated with mutations in one or more of these transcription factors, the article said.

All together now: “This article said nothing about evolution.”  It’s such an ingrained pattern (that the more scientific detail, the less Darwin), it is becoming wallpaper.  For fun, make up a just-so story about how this cloud computing technology in the cell came about.  The crazier the better.  You might even get it published by New Scientist, the euphemistic label for Old Materialist.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

“So here you have a form that’s reduced the first finger, and it is right in this period of transition in the evolution of theropods,” Clark said.
    The find helps fill in what had been seen as a “chink” in the otherwise widely supported theory that birds descended from dinosaurs, said Hans Dieter Sues, a paleontologist at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the research.
    “Having a fossil that shows that there are three digits plus this sort of little residual digit ... is almost a perfect structural intermediate” linking theropods and birds, he said.

Remember that Darwinians are not above lying and distorting evidence to promote their agenda.  For decades, National Geographic has been adept at misleading the public with the power of suggestion and visualization.  Stay on your toes; forewarned is forewinged.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Birds • Fossils • Evolution

What Makes You Human?   06/17/2009    
June 17, 2009 — If you are a war-mongering beast who likes to burn things, you’re displaying your evolutionary past.  That’s what a couple of news reports are claiming.  New Scientist has a review of two books: Fire: The spark that ignited human evolution by Frances D. Burton, and Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham.  Saswato R. Das got the message.  He entitled his review, “How Fire Made Us Human.”  Here comes the synopsis in the form of a just-so story:

Anthropologist Frances Burton suggests that taming fire led to the evolution of modern humans.  Millions of years ago, our ape-like ancestors may have overcome their fear of fire to pick at found delicacies – maybe an animal accidentally cooked in a forest fire.  Over time, they learned how to keep a flame going by feeding it twigs, how to use fire to thwart predators and how to harness it for heat and light.  This familiarity with fire, Burton argues, changed the hormonal cycles that depend on light and darkness: light from nightly bonfires may have caused a change in the nocturnal flow of melatonin.  Over time, this changed the rates and patterns of our ancestors’ growth, and the regulation and activation of genes, leading ultimately to us.

Evolutionary anthropology should not be understood as following the scientific method to achieve conclusions that are observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable or any of that good stuff you associate with the word science.  No; it is the endless quest for a good story (see 12/22/2003 commentary).  Since the storytelling rules eliminate design as a possibility (see Brett Miller cartoon), you can be sure the stories will be funny.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Plants Use the Perfect Propeller   06/16/2009    
June 16, 2009 — What kid hasn’t played with maple seeds to watch them spin in the air like helicopters?  Scientists watch them, too.  A team from the Netherlands and California found out how they stay in the air for so long without engines to drive them.  One would think in an era of advanced aeronautical engineering the physics would all be worked out, but the abstract explains that the seeds know more than the engineers do:

As they descend, the autorotating seeds of maples and some other trees generate unexpectedly high lift, but how they attain this elevated performance is unknown.  To elucidate the mechanisms responsible, we measured the three-dimensional flow around dynamically scaled models of maple and hornbeam seeds.  Our results indicate that these seeds attain high lift by generating a stable leading-edge vortex (LEV) as they descend.  The compact LEV, which we verified on real specimens, allows maple seeds to remain in the air more effectively than do a variety of nonautorotating seeds. 

Like autorotating seeds, insect wings generate very high lift despite operating at angles of attack well above those that will stall conventional aircraft wings and helicopter blades (11) (Fig. 1D).  Instead of stalling, insect wings generate a prominent leading-edge vortex (LEV), which is known to be responsible for elevating both lift and drag.  Building upon these observations, we hypothesized that autorotating seeds create a LEV that enables them to generate high lift at high angles of attack during their descent.

Everything about this article was wonderful except the evolutionary storytelling, which incited wonder of a different kind (see Brett Miller’s treatment of the Convergence Concoction).  Convergence is not an answer; it’s a sidestep.  What should have falsified evolution is turned into a support for it by the hocus-pocus of employing a miracle word.  Aircraft engineers don’t need miracles, they need real-world physics, inspired by nature’s designs.  Keep the materialistic metaphysics out of it.
    A great film on seed dispersal, including stunning images of autorotating seeds, is the Moody Science production Journey of Life.  Take your kids on a walk in the woods where maples grow and play with the seeds.  Make it a teachable moment.  Older kids might want to do a school science project on autorotating seeds.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts • Physics • Biomimetics • Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Sex is the ultimate absurdity.  Forget the hormonal rushes, the sweat and the contorted posturing.  Forget about the heartache, the flowers, the bad poems and the costly divorce, just think about the biology.  It’s nuts.  Cloning makes far more sense.

“Sex improves the efficiency of selection, allowing good genes to recombine away from the junk residing in their genetic backgrounds,” says Otto.  “As the good genes spread, they then carry along the sex genes, beating out the genes for cloning, and often overcoming the costs of sex.”
    Exactly how often these circumstances apply is uncertain.  “It’s still not clear that selective interference gives a strong enough individual advantage to maintain high rates of sex and recombination,” says Barton.  “There needs to be a lot of selection, which is plausible but not definitely established as yet.”

How many times have we seen Darwinists do this?  Necessity is the mother of invention, so even though they are clueless about how, and have no evidence, they make up a story to have the solution arise miraculously.  They have unfeigned faith that Evolution (capitalized, because She is a Good Fairy in their theology) finds a way to cobble together an invention to meet the necessity.  Be a good coach.  Call foul when you see Illegal Procedure.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Genetics

How Old Is This Germ?   06/15/2009    
June 15, 2009 — Rip Van Microbe has awakened after 120,000 years, said Live Science without batting an eye.  That’s strange; human observation only goes back 1/12 of that time max.  The bacterium came out of its suspended animation and grew as if nothing had happened.  “Such vigor is partially due to the microbe’s small size, the scientists speculate,” the article said.  “Tiny microbes like this one can also hide more easily from predators and take up residence among ice crystals and in the thin liquid film on those surfaces.”

No scientist would have “speculated” such a thing before.  This could just as easily have falsified the belief that the Greenland location was as old as claimed, but no— evolutionary dating must survive all empirical challenges.  Let’s see if we have a law of nature that has been discovered.  If longevity is inversely proportional to size, flies should outlive humans.  Wrong.  If longevity is a function of ability to hide more easily from predators, gophers should outlive humans.  Wrong.  It seems the only law of nature we have discovered is that Darwinians are incorrigible storytellers.
Next headline on:  Dating Methods

A typical liberal response is the tit-for-tat moral equivalency strategy: i.e., to find another murderer motivated by alleged Christian conservative views (like the recent abortionist murderer).  Keep in mind a couple of important differences.  (1) The chilling body count of victims of state-sponsored genocide in the name of social Darwinism and atheism should put that argument in context (re-read the 11/30/2005 entry; also 12/11/2007).  (2) Compare Jesus and Darwin.  Jesus said the greatest commandments are to love God with all our heart and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.  There is no conceivable way to get vigilante murder out of that fountainhead of love.  On the other hand, Darwin portrayed nature (including mankind) as an amoral, unguided, purposeless march of progress toward “fitness” in a cruel, heartless, Malthusian world.  He himself made statements about human breeding of the weak and imbeciles being highly injurious to the human species – statements directly echoed by von Brunn.  Though he would have abhorred racism, murder and totalitarianism in the name of his theory, Darwin was himself a Social Darwinist (see review of new book The Darwin Myth on Evolution News and how some of his followers today still echo the eugenics sentiment Evolution News; see also piece by David Tyler on ARN, “Darwin was an advocate of Social Darwinism”).  In other words, you can derive totalitarian dictatorships and neo-Nazi murderers from natural selection, but you cannot derive vigilante murderers from the teachings of Jesus.  Was not the conservative movement’s outrage against George Tiller, the late-term abortionist, motivated by a love for life – the life of the unborn?  Media bias was once again blatantly evident with commentators tying Tiller’s murderer to conservative Christian influences, but failing to tie von Brunn with Darwinian doctrines.  These are not morally equivalent cases.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

Darwin-Only Advisors Hunker Down to Re-Strategize   06/12/2009    
June 12, 2009 — Strict Darwinian materialists are a minority in the United States, yet they enjoy autocracy in educational policy, complete control of scientific institutions, and nearly complete unquestioned support from the mainstream media.  Nevertheless, they have to face living in a country that is predominantly religious.  Once in awhile they suffer setbacks, like the recent changes in textbook policy in Texas that will require more scrutiny of the claims of evolution.  What do they say amongst themselves when strategizing how to handle the public?

1. NCSE strategic plan:  Eugenie Scott was interviewed as a Newsmaker in Science last week.¹  Yudhijit Bhattacharjee lobbed friendly softballs to her, like How has this battle changed in the past 20 years?, Why has the ID movement survived the 2005 Dover trial?, and What should scientists do to help the cause?  Her answers were those of a general in the strategy room of a war.  Scott said that “The enemy has become more diverse.”  Enemies have spread from K-12 to “community colleges and even 4-year colleges.”  She mentioned “periodic assaults on science standards as we recently saw in Texas,” and the ongoing threats of antievolution legislation.
       Scott used arguments from her standard arsenal, portraying opponents of evolution as those who don’t “understand the nature of a scientific experiment,” but then portrayed evolution as “the big picture.”  She dismissed the Discovery Institute’s “standard creationist arguments” without mentioning any one in particular.
       As for what scientists should do to “help the cause,” Scott said, “Universities need to do a better job of teaching evolution because that’s where high school teachers get their training.  Evolution needs to be brought into every course of biology instead of getting tacked on as a unit to the intro class.”  She did, however, advise against presenting evolution in atheistic terms.  “If a professor were to say that evolution proves there is no God, that’s not just bad philosophy of science, it ensures that a significant number of students will stick their fingers in their ears.”
       Why, then, did Science, in its Origins blog, parade the poetry of Emily Ballou, whose lines mock the Bible and describe how evolutionary thinking caused Charles Darwin to lose his faith?  In that entry, Claire Thomas quoted this line from Ballou’s book as the stinger at the end of the article: You can safely put God to bed now / the way you can’t your daughter anymore. / Tuck the sheets so tight he cannot move / and lock the bedroom door.  (Cf. 07/12/2006).
2. Texas tech:  Meanwhile, how will evolutionists handle the new rules in Texas?  This week in Science,² Bhattacharjee continued the discussion by describing how “Authors Scramble to Make Textbooks Conform to Texas Science Standards.”  Before, evolutionary writers like Ken Miller had to work around demands to teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary theory (which Miller interpreted to be “unresolved questions” about evolution, not real weaknesses of the evolutionary edifice).  In fact, in the 2004 Dover trial, defense attorneys pointed out that Miller himself had used the phrase “strengths and weaknesses” in his textbook.  That moment in the trial was “more than a little embarrassing,” Bhattacharjee said.  He revealed an inside scuffle between the two anti-creationist generals:

   Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California sees Miller’s earlier revision as a failed “attempt to be clever.”  And she’s worried that history might repeat itself.
       “When you put ‘weaknesses’ and ‘evolution’ in the same line, you reinforce doubts that creationists are trying to sow,” says Scott, whose organization monitors the issue as it plays out in state and local districts.  In fact, Scott was so incensed by the revelation at the Dover trial that she confronted Miller after he testified.  “What were you thinking?” she asked him.
       Miller’s answer, then and now, is not to get too excited.  The new Texas standards leave plenty of room for authors to explain the robustness of evolutionary theory, he says, and that’s precisely what he and his publisher, Prentice Hall, plan to do.  “The advocates of these standards underestimate the strength of the scientific evidence for structures and phenomena that they mistakenly believe evolution cannot account for,” Miller says.  “The new wording is an opportunity to make biology texts even stronger.”

   Still, “many scientists view the new version [of the standards] as more insidious than the previous one.” Students must be able to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations” concerning the complexity of the cell and other areas in which writers claim evolution offers the only explanation – including the “sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record.”  How’s Miller going to abide by that requirement?  By introducing students to “punctuated equilibria.”  Steve Nowicki, another textbook author, is also planning to work within the new standards in his own way.  “I understand that there may be a political agenda behind the standards, but I am taking them at face value,” he said.  “If a state thinks students need more information to understand evolution, I am happy to provide that.”  What constitutes “more information” is probably the point of contention.
3. Converting the religious:  In BioScience,³ Douglas Woodhams (U of Zurich) advised his fellow scientists to “frame” arguments for conservation in terms that will motivate “people of faith” to join in efforts to protect biodiversity.  Woodhams, who works with SaveTheFrogs.com, has had to find ways to get religious people in Panama to understand why protecting amphibians is important.  He presumed that their Biblical world view would cause them to believe that “God created nature for unlimited human domination and that nature is passing away and thus lacks any deep value.”  Confronting believers with strictly secular arguments, he feels, is counter-productive.  “Scientists may help convince the religious community of the mandate for biodiversity conservation by pointing the faithful toward their own environmental ethics,” he said.  “Indeed, if scientists appeal to people of faith, our critical information might gain more concerted attention.”  Framing the arguments this way results in a more constructive engagement.
       Woodhams was quick to point out that he did not mean to imply any kind of compromise over epistemology:

   To be clear, I am not suggesting that creationism, intelligent design, or other faith-based theories be supported by scientists.  I am suggesting that science, at its interface with the public, be presented in accessible and socially relevant terms.  Science exists in a value-laden political and social context, and framing our results does not reduce the purity or rigor of the scientific method.  Rather, the frame is merely a decoration to draw attention to the picture.
       Framing science applies to any audience; here I focus on the faith community because it is large and many in it are suspicious of scientific claims.  By emphasizing the moral excellence, the virtue, of biodiversity-conservation recognized by scientists and religious adherents alike, scientists may gain a foot in the door and begin to speak through the crack.  We might influence a large audience that was previously indoctrinated against conservation.

   So in other words, while (like Richard Lewontin said) scientists cannot allow a divine foot in the door, Woodhams is looking for a foot in the door of the “faith community” (as opposed to those who follow the creed of the scientific method) by appealing to their own Scriptures in support of his goals.  He quoted Psalm 104 and other Biblical passages that extol the value of created animals.
       Woodhams expressed agreement with Gould’s strategy of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) – the idea that science and religion occupy separate spheres.  What was lacking in his essay, though, was any identification of the grounds of his own “scientific” doctrine of moral excellence, virtue, or environmental ethics.  Who gave the “mandate for biodiversity conservation” in his view?  If it didn’t come from the Bible, did he find it in the Origin of Species by Natural Selection?  Presumably Darwinism has brought more animals to extinction than conserved them.  Nevertheless, his article was framed in stark us-vs-them terms, as if evolutionary biologists are keepers of the heart and soul of conservation ethics.

The hypocrisy of the DODO crowd (Darwin-only, Darwin-only) is so obvious one wonders how they can avoid noticing their own reflection.  They claim creationists have a political agenda but they are right in there at every school board meeting, court case and election, trying to push their people and oust the challengers.  They talk about creationist code-phrases but employ scads of their own: NOMA, punctuated equilibria, Dover (as a symbol for the collapse of ID), and “people of faith” as enemies of practitioners of the scientific method, who obviously are as pure in their motives as the new-fallen snow.
    Look who was calling the creationists “enemies” – Eugenie Scott herself, and Yudhijit didn’t bat an eye.  They are at war.  Some tacticians want to shmooze the enemy (like Woodhams), and others want to do battle.  Never is there any shame for their own sins.  Never is there any realization that Darwinism has real weaknesses.  The fossil record?  The complexity of the cell?  The coded information in DNA?  The origin of life?  Those aren’t weaknesses.  Evolution is robust!  Those are just “unresolved questions.”  They even have a magic wand to explain them away.  It does real magic, too.  It produces sudden, unexplained, miraculous innovations of complete new structures and functions without leaving any trace in the fossil record.  It’s called Punctuated Equilibria.  Preach it, bro.
    This people-of-faith vs science dichotomy is phony baloney.  What you see above is the People of Froth (10/13/2005, 09/26/2005) preaching to the People of Fluff (09/09/2008).  Don’t give them power because they will never share it.  It’s DODO all the way in their system of Darwin-Only Public Education (DOPE).
Next headline on:  Evolutionary Theory • Education • Bible and Theology

This Place Really Has Atmosphere   06/11/2009    
June 11, 2009 — Of all the bodies in the solar system, only eight have a substantial atmosphere.  If you add in those with tenuous atmospheres, you can add in Triton and Mercury, and maybe a few others, till it becomes pedantic to call it an atmosphere if there are only a few short-lived molecules hovering over a moon.  Atmospheres are interesting because they circulate, creating winds and clouds and a host of interesting effects that some scientists spend their entire careers studying (to say nothing of weathermen).  They also can dissipate into space over time.  What does the ambience of gas around a sphere have to do with life, evolution, and dating methods?  Here are some recent reports.

1. Mercury:  One doesn’t envision the planet Mercury with an atmosphere, but it has a very slight one.  Why it has any is a puzzle.  So close to the sun, any volatiles should have heated up and escaped from its weak gravity.  Science Daily reported, though, that the solar wind supplies a tenuous atmosphere that hangs around a little while.  Charged particles from the sun liberate molecules from the surface in a process called sputtering (a kind of erosion on an atomic scale).  But then, Mercury’s slight magnetic field should keep the solar wind at bay.  The report says that magnetic “tornados” allow solar wind to reach the surface at certain points and times.  The MESSENGER spacecraft found that these “flux transfer events” allow solar wind particles to replenish the thin atmosphere.  Space.com also discussed this story, saying, “For some reason, there are more tornadoes than scientists had anticipated.”
       The sun may not be the only source of gas surrounding this small planet.  Nature this week (June 11) called attention to a recent discovery by MESSENGER of a bright patch on the surface:¹ 

   Baked by the Sun and blasted by impacts, Mercury is thought to have lost much of its volatile content – such as water vapour and carbon dioxide – early in its history.  But its interior may have been bubblier than thought, according to Laura Kerber of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and her colleagues.  Using observations from the MESSENGER spacecraft, the researchers spotted the remnants of a volcano that they say was driven by explosive magma with high volatile concentrations.
   

   If the volatiles on Mercury resemble those on Earth, as alleged, this complicates theories on the origin of the planets.  It means “Mercury formed from volatile-rich planetesimals from the outer Solar System that migrated inwards.”
2. Earth:  The solar wind batters Earth’s atmosphere, too.  Fortunately, our strong magnetic field keeps most of our gas intact.  National Geographic News said, though, that the sun does steal some of our atmosphere.  The same magnetic energy that protects us also funnels some of the solar wind inside, where it gets heated and escapes.  In fact, we’re losing more oxygen and hydrogen than Venus and Mars.  Not to panic, though: estimates show it would last several more billion years.  The article noted that most of Mars’ original atmosphere was probably lost due to the lack of a global magnetic field.
       A planet’s atmosphere is linked to its geology.  Astrobiologists considering conditions for life on other planets need to consider this.  Science Daily reported that without plate tectonics, an atmosphere cannot be sustained.  “If you have plate tectonics, then you can have long-term climate stability, which we think is a prerequisite for life,” said Rory Barnes (University of Washington).  But tectonics can be too severe as well (think Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io).  The close-in habitable zone around red dwarfs has a side effect of generating strong tides and more volcanic activity.  “The planet must be at a distance where tugging from the star’s gravitational field generates tectonics without setting off extreme volcanic activity that resurfaces the planet in too short a time for life to prosper,” the article said.  So now there is a “Tidal Habitable Zone” to worry about.  Barnes said, “Overall, the effect of this work is to reduce the number of habitable environments in the universe, or at least what we have thought of as habitable environments.”
3. Mars:  A report on Science Daily claims that meteor bombardment might have helped Earth and Mars become more habitable.  How?  by modifying their atmospheres.  Researchers at Imperial College London calculated that impacts during the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment could have delivered 10 billion tonnes of water vapor and carbon dioxide to both Earth and Mars.  Why, then, are the planets so different today?  They claim Mars’ lack of global magnetic field exposed it to erosion by the solar wind.  Also, a decline in volcanic activity cooled the atmosphere so that the remaining water molecules froze out.
       The article from Science Daily mentioned above also speculated about how Mars might become more friendly to life.  “If Mars were to move closer to the sun, the sun’s tidal tugs could possibly restart the tectonics, releasing gases from the core to provide more atmosphere.  If Mars harbors liquid water, at that point it could be habitable for life as we know it.”
       Meanwhile, don’t worry that germs carried by our rovers might be seeding Mars with Earth life.  A story on Astrobiology Magazine says the ultraviolet radiation is intense enough to sterilize everything on the surface.  There’s no escape, even inside salt crystals.  And that’s not the only hazard to life.  Andrew Schuerger, a NASA scientist listed “at least 13 separate factors on Mars that can kill Earth microbes, not counting perchlorate salts uncovered by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander in the polar region of Mars.”  Earth life would be in even more danger from ionizing radiation if it were not for our atmosphere – with its tenuous ozone layer absorbing most of the sun’s ultraviolet rays.
4. Titan:  The atmosphere of Saturn’s giant moon Titan has been in the news a couple of times this month.  For one thing, summer is refusing to leave its south pole.  A press release from JPL’s Cassini Mission summarizes a paper in Nature about this.²  New Scientist said that Titan’s atmosphere is turning out to be “much more complicated than we ever imagined,” according to Henry Roe of Lowell Observatory.  That, he said, is the “real story” that “we’re only just beginning to acknowledge within the field” of atmospheric science.  Science Daily also reported on the latest findings about Titan’s sluggish seasons.  So did Space.com.

The atmosphere in the Creation Restaurant is nicer.  There’s no hot air.  The well-mannered customers do not emit foul-smelling gas (04/08/2002).  They don’t moan over their gastric pains (05/02/2003 and 08/22/2005 commentary).  You won’t inhale any stale, foul-smelling smoke about life emerging from dust.  There are no rude customers puffing on Charlie brand cigars (02/05/2002) while making up stories about things they never saw.  It’s one big non-smoking section.  Ahhhhh.  Take a deep breath and savor the aroma of a healthy science atmosphere.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Physics • Geology • Stars • Origin of Life

Gotta love those animals.  Is your hummingbird feeder out?  Take your kids to see the Navy Blue Angels or Air Force Thunderbirds, then tell them by the backyard feeder about this story.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Facts

Planets Can’t Grow Past the Electric Fence   06/09/2009    
June 9, 2009 — In the artwork, it looks so simple: dust clumps into planets that grow into nice, orbiting solar systems – like ours.  It’s not so simple when you try to nail down the real physics.  Planet-building models have to contend with a host of variables and barriers to growth (accretion).  Another barrier was discussed in Astrophysical Journal this month:¹ the electric barrier.
    Satoshi Okuzumi (Kyoto University) tackled the problem of static electricity among particles trying to accrete into planets.  He specifically worked on the earliest stages, when particles are just microns to millimeters in size.  What happens when cosmic rays add static electricity to the clumps?  Astronomers have been working on planet-building for decades, so it’s surprising so little attention has been paid to this question.  “Although the importance of dust charging is well recognized in the above context, its effect on dust coagulation in protoplanetary disks has been hardly examined.”
    What happens is bad news.  The static charge builds up and forms a barrier that repels particles from sticking to each other.  After a lot of math and analysis, he concluded that the particles can’t grow any further.  They “freeze out” and planetesimal growth stops.  Now what?
    Okuzumi suggested that turbulence can overcome the electrostatic barrier.  But this brings more bad news.  For one, the expected turbulence only occurs at 20AU, about the radial distance of Uranus.  So much for Earth and its lovely neighbors.  For another, the turbulence makes the collision rate over three times higher than the threshold past which destruction overtakes accretion.  That won’t work, either.  Here are his two major findings: 

1. For a wide range of model parameters, the effective cross section for the mutual collision of aggregates is quickly suppressed as the fractal growth proceeds and finally vanishes at a certain aggregate size (Sections 3.2.1 and 3.2.2).  This is due to the strong electrostatic repulsion between aggregates charging negatively on average, and happens much before the collisional compression of aggregates becomes effective.  Both the charge fluctuation and the thermal velocity fluctuation do not help the aggregates to overcome the growth barrier.  Without strong turbulence, the quasi-monodisperse fractal growth is very likely to “freezeout” on its way to the subsequent growth stage.
2.   Strong ... turbulence will help the aggregates to overcome the above growth barrier (Section 3.2.3).  However, such turbulence is likely to occur only in MRI-active regions, i.e., at outer disk radii or high altitudes (Section 4.3).  Furthermore, it will cause another serious problem—the catastrophic disruption of collided aggregates—in later stages.  These facts suggest that the combination of electric repulsion and collisional disruption may strictly limit the collisional growth of dust aggregates in protoplanetary disks.

If you’re not intimidated by equations and jargon, this paper is funny.  It’s another “assume a can opener” joke.  Here he was all set out to tell us how tiny dust particles grow into planets, and in the end, he had to assume that large particles already existed.  Get a charge out of that.  Isn’t that what he does, right here?  “Let us consider a small population of irregularly large aggregates (referred to as "test aggregates") growing with a large population of standard (D ~ 2) fractal aggregates ("field aggregates").  Under this assumption, the kinetic energy of relative motion between test and field aggregates is written as ... ” and off he goes, assuming the existence of the very thing he was trying to prove.  Some whiz-bang math later, he says it again without apology: “Therefore, if there exists an aggregate that is large and compact, it will be able to continue growing by sweeping up smaller "frozen" aggregates.”  Good grief, that is hilarious.  He followed it with a brief return back to reality: “In any case, we expect that the effect of dust charging should qualitatively modify the current scenario of dust growth in protoplanetary disks.”  That’s the evolutionist’s way; a solution exists! – in the future.  “Quick!  Can anybody else concoct a better just-so scenario?”
    Even in the most charitable description of this paper, he has created more problems than he has solved.  Now, the number of lucky dust particles hoping to become lucky mud some day has dwindled considerably.  It’s better to hear true bad news than flawed good news.
    But what about the evolutionist who argues, “We may have problems in our models, but we know planets exist, so they had to form somehow.  At least this guy was using SCIENCE to try to figure out how they came about.”  This is the error of begging the question.  It’s not a matter of science; it’s a matter of assumptions about initial conditions.  Why not assume planets were created?  The disruption of planets into smaller pieces fits the observations and the second law of thermodynamics (the best-attested law in all nature).  Why must we begin with the metaphysical assumption that things always grow from small to complex, and not assume the reverse?  Why not model things from the top down?  Why must we assume naturalism?  It’s not clear that bumping one’s head against the wall of naturalism is healthy, when more elegant solutions exist.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics

Animals Become Tame with Minor Genetic Changes   06/09/2009    
June 9, 2009 — “In what could be a breakthrough in animal breeding, a team of scientists from Germany, Russia and Sweden have discovered a set of genetic regions responsible for animal tameness,” began a report in Science Daily.  Groups of tame rats and aggressive rats were bred separately, then mated.  Scientists identified genetic regions responsible for the different behaviors.
    The editor of the journal Genetics in which the results were published (June issue) remarked how humans have tamed some animals for thousands of years but have had difficulty with others.  He said it’s not folklore and mythology; “genetics plays a large role in the process, and this research provides a solid scientific explanation of this phenomenon, and offers clues about how genomes can be manipulated to breed tame animals of species once believed to be untamable.”

How difficult would it be for the Creator to alter the behavior of animals toward humans?  The Bible says God put the fear of man into animals after the Flood (Genesis 9:2) and that in the Millennium wild animals will become tame again (Isaiah 11, 65).  Is that just folklore or mythology?  Modern genetics shows there’s a “solid scientific explanation for this phenomenon.”  Compared to inventing an animal in the first place, taming wild animals would be a minor tweak for the Master of Genetics.  This is certainly more plausible than thinking lions and horses are the products of slime and chance.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Genetics • Bible

“For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from,” Ruben said.  “That’s a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.
    “But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs,“ Ruben said.  “However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds.  Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed.  That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link.
    “A velociraptor did not just sprout feathers at some point and fly off into the sunset,” Ruben said.

“Frankly, there’s a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises questions,” Ruben said.  In some museum displays, he said, the birds-descended-from-dinosaurs evolutionary theory has been portrayed as a largely accepted fact, with an asterisk pointing out in small type that “some scientists disagree.”
    “Our work at OSU used to be pretty much the only asterisk they were talking about,” Ruben said.  “But now there are more asterisks all the time.  That’s part of the process of science.”

Sometimes the key to a story is in the asterisks.  The OSU professors should be commended for going against a strong current of dogma in their field.  Notice how many non-evidential factors producing that dogma were pointed out in the article: careers on the line, museum politics, romanticized notions, and old die-hard theories presented as fact.  Those are the same non-evidential factors running rampant throughout King Charles’ domain.  He’s the one that needs to go flying off into the sunset – with velocity.
    The OSU profs saved their skin, though, by still pinching their incense to Caesar, claiming that the mythical “common ancestor” is just a little further back in the record, and that birds were “evolving in parallel” along with the dinosaurs.  That’s all they can do – toss in a few more naturalistic, purposeless, chance miracles to keep the Bearded Buddha shrine operating.  Now the museum workers are going to have to figure out what to do with all those feathers (01/21/2009, 07/09/2008, 06/13/2007, 02/08/2006).  Maybe they can stick them on the wooly mammoths, as caricatured by Tom Weller in Science Made Stupid, a mandatory lesson on how evolutionary stories are propagated. 
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils • Evolution

Fine-grained sedimentary rocks (grain size <62.5 µm), commonly known as shales or mudstones, are the most abundant sedimentary rock type.  They contain the bulk of geologic history recorded in sedimentary rocks (Schieber, 1998), and are a key element in organic-matter burial, the global carbon cycle, and the hydraulic isolation of groundwater resources and waste materials.  Economically, they are an important source of hydrocarbons, minerals, and metals (Sethi and Schieber, 1998).  They are susceptible to weathering due to their clay content, and so often appear quite homogeneous to the casual observer.  Because of this, they are much more poorly understood than other types of sedimentary rocks, in spite of their importance.
    An enduring notion about deposition of muds has been that they are deposited mainly in quiet environments that are only intermittently disturbed by weak current activity (e.g., Potter et al., 2005).  Flume experiments have shown, however, that muds can be transported and deposited at current velocities that would also transport and deposit sand (Schieber et al., 2007).  Deposition-prone floccules form over a wide range of experimental conditions, regardless of the exact parameters that drive flocculation in a given experimental run.  Floccule ripples, ranging in height from 2 to 20 mm, and spaced from centimeters to decimeters apart, migrate over the flume bottom and accrete into continuous mud beds at streamwise velocities from 0.1 to 0.26 m/s.

There is an apparent paradox in mud sedimentation.  Whereas mud constituents are cohesive and flocculate, floccules made from cohesive particles appear to act noncohesively in transport.  Observation of floccule-ripple migration shows that erosion removes not simply single floccules, but also larger chunks of material.  Once moving, these chunks break up into smaller subunits that presumably reflect the maximum equilibrium floccule diameter for a given level of turbulence (Parthenaides, 1965).  Floccule-ripples migrate significantly slower than sand ripples under comparable conditions.  Thus, cohesive forces between floccules assert themselves once the floccules come to rest next to each other, but they are ineffective as long as the floccules move in turbulent suspension.

Go back and read the earlier entry on this topic (see 12/14/2007).  Considering the vast quantities of sedimentary rocks around the world of this type (think major parts of the Grand Canyon), this really is big news.  A lot of geologic dating, fossil interpretation, and economic geology (e.g., oil shale interpretation) could be in for upsets.  The impact of reevaluating most of the geologic record in light of these findings cannot be ignored.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods • Physics

Tickle Me Darwin   06/08/2009    
June 8, 2009 — Observation: orangutans seem to laugh when tickled.  Conclusion: humans evolved laughter from our ape past.  This is the story being promoted by the science news outlets.  “At least 10 million years ago, our ancestors may have been laughing it up over the latest stone-age prank or bout of tickling,” announced Live Science.
    New Scientist joined in the laugh fest, saying “Laughter is not uniquely human.... laughter dates back some 10 to 16 million years, to our common ancestor.”  Science Daily aped this story, and as did the BBC News and Nature News.  National Geographic was tickled with it and even included sound recordings so you could hear the laughter of a bonobo, chimp, gorilla, orangutan and a human child.
    Each of these articles was accompanied by pictures of apes making funny faces – something that should have been known since the old Bonzo movies.  None of the studies claims, though, that the apes laughed at the shaggy man joke.
    National Geographic wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for these punch lines:

But even the most casual listener can tell a human laugh from an ape laugh.  Davila Ross points out that human laughter has distinct differences from ape laughter, most likely because humans have evolved much more rapidly than apes during the past five million years.
    And at least one great mystery remains: What purpose does ape laughter serve?....
Primates have apparently packed a lot of laughter into the last 10 to 16 million years, but there’s a chance the chuckle originated even earlier: Tickle-induced “laughter” has also been reported in rats.
    The idea remains controversial, but it could suggest that our funny bone evolved much closer to the trunk of mammals’ evolutionary tree.

The storytelling continues (see 11/22/2005).  It’s an endless joke at our expense.  Don’t be surprised if one of them looks for the laughter gene in bacteria.  Maybe these scientists should analyze why common-sensical people are laughing at them for taking themselves seriously.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Early Man • Mammals • Dumb Ideas

The iPS stem-cell revolution appears to have all the potential of great historical advances with wonder drugs and antibiotics.  The research described above owes nothing to Darwin.  The Darwinian angle is using human embryos like chattel, like bits and pieces of biological stuff without intrinsic worth, just playthings for researchers.  The successful research advances capitalize on existing design that scientists are discovering was there all along.  It’s ID science, intelligently pursued, with morality – the honest application of the commandment to love one another.
Next headline on:  Health • Human Body • Cell Biology • Biomimetics • Physics • Politics and Ethics • Intelligent Design

Bees’ Knees Bridle the Breeze   06/05/2009    
June 5, 2009 — Bees stabilize their flight in windy conditions by extending their hind legs.  Even though this costs 30% more energy and produces more drag, it provides stabilization against turbulence by increasing their moment of inertia (i.e., their resistance to being flipped over).
    A team of scientists videotaped the insects flying when blasted by powerful bursts of air, Science Daily reported.  “In every case, the bees displayed a side-to-side rolling motion at high flight speeds, negotiating the turbulence by extending their rear legs while in flight.”
    They only studied ten species of bees.  The team thinks this may be a universal skill among other members of their class Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants, and sawflies), but are not sure.  There was no mention of evolution in the article, except that one of the scientists is a Harvard evolutionary biologist who said, “we know remarkably little about how animals navigate windy conditions and unpredictable airflows.”

Who taught these bees about physics and aerodynamics?   Did they learn it in Bee’s Knees Flight School?  Did a lucky one figure it out and share the idea with its fellow aces (Lamarckism)?  Did a lucky mutation arise, after trillions of bees fell dead from gusts of wind (neo-Darwinism)?  Did the right engineering solution just emerge (naive Darwinism)?  Those ideas don’t fly, even in hot air.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Physics • Amazing Facts

“Social Brain Hypothesis” Discredited   06/04/2009    
June 4, 2009 — According to evolutionary theory, the extra processing required for living in social groups should make brains bigger.  Not so, found a couple of scientists who looked into the question.  There’s no general correlation.
    According to Live Science, John Finarelli (University of Michigan) and John Flynn (American Museum of Natural History in New York) examined the largest number of species ever – 289 terrestrial carnivores, half of which were fossil species.  The “social brain hypothesis” (i.e., that brains of social animals tend to be bigger) may hold up for the dog family, but that’s about it.  It’s not true for weasels, bears and many other groups.  Some with large brains are non-social, and some social animals do not have proportionally larger brains.  Nature commented briefly on this find in today’s (June 4) issue, calling the old idea a “plausible hypothesis” that has now been “quashed.”  It continued, “The authors suggest that the ‘social brain hypothesis’ falls apart when looking at carnivore groups, extinct and otherwise, beyond modern canids (wolves, jackals, foxes and the like).”
    This undercuts what evolutionists thought they understood about brain size, or encephalization.  Flynn said, “Evolutionary change in encephalization is a widely observed phenomenon, but has been very hard to explain.”  Testing is good, he said, but this idea failed:

“Increased brain size may mean different things to different groups, depending on unique evolutionary histories, ecologies, life history attributes etc.,” he said.  “That is to say, it might be that seeking simple, one-size-fits-all explanations across all mammals (or all amniotes [animals such as birds, mammals and reptiles that give birth to young inside eggs]) has been the problem all along.  Nevertheless, seeking general explanations (and then testing them with all available data), within clades or across groups, is a valuable goal of evolutionary studies.”

Intelligence does appear to increase with time in some cases.  Above right is a plot by neuroscientist Lori Marino at Emory University that shows an index computed from the ratio of brain size to body size, the so-called encephalization quotient (EQ), for a bunch of species of dolphins and toothed whales over the last 50,000,000 years.  They were all pretty stupid 50,000,000 years ago, but 48,000,000 years later, white-flanked dolphins were the smartest things on the planet.  If you go to the local library and look up “Dolphin Literary Criticism,” it’s all from two million years ago.  Once you get to a certain level of complexity, there’s a niche market for intelligence, and it may get filled.

Another evolutionary myth has been falsified, and Seth Shostak has been embarrassed again.  Keep up the good work.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Evolutionary Theory • SETI

Science as Tyranny   06/03/2009    
June 3, 2009 — Movements since the late 19th century have employed science as justification for tyrannical ideas.  Ziauddin Sardar wrote in Nature, “Misplaced faith in science, as rational dogma, as the enemy of pessimism, as a theory of salvation, often serves as the glue that binds modernity and fascism together.”¹  Could that happen again?
    Sardar, the editor of Futures, was reviewing a new book by Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, 2009).  He began,

A hundred years ago, a group of Italian visionary artists declared war on civilization.  Rejecting the artwork, poetry, music and architecture of the period, these ‘Futurists’ wanted to create the world anew.  Science and technology formed the building blocks of their brave new world, which they expressed not just in art but in violence and naked nationalism.  In Inventing Futurism, art historian Christine Poggi describes how the Futurist movement’s raw passion for technology was moulded by the atmosphere of political foreboding of the times.

“We want to free this land,” Marinetti wrote, “from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquarians ... the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.”  He urged his readers to set fire to library shelves and to flood museums.  “Take up your pickaxes ... and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!  Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.”  Marinetti saw science as a modern, virile enterprise to be pursued at all costs, and technology as the instrument that would usher the world into sunlight with velocity and violence.  A mythical struggle had to be waged between the masculine forces of science and technology, represented by the sea, and the seductive feminine power of the stars that prevented civilization from advancing forwards.

The visions and concerns of the Futurists, Poggi tells us in this difficult, sometimes frightening but always illuminating study, emerged out of the uncertainty and confusion produced by modernity.  Their artificial optimism sought to produce a philosophy for a new life, not just new art or architecture.  It is not surprising that the Futurists saw an echo of excessive nationalism in their notion of modernist violence and war.

Environmentalists want the park, but social activists are up in arms.  “I don’t want to honor a despicable man,” says Karen Tajbl, chair of the social action committee of the Sierra Foothills Unitarian Universalist Church.  Tajbl points out that last year in Sacramento, the citizens “cleansed” the name of Charles M. Goethe, a philanthropist but also founder of the Eugenics Society of Northern California, from several public places.

A pervasive theme in the book, which is heavily slanted toward psychology, is the scientific basis for ethical behaviour.  Neuroscientist Christian Keysers explains that mirror neurons are activated when we perform certain activities, and when we watch others do those same activities: “The emotions of others are contagious because our brain activates our own emotions at the sight of them.”  This facilitates both learning and empathy.  “Our brain,” he concludes, “is ethical by design.”

Philosopher Nick Bostrom tackles human enhancement.  He is concerned because humans “are a marvel of evolved complexity”, something with which we tamper at our own risk.  So he proposes a “rule of thumb, for identifying promising human enhancements”.  Bostrom sees some of our limitations as resulting from selection pressures that no longer exist for most humans.  Today, for instance, we can feed the higher metabolic demands of a larger brain, whereas in our recent past, we could not.  We might also overcome evolutionary restrictions.  Bostrom suggests that genetic ‘medication’ could be administered to confer an advantage, such as the protection a mutant haemoglobin gene offers against malaria in people with the sickle-cell trait.  Alternatively, embryo screening could promote favourable genetic profiles.  Thus, Bostrom sees the morality of human enhancement as an issue of what is achievable rather than what is acceptable.  His heuristic is useful from the scientific point of view, offering us a test for whether we should even consider a particular kind of enhancement, but it probably won’t be accepted by the ethics community....

Psychologist Matthew D. Lieberman believes that some ideas are more ‘sticky’ than others, and that the ideas that persist differ from one cultural group to another.  He argues that “Big Ideas sometimes match the structure and function of the human brain such that the brain causes us to see the world in ways that make it virtually impossible not to believe them.”  Lieberman thinks that East Asian cultures stress interconnectedness among individuals, whereas Western Europeans tend to be more independent.  He suggests that this tendency might be genetically influenced by a serotonin transporter gene, found twice in its ‘short’ variant in two-thirds of East Asians, but in only one-fifth of Western Europeans.  “These cultural Big Ideas appear to have migrated until they found the populations with the right neurochemistry to make them sticky,” Lieberman says.

If you are not terrified of the Darwin-drunk scientific elitists, you should be.  In America, they are drooling over the new prestige the current administration is granting to “science” (which means liberal scientific establishment institutions, as distinguished from the unbiased pursuit of knowledge).  Today’s scientific futurists, who root their morality in the same Darwinist ideology that was rampant among futurists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, would love nothing better than to play the elite oligarchy directing the fate of every human being on the planet (themselves exempted).
    Morality to the materialistic evolutionists is something that can be chemically or genetically controlled.  We are the results of selection pressures from our past that can be influenced with science, they say.  Ethics becomes what they say it is, because they have ruled out any unchanging, absolute foundation for ethics.  You can be sure that the Italian futurists pictured themselves as the most ethical people in the world, as did William Shockley.  So what if a certain lady’s genetic predisposition was to consider him a despicable person?  Adjust her serotonin level and she will come around.
    Everyone should get a copy of a lecture series called Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century by Vejas Liulevicius from The Teaching Company and listen to it carefully.  Horrific as the events are he describes, he actually understates their awfulness.  As you listen, note the influence of Darwinian thinking on the worst totalitarian dictators.  Darwinian ideology has contributed to the most ruthless horrors in the history of the world, resulting in a body count that outstrips any number of religious wars you want to list by orders of magnitude.  These atrocities all occurred within the 20th century, “Darwin’s century,” within the memory of people alive today.  Millions of white crosses in military cemeteries don’t lie: ideas have consequences.*
    Would that leaders had listened to J. Gresham Machen who warned at the coming storm before the first World War, “What is today matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.  In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combatted; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate.”  We have another chance today.
*Not forgetting the millions in unmarked mass graves.  Remember the 11/30/2005 entry.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Darwin and Evolutionary Theory

1. Evolution the tool user:  “Evolution has a ‘toolkit’ and when it needs to do a particular job, such as see light, it uses the same toolkit again and again.”  These are the words of Margaret McFall-Ngai [U of Wisconsin-Madison] in Science Daily, explaining why squid can sense light through their light-emitting organs.  The article explained that “molecular machinery” is involved – tangible evidence not of design, but that Evolution has been at work with its toolkit.
2. Guppy race:  Evolution is slow and gradual – except when it is fast and furious.  “What’s the secret to surviving during times of environmental change?” asked Science Daily.  “Evolve...quickly.”  (This sounds like a version of the bumper sticker, “Evolve or perish.”)  Guppies in Trinidad have apparently altered their reproductive habits in just eight years when transplanted to different streams – one with more predators, one with fewer.  How this constitutes evolution when the reproductive apparatus was the same before and after was not explained, but “fitness differences” were defined in terms of survival rate (see 10/30/2002, “Fitness for Dummies”).  Surprisingly, after 150 years of Darwinism, “This is one of only a few studies to look at adaptation and survival in a wild population,” the article said.
3. Spanish hominid:  Evolution got the credit for a fossil monkey with “modern facial features,”  The face and jaw, found in Spain and said to be 12 million years old, “sheds important new light on the evolutionary development of hominids, including orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans,” the article in Science Daily said.  Less prominent coverage was given to the puzzle about this muzzle.  This fossil, named Anoiapithecus, has a flat face.  The only primates with a similar face are in the genus Homo (which includes us; see 05/27/2009).  More recent apes than Anoiapithecus, though (supposedly our closest ancestors) have a much more protruding jaw.  Evolution takes credit (08/24/2007) nonetheless: “the similarity might be a case of evolutionary convergence, where two species evolving separately share common features.”  This fossil also throws a monkey wrench (so to speak) into the “out of Africa” hypothesis favored among paleoanthropologists.  Instead, this argues for a more controversial “into Africa” hypothesis (see New Scientist) – something that might make Europeans feel superior once again as being in the forefront of human evolution.
4. Mosquitos vs. turtles:  Who will win the evolutionary arms race in the Galapagos?  The mosquitos or the giant tortoises?  Science Daily seems alarmed about the danger to the long-time residents that are so popular with tourists: “Mosquito Evolution Spells Trouble For Galapagos Wildlife,” the article announced.  It said that an “ancient” mosquito population came to the islands 200,000 years ago and has recently developed a taste for tortoise blood.  Park officials are very concerned that diseases that could be introduced by tourists could spread to the island inhabitants, so they are taking precautions by spraying the interiors of planes arriving on the islands.  “It is absolutely vital that these control measures are maintained and carried out rigorously, otherwise the consequences could be very serious indeed,” a scientist said.  He did not explain why there should be a cause for concern, since all of the inhabitants of the islands supposedly evolved according to a well-known evolutionary dogma: the founder principle (see 05/08/2002 and 02/10/2009, bullet 4).  Are they ranking the organisms according to some arbitrary rule?  Are they claiming that human beings have some special stewardship responsibility over the animal kingdom?
5. Saved by the junk:  Functional “junk DNA” has been an argument against evolution, but they have found a way to turn it into an argument for evolution.  PhysOrg printed a story that now claims junk DNA is vital to an animal’s survival – and therefore its evolution – because it allows an organism to adapt quickly.  Tandem repeats (once a category of junk DNA) have been found to influence the activity of neighboring genes.  This means they “may allow organisms to tune the activity of genes to match changing environments – a vital principle for survival in the endless evolutionary race.”  Researchers explained, “If this was the real world, only cells with the repeats would be able to swiftly adapt to changes, thereby beating their repeat-less counterparts in the game of evolution.  Their junk DNA saved their lives.”  They did not say who is playing the game or who wrote the game in the first place.
6. Animorals:  Animals can tell right from wrong, claimed The Telegraph.  “Until recently, humans were thought to be the only species to experience complex emotions and have a sense of morality,” the article by Richard Gray said.  “But Prof Marc Bekoff, an ecologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are ‘hard-wired’ into the brains of all mammals and provide the ‘social glue’ that allow often aggressive and competitive animals to live together in groups.”  Gray did not explain what the moral standard was by which to judge moral behavior, nor why social glue is a good thing.  Some aggressive and competitive animals are loners.  If morality is hard-wired, is it really morality?  Who is the judge?
7. Say what?  One article on Science Daily claim that a genetic change to the language-related FOXP2 gene in mice to make them mimic the human form of the gene speaks “volumes about our evolutionary past” (Note: the mice do not talk; they just squeak a little differently.)  Presumably, “Those differences offer a window into the evolution of speech and language capacity in the human brain.”  The scientists involved admitted that “Currently, one can only speculate about the role these effects may have played during human evolution.”  But then, another Science Daily four days earlier had announced, “More Genetic Differences Between Mice And Humans Than Previously Thought.”  It further claimed that some of the newly-analyzed mouse genes are “evolving at an unusually rapid pace, probably as a result of an evolutionary ‘arms race’ among mice and their reproductive cells.”
8. Small talk on cars:  Evolution even applies to car companies.  That’s the point Meredith Small tried to make on Live Science.  Her article, “How Evolution Could Sink (or Save) GM,” contained the following statement, reminiscent of Rockefeller-era social Darwinism: “It would seem that the country should act as a collative [sic; collective?] and care about this,” (i.e., the bankruptcy of General Motors).  “But the reality is that capitalism is like evolution by natural selection, and natural selection can be a harsh reality.”  Taking the edge off, she launched into a discussion about group selection as a possible offset to the ruthlessness of natural selection.  But group selection, she said, doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.  Why should we care about the job losses of people we don’t even know?  She quoted Bobbi Lowe (U of Michigan) who believes “humans are not well designed to operate” by caring for distant members of our species.  We only care about close kin, because that was “critical in our ancestral past when humans lived in small groups,” she explained.  “We also don’t plan well for the future because our hominid history was marked by uncontrollable, unpredictable environments.”  This seems to ignore the many people (and birds and squirrels and ants) who are good long-term planners.  Giving Lowe the mike, Small continued,

   “We evolved to strive for resources and seldom, if ever, found ourselves evolutionarily ‘rewarded’ for conscious restraint,” Lowe has written.  Instead, she claims, humans are designed by evolution to work well on the short-term, and forget about the more global view on conserving anything because we just can’t do it.”

   That seems a pretty broad-brush characterization of the human race.  It also raises the question of how evolution could “design” anything.  Meredith Small failed to distinguish between human design and blind forces of nature, so for the above quotes and the following, she wins a well-deserved SEQOTW prize:

   There are many forces of evolution, but natural selection, biologists feel, is the most important.  It works like this: All sorts of variation is produced (think SUV, compacts, vans, and sedans) and then the environment (think free market) selects for some and ignores others.  The ignored ones are dropped out of the gene pool (think showroom floor or metal recycling plant), and too bad for them.
       In this biological (or economic) system, only the best adapted survive.  So what if evolution is presented with something more sleek, in cool colors, or with tinted windows – if it takes too much energy (gas) to use, it will be selected against.
       Natural selection operates on individuals, or individual automobiles companies because not all of them are going bankrupt, and that affects the future of the total gene pool, or automobile business.  That’s how biological life, and capitalist economies, have been shaped over generations.

Silly, silly, silly.  These people only get away with saying such things because we are not laughing loud enough.  Look at them.  They worship cartoony idols (King Charles, Popeye, Yoda and Tinker Bell) that have magical powers.  They say things that not only make no sense, they plagiarize design words and contradict their own core beliefs.  They justify humans’ worst character flaws as artifacts of an animal past.  Get out on the yellow brick road and sing We’re off the shame the Wizard, the blunderful Wizard of Flaws (see lyrics in the 09/05/2008 commentary) as you accomplish your mission to expose charlatanry and bring science back to the real world.
Next headline on:  Evolution • Fish and Marine Biology • Early Man • Mammals • Terrestrial Zoology • Genetics and DNA • Politics and Ethics • Dumb Ideas

Milankovitch Cycles Indistinguishable from Randomness   06/02/2009    
June 2, 2009 — A claim has often been made by geologists that the rock sediments record cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit.  Milankovitch cycles, named for the man who analyzed them, are a set of regular periodic changes to the orbital eccentricity, obliquity, and axial precession of the Earth over tens and hundreds of thousands of years.  These subtle changes, it is alleged, produce climate change and sea level fluctuations.  The climate forcing, in turn, produces periodic differences in the thickness of sedimentary layers.  The search for Milankovitch signatures in rock records has been used as a method of dating sediments.
    Geologists at Virginia State and Virginia Polytechnic tested this hypothesis with computer models.  They specifically encoded Milankovitch-like cycles in the production of sediments.  The layering produced was indistinguishable from randomness, according to their report in the Journal of Geology.¹  Here was their conclusion:

The simulations used a cyclic Milankovitch driver to produce cyclic stratigraphy, but the lithofacies thickness frequencies and autocorrelation methods used to analyze the resultant rock successions found that these records often appeared independent of periodic orbital forcing.  This indicates that the factors involved in depositing cyclic sedimentary layers, as simulated in the model, tend to mask the original periodic signal (such as Milankovitch orbital forcing) and produce the appearance of independence or stochasticity.  The hypothesis is that the rocks are independent of extrabasinal forcing, and these simulations indicate how difficult it is to disprove such independence.  Real rock successions are very likely to have been historically more complex than our simulations governed by merely a few basic parameters.  This poses a challenge to even most cleverly designed quantitative methods used to test for stratigraphic patterns, with their statistical outcomes being inherently ambiguous: does a given outcome indicate that the record was not formed in a cyclic fashion, or does it merely reflect the fact that an original cyclic driver has been masked by the complexity of depositional processes?  It is important, therefore, to have controls by which these methods can be tested.  The use of simulations can provide such controls by producing synthetic data with known Milankovitch cyclic drivers and thus providing an independent assessment of statistical methods applied to test real empirical records.

The methods for testing for the presence or absence of a Milankovitch driver in ancient successions must demonstrate patterns that are distinct from what would be expected if the rocks were deposited independent of orbital forcing.  One of the problems with many of the methods for detecting cyclicity is that they test a single series (e.g., a stratigraphic column).  This tends to miss lateral substitution of facies that occurs at similar water depths in real settings.  The benefit of using simulations is their ability to capture information such as periods of no deposition or gaps in deposition from erosion that would otherwise be difficult to quantify in real successions.

Another dating method is shown to be a bruised reed.  Unfortunately, some well-meaning books like The Privileged Planet have leaned on this reed: “Finally, there are the Milankovitch cycles, probably the single most useful type of clock for layered deposits” (p. 30).  If this is the best, what about the others?  They tried to defend it with mathematical talk about Fourier analysis and power spectra (p. 370 n25), assuming that sophisticated math can discern a reliable signal in noise.  They did not consider the possibility of getting false signals in actual noise.  Then they used it and other methods to portray an old earth embedded with log records of its history over vast ages.
    Although that section did not harm the basic thesis of the book (that our planet appears designed for scientific discovery), it exposes a weakness of some well-meaning attempts to ground design inferences in shaky foundations.  Layers of rocks record something, obviously, but the time scale and explanations become increasingly tenuous when eyewitnesses are unavailable and multiple causes are involved.  We should be wary of taking published scientific claims uncritically and placing too much authority in the ability of secular scientists to discern unobservable history through their worldview-tainted glasses.
    Be wary especially of the divination methods of pagans (examples: 11/06/2008, 07/26/2008, 06/12/2008, 01/25/2008).  Would Daniel have referred to the scholarship of the Babylonian hepatoscopists as a reliable source?
Next headline on:  Geology • Solar System • Dating Methods

Biology has thus repeatedly found ways of producing net work by rectifying fluctuations with ratchets, and it is interesting to speculate on other areas where this mechanism may play a role.  Evolution is one directly analogous system and a comparison between it and Brownian ratchets has been drawn previously.  Clearly, random mutations in an organism’s genome lead to fluctuations in phenotype.  Reproduction can lock in these variations, and natural selection then acts as a ratchet, reducing the likelihood of maintaining a population that is less competent at reproducing while increasing phenotypic populations that are fitter.  A more tenuous comparison, though, comes to mind when I consider my own thoughts, which all too often seem quite random.  I must consciously work to rectify these thoughts, plucking out the good ones and discarding the bad, in an attempt to construct an understanding of the world about me.  Could my own thinking be working by trapping useful ideas from a pool of noise?  One of the not-so-useful ideas, right?  But, it has been suggested that certain nuclei in the basal ganglia act as a random motor pattern noise generator.  If our brains can create noise, maybe they can ratchet it too.

One of the best videos of the motion of grass seeds is in volume one of Moody’s DVD set Wonders of God’s Creation.  Time-lapse photography shows the seeds moving around like bugs and even burying themselves in the soil.
    It’s a shame Wolgemuth had to turn an otherwise interesting scientific discussion about plant engineering into another shallow Darwinian speculation.  If he is unable to separate his own thoughts from noise, why should his readers try to do so?
Tip: To get Darwinian foxtails out of your brain, don’t try to pull them out backwards.  Push them through to their logical conclusions, where their blunt pointlessness becomes evident to all.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts • Darwinian Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Burrows suggests that the use of resilin springs can have two cost saving advantages.  First, by saving the space that would be required for a muscle to do the job of ‘resetting’ the movement, the resilin spring allows the muscle that generates the power stroke to become larger and hence more powerful.  Second, the amount of nervous control required can be reduced because one direction of movement is controlled automatically by a spring.  As a result of this natural engineering, these limbs of the crab Carcinus maenas can beat in a coordinated way at a remarkable 20 times a second.

Did the crab engineer this itself?  Of course not.  Did a blind, mindless, directionless process do it?  Get real.  This scientist had no need of that hypothesis, nor should anyone else.
Research project:  What is the amino acid structure of resilin?  What is the gene that encodes it?  How much variation exists in resilin genes between crabs and insects?  What is resilin’s distribution in the animal kingdom?  Look up resilin on the web and you will find interesting articles like these at BioMed and Nature. 
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