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Experimental evolution systems allow the genomic study of adaptation, and so far this has been done primarily in asexual systems with small genomes, such as bacteria and yeast.  Here we present whole-genome resequencing data from Drosophila melanogaster populations that have experienced over 600 generations of laboratory selection for accelerated development.  Flies in these selected populations develop from egg to adult ~20% faster than flies of ancestral control populations, and have evolved a number of other correlated phenotypes.  On the basis of 688,520 intermediate-frequency, high-quality single nucleotide polymorphisms, we identify several dozen genomic regions that show strong allele frequency differentiation between a pooled sample of five replicate populations selected for accelerated development and pooled controls.  On the basis of resequencing data from a single replicate population with accelerated development, as well as single nucleotide polymorphism data from individual flies from each replicate population, we infer little allele frequency differentiation between replicate populations within a selection treatment.  Signatures of selection are qualitatively different than what has been observed in asexual species; in our sexual populations, adaptation is not associated with ‘classic’ sweeps whereby newly arising, unconditionally advantageous mutations become fixed.  More parsimonious explanations include ‘incomplete’ sweep models, in which mutations have not had enough time to fix, and ‘soft’ sweep models, in which selection acts on pre-existing, common genetic variants.  We conclude that, at least for life history characters such as development time, unconditionally advantageous alleles rarely arise, are associated with small net fitness gains or cannot fix because selection coefficients change over time.

Our work provides a new perspective on the genetic basis of adaptation.  Despite decades of sustained selection in relatively small, sexually reproducing laboratory populations, selection did not lead to the fixation of newly arising unconditionally advantageous alleles.  This is notable because in wild populations we expect the strength of natural selection to be less intense and the environment unlikely to remain constant for ~600 generations.  Consequently, the probability of fixation in wild populations should be even lower than its likelihood in these experiments.  This suggests that selection does not readily expunge genetic variation in sexual populations, a finding which in turn should motivate efforts to discover why this is seemingly the case.

Natural selection is always presumed to be the wonder-worker that can produce eyes, ears, sonar, flippers, jaws, hearts, and brains with its gradual, step-by-step improvement of natural variation, without design (07/20/2010, 05/04/2010).  OK, where is it?  It doesn’t work theoretically (09/28/2010, 06/11/2010, 03/21/2010, 03/17/2003), it doesn’t work rhetorically (04/17/2010), it doesn’t work historically (08/05/2010), and it doesn’t work experimentally (09/22/2010).  It doesn’t work in the lab, and it works less in the wild.  Unless you include “reverse evolution,” (06/26/2010), it doesn’t work at all.  Game over, Charlie (05/14/2010).  Stop the hype (08/13/2010).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Genetics • Darwin and Evolutionary Theory

Some day this exuberant, over-the-top headlining will backfire on the scientific community.  Is Gliese 581g an interesting place deserving of more study?  Certainly.  So is Titan, or Venus.  Given the track record of SETI, or of finding life right here in our own solar system, one would think scientists would have learned a little restraint.  Undoubtedly Dr. Vogt is assuming that if life had been found there, it would have evolved there by a long process of chemical and biological evolution.  Given the track record of explaining life right under their noses with that assumption, one would think scientists would have learned a little restraint.  In both cases, one would have thought incorrectly.  The chances of finding hubris in a naturalistic scientist’s brain, however, is 100%.  There’s almost no doubt about it.
Next headline on:  Stars • Solar System • Origin of Life • Media

Are Macintosh and Forgan saying that aliens are unnatural?  Well, then, are humans unnatural, too?  Are intelligent signals unnatural?  If something is unnatural, does that imply it is designed?  What evidence would it take for someone to make a design inference?  “Even the smallest snippet from an alien broadcast could count as evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence,” the article said.
    This means that SETI researchers accept the design inference: “patterns” that have no known natural origin can be discerned by the human mind as having come from another mind – on purpose, by design.  Seth Shostak, Mr. SETI himself, tried to wriggle out of this conclusion but couldn’t (12/03/2005).  Why not just face the obvious and admit it?  We invite SETI researchers to join the Intelligent Design movement.  The only drawback is that they have not found evidence for their targets yet, while leaders of the I.D. movement have found plenty – their own genes, cells, bodies, and minds.
Next headline on:  SETI • Physics • Intelligent Design

Morphogenesis: Evolution of Form Solved?     09/28/2010    
Sept 28, 2010 — The body plans of organisms are hard to account for in linear strands of DNA.  How do you get a backbone, vertebrae, and ribs out of a chain of nucleotides?  Recognizing the mystery of morphogenesis (the origin of form), the director of the Synthetic Life Lab in New York, Stuart Pivar, has published an “Innovative solution to the evolution of form,” reported PhysOrg.  His new theory is “based neither on a genetic code nor on natural selection, thus contradicting the orthodox Synthetic paradigm that has dominated evolutionary biology for seven decades.”
    If it’s not neo-Darwinian, is it based on creation or intelligent design, then?  No way; “Nevertheless, this model offers an alternative naturalistic theory that can account for the origin of form without recourse to any form of creationism or supernatural intervention,” the press release ended.  “If it should gain widespread acceptance, this model would negate the creationist argument that science has no theory for the origin of complex life.”
    The essence of this promising theory that eluded da Vinci, Vesalius, Goethe, von Baer, D’Arcy Thompson and others, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology,¹ is “based on the premise that the body is a mosaic enlargement of self-organized patterns engrained in the membrane of the egg cell.”  The paper consists largely of drawings of egg cells morphing into limbs, skulls, hands, feet, vertebrae, ribs – all put together into a human skeleton.  One of his drawings is reproduced in the PhysOrg article.  The caption in the paper states, “The mutual rotation of the two toroidal spheres through two rotations implants the notochord and the nerve chord beneath the dorsal midline, causing the ribs to fragment.  The reassembly of the fragments forms the vertebrae and the somites, the latter forming the interior bands of muscles that encompass the body.”
    How does this become an exercise in astrobiology instead of a demonstration of embryonic development?  Pivar claims that his “hydrostatic model” gives a “causative” explanation of how body plans evolved, “independent of the environment, rather than the result of random errors in the genome.”  What is this hydrostatic model?  In short, “The body is a mosaic enlargement of the pattern of circumferential bands assumed by the columns and rows of molecules that comprise the egg cell membrane.”  Under its internal pressure, the egg cell assumes a toroidal shape that produces an incipient notochord.  Let’s let him describe what happens next:

The hypothesis presumes that, in response to physical forces, the molecules comprising the egg cell membrane become arranged in circumferential bands separated by polar meridians, subdividing the surface into trapezoidal plates, much like a geodesic globe of Earth.  Subject to deformation during subsequent hydrodynamic disruption, each of the plates will curl axially to become a bone of the vertebrate skeleton, the apical cap forming the skull.  This topological theorem predicts the form of the bones of the vertebrate skeleton and their configuration in the body with accuracy beyond the possibility of coincidence.

Surely he cannot be serious, can he?  Body plans are more than bones – what about the muscles, nerves, and organs that animate them?  Besides, most life forms are unicellular and invertebrate.  If he is suggesting a physical, mechanistic, natural-law explanation, why the diversity of body plans, especially in the Cambrian Explosion?  His drawings take known end points (a skull, a rib cage) and extrapolate them backward to known starting points (egg cells), with no explanation of how, mechanistically, the egg cell necessarily gets from there to here.  How do hydrodynamic deformations produce eye sockets and a jaw in a vertebrate skull?  He has no causal explanation; just his imagination.  Any set of n 7-year-olds could produce xn different drawings from the egg, where x is a positive integer from 1 to infinity, producing infinite bizarre end points from hydrodynamic forces on molecular bands in the egg membrane.
    If Pivar thinks he can pin all morphogenesis on initial conditions in the egg, he has merely displaced the puzzle into the egg.  How did the egg cell get so precisely designed to be able to generate such complexity and diversity?  This is no more an explanation than displacing the origin of life on earth to the assertion, “Aliens brought it here.”  OK, then, where did the aliens get it?  It’s a classic sidestep.
    The only way this silly hypothesis could get through peer review is that Darwinians are desperate.  They cannot answer the devastating critique of naturalism found in the second half of the film Darwin’s Dilemma, where the mind-boggling details of development were shown in a mind-boggling way (after the film gave airtight documentation of the sudden emergence of all the body plans of all the major phyla at the Cambrian Explosion).  Caught empty-handed, the naturalists have been driven to say something – anything, even cartoon diagrams – to fill in the void in their world view about how body plans arose.  Hypotheses this vapid, this hyped by the secular press as something that might “account for the origin of form without recourse to any form of creationism or supernatural intervention,” can only be interpreted as “something is better than nothing” – if you can call it something.
    “How life originated and evolved is arguably the greatest unsolved problem facing science,” they said.  “Thousands of scientists and scores of organizations and scientific journals are dedicated to discovering the mechanisms underlying this mystery.”  It’s not unsolved by science at all.  By naturalism, maybe, but not by science.  The science of intelligent design solves it perfectly.  Darwinian desperation at this fundamental level shows that ID is winning the evidence war.  Now on to the persuasion war.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Genetics • Dumb Ideas

This is an excellent companion to Expelled: No Intelligent Allowed (see 09/12/2009 Resource of the Week), which lacked sufficient time to document the connection from Darwin to Hitler.  In this documentary the documentation is lengthy and convincing.  The quotes by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her grandson about abortion are shocking, as are quotes by George Bernard Shaw and other secular progressives in the heyday of eugenics.  Quotes from Hitler’s own writings, and those of his aides, should dispel any myths that they were “Christian” in any conceivable sense; they may have had a pantheistic streak, but were thorough-going Darwinians and pagans in thought and act, devoid of any Judeo-Christian moral compass.  To them, natural selection was the law of nature to which all life, including humans, societies and nations, must bow.
    Production quality is good, but the documentary is long and mostly talk, though Todd Friel livens it up with enthusiastic stage questions and comments.  It’s probably best to use it as a series with Q&A and discussion after each segment.  The documentary divides nicely into three 30-minute segments, and the website has a printable study guide with discussion questions, bibliography and references to quotes cited in the film.
    One theme that comes through prominently is how the scientific community was a willing accomplice to all the worst of the social catastrophes that were rooted in Darwinism.  John West does a great job tying the consensus of science to the eugenics movement.  The American Museum of Natural History had an exhibit he describes, with the two founding fathers of eugenics prominently displayed in large statues at the entrance – Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin.  They knew the connection; why should anyone else doubt it?  Get this DVD and watch it.  It’s a great lead-in to the next story about embryonic stem cell research (below).  Put the quotes from the film next to today’s crybaby quotes by scientists about the need for federal funds to cut up human embryos, and connect the dots.  What hath Darwin wrought?  Rot.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Politics and Ethics • Media

As participants with a conflict of interest, ESC researchers should recuse themselves from discussions about ethics and federal funding of embryo destruction.  This is a matter for philosophers and theologians.  Notice that everyone has a philosophy and a theology – even atheists.  But there are some specialists, notably ethicists, historians and theologians, who have the background and training to assess human nature and the ethics of scientific decisions.  Bioethics is a hugely important topic these days with many subcategories beyond just ESC research.
    No amount of scientific research on embryos can address the ethics of doing what they can do.  The hubris and shameless emotional ranting of the scientific community (as legitimated by the journals) is all the more reason to discount their testimony.  Scientists can tell us they can build a bomb or cure a disease; they cannot tell us what we should do.  Curing a disease can be an ethical atrocity if done the wrong way (see parody in the 09/03/2010 commentary).
    Even less should scientists order John Q. Public to reach into his pockets and give them what they want.  That’s why we have a representative government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  Scientists, you are citizens, too.  Act like you have one vote, not a privileged, exalted, oligarchical position over the rest of humanity (03/12/2004).  You can state the facts as you see them, and make your case in the marketplace of ideas, but lay off the tantrums and accusations that anyone who disagrees with you is somehow a “religious fundamentalist” out to attack science itself.  In short, grow up.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Politics and Ethics

Mere Biochemistry: Cell Division Involves Thousands of Complex, Interacting Parts     09/25/2010    
Sept 25, 2010 — In biochemistry, the stem -mere means “part” (as in centromere, telomere) and -some means “body” (as in chromosome, ribosome).  Biochemists are learning that these cell organelles are not -mere bit parts, but -some fit bodies.

1. Telomeres and chromosomes:  PhysOrg reported that the chemical “caps” on the end of chromosomes, called telomeres, have a special code to keep them intact.  Scientists from Portugal and U of Indiana found that a histone tag near the telomeres keeps the DNA Damage team from tying separate chromosomes together – a response that would spell death for the cell.  “It’s amazing,” a Portuguese scientist remarked, “but it appears to be this single change that underlies the cell’s ability to distinguish the end of the chromosome (i.e. a telomere) from a break in the middle.”  Described as “like the plastic caps on shoelaces,” telomeres not only keep chromosomes intact, but are also implicated in the aging process as they wear off, or in cancer when they go awry.
2. Ribosome quality control:  Cells need to search and destroy nascent proteins that fail to have a “stop code” when being translated in the ribosome.  PhysOrg reported that a quality control mechanism in bacteria that corrects or deletes failed polypeptides in the ribosomes operates similarly, but is unrelated to, the system in eukaryotes.  Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute used a “homology approach” to identify a protein in yeast that performs the same inspection role on nascent proteins that a different protein plays in bacteria.  “The [bacterial and eukaryotic] mechanisms are very different, but the concepts are remarkably similar,” one researcher said.  “—that’s the beauty of it.”  We know all about that.  Search engines are a concept, but the manifestations (Google, Bing) can be very different.
3. Centromere code:  It goes without saying that heredity depends on accurate copying of DNA at each cell division.  PhysOrg reported on a finding at Pennsylvania School of Medicine that showed how the “histone code” epigenetically (i.e., apart from DNA inheritance) identifies the center of each chromosome – the centromere – so that the spindle apparatus accurately connects to it during cell division (see also 05/06/2010 and 12/17/2007).  Science Daily described how a “centromere identifier attracts other proteins, and in cell division builds a massive structure, the kinetochore, for pulling the duplicated chromosomes apart during cell division.”  The article quoted a researcher happily saying, “Our work gives us the first high-resolution view of the molecules that control genetic inheritance at cell division.  This is a big step forward in a puzzle that biologists have been chipping away at for over 150 years.”
4. Telomere linemen:  Researchers at the Wistar Institute identified another key player in the cell’s task of keeping its chromosome ends (telomeres) intact.  A two-part protein named Cdc13, which has a “crucial support role in maintaining and lengthening telomeres,” is able to simultaneously grip the tail end of the telomere while recruiting the telomerase enzyme to add more cap units.  Emmanuel Skordalakes of Wistar had an interesting analogy to describe the action: “You can think of Cdc13 as if it were you hanging on to the edge of a cliff, with one grip stronger than the other,” he said.  “You’re going to keep that strong hand on the cliff’s edge while your weaker hand reaches into your pocket for your phone.”
5. Centrosomes untangled:  Centromeres, centrosomes; what’s the difference?  Centromeres are the center parts of chromosomes where attachments are made to pull paired chromosomes apart during cell division.  The centrosome is also involved in cell division, but it is a “complex made up of several hundred different proteins,” reported Science Daily, that includes the centrioles and the spindle apparatus that winches the paired chromosomes apart.  In attempting to dissect differences between normal divisions and faulty ones, German biochemists investigating centrosomes in fruit flies “identified more than 250 different proteins making up this complex.... They found a whole series of proteins responsible for the separation of chromosomes, number of centrosomes and their structure.”  They hope their detective work will “unravel regulatory networks in the future, which will help to target and interfere with the division of cancer cells.”
6. Switched-on mitosis:  A casual look at cells in identical circumstances seems to show them dividing at random.  Some scientists have preferred to think there is something inherent in a cell that tells it when to divide.  There is: a toggle switch.  Scientists at Duke University found a switch in the cell that determines which cells will divide, and which ones won’t.  PhysOrg said this “gene circuit” acts like a “bistable switch.”  The article explained, “The gene circuit is in all cells and can tell identical cells to live in two states simultaneously, either on or off.”  When the signal to divide comes, some respond, and some don’t.  This helps reconcile competing hypotheses about how cells know when it’s time to divide.  “Bistability is not unique to biology,” the article said.  In electrical engineering, for example, bistability describes the functioning of a toggle switch, a hinged switch that can assume either one of two positions – on or off.”  The bistable switch in the cell determines which cells will be the dividers and which will not.  “Genetic switch underlies noisy cell division” was PhysOrg’s headline.
7. Coded chromosomes:  Cell division is like a symphony, reported Science Daily, describing what researchers at Rockefeller University have found.  They found hard evidence for the “histone code hypothesis,” the idea that tags on the histone proteins on which DNA is wound provide an independent epigenetic code, distinct from the DNA code, that affects heredity (for historical background, see 11/04/2002, 02/16/2004 and 07/26/2006).   “The orchestration of the exact timing and localization of the vast array of molecules and processes involved in reproducing the chromosomes is one of the basic wonders of biology and is at the core of both healthy living and diseases such as cancer, that arise when the process goes awry,” the article said.  “We cracked one code,” Hironori Funabiki, head of the Laboratory of Chromosome and Cell Biology at Rockefeller, said, “but there are yet many to be decoded to understand how chromosomes orchestrate mitosis.”

This is some of the de facto intelligent design research taking place around the world.  Keep pouring on the evidence: nothing in biology makes sense in the darkness of evolution; nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

1. Spider power:  Several reports continued to praise the wonder of spider web silk.  Scientists have known for years that it is stronger than steel and Kevlar, the material in bullet-proof vests.  Now, a world-record orb web spinner has been found with silk ten times as strong.  Live Science said the Darwin bark spider (Caerostris darwini), a new species found in Madagascar, spins silk twice as strong as any previously studied silk, and twice as elastic.  This “toughest biomaterial ever seen” is 10 times stronger than Kevlar.
       Not only that, the spider manages to spin its giant webs across rivers, streams and lakes up to 25 meters across.  “Our initial reaction was simply 'Wow!'” said one researcher.  Another commented that the discovery “opens up new technological applications for spider silk that capitalize on C. darwini silk’s truly impressive combination of light weight and high performance.”
       National Geographic posted a photo gallery that shows giant webs that could have been the inspiration for Shelob’s lair in Lord of the Rings.  The spider catches large mayflies, but scientists believe that bats or small birds could get entangled in the large, super-strong webs.  Learning how this little spider, less than an inch long, can spin such massive structures will probably keep the National Geographic Society busy for awhile.
2. Bird power:  An old joke has a businessman saying, “I just flew in from Chicago, and boy, are my arms tired.”  Flying like a bird has been a dream ever since man watched the effortless flight of our feathered friends.  Now, for the first time, human-powered flight has been achieved in a new “ornithopter” that slowly flaps its wings as the operator pedals a cycle inside a compartment.
       The Snowbird, invented by Todd Reichert of the University of Toronto, “represents the completion of an age-old aeronautical dream.”  Reichert piloted and powered the test flight of Snowbird and was one of its lead developers.  “Throughout history, countless men and women have dreamt of flying like a bird under their own power, and hundreds, if not thousands have attempted to achieve it,” he said.  This represents one of the last of the aviation firsts.”
       To really enjoy this achievement, watch one of the videos available at the BBC News and Live Science #1 and #2.  It’s a pretty clumsy contraption compared to a sparrow or pelican, but getting a man with a 0.3 horsepower human “engine” off the ground with flapping wings is quite a sight.
3. Plant champions:  Leaves act, in a way, like perfect solar cells.  Why not follow their example?  “A team led by a North Carolina State University researcher has shown that water-gel-based solar devices – ‘artificial leaves’ – can act like solar cells to produce electricity, an article on PhysOrg began.  “The findings prove the concept for making solar cells that more closely mimic nature.  They also have the potential to be less expensive and more environmentally friendly than the current standard-bearer: silicon-based solar cells.” 
       Will our homes some day be independently powered by rooftops of leaf-like solar systems?  Dr. Orlin Velev of the University wants to “learn how to mimic the materials by which nature harnesses solar energy.”  One challenge is to mimic the self-regeneration capabilities of plants.  The other is to mimic their efficiency.  While hedging his bets at this point about the potential for human technology at this early stage of development, he said, “we believe that the concept of biologically inspired ‘soft’ devices for generating electricity may in the future provide an alternative for the present-day solid-state technologies.”  His team has even shown the ability to incorporate chlorophyll, plant’s light-snatching molecule, into his arrays, along with synthetic light-sensitive molecules.  Science Daily accompanied their write-up with a photo of leaves uplifted under the sun.
4. Plant champions II:  It’s not just their light-gathering power that has some scientists excited about leaves.  Their unique shapes offer interesting possibilities for invention.  Scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany succeeded in taking a plant stem with leaves and replacing all the cells with iron carbide, a magnetic material.  Why?  “Biology’s intricate forms provide a wide range of templates for a variety of applications,” the article explained.  Specifically, “Nature’s fine structures are also suitable for technical applications – they exist in a myriad variety of forms, they usually display high mechanical stability and, due to their large surfaces, provide suitable templates for catalysts and electrodes.”  The structure of the leaves was preserved down to the last detail.  Zoe Schepp, who carried out the experiment, said, “What is important about this study is that it shows how we can exploit nature’s formal variety to produce wafer-thin metal carbide structures in one simple step.”
5. Gecko champion:  Our biomimetic friend the gecko is back with a new trick.  Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found away to use the sticky-foot mechanism to print electronics on a variety of surfaces, like clothes, plastic, and leather.  See the story at Science Daily.  Will electronic clothes be in our future?
6. Cell champions:  Most cells have “primary cilia” that act as tiny antennae, sensing their environment.  Science Daily and PhysOrg talked about a “cilia revolution” in materials science where inventors are using that strategy to build materials that can respond to thermal, chemical and electrical stimulation.  “University of Southern Mississippi scientists recently imitated Mother Nature by developing, for the first time, a new, skinny-molecule-based material that resembles cilia, the tiny, hair-like structures through which organisms derive smell, vision, hearing and fluid flow,” Science Daily said.  The “Man-made, hair-like structures [are] poised to change industry paradigms,” PhysOrg headlined.  The “artificial cilia” produced by USM scientists respond to acidity, temperature and radiation by bending over and fluorescing blue.  The fact that the researchers can control this behavior opens up “unlimited possibilities for future use.”  The article continued, “Scientists long imagined what could be done if they could engineer cilia for other organic and nonorganic uses.  But creating them solely belonged to the life nurturing processes of nature, until now.”  Of course, they are not quite as elegant and exquisitely controlled as living cilia, but “There is no limit to dreaming up applications for such a material,” the article ended.  The press release originated from the National Science Foundation.
7. Jellyfish power:  Plants don’t monopolize the solar power market.  Some jellyfish contain green fluorescent protein (GFP) that holds promise for better solar cells, too.  “When exposed to ultraviolet light, the GFP absorbs photons and emits electrons, which travel around a circuit to produce electricity,” an article on New Scientist reported.  A team at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, is excited about the possibility “to create a biological fuel cell that generates electricity without the need for an external source of light” by using the ingredients of biological light.  Their “jellyfish biophotovoltaic device” might be able “to power nano-devices embedded in living organisms,” the lead author said.  The design is simple, green, and efficient.
8. Beetle meter:  Nature last week (470: p. 370, 09/23/2010) included a short research highlight about scientists at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, who imitated the way the Hercules beetle changes color in muggy weather.  “Inspired by the natural design of the Hercules beetle,” the short article said, “researchers have created a film that changes colour according to the ambient humidity.”  What’s it good for?  “A sensor made from the material would not need electricity and could be used in small medical or agricultural devices.”
9. Bee democracy:  Can biomimetics inform politics?  Thomas D. Seeley, a professor of neurobiology and behavior, thinks so.  He has written a new book on “Honeybee Democracy,” reported PhysOrg.  What do our honey-making friends have to teach us?  Seeley has observed the bees’s decision-making behaviors and observed that they tend to achieve optimal decisions, even though no one individual has a complete view of the situation.  “Indeed, humans can learn much about democratic decision-making by looking at bees, Seeley said.  If the members of a group have common interests, like the bees in a swarm, then the keys to good collective decision-making are to ensure the group contains diverse members and an impartial leader, and conducts open debates.”

Did the spider hunters help their Darwinist case at all with their ending paragraph?

In summary, we hypothesize that the world’s longest orb-webs and toughest silk coevolved within the genus Caerostris as species began to occupy a novel habitat – the flyways above rivers.  This spectacular adaptation puts C. darwini at a considerable advantage over other forest dwelling species of orb spiders, by allowing Caerostris to ensnare abundant insects or other prey flying over water.  Perhaps most importantly, our study demonstrates how understanding the ecologies of spiders can play a critical role in biomimicry.  The discovery of C. darwini’s incredibly tough dragline silk followed from our initial observations about its extraordinary orb webs and greatly expand our understanding of the potential performance of silk fibers.

The bluffing here is odious.  Darwinism had nothing to offer this discovery or the practical uses that might come from it.  It wasn’t evolutionary theory that played the “critical role” in understanding the extraordinary orb webs this spider makes.  It was ecology.  Ecology as a science has no necessary connection to Darwinism.  The team found this spider and predicted its webs would be strong, based on the habitat, and they were.  What’s Darwin got to do with it?  They produced no evidence of a mutation or selection effect that would have produced this extraordinary material.  Evolution was only a distraction, a tumor, a parasite, a name-dropping gimmick to give their dictator, King Charles, some credit for a story that had everything to do with intelligent design, not evolution.
    OK, enough of Darwin.  We love biomimetics here because the stories are usually so interesting, amazing, useful, promising, and de-Darwinated (that’s like decaffeinated or detoxified).  We’ve been reporting biomimetics stories for years, but many of them seem to predict future inventions that have not yet made it to market.  Here’s a project: List products people are using today that have a plant or animal inspiration.  In a sense, all aircraft could qualify, because the Wright brothers studied birds for ideas.  Synthetic sponges seem to imitate their natural counterparts.  We know that Velcro got its start when a man was curious how cockleburs stuck so effectively to clothing.  There are three examples to get you thinking.  This website lists ten interesting “product designs that are inspired by nature,” but not all of them are in common use yet.  Send in your examples of biomimetic items you use, so that we can assemble a list of useful products we all use that had natural design, not Darwin, as their inspiration.
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Terrestrial Zoology • Plants • Birds • Marine Biology • Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

The discovery in question of several molecularly and cellularly different cortical areas in Broca’s language region and in neighbouring areas shows that our faculty of speech is actually embedded in a much more differentially developed brain landscape than we have believed for the past 150 years.  The findings are not just important for language research and the diagnosis and treatment of strokes.  They also alter the neurobiological basis for current discussions on the evolutionary development of language, speech training and language disorders.

In conclusion, the novel parcellation of the ventro-lateral frontal cortex and Broca’s region provides a new anatomical basis both for the interpretation of functional imaging studies of language and motor tasks as well as for homologies between human and macaque brains.  It will, therefore, contribute to the understanding of the evolution of language.  The analysis of the receptor distribution sheds new light on the organizational principles of this region.  This direction is a further step from a rigid and exclusively cytoarchitectonic parcellation scheme as introduced by Brodmann 100 years ago towards a multimodal and functionally relevant model of Broca’s region and surrounding cortex.

So these findings “alter the neurobiological basis for current discussions on the evolutionary development of language,” the press release said.  How do they alter them?  Let’s be specific.  Do they falsify, destroy, demolish, render irrelevant, capsize, ruin, annihilate, crush, nuke, extinguish, dismantle, ravage, suppress, repudiate, abolish, supersede, invalidate, abrogate, cancel, impair, mutilate, expunge, eradicate, dissolve, or obliterate them?  Use your Broca’s region, if you “understand” with mere neurons, and speak up.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mammals • Mind and Brain • Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionists Promise Without Delivering     09/22/2010    
Sept 22, 2010 — Some science news reports lead the reader to think that some major new understanding into evolution is under the headline, but they often fail to deliver. 

1. Darwinian abomination:  Science Daily promised, “Toward Resolving Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’: Patterns of Flower Biodiversity Point to the Importance of Having ‘Room to Grow’.”  The article was accompanied by a photo of a cheerful biologist, Dr. Jana Vamosi [University of Calgary], looking like she had a breakthrough answer to Darwin’s great mystery about the origin of flowering plants and their diversity.  Below the headline, though, was nothing of the sort.  Her team found some measurements of biodiversity as a function of living space, but that’s all.
       Yet she claimed that “the findings of this research mostly shed light on what produces the world’s diversity,” without any hint of where flowering plants came from and how they evolved into orchids, daisies, tomatoes, buffaloberries and a host of deciduous trees.  To say that living space “drives the incredible diversity of flowers” would be like saying the multiplicity of stars drives the emergence of aliens.
   
2. Abomination, take two:  An article in Science Daily from the Journal of Botany tried to explain the emergence of land plants, but ended up comparing living plants.  “By comparing green algae and bryophytes, [Linda] Graham [U of Wisconsin, Madison] and her co-researchers obtained insight into the evolutionary hurdles that plants needed to overcome to transition successfully to life on land, and how early plants’ success influenced carbon cycling.”  Identifying the hurdles does not generally win races, unless the racer has the goods to get over them.  The article gave no clue about how plants even knew hurdles existed, let alone succeeded in surmounting them.  The article merely assumed evolution without evidence: “All plants descended from a group of ancestral green algae, whose modern representatives thrive in aqueous environments.”
3. Crow bar:  Last week, Science published another paper on the amazing tool use of New Caledonian crows.¹ (For background see 05/26/2009).  “Tool use is so rare in the animal kingdom that its evolutionary origins cannot be traced with comparative analyses,” the abstract began, tantalizing the reader that insight into this mystery was at hand.  “Valuable insights can be gained from investigating the ecological context and adaptive significance of tool use under contemporary conditions, but obtaining robust observational data is challenging.”
       The authors took up the challenge, but only delivered this tidbit: tool use seems to help the crows’ diet – “just a few larvae can satisfy a crow’s daily energy requirements, highlighting the substantial rewards available to competent tool users.”  The rewards are clear, but how did tool use evolve?  It just did.  They asserted, “basic stick tool use is heritable, and hence an evolved adaptation.”
       This team also thought that opportunity alone produces the evolutionary goods.  Humans brought candlenut trees to Malesia, they noted; “In light of our findings, it seems possible that the anthropogenic introduction of this tree species to New Caledonia created foraging opportunities (i.e., lipid-rich, but hidden, larvae) that, presumably in combination with other factors, led to the rapid evolution of tool use in NC crows.”  Possibly, presumably, in combination with other factors; does that lead to anything?  Does that constitute an evolutionary explanation?

This is how the Darwin Party creates the illusion of progress, pushing a dead hulk without an engine and announcing it as a powerful sports car.  It’s fakery running on dogmatism, masquerading as science.  These articles are representative of the tricks of the charlatans.  They must be exposed. 
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Plants • Birds • Dumb Ideas

More Neanderthal Promotion     09/22/2010    
Sept 22, 2010 — It’s a good time to be a Neanderthal.  You’ll get more respect than ever before from paleoanthropologists.  The latest example, published in PhysOrg, is headlined, “Neanderthals more advanced than previously thought.”  Julien Riel-Salvatore [U of Colorado at Denver] says he is “rehabilitating Neanderthals” by challenging a half-century of “conventional wisdom” that portrayed them as numbskulls.  His studies in Italy show Neanderthals to be creative, adaptable and successful, coming up with tools, art and hunting implements on their own without “modern human” help.  “We are more brothers than distant cousins,” he thinks.  See also the 05/08/2010 entry.
Update:  National Geographic just published a strange new idea: that volcanoes killed off the Neanderthals.  Ker Than explained that major volcanic eruptions near the Caucasus Mountains so damaged their habitat they were unable to bounce back.  This flies in the face of a long-standing theory that modern humans proved too brainy for them and pushed them off the world stage.  And didn’t Neanderthals cover a wide area from northern Europe to the Middle East?  Other anthropologists were quoted with objections to the new idea.

It’s going to take a long time to undo the Neanderthal myth because of the Law of Inertia for Falsified Theories (01/15/2010).
Next headline on:  Early Man • Mind and Brain • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution

The mechanism proposed by Leonid Sazanov’s group at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge is “almost completely unexpected,” says Faculty Member Thomas Meier.  Unlike the ATP synthase, which “drives protons across the membrane in a rotary turbine-like motion,” writes Faculty member Nathan Nelson in his review, the transfer of electrons from NADH cause a slight widening of one part of the complex, forcing the long helix to move like the a [sic] row of pistons that shove protons across the membrane.

The overall architecture of this large molecular machine is now clear.  F-ATPase [ATP Synthase] has been compared to a turbine.  In a similar vein, complex I seems to resemble a steam engine, where the energy of the electron transfer is used to move a piston, which then drives, instead of wheels, a set of discontinuous helices.

The membrane-spanning enzyme known as complex I couples the movement of electrons to that of protons as a way of converting energy.  Crystal structures suggest how electron transfer drives proton pumping from afar.
    Complex I is one of the energy-converting enzyme complexes found in the membranes of the cell’s fuel factories, the mitochondria, and was the last such complex without a structural portrait.  But in an epoch-making paper in this issue, Sazanov and colleagues¹ describe X-ray structures of bacterial complex I, and report that it has an unusual ‘piston’ mechanism for controlling proton movement across mitochondrial membranes (see page 441).

So what can evolutionists do with the discovery of rotary engines and piston engines in the simplest forms of life, all the way up to humans?  They just attribute it all to the remarkable creative power of the goddess Evolution.
    A Nature Education article by Nick Lane (cf. 08/11/2010) referred to the piston paper by Efremov et al, saying “Again, the structure betrays the mechanism – in this case not a rotary motor but, even more surprisingly, a lever mechanism not unlike the piston of a steam engine (Figure 2),”  But then, Lane invoked Michael Russell’s lame hydrothermal waste dump myth (02/15/2008) – you remember, the one that falsified the primordial soup myth (02/05/2010) – to draw a parallel from simple proton gradients in deep sea vents to the proton gradients that drive pistons and rotors in the cell.
    That’s like comparing rolling stones to automobiles, or clouds to aircraft.  Look at his convoluted reasoning to get from rolling stones to automobiles without intelligent design:

There are, of course, big open questions – not least, how the gradients might have been tapped by the earliest cells, which certainly lacked such sophisticated protein machinery as the ATP synthase,” Lane admitted.  “There are a few possible abiotic mechanisms, presently under scrutiny in Russell’s lab and elsewhere.  But thermodynamic arguments, remarkably, suggest that the only way life could have started at all is if it found a way to tap the proton gradients.

  So tell us, Nick, did Life try to tap into these gradients on purpose?  After all, if it “found a way,” it must have been looking for it.  In Lane’s vision quest, Life, in some nebulous form lacking ATP and a proton gradient, studies those deep-sea vents with furrowed brow, asking “How can we tap into that?”  But wait – without a way to tap into it already, it would have no energy to look for, discover, and harness the proton gradient.  Well, that must imply, then, that all the machinery just “arose” all together, fully formed, by chance.  Maybe it was a miracle: “the acquisition of mitochondria and the origin of complexity could be one and the same event,” he said.
    Only an evolutionist gets away with this kind of nonsense in scientific lit.  But that’s not all.  Lane proceeded to extend his mythology to all complex life, with all its organs and functions, speculating how it all originated with proton gradients.  In the end, though, he had to admit the whole idea was a myth:

The question is, what kind of a cell acquired mitochondria in the first place?  Most large-scale genomic studies suggest that the answer is an archaeon – that is, a prokaryotic cell that is in most respects like a bacterium.  That begs the question, how did mitochondria get inside an archaeon?  The answer is a mystery but might go some way toward explaining why complex life derives from a single common ancestor, which arose just once in the 4 billion years of life on Earth.

Well, at least he recognized he left some “big open questions” begging.  Nothing more needs to be said.  He just shot any claim to science out from under his own feet and showed himself belonging to a “mystery” cult, along with the editors of Nature, who, by printing his speculations, became willing accomplices in promoting the mystery cult.
    Take Nick Lane’s freak show (08/11/2010) to Mad Magazine where it belongs.  The rest of us are enjoying this confirmation of intelligent design at the smallest scale of life.  You’re running on pistons and rotary engines.  Cool!  Lane gets a teeny bit of credit for sharing one amazing factoid in his article about the electrical potential in your body set up by these proton gradients: “A membrane potential of 150 mV across the 5-nanometer membrane gives a field strength of 30 million volts per meter – equivalent to a bolt of lightning.”  You’ve got lightning in your tank.  Hot!
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Exodus Theory Inherits the Wind     09/21/2010    
Sept 21, 2010 — An old theory that the Exodus story occurred because of natural winds has surfaced again.  It seeks to provide a purely natural explanation for what the Old Testament records as a miracle.
    Two atmospheric scientists from Boulder, Colorado, Carl Drews and Weiqing Han, referenced a theory by Doron Nof (see his website) that briefly made a splash in 1992 on TV with model demonstrations of high winds blowing back the waters off a submerged sandbar.  Some believers tended to think this might give a plausible explanation for the Exodus story, while unbelievers tended to discount the Exodus story as elaboration of a natural phenomenon.  Drews and Han drew from Nof’s idea, which was elaborated on by Russian scientists Naum Voltzinger and Alexei Androsov, with new models and experiments: “A suite of model experiments are performed to demonstrate a new hydrodynamic mechanism that can cause an angular body of water to divide under wind stress, and to test the behavior of our study location and reconstructed topography.”  They also pointed to a new site for the crossing on the western Sinai Peninsula rather than the Gulf of Aqaba.  Between the Lake of Tanis and the Nile, they calculated, a land passage 5 km wide might have opened up for 4-7 hours under winds of 28-33 m/s (62-74 mph), but they admitted, “these stronger winds may render walking too difficult for a mixed group of people.”  Their theory was published in PLoS One.¹
    As to whether this provides a plausible natural explanation for the Red Sea crossing, Drews and Han were restrained in their paper: “Wind setdown is the drop in water level caused by wind stress acting on the surface of a body of water for an extended period of time.  As the wind blows, water recedes from the upwind shore and exposes terrain that was formerly underwater.  Previous researchers have suggested wind setdown as a possible hydrodynamic explanation for Moses crossing the Red Sea, as described in Exodus 14.”²  But in the popular press, they drew the connection more directly.  Drews was quoted in Live Science saying, “People have always been fascinated by this Exodus story, wondering if it comes from historical facts.  What this study shows is that the description of the waters parting indeed has a basis in physical laws.”  Similar, in Science Daily, the subtext was that the Biblical miracle can be explained naturally: “Computer Modeling Applies Physics to Red Sea Escape Route” was its headline; Live Science titled its story, “Parting of Red Sea Jibes With Natural Laws.”  Indeed, Brett Israel in his write-up was ready to exchange Gods: “Mother Earth could have parted the Red Sea, hatching the great escape described in the biblical book of Exodus, a new study finds.”

There’s baloney in this story, but first, some disclaimers.  It’s true the authors and reporters never denied the Exodus story was miraculous or called it a myth.  It’s also true that Biblical miracles can be accomplished with natural means (example: the Jordan crossing made possible by a landslide upriver, as described in Joshua 3).  These become, then, miracles of timing of natural events.  For all we know, the authors respect the historicity of the Bible’s account and may even wish to shed light on its miraculous character.  Lastly, studying the power of wind and its ability to create land bridges under specific circumstances is honorable scientific practice.
    The baloney is in two inferences: (1) that explaining a Biblical story “naturally” is superior to accepting a miracle.  That assumption begs all kinds of questions: what is meant by natural and miracle?  What is meant by a scientific explanation?  There are nuances of coordination between natural law and divine action that are glossed over in the broad-brush assumption that natural law trumps miracles (see joke).  A false impression is promulgated that all Biblical miracles can be subsumed under “natural explanations,” with a corollary that the Biblical accounts themselves are extensions of normal, natural phenomena that ancient people exaggerated and interpreted as miracles.
    The second problem is this: it would take more faith to believe the “natural” explanation in this tale than the straightforward Biblical account in Exodus 14.  Yes, God did use a “strong east wind all night” as part of his action (v. 21), but the Bible goes on to say the waters became “a wall to them on their right hand and on their left” (v. 22).  Moreover, the timing of this amazingly specific wind (if that is all that was involved) – a finely-tuned wind that could blow waters left and right and maintain dry land in the midst of the sea (v. 22) without blowing women and children into the water with hurricane force gusts – was so precisely timed as to begin when Moses stretched out his hand over the sea (v. 21), allow all the Israelites to cross, then stop exactly when Moses stretched out his hand again (v. 26), drowning the entire army of Pharaoh.  Is the theory of Drews and Han, and their predecessors, somehow an improvement?  By any account, it’s a miracle anyway taking their theory, so where is the net gain in “natural” explanation?
    The Bible is explicit that this was an actual miracle under the direct purpose and intervention of God.  Throughout the Old Testament, the prophets and psalmists recalled this extraordinary example of God’s power to protect His people, by opening a path in the “great deep” for them to cross.  If such things happened normally from time to time, any Jewish teen could see through it, telling Mom and Dad, “What’s the big deal?”  It would be a miracle if the Exodus story lasted more than a generation.  If you are a Bible believer, avoid getting sucked into the idea that these so-called “natural” explanations of Biblical miracles help make them more plausible.  At best, they still require a lot of faith and leave many questions begging.  At worst, they are paths to unsophisticated skepticism and leave many questions begging.  Be more charitable than Science Daily and Live Science; feed the beggars.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Geology and Earth Science

Tyrannosaurs, the group of dinosaurian carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and its closest relatives, are icons of prehistory.  They are also the most intensively studied extinct dinosaurs, and thanks to large sample sizes and an influx of new discoveries, have become ancient exemplar organisms used to study many themes in vertebrate paleontology.  A phylogeny that includes recently described species shows that tyrannosaurs originated by the Middle Jurassic but remained mostly small and ecologically marginal until the latest Cretaceous.  Anatomical, biomechanical, and histological studies of T. rex and other derived tyrannosaurs show that large tyrannosaurs could not run rapidly, were capable of crushing bite forces, had accelerated growth rates and keen senses, and underwent pronounced changes during ontogeny.  The biology and evolutionary history of tyrannosaurs provide a foundation for comparison with other dinosaurs and living organisms.

Several easily degraded soft tissues, such as cells, blood vessels, and collagen, have been reported from a specimen of Tyrannosaurus (15, 35).  Some of these findings have been met with skepticism (36), and they remain to be validated by other research groups.  However, if correct, they promise to give radical new insight into the process of fossilization and may allow for molecular phylogenetic analysis of these extinct taxa (37).

The Smithsonian piece contained the expected Two Minutes’ Hate against “young-earth creationists,” talking about how horrified Schweitzer gets when these ignoramuses “misrepresent” her findings, “twist your words and they manipulate your data,” which “drives Schweitzer crazy,” as if it’s their fault these soft tissues were found in the bone.  Not even terrorists get the abuse that creationists endure from academia.  Despite the rhetoric, the Smithsonian article provoked many comments from Darwin skeptics, some wise, some otherwise.
    Though Schweitzer is a Christian, she’s the schizophrenic type that evolutionists can tolerate (cartoon): “For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science.  After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence.”  So religion has no evidence but faith, and science has no faith but evidence.  How nice and neat (see 01/06/2008, and appeasement and false dichotomy in the Baloney Detector).  A true “scientist”, according to them, must have faith that evidence always will somehow lead to exaltation of their idol, Darwin-Baal.
    Evolutionists are tragically comical sometimes.  In this case they act like the musicians on the Titanic still entertaining the guests as the ship goes down.  Only this time, they are not playing Nearer My God to Thee, but Everything’s All Right:

Sleep and I shall soothe you
Distract and dogmatize you, 
Molecular phylogeny for your hot forehead
oh then you’ll feel
Everything’s all right
Yes everything’s fine;
Fossils are cool and consensus is sweet
For the shock in your eyes 
Close your eyes
Close your eyes
And relax
Think of nothing tonight.
[Chorus]
Everything’s all right
Yes everything’s all right yes.

Escapism is the cure for worry about secular paleontology’s timeline falling, never to rise again.  We say, wake up!  If Schweitzer’s data have been met with skepticism, fine; resolve it.  If the claims remain to be validated by other research groups, what are they waiting for?  Do it (02/22/2006, 11/23/2006).  You can shut up the creationists by falsifying the soft tissue evidence or else explaining, with preferably a demonstration, how blood cells and flexible tissues could survive for 65 million years.  But don’t give us a song and dance. 
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Dating Methods

Why do we keep finding bigger and better animals in the fossil record?  That doesn’t sound like evolution.  As for the millions of years and dinosaur heritage talk, see the 05/10/2010 entry.
Next headline on:  Birds • Fossils • Amazing Facts

Synonymous Codons: Another Gene Expression Regulation Mechanism     09/19/2010    
Sept 19, 2010 — Some words in English have alternate spellings, but sound the same.  If the sound is the same, how would a recording device tell them apart?  Would it make any difference?  It shouldn’t, but now scientists are realizing that genetic codons spelled differently can influence the protein formed – even when the spellings, called “synonymous codons”, produce the same amino acid when translated.
    Suppose you are a prompter at a spelling bee.  You read the word "aneurysm" aloud as the next word to be spelled.  One student spells ANEURYSM, the next spells it ANEURISM.  Since both forms are acceptable according to the dictionary (though the first is more common) each student should be graded as correct.  But imagine that the judge, listening to the second spelling and not as familiar with it, has to check the dictionary before announcing her decision.  Now suppose that the slight time delay affects what a reporter has time to write before rushing his story to the press.  The resulting story could differ substantially, even though both spellings are, for all practical purposes, equivalent.  Something like that happens in the genetic code, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, publishing in Science.¹ 
    There are 64 possible triplet codons in the DNA code (table), but only 20 amino acids they produce (chart).  As one can see, some amino acids can be coded by up to six “synonyms” of triplet codons: e.g., the codes AGA, AGG, CGA, CGC, CGG, and CGU will all yield arginine when translated by the ribosome.  If the same amino acid results, what difference could the synonymous codons make?  The researchers found that alternate spellings might affect the timing of translation in the ribosome tunnel, and slight delays could influence how the polypeptide begins its folding.  This, in turn, might affect what chemical tags get put onto the polypeptide in the post-translational process.
    In the case of actin, the protein that forms transport highways for muscle and other things, the researchers found that synonymous codons produced very different functional roles for the “isoform” proteins that resulted in non-muscle cells – beta-actin progressing to the sites of cell movement at the membrane, and gamma-actin staying in the interior, “in dense non-branched networks and long contractile stress fibers that impart morphological stability and support cell adhesion.”  Though both forms got “arginylated” with an arginine tag after translation, the beta-form appeared to start folding earlier, producing a slightly different shape that affected other post-translational modifications, thus affecting its functional role in the cell.  The gamma form also got tagged with ubiquitin, targeting it for earlier degradation in the proteasome.
    The authors proved that it was the different codon spellings that produced these changes by modifying the codons in both genes with their look-alike synonyms and watching the outcomes.  Sure enough, the beta-actin gene produced a protein that acted like gamma-actin when spelled the gamma way, and the gamma-actin gene produced a beta-actin-like protein when spelled the beta way.  The authors extended the principle they discovered to say, in conclusion, “This mechanism may be used not only with actin isoforms but also with other closely homologous but selectively arginylated proteins.”  As a result, an alternate spelling difference in the DNA code can result in different functional outcomes for two isoforms of actin, even though their amino acid sequences are essentially identical (98%).  This amounts to a new mechanism for regulation of the genome and proteome (the set of proteins in the cell).
    Ivana Weygand-Durasevic [U of Zagreb, Croatia] and Michael Ibba [Ohio State], commenting on this finding in the same issue of Science,² recognized it as a fundamental discovery: “This is an unexpected example of proteins whose properties are determined at the nucleotide rather than the amino acid level, forcing a reassessment of what defines a synonymous change in a gene sequence.”  In their conclusion, they repeated, “Whatever the exact mechanism, the discovery of Zhang et al. that synonymous codon changes can so profoundly change the role of a protein adds a new level of complexity to how we interpret the genetic code.”
    For other recently-discovered regulatory mechanisms in the genome and epigenetic factors affecting function, see 08/09/2010 bullet 2, 08/02/2010, 07/31/2010, 07/24/2010, and 06/24/2010, or search for the words regulation, gene expression, or epigenetic in the Search Bar.

The mismatch of 64 codons to 20 amino acids has struck some geneticists as wasteful.  “Degenerate” is the term used to describe mismatched codes that do not show a one-to-one correspondence.  The finding described above may change that view.  Perhaps all those synonyms have functional purposes after all.  If so, it suggests that synonymous mutations might be more destructive than thought, even though the same amino acid sequence is produced in translation, and even though there may be some tolerance to synonymous mutations (i.e., they might not result in the death of the organism).  Design theorists might find some functional role for adaptation at the micro-evolutionary level (where no new genetic information is added) where synonymous mutations might be switched on by epigenetic factors from cues in the environment.  There are several ways this finding can enlighten design thinking while causing new strains for evolutionary theory.
    The authors did not comment on how this regulatory system might have evolved, other than to state that the two forms of actin are “homologous,” or presumably descended from a common ancestral form.  But that’s a circular argument for common descent, because it assumes that sequence similarity is evidence of common descent.  It could be evidence of common design.  An ancestral cell would need the two functions simultaneously: motility at the cell membrane, and network maintenance in the interior.  Arguing that one evolved from the other begs the question of how the functions arose in the first place.
    Each “reassessment” of our knowledge of the genetic code leads to more functional complexity.  That’s not evidence for evolution, but for intelligent design. 
Next headline on:  Genetics • Cell Biology • Amazing Facts

Elementary schools converted into nursing homes.  Lonely only children coddled by parents and grandparents.  A generation in which men seriously outnumber women.  China’s one-child policy may have slowed population growth in the world’s most populous country.  But it has also produced a rapidly aging population, a shrinking labor force, and a skewed sex ratio at birth, perils that many demographers say could threaten China’s economy and social fabric.
    As the most spectacular demographic experiment in history, the one-child policy is unprecedented in its scope and extremity.

To implement the policy, the government beefed up its birth planning infrastructure, adding thousands of workers and launching propaganda campaigns.  Enforcement was flawed from the beginning: The central government assigned stringent birth quotas to local governments but left them to shoulder a portion of the costs.  Some local officials intent on meeting targets forced pregnant women to abort and sterilized men against their will.  Others issued offending parents outrageous fines to recover program costs.
    The drive sparked a backlash, fueling discontent among peasants.  It also led to a rash of female infanticide among Chinese hoping to make their sole child a boy—a prelude to sex-selective abortions that later became widespread.

He [Mao] wasn’t alone in worrying about population growth.  In Western countries, too, public health breakthroughs and falling mortality rates had led to a fear of overpopulation, sparking a wave of neo-Malthusianism that culminated in the controversial 1972 report The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome, an international group of scientists.  Doomsday projections found their way to China.  “Developed countries spread Club of Rome thinking to the developing world,” says Liang Zhongtang, an economist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences who participated in deliberations over the one-child policy.
    In China, neo-Malthusianism resonated with a government intent on boosting economic growth.  The aim was to manipulate population dynamics under the planned economy.

Chairman Mao was one of the most evil men the world has ever seen.  The influence his beliefs and actions had on hundreds of millions of people yearning to breathe free is beyond appalling.  And this story is not the worst of the nightmares traceable to that evil, evil dictator.  When his policies led to a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese (because he trusted the science charlatan Lysenko), he didn’t accept responsibility for any of it.  Hvistendahl says, “attention focused on population as the culprit, and Chairman Mao Zedong, who had once encouraged large families, shifted course.”  The people would now suffer for his mistake with the “most spectacular demographic experiment in history,” the one-child policy adopted by his successor.  Mao died in luxury, accompanied with wine, women and song, as his victims starved and rotted in hard labor camps.  He never took any responsibility for murdering 77 million of his own people (11/30/2005), but paraded his big-brother visage throughout the country, forcing his subjects to adore him like a god.
    He was no god; he was a devil.  Mao justified his political horrors with “scientific” ideology.  He venerated Lenin, Stalin, and Darwin, building a political apparatus – and guiding the most populous nation on the planet – around their views.  Darwin, in turn, was strongly influenced by the know-nothing Thomas Malthus, a preacher of sorts dabbling in a subject he did not understand.  It resulted in Darwin’s vision of a secular world uncared for by God, a world of natural selection, a cruel world of struggle and hunger and death, pitiless in its indifference to the suffering of the individual.  Too bad Malthus was not good at math and economics.  Who told him population grows exponentially but food supply grows linearly?  Nobody.  Malthus made it up!  Who told Olsder that game theory proved China would have a population catastrophe?  Nobody.  He made it up!  These big liars and their willing dupes have the blood of millions on their hands.
    This story is a lesson not just to China watchers but to the whole world.  The consequences of flawed ideas can be far-reaching, emotionally wrenching, and cruel.  They can be matters (literally) of life and death.  The true stories that could be told by Chinese couples deprived of their natural rights to life, liberty and family are too horrible to contemplate.  Can you hear their cries?  Can you see their tears?  The conclusion piles insanity on cruelty: political inertia, propaganda and indoctrination have made this horrendous demographic experiment very difficult to stop.
    If China’s people had been given the liberty to enjoy their natural rights endowed by their Creator, it’s likely there never would have been the feared population bomb.  (It didn’t happen in Europe and America, despite the Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich.)  People with freedom to explore their potential, especially those taught to value work and improve their lives and society, become wealthier (wealth generation, remember, is not a zero-sum game; the scientific findings of Faraday and Morse, for instance, created millions of new jobs).  Free people develop technology and science and better medicine.  Free people don’t have to depend on lots of children for their future, hoping that a few infants might survive the perils of childhood diseases to assist them in old age.  If anything, in Europe and America, the problem is that birth rates are too low.  It’s the repressed poor in third world dictatorships that tend to have high birth rates.
    Yesterday was Constitution Day in America (see US Constitution Initiative website and the National Archives Charters of Freedom).  If China, desiring to modernize in the 1970s, had followed the example of the American Constitution, with its foundation of individual liberties granted by God, its people could have avoided so much heartbreak and terror.  Unless we learn the hard lessons of this story, we are doomed to see even worse horrors from any big government bent on an agenda trusting the bad ideas of Darwin and Malthus.  Never assume that past dictatorships have exhausted the horrors in the Darwin Pandora’s box.  A new documentary, What Hath Darwin Wrought, has just come out.  Watch the trailer, and spread the message, before a world government picks up where China left off.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Darwin and Evolutionary Theory • Politics and Ethics • Philosophy of Science

Are planetary scientists coming closer to “the truth” about our moon’s origin?  The data are certainly getting better.  But infrared maps and crater size-distribution statistics do not interpret themselves.  They need to be incorporated into a paradigm (interpretive framework with its ancillary assumptions).  That paradigm has shifted again, according to Greenhagen.
    The paradigm has not shifted to revolution status, evidently.  Scientists are at the stage of admitting more anomalies in the current paradigm.  According to Thomas Kuhn, this is a routine part of normal science.  Only when the anomalies accumulate to the point of unwieldiness, or younger scientists enter the field with maverick ideas, can the paradigm get replaced by a new paradigm in a “scientific revolution.”
    The current paradigm includes a time framework and numerous unproveable assumptions.  Entrenched assumptions currently include the Age of the Solar System (A.S.S.) of 4.5 billion years (the Law of the Misdeeds and the Perversions that cannot be altered), the reliability of radiometric dating along with its copious assumptions about initial conditions, the hypothesis the moon formed when a Mars-size body impacted the Earth, the Late Heavy Bombardment, the reliability of crater count dating, and more.  Interpretations made about the moon (our nearest neighbor) are often extrapolated to other bodies in the solar system.
    The moon, though, is a very complex body.  There are big differences between the maria and the cratered highlands, some of which approach crater saturation (which implies that any history before saturation has been erased).  There are old-looking things and young-looking things side by side.  There are differences in surface composition, texture, regolith depth, and elevation.  There is evidence of ongoing activity today (08/23/2010), including young-looking lava flows (11/12/2008), recent cratering (05/21/2008), and transient lunar phenomena (07/12/2007) witnessed for decades by amateurs.  Why isn’t the moon stone cold dead after 4.5 billion years (01/25/2009)?  How could gas and lava get to the surface now (11/09/2006)?  Why is the far side of the moon so different from the near side?  Why does the terrain differ so much from place to place? 
    To handle the anomalies, a host of special conditions and one-time events need to be invoked (02/19/2007).  The Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) itself is an ad hoc proposition, specifying unique conditions that presumably sent main-belt asteroids toward the earth once but never again (a Jupiter-Saturn tango?  Uranus and Neptune passing by on their way out?  a unique swarm of comets?).  One must not be fooled into thinking that giving a speculative idea a name like LHB somehow confers plausibility on it.  The impact hypothesis for the moon’s origin is even more highly contrived, requiring just-right conditions for the impactor’s size, speed, composition and angle of attack (01/26/2007, 11/04/2002).  Divination must be used (not with LRO’s Diviner infrared instrument, but the occult kind) to envision histories forever buried beneath craters and the consequences of unobserved secondary and tertiary craters.  Head et al assumed certain patterns from secondary craters, but how do they know that large secondaries were not launched into orbit, to land with a bang centuries or millennia later?  Tweaking assumptions can have drastic effects on conclusions.
    Bro, can youse paradigm?  Scientists are often oblivious to the assumptions they spend on paradigms.  Within the guild, everything seems intuitively obvious.  Anomalies are mere puzzles that will be solved within the consensus, they glibly presume (03/31/2005).  What is needed is thinking outside the box, if for no other reason that to study the soundness of the box.  Why, for instance, must scientists take a bottom-up strategy for origins?  Is it somehow more blessed to explain everything up from particles to people, from hydrogen to high-tech, than from top-down design?
    Top-down thinking certainly has the Second Law of Thermodynamics in its favor.  For an example of outside-the-box, top-down thinking about the moon, you might want to examine the new updated edition of Our Created Moon by Whitcomb and DeYoung, available on Amazon.com.  It explores the design purposes of the moon as well as analyzing flaws in secular origin theories.  Other top-down analyses of the moon include Tas Walker’s analysis of fault scarps (9/2/2010 at CMI), an analysis of transient lunar phenomena by Dr. Don DeYoung in Journal of Creation April 2003 (free access to PDF file), videos on “Our Created Moon” by Dr. DeYoung viewable on Answers in Genesis, and an article by DeYoung on ICR comparing bottom-up and and top-down views on the origin of the moon.
    Regardless of world view, everyone should take a look at our amazing moon this weekend for “International Observe the Moon Night” (see Space.com).  Think about not only its beauty and rarity (05/04/2006), but also another powerful reality: without that moon, we could not exist (07/13/2008, 12/24/2008).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods

Many Stars Are Planet Destroyers     09/16/2010    
Sept 16, 2010 — A NASA study is being called “Bad news for planet hunters.”  A survey of stars in globular clusters has not turned up the number of planets expected.  Astronomers conclude that stars in these presumably ancient clusters have long since devoured their planets or sent them careening out into oblivion.
    The leading popular science outlets, including Science Daily, PhysOrg and Live Science covered the story that was published in Astrophysical Journal.  Since at this time it is simpler to look for “hot Jupiters” (large planets close to the star), and none were found in the large globular cluster 47 Tucanae, the research team concluded that they have been destroyed.  They believe that violent tidal forces caused early planets to spiral into the stars or be flung out of orbit.  It also seems apparent that planet-building material has been depleted around these stars.  “Globular clusters turn out to be rough neighborhoods for planets,” said Brian Jackson [NASA-Goddard], “because there are lots of stars around to beat up on them and not much for them to eat.”
    Speaking of eating, Space.com added the thought that when alien worlds collide, the chances for finding life in extrasolar systems dwindle.  Based on Spitzer Space Telescope data, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics publishing in Astrophysical Journal Letters believe that the large amounts of dust around tight double-star systems they observed are also evidence for destroyed planets – planets that collided with each other.  Dust should be long gone in these stars’ life cycles, they surmised.  That dust is still present implies that planetary collisions “must be kicking up fresh dust.”  The four dusty binaries Spitzer has found so far implies also that “the observations are not a fluke: something chaotic is very likely going on.”  Consequently, double stars “may not be the best places to look for extraterrestrial life,” the article said. The study leader called their results “real-life science fiction” if there is such an oxymoronic category.

Results like these are statistical and preliminary, so no firm conclusions should be drawn.  SETI hopefuls can argue that there are quintillions of other stars out there.  Still, both types of systems (globular cluster members and tight binaries) are assumed to be ancient.  There’s no reason that these stars should lack planets, if planets are a natural consequence of stellar evolution.  If so, the lack of planets around them suggests that planets have limited lifetimes.  It could be argued that binaries and globulars have more destructive tidal forces than single stars like our sun, meaning that the multitude of single stars may still have long-lived habitable zones.  Perhaps.  The most interesting aspect of the reports may be that survey results were not what the scientists predicted.
Next headline on:  Stars and Astronomy • Solar System • Physics • SETI

We’ve harped on consensus many times, so no long reruns here, but science is supposed to be about truth based on evidence, not majority rule.  There are times when a consensus, with its presumed authority of the collective, can actually hold back scientific progress (e.g., 04/30/2009).  This is especially true for areas of science that are inference-based and non-repeatable.  Recall novelist Michael Crichton’s blistering attack in 2003 to a Caltech audience on the notion of consensus (12/27/2003); the whole address is available in PDF form from Stephen Schneider’s Stanford website.
    The philosophy of science of the pro-consensus reporters is appallingly shallow.  They picture scientists as ruling elites, the Knowers of the Culture, and lay people as ignorant scum.  There’s plenty of scum to go around.  It’s not only lay people who have cultural biases.  Those biases are nearly impregnable in certain “scientific” circles and situations.  Science becomes corrupt when it demands allegiance on the basis of sheer numbers or authority.  Remember that one of the great physicists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman, joked that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
    For a good introduction to philosophy of science that reveals the difficulty of establishing infallible trust in the scientific community, we recommend again Dr. Jeffrey Kasser’s lecture series (see 04/18/2009 Resource of the Week) and Dr. Stephen Goldman’s lecture series, Science Wars (12/19/2009 Resource).  Even if you have no reason to doubt the consensus, at least be knowledgeable of the philosophical issues involved.  Without a doubt, many scientists are honest and above reproach, particularly in the less politically-charged areas of research.  Many scientists are sincerely looking for the truth.  So are many in the public.  You could be, too.  Orient yourself to truth, not consensus.
    Related reading:   See also the 11/25/2008 entry for examples of how wacky some scientific ideas can become, the 11/15/2010 entry on the inertia of specious theories, the 03/17/2006 on ways scientific journals can perpetuate false ideas, and the 04/02/2010 commentary for a list of 30 factors that can distort consensus science into groupthink.  Other commentaries on philosophy of science can be found at 05/13/2010, 04/30/2009, 10/29/2008, 06/28/2008 on “Yellow Science”, 08/13/2007, 03/19/2007.  More can be found using the search phrase, "philosophy of science".  Lest you think it doesn’t matter, keep in mind this maxim from Greg Bahnsen: “Everyone does philosophy, but not everyone does it well.”  Know what you believe – and why you believe it.
Next headline on:  Philosophy of Science • Politics and Ethics • Education

The causes of such a pattern might be unique to time and place, and may include a combination of (1) lack of continental vegetation, (2) clustering of continents near the equator, (3) increased continental weathering rates, (4) widespread uplift and erosion associated with regionally extensive and relatively synchronous orogenesis [mountain-building] recording supercontinental amalgamation, and (5) production of significant relief, providing stream power for large-scale river systems.

Composite explanations are generally avoided in science because of Ockham’s Razor: “plurality should not be posited without necessity.”  If a scientist explains the yard being wet by saying, “It might have rained, or the sprinklers might have come on, or a water-spraying truck drove by,” the power of the explanation is decreased.  Here, the scientists admitted that something extraordinary – something possibly unique in the geologic record – occurred to move sediments so far at one time.  (Notice, incidentally, this amounts to a rejection of uniformitarianism.)  Nothing like that is seen happening today.  Special pleading is also to be avoided when explaining things scientifically, but isn’t that what they just did?  They did not explain with reference to natural law and observable, repeatable processes.  They said, essentially, that an extraordinary one-time effect might have been caused by five things or any combination of them.  On the surface of it, the explanation sounds weak.
    A scientific explanation is strengthened when a single cause explains multiple effects.  Suppose your yard is wet, some objects are knocked over and a swath of wetness covers several homes in a line.  Which explanation is better?  (A) House #1 turned the sprinklers on, house #2 had a watering truck drive by, house #3 got rained on and house #4 had an above-ground pool that leaked, and the houses just happened to be in a line.  (B) There was a brush fire nearby and a water-dropping plane doused the area.
    A global flood would produce all 5 effects that the geologists listed as causes: (1) a lack of continental vegetation, because it had been stripped away at the onset of the flood; (2) clustering of continents near the equator, because creationists generally agree the continents split apart as the fountains of the great deep opened; (3) weathering rates increased dramatically (well, duh); (4) widespread uplift and erosion associated with regionally extensive and synchronous mountain building occurred (because the mountain ranges formed as a consequence of the dividing continents, and erosion was intense); and (5) production of significant relief, providing stream power for large-scale river systems, because the new mountains caused dramatic runoff as the waters receded, transporting soft sediments over vast distances.  One more for good measure: a global flood would explain the “high degree of sediment mixing and homogenization” of sediments they observed.
    Notice that the secular geology explanation cannot account for increased weathering rates, widespread erosion, homogenization, synchronous mountain building and large-scale river systems (cf. 04/30/2009, “Are Secular Geologists Ready to Consider a Global Flood?”).  In the current example, the composite, special-pleading scenario in the paper leaves much to be desired as a scientific explanation.  Biblical creationists can point to a single cause that explains all the effects.  They have eyewitness testimony, too: Yes, uh... Noah.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods • Bible and Theology

Archer Fish See Like People     09/13/2010    
Sept 13, 2010 — An archer fish can spit out a man’s cigarette.  That’s actually a humorous scene at the end of a video clip on The Scientist that talks about the amazing eyes of this underwater sharpshooter.  New research shows that these freshwater fish, known for their ability to spit bugs off bushes, have a mammal-like ability to pick out their targets against various backgrounds.
    A paper in PNAS describes the experiments that proved archer fish possess “orientation saliency,” a “fundamental building block of vision” that allows the brain to discern a target from its background.¹  The Scientist said,

Up till now, researchers believed that the ability to see objects positioned out of line with their backgrounds, known as orientation saliency, was only found in mammals, which have specialized neurons in their brain that allow the animal to perceive these off-kilter objects.  But recent anecdotal evidence suggested that archer fish are also capable of picking out askew objects, such as insect prey, from complex visual backgrounds.

Another intriguing question raised by our findings is the implications of the evolutionary relationship between orientation saliency in the two species investigated.  If orientation saliency mechanisms in archer fish and humans are homologous (i.e., derived from common ancestry), then the fact that this functionality has been preserved for so long implies that these mechanisms are of high functional importance and that no better alternatives have been found during the course of evolution.  This further suggests orientation saliency as a fundamental building block for visual representations and efficient visual processing.  Similarly, if orientation saliency mechanisms in archer fish are analogous to those of humans (i.e., reflect independently convergent evolutionary processes), it would strongly support the notion that orientation saliency has computational optimality in a wide variety of contexts.  Hence, both evolutionary alternatives suggest that orientation-based saliency constitutes a universal building block for efficient visual information processing.

Evolution dogmatists are funny sometimes.  The most embarrassing facts fail to dislodge their beliefs.  They’re like bugs wrapping themselves with velcro around a twig, lest the facts, like the spit-cannons of an archer fish from the observable world below, knock their feet out from under them.
    Consider how silly both evolutionary explanations are.  If the trait “arose” in some common ancestor of fish and humans (perhaps some acorn worm), what ancestor was it, and why did the worm need orientation saliency?  Why doesn’t every animal from the ancestor up have it?  Without a natural law demonstrating a path from need to function, it’s an appeal to a miracle anyway.
    If, on the other hand, evolution “gave rise” to the trait independently by “convergence,” is that not an appeal to two miracles?  A miracle can be defined in the materialist world as any improbable situation that requires a leap of faith to accept the evolutionary explanation.  It’s a corollary of the Stuff Happens Law (SHL) that says, “Sometimes amazing stuff happens.”  (The SHL, in philosophy of science, represents the absence of scientific explanation.)
    The more amazing things that happen – e.g., flight six times (insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, humans with their flying machines, and flying fish, 09/11/2010), the more the miracles like human-like sight in archer fish, the more evolutionary theory is lacking in explanation, the more they reach ecstasy.  It gives the Darwiniacs even more reason to sing their praises to Evolution, that miracle worker from which, and to which, and for which, are all things.
    Now go watch the video clips on The Scientist and think like a rational human being.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Mammals • Mind and Brain • Darwin and Evolution • Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

Saying evolutionarily conserved is like saying “aimlessly straight.”  It’s a meaningless phrase we should not be duped into thinking signifies anything logical.  This discovery emphasizes once again that things do not just happen; specific parts that are functionally exquisite are necessary for function.  One question the research team appeared to overlook, though, is what controls MEC-17?  If this enzyme puts up the signs, who is the foreman?  We are certainly not consciously controlling much of this in our bodies.  Most of it happens without our knowledge.  It’s like the infinite regress question: who watches the watchers?  The hierarchy of design must eventually stop at a Designer who is omniscient and omnipotent.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mind and Brain • Cell Biology • Health • Amazing Facts

World’s Top Chemists Can’t Match a Plant     09/12/2010    
Sept 12, 2010 — There’s a race on: a race to get cheap energy from the sun.  “The design and improvement of solar cells is one of the most vibrant areas of science,” said the BBC News, “in part because sunlight is far and away the planet’s most abundant renewable energy source.”  Two recent articles show that top labs around the world have not been able to do what plants do with such seeming ease under the sun.
    The BBC News article explores one approach: harvesting real photosynthetic enzymes from plants and employing them on a scaffold of carbon nanotubes.  Michael Strano of MIT and his team have succeeded in getting the enzymes, lipids and surfactants to self-assemble on nanotubes, a promising step that may allow for solar cells that both harvest light and can repair themselves.  Oxygen, unfortunately, is very damaging to solar cells.  “There’s a kind of a horse race among scientists around the world to make the highest efficiency cell, but very few people are asking what happens with that cell when you plug it in for a few hours or for a week or for months.”  Obviously a short-lived efficient cell is no good.  Despite Strano’s advances in mimicking self-repairing structures, “the efficiency of the cells as designed is just a tiny fraction of that provided by the current best solar cells,” the article noted.  Still, plants give him hope that a solution will be found: “What our paper is good for is starting to think about device lifetime and borrowing concepts from nature.  Can we make cells that have an infinite lifetime?”
    A different approach is to imitate what photosynthetic cells do using synthetic materials.  New Scientist reported that chemist Daniel Gamelin at the University of Washington is building on a previous synthetic water-splitting discovery to find ways to mass produce tiny arrays of them, get the cost down and the efficiency up while improving device lifetime.  Meanwhile, a team led by another scientist, coincidentally named Dr. Sun, is at work in Stockholm, Sweden experimenting with different kinds of electrodes that produce more-desirable hydrogen gas instead of hydrogen ions.  Unfortunately, “the efficiency is abysmal” for these and all other electrodes tested so far, said rival John Turner in Colorado at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  Dr. Sun would be happy to get 10% efficiency – far below the near-100% efficiency plants get from the sun. Turner has achieved 12% efficiency, but his electrodes are only stable for a few days.  (The best solar cells achieve 27% efficiency.)
    Getting efficiency, durability and low cost in one device is, so far, out of reach.  That’s why the photo in the New Scientist article of green leaves under the bright sun, with its caption “Catching up with nature’s innovation,” remains tantalizing but frustrating.  “Take sunlight, add water, and there you have it: free energy,” the article teased.  “Plants have been doing this for quite some time, splitting water’s hydrogen apart from its oxygen, but our efforts to turn water into a source of free hydrogen fuel by mimicking them have borne no fruit.”

Even if their efforts do bear fruit some day, the next trick – bearing fruit, with its seed in itself, after its kind – would make electrolysis look like a fruitcake.  Stories like these are important to remind ourselves that the wonders in nature are far more marvelous than we realize.  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, cheap imitation that falls far short of the goal only accentuates the perfection of the original, like a bunch of sports fans with vuvuzelas trying to play a Mozart symphony.
    Plants (even the measliest weeds in your yard) are light-years ahead of human science.  They split water with ease, at near 100% efficiency in ambient temperatures (09/16/2004, 02/10/2010, bullet 1, 05/09/2007), with self-repair (06/29/2010), self-defense (09/13/2006), sunscreen (08/22/2002, 06/23/2006), and automatic response to vastly different light levels and temperatures (01/24/2005, 11/28/2007, 10/13/2008, 05/13/2008).  On top of all that, they then package their technologies in tiny seeds launched into the air or soil or water (06/16/2009, 06/02/2009, 05/11/2007), where they can take root and grow into copies of themselves.  Until you can mimic that, scientists, don’t tell us plants evolved by blind, unguided processes (01/17/2010, 03/23/2009).  Even if you ever succeed (03/27/2010, bullet 2, 01/12/2010, bullet 3), you will have only illustrated the necessity of intelligent design to account for the exquisite engineering we observe in living things.
Next headline on:  Plants • Physics or Chemistry • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

It is a pleasure to report good scientific work that is not dependent on Darwinian storytelling (cf. 09/10/2010).   Most of the elements of classic science are here: noticing an interesting phenomenon, observing it carefully, asking questions, searching existing literature, proposing an experiment to gather more detailed data, obtaining specimens, designing an experimental apparatus, running controlled experiments and taking measurements, evaluating the findings, publishing, and suggesting applications for the benefit of humanity.  What’s missing is Darwin worship, thank God.
    The original paper had no use for evolutionary theory.  The authors stayed out of political trouble by donating the required pinch of incense to Emperor Charlie: “the flying fish has evolved to have good aerodynamic designs (such as the hypertrophied fins and cylindrical body with a ventrally flattened surface) for proficient gliding flight,” they said, but the emphasis of even that statement was clearly on the design, not the evolution.  From then on, they left the Charlie Temple turnstile behind, and focused on the good engineering (intelligent design) of their fish.
    They did not even try to speculate on the origin of the adaptation, other than to say, “Although reasons for the flight of flying fish have been suggested (i.e. escape from underwater predators or saving of transport cost) (Rayner, 1986Go; Davenport, 1994Go), the exact reason is still not clear.  Nevertheless, their behavioral adaptation for flight is quite unique.”  Those statements would be just as comfortable in a creation paper.  They dodged the temptation to tell an evolutionary just-so story (see next entry), and focused instead on the design.  And thankfully, we were also spared a miracle story about “convergent evolution,” or the genes for flight being pushed back to some imaginary ancestor of fish and birds.  It takes discipline to avoid falling into these Darwin traps.  Engineers are comfortable with the concept of intelligent design.  The authors work for the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Institute of Advanced Machinery and Design at Seoul National University.
    Does design-focused research of the living world produce good science?  Here was one more great example.   Maybe some day we’ll be able to buy cars that can sprout wings and glide across a lake – thanks to flying fish and design-conscious science.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Evolution Storytellers Unrepentant     09/10/2010    
Sept 10, 2010 — Evolutionists have been criticized for telling “just-so stories”¹ for decades and decades, even by other evolutionists (see 08/08/2010), yet the storytelling continues, as recent examples in the news media illustrate.

1. Blame Mom:  In its “Science News” category, Science Daily trumpeted the headline, “Acting Selfish?  Blame Your Mother!”  In the article, we are told, “The fact that our female ancestors dispersed more than our male ancestors can lead to conflicts within the brain that influence our social behaviour, new research reveals.”  And what did the Oxford scientists use for evidence?  Very little: “They found that because, historically, women moved about more than men, and so are less related to their neighbours, our paternal and maternal genes are in conflict over how we should behave – with our paternal genes encouraging us to be altruistic whilst our maternal genes encourage us to be selfish.”  Before now, you may have thought that men tended to be the wanderers, or the more selfish.  Not according to this evidence-deprived tale.  The scientists did not prove a relationship between any gene and selfishness, or between any gene and any behavior, for that matter – even less that Mom’s genes are more selfish than Dad’s.
       Oxford zoologist Andy Gardner went further.  He even evolved the proverbial cartoon demon and angel on the shoulder: “This leads to conflicts over social behaviour: the genes you receive from your father are telling you to be kind to your neighbours, whereas the genes you receive from your mother, like a demon sat on your shoulder, try to make you act selfishly.”  Gardner did not consult his mother for her opinion on this story.  Maybe she would have cast her husband in the demon role.
       Science Daily printed this story without any critical analysis whatsoever, basically just regurgitating a press release from the University of Oxford that, curiously, illustrated the theory with a contrived photo of a demon and an angel on a hapless man’s shoulders, whose expression suggests he is a witless dupe of conflicting genetic voices in his brain.  Apparently, the Oxford team did not apply their theory to their own motivations for writing the story in the first place.
2. Thank Mom:  Redeeming dear mother, New Scientist gave some hairy ape-mom of past eons appreciation for bequeathing us with large brains.  Michael Marshall wrote, “Thank mothers for large ape brains.”
       For evidence, he cited a study by two London profs who compared brain size with metabolic rate for hundreds of marsupials and placental mammals (we are the placental type).  “Placental babies are connected to their mothers via the placenta for a long time,” Vera Weisbecker [U of Cambridge] explained, conveniently failing to explain why inside connections are superior to outside connections like a pouch and a nipple.  From there she launched a story: “So if she has a high metabolic rate, the baby is more likely to benefit.”  Those poor kangaroos and wallabies are left behind as big-brain wannabees.
       Marshall continued, “By contrast, marsupial babies are born while they are still very small, then spend a long time feeding off their mothers’ milk – a slower way to grow a large brain,” he said without providing a graph of lactation vs brain development.  “Placentas offer a continuous supply of rich nutrients” he said, without providing a table of comparative nutrient richness of placentals vs marsupials.
       Problem: not all nutrient-enriched placental mammals have big brains.  “However, the pair found no difference in the average brain sizes of marsupials and placental mammals – as long as they excluded primates,” Marshall admitted.  The placental-vs-marsupial distinction appears to have just dropped out of the story as irrelevant.  Solution: change the plot.  “These, it seem [sic], got their disproportionately large brains from a double maternal boost.  They are supplied with large amounts of energy by their mothers during gestation, and then receive additional months or even years of care after birth.”  Funny the kangaroos never thought of that.  Doesn’t Dad get any credit?
3. How the animal got its personality:  Whenever an evolutionary story begins with “How... ” there is a risk of sounding like Kipling’s “How the Camel Got Its Hump.”  New Scientist published its latest entry in, “How animals evolved personalities.”  Notice that the question was switched from “Did personalities evolve?” to “how did they evolve?”
       Max Wolf at the Max Planck Institute took up the story.  For evidence, he played video games: he “created simple simulated animals with personalities that were either consistently aggressive or meek, or flipped between the two.”  Presumably he applied a little intelligent design to do this – maybe even a little moral judgment.
       As Wolf took his sim-lambs and sim-wolves and pitted the aggressives against the meeks, the latter did not inherit the sim-Earth, “until Wolf introduced a new one that could learn about the behavioural patterns of others.”  Without explaining the evolution of learning, he found that was the “Aha!” moment.  “‘Learners’ and those with a consistent personality wiped out animals whose behaviour was not consistent.”  Well, it’s all about survival of the fittest, not consistency, you know.
       But modern evolutionists are a kinder, gentler bunch.  They view cooperation as Darwin’s fairy godmother.  “These types together formed a more stable society because the learners could adjust their behaviour to that of the others, and so avoid costly conflict,” the article ended.  “The study shows that sociality could be a strong factor in the evolution of personality differences, says Sasha Dall of the University of Exeter, UK.”  A strong factor?  Are there others?
4. How the leader got his authority:  Appropriately, Anjana Ahuja”s article on “The natural selection of leaders” in New Scientist begins, “Imagine this.”  From then on, imagination is the key to her story: “In our new book, Mark van Vugt at VU University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and I propose that leadership and followership behaviours can be traced to the earliest days of our species,” she said, having observational access only to living populations, not those in the earliest days.  “Given that all human groupings – be they nations, gangs or cults – have leaders and followers, and that these behaviours appear spontaneous, our thesis is that leadership and followership are adaptive behaviours.”  If evolution is the only game in town, that follows naturally: they are adaptive, not subject to moral assessment.
       And what evidence does Ahuja provide to prove her proposition?  Evolution itself: “In other words, they are behaviours that evolved to give our ancestors a survival advantage (our book’s title, Selected, reflects the role natural selection plays in leadership).”  Since she and her colleague observe modern people groups often selecting leaders from the bottom up, they assume that ancient primitive humans, and even other animals, found this kind of selection “natural” or advantageous for survival.
       The plot permits some corollary sub-plots.  Since she sees many modern leaders being tall (a photo of Barack Obama stands alongside the article, with the caption, “Was he born for the job?”), she projects tallness as a survival advantage selected for in primitive human populations.  She sees modern leaders (like Obama and Putin) being fitness buffs, and projects that brawn was selected over brain by cavemen.  Strangely, she did not evaluate how Kim Jong Il ever became leader of North Korea.
       It would seem that if this is the way evolution made us, we should just go with the flow.  “That is not to say that workplaces should become havens of primitivism,” she cautioned, however.  Backpedaling a little from the implications, she found room for us thinking machines to overrule our Darwinian urges.  “Evolution might have bestowed on us an instinctive suspicion of leaders who are short, female or who belong to a different tribe (skin colour is an obvious badge of belonging), but we need to ask whether such prejudices belong in today’s interconnected world, in which citizens of all colours and religions need to rub along.”  Why would evolved machines ever wish to do such a thing?
       From there, she got preachy, implying that humans “should” contradict our evolutionary heritage: “Perhaps the most important take-home message in our book is that there is a mismatch between the way we lead and follow today, and the way our ancestors operated.”  Fortunately for us, her just-so story provides “insights into our recent past [that] may help improve things.”  To be consistent, though, it would seem that evolution improved things on its own for a long time without our needing to intervene with immaterial things like design, plan, conscious thought, ethics, and leadership training.

Who could forget Richard Lewontin’s memorable candor when he said, “We take the side of science” [read: Darwinism] “in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, ... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism” (see full quote in the Baloney Detector under Subjectivity).
    The situation is analogous, maybe even homologous, with state-controlled media like Pravda, in the height of the communist dictatorship, with its prior commitment to Marxism, interpreting world events in the light of class struggles, and glorifying the progress of the regime while conveniently overlooking the failures (like millions starved because of Lysenko-driven artificial famines).  How about a bloodless coup?  “Mr. Darwin, tear down this wall!”
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Mammals • Early Man • Mind and Brain • Politics and Ethics • Dumb Ideas

Recent findings have reported the presence of filamentous tubular integumentary structures in ornithischian dinosaurs such as the heterodontosaurid Tianyulong and the ceratopsian Psittacosaurus.  The debate about the homology between these structures and bird feathers is open.  If ornithischian tubular filaments are a kind of feather, they are an evolutionary novelty in dinosaurs, and their presence is expected in non-maniraptoran theropods such as Concavenator.  If they are not a type of feather, Concavenator marks the most primitive presence of non-scale skin appendages in the theropod lineage, placing them at the node Neotetanurae.  The simplest hypothesis about the ulnar Concavenator skin appendages is that they are short, rigid filaments (Fig. 2).  However, it is possible that they might have had barb ridges, because these structures appear before the formation of the follicle.  In any case, Concavenator shows that the combination of scale and non-scale skin appendages exhibited in present-day poultry was already present in large theropod dinosaurs 130 million years ago.

For analysis of the confusion that reigns in the alleged evolutionary transition from dinosaurs to birds, see Casey Luskin’s entry, “Inconsistent Reasoning Governs Evolutionary Interpretations of Feathered Dinosaurs” in Evolution News and Views.  If the evolutionists want to interpret the bumps on Concavenator as feather attachment points, they should apply the same reasoning to Protoavis.  But they don’t want to do that, because “it would wreak havoc with standard evolutionary story” because Protoavis, in their timeline, would represent a bird living contemporaneous with the earliest dinosaurs – a conclusion that “could undermine the entire dino-to-bird evolutionary theory.”
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Birds • Fossils

William of Ockham taught that entities should not be multiplied without necessity.  Scientific explanations become dubious when ad hoc conditions must be added to otherwise lawlike behavior.  If the field reverses like clockwork, as the article claims, why would it occur 10,000 times as fast on occasion?  And wouldn’t local effects call into question the whole inference of regularly-timed global reversals built on measurements of local fields?  How, then, can New Scientist claim that we are overdue for another reversal that “would cause widespread chaos – for navigation and migratory birds”?  It appears geophysicists know less about this subject than they claim.
    As an alternative explanation, consider the theory of Dr. Russell Humphreys that invokes a single cause to explain all the effects: a catastrophic global flood.  This theory, that made predictions confirmed by Voyager 2, is explained by Jonathan Sarfati at Creation.com along with answers to skeptics’ objections.  Which theory would Ockham prefer?  (See Jan 2010 Scientist of the Month.)
Next headline on:  Geology • Physics • Dating Methods

Pernicious pragmatism for propaganda purposes – that’s telling Big Lies to children.  The only people who can “laugh, share, think and wonder” at One Smart Fish are mature creationists who can see through the naked propaganda ploy of this book: laugh, because the story is so insipid; share, like this CEH commentary is doing; think, something the Darwinbots are deficient at; and wonder how judges can be so stupid – unless they are willing accomplices in a conspiracy to bend young minds toward evolutionary dogma.  Darwin would blush at this convoluted mischaracterization of his theory; but the Bearded Buddha and his priests will accept the brain offerings just the same, with or without convolutions.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Education • Media • Politics and Ethics

Asteroid Piñata Found     09/05/2010    
Sept 05, 2010 — Asteroids are much more diverse than previously imagined.  The Spitzer Space Telescope (now in its “warm” mission after the liquid coolant has dissipated) is targeting about 700 asteroids in a program called ExploreNEOs (Near-Earth Objects).  NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope website reported results from the first hundred studied.  The scientists found that near-Earth asteroids...

...are a mixed bunch, with a surprisingly wide array of compositions.  Like a piñata filled with everything from chocolates to fruity candies, these asteroids come in assorted colors and compositions.  Some are dark and dull; others are shiny and bright.  The Spitzer observations of 100 known near-Earth asteroids demonstrate that the objects’ diversity is greater than previously thought.

Since asteroid surfaces become darker with time due to exposure to solar radiation, the presence of lighter, brighter surfaces for some asteroids may indicate that they are relatively young.  This is evidence for the continuing evolution of the near-Earth object population.
    In addition, the fact that the asteroids observed so far have a greater degree of diversity than expected indicates that they might have different origins.  Some might come from the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and others could come from farther out in the solar system.  This diversity also suggests that the materials that went into making the asteroids — the same materials that make up our planets — were probably mixed together like a big solar-system soup very early in its history.

With all due regard for journalistic creative writing, piñatas are typically created by intelligent design.  So who filled the asteroid piñata with such a creative variety of goodies?  Are they implying scientists are scooping up the treats without thanking the Source?  Metaphors bewitch you (07/04/2003).
    The scientific work behind the metaphors is dull but necessary, tedious but incremental.  No one can draw firm conclusions from this admittedly preliminary work, other than the common experience of scientists working in exploratory projects: (1) surprises abound, (2) predictions are made to be broken, (3) nature yields its secrets with difficulty, and (4) human hubris tends to outrun reality.
    Consider what they said about space weathering darkening objects within a million years.  That sounds like a long time, but it is a tiny, tiny fraction of the assumed age of the solar system (4.5 billion years).  Have there been that many impacts within the last .02% of the assumed age?  Liberate your mind.  The few planetary scientists not wedded to the moyboy paradigm (“millions of years, billions of years” see 09/16/2005), with its reckless drafts on the bank of time (07/02/2007), have the freedom to think outside the box and perhaps provide novel solutions to puzzles inherent in deep-time addiction (e.g., 09/05/2002).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics • Dating Methods

Can anyone explain why this is not a cult like Scientology?  No wonder one of our readers renamed the news site Seance Daily.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Congress is unlikely to have a huge appetite for a bruising, highly polarizing debate in the weeks immediately preceding November’s midterm elections.  Yet time is of the essence, and a great deal is at stake.  The House may revert to Republican control in November, in which case action to affirm the funding would be highly unlikely....
    Congress should take up the issue speedily when it reconvenes mid-month.  And if ever there was a time for scientists to let members of Congress and the public know what they think, it is now.

Meanwhile, adult stem cell research is humming along as if nothing happened.  Here are ten examples of recent findings reported in the last week or two:

1. Asymmetric cell division:  University of Oregon researchers have come closer to identifying how adult stem cells in fruit flies differentiate into specific cell types (see Science Daily).  PhysOrg said this was observed with live cell imaging.
2. Stem cell factories:  Researchers at the University of Nottingham are perfecting the art of inducing adult cells into stem cells, reported PhysOrg.  “Large scale, cost-effective stem cell factories able to keep up with demand for new therapies to treat a range of human illnesses are a step closer to reality,” the article announced cheerfully without referring to embryos.
3. Cell conversion:  The same issue of Nature that complained about the Lamberth ruling featured a success with adult stem cells.³  Richard P. Harvey reported that it may be possible to skip the inducement state altogether: “Scientists report the conversion of one type of differentiated cell, the fibroblast, into another – the cardiomyocyte.”  Embryos were not needed for this or other adult cell research, which can turn cells into an “embryonic stem-cell-like state.”  The application is good news for the disabled: “This approach may find use in regenerative strategies for the repair of damaged hearts.”
4. Boob job:  Science Daily announced, “Adult Mammary Stem Cells in Mice Identified and Isolated for First Time.”  This discovery may aid the development of treatments for human breast cancer.
5. Liver in the skin:  Imagine regenerating a liver from skin.  That’s what Science Daily reported: “Liver Cells Created from Patients’ Skin Cells.”  This might help many people, because “In the UK, liver disease is the fifth largest cause of death after cardiovascular, cancer, stroke, and respiratory diseases.”
6. Lung stem cells:  Lung cancer is a scary diagnosis, because it metastasizes rapidly and often kills its victims.  PhysOrg reported hope for this leading cause of cancer deaths, because it now appears possible to identify lung stem cells gone awry and arrest them before they proliferate.
7. Partners in health:  PhysOrg reported that “A study led by a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has revealed a unique ‘partnership’ between two types of bone marrow stem cells, which could lead to advances in regenerative medicine.”  This is a step toward re-growing damaged cells, tissues and organs.
8. Different strokes:  Strokes may not have to be debilitating, thanks to research at the University of South Florida.  PhysOrg reported that a simulated stroke could be intercepted with adult stem cells.  “Human umbilical cord blood cells (HUCB) used to treat cultured rat brain cells (astrocytes) deprived of oxygen appear to protect astrocytes from cell death after stroke-like damage,” the article said.
9. Leukemia link:  PhysOrg said that researchers at the University of California at San Francisco are coming closer to understanding how blood stem cells suffering from mutations can lead to leukemia.  “The discovery also suggests a possible therapeutic strategy, the scientists say, for reducing the risk of leukemia that results from chemotherapy used to treat solid tumors.”
10. Smart heart ASCs:  PhysOrg reported on landmark work at the Henry Mayo Clinic that showed that “ rationally ‘guided’ human adult stem cells can effectively heal, repair and regenerate damaged heart tissue.”  Even stem cells benefit from intelligent design.

The tear-jerking stories of scientists whose taxpayer-funded experiments on human embryos were interrupted by the judge’s decision are horrendous examples of biased reporting.  Does your heart bleed for scientists whose chance at the public teat might be cut short, and they might have to actually earn their money?  Do they realize that many people are appalled at the prospect of human embryos being cut up for research, and consider it immoral and a violation of the sanctity of human life?
    Let’s put the ESC researchers’ bleeding hearts in perspective with a little tale.  Picture a Nazi scientist working for the Max Planck Institute in 1938 wringing his hands over a shortage of prisoners to work on.  We’ll take Nature’s crybaby article and revise it for that context:

Human Experimentation Thrown Into Limbo by Prisoner Shortage [Fiction]

Gunther Monster was working late on 23 August when a postdoc sent him the headline about a newsreel story entitled: “Bad news for human experimentation researchers.”  Monster, a human experimenter at Max Planck Institute, says that as his eyes flew down the newspaper article, he thought: “This can’t be real.  This can’t be right.”  Earlier that day, in Berlin, a judge overturned an SS officer’s policy of providing prisoners without question, and had put a temporary stop on government supply of prisoners for research, pending resolution of a suit that is seeking to make the hold permanent (see ‘The legalese behind the funding freeze’).
    “I was devastated,” Monster says.  “It was a huge blow to the research I have spent so much time working on.”
    He summoned enough presence of mind to phone his lab technician, asking him to release 20 subjects first thing in the morning back to Auschwitz.  They were part of an experiment funded by the Max Planck Institute.  Then, recalls Monster, “I went home and stared at the walls and thought: ‘What am I going to do next?  What is going to sustain me for my job in the future?’”
    Monster is one of hundreds of researchers whose MPI-supported work has been thrown into legal limbo and financial jeopardy by the new policy....

...but the prisoners took some relief, however small, at their temporary respite.  Unfortunately, in America 2010, human embryos are not available for interviews about their feelings about the ruling for about 12 years.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Politics and Ethics

Stephen Hawking His Atheism     09/02/2010    
Sept 02, 2010 — Science reporters are creating sensationalist headlines about Stephen Hawking claiming there is no God.  His new book has a title, The Grand Design, that sounds theistic but in fact claims that God is not necessary because our existence is a consequence of the law of gravity.
    The headlines like PhysOrg’s “God did not create Universe: Hawking” or the BBC News quotelet, “Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe” are misleading because this is not a new position or discovery by the ALS-afflicted physicist, but more of a restatement of his beliefs elucidated in his 10-year-old best seller, A Brief History of Time.  Roger Highfield in New Scientist says, “Hawking hasn’t changed his mind about God.”  In fact, his beliefs are as old as Einstein’s, and Spinoza’s, who believed that whatever we mean by “God” is just a restatement of the laws of physics.  Einstein famously said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”  Hawking told Highfield, “If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.  If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence.”  One thing that is new is that Hawking appears to have abandoned the hope that mankind would come up with a “theory of everything” as promised in A Brief History of Time.
    Craig Callender, writing for “Culture Lab” at New Scientist, had perhaps the most nuanced coverage of the latest Hawking-atheism claim.  Reviewing The Grand Design, Callender was doubtful Hawking had achieved his goal of removing a personal, intervening God from the universe.  For one thing, Hawking appears to have cast his dice on M-theory, a future hope for a reality that is only partly glimpsed by various string theories.  M-theory can also mean the set of all current string theories.  For another, Hawking’s confidence relies on an unknowable multiverse.  Callender elaborated,

M-theory in either sense is far from complete.  But that doesn’t stop the authors from asserting that it explains the mysteries of existence: why there is something rather than nothing, why this set of laws and not another, and why we exist at all.  According to Hawking, enough is known about M-theory to see that God is not needed to answer these questions.  Instead, string theory points to the existence of a multiverse, and this multiverse coupled with anthropic reasoning will suffice.  Personally, I am doubtful.
    Take life.  We are lucky to be alive.  Imagine all the ways physics might have precluded life: gravity could have been stronger, electrons could have been as big as basketballs and so on.  Does this intuitive “luck” warrant the postulation of God?  No.  Does it warrant the postulation of an infinity of universes?  The authors and many others think so.  In the absence of theory, though, this is nothing more than a hunch doomed – until we start watching universes come into being – to remain untested and untestable.  The lesson isn’t that we face a dilemma between God and the multiverse, but that we shouldn’t go off the rails at the first sign of coincidences.

You may have noticed that we added a long-overdue “Philosophy” chain link.  Many of our entries over the past decade have needed this tag.  Perhaps some day a volunteer can help add it to the back issues where appropriate.  It will include philosophy of science, history and sociology of science, and related topics that do not necessarily invoke theology (though it is arguable that philosophy, logic and reason themselves cannot be isolated from the presupposition of an all-wise, independent, immutable Mind).  A good lecture series that explores perspectivalism as a running theme in the history of science and philosophy is the Teaching Company product Science Wars by Steven Goldman (see Resource of the Week for Dec. 19, 2009).
    A simple principle can make you wiser than Stephen Hawking.  Not necessarily smarter, but wiser.  It’s the ability to spot the self-refuting fallacy and its relatives: arbitrary beliefs, begging the question and unargued presuppositions.  While Hawking was busy typing away on his speech synthesizer telling us God is out of a job because the laws of nature will do all the work, he was invoking mind, reason, logic and intelligence.  None of those are laws of nature.  They deal in the rational realm of concepts.  What’s more, the concept of a “law of nature” is loaded with questions begging for answers: are laws of nature decrees of God, or mere observed patterns in experience?  In what realm do laws of nature exist, and how do they impress their will on mindless reality?  What do we mean by the fine word “nature” in the first place?  Hawking cannot employ a concept he cannot justify.
    Even more devastating to Hawking’s view is that he started with something – laws of nature and a multiverse – instead of nothing.  Then he had the gall to tell us it explains why there is something instead of nothing.  The late Francis Schaeffer reminded his students that theists can turn the tables on atheists who love to invoke the “Who made God?” argument by pushing back on the “something” that they typically presume already existed: e.g., where did the laws of nature come from?  Where did gravity come from?  Where did the multiverse come from?  Schaeffer insisted that secularists cannot tell us that the universe came from nothing unless they mean nothing nothing: no laws, no fields, no quantum energy, no categories, no mind, no evolution – really nothing.  He would illustrate it by drawing a circle on a blackboard and announcing that within the circle was everything that is.  Then he would erase the circle.  Stephen Hawking’s failure to go all the way back is the latest incarnation of the “Get your own dirt” joke (see Humor Page).
    Once again, Hawking and his followers cannot defend their world view without stealing goods from the Judeo-Christian smorgasbord.  One cannot get something from nothing nothing, and if something material pre-existed, it cannot be eternal by the law of entropy.  Also once again, the evidence for creation (suggested by their “anthropic reasoning” and Callender’s amazement at our luck at being alive, as if “pure dumb luck” constitutes a scientific explanation) is overwhelmingly evident to everyone.  For all his brains and education, therefore, Stephen Hawking is a fool (“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools”) for ignoring the abundant evidence for God (Romans 1:16-22).  A fool is arbitrary or inconsistent, or both.  As such, a fool can prove anything, and therefore can prove opposite things.  That’s what fools do (see Alice in Wonderland and 04/26/2010).  If you understand this, and are therefore wiser than Hawking, help him and his followers gain some wisdom.  How?  Speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).  Pray also for Stephen Hawking.  The Lord has been longsuffering with the poor sophoxymoroniac (02/02/2008 commentary), whose disease normally would have taken his life many years ago.  Pray that he will see the light in time.  Wouldn’t it be great to imagine him fully restored to perfect health in heaven?
Next headline on:  Media • Physics • Cosmology • Origin of Life • Mind and Brain • Philosophy of Science • Dumb Ideas • Bible and Theology

Every movement has nutcases.  Lee was no spokesman for Darwin any more than Charlemagne for Jesus Christ as the emperor killed pagans who refused to convert.  But consider that the misanthropic ideas of James J. Lee were not that different from university professors who have taught that human beings are a plague on the planet, and that mass death of humans would not be such a bad thing (e.g., Eric Pianka, 04/02/2006, who told the Texas Academy of Sciences that humans were no better than bacteria and got a standing ovation for saying it would be a good thing if airborne ebola wiped out 90% of humanity).
    No Christian theologian familiar with Christ’s and Paul’s teachings about loving one’s neighbor and loving our enemies would ever condone genocide in the name of Christ, and certainly Darwin and Malthus would have been appalled at the actions of today’s hostage-taker.  Still, Klinghoffer’s list of recent madman who felt they were fulfilling Darwin’s laws of nature is noteworthy and disturbing.
    One of Lee’s statements demanded saving the lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, ants, beetles and other animals, but then he said, “The humans?  The planet does not need humans.”  This shows he was a nutcase, because he could not think logically about evolution.  If humans arose by a Darwinian process, then they are just as much a part of nature as beetles, and whatever they do is just as amoral, meaningless and purposeless as any other part.  If humans wipe out all other life, so what?  Why would Lee care?  His anguish is a desperate cry from his soul.  Despite his love for Darwin, he could not extricate himself from the image of God imprinted in his being.
    The late Greg Bahnsen used to complain about the inconsistency of the media.  He said he wouldn’t mind reporters drawing attention to the religious beliefs of Christians who go berserk as long as they were consistent.  When a Darwinist goes nuts, why is there no connection made to his motivations?  If reporters were truly objective, they would highlight the beliefs of Darwinist madmen as quickly as they point out the religious beliefs of those who commit crimes in the name of Christ.  “This incident goes to show the danger of Darwinist ideas to promote hate and intolerance in young men,” would be a fair assessment.  “When young men’s minds are filled with ideas of survival of the fittest and view humans as responsible for wrecking the environment, it’s little wonder that they sometimes go off the deep end and take actions into their own hands.  Too bad no one shared with him the love of Christ.”  The heat death of the universe will likely occur before you ever hear that in the mainstream media.
Next headline on:  Media • Education • Darwin and Evolution • Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

1. Embryo trick:  Scientists inspired by the cilia that embryos use to direct cells to their places copied the trick with “biomimetic cilia” they hope to use with lab-on-a-chip applications (see abstract at PNAS).
2. Stickybot:  Inspired by gecko feet, scientists at Stanford designed a look-alike robot, reported Science Daily, that uses the same principle of dry adhesion by multiplication of surface contacts.  “The material is strong and reusable, and leaves behind no residue or damage,” just like a gecko foot, the article said.  They even imitated the gecko’s rotating ankles so that it can change direction.
3. Perfect little engine:  Ever heard of a salp?  This small jelly-like creature lives in the sea and is important for carbon cycle.  Science Daily told about its “near-perfect little engine” that propels it and filters its food with a microscopic mesh.  Because “the scientists are captivated by the unique, almost magical performance of this natural undersea engine,” they think inventors could learn something.  Science Daily asked, “What if trains, planes, and automobiles all were powered simply by the air through which they move?  Moreover, what if their exhaust and byproducts helped the environment?  Well, such an energy-efficient, self-propelling mechanism already exists in nature.”
4. Beetle bifocals:  Scientists at the University of Cincinnati were stunned to find a diving beetle with bifocal compound eyes.  Live Science reported that the eyes have two retinas, one for distance and one for close-up inspection.  Analysis of how this unique beetle sees could help bifocal manufacture.  “Bifocal glasses and contacts create two images that interfere with each other, creating an area of blur,” the article said.  “The beetle larvae solve this interference problem by having focal planes [that] are slightly shifted so they aren’t completely on top of each other.  In fact, the researchers found the shift of the focal planes improved contrast of the resulting image three-fold.”
5. Oyster glue:  The Navy is employing “interdisciplinary, cutting-edge research” to copy oysters.  The amazing underwater adhesives that oysters use are attractive to the Navy not only because of their importance to the marine ecology, but also because of the insights they provide.  Naval researchers have been “studying marine animals’ various adhesives, uncovering fundamental properties that could yield new innovations from replacements for medical sutures to surface coatings that keep waterborne craft from picking up marine hitchhikers,” the article said.  They found that oysters have a unique adhesive for sticking to one another as they build oyster reefs.
6. Put on your bacteria:  New Scientist posted an unusual article and video about researchers using bacteria to grow fibers for clothing.  Such biodegradable clothing will be “green” not necessarily in color, but in the sense of being biodegradable and environmentally-friendly.
7. Code in the nose:  Inventors have been working on artificial noses for some time, with only mixed results at distinguishing the thousands of odors that natural noses are so good at detecting.  PhysOrg reported that Stanford inventors are finding that a touch of DNA helps.  The combinatorial flexibility of DNA is providing the coding repertoire for sensors to respond to many more molecules than before.  Live Science added that frog egg cells are providing a key ingredient in robotic noses as receptors.
8. Cornea breakthrough:  Synthetic corneas are too hard to make, and cornea transplants are expensive and difficult, so why not regrow the real thing?  The BBC News reported that biosynthetic implants, using “a synthetic version of human collagen designed to mimic the cornea as closely as possible,” are providing real hope for restoring impaired vision.  Already in tests patients reported “dramatically improved” vision with the new technique.
9. Pop goes the circuit:  Manufacturing circuits inspired by bacteria?  Why not?  Synthetic circuits is a relatively new method within the “emerging field of synthetic biology” of organizing genetically-modified bacteria to “produce a myriad of useful proteins, enzymes or chemicals in a coordinated way.”  Science Daily reported that scientists at Duke University were surprised to find bacterial cells popping, or committing suicide, when reaching a certain stage of plasmid density.  They modeled the behavior with a sample circuit they called ePop and found that it can “increase the efficiency and power of future synthetic biology circuits.”
10. Flying with altitude:  Somehow, fruit flies know the right altitude for their flying and hovering needs.  Live Science reported that findings about how they calculate optic flow might help designers of “insect-inspired robots.”  Mike Dickinson’s team at Caltech found that flies use horizontal edges and “integrate edge information with other visual information to pick flight plans.”  This work not only helps “unveil the mysteries of insect flight and cognition, but it may have practical implications for humans, as well.”

Biomimetic designers wanted: bright, young, observant, inquisitive, logical, perceptive, entrepreneurial, honest, forward looking, optimistic, enthusiastic.  This implies that Darwinians need not apply. 
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Marine Biology • Cell Biology • Terrestrial Zoology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts