Fooling Around with OOL     05/31/2010    
May 31, 2010 — Origin of Life (OOL) research is one of those areas in science where one doesn’t have to make any real progress, as long as he or she looks busy.  Anything the scientist says, no matter how speculative, or even foolish, is likely to be taken seriously, because the alternative – creation – has already been ruled out as “pseudoscience” by the ruling scientific elite.  Here are some recent examples.

1. Cook up that DNA:  You can get DNA to copy itself without life.  How?  Inside a deep sea vent, says Dieter Braun of the University of Munich.  New Scientist gave his idea publicity, complete with a photograph of a black smoker with the caption, “Providing a perfect setting for life to replicate.”  That idea, of course, runs contrary to the view of other theorists who consider the deep sea to be the last place one would think life would begin (e.g., Jeffrey Bada, 06/14/2002; see also problems with salt in the ocean, 09/17/2002).  Braun provided a semblance of empirical evidence for his view by putting DNA, nucleotides, and the polymerase enzyme that knows how to assemble them into tiny test tubes and heating them with a laser to set up convection currents.  He and his assistant found copies of DNA accumulating in pockets at the top.  Asked how different configurations might form, he speculated that “Fatty acids in the water may have provided a shuttle service,” and even form membranes to keep them together – the beginning of cells.  It’s all so simple, Nick Lane commented: “The work shows that DNA can be both concentrated and replicated under a very simple set of conditions.”  Of course, by providing DNA, DNA polymerase and nucleotides, he gave his experiment a whopping head start.  But wasn’t RNA supposed to come first?  He didn’t say.  DNA lacks enzymatic activity.  Without enzymes, DNA by itself would be a dead end.  That’s why “RNA World” theory at least tried to cover those two functions in one molecule.  The RNA World hypothesis has its own set of problems (07/11/2002, 02/15/2007).
2. Top Down: Is it ID?  On Live Science, Stuart Fox speculated that Craig Venter’s latest experiment with “synthetic life” (see 05/22/2010) “May Reveal Origins of Natural Life.”  By that he means that further experiments that reduce a cell to its minimal components may show how simple a cell can be to qualify as living.  That, in turn, may reveal possible pathways that primitive cells may have taken in their path from nonlife to life: “Venter addressed this issue on Thursday, noting that he and researchers at his institute had themselves debated how this technology would allow scientists to test the minimum level of biological material needed to spark life,” Fox said.  In Venter’s words, “I think it’ll be interesting as the people working on origins of life, people trying to understand these minimal early possible precursors to life as those programs proceed in one direction, and we proceed from the other, building on top of the evolution of an information system, we might be able to meet somewhere in the middle and have some exciting new tools.”  The only thing clear from the articles that the ones doing the debating, experimenting, researching, working, evaluating, testing, building, meeting and understanding (if that) were human beings – not primitive lifeforms.
3. Chirality and shattered mirrors:  Marcus Chown published a three-page article in New Scientist on the mystery of homochirality – why all living things have left-handed amino acids in their proteins (see online book).  He gave most prominence to a theory that supernovas or black holes gave a slight quantum excess to one form, and that these were enhanced in the waters of the early earth.  This suggestion, however, turned out to be quite weak by page 3, and Chown could only hope for findings to come forth from spacecraft in the future when all was said and done. 
4. Phosphorus for us:  There’s phosphorus in DNA.  There’s phosphorus in ATP.  That can only mean one thing: earth needed phosphorus to have life.  It’s not clear how phosphorus got into our atmosphere.  Maybe it came special delivery.  PhysOrg reported that Dr Terry Kee of the University of Leeds thinks it came from meteorites.  “Phosphorus is present within several meteoritic minerals and it is possible that this reacted to form pyrophosphite under the acidic, volcanic conditions of early Earth.”
       Now, once Earth had pyrophosphite, it had an energetic molecule that, while not as useful as ATP, was at least somewhat similar.  “The team found that a compound known as pyrophosphite may have been an important energy source for primitive lifeforms.”  Did he have any evidence for this?  No; it’s just a requirement.  “It’s a chicken and egg question,” he said.  “Scientists are in disagreement over what came first – replication, or metabolism.  But there is a third part to the equation – and that is energy.”  So while scientists are disagreeing about two things, why not add a third?  That’s progress: “You need enzymes to make ATP and you need ATP to make enzymes,” explained Dr Kee, as if adding questions qualifies as explaining something: “The question is: where did energy come from before either of these two things existed?”  We may not know the answers, but at least our ignorance is getting more sophisticated thanks to OOL research.

Here’s another case where “Amazing Facts” and “Dumb Ideas” got awarded together.  That statement about ATP is a gem plucked out of garbage.  Think of the efficiency of the energy system your Maker provided the human body, such that those quadrillions of exquisitely crafted ATP synthase motors can extract out of phosphorus, using proton motive force, enough energy to send an athlete hurtling down a track, or pole-vaulting over a bar, or high jumping, power lifting, and all the other amazing feats of speed and strength we enjoy watching in sports, out of just 250 grams of ATP – the equivalent of a single AA battery!  Incredible.  Did that superbly crafted design evolve by chemical evolution?  Not on your life.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas • Human Body • Amazing Facts

1. Defining life:  With the stroke of a pen, South Korea decided that frozen human embryos are not life forms.  PhysOrg reported that “The ruling means that human embryos that are in their early stage and are not implanted into a mother’s womb cannot be seen as human life forms,” even though they have a full complement of human DNA from a father and a mother.  Well, if that is the decision, fertility clinics are free to toss out any ethical concerns about them.  The embryos become non-persons.  The clinics can dispose of them, or turn them over to the Science Lab.  “Following the ruling, shares related to stem-cell research surged on the local market.”
2. Your embryonic brain stem cells:  When you were a mere embryo in the womb, your developing pin-sized brain had special stem cells that were busy building the center of higher learning – the neocortex.  PhysOrg reported that neurologists at UC San Francisco discovered a stem cell in the human embryo “illuminates human brain evolution, points to therapies.”  It “likely accounts for the dramatic expansion of the region in the lineages that lead to man, the researchers say.”  Is this because mice and monkeys lack these stem cells in their brains?  Not exactly; it’s just that in primates and especially in humans, the complexity of the layers and types of stem cells is dramatic.  The scientists equivocated about the e-word, saying that their work follows the “molecular steps that the cell goes through as it evolves into the nerve cell, or neuron, it produces.”  So what’s politics got to do with it?  “This information could then be used to prompt embryonic stem cells to differentiate in the culture dish into neurons for potential use in cell-replacement therapy.”  But what would somebody else’s stem cells, with their DNA, do inside your head?  Is that ethical or desirable?
3. No controversy in this heart:  The phrase “non-controversial” has a calming effect on a heart.  Science Daily began an article, “A new and non-controversial source of stem cells can form heart muscle cells and help repair heart damage, according to results of preliminary lab tests reported in Circulation Research: Journal of the American Heart Association.”  The source is amniotic membrane, a sac in which the embryo develops, which is a form of medical waste normally discarded after a baby’s delivery.  Now, it can be kept to derive stem cells to heal damaged hearts.  The press release from the American Heart Association said that the cells are not rejected, and transform into heart muscle cells that start beating spontaneously.  In experiments on rats, a significant percent of them survived for weeks and decreased scarring after a heart attack.  If clinical trials show this works on humans, saving up this previously discarded tissue for heart therapy would be a very loving thing to do.
4. Spanish love:  Spanish scientists have turned fat into a lovely thing.  Science Daily reported that scientists at the University of Granada took stem cells from adipose tissue (fat cells) and reprogrammed them into cardiac myocytes – heart muscle.  “This technique could be used in the future for regeneration of cardiac muscles through the use of cells directly extracted from the patient.”  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Some day, your doctor might extract your fat and use it to repair your heart.
       A somewhat similar study at the University of Texas was reported by PhysOrg.  Your own adult stem cells could be re-injected into your heart and start the repair process, scientists have found.  “Injection of a patient’s own adult stem cells into the heart has shown some efficacy in assisting recovery after a heart attack in early human clinical trials,” the article said.
5. Hope for MS patients in bone:  Stem cells in bone marrow appear to offer hope for those with multiple sclerosis.  Science Daily reported that “A groundbreaking trial to test bone marrow stem cell therapy with a small group of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) has been shown to have possible benefits for the treatment of the disease.”  This was a human trial with encouraging results: “The procedure was well tolerated and the participants were followed up for a year.  No serious adverse effects were encountered.”  Bone marrow stem cells are a form of adult stem cell, with no ethical or controversial issues; they can be taken from the patient and re-injected the same day.
6. Seeing the way for an embryonic stem cell therapy?  A first step toward a possible use of embryonic stem cells was announced by Science Daily.  Researchers at UC Irvine have succeeded in coaxing human embryonic stem cells to differentiate into an “an eight-layer, early stage retina” in the lab.  This was in isolation from an actual eye.  “We made a complex structure consisting of many cell types,” the study leader said; “This is a major advance in our quest to treat retinal disease.”  It is hoped that creating retinal tissue might lead to treatments for macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa and other blinding diseases, but such actual therapies are a long way off.  The article did not say whether embryonic stem cells were required for this feat, or whether adult stem cells, such as induced pluripotent stem cells, could work just as well.

Is it right to do wrong to have a chance to do right?  Do the ends justify the means?  If there are two ways to get something done, and one is not controversial, why choose the controversial way?  Have we not learned that declaring someone a non-person is the first step to unspeakable abuses of human rights?
    The proponents of embryonic stem cell research know how to play on your emotions with tear-jerking commercials of suffering people.  Californians saw that with their $3 billion stem cell initiative they couldn’t afford (02/08/2005).  What the pleading scientists don’t tell you is that (1) they stand to make a lot of money from tax-funded ES research, (2) embryonic stem cell research is getting stampeded by actual successes in the adult stem cell arena, and (3) ES research is tainted by desires to tinker with human cloning and chimeras (mixing human and animal cells).  Stay away from it.  They have nothing to show for it after years of hype and millions of dollars and one of the biggest scandals in the history of science.  Its advocates are primarily Darwinian leftist progressives.  They have mixed motives.  The practice of harvesting embryos opens up a potential shop of horrors, with markets for women selling their eggs, and catalogs of human body parts.  And with non-controversial iPS and adult stem cells available, we don’t need anything they’re selling.
Next headline on:  Health • Cell Biology • Human Body • Politics and Ethics

Science Explains Why the Universe Exists     05/29/2010    
May 29, 2010 — They’ve done it again – those clever scientists have figured out why the universe exists.  What would we ever do without them?  Michael Bolen at Yahoo News had to share the good news, “Scientists discover explanation for why the Universe exists.”  Space.com explained it as a victory in an ancient contest: “Why We Exist: Matter Wins Battle Over Antimatter.”  We should be tickled at the news, like one scientist Bolen quoted: “‘Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result,’ said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a physicist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.”  Never say scientists are a dull lot.
    Theory predicts that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced in the big bang.  Trouble is, they annihilate each other.  Mix them up, and poof – nothing remains but energy racing out in all directions, with no hope for planets and people.  Cosmologists have long hoped to find some mechanism for asymmetry – a little leftover of one or the other to make up a universe of matter (or antimatter; whichever you decide to call it, it doesn’t matter).  The latest attempts looked for asymmetry in collisions at the Tevatron and Large Hadron Colliders in Illinois and CERN, respectively.  They think they found it.  Thus the goose bumps.  But to explain it, they had to deviate from the Standard Model a little.  That might make the Standard Model a bit non-standard, if that matters. 
    Adrian Cho in Science was not prepared to diagnose goose bumps.¹  They might just be zits, he suggested: “the marginal result could be a fluke, and theorists say it’s difficult to explain why the effect is so big in this study and so small in earlier work on related particles.”  A look into the Cho’s article reveals a good deal of interpretation of statistical data that is so theory-laden it is hard to know where observation ends and theory begins.  Not only that, the results will need further testing.  Only if one accepts the theory that “a B meson can decay into an easily spotted particle called a muon, whereas an anti–B meson decays into an antimuon,” can one call this a success.  In the experiment, two-muon events outnumbered two-antimuon events by only 1%.  The experimenters claimed that this bias is 40 times larger than what the Standard Model predicts.  That seems an extremely flimsy occasion for goose bumps, or for headlines that scientists have discovered an explanation for why the universe exists.
    Like David Berlinski wrote in his 2009 essay, “The State of the Matter” (The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays, Discovery Institute, 2009, p. 525), “Although a very great achievement, the Standard Model proved in some respects unsatisfying.  No physicist has ever suggested otherwise.... If there were questions that the Standard Model did not answer, physicists assumed, this indicated only that the Standard Model was a work in process and so a work in progress.”  A moving standard is not really a standard, is it?

What the physicists should be saying is that the asymmetry of matter over antimatter is another of many finely-tuned parameters of our universe that makes life possible.  It is one of dozens of cosmological factors that shouts intelligent design.  Instead of getting goose bumps over that, they deny it, and prefer to get goose bumps over their own pride at every suggestion, no matter how trivial and feeble, that they might be making some progress in their own bottom-up explanation programme.  The Standard Model, this godless mind game with a bit of expensive atom-smashing thrown in, needs 24 elementary particles, 4 forces (some of which they have managed to combine since the 1970s), an unknown number of quantum fields, various symmetries, some of them broken, and various numbers of unobservable dimensions, depending on whose Kaluza-Klein theory one prefers.  But none of them know what to do with gravity.  It shouldn’t be called the Standard Model; it should be called the Standard Ignorance.  It has spawned various non-standard ignorances since, such as String Theory and the Landscape (multiverse theory), which are all united under the over-arching materialist Paradigm of Ignorance (Pig) known as the Stuff Happens Law.  In a perverse sort of way, therefore, materialists can claim their world view is law-governed (09/15/2008 commentary), and therefore scientific – even Baconian.
    David Berlinski’s essay The State of the Matter is a suitable climax to his devilishly delightful set of essays mentioned above.  He is no creationist, Christian, or intelligent design proponent, for that matter; we do not endorse him for those reasons.  But all the more, those reasons demonstrate that criticism of Darwinism and secular materialism is not exclusively the domain of Christians and creationists.  Furthermore, Berlinski is both a well-read, worldly scholar (particularly in mathematical physics) and a wordsmith of the first order, making it a delight to read his tactful demolitions of the secular empire.  He is particularly adept at exposing the scientific pretensions of fools.  To whet your appetite, we end with his conclusion to The State of the Matter, an excellent survey of the rise and fall of 20th century material physics:

What implications in all this for the grand narrative of our times?  Where do the arrows of explanation in the end point?
    The plain truth—no trivial thing, of course—is that no one knows. It is odd and remarkable that in the face of theories that have proven inconclusive such as string theory, physicists that they must at once change the standards by which their theories are judged.  When it is not possible to argue the facts, lawyers quite understand, then it is necessary to argue the law.  In this the physicists have unwittingly drawn close to doctrines that previously they had rejected as frivolous.  But neither physicists disposed radically to change the law, nor physicists disposed radically to reject the change, have made arguments that have persuaded the other side.  And if they cannot persuade one another, surely it is unreasonable for either side to expect that they have persuaded us.

The full force of those lines, to be appreciated, needs to have the momentum of all that preceded it—the bizarre ruminations that led up to the Standard Model, string theory, and the multiverse hypothesis.  The godless have been forced into absurdity by the realities of the universe as it is.  “If we are not disposed to escape the Landscape, Leonard Susskind has warned, we shall be ‘hard pressed’ to answer critics prepared to welcome theories of intelligent design.”
Next headline on:  Physics • Cosmology • Intelligent Design

The worldwide financial crisis in 2008, which led to what many in the United States now call the “Great Recession,” has caused researchers to rethink traditional economic theories of financial markets and the corporate world.  Even renowned financial theorist Michael Jensen, whose widely cited work has laid the foundation for the broad use of stock options as an executive compensation tool, has called on his fellow researchers to incorporate “integrity” into their economic models.

“We know from simple observation that the traditional principal-agent model is not fully descriptive of real-world behavior,” Stevens said.  “A majority of people are paid a fixed salary in their jobs and yet provide sufficient effort for their pay.  This is particularly true in professions and nonprofit firms where the financial incentives required by the traditional model are difficult if not impossible to arrange.  The traditional principal-agent model can’t explain this behavior.  Our model, however, demonstrates that a principal can pay a morally sensitive agent a fixed salary that is increasing in the productivity of the agent’s effort.”
    Their model also demonstrates the value of moral sensitivity to the firm and society.
    “Our model suggests that moral sensitivity increases the efficiency of principal-agent relationships within the firm – which makes more of these relationships possible – and allows the agent to receive a fixed salary that is increasing in his or her productivity or skill,” Stevens said.  “Thus, moral sensitivity increases the general welfare of society by decreasing unemployment and increasing the productivity and pay of those who are employed.  This explains the emphasis placed on moral training within the firm and society at large.  This also provides a warning against letting moral sensitivity diminish.”

Where does ethics come from?  To find the source, don’t walk across campus to the science lab, where the Dawk is telling impressionable frosh that they are evolved slimeballs.  Don’t go to the auditorium where Shermer is telling them intelligent design is a myth and a pseudoscience, and we must use Reason, but he can’t for the life of him tell us a reason why.  Don’t walk over to the Humanities, where the profs want to divide everybody into groups of the aggrieved who want to hold placards with upraised fists dripping in blood and chant, with foaming mouths, “End the Hate!”  Don’t go to the Astronomy department, where they say universes just happen from time to time, and ours is just one of an infinity that popped into existence out of a quantum fluctuation, and is on the way to a heat death.  Don’t go to the music department where they tell you hip-hop is the equivalent of Bach.  Don’t go to the History department, where the profs have no idea why functionally modern humans spent 800,000 years grunting in caves, then decided in the blink of an eye to build cities, ships, trade, agriculture, writing, economics, warfare, manufacturing, mathematics, law, religion, morality and philosophy.
    No, to find morality, use your head.  You have a conscience.  Where did that come from?  It didn’t evolve.  You know innately that certain things are good and certain things are evil.  Good and evil refer to eternal standards.  Conscience, in a sense, is a law of nature.  Paul, a “scientist” of that inner law, explained, “For when the Gentiles [i.e., non-Jews] who do not have the law [the Jewish Scriptures], by nature do what the law requires [i.e., knowing that murder, theft and adultery are wrong], they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them....” (Romans 2:14-15).  We all know that is true by experience.  Steal something, and even if you get away with it and nobody knows about it but you, the proverbial devil and angel on your shoulders start having their argument in your ears.  People have moral sensibilities, and economic theorists have been amiss to ignore those factors in their models.  By treating people as mere Pavlovian dogs responding only to incentives, they have been missing out on how the real world operates.  Could that have led to bad forecasts that blindsided the world to one of the worst financial collapses in modern times?  Well, it’s about time to add the words morality and integrity back into economics theory – for practical reasons if for nothing else.
    To find integrity, leave the campus, cross the street, and go into that building with the steeple.  There you will get to the source.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge (Proverbs 1).  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. ((Matthew 22:34-40).
    It’s nice to see that some economists are finding out that integrity matters.  The other sciences could use some integrity training.  There was a short-lived call for integrity in Science and Nature after the Hwang scandal in 2006 (02/05/2006).  Not much happened.  It was followed by shameless arrogance in Darwinist response to the movie Expelled in 2008, and then a half-hearted admission of fallibility after Climategate in late 2009.
    This month there was a rare mention of the I-word in Science Daily that showed that the IQ (Integrity Quotient) in science needs improvement: “Ethics Experts Call for Refocus of Scientific Review to Ensure Integrity of Research Process.”  The article began, “In a paper published this week in the journal Science, experts caution that important ethical issues in the testing of new therapies like stem cells may not be receiving the attention they deserve.”  So here we are, four years after the Hwang scandal; has no improvement been made?  McGill University ethicist Jonathan Kimmerman, co-author of a study on how clinical trials are designed, said, “What is often overlooked is that allowing studies of poor scientific quality to proceed potentially undermines the entire scientific enterprise, because they undermine trust, consume scarce research resources, and weaken incentives for medical scientists to perform the best research they can.”
    Scientists apparently don’t have the innate incentives to make progress on their own, so we may have to provide incentives for them.  Do your duty; take a scientist to church.  Tell him it’s an experience that’s out of this world, or it will bring true riches, or tell them it’s a science project – whatever incentive appeals to his or her maturity level.  Take someone who needs it, like the Dawk.  He’s already admitted that he prefers living in a Christian society instead of one that acts out Darwinian principles, so he is already inconsistent and needs to learn integrity.  If he kicks and screams, give him a pacifier so he doesn’t disrupt the hymn.  You may have to use childish incentives on him until he gains the maturity to exercise his conscience, but real progress will only be possible when he can explain and defend the source and ultimate reference of integrity.  That, of course, will only be the beginning of knowledge, but getting on the right path is a victory.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

1. Proto-squid:  What was Nectocaris?  The strange fossil in the Burgess Shale, one of many strange fossils in the Burgess Shale, defied classification since its discovery 100 years ago.  Was it a mollusc?  Was it an arthropod?  After looking at dozens of them, scientists publishing in Nature decided this week,¹ based on one trait, that it must have been the ancestor of squids and octopi.  That trait appears to have been an organ of jet propulsion that modern squid, cuttlefish and octopi use to scoot through the water.  This organ on Nectocaris doesn’t look quite the same; it’s at right angles to the creature, for one thing, as if it would have spun the poor animal in circles.  Perhaps it had a pivot so it could be aimed in various directions.  The creature has eyes and tentacles but lacks some other characteristic cephalopod traits.  Nevertheless, Smith and Caron put their theory out there anyway, and Stefan Bengtson liked the theory enough to title his commentary, “A little Kraken wakes.”²  The news media immediately jumped on the bandwagon with headlines like the one on PhysOrg, “Palaeontologists solve mystery of 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore.”
       Even if Smith and Caron are right, it doesn’t help Darwin’s story.  Smith wrote in the press release printed by PhysOrg, “This is significant because it means that primitive cephalopods were around much earlier than we thought, and offers a reinterpretation of the long-held origins of this important group of marine animals.”  Like the other Cambrian body plans, a complex cephalopod emerged out of nowhere.  Smith continued, “We know very little about the relationships between the major groups of molluscs, and the early history of the group,” yet somehow, he said, “Fossils like Nectocaris help us to map out how the groups alive today might be related, and how they evolved.”  If this is indeed a cephalopod in Cambrian strata, it exacerbates the problem of complex life appearing early in the fossil record.  “Far from being mindless filterers or grazers, they [cephalopods] are active predators possessing the most advanced nervous system known among invertebrates.  Their brain-to-body ratio exceeds that of most vertebrates,” Bengtson said.  “They are masters of camouflage, changing shape, surface pattern, texture and colour in the blink of an eye – and they do have good eyes.”
2. Swimming tank:  Imagine a triceratops swimming across the ocean.  That’s almost what a story in Live Science is asking us to believe: “Newfound Horned Dinosaur Probably Island-Hopped to Europe.”  Horned dinosaurs of a type normally known from the Gobi Desert have been identified in Europe.  How did they get there?  Based on another paper published in Nature this week,³ Charles Q. Choi reported that the ancestors of this kind of dinosaur were only known from the far east.  Based on what the scientists said, he imagined this scenario: “Their ancestors might have swum westward from island to island, or they might have walked to these areas when the islands were landlocked, only to get separated later when sea levels rose,” he said.  Perhaps you can think of other mental pictures.  Xing Xu of feathered dinosaur fame commented on this find in Nature.⁴  He began by mentioning the large gaps in the record: “Reconstructing the historical distribution of Earth’s fauna and flora is a challenging task, not least because of the incomplete, often poorly dated, nature of the fossil record,” he said.  “Such problems are particularly severe with respect to European biogeography in the Late Cretaceous period (about 100 million to 65 million years ago), when Europe was an archipelago.”  A shipload of Darwin caulk is necessary for such situations; maybe even an Ark load.
3. Reset button:  Science Daily told a mystery tale of catastrophe: something hit the reset button, and killed almost everything, but fortunately we survived.  “A mass extinction of fish 360 million years ago hit the reset button on Earth’s life, setting the stage for modern vertebrate biodiversity, a new study reports.”  What was it?  Nobody knows, but “Those few species that survived the bottleneck were the evolutionary starting point for all vertebrates -- including humans -- that exist today,” we are told.  It was a global extinction.  It left a completely different world.  Maybe the world got drunk, because the article said the 15-million-year gap “was the hangover after the traumatic Hangenberg event.”  Somewhere out of the hangover, our grandpappy emerged.  “When tetrapods finally recovered, those survivors were likely the great-great-grandfathers to the vast majority of land vertebrates present today.”
       It would be nice to know what happened, but: “What remains mysterious is exactly what happened 360 million years ago to trigger this mass extinction, the authors said.”  If you thought trees were our friends, “The first appearance of forest-like environments in some regions might also have produced atmospheric changes catastrophic to animal life.”  What did the forest trees evolve from?  They didn’t say.  Perhaps they just “appeared.”  Maybe this study helped the scientists learn some things about evolution: “The research also raises questions about the pattern of evolution after the extinction event.  It remains unclear why groups that were abundant before the event did not recover, while other groups spread and diversified in radical new ways.”  Your tax dollars at work: “Funding for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago Hinds Fund, the Paleontological Society, the Palaeontological Association, the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, and the Evolving Earth Foundation.”
4. The cannibal in the family tree:  National Geographic, always one to overdo the shock and awe (how do they fit so many “Annual Shark Week” events in a year?) decided to introduce the cannibal in our ancestry, Homo gautengensis.  If you hadn’t heard of this particular Uncle Harry, or how they knew someone 800,000 years ago liked the taste of human flesh, the story gets a little sketchy the more you get into the fine print.  First, you find there’s not enough bone to make a valid reconstruction.  There’s not enough bone to know whether it spent time in the trees, to know what it ate, to know whether it talked, or to know how it lived.  Then you find there’s dispute among experts whether it was Homo at all, or rather Australopithecus.  Then you learn that it doesn’t really matter, because it and Australopithecus sediba, another contender for human ancestor, were contemporaries – casting the evolutionary status of both fossils into doubt.  Then you learn that the dating of both of these fossils is also very questionable; no one is certain when they lived.
       Finally, you learn that the author of the paper about this dude isn’t even sure what he is holding in his hand: “It is up to my colleagues to decide whether they are convinced that a new species is warranted and whether they will use [the designation] in their research.”  As for its evolutionary value, he said, “The real significance of the new species is that it shows just how complicated, how bushy, our evolutionary tree was.”  So by this time, the reader can judge the scientific value of the caulk holding together a picture of a tree-swinging human ancestor that scraped the brains out of other Homo things for food, as the National Geographic shock-and-awe article opened, into the grand scheme of human evolution.  Let’s return to the opening: “There’s a good chance it was a tiny little cannibalistic tree swinger, but the newly identified Homo gautengensis is family, according to a new study.  Thought to have used tools—and possibly fire—the creature is the oldest named species in the human genus, Homo, study author Darren Curnoe says.”  Wanna bet on it?

Do you see how we’ve been scammed?  This isn’t science.  This is a racket.  This is the biggest con job ever pulled off in the name of science.  You should see the phylogenetic tree in the squid paper.  It’s all dots, with a few tiny dashes representing actual data.  The dots are imagination!  The chart tries to connect Kimberella, one of the Ediacaran creatures that went extinct, with Nectocaris, and those with squids!  Kimberella looks nothing like Nectocaris.  It’s all a convoluted story, because Darwin needs connections between things to form a continuous lineage.  What if they (in actual fact) had nothing to do with each other?  His disciples are playing dot-to-dot games with dots that are far apart and not obviously connected.  The connections are in their minds, not in the data.  Ditto for the dots in the horned dinosaur chart – it’s mostly dots, not dashes, and the dashes are almost all in contemporary groupings.  If anything, the dots, representing ancestral links, are getting farther and farther apart.  They exist only in the imagination of Darwinists.
    The Burgess Shale is an ecological zone of extinct creatures found in the Canadian Rockies, not an evolutionary time period.  The data exist in the present, not in the past (pause and think about that).  The Burgess Shale fossils were forced into an evolutionary story by evolutionary-minded human beings.  What the Darwinists should be reading from the fossil record, as the film Darwin’s Dilemma so powerfully shows, is the abrupt appearance of all the animal phyla without evolutionary precursors.  In spite of this strong evidence, the Darwinian story is like a big stage show, with painted sets, fogma machines (05/14/2007) and special effects that trained stage hands operate on cue.  Scientists are the actors.  They speak their memorized lines with gusto.  Data are the props that give the audience the illusion of reality, just like props on a stage.  And just like theater, it’s all about a story, not reality.  If you want entertainment, you can stay and watch the Darwin Theater of the Absurd, and laugh at how their miracles emerge on cue thanks to the rigging and special effects and industrial light and magic.  But if you want reality, you have to step outside,* where design is clearly seen, such that men are without excuse. 
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Biology • Dinosaurs • Early Man • Darwin and Evolution
*Be sure to step all the way outside.  The Darwin Imagineers have built a whole amusement park around their theater – Fantasyland (02/22/2008, 06/09/2003, 12/05/2008, 10/08/2008, etc.), featuring Tinker Bell flitting about Charlie’s Magic Kingdom, zapping animals at random with her mutation wand, and Goofy, trying to turn mistakes into innovations, a-hyulk!  Remember, they’re only actors being paid to make it look like wishing upon a star makes your dreams come true.  They bleed when they’re cut, like other mortals— but they also have intelligently designed blood clotting mechanisms at the rescue.  And they go to the hospital outside Fantasyland, where altruistic people with real souls give them love and care.

Darwin in Space without a Helmet     05/26/2010    
May 26, 2010 — “Space agencies may one day have Charles Darwin to thank for the longevity of their spacecraft,” began an article in New Scientist.  This seems a strange thing to write about a biologist who knew nothing of space travel.  “The life expectancy of a popular type of ion engine has been almost doubled using software that mimics the way natural selection evolves ever fitter designs.”  This seems a strange thing to write about a biologist who knew nothing of software, engines or ions.
    Cody Farnell, a space flight engineer at Colorado State University, was inspired by the father of evolutionary theory to design “evolution-mimicking software” called a genetic algorithm (GA), the article explained.  It randomly varied the grid geometry and the voltages applied to it for a new ion-drive spacecraft engine design.  Farnell considered these values as roughly analogous to genes in biology.  “If the performance was promising, the ‘genetic material’ was subjected to further random changes, or mutation, and this process was repeated until no more improvements were forthcoming,’ the article said – survival of the fittest.
    Farnell did not say if his engine had to fight with other engines for mates, or whether females of the species had to lay eggs or raise their young.  It’s also not clear whether the engines would be able to fend for themselves in the wild without Farnell’s intelligently guiding hands.

Darwin needs the oxygen of intelligent design to breathe, just like other mortals.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Dumb Ideas

When Judge Jones issued his ruling, he declared that ID is not science because it invokes supernatural causation and because it “employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s”.  A contrived dualism is a false dichotomy – if evolution is wrong then ID must be right – and it highlights ID’s lack of explanatory power.  ID is nothing more than an attack on evolution; in and of itself it is nothing more than a belief in God.  To see what I mean, try this experiment if you ever find yourself talking to a proponent of ID.  Say, “OK, for the sake of argument let’s say evolution is wrong and let’s forget about it.  Now tell me how intelligent design works.”  Having tried this a few times myself, I am confident that you will be met with nothing but an awkward silence.

The idea that science can’t tell us anything about the objective world just because it is a human activity fraught with human flaws and biases is easily refuted the minute that planes fly or atomic bombs explode.  Scientists, meanwhile, do us a disservice when they promote scientism – the idea that science can answer every meaningful question we might ask about the world.
    Between postmodernism and scientism lies a middle way by which objective knowledge of the world can emerge.  We ought to think about science as a Bayesian algorithm, Pigliucci argues, echoing the sentiment of many contemporary philosophers of science.  Bayesian algorithms calculate probabilities of future events or observations based on prior knowledge.  As we gain new knowledge, we feed that back into the equation, “updating our priors” and leading to increasingly accurate predictions.  In this way, little by little, science nudges us closer to understanding the way the world really is.

There are many names, issues and fallacies in these articles, too many to discuss in detail, but hopefully you latched onto some of them already.
    To whet your appetite, let’s return to a rhetorical projection theme we’ve used before (02/01/2007 commentary) that is not that unbelievable historically.  The Darwinians are usurpers, who have overtaken the castle of science and driven the rightful owners out.  They have taken over walls and monuments they did not build, leaving the founders and builders camped outside.  The Darwin Party also took ownership of the army and propaganda machinery.  Every time the rightful owners demand entry, the usurpers lob stinkbombs over the walls and laugh.  Meanwhile, the Darwin Party propaganda machine keeps the peasants inside persuaded that they are the true owners.  They set up a Sacred Tree in the temple shrine dedicated to King Charles, whom they parade regularly in his New Clothes at regular intervals with pomp and bombast.  Anyone who steps out of line is quickly expelled and sent outside the walls.  To maintain the illusion of scientific fairness, occasional parleys with the enemy are arranged, but these are carefully controlled such that the enemy is never given any real power or opportunity for rebuttal in the Party-controlled media, which carefully filter what the peasants are allowed to hear.  But lately, the peasants have been seeing increasing anxiety on the part of their handlers.  Whispers are going around that the New Clothes are not what they seem; messages from outside the wall are getting through that maybe they can trust their eyes after all.
    Simplistic?  Perhaps.  New Scientist has offered more nuanced material than this, but it is still very one-sided and filtered.  Here’s Shermer: “We KNOW that evolution is a fact fact fact and the creationists are a bunch of narrow-minded, bigoted pseudoscientific simpletons who won’t go away no matter how much I wish they would, but for a moment, I’ll grant the slightest, remote possibility that they might have a grain of truth in some of the things they are saying, and if we stomp on them too hard, and they win the masses and turn on us, they might take revenge, which could hurt my retirement, so we’d better play nice and endure them and just try to listen to them and convince them, because the TRUTH is our only weapon.”  Isn’t he just charming.  Dr. Shermer, you loving little skeptic, you, tell us: where did truth come from?  Did it evolve?  If truth evolves, is it really the truth?  Where did the Golden Rule come from?  Did you find it in Origin of Species?  If a rule evolves, is it really a rule?  If a different rule can take its place tomorrow, was it ever golden?  Suppose we do become the majority someday, and decide your kind are a danger to society, and should all be locked up.  Explain on what moral grounds you should stop us other than survival of the fittest.
    Here’s Amanda Gefter, a materialist charismatic (04/11/2009): “Philosophy of science is wonderful – as long as I get to pick the philosophers that allow me to punch a creationist.  Finding demarcation criteria between science and pseudoscience is hard – but Pigliucci is such a genius, he made it easy.  He’s almost as great a philosopher of science as Judge John E. Jones.  I never realized how easy it is.  Give me a bag and let me write ‘explanatory framework’ on it, and give me another bag and let me write ‘Empty’ on it, and I get to decide which systems to put in one bag or the other.  I don’t like intelligent design’s explanatory filter, so I’m going to put it into the Empty bag.  I don’t like having to explain how chance works in Darwinism, so I’m going to dodge that and ask an I.D. person how God works.  I don’t like having to explain Darwinist miracles of emergence, so I’m going to tease I.D. people by forcing them to tell how intelligent agents work.  Of course, I don’t ask that of SETI people, so we’ll put them in the halfway house and call them ‘almost scientists’.  But I digress.  Back to our mission: let’s all follow the Yellow Bayes Road and we will someday reach the Wizard of Understanding!”  Isn’t she just charming, Pigliucci tales and all.  Thank goodness Fitzpatrick was there to bring us back to Kansas (12/05/2008).
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology • Media

The book of Genesis says people lived for hundreds of years before and after the Flood.  Methuselah lived for 969 years.  People bore children well into centuries.  There is nothing theoretically impossible about it, if physiological repair mechanisms were working properly.  After the Flood, longevity began plummeting substantially, but even at the time of the patriarchs it was common to be healthy to the age of 150 years.  Factors such as UV radiation from a changing atmosphere, new virulent diseases, or mutational load from a genetic bottleneck on the Ark, could have been responsible.
    Since sin entered the world, God has put a time limit on each individual’s sojourn on this planet; “It is appointed unto man once to die, and after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).  Thank goodness evildoers no longer have centuries to work their wickedness.  These days, politicians would certainly have to reconsider Social Security laws if we had Methuselahs retiring at 65.  It’s interesting to consider, though, that there are no inevitabilities to aging as we know it.  Through molecular biology and genetics we can discover the cellular mechanisms responsible for the aging process and perhaps adjust some of them to extend the quality of life of our senior years before the cosmic ray with your name on it hits you.  Death can be delayed but not denied.  Even Methuselah probably thought it came too soon.  But now that the Lord Jesus Christ has taken our judgment for us, death can be the doorway to eternal life with our Maker, by faith (Hebrews 10-13).  “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” ().  Will you be at your welcome home party?
Next headline on:  Health • Human Body • Bible and Theology

It matches in weight with a rubber band.  Now try keeping the weight constant while providing constant flapping power from an energy source, and providing the ability to extract energy from the environment, remote sensing with compound eyes and elaborate coded olfactory senses, rapid-firing muscles, photonic crystals, articulating limbs, and the ability to reproduce with four-stage metamorphosis via a complex genetic coded transcription and translation system using thousands of molecular machines.  That will be the day Harvard can brag a little.  “Just like the real thing” the photo caption says next to a photo of a tiger swallowtail.  They’ve got to be kidding.  It’s nothing more than a cheap dime-store toy painted like a butterfly on the outside.  We’ll give them partial credit for learning something about wing veins having a purpose, and for avoiding mention of evolution.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design

Venter Group Plagiarizes Genetic Code     05/22/2010    
May 22, 2010 — Is plagiarism a form of intelligent design?  We think of intelligent design in terms of God and creation, but in generic terms, I.D. only refers to purposeful, designed action by an agent – any agent, large or small, good or evil.  A planned murder, for instance, can be an evil form of intelligent design.  A forensic team can use design detection techniques to ferret out the evidence between death by murder over death by natural causes.  In the same way, an attorney general can determine, using design detection techniques, whether an ad campaign broke copyright laws, and a professor can discern whether a student borrowed someone else’s material to write a term paper.  The news is filled with dramatic announcements that Craig Venter’s lab has created an organism with the first “synthetic genome.”  How should this achievement, dramatic and groundbreaking though it is, be understood?
    Live Science headlined the story, “First Live Organism with Synthetic Genome Created.”  The word “created” was emphatic in the article; “the J. Craig Venter Institute says they have succeeded in creating the first living organism with a completely synthetic genome.”  It almost sounds like the lab created something entirely new from scratch – “artificial life.”  New Scientist even used religious overtones, dubbing it an “Immaculate Creation.”  A closer look, though, shows that the “synthetic genome” still used the 4-letter code of a living bacterium, and used its own transcription and translation machinery.  It would be a little like a programmer inserting a USB drive with a program into an existing computer; the computer has to have the operating system and software to recognize the code.  This is a far cry from making a computer with its own code and operating system, like the terms “artificial life” and “completely synthetic genome” imply.  Science Daily’s headline was a little more accurate, saying, “Scientists ‘Boot Up’ a Bacterial Cell With a Synthetic Genome,” but even then, Venter’s team relied on an operating system and coding system that was already defined.
    The Venter Institute found out some things about genomes by experience.  Notably, they are not very forgiving.  “Even a tiny inaccuracy could prevent the inert DNA from activating into a live bacterium, making accuracy paramount,” the Live Science article recounted.  “At one point, a single base pair mistake set the entire program back three months.”  The team also added panic code that would kill the organism if it left the lab, and took part in a bioethical review before the project.  “It’s part of an ongoing process that we’ve been driving, trying to make sure that the science proceeds in an ethical fashion, that we’re being thoughtful about what we do and looking forward to the implications to the future,” Venter said.
    Unlike surreptitious plagiarizers, the Venter Institute proudly planted watermarks in their genome.  “The researchers deliberately inserted four sequences of DNA that serve as watermarks so they could distinguish between the naturally occurring and synthetic bacteria,”  Live Science reported.  “The watermarks contain a code that translates DNA into English letters with punctuation, allowing the scientists to literally write messages with the genes.”  So what did they write?  The 46 researchers included their names, and the names of some famous scientists, “and a URL that anyone who deciphers the code can e-mail.”

Geneticists keep walking right into the I.D. trap.  Why don’t they acknowledge it?  If an alien civilization discovered Venter’s genome, and read the names, would they be justified in making an inference to design?  Of course.  Then why would they be forced, according to the rules of the NCSE and the Darwin Party, to say that the explanation for the genetic code itself is blind chance and necessity?  A message is a message.  A function is a function.  If the function of a URL is to allow a human to send an email, and the function of a signal transduction system is to send a hormone to a chromosome to stop or start transcription of a gene, what’s the difference?  These are both examples of messages that carry out functions.  Are we to assume that Venter’s lab found it worthwhile to plagiarize chaos?  That would be like a professor giving a student an F for turning in a term paper that plagiarized gibberish.
    Another lesson from this story is to avoid news media hype.  This is an incremental step, not a breakthrough.  Geneticists have been doing genetic engineering for years, including genetic watermarking.  Scientists have inserted genes for insulin in bacteria, and genes for spider silk in goats.  Venter’s lab has taken existing genes from bacteria and performed some reverse engineering on it, then inserted it back into the hardware of a living cell.  Any way you look at it, it’s intelligent design.  Venter, your work owes nothing to the Darwin Party and its ideology.  Get on board with the I.D. Movement and give credit where credit is due.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Politics and Ethics

Should Darwin Get a Pass in Science Class?     05/21/2010    
May 21, 2010 — In many public school science classrooms today, Darwinism is taught uncritically as a scientific fact.  Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) defends that practice, and Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute (DI) contests it.  This month the two in their own venues argued their points of view, and another educator weighed in on a larger issue about science education.
    In Nature,¹ Scott wrote a book review of How Science Works: Evolution. A Student Primer by R. John Ellis (Springer, 2010).  The phrase “How science works” is often one of her own catch-phrases, so it would seem she would warm up to this pro-Darwin book, but she had some criticisms.  “The public misunderstands and mistrusts the scientific explanation of evolution more than any other branch of research, particularly in the United States,” she began.  She thought Ellis did a pretty good job explaining how science works: “Students learn about testing multiple hypotheses, reliance on natural causes, the open-endedness of science, its lack of dogmatism and the function of peer review and replicating results.”  But she got a little nervous when he went overboard on his naturalism: “

He contrasts naturalism – the ideology that only the physical universe exists, operating “according to inbuilt, unvarying regularities” – with supernaturalism, the view that non-physical “active agents” interact with the physical world.  Religion, “the belief in some superhuman controlling power or powers”, is a subset of the latter, he writes.  Ellis distinguishes between the methodological and philosophical aspects of naturalism, but regularly conflates it with science, which is not an ideology.

1. The inquiry method of teaching science stresses process over content.
2. There are no legal obstacles to teaching scientific critiques of prevailing theories.
3. There is ample evidence of controversy in evolutionary literature.

Argument and debate are common in science, yet they are virtually absent from science education.  Recent research shows, however, that opportunities for students to engage in collaborative discourse and argumentation offer a means of enhancing student conceptual understanding and students’ skills and capabilities with scientific reasoning.  As one of the hallmarks of the scientist is critical, rational skepticism, the lack of opportunities to develop the ability to reason and argue scientifically would appear to be a significant weakness in contemporary educational practice.  In short, knowing what is wrong matters as much as knowing what is right.  This paper presents a summary of the main features of this body of research and discusses its implications for the teaching and learning of science.

The study of reasoning also offers an opportunity to explore the types of arguments used in science, which may be abductive (inferences to the best possible explanation), such as Darwin’s arguments for the theory of evolution; hypothetico-deductive, such as Pasteur’s predictions about the outcome of the first test of his anthrax vaccine; or simply inductive generalizations archetypal represented by “laws.”

The problem with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education is that she never received a good science education.  She got a defective education from the triumphalist Julian Huxley era when logical positivism was in swing and Darwinism was presented as a done deal.  That was before Quine and Kuhn and Feyerabend upset all the applecarts; Lakatos, Laudan, van Fraasen and many others undermined everything we thought we understood about “how science works.”  Even Osborne’s short list begs many questions about scientific reasoning – i.e., what is meant by a law of nature?  Scott is living in the 1940s and needs a refresher course in how science works.  She needs to learn about abductive reasoning (used extensively by Stephen Meyer in Signature in the Cell).  She also needs a refresher course in logic so that she does not make self-refuting statements, like stating the ideology that methodological naturalism is not an ideology, or claiming that science cannot refer to the supernatural, but then employing reason to make that claim, when reason is not made of particles or forces, and refers to logical truths that are universal, timeless, necessary and certain.
    Eugenie Scott needs to go take classes in Philosophy of Science and Elementary Logic, particularly in how not to be inconsistent.  Her definition of science includes testing multiple hypotheses, as long as the hypothesis selection process can exclude ones she doesn’t like.  Her science is fine with natural causes, as long as she can dip into the supernatural causes she needs, like logic and reason.  Her science is open-ended, as long as she can close off the ends she doesn’t like.  Her science lacks dogmatism, as long as she can be dogmatic about the parts she wants to be dogmatic about.  Her science is fine with peer review, as long as the pool of peers is protected against the peers she doesn’t like.  Her science is fine with replicating results, as long as she doesn’t have to replicate the parts she can’t, like universal common descent.  Her science believes in following the rules of “how science works,” as long as she and her totalitarian Darwin Party hacks get to make the rules.  Is this the kind of shallow, uninformed, naïve, partisan, illogical thinking that should be representing science education at school boards?  Do a good deed for your country: send the NCSE back to school.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwin and Evolution

Once upon a time, children, Hairy and Skinny were clinging to Mr. Opossum in the mystic forest.  Skinny looked at the fantastic array of dinosaurs, birds, mammals and reptiles around him, and thought, “I’m so plain and skinny.  I really need to reach my potential.  I need to stretch and learn new things.  Someday I’ll become covering for a whale or an elephant.  I’ll be a fat hippopotamus and develop my own sunscreen (05/25/2004).  I’ll cover fantastic creatures large and small.  My sensors will become so fine, they will rapidly move along the strings of musical instruments, and cover the scalps of philosophers!”  Hairy just laughed at all this.  “You dreamers and visionaries,” he said, “you always have your head in the clouds.  Don’t you realize how many mutations you are going to have to suffer through to wait for those things to emerge?”  Skinny sighed, deflated at the prospect.  “You should be like me,” Hairy said.  “I don’t worry.  I do my job so well, I don’t need to evolve!”
    Cut, print, publish.  That’s genius.  That’s the thinking of a real scientist.  Children, aren’t you glad we have scientists to entertain us with stories of how we got here?
Next headline on:  Fossils • Mammals • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

How Science Is Done: Upsetting Applecarts     05/19/2010    
May 19, 2010 — Hardly a week goes by without some scientific finding upsetting an applecart – a long-held belief.  Often, those beliefs are scientific theories taught in textbooks by science professors.  Defenders of science say that this is the way science works.  It’s a self-correcting process, they argue; it’s to be expected that new data will lead to adjustments to theories.  Is that true, or a marketing spin?  How would anyone tell?  Some examples might help.  Here are some recent scientific applecarts that have been upset, according to the news and science journals.

1. Standard candles – Not:  Supernovas are the standard candles astronomers use for measuring vast distances in space.  At first there was one type, then two.  Then astronomers found sub-types within those.  Now, according to Space.com, “Two faint supernovas unlike any star explosions ever seen before may have exploded in the same way, or they may differ, but in either case are breaking down categories that distinguish one type of stellar death from another.”
2. Water from the rock:  Numerous TV documentaries about the history of Planet Earth have shown the oceans coming special delivery from comets.  Now, Science Daily is claiming that a new study using silver isotopes “indicates that water and other key volatiles may have been present in at least some of Earth’s original building blocks, rather than acquired later from comets, as some scientists have suggested.”  But then, that explanation conflicts with dating of Earth’s crust from hafnium and tungsten.  To solve the puzzle, the scientists appealed to a model of planet formation called “heterogeneous accretion,” the article said.  This solution ads whatever hoc is necessary to get the two results together.
3. Insights into speciation, or outsights?  Science Daily reported on work by Jeffrey Feder at U of Notre Dame that contradicts a “prevailing assumption” about speciation.  His work “conflicts with current thinking” and he claims that “past work on the genomics of speciation lacked experimental data” despite being the main subject of Charles Darwin’s book 150 years ago.
4. Back to the Easter Island drawing board:  You know those roads on Easter Island?  They weren’t for transporting the large statues (moai).  They were built for ceremonial purposes, reported PhysOrg.  “The find will create controversy among the many archaeologists who have dedicated years to finding out exactly how the moai were moved, ever since Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl first published his theory in 1958.”  This team accused Heyerdahl of being “so swayed by his cast iron belief that the roads were for transportation – he completely ignored them.”  But then, are we sure about today’s claims?  Dr. Colin Richards said, “The truth of the matter is, we will never know how the statues were moved.”
5. Dinosaur demotion:  A dinosaur got demoted to primitive pre-dinosaur reptile.  According to Science Daily, Azendohsaurus madagaskarensis is not a dinosaur, and never was a dinosaur.  It’s now “a member of Archosauromorpha, a group that includes birds and crocodilians but not lizards, snakes, or turtles.”  They figured this out by analyzing the whole skull, not just the jaws and teeth.
       John J. Flynn, curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, commented on the reclassification and reinterpretation of this specimen.  “This is the way science works,” he said.  But in the next breath, he revealed that the new interpretation drew on a theory-rescuing device called convergent evolution – explaining similar features in unrelated lineages by saying they both hit on the same solution independently.  “As we found and analyzed more material, it made us realize that this was a much more primitive animal and the dinosaur-like features were really the product of convergent evolution,” he said.  As if to take the edge off that line, his colleague Andre Wyss added a cheerful note: “In many ways Azendohsaurus ends up being a much more fantastic animal than if it simply represented a generic early dinosaur.”
       Behind him, though, was a can of worms the reclassification opened.  Archosaurs were thought to be primarily carnivorous before now.  “Now there are many more cases of herbivorous archosaurs.” Wynn said.  “We are rethinking the evolution of diet and feeding strategies, as well as the broader evolution of the group.”  See also the Science Daily article.
6. Two inflations are better than one:  Inflation theory was invented in the early 1980s to solve some conundrums in cosmology.  Since the idea caught on, it has undergone several transmogrifications.  Now, there is apparently a need for a “second inflation” reported Rachel Courtland in New Scientist.  Some scientists at the University of Heidelberg have brought in a “little inflation” to cover up additional conundrums caused by the first inflation.  The idea has the sound of epic myth, or at least of a whoosh of hand-waving.  Last sentence: “It just shows that the story might not be as simple as we think.”
7. Google lab:  Citizen scientists can perform their own experiment by doing a search on science news sites for the phrases, “than thought” and “than previously thought”.  For instance, PhysOrg reported this week that scientists now believe “The Earth’s mantle flows far more rapidly around a sinking tectonic plate than previously thought, according to new computer modeling by UC Davis geologists.”  (Ditto on Live Science.)  A quick search on the CEH search bar turned up 130 hits on these phrases used over the years.  Variations of the phrase can add to the collection, like this one on Science Daily about genetic secrets that are coming to light and changing views about “genomic dark matter” that “were once thought of as nothing more than ’junk DNA.’”  The phrases suggest the sound of applecarts turning over.

In the early days of the scientific revolution, science was not a profession – it was an avocation.  Many early scientists earned degrees, and some taught in universities, but many did their experimental work as a hobby because they loved nature, they loved truth, and wanted to figure things out (browse our online biographies and see).  Undoubtedly many in the scientific community maintain that idealism, but there are good reasons to doubt it is universal.  The professionalization and institutionalization of science has led to some distasteful consequences: tenure, political groveling for funding, good-old-boys clubs, networking, going along to get along, and more (see lists in the 05/13/2010 and 04/02/2010 commentaries).  What motivation do some career scientists have to “get the world right”?  They’ve got tenure; they’ve got a grant; they’ve got grad students they have to keep busy doing something; they have the respect of their peers.  Like Pilate, they can sneer, “What is truth?”.  That’s of little concern in the humdrum of keeping the status quo going, looking busy, dealing with each year’s batch of students, and pumping out an occasional paper with grad students doing the hard work.  They know the news media will pick up whatever they say as the latest manna from heaven, a breakthrough that sheds light on whatever and brings us Understanding.  You might enjoy browsing through PhD Comics for a humorous inside look at academia.  It’s to the idealism of science what Dilbert is to free enterprise.
    Happily, many scientists are noble-minded, motivated, serious-minded people of integrity.  But they are that way in spite of the many distractions that pull them toward mediocrity or business as usual.  Announcing each finding as a revelation that overturns previously-held beliefs plays on the short memories of people.  In the short term, it sounds like scientists are making progress.  It keeps hope alive that science is converging on the truth about the world.  We must not be so naïve as to think that is necessarily true.  Like our commentaries have said, not all motion is progress; sometimes it is just commotion – in this case, turning applecarts upside down, only to turn other ones right-side up, with no net gain in upright carts, but a lot of spilled apples.
    One area where science can contribute to progress is in the collection and refinement of raw data.  Speculation thrives in the absence of data.  Space missions like Cassini, Herschel and MESSENGER, orbiters like Aviris and MLS that refine our measurements of climate, the Human Genome Project and mapping genomes of other organisms, deep sea submarine robot explorations, ever-increasing resolution in microscopy – these at least provide the detail that can constrain speculation.  We sometimes confuse progress in data collection with progress in scientific understanding.  They are not one and the same.  In the recent Titan story (05/16/2010), we saw that Cassini has mapped 22% of Titan’s surface with radar – a fantastic scientific achievement.  It does not necessarily follow that scientists understand how Titan formed or how old it is.  What the data collection does is put some welcome shackles on the imaginations of storytellers.  With fewer applecarts to upset, and more apples in the bag, hopefully there will be less moldy applesauce on the ground.
Next headline on:  Stars and Astronomy • Physics • Solar System • Darwin and Evolution • Fossils • Dinosaurs

1. A mudflow produced a 1/40th scale model of the Grand Canyon in one day.
2. This canyon included a relict river that obviously had not formed the canyon.
3. The canyon included side canyons and other features similar to those of the Grand Canyon.
4. Pyroclastic flows produced laminated sedimentary deposits in hours, not centuries or millennia.
5. The sedimentary deposits showed sudden shifts in bedforms caused by flow rates and source materials, not by long ages.
6. Badlands topography along the Toutle River was formed in days, not thousands of years.
7. Logs uprooted by the blast were being planted in upright positions at the bottom of Spirit Lake, giving the appearance they had grown in that position.  This was reminiscent of the Yellowstone fossil forests.
8. A layer of peat buried in Spirit Lake has the texture and appearance of a coal deposit forming.

The complete silence about Steven Austin’s research at Mt. St. Helens by the secular media is stunning.  Is it because his credentials are lacking?  No; he has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  Is it because his field work was unexceptional?  No; he was the only one to don scuba gear and dive to the bottom of Spirit Lake, and use sonar to map the lake bottom.  Is it because his findings with the canyons and stratification lacked significance?  No; they were revolutionary and explanatorily rich.  They have been well received in creationist audiences around the world, but completely passed over by the secular journals, although Austin has a number of colleagues in the Geological Society of America that have taken interest in his work and spoken well of it.  So much of this phenomenon is political.  If you are an overt creationist, as Austin is, it doesn’t matter how good your credentials and field work are.  You will be shunned by The Guild, but welcomed by millions of people who appreciate honest science that is willing to criticize Darwin and Lyell.
    Your commentator remembers visiting Yellowstone in the 1970s and early 1980s and seeing the interpretive signs at the Lamar River fossil forests.  They spoke of 27 layers of forests that grew on top of one another over at least 20 thousand years.  According to some estimates, it took 50 thousand years, maybe 100 thousand for each layer to develop: a soil to form, small plants to invade, trees to grow, a mature forest to develop, then a volcanic eruption to bury the forest and the cycle to repeat again.  Large sequoia stumps are visible in some of the layers.  The standard scientific interpretation was that here was clear evidence of a long passage of a time--much longer than the book of Genesis could allow.  You recall that it was this evidence that caused young Ronald Numbers in college to stumble and lose his creationist beliefs (01/12/2007).  Theistic evolutionists also used the Yellowstone fossil forests to mock the young-earth creationists and insist there was no way to fit earth history into a six-day creation.  Look: the evidence was right there – tens of thousands of years to form those 27 layers of forests.
    Your commentator also remembers re-visiting Yellowstone in 1994 and finding those interpretive signs gone.  Puzzled, he asked three different park rangers about them.  “Oh, we don’t believe that any more,” was the typical response.  “Ever since Mt. St. Helens, we”ve come to believe that lava flows rafted the trees in from some distance away.”  Then, your commentator picked up a book in the visitor center, Roadside Geology of the Yellowstone Country by William J. Fritz (Mountain Press, 1985).  Sure enough, he said the same thing:

When I visited the Mount St. Helens area shortly after the eruption, it was just like Yellowstone!  I found many horizontal logs all lined up by the streams and mudflows and some upright stumps that had been moved by the flows propped upon the stubs of their roots.  I found that about 10 percent of the transported trees remain as upright stumps, the rest as horizontal logs.  The mudflows also buried many standing trees where they grew along the edges of stream channels.  Thus, in Yellowstone when you find concentrations of over 10 percent upright stumps, some were preserved where they grew alongside stream channels.  A few million years from now when the Mount St. Helens sediments have hardened into rock and the trees have petrified they will be almost like those in the Yellowstone Country.  Both the mudflows and the appearance of the trees is identical.

Aside from the fact that Dr. Fritz just made some reckless drafts on the bank of time, and that petrification does not require millions of years (01/24/2005), he recognized that a paradigm shift occurred – the Yellowstone fossil forests did not require successive ages.  A catastrophic event is a better explanation.  Now we have eyewitness observations to show how.  You can hike the trails up into the Lamar forests and find both upright and horizontal logs that are analogous to what were seen at Mt. St. Helens.  The stumps have their roots sheared off, and no evidence that they grew in soils.  A good analysis of the evidence can be found in geologist Harold Coffin’s book Origin by Design (Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1983), ch. 11.  The theistic evolutionists were wrong; you can fit the evidence at Yellowstone in to a lot less time than the secular geologists claimed.  Does it prove a Biblical time frame?  No, but it doesn’t rule it out, either.  Ron Numbers lost his faith over bad science, and 30 years after Mt. St. Helens, the secular geological community have turned a blind eye to some of the most exciting lessons from the famous eruption.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

This is just another in a long-running series about spider silk.  It highlights a common theme: the wonders of nature – things all around us – are more amazing than we imagine.  Understanding their design (not their presumed evolution, a useless distraction*) is the key to scientific advancement and progress – measured in ways that can enrich our lives.
*Only one of the papers in Nature even mentioned evolution – and that was to say, “The overall dimeric structure and observed charge distribution of NT is expected to be conserved through spider evolution and in all types of spidroins.”  Conserved means un-evolved.  The paper had a lot to say about structure and function, though.  Evolutionary theory contributed absolutely nothing to the research.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Titan Continues to Surprise Saturn Scientists     05/16/2010    
May 16, 2010 — Since reaching Saturn in 2004, the Cassini spacecraft has now made 68 flybys of Titan, the large smog-shrouded moon.  Space.com highlighted a recent picture showing the rings appearing to bisect the moon.  What are some of the latest findings of this alien world – the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere?
    Space.com reported on work by scientists at the University of Louisiana to determine whether there is lightning in Titan’s atmosphere.  Evidence was tantalizing but not certain from the Huygens probe in 2005.  “So far, the only world where lightning is 100 percent confirmed is Earth,” said Andi Petculescu, professor of physics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
    Now that 22 percent of Titan’s surface has been mapped in radar, scientists at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Tucson in Arizona are trying to get a handle on Titan’s crater count, reported PhysOrg and Space.com.  So far they have only identified 5 certain impact craters, and 44 probable candidate craters.  That is surprising for such a large world.  By end of mission (2017) scientists should have 50% of the surface mapped in radar.
    Another story on Space.com reported that the interior of Titan appears to be slushy inside.  Scientists infer from gravitational tugs on the spacecraft that Titan lacks a hard core.  Inferring the nature of the interior required measuring changes in spacecraft speed on the order of five thousandths of a millimeter per second, the article said.  Assuming the interior is as they believe, they think Titan must have built up “rather slowly for a moon, in perhaps around a million years or so, back soon after the formation of the solar system.”  National Geographic also reported this story in March and printed a larger picture of the cutaway artwork of Titan’s interior.  The finding was “really quite a surprise” according to one team member because it suggests that Titan had a very different history than Ganymede, a similar-size moon of Jupiter.
    Some Utah scientists found similarities to their home state in Titan’s landscape.  PhysOrg said last March that Cassini scientists found karst-like landscape in the radar images that “suggests there is a lot happening right now under the surface that we can’t see.”  Liquid methane may take the place of water flowing under the surface.  The article includes a short video flyover of some of Titan’s “canyon country” compared with similar terrain in Utah.
    One of the most unusual findings announced recently is that Titan’s river channels may be studded with gems.  JPL’s Cassini page announced a rock-n-roll feature this month: Titan may act as a “gem tumbler”  Large ice boulders like the ones seen by the Huygens Probe may tumble down channels of liquid methane for hundreds of miles.  Like pebbles on earth, which get rounded by the friction of a streambed, these ice boulders may end up as sparkling spheres of ice 1 to 8 inches in diameter.  “The effect would be similar to bejeweling an area with light-catching rhinestones.”  This may be the explanation for the brightness of the land of Xanadu on Titan – a mysterious region brighter than the rest of the moon.
    Each month a Cassini scientist makes a detailed presentation on some aspect of the science returns of the mission in a series called CHARM: “Cassini-Huygens Analysis and Results of the Mission.”  The April presentation by Christophe Sotin, Titan: the Moon that Would Be a Planet (PDF) included comparisons of Titan to Earth and Mars.  Sotin reiterated the problem of maintaining Titan’s atmosphere for billions of years.  Slide 9 says, “Without the greenhouse effect caused by methane, the surface temperature would be around 70 K.”  Slide 13 states that the methane irreversibly transforms into ethane.  “If there is no replenishment (from the interior or from meteorites), the methane would disappear, the greenhouse effect would vanish, the surface temperature would drop, and nitrogen would freeze,” Sotin said.  “All this would happen in less than 100 Myrs (likely 30 Myrs).”  What is the source of the methane?  Can it be replenished from the interior?  Slide 25 says that “No convincing evidence of active cryo-volcanoes has been found so far.”  It also notes, “The number of impact craters is small.  It suggests that Titan’s surface is young.”  Young could mean anything from 100 Myr to 3 billion years, he quickly stated, but even the upper estimate falls far short of the estimated time of Titan’s formation according to standard theory.  His last slide said the “Carbon cycle implies replenishment in methane,” but then said there’s no evidence for it: “Still lacking convincing evidence for cryovolcanic features.”
    It’s hard to find a news article on Titan without mention of life.  There is no life there, of course, but scientists often presume that the presence of carbon building blocks says something about the possibility of life emerging, even though the temperature is 290 degrees below zero, and there is no liquid water – usually considered a prerequisite.  This time there was some variety.  In the lightning article on Space.com Petculescu said, “Since Titan’s environment is not unlike that of pre-biotic Earth, further studies of lightning can shed light on life emergence not only on early Earth but also, possibly, on Titan itself.”  PhysOrg subtitled its article on crater counts with this line: “Impact craters found on Titan could help scientists determine the age of this Earth-like moon and its potential for life.”  But in the body of the story, it said, “But it’s no secret that Saturn’s largest moon is a very unfriendly place for life” primarily because of its temperature, which makes liquid water impossible.  The article later quoted the opinion of Charles Wood at LPL who said, “If it were warmer, you’d definitely think life existed there.”  Even without life on Titan, “Understanding the chemical processes on Titan may help scientists understand how life began on Earth billions of years ago,” the article said, even though the evidence so far is inconclusive about the geological prospects for life.
    William Bains of the Royal Astronomical Society didn’t need evidence to tell UK astronomers what he thinks of life on Titan.  It stinks.  Science Daily shared his opinions: “Hollywood would have problems with these aliens,” he said.  “Beam one onto the Starship Enterprise and it would boil and then burst into flames, and the fumes would kill everyone in range.  Even a tiny whiff of its breath would smell unbelievably horrible.  But I think it is all the more interesting for that reason.  Wouldn’t it be sad if the most alien things we found in the galaxy were just like us, but blue and with tails?” 

Yes, it would be sad.  Very sad.  Very sad that scientists get their science from Star Trek and Avatar instead of empirical lab work, like they should.
    The life angle is a distraction.  Nobody really believes there is life on Titan.  The L-word is the sexy girl standing next to the pickup truck that draws the public eye to an otherwise ugly, smoggy thing you would not give a second look.  Titan is fascinating in its own way, from a distance, but you wouldn’t want to live there.  Titan’s environment not unlike that of pre-biotic Earth?  Who are they kidding?  It’s vastly different.  We have water here.
    It’s also illogical to talk about “life emergence” from chemical constituents.  Life is more than its parts.  Why not talk about life on the sun?  After all, the sun has protons and electrons – look: the building blocks of life!  Oh yes, it’s a little hot there, but “understanding the chemical process on” the sun “may help scientists understand how life began on Earth billions of years ago.”  Pick any planet, moon, or location in the universe and you can play their silly game.
    The real story they have not addressed is the age question.  Once again we have seen them admit that Titan’s atmosphere is undergoing irreversible processes.  The methane keeps the nitrogen from freezing, but it is being depleted.  It should have rained down as ethane and formed oceans on the surface, but the surface is largely dry.  Try as they might, they cannot find clear evidence of outgassing to replenish the methane – and where are they going to dispose of the ethane, which should be a half mile thick over the whole moon?  There are also few craters.  None of this says Titan is very, very young, but it sure says Titan is likely not 4.5 billion years old.  If not that old, then many questions spring up, if not a whole new paradigm.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Origin of Life • Dating Methods

If Humans Build DNA Machines, Is It Intelligent Design?     05/15/2010    
May 15, 2010 — Two teams have succeeded in building little robots that work on DNA tracks.  These resemble in many respects the machines that cells use to perform its functions on DNA.  No one denies that humans engineered their nanobots on purpose, but Darwinist scientists claim natural cellular machines evolved without purpose or design.  What’s the difference?
    Nature reported on work by two teams that built such DNA robots.  Lloyd Smith commented on these in the same issue as a kind of science fiction come true.¹  He made it clear that these are information-rich systems:

There are several interesting concepts lurking in these papers. Lund et al. point out that macroscopic robots generally have to store a fair amount of information to provide “internal representations of their goals and environment and to coordinate sensing and any actuating of [their] components”.  Molecular robots, however, have limited ability to store such complex information.  In both devices, the motion of the walkers is thus programmed into the DNA surface, rather than into the walkers themselves.  Similarly, by setting the cargo-donating machines into predetermined loading or non-loading states, Gu et al. also use information stored in the walker’s environment to control the outcome of their system....
    Although both papers integrate DNA walkers with origami landscapes, they differ in one important respect.  Lund and colleagues’ device is autonomous – no external intervention is required for it to execute the program built into the system.  By contrast, Gu and colleagues’ device relies heavily on external interventions, most importantly the addition of new DNA strands to drive the movements of the walkers and the operation of the cargo-carrying DNA machines.  The reward for this lack of autonomy is greater complexity of behaviour: whereas Lund and colleagues’ robot is currently limited to walks along a path, Gu and colleagues’ robot can pick up cargo while walking, and can adopt eight states that correspond to different manufacturing possibilities.  Future work will seek to maintain autonomy while ramping up the attainable complexity of behaviour programmed into molecular systems.
    Although we remain far away from the possibilities imagined for nanotechnology by science fiction, it is inspiring nonetheless to see such creativity and rapid progress in the development of autonomous molecular systems that can execute complex actions.  This is undoubtedly a field to watch.

So if we do it, it’s intelligent design, but if nature does it, it’s blind evolution?  You realize, of course, that the natural machines in cells are far ahead of us: they are not only autonomous, but attain very complex behaviors that are programmed into their molecular systems.  Not only that, they belong to complexes of molecular machines, which belong to networks of signal processing systems, that boggle the mind – and they belong to entire systems that have a coded library, and can reproduce all their parts!  Why should not scientists find it “inspiring to see such creativity” of “autonomous molecular systems that can execute complex actions” and ascribe it to design?  Molecular biology should be filled with God-fearing, worshiping, praise-singing scientists shouting Hallelujah!  What we get instead are man-fearing, fault-finding, hate-mongering ingrates shouting Pal-Ayala (next entry).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design

1. John Avise in PNAS¹ wrote a paper labeling ID as “religious creationism” but then used religious arguments in a science journal to attack it: i.e., “God wouldn’t make the world this way” –

   Intelligent design (ID)—the latest incarnation of religious creationism—posits that complex biological features did not accrue gradually via natural evolutionary forces but, instead, were crafted ex nihilo by a cognitive agent.  Yet, many complex biological traits are gratuitously complicated, function poorly, and debilitate their bearers.  Furthermore, such dysfunctional traits abound not only in the phenotypes but inside the genomes of eukaryotic species.  Here, I highlight several outlandish features of the human genome that defy notions of ID by a caring cognitive agent.  These range from de novo mutational glitches that collectively kill or maim countless individuals (including embryos and fetuses) to pervasive architectural flaws (including pseudogenes, parasitic mobile elements, and needlessly baroque regulatory pathways) that are endogenous in every human genome.  Gross imperfection at the molecular level presents a conundrum for the traditional paradigms of natural theology as well as for recent assertions of ID, but it is consistent with the notion of nonsentient contrivance by evolutionary forces.  In this important philosophical sense, the science of evolutionary genetics should rightly be viewed as an ally (not an adversary) of mainstream religions because it helps the latter to escape the profound theological enigmas posed by notions of ID.

   This paper was part of a lengthy series called the Sackler Colloquium, “In the Light of Evolution IV,” that was completely one-sided for Darwinism.  Not a single pro-ID position was invited, even though there is a long tradition of theological, philosophical and scientific positions answering the types of arguments Avise presented.  David Tyler presented a rebuttal to Avise’s position on the ID blog Access Research Network.
2. Michael Zimmerman leapt for joy at Avise’s paper in the Huffington Post, saying, “In case you had any doubt, the last nail was just placed in the coffin of intelligent design (ID).  And, in case you had any doubt, that last nail joins many others that have been in place for quite some time.”  His article was entitled, “Intelligent Design: Scientifically and Religiously Bankrupt.”  Zimmerman is the activist behind the Clergy Letter Project, trying to get religious leaders to sign a statement in support of Darwinian evolution.  Robert Crowther compared his arguments to the Hindenberg on Evolution News & Views.
3. Michael Ruse called ID an “oxymoron” and a “mountain of waffle resting on analogy” in The Guardian.  “Neither scientists nor believers should touch it,” he said.  Responding to Steve Fuller in The Guardian (a philosopher who has given ID a fair shake; see Uncommon Descent), Ruse called ID “very bad theology.”  Jay Richards wondered on Evolution News & Views why Ruse, a science philosopher and historian, thinks he is an expert on theology.  Casey Luskin also responded on Evolution News & Views, joking, “I love watching atheists try to tell religious people what they should believe about God.”
4. Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) wrote for Science Blogs that ID and creationism is kind of like – believe it or not – postmodernism and Marxism.  This is a strange charge, considering that most proponents of ID or creationism would be adamantly opposed to both of those ideologies.  Robert Crowther on Evolution News & Views tried to straighten the picture right side up again.
5. Francisco Ayala is a former Dominican priest turned evolutionary biologist.  One might think a person with religious roots would have a soft spot in his heart for thoughts of design in the world, but Ayala has been among the most harsh in his rhetoric against ID, calling ID an “atrocity” that is “disastrous to religion” among other things.  He even accused supporters of ID in the Discovery Institute of not really believing what they are saying.  He made these remarks recently in Spain (see Uncommon Descent for translation).  This set off a series of responses by ID supporters (see idnet.com.au response on Uncommon Descent and Barry Arrington on Uncommon Descent).
       Back in March, Ayala wrote a book review critical of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell for BioLogos, the website of theistic evolutionist Francis Collins.  Ayala used the argument for dysteleology and suffering to call ID a form of “blasphemy” for attributing the human genome to the design of God.  David Klinghoffer complained on Evolution News & Views that Ayala apparently didn’t even bother to read Meyer’s book.  Klinghoffer later in March took Ayala again to task on ENV, and with him, Darrell Falk for allowing a slipshod review by a staunch evolutionist on the BioLogos website.
       Meanwhile, Francisco Ayala was welcomed by the National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Colloquium, “In the Light of Evolution IV,” to present his opinions on the evolution of morality by Darwinian natural selection.  In his paper in PNAS,² Ayala’s first sentence paid homage to Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871).  After dismissing theological explanations for morality, including those of Aquinas and Paley, he gave Darwin the pride of place.  He explained morality in purely mechanistic terms: as an “exaptation,” or unplanned consequence of natural selection for intelligence, that turned out to be advantageous.  In other words, morality is an impersonal, unplanned accident.  He gave the same explanation for human rationality.  It appears that Ayala repudiates any role for divine involvement for any of the unique features of the human psyche in any way, shape, or form; yet this is the man that BioLogos welcomed as a “a moderating influence in the science/religion dialog.”  Ayala also received this year’s Templeton Prize for progress in “affirming life’s spiritual dimension” – an honor once awarded to Billy Graham, Alexander Solzhenitzen, Chuck Colson, Bill Bright and Mother Theresa (see comment on CMI).

No comments are really necessary here; the articles speak for themselves.  If anyone thinks this situation is fair, or desirable in scientific or intellectual circles, or represents the way an enlightened free marketplace of ideas is supposed to operate, that person needs a serious deprogramming session.  This is Malice in Blunderland, where up is down, in is out, the mobsters are running the city, and the inmates are running the asylum.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwin and Evolution • Media

Should Scientists Take Sides as Political Activists?     05/13/2010    
May 13, 2010 — “Scientists’ turn to win votes” announced a Nature editorial today.  The science journal argued it’s no time to bemoan the loss of “science-savvy politicians,” but rather time to “make new friends” in the political arena.  “Other scientific societies should rally their memberships to get the word out to new parliamentarians about the value of science.”  Nature was not cryptic about which side it is on.  It mentioned a Liberal party member as “the most articulate voice during the election for science and its importance in policy-making,” but repeatedly chided members of the Conservative party: “Since the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher imposed savage cuts to research in the 1980s, most academic scientists have shied away from the Conservative Party,” the article said, only to follow it up with this patronizing statement: “Unlike Thatcher’s party, the Conservatives of today have made supportive noises about science – even if most members lack a strong understanding of scientific issues.”
    That editorial was primarily about UK politics.  The next editorial, however, dabbled in the American political scene.  “The University of Virginia should fight a witch-hunt by the state’s attorney general,” demanded the editors of Nature.  They are upset that Kenneth Cuccinelli, a “firebrand conservative” elected attorney general of Virginia, is investigating grant money going to Michael Mann, whose “hockey-stick” graph was the centerpiece of the Climategate controversy last year.  The journal’s editors are demanding that the university fight a subpoena issued by the attorney general on the grounds of “academic freedom” – without stopping to ask if academic freedom means use of tax dollars without accountability.  Regardless, the editors thought they would paint the attorney general in the worst possible light by associating him with people whom they assumed their readers would regard as distasteful: “Certainly Cuccinelli has lost no time in burnishing his credentials with far-right ‘Tea Party’ activists, many of whom hail him as a hero.”
    In New Scientist, Michael Brooks argued that it is “time for scientists to go into politics.”  He is running for election in the UK in the Science Party, a political party he founded last month “to highlight the importance of science to the UK economy and science’s lack of representation in Parliament.”  The Science Party wants members of Parliament “to understand scientific issues such as climate change, genetic engineering, finding ways to meet our energy needs and improve our nation’s health,” according to their website.  “We also believe that the UK cannot afford to cut funding for scientific research.”
    Brooks takes issue with Martin Rees (05/02/2010), head of the Royal Society, who believes the role of science is merely to advise and inform government, not make policy.  Brooks, who is angry that politicians often ditch scientific advice when they feel it is inconvenient, feels government needs to feel the authority of science.  This includes issues such as climate change, he pointed out.  “Sometimes scientists have to be willing to stand up to those who would seek to subjugate or sideline science,” he said.  “Often the only people well enough informed to understand the consequences of not taking scientific advice seriously are the scientists themselves.”
    Speaking of climate change, a huge number of climate scientists wrote a letter to the editor of Science last week, disturbed about the bad rap they have gotten in the media since the Climategate scandal.  Rather than express any remorse, however, they stood their ground that global warming is a fact requiring humans to take political action to avert catastrophe.  They compared it to other scientific “facts” including Darwinian evolution:

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling.  Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them.  This process is inherently adversarial—scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation.  That’s what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did.  But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of “well-established theories” and are often spoken of as “facts.”
    For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution).  Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong.  Climate change now falls into this category: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

In earlier times, it was enough to build trust within a researcher’s community of scientific peers.  Disciplines were small and methodologically coherent.  Research neither drew heavily on public funds nor profoundly affected public decisions.  Today, the circle of stakeholders in science has grown incomparably larger.  Much public money is invested in science and, as science becomes more enmeshed with policy, significant economic and social consequences hang on getting the science right.  Correspondingly, interest in the validity of scientific claims has expanded to substantially wider audiences.  It is not only the technical integrity of science that matters today but also its public accountability.

Standards of individual good behavior are especially difficult to identify and enforce in evolving scientific domains with under-developed histories of accounting to external audiences.  Divergent national traditions of openness and confidentiality present additional hurdles for climate scientists, who are involved in international, as well as interdisciplinary, consensus-building.  As the UK inquiry on the hacked CRU e-mails revealed, some data relied on by climate scientists had been obtained from national governments under nondisclosure agreements.  The parliamentary committee conducted, in effect, a process of post hoc standard-setting when it concluded that the climate science community should have followed more open practices of publication and disclosure.

Each scientist has a vote, like any other citizen.  Do they want something more?  Each scientist can take part in their political party, and try to influence their neighbors.  What more are they asking for?  Would they be happy with some kind of scientific oligarchy, like a panel of wizards advising the king?  Heaven forbid.  Like Jasanoff said, there is no higher court where science can account for itself to the world.  Science must be accountable to the people.
    Once again we see the fine word “science” being applied to a mixing pot of good, bad, and ugly.  Not all science is created equal.  Not all science deserves public funding, public support, or public respect.  Some of it deserves to be publicly shunned and criticized.  Consider:

1. Not all sciences are epistemically equal (compare “political science” with particle physics).
2. Not all sciences are methodologically equal (compare taxonomy with quantum mechanics).
3. Not all sciences are capable of equal degrees of confirmation (compare origin sciences with electromagnetics).
4. Not all sciences are practically equal, especially for governments (compare ballistics and space technology, which have potential defensive applications, with elusive searches for cosmic strings, dark matter, SETI, or some “last universal common ancestor”).
5. Not all pure sciences generate equal national prestige.  Think of an outer planet mission like Cassini, which has generated international cooperation, stimulated millions of students to become interested in science and engineering, made people around the world stand in awe of its amazing pictures, and has given its member nations pride and prestige in science.  Compare that with futile attempts to discover speciation among lizards in the Bahamas (PhysOrg) or endless attempts to explain the evolution of altruism via game theory.

Those are just a few issues that bear on governmental and public support for science; see the 04/02/2010 commentary for 30 more.  We need to decouple “scientific institutions” and “professional scientists” from “science” per se.  If science is a search for truth about nature in an orderly, methodical, rational way, then we can all be scientists, and we all should be, to a certain measure.  Many great discoveries have been made by hobbyists and citizen scientists.  There’s something pure about that.  Of course, individuals cannot build Large Hadron Colliders and 10-meter optical interferometer telescopes on Mauna Kea; those kinds of science projects require huge collaborations and funds.  Much of science, perhaps most of it these days, requires advanced education and a full time commitment.  But like Jasanoff said, once scientists become professionalized and collaborative, they can be subject to groupthink, even if they follow ostensibly reliable methods like peer review and multiple rounds of assessment.  Don’t think scientists are beyond human nature.
    Whose science is it, anyway?  An argument can be made that professional scientists, who are forever banging their crutches on the public trough (as David Berlinski aptly put it), are the last ones who should be influencing public policy.  Governments of the people, by the people, and for the people should have the ultimate say in how their money is spent.  The public must, of course, be informed properly and have a sufficient level of scientific literacy to understand why a science project is worth funding (in representative democracy, this is handled by well-educated advisors of the executive branch).  But scientists have a responsibility of providing visible and tangible benefits to the public – not just demands on the grounds of their authority as scientists.
    That huge group of climate scientists harrumphed about the lack of respect they were getting from the public (and basically demanded they get it, and demanded the government take their policy advice seriously).  They claimed global warming is a fact that cannot be denied, despite the scandals.  Consider for a moment this notion of “global temperature” on which so much of their consensus rests.  There is no such thing!  The globe does not have a temperature.  Individual points on the globe do, at least moment by moment, but temperature is a dynamic and localized quantity.  It’s a hundred below at the poles at the same time it’s a hundred above in the desert.  There is no way to come up with a measure of “global temperature” that is not a function of (1) the instruments used to measure it and (2) the points and times selected where it is to be measured and (3) the statistical methods used to average the data and (4) the theory used to interpret the final number.  The answer is “theory-laden” as philosophers say.  So when climate scientists say that global temperature has increased 0.75 degree over the last century, what could that possibly mean?  It can mean whatever their political agenda wants it to mean.  In fact, in the same issue of Nature, Peter Stott and Peter Thorne basically admitted that temperature data collections are non-standardized, non-uniform, missing large chunks from big parts of the world, “or are otherwise not easily accessible – or for more complex financial or political reasons.”  See?  There are issues beyond just pure, unbiased science involved in something this complex and convoluted.  They said that there are only three institutions monitoring global temperature records, the records are in the hands of just a few people who are trying to get standards recognized.  That means, does it not, that records from early in the 20th century on which the conclusions that temperatures are rising cannot be relied upon.  Moreover, here’s what they said about their recommendations to improve things: “The concept we have outlined above has so far been developed by a few individuals at a single institution.”  Yet the global warming community talks like the science is so solid only an idiot could question it.
    We talked about this at length in the 10/05/2009 commentary, so we won’t belabor the point again here.  Suffice it to say the climate science consensus complainer corporation compared their “fact of global warming” to – guess what?  Darwin’s theory of evolution.  That tells you all you need to know.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

• It is the most abundant multicellular animal on earth.
• It has the world’s strongest muscles, and outperforms man-made motors.
• It jumps so quickly, it seems to vanish.
• It can accelerate to over 100 mph in a few thousandths of a second.
• It can jump thousands of times its body length per second.
• If a man could jump as fast as this animal, he would have to go 3,800 mph.
• It has two separate propulsion mechanisms.
• It has finely-tuned legs for swimming.
• It has an optimized hydrodynamic shape.
• It has an exceptionally rapid nerve transmission system.

The authors tried to sneak in evolution into this story, but they can’t get away with it without the Baloney Detector going off.  One scientist said, “The copepods’ evolutionary success should be seen in relation to their ability to flee from predators.  Their escape jump is hugely powerful and effective.”  This is a royal non-sequitur.  Suppose I made up a theory called gribbleflix that states that organisms will come up with what they need to survive.  How would you feel if anything you presented, no matter what it was, I could explain by saying the reason it survives was because of its gribbleflixary success?  If it is fast, it’s because of gribbleflix.  If it stays in one place, it’s because of gribbleflix.  Pretty soon you would be pretty frustrated at me.  Why, then, do we let the evolutionists get away with this trick?
    You probably did not expect these tiny, little, shrimpy, insignificant, primitive nothings to win the World’s Strongest Animal Contest.  Sounds like evolution was all downhill from there, and now all we have are weightlifters and sprinters trying to earn a distant honorable mention.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Amazing Facts

Self-propelling bacteria are a nanotechnology dream.  These unicellular organisms are not just capable of living and reproducing, but they can swim very efficiently, sense the environment, and look for food, all packaged in a body measuring a few microns.  Before such perfect machines can be artificially assembled, researchers are beginning to explore new ways to harness bacteria as propelling units for microdevices.  Proposed strategies require the careful task of aligning and binding bacterial cells on synthetic surfaces in order to have them work cooperatively.  Here we show that asymmetric environments can produce a spontaneous and unidirectional rotation of nanofabricated objects immersed in an active bacterial bath.  The propulsion mechanism is provided by the self-assembly of motile Escherichia coli cells along the rotor boundaries.  Our results highlight the technological implications of active matter’s ability to overcome the restrictions imposed by the second law of thermodynamics on equilibrium passive fluids.

The idea that, in nonequilibrium states, a directional motion can arise from the chaotic dynamics of small molecules was first put forward by [Richard] Feynman in his famous “ratchet and pawl” thought experiment [1966].  The combination of asymmetry and nonequilibrium was soon recognized to be at the origin of the “ratchet effect,” opening the way to the stimulating concept of Brownian motors in physical and biological contexts.  Many ways have been considered to drive a system out of thermal equilibrium, such as cycling temperature or applying time-dependent external fields.  Our experiment demonstrates an intriguing realization of a ratchet mechanism, where bacteria can be thought of as intrinsically off-equilibrium “molecules.”  Asymmetric environments can be used to break the remaining spatial symmetries and allow the emergence of an ordered, reproducible motion that could serve as the driving mechanism for completely autonomous, self-propelling microdevices.  Applications at the micrometer scale, such as self-propelling micromachines or pumps and mixers for microfluidics, are the most promising, but it will also be important to answer the question whether bacterial motors are confined to the microworld, or we can think of a macroscopic exploitation of bacteria as mechanical power sources.

Evolution?  They had no need of that hypothesis.  We hate to keep rubbing this in, Eugenie, Ken, Richard, Jerry, and Francisco, but the first step in recovery is to admit you have a problem.  We know it will get depressing when nobody calls wanting to hear your rendition of the Theodosius Soliloquy,* and the universities can’t attract bright students fast enough to enter their biomimetics labs.  But you can still have a future in the Design Age.  Find a hobby; plant tomatoes, try art, take a hike.  Life will go on.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Physics • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts
*“Nothing in Baal-orgy makes cents except in the lie tough Eve-illusion.”**
**Eve-illusion is the old lie, “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” through man’s own naturalistic inquiry, including evolutionary theory and the evolution of altruism (good) and war (evil), without reliance on God’s revelation of Truth.

The trend of evidence has been clear for decades now.  Every major animal body plan is found in the Cambrian.  Each one is found earlier and earlier.  (Search on “Cambrian explosion” in our search bar for many other examples.)  The earliest ones are just as complex as later ones.  Where is the evolution?  Abrupt appearance of complex body plans is not evolution.  If you want to believe Darwin’s story of slow and gradual evolution, you believe it not because of the evidence, but in spite of it.
    Darwin’s theory is a fully naturalistic story – except for all the miracles needed to prop it up at every stage.  How did you like this little cryptically-stated miracle in the Landing et al paper: “specialized zooids appeared early in bryozoan phylogeny.”  Appeared.  Wonderful.  Tell us, How did they appear?  Enlightened rationalists want to know.  Did they just “emerge” out of the mud?  Did Tinker Bell zap an Ediacaran frond and a specialized bryozoan zooid popped out?  After watching Darwin’s Dilemma, we are getting a little weary of the mythological dogma repeated by the priests of the church of Darwin who say, “just believe.”
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Fossils • Dating Methods

Archaeopteryx Fossil Retains Original Soft-Tissue Material     05/10/2010    
May 10, 2010 — We are usually told that fossils involve the complete replacement of original living material by rock, except in rare cases (such as amber), because organic material is quickly destroyed.  One of the most famous rock fossils is Archaeopteryx, the bird that has often been claimed to be a missing link from dinosaurs.  An international team used X-rays to probe one of the nine known specimens of Archaeopteryx.  To their surprise, they found original atoms from the feathers and bones of the animal still residing in the rock impressions – this after 150 million years has past since the bird died, according to the evolutionary chronology.
    Science Daily, the BBC News, and New Scientist all reported the paper that appeared in PNAS.¹  The team, including scientists from Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory, Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Manchester, UK, used synchrotron rapid scanning X-ray fluorescence (SRS-XRF) to detect atomic species in the rock and the fossil impressions of the Thermopolis Archaeopteryx specimen.  Their color-coded map of the data shows enriched zinc and copper in the bone impressions relative to the rock, and enriched phosphorus and sulfur in the rachis [main stems] of the feather impressions.  They interpret these as remnants of original soft tissue from the specimen rather than leached material from the rock sediments: “Here we present chemical imaging,” they said, “... which shows that portions of the feathers are not impressions but are in fact remnant body fossil structures, maintaining elemental compositions that are completely different from the embedding geological matrix.”  This was the first detailed chemical analysis of this fossil ever performed, they said.  They referred to another study on dinosaur bone that supports “our most striking result: that elevated Zn levels associated with the skull and other bones have persisted over geological time and most likely, along with phosphorous and sulfur, are remnants of the original bone chemistry.”  The authors seemed to like that word “striking.”  They used it 4 times: e.g., “striking and previously unknown details about the chemical preservation of soft tissue, elemental distribution patterns most likely related to the organism’s life processes, insights into the chemistry of the fossilization process, and details of curation history.”
    The paper and the popular articles spoke of evolution in various ways.  The original paper had very little to say about it, other than some opening generalizations.  The abstract began, for instance, with “Evolution of flight in maniraptoran dinosaurs is marked by the acquisition of distinct avian characters, such as feathers, as seen in Archaeopteryx from the Solnhofen limestone.”  They did not elaborate on how the said acquisition of pennate flight feathers might have occurred by the unguided process of natural selection.  The opening sentence of the paper followed, saying, “Archaeopteryx are rare but occupy a pivotal place in the development of Darwinian evolution because of their possession of both reptilian (jaws with teeth and a long bony tail) and avian (feathered wings) characters.”  After that, the E-word did not appear further, except for a brief suggestion, without evidence, that Archaeopteryx appears transitional between dinosaurs and birds.
    Jeff Hecht at New Scientist, however, drew from this the notion that “Copper and zinc are key nutrients for living birds, and their presence in the fossil bones shows the evolutionary link with dinosaurs” – even though the original paper did not state such a thing.  He did quote Roy Wogelius [U of Manchester] of the team, saying, “It’s amazing that that chemistry is preserved after 150 million years,” and “There is soft-tissue chemistry preserved in places that people didn’t expect it.”  The BBC News referred twice to the fossil as a “snapshot of evolution” and called it “a ‘missing link’ that documents a fabulous transition from dinosaur to bird,” even though the paper was really not about evolution or dinosaurs at all.  Science Daily gave the story the misleading headline, “X-Rays Reveal Chemical Link Between Birds and Dinosaurs” when, again, the paper made no such claim.  Moreover, the article called it a “150-million year old ‘dinobird’ fossil” and claimed that “When the first Archaeopteryx specimen was uncovered a century and a half ago, just a year after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the discovery provided the strongest evidence yet for the theory of evolution.”  None of the popular articles dealt with the question whether preservation of original organic material from an animal as frail as a bird, which usually decays completely within days or weeks, is possible for 150 million years.  None considered whether finding such material should call into question the age of the specimen.

OK, readers; here’s the science, here’s the data, there’s the spin.  You are smart enough to decide.  Is it plausible that portions of the original bone and feathers of a bird have been sitting in this rock for 150 million years?  What kind of faith does it take to believe that?  Consider how long 150 million years is.  All of recorded human history – all the wars, battles, migrations, conquests, and population explosions – fits within 10,000 years or less.  That includes all the geological catastrophes (post-Flood, for creationists): all the volcanoes, tsunamis, Krakatoa, Mt. St. Helens, Vesuvius, and many more.  All the big floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes that people have written about fit within a thousandth of 1% of the time evolutionists are talking about.  Did that time even exist?
    Instead of asking such questions, instead of doubting their assumptions like good scientists should, instead of realizing that such discoveries are an assault on their core beliefs, evolutionists just waltz on forward proclaiming their myths as if nothing happened.  “Well, what do you know; soft tissue can be preserved for 150 million years, and isn’t it wonderful how Archaeopteryx is such a beautiful icon to hang at the shrine of the Bearded Buddha?  Guard – arrest that man!  He is not bowing deep enough – he might be a creationist!  Expel him lest he commit sacrilege in this sacred place!”
Next headline on:  Fossils • Birds • Dinosaurs • Dating Methods

It’s tragic to see a symbol of the Bible being treated badly; perhaps the governments will realize their mismanagement and do something in time.  The Jordan was once a raging torrent in wet seasons.  An old hymn talked about “Jordan’s stormy banks” and as recent as 150 years ago it was a dangerous river to cross at times.  “Crossing that old river Jordan” was often a symbol of leaving the land of sorrows to enter heaven.  Nothing on this planet is permanent, though.  Substance is more important than symbolism.
    If you ever visit Israel, be sure to see the beautiful headwater streams north of the Sea of Galilee, especially near the archaeological site of Tell Dan.  The powerful torrents of clear spring water flowing over waterfalls are a beautiful sight.  They remind one of Psalm 42.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology

1. “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome” is the primary paper by Green et al.¹  Some 55 authors are listed on the paper, including Svante Paabo, who has advanced theories about Neanderthal interbreeding for years.
2. “Targeted Investigation of the Neandertal Genome by Array-Based Sequence Capture” by Burbano et al compared human and Neanderthal genes with the chimpanzee genome.²  They “identified 88 amino acid substitutions that have become fixed in humans since our divergence from the Neandertals.”
3. Ann Gibbons summarized the papers in a news article in the same issue entitled, “Paleogenetics: Close Encounters of the Prehistoric Kind.”³ 
4. Elisabeth Pennisi investigated the question of whether it might become possible to clone a Neanderthal, in “Paleogenetics: Cloned Neandertals Still in the Realm of Sci-Fi.”⁴  She called it a pipe dream due to technical and ethical reasons.
5. Pennisi added a cameo article about Richard “Ed” Green, the postdoctoral fellow in charge of the Neanderthal sequencing project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.”  He developed barcoding methods for streamlining the effort of wading through the DNA evidence.

• New Scientist said “Neanderthal genome reveals interbreeding with humans.”
• Science Daily announced, “Neandertals ‘Hardly Differed at All’ from Modern Humans.”  Another Science Daily entry featuring Ed Green said, “Neanderthal Genome Yields Insights Into Human Evolution and Evidence of Interbreeding With Modern Humans.”
• National Geographic wrote, “Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence; Most of us have some Neanderthal genes, study finds.”
• Clara Moskowitz got clever with her headline for Live Science, saying, “Humans and Neanderthals Mated, Making You Part Caveman.”
• The BBC News wrote, “Neanderthal genes ‘survive in us’.”  The article is accompanied by a timeline (not to scale), a video clip, and a picture of Svante Paabo.
• Time Magazine’s coverage emphasized the opinions of Svante Paabo and Erik Trinkaus.  Webb Miller thought this is was a “way cool paper” representing “great science” because “Some [scientists] will love it, and some of them will hate it.”
• The New York Times highlighted a large picture of the Croatian cave where Neanderthal bones with DNA were found.  Their coverage entertained some competing views, saying, “the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record.”  The Times quoted Ian Tattersall [America Museum of Natural History] calling it a “fabulous achievement” but “probably not the authors’ last word, and they are obviously groping to explain what they have found.” 
• “Probing Question: What can we learn from Neanderthal DNA?” asked PhysOrg on April 22, before the paper was published, adding, “Contrary to their image as knuckle-dragging brutes, the Neanderthals on television play tennis and attend cocktail parties – and sell auto insurance.”  Maybe some Brutus-types you know come to mind.
• John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist and blogger, welcomed the news.  “Neandertals Live!” he announced on John Hawks Weblog, where a philosophical-looking Neanderthal graces his banner.  His entry summed up what this means for paleoanthropology from an evolutionary perspective.

Now that we know they are us, and we are them, and that so-called Neanderthals are walking among us playing tennis and selling us insurance, it’s time to assess the damage the Neanderthal myth has done to humanity.  This was never about a pure, unbiased search for the truth of human history.  It was all about looking for props to support a story – a story of Europeans emerging from lower animals over millions of years in a way that guaranteed they would be on top.  It’s a kind of historical racism, only the victims have been unable to sue in court because they were assumed extinct.  Well, maybe 1-4% of the 6 billion people can find a lawyer now.  Got big brows?  Are you big-boned?  Maybe you stand to make a lot of money.
    The first Neanderthal bones were found a few years before Darwin published his Origin.  The Neander valley in Germany, by the way, was named after Joachim Neander, author of “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation.”  Although the skeletons looked a little strange, it would take a few years for evolutionary demagogues to find a way to use them as props for the story.  Evolution was already on the rise in Victorian Britain.  Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, and Lamarck, and Robert Chambers had written scandalous but delicious tales of humankind arising from the lower animals.  The geologists had already ditched Mosaic chronology for Hutton’s deep time by the 1830s, with Lyell as their champion, so the timescale was set.  The British Empire with its Victorian theme of progress was already displaying European “superiority” over the other races of mankind, and racism was hot.  So when Darwin made his strategic coup by publishing an apparently plausible mechanism for evolutionary common ancestry, evolutionism exploded on the scene.  Acceptance of the controversial theory was tentative at first (many leading scientists were outraged), but within ten years Darwin, his Four Musketeers (Lyell, Gray, Huxley, Hooker) and the X-club bad boys had stolen the high ground.  By the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man in 1871, hardly anyone had the energy to protest – not even the clergy.  This was not a matter of science; it was a sociological phenomenon of late 19th century Victorian racist culture.
    Now all that was necessary to keep the momentum going was to fill in the blanks of the Darwin Saga with the appearance of scientific progress.  Bones that looked any way different were hot items.  They were immediately placed into the march of progress from monkey to man.  Look at the first artist reconstruction of Neanderthal Man (Wikimedia) made in 1888 when the Darwin hysteria was in full swing.  Clearly the artist was attempting to make it look as brutish, ape-like, and “other” as possible.  That’s the key: these ancient bones had to be other than people.  The Darwinists manipulated the perception of human history by giving them other-sounding names: Neanderthal Man, Java Man, Heidelberg Man, Peking Man, Rhodesia Man, Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man.  They manipulated taxonomy to support their Darwinian, deep-time story: Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis.  The storytelling continued into the 20th century, with more artist reconstructions, an elaborate tale of when and where different groups emerged on the scene, and where they migrated.  Fictional stories were concocted about how different species of human ancestors might have met one another and fought to the death.  Other fictional stories were made up out of whole cloth about the invention of language, culture, and religion.  The Neanderthals, we were told, separated from a common ancestor of modern humans 650,000 years ago.  They were portrayed as brutish, stooped-over, heavy-browed, muscular mammoth-hunting cavemen who knew little more than how to build fire, have sex and eat meat.  But when the intelligent, slender Cro-Magnon arrived (you know, the Europeans), these brutes were no match, and over years were beaten back to extinction.
    Does any of this have any connection to true history?  Of course not.  Yes, there are bones, and flutes, and burial sites, and caves, but the “scenario” is a big, bad myth.  It is 150 years overdue to put this one out of our misery.  Consider how absurd it is.  Evolutionists are asking us to think that Neanderthals went on their own evolutionary journey 650,000 years ago, only to encounter “modern” humans 100,000 to 80,000 years ago, and find they could have fertile offspring!  If Darwin’s theory means anything at all, in that long a time the Neanderthals and other human species should have drifted so far apart that interbreeding would have become impossible..  That’s what most evolutionists believed until very recently.  The evidence for interbreeding in the Neanderthal genome is not just an adjustment to the Darwinian paleoanthropology scenario; it undermines it.  Even more nonsensical is the idea that modern humans, virtually identical in every way to us, walked through Europe for over 100,000 years without ever inventing a wheel, building a city, riding a horse, or planting a farm.  That’s 10 to 12 times the length of all recorded human history.  Anyone who does not see the patent absurdity of the evolutionary claim needs a serious deprogramming session.  Not only that, evolutionists are telling us that human ancestors were capable of fire and cooking and hunting and upright walking, and maybe verbal and symbolic communication, for half a million to a million years.  As Duane Gish rightly asked in 1993, “what in the world were our advanced hominid ancestors doing for almost a million years?  Why was evolution, both physical and cultural, so quiescent for such a vast stretch of time?  If Homo sapiens had evolved perhaps as much as 150,000 years ago or even longer, why was it that he invented agriculture and domestication so recently and so abruptly?” (Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics, p. 354).
    Creationists – you know, those know-nothings who are the brunt of the Darwin Empire’s most vicious ridicule and disgust – have been saying for a long time that the average brain capacity of “Neanderthal Man” exceeded our own.  They are not the only ones who have said that if you gave a Neanderthal a shave and a haircut, dressed him in a business suit, and marched him down Wall Street, nobody would pay any attention.  Now we know they are among us playing tennis and selling insurance.  On top of that, the history of evolutionary hoaxes with early-man fossils (Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man) and the ongoing wars between today’s ape-man hunters vying for the stage with the hottest missing link is a history of shameful intrigue, extrapolation of evidence, mythmaking and reversals.  They cannot understand how civilization emerged from nothing.  They cannot understand why the first cave paintings were already the best.  And they present themselves as making progress toward “understanding our origins”.
    Readers, people, please: does it begin to dawn on you that we have been snookered by the Darwin Party con men?  Why do we listen to these so-called experts?  Why do we think their story is getting better with time?  Is this new paper a sign of progress?  No; it spotlights a 150-year detour away from the truth.  They have vaunted their ignorance, yet vented their arrogance by expecting us to believe that the other parts of their myth are still intact.  I’m sure you will be thrilled to find out in another few decades that everything they are telling you in 2010 was wrong, too.  Chances are good that will happen, because not much remains of what they were telling us a few decades ago, and decades before that, ad nauseum.  If your driver chose the wrong road, don’t be surprised when things don’t look right after hours of driving, even when your confident-sounding cabbie has a good story and keeps telling you he’s getting closer to the destination.  When is it going to dawn on you that that’s his angle – keeping a good story going, not looking for the destination?  The Darwinists stay in power by perpetuating an illusion of legitimacy, as if they are getting warmer.  Each new bone, each new genome, is “shedding light” on our evolution.  Stop believing the lies.  The props have nothing to do with it; the story is the centerpiece, and that is not up for debate.
    The Biblical timeline, by contrast, fits known human history well.  One must understand that dating of artifacts beyond 10,000 years ago is infected with the deep-time mythology, producing a circular system of reinforcement.  Evolutionists need that deep time.  To make it look legitimate, they fill it in with stages in their fictional play, and then they date those stages with infected dating methods to give them an air of scientific objectivity.  Don’t follow the script.  Look at the hard evidence itself.  The best evidence is inscriptions – clay tablets, writing, cities, architecture, pottery.  The birth of civilization in the Fertile Crescent fits what the Bible says about the spread of humanity after the Flood and Babel.  Verifiable records show all artifacts were made by intelligent, skilled, sentient Homo sapiens – every one of them.  And just as people today are quick to migrate to every corner of the globe, migration by true humans was very rapid after the Flood.  Columbus did not discover a New World; people were already there, having migrated from Asia over land bridges centuries before – maybe millennia before.  People were in the South Pacific, on Easter Island, in South America, all over the place when the latecomer Europeans showed up.  Who is really superior, the latecomers?  Jon Saboe’s novel The Days of Peleg (Resource of the Week for 11/07/2009) provides a plausible account of how all this could have happened in a short time.  Another important point is that human population statistics match the Biblical timeframe like a comfortable shoe.  But if upright, intelligent humans inhabited this planet for nearly a million years, we should be climbing over their bones, not finding them here and there in isolated caves.
    So who were the Neanderthals?  For one thing, it’s time to ditch that name with its evolutionary baggage.  They were Homo sapiens with some accentuated features.  No, they didn’t live 650,000 years ago; they lived a few thousand years ago.  They migrated after the Flood, like everyone else.  After Babel, close-knit family groups went their separate ways.  Inbreeding of tribes led to accentuated features.  Some traits could have been aggravated by diet, harsh environment, age, or disease.  But for all we can tell, they were strong, astute, fit, creative, intelligent, capable people.  Today’s pot-bellied scientists with high cholesterol who couldn’t find a steak in a meat market or carve a turkey should aspire to their stature.  Maybe they were the frontiersmen of their day, living out in the harsh extremes of the world, like the Inuit and certain tribal peoples who know a lot more about living off the land than many scientists ever will.  Maybe they preferred the simple life of the hunter-gatherer, as do some people groups in 2010.  Maybe they were the environmentalists; who knows?  They weren’t around for 650,000 years; just a few thousand, like all the other people we KNOW about, where know is the operative word.
    A creationist taxonomical initiative called baraminology accepts the Genesis record that God made things to reproduce after their “kinds” (baramin).  The created kinds were most likely groups larger than a species (although a baramin may represent a species in some cases, such as with Homo sapiens; for introduction see ChristianAnswers.net and CreationWiki).  Baraminology entails significant amounts of genetic variability inherent in the genomes of the original kinds.  The picture of a gradually progressing tree of life Darwin used to propagate his anti-Genesis mythology of human history is rejected in favor of the original Genesis picture: a world of distinct reproductive groups varying within their kinds.  Each baramin is related by common descent, so there is room for some of the same comparative genomics studies within kinds as Darwinists try to make across kinds, but baraminologists deny that all organisms are related by common descent.  They say, instead, that similarities are marks of the single Creator of all things (see Walter ReMine’s thesis in The Biotic Message, Resource of the Week for 10/10/2009).  The built-in variability in each genome would lead to branching of similar species within kinds up to the genus and family level, and perhaps beyond (after all, taxons are man-made groupings), as the original kinds invaded new ecological niches on a dynamic planet.  These branchings would not incorporate new genetic information, but rather express built-in capabilities in new ways and combinations, in some cases with extreme accentuation of existing genetic tools.  In this view, all the human racial groups stem from the original human pair and retain their full humanness.  The slight differences in skin color and other traits are explained as environmentally-enhanced variations or genetic bottlenecks occurring since the migrations after Babel.  Dr. Robert Carter has an interesting DVD on the genetic evidence for human migration in and out of Africa that arguably does a better job of explaining the evidence from a Biblical creationist standpoint than the evolutionist “out of Africa” story; see CMI for video teaser and info on how to order; see also his article on CMI about “Adam, Eve, and Noah vs Modern Genetics.”
    You can reject this view if you want to.  It’s a free country.  You can let the cultural knee-jerk reflex take over: laugh, mock, scorn, ridicule, and write scathing attacks on your blog about how stupid the know-nothing flat-earth Neanderthal-faced less-evolved creationists are.  Go right ahead; Darwin’s bulldogs have been doing that since the X-Club, and creationists are pretty used to it.  (Duane Gish has been vindicated, you realize.)  Such tactics only show one’s lack of ability to discuss evidence rationally with civility.  Among the worst of the mockers are some theistic evolutionists and some progressive creationists who choose to be so entranced by the siren song of the deceivers, they have been willing to twist Biblical history to ridiculous extremes – so far as to make Neanderthals and the other Darwinist early-man cartoon characters out to be unsouled, upright-walking animals, equivalent to us in almost every respect, except lacking the image of God.  We hope this revelation is a lesson to them.  The next time the Darwinists have to backtrack and admit in print that you’ve been snookered, and everything they taught you for 150 years was wrong about Neanderthal Man, or Darwin’s finches, or the human genome, or fill-in-the-blank, don’t say we didn’t warn you.  Don’t say St. Peter didn’t warn you, either (read II Peter 3).  From now on, the only Neanderthal Man you should pay attention to is the original one, Joachim Neander.  He wrote:

Praise to the Lord, who over all things so wondrously reigneth,
Shelters thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth!
Hast thou not seen how thy desires ever have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee;
Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
If with His love He befriend thee.
(See Romans 5 and Hebrews 2 for more on that.  Express your humanness as it was intended to be.  Get back into a relationship with your Maker.)
Next headline on:  Early Man • Genetics • Fossils • Dating Methods

Can Darwin Be Rescued from a New Eye Discovery?     05/07/2010    
May 07, 2010 — Darwinists have claimed for years that the human eye is an example of bad design, because it is wired backwards – the photoreceptors are located behind a tangle of blood vessels and other material.  But then in 2007, German scientists found that cone-shaped cells called Müller cells act like waveguides that transmit the light through the tangles straight into the photoreceptors (05/02/2007).  Some Darwinists responded that this was only a makeshift correction effected by the “tinkering” of natural selection.  It did not change the argument that the eye was poorly designed, they said.
    Now, more facts have come to light about those Müller cells (also called retinal glial cells).  Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have found out that they do far more than just conduct light to the photoreceptors.  Kate McAlpine reported for New Scientist that Müller cells offer several advantages.  They act as noise filters, tuners and color focusers:

At least two types of light get inside the eye: light carrying image information, which comes directly through the pupil, and “noise” that has already been reflected multiple times within the eye.  The simulations showed that the Müller cells transmit a greater proportion of the former to the rods and cones below, while the latter tends to leak out.  This suggests the cells act as light filters, keeping images clear.
    The researchers also found that light that had leaked out of one Müller cell was unlikely to be taken up by a neighbour, because the surrounding nerve cells help disperse it.  What’s more, the intrinsic optical properties of Müller cells seemed to be tuned to visible light, leaking wavelengths outside and on the edges of the visible spectrum to a greater extent.
    The cells also seem to help keep colours in focus.  Just as light separates in a prism, the lenses in our eyes separate different colours, causing some frequencies to be out of focus at the retina.  The simulations showed that Müller cells’ wide tops allow them to “collect” any separated colours and refocus them onto the same cone cell, ensuring that all the colours from an image are in focus....

In this study, wave propagation methods allowed us to show that light guiding within the retinal volume is an effective and biologically convenient way to improve the resolution of the eye and reduce chromatic aberration.  We also found that the retinal nuclear layers, until now considered a source of distortion, actually improve the decoupling of nearby photoreceptors and thus enhance vision acuity.  Although this study was performed on data from human retinas and eyes, most of its consequences are valid for eyes with other retinal structure and different optics.  They are also valid for the more common case of eyes without a central fovea.

However, Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island cautions that this doesn’t mean that the backwards retina itself helps us to see.  Rather, it emphasises the extent to which evolution has coped with the flawed layout.  “The shape, orientation and structure of the Müller cells help the retina to overcome one of the principal shortcomings of its inside-out wiring,” says Miller.

It’s Miller time for the SEQOTW award.  The fast-talking Darwin Party ideologue has shown to all that facts and logic are not as important to him as defending the shrine of the Bearded Buddha.  Some Catholic.  Does he not read the Bible?  Ears that hear and eyes that see— the LORD has made them both (Proverbs 20:12).  He would rather say that God’s creations have a flawed layout and principal shortcomings and are done all wrong than to offend his real god, the one whose work is flawless, Charlie baby.  He tries to have it both ways; keeping his Catholic faith and his evolution (Finding Darwin’s God), but when someone has to give on a matter of propositional truth, it is always God, not Darwin.  Cornelius Hunter has made some important points about Miller’s response to this paper in his blog, Darwin’s God.
    Look; let’s understand something about this dysteleology argument.  Flawed is as flawed does.  The vertebrate eye is a marvel of engineering.  Its performance is so good, we cannot come close to imitating it in all its specifications that must be met simultaneously (stereoscopic, motion-picture, miniature, high-def, self-repairing in many cases, self-cleaning, high signal-to-noise ratio, high depth of field, high dynamic range, low chromatic aberration, fast focus, image processing, long life, and much more).  In fact, it may well exhibit the best of all possible optics (see 05/09/2002).  What does Miller want God to do better?  Does God have an obligation to listen to a fallible human’s uninformed opinion about how to design an eye?  The audacity.  There are reasons why the eye is wired the way it is.  The photoreceptors shed parts and require a lot of energy; they need to be near the blood vessels in the back of the eyeball, not facing the inside (for rebuttals to the backward-design argument, see footnote 1 of the 05/02/2007 entry).
    Now we find that it is not just a necessary evil to keep the photoreceptors in back near the blood vessels.  It actually provides optical advantages.  The Müller cells act as waveguides, color focusers and noise reducers.  If the photoreceptors were facing the inside, there is a good chance our vision would be inferior – color focus would be poorer, and stray reflections from inside the eyeball would produce distracting flashes and reduce clarity.  Octopi and squid, which have the photoreceptors in front, live in a completely different environment.  They have to operate in the dim light of a watery medium.  Each animal has the eyes it needs for its habits and habitat.  Don’t you think the Creator knows a few things about optics and wiring that Ken Miller doesn’t?
    One of the stupidest evolution quotes ever made has been memorialized in our Baloney Detector.  Jared Diamond wrote this groaner for Discover magazine 25 years ago (6/1985, p. 91) after parading the old bad-design-of-the-human-eye argument (you see, it’s been around a long time).  It’s doubtful he has ever disowned it, because he still is a staunch evolutionist.  He said, “the eyes of the lowly squid, with the nerves artfully hidden behind the photoreceptors, are an example of design perfection.  If the Creator had indeed lavished his best design on the creature he shaped in his own image, creationists would surely have to conclude that God is indeed a squid.”
    Jared and Ken have been waltzing around this planet for the last 25 years enjoying their eyes, looking at wonders of creation, and telling the rest of us that evolution is a fact because no God would ever do such a bumbling design job.  Take note of three little words (underlined below) in the classic Bible passage of why such people deserve the wrath of God for their unbelief, as stated in Paul’s letter to the Romans: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.  For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead [sum total of his divine attributes, including wisdom, omniscience, goodness, and ability to design things], so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Professing to be wise, they became fools....” (Romans 1:18-22).  Talk about evidence being manifest in them.  It’s right there in their eye sockets.  If you are not thankful with all the evidence in front of you, there’s no hope.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mammals • Physics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts • Biomimetics • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer, and the brain a vast community of microscopic computers.  But even this model is probably too simplistic since the neuron processes data flexibly and on disparate levels, and is therefore far superior to any digital system.  If I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and “artificial intelligence” a grandiose misnomer.
    I think it is time to acknowledge fully that living cells make us what we are, and to abandon reductionist thinking in favour of the study of whole cells.  Reductionism has us peering ever closer at the fibres in the paper of a musical score, and analysing the printer's ink.  I want us to experience the symphony.

Here we describe the assembly of a ‘splicing code’, which uses combinations of hundreds of RNA features to predict tissue-dependent changes in alternative splicing for thousands of exons.  The code determines new classes of splicing patterns, identifies distinct regulatory programs in different tissues, and identifies mutation-verified regulatory sequences.  Widespread regulatory strategies are revealed, including the use of unexpectedly large combinations of features, the establishment of low exon inclusion levels that are overcome by features in specific tissues, the appearance of features deeper into introns than previously appreciated, and the modulation of splice variant levels by transcript structure characteristics.  The code detected a class of exons whose inclusion silences expression in adult tissues by activating nonsense-mediated messenger RNA decay, but whose exclusion promotes expression during embryogenesis.  The code facilitates the discovery and detailed characterization of regulated alternative splicing events on a genome-wide scale.

But between DNA and proteins comes RNA, and an expanding realm of complexity.  RNA is a shape-shifter, sometimes carrying genetic messages and sometimes regulating them, adopting a multitude of structures that can affect its function.  In a paper published in this issue (see page 53), a team of researchers led by Benjamin Blencowe and Brendan Frey of the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, reports the first attempt to define a second genetic code: one that predicts how segments of messenger RNA transcribed from a given gene can be mixed and matched to yield multiple products in different tissues, a process called alternative splicing.  This time there is no simple table – in its place are algorithms that combine more than 200 different features of DNA with predictions of RNA structure.

The work highlights the rapid progress that computational methods have made in modelling the RNA landscape.  In addition to understanding alternative splicing, informatics is helping researchers to predict RNA structures, and to identify the targets of small regulatory snippets of RNA that do not encode protein.  “It’s an exciting time,” says Christopher Burge, a computational biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.  “There's going to be a lot of progress in the next few years.”

The code is likely to work in a cell-autonomous manner and, consequently, may need to account for more than 200 cell types in mammals.  It will also have to deal with the extensive diversity of alternative-splicing patterns beyond simple decisions of single exon inclusion or skipping.  The limited evolutionary conservation of alternative-splicing regulation (estimated to be around 20% between humans and mice) opens up the question of species-specific codes.  Moreover, coupling between RNA processing and gene transcription influences alternative splicing, and recent data implicate the packing of DNA with histone proteins and histone covalent modifications – the epigenetic code – in the regulation of splicing.  The interplay between the histone and the splicing codes will therefore need to be accurately formulated in future approaches.  The same applies to the still poorly understood influence of complex RNA structures on alternative splicing.

We are happy to bring you this story on the day of its release.  It may be one of the really big science papers of the year, or decade.  It could be Nobel Prize material.  (Any great discovery is, of course, surrounded by the work of many other teams, as was the work of Watson and Crick.)  What more can we add as commentary other than, “Wow”?  This is amazing confirmation of design, and a huge challenge to the Darwin Empire.  It will be interesting to see how they try to recast their simplistic 19th-century story of random mutation and natural selection in light of this.  Did you catch what Tejedor and Valcárcel said?  Species may have their own “species-specific” codes.  “The interplay between the histone [epigenetic] and splicing codes will therefore need to be accurately formulated in future approaches,” they said.  Being translated, that means: “Darwinists need not apply.  You don’t have the skills to handle this.”  If the plain-old Watson-Crick genetic code was a challenge to Darwinism, how now with the Splicing Code generating thousands of transcripts out of the same genes?  On top of that, the Epigenetic Code controls the context of gene expression.  It may well be that the arrangement of chromosomes inside the nucleus plays a kind of coding role in the regulation of gene expression, too.  Who knows what other codes are involved in this incredible “interplay” we have only begun to read, like a Rosetta Stone just beginning to poke above the sand?
    Now that we are thinking codes and informatics, all kinds of new research paradigms come to mind.  What if the genome acts partly like a storage area network?  What if there is cryptography going on, or compression algorithms?  We should be thinking advanced information systems and storage technologies.  Maybe we will find some steganography even.  Undoubtedly there are additional robustness mechanisms, like backups and retrieval – perhaps that helps explain pseudogenes.  Whole-genome duplications may be responses to stress; other anomalies may be due to antivirus activity.  Some of these trails may prove useful markers for historical events that have nothing to do with universal common ancestry, but open up comparative genomics in terms of informatics and design for robustness, and the understanding of disease.
    The end of it all is an organism functioning in the world.  Think of a tiger: strong, sleek, unified, with a coat of fur marked with stripes, eyes and ears pointed forward, stalking through the jungle, equipped with all the muscles and bones and senses and behaviors it needs to live through the days and nights of a planet orbiting a star.  Above it are birds flying through the canopy.  Below are snails and small reptiles and ants.  Fish are darting in the river.  Hundreds of species of plants each know how to send their roots down and their leaves up and when to produce their flowers and fruits.  A team of human scientists carries their video cameras into the jungle hoping to remotely trigger them and capture footage of the elusive tiger.  In the soil below and within and without all these other organisms, trillions of microbes are functioning in their microcosmos.  All this is happening because of molecular codes translating and regulating chemistry into directed function.  What philosophers in ancient times could possibly have known that this level of computational, information-based complexity undergirded the stuff of life?  We are the generation blessed to discover these realities.
    Darwinists are in for rough going ahead.  The discoverers tried mutating the Splicing Code and got cancers and mistakes.  How are you going to navigate a fitness landscape now, when it is a minefield of catastrophes waiting to happen when one starts mucking with all these intertwined codes?  We know there is some built-in robustness and tolerance, but the picture emerging is a highly-complex, engineered, optimized informatics system – not a random arrangement of parts that can be endlessly tinkered with.  The whole idea of code is an intelligent design concept.  A. E. Wilder-Smith used to emphasize this.  A code implies a convention between two parties.  Convention – coming together – is an agreement in advance.  It implies planning and purpose.  The symbol SOS, he would say, we use by convention as a sign of distress.  SOS does not look like distress.  It does not smell like distress.  It does not feel like distress.  Nobody would know it means distress unless they understand the convention.  In the same way, the codon for alanine, GCC, does not look, smell or feel like alanine.  It would have nothing to do with alanine unless there were a pre-planned convention between two coding systems – the protein code and the DNA code – that “GCC shall mean alanine.”  To convey that convention, a family of translators, the aminoacyl-tRNA-synthetases, are employed to translate one code into the other.
    That should have nailed the case for design in the 1950s, and many creationists preached it effectively.  But the evolutionists are like fast-talking salesmen.  They wove their just-so stories about Tinker Bell zapping the code and creating new species by mutation and selection and convinced many that miracles can still happen.  OK, well now it’s 2010 and we have the Epigenetic Code and the Splicing Code, two codes much more complex and dynamic than the simple DNA code.  We have codes within codes, codes above and below codes – a hierarchy of codes.  They can’t just stick their finger in the pistol this time and bluff their way out of it with smooth talking now, not with cannons to the left of them and cannons to the right of them, a whole arsenal aimed at their vital parts.  This is a game changer.  The informatics age has grown around them and they are has-beens, like pike-thrusting Greeks facing modern tanks and helicopters.
    Sad to say, they don’t realize it; or if they do, they have no intention of conceding.  In fact, some of the worst and most vicious, intolerant and hateful anti-creationist, anti-design rhetoric in recent memory has been pouring forth from the Darwin-controlled journals and newspapers this week, right when the Splicing Code paper was being published.  Some examples will be forthcoming.  And as long as they have the microphones and control the institutions, many people are going to be misled into thinking they still have the high ground in science.  We bring you this material for you to read, study, understand, and arm yourselves with the information you need to combat bigoted bluffing blather with truth.  Now go do it.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Intelligent Design

Biomimetics: Design Science Is Flourishing     05/05/2010    
May 05, 2010 — Some research centers appear to be on the verge of a golden age – the age of biomimetics (the imitation of biological design).  Products that will change our lives are springing from designs inspired by studying how plants, animals and cells have solved real-world problems.  Although some of the research mentions evolution, the real power behind the research and development is the word design.  Here are just a few recent examples.

1. Make a muscle:  Scientists at the University of British Columbia are taking inspiration from muscle proteins.  They want to design materials that mimic their mechanical properties, “which are a unique combination of strength, extensibility and resilience,” they said in their paper in Nature.¹  The chief molecule responsible for these desirable properties is a giant protein aptly named titin.  It acts like a “complex molecular spring” thanks to “a series of individually folded immunoglobulin-like domains as well as largely unstructured unique sequences.”
       The scientists have now succeeded in recasting solid biomaterials by making “artificial elastomeric proteins that mimic the molecular architecture of titin” that “behave as rubber-like materials showing high resilience at low strain and as shock-absorber-like materials at high strain by effectively dissipating energy.”  They call it a new “muscle-mimetic biomaterial.”  Even though it is a passive substance, they can tweak it: “The mechanical properties of these biomaterials can be fine-tuned by adjusting the composition of the elastomeric proteins, providing the opportunity to develop biomaterials that are mimetic of different types of muscles,” they said.
       Wow; will this be the new flubber?  “We anticipate that these biomaterials will find applications in tissue engineering as scaffold and matrix for artificial muscles.”  Watch for the biceps on upcoming robots.  Elliot L. Chaikof commented on this paper in the same issue of Nature,².  He said that biological materials are attractive because they allow for dissipation of energy and damping vibrations that prevent structural failure.  “The elasticity and energy-recovery properties of such structural proteins are therefore fine-tuned for their biological roles, and are crucial determinants of the normal physiological responses of a broad range of tissues, including those that comprise the cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems.”  The problem with synthetic materials in biomedical devices (microvalves, microactuators, etc.) is that “they cannot facilitate tissue repair, remodelling or regeneration, and they often provoke maladaptive host responses at tissue–material interfaces.”  Creating parts out of protein is therefore a worthy goal.  Chaikof reminds the reader that we are merely at the frontier:

   Lv and colleagues’ material is certainly impressive, but is it a true muscle mimic?  Muscles are complex molecular machines, in which several components are assembled into well-ordered structures capable of converting a stimulus into motion.  Titin is a major constituent of muscle, but a titin mimic alone does not reproduce all the properties of muscle – such as its tensile strength, or force-generating and force-sensing abilities.  In the absence of a self-repair mechanism, protein-based materials are also inherently susceptible to biological degradative processes after implantation, which could release ‘foreign’ protein fragments into the host.  For biomedical applications, such materials therefore need to be carefully assessed to ensure that no fragments cause adverse immune reactions.  Future work will undoubtedly address these issues, leading to creative designs and fabrication techniques for assembling artificial muscle elements that reproducibly and repeatedly respond on command, perform work, and function well after surgical implantation.

   Flubber basketball players may have to wait a while longer.  This job is harder than it looks.  Science Daily reproduced a press release from UBC about the progress so far; see also PhysOrg’s headline, “Designed biomaterials mimicking biology: Potential scaffold for muscle regeneration.”
2. Moths are the prototype:  A perfectly non-reflecting display would be really cool for your eyeglasses or camera lenses.  “Moths are the prototype” for a new nanocoating being developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg, Germany.  Science Daily explained that moths have to avoid predators while flying about at night.  While other insects’ multi-faceted eyes shimmer under light, “the moth’s eyes are perfectly non-reflecting.”  That’s because “Tiny protuberances smaller than the wavelength of light form a periodic structure on the surface.  This nanostructure creates a gentle transition between the refractive indices of the air and the cornea.  As a result, the reflection of light is reduced and the moth remains undetected.”
       That trick is being imitated in a new process that applies the anti-reflective surface structure during manufacture of the component, without having to add a second coating process.  This not only saves money but increases durability.  The materials the Fraunhofer team is making are strong, scratch-proof and easy to clean.  Imagine soon having cell phone displays, dashboard display covers, eyeglasses, and any other transparent surface that have all these desirable properties – thanks to the lowly moth.
3. Purple is the new green:  Purple bacteria, that live in the bottom of lakes and in coral reefs, are among the very best at harvesting energy from sunlight.  According to an article in Science Daily, “Its natural design seems the best structural solution for harvesting solar energy.”  That’s why “Neil Johnson, a physicist and head of the inter-disciplinary research group in complexity in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami, thinks its cellular arrangement could be adapted for use in solar panels and other energy conversion devices to offer a more efficient way to garner energy from the sun.”
       Johnson said (without first-hand observation) that these bacteria have been around for billions of years, and “you would think they are really simple organisms and that everything is understood about them.”  But it was recently discovered that they can “adopt different cell designs depending on light intensity.”  That realization “could help direct design of future photoelectric devices.”
       Purple bacteria have some tricks up their sleeves.  They use a non-intuitive technique to squeeze more energy out of available light.  To optimize, they can’t stay wide open all the time; they have to adjust the input to the ability to process the energy – which they do.  They hit a balance: “purple bacteria create a design that balances the need to maximize the number of photons trapped and converted to chemical energy, and the need to protect the cell from an oversupply of energy that could damage it,” Johnson explained.
       At this point, the scientists are just trying to understand how the bacteria do it.  “Currently, the researchers are using their mathematical model and the help of supercomputers, to try to find a photosynthetic design even better than the one they found in purple bacteria, although outsmarting nature is proving to be a difficult task.”  Maybe its just too hard.  So why not save energy, and harness the bacteria themselves?  “Because these bacteria grow and repair themselves, the researchers hope this discovery can contribute to the work of scientists attempting to coat electronic devices with especially [sic] adapted photosynthetic bacteria, whose energy output could become part of the conventional electrical circuit, and guide the development of solar panels that can adapt to different light intensities.”
4. Between the fern and the deep blue sea:  “Tiny Hydrophobic Water Ferns Could Help Ships Economize on Fuel,” Science Daily announced.  How is that?  “The hairs on the surface of water ferns could allow ships to have a 10 percent decrease in fuel consumption,” the article explained.  “The plant has the rare ability to put on a gauzy skirt of air under water.”  That translates into reduced friction, which translates into fuel savings.
       The tiny water fern Salvinia molesta is so hydrophobic, it never gets wet – even under water.  You can pull it out of the water and the water just drips right off, leaving it completely dry, even after it has been underwater for weeks.  Imagine having swimsuits and scuba equipment like that.  Previous attempts to create superhydrophobic materials have not been stable enough to last.  Scientists have known about the fine hydrophobic hairs on the water fern, but they recently discovered that the tips of the hairs are hydrophilic – they attract water.  Strange as that seems, it sets up a water layer that holds the air layer close to the plant.  One colleague was excited by this: “After the solving of the self-cleansing of the lotus leaf twenty years ago, the discovery of the salvinia effect is one of the most important new discoveries in bionics.”
       Half the energy of moving a cargo ship through the water is caused by friction at the hull-water interface.  A ten percent saving on fuel costs by coating the hull with a salvinia-effect material could have an enormous impact.  “Surfaces modelled on the water fern could revolutionise shipbuilding,” the article concluded.
5. Synchronized swimming:  The dancing of a school of fish like a single organism moving gracefully through the water is a visual treat.  “Nature shows and Caribbean vacation commercials often depict a school of fish moving as a single entity to avoid obstacles and elude prey,” PhysOrg agreed, adding, “Engineers hope to give unmanned mini-submarines, mini-helicopters and other autonomous vehicles the same coordinated movement.”  To do that, they first need to understand how the fish do it.
       “Fish signal one another via visual cues and hydrodynamics (the movement of water),” the article explains, describing research at the University of Maryland.  “A line of tiny hair cells down each side of a fish helps them to sense the flow of the water around them.”  A short video shows how the researchers are making their first clumsy attempts to get yard-long robotic submarines in a tank to read each other’s visual cues, using cameras, to steer.  Another researcher is working on the hair cell mimics.  All the while, they are monitoring a school of live fish called giant danios to learn from their coordinated movements.  They’ve learned that one fish getting startled can set off a “wave of agitation” that propagates from neighbor to neighbors.  Another video shows computer models built on the observations.  “We’re developing modern engineering tools to quantitatively study this phenomenon,” the lead researcher said, an aerospace engineering professor with the design-friendly name Paley.  “We’re taking methods you learn as an engineering student and applying them to study biology.”  Next stop: synchronized aerial vehicles exploring the eyes of hurricanes, schools of unmanned submarines gathering data in the deep ocean, maybe even synchronized spacecraft.
6. Autonomous roach robots:  Artificial robots, including drones, unmanned subs, Mars rovers and spacecraft, have to be driven by humans.  Often it takes too long for signals to reach the moving parts to avert danger, and the robot gets stuck.  Roy Ritzmann at Case Western Reserve University is envious of roaches.  They respond to obstacles so nimbly, he decided to wire their neurons to see how fast their brains command their legs.  PhysOrg describes his work in “If only a robot could be more like a cockroach.”
       The way we design robots now is too clumsy for the kind of work we need them to do – to go into the World Trade Center looking for victims, or other rescue situations.  “So, to make a robot that can turn, back up, climb over or burrow under and obstacle without the guidance of a far off rescue worker using computer controls, what could be better than mimicking an insect’s comparatively simple brain?” Ritzmann thought.  “Easier said than done,” found Ritzmann and his assistant Allan Pollack.  If you can imagine doing brain surgery on the head of a pin, that’s about what it took to wire a roach brain to study its neuron firing patterns when it walks.  They found that steps occur about 450 milliseconds after a neuron fires.  The cockroach is controlling the speed of its legs with its brain.  If we can ever get our robots to do that, we’ll really have something – especially if we can get them that small, and able to climb walls and reproduce themselves.  On second thought... restaurants, watch out.

All together now: “These articles said nothing about evolution.”  This is all design, design, design.  We are marveling at the design and complexity of living solutions to real engineering problems, and trying to imitate them.  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, who are we trying to honor?  For any Darwin Party maniacs reading this, worried that the r-word is coming, notice that all this research, though completely compatible with an intelligent-design approach to science, had nothing to do with religion.  It shows that science can approach nature with regard to intelligent design without focusing on the identity of the designer, Designer, or God.
    In the ID Revolution, everyone can join in and get on board without starting a religious war, because the focus is on design detection and design imitation.  Questions about the Designer are, of course, very interesting and important, and very compatible with all this research, but those discussions can be left in the hands of capable theologians and philosophers.  Individual scientists do not have to state their affiliations in their papers.  None of these did; and none of these felt compelled to tell Darwinian tales, either.  If journals will just loosen the reins, and let scientists like these talk about design, even intelligent design, without getting whipped for using the phrase, all they would be doing is validating what is already taking place.
    Simultaneously, journals need to relax the requirement for allegiance to Darwinism.  Just-so stories are becoming so 1940s.  It’s getting harder and harder for observational scientists to maintain belief that blind chance could produce optimized computers (see next entry), synchronized robots, perfectly non-reflecting surfaces, and so many other marvels.  Isn’t it time to jettison the bad habit of force-fitting Information-Age discoveries into a worn-out Victorian mindset?  Intelligent design science is not so much about controversial additions to science.  As you can see in the articles above, design thinking is already being put to great use.  It’s more about some blessed subtractions.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Terrestrial Zoology • Cell Biology • Plants • Marine Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Darwin’s Linux: Did Evolution Produce a Computer?     05/04/2010    
May 04, 2010 — How is a cell like a computer?  Some Yale scientists asked that question, and embarked on a project to compare the genome of a lowly bacterium to a computer’s operating system.¹.  Their work was published in PNAS.²  As with most analogies, some things were found to be similar, and some different – but in the end, these two entities might be more similar overall in important respects.
    The interdisciplinary team, composed of members of the Computer Science department and the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry department, calls itself the Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.  Recognizing that “The genome has often been called the operating system (OS) for a living organism,” they decided to explore the analogy.  For subjects, they took the E. coli bacterium, one of the best-studied prokaryotic cells, and Linux, a popular Unix-based operating system.  The abstract reveals the basic findings, but there’s more under the hood:

To apply our firsthand knowledge of the architecture of software systems to understand cellular design principles, we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (Escherichia coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution.  We show that both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference: The transcriptional regulatory network possesses a few global regulators at the top and many targets at the bottom; conversely, the call graph has many regulators controlling a small set of generic functions.  This top-heavy organization leads to highly overlapping functional modules in the call graph, in contrast to the relatively independent modules in the regulatory network.  We further develop a way to measure evolutionary rates comparably between the two networks and explain this difference in terms of network evolution.  The process of biological evolution via random mutation and subsequent selection tightly constrains the evolution of regulatory network hubs.  The call graph, however, exhibits rapid evolution of its highly connected generic components, made possible by designers’ continual fine-tuning.  These findings stem from the design principles of the two systems: robustness for biological systems and cost effectiveness (reuse) for software systems.

The master control plan of a cell is its transcriptional regulatory network.  The transcriptional regulatory network coordinates gene expression in response to environmental and intracellular signals, resulting in the execution of cellular processes such as cell divisions and metabolism.  Understanding how cellular control processes are orchestrated by transcription factors (TFs) is a fundamental objective of systems biology, and therefore a great deal of effort has been focused on understanding the structure and evolution of transcriptional regulatory networks.  Analogous to the transcriptional regulatory network in a cell, a computer OS consists of thousands of functions organized into a so-called call graph, which is a directed network whose nodes are functions with directed edges leading from a function to each other function it calls.  Whereas the genome-wide transcriptional regulatory network and the call graph are static representations of all possible regulatory relationships and calls, both transcription regulation and function activation are dynamic.  Different sets of transcription factors and target genes forming so-called functional modules are activated at different times and in response to different environmental conditions.  In the same way, complex OSs are organized into modules consisting of functions that are executed for various tasks.

Like biological systems, software systems such as a computer operating system (OS) are adaptive systems undergoing evolution.  Whereas the evolution of biological systems is subject to natural selection, the evolution of software systems is under the constraints of hardware architecture and customer requirements.  Since the pioneering work of Lehman, the evolutionary pressure on software has been studied among engineers.  Interestingly enough, biological and software systems both execute information processing tasks.  Whereas biological information processing is mediated by complex interactions between genes, proteins, and various small molecules, software systems exhibit a comparable level of complexity in the interconnections between functions.  Understanding the structure and evolution of their underlying networks sheds light on the design principles of both natural and man-made information processing systems.

1. Cells are constrained by the environment; Linux by the hardware and customer needs.
2. Cells evolve by natural selection; Linux evolves by designers’ fine-tuning.
3. Cells have a pyramid-shaped hierarchy; Linux is top-heavy.
4. Cells don’t reuse genes much, but Linux reuses function calls often.
5. Cells don’t allow much overlap between modules, but Linux does.
6. Cells have many specialized workhorses; Linux concentrates on generic functions.
7. Cell evolutionary rates are mostly conservative; in Linux, they are conservative to adaptive.
8. Cell design principles are bottom up; in Linux, they are top down.
9. Cells are optimized for robustness; Linux is optimized for cost effectiveness.

Reuse is extremely common in designing man-made systems.  For biological systems, to what extent they reuse their repertoires and by what means sustain robustness at the same time are questions of much interest.  It was recently proposed that the repertoire of enzymes could be viewed as the toolbox of an organism.  As the genome of an organism grows larger, it can reuse its tools more often and thus require fewer and fewer new tools for novel metabolic tasks.  In other words, the number of enzymes grows slower than the number of transcription factors when the size of the genome increases.  Previous studies have made the related finding that as one moves towards more complex organisms, the transcriptional regulatory network has an increasingly top-heavy structure with a relatively narrow base.  Thus, it may be that further analysis will demonstrate the increasing resemblance of more complex eukaryotic regulatory networks to the structure of the Linux call graph.

This is a really interesting paper, because it illustrates the intellectual schizophrenia of the modern Darwinist in the information age.  It might be analogous to a post-Stalin-era communist ideologue trying to recast Marxist-Leninist theory for the late 1980s, when the failures of collectivism have long been painfully apparent to everyone except the party faithful.  With a half-hearted smile, he says, “So we see, that capitalism does appear to work in certain environments under different constraints; in fact, it may well turn out to be the final stage of the proletarian revolution.”  Well, for crying out loud, then, why not save a step, and skip over the gulags to the promised land of freedom!
    You notice that the old Darwin Party natural-selection ideology was everywhere assumed, not demonstrated.  The analogy of natural selection to “customer requirements and designers’ fine-tuning” is strained to put it charitably; to put it realistically, it is hilariously funny.  The authors nowhere demonstrated that robustness is a less worthy design goal than cost-effectiveness.  For a cell cast into a dynamic world, needing to survive, what design goal could be more important than robustness?  Linux lives at predictable temperatures in nice, comfortable office spaces.  Its designers have to design for paying customers.  As a result, “the operating system is more vulnerable to breakdowns because even simple updates to a generic routine can be very disruptive,” PhysOrg admitted.  Bacteria have to live out in nature.  A cost-effective E. coli is a dead E. coli.  The designer did a pretty good job to make those critters survive all kinds of catastrophes on this planet.  The PhysOrg article simply swept this difference into the evolutionary storytelling motor mouth, mumbling of the bacterial design, that “over billions of years of evolution, such an organization has proven robust.”  That would be like our communist spin doctor alleging that the success of capitalism proves the truth of Marxist doctrine.
    A simple bacterial genome shows incredibly successful design for robustness when compared to a computer operating system, albeit at the cost of low reuse of modules.  But then the authors admitted the possibility that eukaryotes might well have achieved both robustness and modular reusability.  That would make the comparison to artificial operating systems too close to call.  If we know that Linux did not evolve by mutations and natural selection, then it is a pretty good bet that giraffes and bats and whales and humans did not, either.  That should be enough to get Phillip Johnson’s stirring speech, “Mr. Darwin, Tear down this wall!” to stimulate a groundswell of discontent with the outmoded regime.  May it lead to a sudden and surprising demise of its icons, and a new birth of academic freedom.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design

“Archerfish spit jets of water with remarkable accuracy at insects as much as a meter or more above the water’s surface, despite the distortion that occurs due to the bending of light as it passes from air to water.  They do all this while being attentive to potential predators approaching from above or below” said lead investigator Dr Shelby Temple.

“The innovation in design here is called ‘matched filtering’ where the visual system takes into account the environment and, through evolution, adjusts its self [sic] to the outside world.  Under water, this world changes more rapidly from top to bottom than it does in air and archerfish have come up with a neat system of accounting for this change and retaining exquisitely tuned vision in every direction at once.  This design principle is something we can learn from in our own attempts at engineering.”

Student to Professor: You have just failed your test on Darwinism.  Bad prof.  As punishment, you must wear this dunce cap and write on the chalkboard fifty times, “Evolution is not engineering, and vice versa.”
    By now long-time readers have honed their ability to spot the tricks evolutionists use to cover their miracles.  Animals “come up with” adaptations.  An “innovation in design” occurs.  The innovation is called “matched filtering”.  The visual system “takes into account the environment, and through evolution, adjusts itself”.  Archerfish have “come up with a neat system” that amounts to a “design principle”.  See?  There’s no such thing as a consistent Darwinist.  Everybody is a supernaturalist.  Evolutionists really do believe in intelligent design.  Force them to admit it.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design

1. We have established, in outline, a consensus picture of how, from a hot dense beginning nearly 14 billion years ago, our expanding universe developed galaxies, stars and planets.
2. We can set our entire solar system in a grand evolving scenario stretching back to a Big Bang – an era when everything was hotter than the centres of stars, and expanding on a timescale of a few seconds.
3. If there is life on Mars, it is very primitive.
4. But could some newly discovered planets orbiting other stars harbour biospheres as complex as our Earth’s, perhaps with intelligent life?
5. There are on-going searches for transmissions that might be “artificial” in origin.... Despite the heavy odds against success, I certainly support these efforts, because of the philosophical import of any detection of a manifestly artificial signal.
6. Even if we couldn’t make much sense of it, we’d have learnt that “intelligence” wasn’t unique to the hardware inside human skulls, and had emerged elsewhere.
7. When we look at Andromeda, we sometimes wonder if there may be other beings looking back at us.
   Maybe there are.
   But on these remote galaxies there surely aren’t.  Their stars haven’t have had time to fuse pristine hydrogen into carbon, oxygen and silicon – the atoms needed for planets and life.
8. What about the far future?  Six billion years from now, when the sun dies,....
9. But what might happen still further ahead?.... The best long-range forecast, therefore, is that the cosmos will continue to expand, becoming ever emptier, ever darker and ever colder.
10. We can’t predict what role life will eventually carve out for itself: it could become extinct; on the other hand, it could achieve such dominance that it can influence the entire cosmos.
    The latter is the province of science fiction, but it can’t be dismissed as absurd.
11. After all, it’s taken little more than one billion years for natural selection to lead from the first multi-cellular organisms to Earth’s present biosphere (including us).

Other than the elevated language, this sounds like the kind of storytelling a shaman would tell gullible tribespeople around a campfire, or a Chaldean would explain to the Assyrian king and his lords to amaze them with the mysteries of the universe.  We need to think big picture, you know; Year 2010 A.D. is nothing in the big scheme of things, especially when you want to talk billions of years and the births and deaths of galaxies.  Rees is a blip on a screen of no consequence to the scientist in Andromeda who is 100 times his superior intellectually.  For all he knows, the Andromedans are creationists.
    With all due respect to Sir Rees and his education and accomplishments in science, what does he know about these things?  What does he know about life on Mars?  Nothing.  What does he know about the beings in Andromeda looking back at us?  Nothing.  What does he know about the first microseconds of the universe?  Nothing.  What does he know about what came before that?  Nothing.  What does he know about inflation?  Nothing.  What does he know about the universe six billion years from now?  Nothing.  What does he know about the interior of stars, the atmospheres of exoplanets, the hardware inside human skulls that give rise to the mind, the conditions for life, and whether those conditions exist in distant galaxies?  (We use the term “know” advisedly, because having theories about them is not the same as knowing first-hand.)  Nothing to very little.  If he restricted his science to empiricism, his essay would be very short, and very dull.  Speculating like a shaman is a lot more fun.  That does not make it truthful.  Wearing badges of authority, like advanced degrees, knighthood, the consensus, and the respect of one’s peers, does not confer truthfulness either.  Ancient authorities had their badges of honor, too.  Modern scientific authority is supposed to be derived from its rigorous, slavish dependence on experimental methods that are observable, testable, and repeatable.  OK, Dr. Rees, we’d like to see them.
    We have another challenge to Dr. Rees.  Our readers will notice that Darwinism is a linchpin of his argument – “it’s taken little more than one billion years for natural selection to lead from the first multi-cellular organisms to Earth’s present biosphere (including us).”  Yet he turned right around and validated intelligent design, by supporting SETI – “searches for transmissions that might be ‘artificial’ in origin.... ”  Why do you put “artificial” in quotes, Dr. Rees?  Define artificial.  In your world view, there is no such thing.  Everything has to be “natural” because it all came out of the big bang.  Oh, we get it; that’s why you also put “intelligence” in quotes later on – “Even if we couldn’t make much sense of it [i.e., the alien message to us], we’d have learnt that ‘intelligence’ wasn’t unique to the hardware inside human skulls, and had emerged elsewhere.”  So intelligence is not really intelligence; it’s just an artifact of hardware.  It just emerged.  How did that happen?  Was it a miracle?  Once it emerged, how was its power to connect to reality validated?  You talked about the “philosophical import of any detection of a manifestly artificial signal.”  What is philosophy?  Is it something that refers to that which is universal, necessary, timeless and certain – i.e., something prior to, and outside the big bang?  If not, if it “emerged” after the big bang, maybe it will evolve, too.  If it evolves, how do we know that the “truth claims” you allege today might not evolve into their opposites, such that a future Scientific Priest six billion years from now might proclaim as true that the big bang never happened, and Darwinism is a myth?  How do you distinguish a “manifestly artificial signal” from a natural artificial signal, if everything in your world view must be natural by definition?  Is your philosophy ultimately derived from hydrogen?  Then how can you possibly contend that it offers knowledge, whatever that is?  But if you aren’t offering knowledge, we’re not interested in what you have to sell.
    So let’s assess the credibility of Sir Martin Rees, Chief Priest and Knight of the Secular Cross of the Royal Empire of the United Kingdom.  He fancies himself a naturalist, but believes in miracles (emergence).  He fancies himself a Darwinist but believes in intelligent design methods (detection of SETI messages as “manifestly artificial”).  He is a scientist but spent 95% of his time talking about things with no experimental evidence to support them.  As a scientist, he is supposed to be an empiricist but referred to consensus, an argument from group authority.  He pretended to be intelligent, but put “intelligence” in quotes, indicating he does not believe intelligence is real.  So why is he trying to reason with us?  Can we not assume the poor soul is babbling like a madman?  His views are hopelessly muddled and inconsistent; he must be judged, therefore, a false prophet.  In the old days he would be stoned.  These days, they do it painlessly at the Royal Pub; take him away and give him a rocking good time with some adult beverages to put him out of our misery.

Footnote:  In an interview for New Statesman, Dr. Rees said that “creationists are people who are intellectually deprived.”  And why is that?  “They don’t appreciate the wonderful story that science has opened up for us.”  (By that he means molecules to man evolution, with Charles Darwin the Grand Poobah Storyteller.)  Well, Dr. Rees, if you’re talking stories, the Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians had a lot more sex and drama in theirs.  Even the interviewer was a little taken aback by his answer: “‘Story’ is an unusual way to describe it,” Sophie Elmhirst said (good for her).  Stick it to him, Sophie; as Stan Freberg remarked, “we’re tired of this Royal jazz.”  The Royal Society, of which you are president, founded largely by creationists, was built on the principle of “nothing on mere authority.”  Certainly you don’t want us to believe your big sweeping story on the basis of your authority or Darwin’s, do you, or because you can ridicule those who disagree with your story?  Stupid is as stupid does.  Sweeping away your critics with a cheap insult is not exactly the way to establish yourself as intellectually advantaged.  Maybe a little wisdom will emerge from your hangover.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • SETI • Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design

Dino-Feather Story Gets Fluffier     05/01/2010    
May 1, 2010 — Xing Xu is at it again, claiming that dinosaur feathers are found everywhere – in China, at least, where the bulk of “feathered dinosaur” claims keep turning up in farmyards.  The latest claim is that “Feather structures in maturing dinosaurs changed as they grew.”  This story is accompanied by artwork showing the critters looking as big and fierce as dinosaur monsters (see PhysOrg and National Geographic); in reality, though, they would have been as small as pigeons.
    Xu’s paper in Nature concerns two specimens of Similicaudipteryx, which is, obviously, similar to Caudipteryx.  Yet Caudipteryx has long been considered by some as not a dinosaur but a member of the class Aves (birds) that became secondarily flightless (see 12/27/2000, 01/25/2008, 01/21/2009).  Since none of the critics of dinosaur-to-bird evolution were allowed to rebut the claims of the paper in Nature, it is hard to have confidence this fossil has anything to say about a transition from dinosaurs to birds.
    Xu claims that the plumage patterns seen in these few fossils “suggests that early feathers were developmentally more diverse than modern ones” and have no counterparts in modern birds.  This is assuming that his team has correctly identified the fossils of extinct animals as members of the same species and can know their ages within acceptable margins of error without having living examples to observe.  Even if that is true, the results do not provide any simple story for the evolution of feathers.  Instead, it appears that modern birds’ moulting habits are simpler now than they were in the past.

The supplemental materials in Xu’s paper include a phylogenetic tree showing all the dinosaur groups that supposedly have feathers, and the feather types that have been found.  At first glance it looks impressive, but a closer look raises questions.  He has tyrannosaurids mixed in with the oviraptors and velociraptors and all these other animals.  The cladogram supposedly shows ancestral relationships, with feather types at the tips of each group.  You look at the feather types, though, and the clear bird feathers (pennate feathers with quills and barbs and barbules, and asymmetric flight feathers) have question marks by half the groups.  You read the caption and find his disclaimer that the evidence is questionable for these.  The ones that have the bird-like feathers could be said to be extinct bird lineages or secondarily flightless birds. 
    And then think about placing a T. rex anywhere near in the same classification scheme with little pigeon-size birdy things and you have to wonder if something isn’t seriously wrong here.  Classification schemes are, after all, man-made.  They don’t jump out of the data.  Fossils show mosaics of traits in complex ways.  We don’t have the soft tissues, the behaviors, and the environments to flesh out many important details.  Another group of scientists starting with different assumptions (shall we say, without evolutionary assumptions) could conceivably categorize these fossils in completely different ways.  Consider, for instance, that the grouping “maniraptorans” was concocted to include both birds and dinosaurs (01/29/2010), by the same people wishing to show they are evolutionarily related.  That raises charges of circular reasoning.
    Xu tries to answer the argument that some of the feather-like structures might have been flayed collagen, but we need to see the counter-arguments from Feduccia and the guys at University of Oregon (02/09/2010).  Nature, Science and National Geographic are giving way too much press to one side, to the Mr. Feathered Dinosaur guy Xing Xu.  This is not good science.  The whole story is not being heard.
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils