Biomimetics Is On a Roll     11/30/2010    
Nov 30, 2010 — There’s a gold rush on: a rush to copy living technology.  Scientists have found that plants, animals and cells have the solutions to problems that will help us all, if we will just study them, imitate them, or harness them.

1. Jellyfish pumps:  Need a flexible pump for medical use?  Look no further than the aquarium tank, where jellyfish have mastered the art of propulsion with soft material.  Science Daily reported on work at Caltech to study how jellyfish do it.  “Jellyfish at millimeter scales, for example, exploit the small layer of water that adheres to their surface as they move and use it as additional paddle at no extra cost,  the article said.  “Further, a clever arrangement of multiple pacemakers within the jellyfish body allow for a reliable yet tunable pumping mechanism.”  One of the researchers “plans to use this practical understanding to help design a whole spectrum of flexible pumps that are optimized for different tasks and conditions.”
2. Elephant trunks:  Getting robotic arms to act gracefully and gently has been a major challenge.  Imagine the pain of shaking hands with a typical robot.  Why not learn the secrets from an elephant, whose trunk can gently pick up a peanut out of a child’s hand?  That’s what Festo, a German company, did.  They created the “elephant’s trunk-inspired Bionic Handling Assistant,” reported New Scientist, which “is peppered with resistance sensors that limit its extension when it senses contact – potentially making it safe for anyone to use and interact with.”  A video clip shows the device doing a clumsy but encouraging imitation of an elephant trunk.
       The short article makes it clear this is not the only example of bio-inspiration going on in Germany:

   Despite its futuristic appearance, Festo’s isn’t the only odd robot arm in development.  A European-wide team has developed something similarly flexible – but here the inspiration came from an octopus’s limb.  Instead of pneumatics, the EU team wants to drive their arm with “electroactive polymers” – smart plastics that bend when a voltage is applied.
       Festo’s decision to seek inspiration from a lumbering mammal marks a departure: it has previously created the most graceful of robotic penguins, jellyfish and manta rays.
       And another German team has created the AirFish: an airship that wags its tail like a rainbow trout.

   Live Science also discussed cheerfully the new elephant-trunk robotic arm, but gave the credit to chance as the inventor: “‘Biomimicry,’ as this design and engineering aesthetic is called, draws inspiration from the biomechanical systems that the process of evolution has honed for millions of years, often resulting in startling insights over manmade artificial solutions.”
3. Shark skin:  Want to reduce drag on swimsuits and ships’ hulls?  Make like a shark, said National Geographic News says.  It’s “scaly hide serves as both a suit of armor and a means of streamlining movement,” researchers at the University of Alabama are finding.  Professor Amy Lang also gave credit to Darwin: “Overall, sharks’ 400 million years of evolution for strength and speed may someday inspire better designs for machines that are prone to drag, such as aircraft, Lang noted.”
   
4. Shark sub.  The whale shark is the world’s biggest fish.  How does it keep all that mass afloat?  “Whale Sharks Use Geometry to Avoid Sinking,” reported Science Daily.  Marine biologists publishing in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology found that the whale shark’s glide, that looks so natural, is really an “astonishing feat of mathematics and energy conservation.”  Adrian Gleiss from Swansea University noted, “oceanic animals not only have to consider their travel speed, but also how vertical movement will affect their energy expenditure, which changes the whole perspective.”
       Sensors placed on the giants showed that they can use their negative buoyancy to descend, but need to flap their tails when ascending; nevertheless, their motion “optimized the energetic cost of vertical movement,” the researchers found.  “This use of negative buoyancy may play a large part in oceanic sharks being able to locate and travel between scarce and unpredictable food sources efficiently.”  Although this article did not mention biomimetics, the principle sounds like something submarine designers could use.
5. Cell rotors:  Another German team has succeeded in getting a three-blade structure in a hexagonal cage billionths of a meter across to rotate spontaneously.  “Nature itself provides the role model for such self-organizing systems,” a report on PhysOrg said, accompanied by a video clip that shows the nano-rotor in action.  The primitive device is a far cry from those found in living cells: “However, the coveted dream of using self-organization effects in such a way that nano machines [i.e., in the cell] assemble themselves is still a thing of the future.”  Presumably, progress will be made by intelligent design.
6. Electrical engineering turns bioengineering:  Students at the University of Texas at Dallas are competing in contests to harness bacteria for useful purposes.  Since E. coli bacteria already have the toolkit for probing chemicals, the students employ synthetic biology techniques to make them do what they want – such as turning green when sensing toxins.  Story at PhysOrg.  An engineering prof said, “Synthetic biology borrows a lot of ideas from engineering and puts them in the context of biology.” 
7. Got that glow:  Speaking of fluorescent proteins (retrieved from jellyfish), Vyv Salisbury, a biomedical researcher at University of West England, is excited about the possibilities of putting glowing bacteria to use.  They have “enormous future potential” to “produce exquisitely sensitive and versatile microbial biosensors,” PhysOrg reported, opening with the promise, “A professor from the University of the West of England will present her inaugural lecture on bioluminesence [sic] and give insight into how this natural phenomenon has been used to make biomarkers that are making exciting breakthroughs in several areas of health research.”
8. Whale blades:  According to PhysOrg, “lessons learned from the ocean’s largest mammals has inspired United States Naval Academy researchers to tackle one of the serious challenges of this technology: the low velocity associated with many tidal flows and the difficulty of extracting useful energy from low speed flows using current designs.”  Enter the humpback whale, with its bumpy-edged fins.  Turns out that design improves performance: “We designed a novel blade modification for potential turbine performance improvement, which was inspired by humpback whale flippers, with the addition of tubercles, or bumps, to the leading edge of each blade,” announced Mark Murray, a Naval Academy engineering professor.  He showed that “the addition of biomimetically derived protuberances (technology that mimics nature) improved stall characteristics and aerodynamic performance.”
9. Studying flight:  Four recent articles did not mention human applications yet, but showed how scientists are eagerly studying the flight capabilities of animals to gain understanding, with a subtle indication that human engineers can learn from them.  Students at Wright State in Ohio are studying dragonflies (New Scientist).  An engineer at Bristol University gained insights into pterodactyl flight (BBC News).  And the BBC News also posted half a dozen dazzling photos of flying fish.  PhysOrg spoke of scientists studying flying snakes.  You thought this one was going to be about birds, didn’t you?  That last article did mention another team proposing that “airplanes be designed more like birds.”

What is Spedding talking about?  Hasn’t he seen a bacterial flagellum?  It’s a more efficient wheel than anything man ever invented.  And his logic is bad.  Like a Darwinian, he has to see everything in terms of mere survival.  The world has a great deal of “useless beauty” that goes beyond mere survival.  Look at the coloration on birds and insects, the patterning on mammal fur, and the shapes and colors of flowers.  Survival does not require these things, or every bird, mammal, and flower would be so decorated.  Beauty and elegance are not incompatible with survival; they provide frosting on the cake, making this a world of incredible variety and beauty.  Even evolutionary scientists can recognize that animals are “overengineered” for the functions they require for survival (03/23/2004).
    Biomimetics has the potential to make Darwinism irrelevant, and bring together both creationists and evolutionists for the common goal of improving human life through understanding and imitation of natural design.  Darwin need not have anything to do with it.  Evolutionary theory could be a harmless sideshow, if not a distraction, to the goals of biomimicry.
    Two alarming subcultures are tainting the biomimetics movement, however.  One is that Darwinists are trying to co-opt the movement by forcing their worldview onto it: e.g.,

• “...the designs that come through evolution are just good enough to survive, that’s all,” (PhysOrg)
• “...the biomechanical systems that the process of evolution has honed for millions of years” (Live Science)
• “...sharks’ 400 million years of evolution for strength and speed may someday inspire better designs for machines” (National Geographic)
• “...Scientists in the US and Canada are studying how flying fish evolved the enlarged paired fins...” (BBC News)
• “After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned what works and what lasts” (Biomimicry Institute)

Hopefully many will discern that oil and water mix better than biomimetics and Darwinism.  How long can the public endure the halitosis that billions of years of chance accidents yielded engineering marvels that our goal-oriented, purposeful human intelligence cannot duplicate?  Remember, too, that as good as the robotic flexible arm or mechanical insect perform, artificial biomimics cannot reproduce themselves, repair themselves, or proofread themselves.  Human technology looks pathetic by comparison.  Darwinists insert their rhetoric into the biomimetics adventure at their peril.
    A second and more worrisome trend is a kind of new-age mysticism arising about nature.  This can be seen at the Biomimicry Institute where Nature is capitalized, as in, “How would Nature heat and cool a home?”  Even though hardcore atheist evolutionists like E. O. Wilson are on its advisory board, the Biomimicry Institute risks a return to Pocahontas-style nature worship with lines like, “Humans may have a long way to go towards living sustainably on this planet, but 10-30 million species with time-tested genius to [sic] help us get there.”  Their children’s CD is labeled “Ask the planet,” as if we are to seek inner wisdom from the Earth goddess.
    It’s an alarming sign, but Bible-believing Christians can take heart at this in a backhanded way.  For one, it unmasks the secular evolutionists as the pantheist pagans they always were at heart.  For another, it fulfills Scripture.  Their behavior follows exactly what the Apostle Paul described in Romans 1, “For his [God’s] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.  So they are without excuse.  For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.  Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!  Amen” (Romans 1:21-25).
    Nothing has changed since the old paganism except the sophistication of its ignorance.  Creationists and proponents of intelligent design can embrace biomimetics, but should be on guard against these trends that would distort it into Charlie worship or pagan Nature worship.  By contrast, engaging in diligent biomimetics research and design is one way to honor and serve our Creator, and to say, “Thank you, Lord.”
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Marine Biology • Mammals • Cell Biology • Terrestrial Zoology • Birds • Physics • Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education • Amazing Facts

Mammals Partied When Dinosaurs Left     11/29/2010    
Nov 29, 2010 — A research team headed by a biology professor at the University of New Mexico are claiming that mammals had a field day when the dinosaurs went extinct.  They got bigger and more diverse, filling in the ecological wasteland left by the missing giant reptiles.  Their analysis was published in Science.¹
    In addition, they think the mammals waxed and waned with the temperature.  According to lead author Felicia Smith [U of NM], quoted in Science Daily, “Global temperature and terrestrial land area set constraints on the upper limit of mammal body size,” Smith said, “with larger mammals evolving when the earth was cooler and the terrestrial land area greater.”  But isn’t there more to evolutionary theory than changing times?
    A look at how they used the term evolution in their paper shows a rather cavalier assumption that evolution just happened.  As to how animals could evolve, they tried a random model, like Brownian motion on a large scale, and a saturation model, with evolution reaching to fill all available space somehow: “as maximum body size evolves, the evolutionary possibilities for increasing size are progressively exhausted.”
    Other than that, the authors treated evolution as a category of stuff happens,  speaking of “the evolution of” this or that.  They even invoked the convergence notion (01/26/2010): “the patterns suggest that large mammals convergently evolved to fill similar ecological roles.”  As for the atmospheric and geographic influences on evolution, they were gracious enough to warn, “However, some caution should be used in the interpretation of our results.”  There’s a lot of uncertainty, after all, about how oxygen levels and other environmental factors could influence evolution.  “Nevertheless, the potential role of abiotic factors in the overall trajectory of mammalian evolution cannot be ignored, and the available data suggest interesting and important trends, which should be explored further.”  Their last paragraph summed up their ideas:

Our analysis implies that the increase in the maximum mass of mammals over the Cenozoic was neither a statistical inevitability driven by increasing species richness nor a random evolutionary walk from a small initial size, but rather reflected processes operating consistently across trophic and taxonomic groups, and independent of the physiographic history of each continent.  We find no support for other hypotheses for the evolution of maximum body mass, including the expected increase in variance due to random divergence from a common ancestor or to increasing species richness; nor do terrestrial mammals ever approach sizes that might invoke biomechanical constraints.  The K/Pg extinction provided the ecological opportunity for mammals to become larger.  Terrestrial mammals did so in an exponentially decreasing fashion, reaching a more or less maximal size by 40 Ma as evolutionary possibilities for increasing body size were progressively exhausted and abiotic factors began constraining the upper limit.

Has a more vacuous scientific explanation ever been submitted in a serious scientific journal?  This is nothing more than the “If you build it, they will come” theory of evolution.  Simply provide the opportunity, and Darwin will send in his army of Tinker Bell helpers to zap the leftover animals with their mutation wands, and presto: giant mammals will emerge.  It’s like a land grant or homesteading act advertised to pioneers: “Go forth and build your towns, your factories, your civilizations!  Give me mammals to match my mountains!” The only caveat is that intelligent design is not allowed; everything must be undirected, purposeless, mindless, and random.
    Notice, further, that Smith and her co-conspirators ruled out all the other vacuous evolutionary explanations before coming up with their vacuous evolutionary explanation.  Can’t say it was “statistically inevitable.”  Can’t say it was a “random walk” in the evolutionary park.  Can’t say it was biomechanical constraints, nor “expected increase in variance due to random divergence from a common ancestor” nor due to “increasing species richness.”  No; all those vacuous, circular, question-begging Darwinian explanations are not vacuous enough.  We need a really vacuous explanation: “we had a giant Earth with nothing big on it anymore; and so I think that ecological opportunity allowed mammals to just go nuts.”
    Any wonder why long ago we instituted a Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week award?
    For more nonsense about mammal evolution, see:

12/24/2009 on natural variation vs. progress,

12/18/2009 on Australian mammals,

12/13/2009 on contenders for SEQOTW,

12/11/2009 on the horse series,

12/04/2009 on vacuous explanations,

11/19/2009 on evolutionary works in progress,

09/22/2009 on use of the Stuff Happens Law,

06/30/2009 on the elephant explosion,

06/03/2009 on evolution as a catch-all explanation,

03/24/2009 on trying to fit animals in uncooperative evolutionary trees,

07/04/2008 on explanation by assumption,

03/06/2008 on translating Darwinese,

01/21/2008 on backtracking earlier claims,

04/25/2007 on telling time tales,

03/29/2005 on mammals (or evolutionists) going crazy after the dinosaurs,

08/27/2004 on the lack of an evolutionary tree in mammal genes,

12/03/2003 on the convoluted story of African mammal evolution.
    For more on the “If you build it, they will come” theory of evolution, see 10/31/2010 and 07/14/2009 on Cambrian animals, 03/29/2007 on salt tolerance, 01/28/2005 on bats, and 08/25/2005 on fossil diversity.  It’s an old custom in Darwin fantasyland.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Dinosaurs • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

For a refutation of Penrose’s cosmology and an analysis of logical flaws in his reasoning from CMB evidence, see Rob Sheldon’s article “Sir Roger’s Revelation” on his blog, The Procrustean.  The cosmology chapters in David Berlinski’s book The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays is also helpful for pondering the limits to human understanding about ultimate reality.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Philosophy of Science

The PVC bacteria are indeed a curiosity and their phylogenetic location in the Tree of Life is unclear.  Although these features could be the result of lateral gene transfer events, convergence, or a complex universal ancestor, their intermediate nature can be considered a more parsimonious scenario.  The possibility of a fusion scenario remains disputed.  More evolutionary scenarios are likely to unfold—and be debated—as more bacteria and archaea are discovered and characterized.  Although division into three domains of life remains the norm, the PVC superphylum may reflect continuity between the three domains, blurring their distinction.

Where are the reporters saying this is dumb, dumb, dumb?  Why do they fall in line like toy ducks with a string-pull voice recording, quacking “Missing link! Missing link!”?  Here are the headlines astute journalists should be writing:

• Your Ancestors Live in Sewage?  Get Real
• Two Evolutionists Tell Grand Fib in the Name of Science
• Scientists Declare War on Endosymbiotic Theory, Causing Rift Among Evolutionists
• Evolutionists Guilty of Claiming Similarities Suggest Ancestry
• Complex Molecular Machines Ignored in Weak Evolutionary Tale
• Speculation Without Evidence: Evolutionists Appeal to Imagination
• Evolutionists Admit They Don’t Know Where Bacteria Fit in Tree of Life
• Two Evolutionists Invoke Miracles to Explain Origin of Eukaryotes

This last one is justified by counting the number of times Devos and Reynaud invoked the well-worn evolutionary miracle words originated, arose, emerged and the like in their “scenario” (i.e., tall tale).  If PVC was such a glorious revolution in celldom, how come all the other bacteria didn’t get with the show?  Why did they live happily for two billion years without getting hip?  If journalists would just do their jobs and ask critical questions, science news would be a lot more interesting.
    It’s a sad state of affairs in science when evolutionists can tell stories and get away with it.  What we need as a “more parsimonious scenario” in biology is less scenario and more observational evidence.  Certain evolutionists and their gutless lackeys in the media could learn a little parsimony – by getting fired.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Origin of Life • Darwin and Evolution • Media

How Long Does it Take to Form a Slot Canyon?     11/26/2010    
Nov 26, 2010 — Some of the most striking features of the southwest are the slot canyons – the narrow, winding defiles in sandstone that can be well over a hundred feet deep and go for miles (photo).  A whole culture of slot canyoneering takes on the challenge of hiking through them, and the amazing patterns of reflected light that develop in them make them major targets for photographers (photo).  Each year, flash floods scour the walls and floors of these canyons, changing them slightly, but hikers often notice little change in depth from year to year.  One might think that it would take many eons for these canyons to form.  A team of geologists decided to test erosion rates by watching an actual incipient canyon starting during floods in the Henry Mountains, Utah.  They monitored the site over three years and reported their findings in the Geological Society of America Bulletin.¹
    The researchers studied a stepped slope created by humans that provided “a well-constrained initial geometry of a steep, unchannelized bedrock slope” and found a remarkable amount of cutting – half a meter – in just 23 days of flooding from seasonal snowmelt.  If that were the averaged annual rate, a slot canyon 100 meters deep could be cut in just 200 years.  Most likely other factors could slow down the rate significantly, but even if it took a thousand years, or 5,000, that presents a problem: why is there any sandstone left after millions of years?  They seemed to recognize the issue while adhering to the geological time scale:

Rates of fluvial bedrock incision mimic rates of external landscape forcing (e.g., tectonic uplift and eustacy [sic]) when averaged over geological time scales, but local rates of channel downcutting into bedrock can be fast during the individual floods that actually drive bedrock incision: we measured up to 1/2 m of local vertical incision into bedrock over 23 days of snowmelt runoff (Fig.9).  Local channel morphology and high but not overwhelming rates of sediment transport enabled such a high local erosion rate.  The local thalweg² slope was high (~20%, Fig. 8), and the cross-sectional morphology of an inner channel focused flow and sediment transport over a narrow zone where almost all erosion occurred.  While poorly constrained, field measurements demonstrated high rates of coarse-sediment transport.  Additionally, preexisting inner-channel alluvium was entrained during this snowmelt runoff event, and so alluvial cover was not consistently present to mantle the inner-channel bed and inhibit bedrock erosion.  Field observations also suggest that thresholds of detachment for abrading the local sandstone are negligible (Fig. 6).

Erosion formed a narrow inner channel with rough sidewalls.  This transient bedrock channel morphology is consistent with other natural slot canyons, in particular the Coyote Gulch narrows, Peek-a-boo slot, and Spooky slot canyons that are tributaries to the Escalante River in southern Utah.  These canyons also incised from an initial condition of flow over steep, unchannelized bedrock slopes following channel diversions by sand dunes.  The erosional topography in all of these cases is consistent with feedbacks between flow, sediment transport, and erosion observed in flume experiments (Finnegan et al., 2007; Johnson and Whipple, 2007).

For fun, let’s take the lowest rate mentioned (0.4mm/year), divide by 4 to get a tenth of a millimeter per year, and extrapolate it over the assumed age of the Navajo sandstone, 190 million years.  That would give you a canyon 19 km deep!  That’s over 15 times the depth of the Grand Canyon, eroding at the slowest rate claimed from cosmogenic radionuclide dating, not actual field observations (if we took their measured rate of .5m/yr, it would be a canyon 95,000 kilometers deep).  By contrast, if you took the very conservative value measured in Taiwan of 10mm/year, you could get a decently deep canyon 50 meters deep (similar to many observed) in just 5,000 years.
    Real erosion is much more complicated, of course, and this simplistic calculation does not take into account many factors.  It should provide a ball-park estimate of reasonableness, though.  Is it reasonable to conclude that erosion anywhere near this rate has been going on for 190 million years?  Arguably, erosion rates have often been higher in the past.  The Biblical time scale for the formation of these canyons begins to look much more reasonable, given that a worldwide flood in that model would have made erosion rates vastly higher for a considerable amount of time (photo).
    Once again, when actual field observations are undertaken, the evidence cries out against the vast eons of time alleged by the evolutionists and secular geologists (for three other examples, see 11/13/2006 about a volcanic field in Nevada, 03/05/2006 about Grand Falls of the Little Colorado, and 01/12/2007 about the fossil forests of Yellowstone).  It’s interesting that these geologists in Utah dared not explore the implications of their own findings for the geologic column and uniformitarianism.
    Your commentator has been to all three slot canyons mentioned in the article (Peek-a-Boo Gulch, Spooky Gulch, and Coyote Gulch) and can confirm that they are fascinating targets for remote wilderness adventure hikes, for those so inclined.  See the Canyon Color and Rock Art sets in the Creation Safaris photo gallery for views from this area, and go exploring if you can (photo).
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

A scientist could do nothing unless he or she had been given a multitude of gifts scientists take for granted.  Let’s start a short list: a brain, a memory, a skeleton, a heart, cells with thousands of molecular machines like ATP synthase and cilia, eyes, ears, skin, a nose, a mouth, a circulatory system, an endocrine system, a respiratory system, a digestive system, complex systems for extracting energy from food, an immune system, a muscle system, language... That’s a lot to be thankful for already, and the list could easily be prolonged.
    Science can bring us knowledge, health and convenience, but it is incapable of bringing us what human beings need most: wisdom, morality, understanding of right and wrong, advice on how to live and how to find peace, joy, and forgiveness.  How is science helping a confused person by prolonging a meaningless existence?  Even crooks can use knowledge, health, and convenience.
    The Creator gave mankind abilities to learn, discover, and figure out His secrets.  That talent is working out fairly well.  But our deepest needs are not for knowledge and things.  We are not here to learn all we can, then perish and let our knowledge turn into dust.  If knowledge is what we needed, He would have sent us a scientist.  But He knew our deepest need was for forgiveness, so He sent us a Savior.
Next headline on:  Health • Philosophy of Science • Bible and Theology

Unlike constitutively active proteases, the proteasome has the capacity to degrade almost any protein, yet it acts with exquisite specificity.  The key stratagem is self-compartmentalization: The active sites of the proteolytic 20S core particles (Cps) are sequestered from the cellular environment in the interior of this barrelshaped subcomplex.  Proteins destined for degradation are marked by a polyubiquitin chain, a degradation signal that is recognized by the 19S regulatory particles (Rps) that bind to either one or both ends of the CP to form the 26S holocomplex.  The Rps (i) recognize the polyubiquitylated substrates, (ii) trim and recycle the polyubiquitin chains, (iii) unfold substrates to be degraded, and (iv) open the gate to the CP and assist in substrate translocation into the interior of the CP.  These tasks are performed by a complex machinery involving at least 19 different subunits, 6 AAA-ATPases (Rpt1–6), and 13 non-ATPases (Rpn1–3, Rpn5–13, Rpn15/Sem1p).

Your cells go green!  They have recycle barrels just like the ones you put on the street, except these are motorized, pull the trash inside, and do the recycling on the spot.  They don’t let in good proteins, because the quality-control system has put special tags on the trash that the proteasome has to read before acting on it.  It’s all part of an elaborate recycling system.
    Evolutionary theory was useless to this discovery, just like it is to every careful inspection of the details of cellular machinery.  “In eukaryotic cells, most proteins in the cytosol and the nucleus are regulated via the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway and malfunctions of this pathway have been implicated in a wide variety of diseases,” the authors said.  My, wonder how life got along before Tinker Bell came up with this series of mutations, enough to build 19 exquisite protein parts working together as a system, when getting just one usable protein is astronomically improbable (see online book).
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Struggling to Make Evolutionary Sense     11/23/2010    
Nov 23, 2010 — Evolutionists love to quote Dobzhansky, who said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”  But when they go about explaining biological observations, the sense and light seem hard to come by.

1. Biodiversity:  The subject of the emergence of diverse forms of living things seems tailor made for a Darwinian explanation.  Why, then, 150 years after the Origin of Species, did Science Daily write a piece called, “The Puzzle of Biological Diversity”?  The opening paragraph seems to contradict long-held ideas: “Biologists have long thought that interactions between plants and pollinating insects hasten evolutionary changes and promote biological diversity,” it said.  “However, new findings show that some interactions between plants and pollinators are less likely to increase diversity than previously thought, and in some instances, reduce it.”
       The findings come from studies of specialized moths that pollinate the Joshua tree.  Researchers found, contrary to expectations, “no evidence that local populations of moths adapt to local populations of Joshua trees.”  One of the researchers boasted that the findings fit his theory, but it’s hard to confirm a theory that can explain opposite outcomes: “But different interactions can have very different effects -- some increase diversity, some don’t increase diversity at all, and some can even reduce diversity.”  If this represents a law of evolution, it resembles the Stuff Happens Law.
2. Arms race:  The metaphor of an “evolutionary arms race” is popular among evolutionists.  According to this projection theme, one organism attacks another, causing it to evolve defenses, making the attacker evolve attacks, leading to more defensive evolution, and on and on.  Science Daily claims this theme has been verified in the case of a new model system, a mustard plant and a fly.  The article begins by claiming that this system “promises to answer many long-standing questions surrounding the evolutionary arms race between plant-eating insects and their host plants” – raising two questions immediately: (1) why haven’t long-standing questions about this been answered after 150 years of Darwinian theory, and (2) when will the promised answers arrive?
       Noah Whiteman at the University of Arizona bypassed the usual model plant Arabidopsis thaliana for one that he could watch in real time as an insect attacked it.  Genetically tractable systems are “holy grails of any serious science that aim to unravel biological mechanisms down to the level of genes and proteins and signaling molecules.”  This statement suggests that few such systems exist for studying the evolutionary arms race phenomenon.  Whiteman did some good old fashioned field work, observing plants that were attacked by the flies, and then bringing them into his lab.  The observations seemed to indicate that the plants were responding by producing chemicals that mess up the flies’ digestive tract, but he admitted, “It’s very complicated, we don’t really know what’s going on at a molecular level.”
       Controlled experiments with knockout genes seem to support ideas that genes respond to attacks and defenses.  The picture is quite complex, though: “As often in ground-breaking research, the initial discovery stirred up a myriad of questions,” including, but not limited to:

   “...How is the leaf miner responding to the presence or absence of these toxic molecules?  Does it care?  Clearly, it does.  There is a cost for detoxifying, but what is it?”
       Ecological questions are waiting to be answered as well.
       “We know that the leaf mining habit has evolved probably 25 times in insects,” Whiteman said, “mostly in beetles, butterflies, moths, some wasps and saw flies.  It’s not present in the other insect orders, but why?  How has selection shaped the ability of these insects to colonize an organism with a potent defense response?

   Clearly, for Whiteman to make sense of this in the light of evolution, he has a lot of work to do.  Incidentally, readers might ask how Arabidopsis thaliana became a model organism for study.  There’s no scientific procedure.  “There seems to be this idea that there is this big convention where people decide what becomes a model organism, when in fact it’s just individuals who decide what can be collected and what will work,” Whiteman remarked.  One wonders if generalizations from a model plant can really be applied to giant eucalyptus trees, the Venus flytrap, cacti and orchids.
3. Protection racket:  Science Daily continued the arms-race theme with birds.  “Like gangsters running a protection racket, drongos in the Kalahari Desert act as lookouts for other birds in order to steal a cut of their food catch,” the article began.  “The behaviour ... may represent a rare example of two species evolving from a parasitic to a mutualistic relationship.”  It’s hard to call this an example of evolution, though, because even if their interactions changed, their biology – their genotype and phenotype – remained the same.  And this was called a rare example of such evolution, if it is an example at all (“may represent”).
4. Rewrite the textbooks again:  Some plants, such as cacti and grasses, use an alternative form of photosynthesis called C4.  Evolutionists thought they knew why.  But now, according to PhysOrg, “A new analysis of fossilized grass-pollen grains deposited on ancient European lake and sea bottoms 16-35 million years ago reveals that C4 grasses evolved earlier than previously thought.  This new evidence casts doubt on the widely-held belief that the rise [e.g., evolution] of this incredibly productive group of plants was driven by a large drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the Oligocene epoch.”
       In other words, if the earlier explanation made sense in the light of evolution, it no longer does.  “The idea that C4 grasses originated prior to global decreases in carbon dioxide levels requires us to reevaluate the way we think about the evolution of C4 photosynthesis,” Dr. David Nelson [U of Maryland] said.  “This new information should encourage the examination of alternate evolutionary selection pressures, such as warm temperatures or dry climates.”
5. Size matters not:  Giving a notion a fancy name sometimes accomplishes little.  “Encephalization” is a term evolutionists invented to describe what they expected to find: increasing brain size relative to body size over time.  Suzanne Schultz and Robin Dunbar at University of Oxford decided to test if encephalization even happens.  Writing in PNAS,¹ they noted that “allometric relationships between brain size and body size have been used as a proxy for evolutionary change, despite the validity of this approach being widely questioned.”  For the first time, they tried “quantitatively investigate temporal trends in brain size evolution across a divergent group of mammals” by studying 511 different living and fossil animal skeletons.
       Contrary to expectations, they found no encephalization patterns: “Encephalization trends vary across mammalian taxa, with some showing strong evidence for macroevolutionary increase in brain size and others not,” they wrote.  ; “These findings challenge the conventional assumption that encephalization is a general trend across mammalian taxa.”  Whatever pattern they found seemed related to sociality, not fitness, but even that association was weak: “This suggests that the pressure for increased encephalization is associated with some aspect of bonded sociality,” they said, but “There are still unresolved questions regarding the cognitive demands of bonded sociality and what aspects of a taxon’s ecology that made bonded sociality evolutionarily so advantageous” – that is, assuming that the weak correlation is real and indicates a cause or effect.
       But even if brain sizes did increase over time, it’s not established that evolution has made progress.  After all, Schultz and Dunbar noted, “A common analogy is drawn with computer technology; over time, size does not directly relate to functional efficacy, even though within comparable technologies it is more likely for a size/function relationship to hold (e.g., when comparing hard drive or RAM size, or dual vs. single Pentium processor speed).  Additionally, an evaluation of variability in total or relative brain size within taxa cannot address general patterns of variation in patterns of brain evolution across groups.”  In short, it’s not clear that any of the data make sense in the light of evolution.
       PhysOrg’s writeup, however, completely ignored the problems they admitted, and made it look like evolution triumphed in explaining the data.  “Over millions of years dogs have developed bigger brains than cats because highly social species of mammals need more brain power than solitary animals, according to a study by Oxford University,” it said in bold print.  That is not what the original paper communicated.
6. Snails is snails:  A new PhD is proud of his New Zealand snail collection.  PhysOrg gave Simon Hills, a Maori native, the limelight for extracting the “secrets of evolution” from fossil and genetic data of New Zealand snails.
       But nowhere in the short article was there any information about evolution that people really care about: evidence of snails emerging from non-snails, or evolving into something else – after all, even the most hard-core creationists accept “changes over time” within kinds.  Moreover, Hills’ snails are all from a single genus.
       Surprisingly, Hills “illustrated that the origins of the modern species are around 13 million years younger then [sic] the oldest known fossil specimens,” yet the snails were still snails after more than twice the time the human brain is claimed to have emerged from chimpanzee-level apes, or a tetrapod mammal is thought to have evolved into a blue whale.
       How could a young PhD candidate confuse snail collecting with scientific explanation?  His answer revealed more emotion than philosophical rigor: “The trick with a PhD is to be excited about your topic,” he said.  “My academic record wasn’t that flash.  Then I took a paper on evolutionary biology and that was it.”
7. Leaf multitasking:  Did you know that the veins in a leaf do much more than transport fluid?  In an article on Science Daily, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona compared them to the major organ systems in your body: “It’s like the skeleton because it holds the whole leaf up and lets it capture sunlight and not get blown over in a windstorm.  It’s like the circulatory system because it’s distributing water from the roots up to all the cells within the leaf, and it’s also bringing resources from the leaf back to the rest of the plant after photosynthesis has happened.  It’s also like a nervous system because there are chemical signals that are transmitted to the leaves from other parts of the plant through the liquid in the veins,” he said.
       For a student in the department of evolutionary biology, Blonder had surprisingly little to say about evolution (i.e., nothing).  Instead, he was studying how leaves achieve the optimum tradeoffs in trying to fulfill these functions simultaneously in different environments.  Leaf veins, for instance, provide multiple paths to each cell, and can repair alternate pathways in case of damage.  “If the city was designed well, you can still take another road to get to where you want to be,” he said, apparently oblivious to the implications for his own work.
8. Flying snakes:  The news media have been having fun with flying snakes without discussing their evolution (e.g., Science Daily)  Like Buzz Lightyear, some snakes can fall with style, and National Geographic has the video to show it.  Did evolution shed light on this phenomenon?  “This is amazingly interesting and curious, and it’s not at all clear how it works or how it could have evolved,” a physicist from Virginia Tech said.  “I’m just trying to answer these basic questions.”  The Dobzhansky flashlight must be out of order.

Imagine a yard containing a number of trees, and imagine that the wind blows from each point of the compass with equal probability.  Come autumn, the result will be an increase in the dispersal of the leaves over time.  This, they suggest, is a zero-force state because there are no directional forces acting on the leaves.  Yet there is a change over time (unlike the phenomenon described by the law of inertia in physics)—the leaves that were originally clustered about the trees become more dispersed.  And if an evolutionary system is similarly in a zero-force state, it too will experience an increase in divergence over time.

For you Darwin-loving anti-creationist skeptics dropping by, will you not study this entry?  Where is the evidence that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”?  Where is the light?  Where is the sense?  These 8 entries are typical of the standard fare that passes through the science news on a daily basis.  Are you proud of this stuff?  Is this what you call science?  Is this what you call Enlightenment?
    For the rest of us who have not left off common sense, this is the theory that its promoters say is so well established, so obvious, so enlightening, that to believe anything else makes one insane or wicked.  It is the theory that must be forced on all our students.  No student shall be allowed to read a warning label, or hear a short statement at the beginning of the semester for 30 seconds that perhaps there are some problems with Charlie’s big tale and there are alternatives one can read about if desired.  Try that and the wrath of the Darwin Establishment brings down fire and brimstone on you.  Incredible.
    If so many powerful people didn’t believe this stuff, it would be called a cult.  Now it has become a culture.  And like a diseased culture in a body, some strong antibiotics are needed to restore science to health.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Plants • Birds • Darwin and Evolution • Philosophy of Science

1. Fly like a bird:  “Should airplanes look like birds?  Engineers envision more fuel-efficient design” was the headline on PhysOrg.  Two researchers tried to start a new design for fuel efficient flying machines.  Lo and behold, they landed on a bird shape.  It’s a bird; it’s a plane.  Specifically, it resembles a seagull, reported Live Science.  That shape works better for flying than the kiwi model.
2. Sing like a bird:  A story on PhysOrg was not exactly about a stool pigeon, but about a team of Harvard researchers who invented a device made out of rubber tubing that can mimic the songs of birds.
3. Hum like a hummingbird:  A researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory has created a robot that mimics the flight of a hummingbird.  Actually, he only has the wing part down, and is missing some other things: “B.J. Balakumar’s robotic hummingbird wing isn't as pretty as the real thing,” Live Science reported.  “It lacks jewel-like colors and the iridescent glint of hummingbird feathers.  But what the unadorned metal wing does have is the ability to help researchers understand how the tiny fliers manage to dart, hover and dive even in gusty winds.”  The working prototype is a long way off.
4. Sing with the dolphins:  Man-made sonar has trouble with bubble clouds.  That set researchers thinking about how dolphins get their signals through them.  Science Daily reported that the research team noted that dolphins create bubble nets when hunting, but don’t seem to lose their sonar.  Curious about how they do it, Timothy Leighton started thinking like a dolphin.  “There were no recordings of the type of sonar that dolphins use in bubble nets, so instead of producing a bio-inspired sonar by copying dolphin signals, I sat down and worked out what pulse I would use if I were a dolphin,” he said.
       The result was twin inverted pulse sonar, or TWIPS, that “exploits the way that bubbles pulsate in sound fields, which affects the characteristics of sonar echoes.”  Two pulses are sent, one the inverse of the other, the second a fraction of a second later.  This makes the signal able to “enhance scatter from the target while simultaneously suppressing clutter from bubbles.”  First test results are encouraging: TWIPS outperforms regular sonar, and may lead to improvements in harbor protection and medical imaging.  As for how dolphins perform sonar so well, Leighton said, “How they successfully detect prey in bubbly water remains a mystery that we are working to solve.”  PhysOrg also wrote about this story.

Maybe God made these things to keep us humble.  For all the abilities of the human body, which are impressive, we all wish we could do some of the things animals can do.  Not many animals are trying to imitate humans, except maybe the family dog, a dancing bear, and trained chimpanzees in the movies.  But they have different motives – the desire for food.
Next headline on:  Birds • Marine Biology • Physics • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design

1. Archaeology:  “The ability to tell the difference between crystals that formed naturally and those formed by human activity can be important to archaeologists in the field,” began an article on PhysOrg.  Scientists at Duke University have “developed a process that can tell in a matter of minutes the origin of samples thousands of years old.”  Merely from the way that the calcite crystals are organized, they can detect whether a rock is natural or comes from man-made plaster.  Incidentally, the technique was recently tested “at an ancient site in central Israel at Tel Safit, close to where David is thought to have slain Goliath,” the article said.
       On a related note, Science Daily reported on a team at Monash University in Australia that claims to have found the “world’s oldest ground-edge implement.”  This indicates the ability to distinguish natural structures from those worked by human hands on purpose – by design.
2. Biomimetics:  The science of imitating natural designs is a form of intelligent design science in practice (11/04/2010, 10/30/2010).   PhysOrg reported on work by Newcastle University students who engineered bacteria to form a sealer for repairing cracks in concrete.  They make the bacteria swim into the cracks, where the microbes “glue” the sides together with their secretions.  This may make it possible “to prolong the life of structures which are environmentally costly to build.”
       Similarly, Science Daily said that a researcher at Delft University in the Netherlands trained bacteria to convert biowaste into plastic.  And then there’s this: New Scientist reported that students in Tokyo got E. coli bacteria to solve Sudoku puzzles.
3. Code in the nose:  Codes and information are stock-in-trade of intelligent design: conveying messages from one entity to another.  Did you know you have a code in your nose? (06/26/2005, 02/01/2008).  It’s a sophisticated one, too: “Odor Coding in Mammals Is More Complex Than Previously Thought,” reported Science Daily.  “A new study in the Journal of General Physiology (JGP) shows that the contribution of odorant receptors (ORs) to olfactory response in mammals is much more complex than previously thought, with important consequences for odorant encoding and information transfer about odorants to the brain.”  The patterns that researchers at Rockefeller University studied “may contribute heretofore unsuspected information used by the olfactory system in categorizing odorants.”
       Another recent story on coding can be found on PNAS, where scientists at Johns Hopkins University found another molecule that is part of the “histone code” in genetics (09/25/2010, bullet 3; 07/26/2006).

Intelligence is real.  Design is real.  Information is real.  Intelligent causes are real.  The question is not whether the researchers in the above fields believe in evolution or I.D.  Many of the above probably believe fervently in evolution.  The point is that they use techniques predicated on the assumption that design is detectable.  Even a hiker can tell that three stones on top of one another were put there on purpose to convey a message.  Some websites like eSkeptic use gymnastic circumlocutions to deny this, calling I.D.’s comparison of SETI with intelligent design a “category error,” or the use of design detection as a “point of departure,” or claiming that the secular researcher knows in advance that the intelligent agent found will be human (in the case of archaeology).
    Come now.  One cannot define science in such a way that rules out intelligent causes and then say that intelligent design is not science.  To do that, one would have to judge much of the history of science as unscientific, because Newton, Kepler, John Ray, Linnaeus and many other scientists performed world-class science to seek understanding of the Designer’s mind.  The skeptics cannot, furthermore, disqualify science based on the motives or beliefs of the scientists, or what their evidence might imply.  There are no demarcation criteria that can rule out intelligent design a priori in science.  Science is supposed to represent an authentic, honest effort to follow the evidence where it leads.  If one rules out intelligent causes at the outset, one can miss the true nature of reality.  And honesty in science already presupposes an intelligent cause for its existence.
    The biomimetics researcher knows he has a good design to mimic.  The biochemist studying the histone code knows that a functional message is embedded in the structure.  The SETI researcher knows a message will imply purpose and intent – and in the particular case of SETI, the seeker has advance knowledge the intelligence will be non-human; it could even be robotic, angelic or demonic--how would anyone tell?  The comparisons between intelligent design and these other active sciences are obvious and real.  No amount of dancing with words can cover for ignoring the obvious, unless one is committed to malevolent intelligent design – which the devils also believe, and cause trouble.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Early Man • Biomimetics • Genetics • Philosophy of Science

Boggle Your Brain     11/19/2010    
Nov 19, 2010 — A new animation of a trip through a brain shows mind-boggling complexity in more detail than ever before.  The animation, posted by freelance journalist Elizabeth A. Moore on CNET News, represents years of work by Stanford University School of Medicine.  Using green fluorescent protein in a mouse brain to light up synapses, and photographing the tissue with array tomography, it allows visualizing the forest of neurons and synapses as if traveling through a brain in a spaceship.
    Even more amazing are the superlatives used by the researchers to describe what they had imaged.  Moore writes,

They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor--with both memory-storage and information-processing elements--than a mere on/off switch.  In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches.  A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.

A typical, healthy [brain] houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses.  Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells.  In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

This is a “must-see” animation.  As disorganized as it looks, there is more design there than you can imagine.  Each synapse is a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter.  Put your thumb near your index finger as close as you can; that’s about a millimeter.  Now slice that distance a thousandfold, and you begin to appreciate the scale of these microprocessors, each with tens of thousands of switches and connections.  In the gaps of the synapses, a host of precision chemical neurotransmitters carry coded messages across to other neurons, using cellular processes that package them on one end and unpackage them on the other.  This all happens lightning fast.
    And remember – this is just a mouse brain.  The human brain is vastly more complex, allowing Mozart to conceive whole symphonies in his head, to derive complex calculus theorems while blind, and the apostle Paul to write a paean to love in his epistles.  We need to be reminded of the realities of life when debating creation and evolution.  Who can really believe that a computer network more vast and complex than the internet, packed into a three-pound lump of wet tissue that grows from a single cell and runs on potatoes, arose by an undirected, purposeless process essentially by chance?  If you think about it, you have falsified Darwinism.  Why?  Darwinism is not about thinking.  Look at the Live Science section called “Brain evolution.”  It didn’t even begin to try to start to commence to explain how all this astounding complexity evolved.
    How can a few tens of thousands of genes produce something so marvelous?  No one knows.  Live Science ended with a quote: “Every year there’s an order of magnitude leap in what we know and there’s still many order of magnitude leaps that we need to take in the near future.”  Dr. Walter Brown often pointed out the complexity of the brain in his creation seminars: an adult human brain, he said, has 100 trillion connections (probably a low estimate), “more than all the soldered electrical connections in the world” (see statement on CreationScience.com, and reference).  Did all of man’s soldered connections and internet connections take place by an unguided, purposeless, uncaring process?  Then neither did your brain’s connections.  Both are purposeful, functional systems – only the human brain is vastly superior, and it designed the soldered connections and computer networks.  Out of nothing, nothing comes.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mammals • Mind and Brain • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Adult Stem Cells

1. Culture triple crown:  Scientists at UC San Diego have provided a perfect environment for the growth and culture of adult stem cells, according to Science Daily.  “Bioengineers from the University of California, San Diego have achieved the ‘Triple Crown’ of stem cell culture -- they created an artificial environment for stem cells that simultaneously provides the chemical, mechanical and electrical cues necessary for stem cell growth and differentiation,” the article began.  “Building better microenvironments for nurturing stem cells is critical for realizing the promises of stem-cell-based regenerative medicine, including cartilage for joint repair, cardiac cells for damaged hearts, and healthy skeletal myoblasts for muscular dystrophy patients.  The advance could also lead to better model systems for fundamental stem cell research.  The article said nothing about embryonic stem cells.
2. Bandage for a bleeding heart:  In another Science Daily report, researchers at the University of Cincinnati have shown that an injection of stem cells into animal hearts, with the appropriate expression molecules, leads to repair of damaged heart tissue.  They used induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) in their experiments.
3. Fat for the heart:  Stem cells derived from fat may be safe in humans, said another story in Science Daily.
4. Arthritis hope:  Stem cells from umbilical cords may be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, announced PhysOrg.
5. Stem cells on the brain:  Scientists at Duke University are trying to understand how stem cells in the brain decide to renew themselves or differentiate into neurons, according to PhysOrg.
6. Building stem cell muscle:  PhysOrg announced hope for keeping muscles strong as we age: “A University of Colorado at Boulder-led study shows that specific types of stem cells transplanted into the leg muscles of mice prevented the loss of muscle function and mass that normally occurs with aging, a finding with potential uses in treating humans with chronic, degenerative muscle diseases.”
7. Saving limbs:  Some people get cardiovascular disease so serious, the only option is amputation of a limb.  Science Daily just announced a treatment that might some day save 100,000 limbs a year by injecting the patient’s own stem cells into the damaged area, to “stimulate new blood vessel formation in ischemic limbs, which can improve perfusion and salvage function.”  The lead researcher at Northwestern Medicine was clearly excited about the hope this provides.  “As study of stem cells continues, I believe we’re on the verge of a rebirth in the practice of medicine,” said Douglas Losordo, M.D..  “Using a patient’s own cells to regenerate their body has enormous potential to treat conditions that have previously been considered irreversible.”

1. Art or science?  The only recent stem cell story in the popular science press was this one from Science Daily: “Embryonic Stem Cell Culturing Grows from Art to Science.”  Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found a more reliable way to culture ES cells.  Is anything good being done with them?  Not according to the article: “At present, human embryonic stem cells are cultured mostly for use in research settings.”
2. Regulators without Rx:  An abstract in Nature (11 Nov 2010) discussed research in Singapore trying to identify all the transcription factors that regulate embryonic stem cells.  There was no mention of any application to help human beings.

Joni Eareckson Tada was interviewed on the Frank Pastore radio show Weds. evening (see her website and listen to her story in the documentary, The Case for Faith).  This long-suffering quadriplegic woman who has championed the needs of the disabled would, it seems, have plenty of reasons from a secular perspective to support ES stem cell research – if she thought for a minute they were ethical and provided hope.  Instead, she pled earnestly against ES stem cell research as a matter of conscience, because cutting up human embryos, which according to the Bible and genetics are human persons, violates the sanctity of human life.  She applauded the many wonderful advances happening in adult stem cell research, arguing that they presented no ethical issues.
    Joni, who according to World Magazine has most recently been battling severe pain with breast cancer, on top of decades of paralysis, said all that needs to be said about this issue, with a credibility most of us lack.  For more information, see the policy statement by Steve Bundy about stem cell research on her Joni & Friends ministry website, and her book Life in the Balance that discusses Biblical answers for the issues of our day, including stem cell research.  Joni also has a DVD entitled Lives in the Balance: the Stem Cell Debate that specifically addresses the issue.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Politics and Ethics • Bible and Theology

Dinosaur Fossils Flaunt Physics     11/17/2010    
Nov 17, 2010 — Recent announcements about dinosaurs show that even the large ones exhibited physics fitness.  Their size did not inhibit their mobility.

1. T. rex racer:  Maybe Jurassic Park got it right after all.  According to Science Daily, “Tyrannosaurus rex was far from a plodding Cretaceous era scavenger whose long tail only served to counterbalance the up-front weight of its freakishly big head.”  A grad student at the University of Alberta studied the muscle attachments in the rib cage and tail and compared them to Komodo dragons and crocodiles.  He concluded that the monster could outrun any other animal in its hunting grounds.
2. Flying giraffe:  Only a children’s storybook author would claim a giraffe could launch itself into the sky, but apparently some pterosaurs as large as giraffes did just that.  Live Science reported, “Giraffe-sized pterosaurs may have pole-vaulted with their arms to launch themselves, just as vampire bats do, scientists now suggest.”  Contrary to previous ideas that they would have had to get a running start or jump from cliffs, the new study at University of Portsmouth suggests they could have “pole-vaulted” themselves from a standing position, using their front limbs, to get high enough to flap their enormous wings and fly – pretty good for an animal weighing 500 pounds or more.  A researcher, who was amazed at the tremendous size and power of these creatures, said, “Pterosaurs had incredibly strong skeletons – for their weight, they’re probably amongst the strongest ever evolved.”
       New Scientist includes a video clip of the proposed launching mechanism.  The BBC News also reported on this story, and included a short audio interview with one of the scientists.
3. Free-range dinosaurs:  The turkey you prepare for Thanksgiving may be a model animal for how some dinosaurs ran, according to Live Science.  Nobody knows if dinosaur meat tasted like turkey, but another article posted on PhysOrg reported the discovery of juvenile dinosaur footprints in Colorado near Denver.  According to the discoverers, “Speedy the Sauropod” was running like a scalded turkey when it made the tracks.

Were dinosaurs primitive animals on the way to becoming smart, like humans?  No; they were incredibly well designed, powerful and successful.  And they all died suddenly, often buried in mass graves.  If it weren’t for the evolutionary scenario imposed on the data, a very different picture of their origins and extinctions might be proposed.  What was Speedy running from?  Why are so many mashed together in water-borne sediments?  Why must we be told Darwin takes credit for explaining them?  “They’re probably amongst the strongest ever evolved” – good grief.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs and Extinct Reptiles • Fossils • Physics • Amazing Facts

Maxwell’s ID Demon Converts Info to Energy     11/16/2010    
Nov 16, 2010 — Information can be converted into energy – provided it is guided by intelligent design.  That’s what researchers demonstrated with an experimental setup of “Maxwell’s Demon,” a famous thought experiment about how to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
    James Clerk Maxwell knew that the laws of thermodynamics did not allow the spontaneous separation of hot and cold gas molecules in a container.  He imagined, though, that an agent (he didn’t call it a demon) could sort the molecules by choosing which ones could pass through a barrier.  Later, it was proved that the Second Law would not be violated, because of the energy expended by the demon choosing the molecules (06/27/2002, 07/17/2002).
    According to PhysOrg, Masaki Sano and a team at the University of Tokyo set up an experiment that shows energy can be extracted from information – the information of scientists acting as Maxwell’s Demon.  They controlled a particle subject to random Brownian motion to walk up a spiral staircase by using electric fields to prevent it jumping back down.  So by controlling its direction, but not pushing it, they allowed it to gain more potential energy.
    The article explained, “The experiment did not violate the second law of thermodynamics because energy was consumed in the experiment by the apparatus used, and by the experimenters themselves, who did work in monitoring the particle and adjusting the voltage, but Sano said the experiment does demonstrate that information can be used as a medium for transferring energy.”
    See also how life uses Maxwell’s demons at the molecular scale in cellular motors (02/10/2010) and in muscle (04/19/2010).

Information into energy: what a concept.  You could teach a child this principle with a simple home experiment.  Get some jumping beans (or any toy that will spontaneously jump) and put them on a small staircase with side walls.  Some will jump and land higher up.  As they climb, block their fall back down.  The bean can eventually make it to the top, where it has increased its potential energy without the child applying any force to it.  Two children can race their jumping beans to the top to make it more fun.
    To apply the lesson, ask them if the bean would ever make it to the top on its own (assuming it can only hop as high as one stair at a time, and there are many stairs).  With unguided reversible processes, the child will see that it is highly unlikely.  But by applying intelligent design (the goal of reaching the top), a mind can harness chance motions to perform work.  The Second Law ensures that entropy will increase in the whole system (bean + setup of experimental apparatus + body and brain of the guiding intelligence), but the object lesson will be a good illustration of the power of intelligent design over randomness.
Next headline on:  Physics • Intelligent Design • Education

If you thought the universe was pretty well figured out, wait till we see what comes from plasma cosmology.  “Often, a detailed understanding of the plasma physics under the specific space and astrophysical conditions holds the key to many long-standing mysteries,” the article said.  Mysteries imply basic misunderstandings in our current science.  Can fundamental changes to our thinking be in store?  No one yet knows; science is tentative, not absolute.  Interdisciplinary approaches are likely to challenge basic assumptions and bring outside-the-box thinking to stale modes of inquiry.  The universe could look very different to future astronomers, just as it differs today from what astronomers thought they knew in 2000, 1900, 1800, 1700, 1600, ....
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Astronomy • Physics • Philosophy of Science

Although compensation for defects caused by “selfish” (self-propagating) DNA elements may seem intuitive, it is problematic to propose that, on the way to evolving compensatory machinery, an intermediate state had to exist that was less fit than its ancestors and sisters.  Why would such an intermediate not just die out in competition before its rescue by compensatory complexity yet to be invented?  A more workable model is that the compensating mechanism was already present (possibly serving unrelated functions).

Although this model is easiest to illustrate using molecular systems of peripheral importance or limited distribution (such as splicing or RNA editing), there is no reason why it might not contribute to the generation of any cellular complexity (the ribosome; mitochondrial respiratory complexes; light-harvesting antennae in photosynthetic organisms; RNA and DNA polymerases and their initiation, elongation, and termination complexes; protein import, folding, and degradation apparatuses; the cytoskeleton and its motors).  Much of the bewildering intricacy of cells could consist of originally fortuitous molecular interactions that have become more or less fixed by constructive neutral evolution.  Indeed, although complexity in biology is generally regarded as evidence of “fine tuning” or “sophistication,” large biological conglomerates might be better interpreted as the consequences of runaway bureaucracy—as biological parallels of nonsensically complex Rube Goldberg machines that are over-engineered to perform a single task.

The shameless, aimless, lameness game these guys played with words and concepts, invoking the Stuff Happens Law (SHL) as a scientific explanation (09/22/2009, 10/03/2010, 11/10/2010), refusing to acknowledge the name of Behe, and calling the most marvelous living machines ever discovered (including ATP synthase and the respiratory chain! – 09/22/2010) a bunch of slapdash accidents, is breathtaking.  This is another example of evolutionist ideologues talking nonsense to themselves in an echo chamber.  Science never gives Behe a chance to respond, or anyone else.  They did us all one favor, though – falsifying neo-Darwinism.
    Their astounding list of machines they claim could be explained by “constructive neutral evolution” (a.k.a. SHL in a cheap tuxedo) shows also how ungrateful they are.  Those machines are keeping them alive.  They are keeping their brains capable of thinking and reasoning.  If they thought for a minute about the stupidity of their SHL theory, and the intricate complexity of those machines – the molecular trucks, proofreaders, editors, repair crews, and more – their response ought to be awe and thankfulness.  Instead, they became vain in their imaginations, neither were thankful (ref.).
    The spliceosomes they claim are gratuitously complex are exquisitely functional.  Have these biologists never heard of alternative splicing?  The splicing machinery generates a multitude of protein products from the same DNA transcription (02/02/2010).  There are reasons these machines are complex, and the proof of the pudding is the brain that allows these scientists to think (although, like pudding, their thinking is mushy).
    For them to think that the fortuitous (happenstance) produced the gratuitous (unplanned), they are not only reasoning circuitously, they are showing themselves to be muddle-headed ingrates.  What they need is fortitude and gratitude.  Then they might become circumspect, like they were designed to be.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Intelligent Design • Darwin and Evolution

SETI Reinvades Oz     11/13/2010    
Nov 13, 2010 — To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first SETI search, astronomers from around the world are going to tune into the stars, listening for aliens.  Frank Drake named his first attempt in 1960 after the land of Oz: Project Ozma.  Today’s searchers, looking at promising candidates with much better resolution, are once again paying tribute to L. Frank Baum’s children’s tale by calling their search “Project Dorothy.”  Frank Drake is pleased, though disappointed at half a century of finding nothing.  “Over the past 50 years our searches have not yet produced the discovery we all hope for,” he said.  “This is understandable – in our vast and awesome universe it will take long, painstaking and comprehensive searches before we will have a good chance of success.”  The story can be found at Space.com.

Frank Drake is the only scientist in the world famous for what he has not found, and for his Drake Equation that calculates any answer from a series of unknowable unknowns.  His celebrity shows there is still hope for those whose only skills are ignorance and talk.
    Remember when the Darwin funDOmentalists laughed and laughed at the Kansas school board for daring to allow alternatives to evolution with jokes about its members being wackos from the land of Oz (04/21/2005)?  Well, the SETI devotees (usually the same crowd) have no protection from the hole they just opened up for themselves.  Next they should start Project Wicked Witch, Project Scarecrow, and Project Munchkin.
    What Baum didn’t describe in detail was the religion of the munchkins.  Before Toto revealed the semi-intelligent cause behind their Wizard’s tricks, the munchkins maintained a sacred ritual, pointing their dishes to the sky and calling for wisdom that never came.
Next headline on:  Stars • SETI

Some describe Mandelbrot as one who chose the role of a maverick in the mainstream sciences.  Quite to the contrary, his uncompromising devotion to analyze and understand the “rough” reality of nature isolated him from the mainstream.  In his view, the common “smooth” representations of natural processes were entirely inappropriate and far from the essence of nature: “Clouds are not spheres and mountains are not cones.”  Alone, he shaped a program of geometry based on fractals, a term he coined to refer to mathematical shapes with irregular contours, just as seen in nature.

Now that Mandelbrot’s work can be considered to belong to mainstream mathematics and the sciences, it is important to remember that there was once strong resistance and skepticism.  I have often asked myself where Mandelbrot found the source of his strength, determination, and endurance in those decades when he was practically isolated in his own mathematical world.  He used to claim that his geometrical view and associated gifts guided him and that he did not feel isolated at all.  I would add that his pristine character as someone who sought the truth in life and nature led him as well.  Moreover, I remember Benoît as a universal scientist and very conscious citizen of the world, knowledgeable and sharp in all branches of the sciences and beyond: the arts, politics, and history.  It will take further generations to grasp the full significance and impact of his insight far beyond the borders of mathematics.

The best way to learn the virtues of good science is to study the lives of its best practitioners.  That’s why we keep an extensive set of online biographies at this site (see Table of Contents).  While Mandelbrot and Huchra do not fit into the intelligent design or creation category, their lives illustrate several virtues that all scientists should emulate:

• Respect for what nature is, not for what the consensus believes it should be.
• Valuing empiricism over theory.
• Willingness to follow the evidence where it leads.
• Honesty.
• Humility.
• A well-rounded education.
• Altruism.
• Independent thinking.
• Hard work.
• Courage to stand alone.

Huchra and Mandelbrot were not complete mavericks, of course, since they both were well connected and were honored within their lifetimes.  Mandelbrot drew on insights from two earlier French mathematicians.  Huchra did not question big bang cosmology, but challenged some of its assumptions, preferring to believe his eyes more than theory.  But at crucial points in their work, they did have to decide whether to fall in line with the consensus or follow their own path.  Notice that Mandelbrot was not trying to be a maverick.  He did not have a martyr complex or anything like it.  The consensus isolated him, to their shame and disgrace.
    If there were more biologists with these virtues, there would be fewer Darwinists.  Notice that the list of virtues does not evolve, and was not produced by a blind, impersonal process.  You can’t be a consistent evolutionist and believe in virtue as a real quality, referencing eternal values.  Moreover, few in the evolution camp exhibit all of these virtues.  The easiest thing in the world for them is to remain bosom buddies with the creationist-haters and ID-attackers, not to think independently and critically evaluate evolutionary theory.
    The bounty on mavericks in biology is high.  Outlaws in Darwin’s corrupt township are expelled with irrational hatred.  Even materialist evolutionists who try to question Darwin’s mechanism, as the eminent Darwinist atheist Stephen Jay Gould and the Altenberg 16 (12/28/2009) found out, face the wrath of the funDOmentalists (see 11/10/2010 commentary for definition; also Gould’s term “Darwinian fundamentalism” in 05/31/2004).  Michael Rampino should fear for his career (11/11/2010).
    Steven Shapin reminded us that science is “produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority” (11/02/2010).  The cultural climates in astronomy and mathematics may be a little more tolerant of mavericks than in biological circles, but consider: in any endeavor, if you want to be remembered for your life and achievements, dare to be a Daniel; dare to stand alone.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Physics • Philosophy of Science • Amazing Facts

“Matthew discovered and clearly stated the idea of natural selection, applied it to the origin of species, and placed it in the context of a geologic record marked by catastrophic mass extinctions followed by relatively rapid adaptations,” says Rampino, whose research on catastrophic events includes studies on volcano eruptions and asteroid impacts.  “In light of the recent acceptance of the importance of catastrophic mass extinctions in the history of life, it may be time to reconsider the evolutionary views of Patrick Matthew as much more in line with present ideas regarding biological evolution than the Darwin view.”

This is a startling announcement that could put Rampino in grave danger.  It’s not that he or Patrick Matthew have anything worthwhile to contribute to the understanding of how we got here.  Good grief, catastrophes do not manufacture wings and eyes and brains, or else they would spontaneously emerge on Mars and Titan.  What is startling is that Rampino would put his reputation and livelihood at stake.  Doesn’t he know the penalty for failing to pay homage to Charles Darwin?  PaV on Uncommon Descent fears, since not even Stephen Jay Gould could survive scorn with his catastrophist theory of punctuated equilibria, even though being an ardent evolutionist, that Rampino will be “gobbled up by the Darwinian thought police” in short order for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Geology

Evolutionary Explanations Come Up Empty     11/10/2010    
Nov 10, 2010 — When evolutionists claim that they have explained the evolution of this or that, or that their research sheds light on its evolution, a closer examination sometimes shows verbiage covering up hollow reasoning, or even employing intelligent design concepts as weapons against design.

1. Snap goes the dragon:  PhysOrg highlighted a research project by some UK biologists and computer scientists who claimed they explained, in Kipling fashion, “How the dragon got its snap” – the snapdragon, that is, a popular garden flower.  Snapdragons (genus Antirrhinum) have asymmetrical dorsal and ventral parts that form a hinge.  When the bee lands on the welcome mat, the flower snaps open, allowing entry into the inner sanctum of pollen and nectar.  According to PhysOrg, the work not only sheds light on the evolution of shape, it throws it:

   The study also throws light on how different shapes may evolve.  In the computational model, small changes to the genes that influence the growth rules produce a variety of different forms.  The shape of the snapdragon flower, with the closely matched upper and lower petal shapes, could have arisen through similar ‘genetic tinkering’ during evolution.  Evolutionary tinkering could also underlie the co-ordinated changes required for the development of many other biological structures, such as the matched upper and lower jaws of vertebrates.

   Left begging by this explanation is how a blind, purposeless, aimless process produced growth rules, closely matched parts, and coordinated changes.  The tinkering metaphor also connotes some kind of personality aiming at a result, however haphazard the method might be.  Even “trial and error” still connotes having a goal in mind.  In evolutionary theory, survival is not a goal; it is an artifact.
       The paper in PLoS Biology on which this story was based did not explain things any better.¹  “The results suggest that genetic control of tissue polarity organisers has played a key role in the development and evolution of shape,” the authors said, leaving it unclear who controls the development, or who wrote the screenplay, who gathered the cast of characters, and who directed their roles.  It also merely assumes that shapes evolved rather than were designed.  If this throws any light, it throws it onto assumptions, not onto evidence.
       Regarding evidence for shape formation, they admitted they were clueless at the outset: “Genes are known to control the shape of biological structures, like flowers, hearts, and limbs, yet how they do this is poorly understood.”  They proceeded to study how (but not why) genes influence the shape of snapdragons, and found that a model that simply accounts for local tissue growth is inadequate.  “These could be most readily explained if genes also affect an internal field of orientations along which growth is directed, established by organisers of tissue polarity,” using words that connote intelligent design.  “Our analysis therefore revealed a previously unsuspected role of shape genes in the control of tissue polarity, highlighting the importance of this process for the development and evolution of tissue forms.”  The word evolution was tagged onto that sentence full of design words like a bumper sticker on a car announcing “Chance rules.”.  Such a message has nothing to do with the design of the car.
       Nothing improved by the end of the paper.  “We propose that effects on tissue polarity have played a key role in the evolution of shapes, such as the closed Snapdragon flower, and thus provide a general mechanism for the generation of complex forms.”  A close reading of that sentence reveals design concepts being employed to argue for a chance process: propose (stating a proposition, appealing to logic and evidence for its support); effects... played a role (a dubious proposition, unless the effects are coordinated and controlled); mechanism (a word normally used of plans and goals); and generation of complex forms (a phrase that could be used for a chance process, but not for one with functional benefits, like snapdragon pollination).  The authors proceeded to include a paragraph on the “Evolution of Shape” as a general principle.  The same problems plagued this attempt: use of subjunctive mood hiding the active causes, assumption of evolution, hedging words (might have, may have), and the use of design words to argue for chance:

   Dorsoventral flower asymmetry is a common feature of the Lamiales (the Order to which Antirrhinum belongs).  However, the formation of flowers that have a closed mouth with a hinged palate (known as the personate form) is restricted to a small but diverse clade within the Lamiales.  The Antirrhinum corolla model indicates that a key step in the evolution of personate flowers may have been bringing tissue polarity organisers under the control of genes like DIV and DICH.  In particular, the formation of a hinged lower palate matching the upper corolla depends on promotion of CENORG by DIV.  It is possible that equivalent morphogenetic changes could have been brought about through changes in patterns of specified growth rates rather than tissue polarity.  However, modulating tissue polarity may provide a simpler developmental mechanism for some coordinated changes in form and may therefore have been favoured during evolution.  Other evolutionary innovations, such as formation of flower spurs, may also involve genes influencing organisers of tissue polarity.  Thus, changes in polarity as well as specified growth rates may play a key part in the evolution of complex morphologies.

   It should be clear to the skeptical reader that random changes to a coordinated mechanism are not likely to produce functional “innovations” in any blind system.  The authors therefore shrewdly co-opted the language of design and implied that it supported the explanation of complex shapes (not only those of snapdragons, but “complex morphologies” throughout life) by a random, unguided, purposeless, aimless process of evolution – provided one overlooks the bet-hedging phrases suffusing the explanation (may have, it is possible, could have been, may provide, may therefore have been favoured during evolution, may also involve).
       PhysOrg and Science Daily both dutifully reproduced the press release from the John Innes Centre without any critical analysis, even with its overtly evidence-challenged, design-free statement that extrapolated their puny work on snapdragon genes into an over-arching principle: “the researchers show how these principles allow very complex biological shapes to generate themselves.”  One of the authors was even more explicit: “How do hearts, wings or flowers get their shape?” Prof. Enrico Coen asked.  “Unlike man-made things like mobile phones or cars, there is no external hand or machine guiding the formation of these biological structures; they grow into particular shapes of their own accord.”
2. Eh? goes the tetrapod:  “Were our tetrapod ancestors deaf?” asked PhysOrg, assuming out of the starting gate that humans had tetrapod ancestors.  The article gave credence to researchers at the University of Southern Denmark who “have shown that the closest living relatives of the tetrapods, the lungfish, are insensitive to sound pressure, but sensitive to vibrations.”  That may be true of living lungfish, which are fish, but tetrapods are four-footed non-fish.  “Many changes in the sensory systems of tetrapods are associated with the water-to-land transition,” the article stated, again announcing a truism only logical if evolution is assumed.  That statement was followed by an uncontroversial fact of living tetrapods: “In hearing, one of the crucial elements in detecting airborne sound is the tympanic ear”
       But next was a statement of profound faith in a string of chance miracles: “Surprisingly, the tympanic ear originated independently in the major tetrapod lineages and relatively late after the terrestrial tetrapods emerged – in the Triassic, more than 100 million years after the origin of tetrapods.”  By couching the proposition in passive voice verbs (originated, emerged), the authors misdirected the readers from a hollow scientific explanation onto a dogmatic assumption.
       Surprising is an understatement.  Look at the chain of chance occurrences to even get close one time: “Sensitivity to airborne sound entailed three major changes of the ear between the age of Carbon and the Triassic: a changed sensitivity in the inner ear, a change in the articulation of the middle ear bone and finally coupling of the middle ear bone to skin covering the spiracle, creating a tympanic ear.”  But those are the least of their worries for evolution to get right.  The structures would be useless without a brain to hear the sounds and the senses to react to them.  The authors, naturally, neglected to explain how those details “emerged.”
3. Yum! goes the caveman:  A psychologist at McGill University says that the sight of red meat makes humans less aggressive, why?  Because, he believes, “humans may therefore have evolved an innate predisposition to respond aggressively towards meat,” Frank Kachanoff said.  This counterintuitive belief is explained by the hunt being over and the cave clan gathering around the soothing campfire.  After the fact, the psych reasoned, “it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time.”  But does testing 82 living males reveal anything about unseen evolutionary ancestors?

• Oxygen produces complex life, says Live Science.
• Life?  Primordial soup not needed; primordial haze will do (Space.com).
• Human evolution was shaped by plate tectonics (New Scientist).
• Fly eye similarities to human eye show that sight is an “evolutionary bestseller” (PhysOrg).
• The fossil record doesn’t really undermine Darwin (Science Daily; see 10/31/2010 for details).

Is this the folly of deception or of ignorance?  Are these evolutionists intentionally trying to foist a false view of the world on the public, or are they just so blind, they confuse their own imagination with reality?  Readers can draw their own conclusions.  One thing is indisputable: this is not science.  Even strong evidence of design, and the language of intelligent design, becomes twisted into weird faith that Darwin has been vindicated.  Holding to beliefs so empty, so committed to a view in spite of evidence, so beholden to a godlike hero named Charles Darwin, can only be described by a new term specially coined to describe it: funDOmentalism, where the DO stands for “Darwin Only.”  To a funDOmentalist, no evidence can alter their faith; it is the one great truth they most surely know, even if all of reality must be contorted to fit it.
Next headline on:  Plants • Marine Biology • Early Man • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Calling this complex animal an “important step in unraveling the evolution of decapods” is like finding a complete building, with pipes, electricity, structural steel, and all the interior and exterior furnishings, and calling it an important step in unraveling the evolution of buildings, then claiming that more finds are necessary to unravel the complete story.  What’s unraveling here is the evolutionary story itself.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution

The new findings suggest that a Venus flytrap’s chemical signals work much like those in the human brain.  Like neurotransmitters, the plant chemicals accumulate until they affect the plants’ cell membranes, creating electrical imbalances that cells use to communicate.  In the brain, these so-called “action potentials” are the language of neurons.  In a Venus flytrap, they’re the signal that spells dinnertime for the plant and slow digestion for its hapless prey.

You can buy these amazing plants at many nurseries.  What a fun way to fascinate kids with science: they can see the trigger hairs in the traps, and learn by observation that it takes two strokes within 30 seconds to get the trap to spring shut – another mechanism to help the plant (which has no eyes or ears) to differentiate between live prey and debris.  Good questions are sure to follow: how could that just happen?  Does the plant have a brain?  Well, sort of.  Help kids realize that even the small, simple things are incredibly complex, and that many sophisticated parts must work together for things like the Venus flytrap to succeed.
Next headline on:  Plants • Amazing Facts

Cells Can Be Transformed     11/08/2010    
Nov 8, 2010 — An astonishing feat has been performed in a Canadian lab: scientists turned human skin cells into blood cells.  Bypassing the need for stem cells, the technique provides hope for a supply of blood from a person’s own skin.
    Jeremy Hsu at Live Science calls it a “modern miracle.”  The technique avoids “the ethical concerns concerning embryonic stem cells and the immune system complications that might reject foreign biological material.”  Reprogrammed adult stem cells were tried, but they are difficult to make in quantity and cannot be transplanted.  Bypassing the stem cell stage, the team at McMaster University found they can create larger quantities of blood cells.  They also found that the technique works with skin from young and old individuals.
    Does this open the door for creating other types of cells by this method?  “We’ll now go on to work on developing other types of human cell types from skin, as we already have encouraging evidence,” said Mike Bhatia, a lead study author and scientific director of the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute at the University.  Science Daily added that this method offers hope also for cancer patients, who in the future may no longer need to find bone marrow transplants that are a perfect match.
    Cynthia Dunbar at the National Institutes of Health said, “Bhatia’s approach detours around the pluripotent stem cell stage and thus avoids many safety issues, increases efficiency, and also has the major benefit of producing adult-type l blood cells instead of fetal blood cells, a major advantage compared to the thus far disappointing attempts to produce blood cells from human ESCs [embryonic stem cells] or IPSCs [induced pluripotent stem cells].”
    In another cell story, Science Daily reported that researchers at Johns Hopkins found “a protein mechanism that coordinates and regulates the dynamics of shape change necessary for division of a single cell into two daughter cells.”  A protein designated 14-3-3 “sits at an intersection where it integrates converging signals from within the cell and cues cell shape change and, ultimately, the splitting that allows for normal and abnormal cell growth, such as in tumors.”  This controller protein influences the actions of molecular motors: “myosin II, a complex of motor proteins that monitors and smoothes out the shape changes to ensure accurate division.”

This very welcoming news about blood cells from skin has the potential of being called a breakthrough of the year (or decade).  It is important not only for the tremendous health benefits it can offer, but for showing that ethically-clouded practices like the use of human embryos are not needed or justified.  Even more amazing are the insights this technique will provide into the workings of the cell – insights that required no help from Darwin – that promise even more health benefits in coming years.  People who care about the value of human life will also welcome this finding that may take some of the pressure off the stem cell gold rush.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Politics and Ethics • Amazing Facts

The evolutionary claims in this article are incoherent.  If the evolutionary biologists want to portray man as an intrusion into the environment, then it’s a story of artificial selection, not natural selection.  Artificial selection is intelligent design – whether or not the designers (people) know exactly what they are doing.  In this case, the tribespeople were selecting for dead fish (ones they could eat) instead of living fish.  They were still imposing their will on organisms for their own purposes.    Besides, people can’t “kick-start the evolutionary process of natural selection.”  Natural selection is not a process; it is an aimless, directionless, purposeless filter. 
    If, on the other hand, the team wants to portray the religious rituals of the tribespeople as natural, then it makes no sense to “want to hopefully find a balance between the cultural practices of these people and the ecosystem,” because the people are already part of the ecosystem.  Whatever nature does is in balance by definition.  They cannot appeal to some higher ideal of balance outside nature, because the evolutionary scientists are part of nature, too.  That also implies that their research is an evolutionary product of natural selection with no independently-verifiable adherence to a supernatural standard of truth or morality.  I.e., science implodes.  It would also mean they need to accept the gospel preaching in a local Baptist church as natural – and also the anti-evolution teachings of Biblical creationists.
    There’s no evolution in this story in the sense Darwin meant.  There’s only natural variation and population dynamics.  Some of the fish probably already had a natural resistance to barbasco anyway, which might have been due to deleterious mutations – a loss of genetic information.  It’s like the old peppered moth myth.  In that case, introducing man-caused soot onto the tree trunks did not cause dark moths to evolve out of light moths (even if that part of the story were true); it just change the proportions of light and dark populations by allowing birds to pick out the contrasting colors (if that part of the story were true).  Same here.  The barbasco is the soot; the tribespeople are the predators.  Fish naturally resistant to the barbasco increased in numbers.  No evolution occurred.
    So despite all the evolution-talk and natural-selection talk in the article, the research has nothing to do with evolution.  It is, instead, a case study on the shallow reasoning of evolutionary biologists.  This entry counts as the 600th in the “Dumb Ideas” category.  It would take a long time to read the other 599 examples reported here over the last 10 years – long enough to evolve resistance to toxic ideas.  Help pass on that resistance to your “non-evolved brethren” (i.e., everyone).
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

1. Fingers do the walking:  Science Daily blindly reproduced an audacious claim from the University of Liverpool that Neanderthals were promiscuous on the basis of – what? – their finger bones.  “Neanderthals Were More Promiscuous Than Modern Humans, Fossil Finger Bones Suggest.”  The thinking was that a thick finger bone suggests larger amounts of male hormone during development, which in turn suggests that the men were more masculine, therefore aggressive, therefore promiscuous.  Not only that, the same scientists concluded that Australopithecus was monogamous, and Ardipithecus was promiscuous.
2. Cometary omens:  Charles Q. Choi in Live Science took the occasion of Deep Impact’s flyby of Comet Hartley 2 (see JPL for photos) to tell a story: “How Earth May Owe Its Life to Comets.”  The origin of earth’s water and the origin of life are major unsolved problems for secular scientists, and comet impacts could inflict more damage than aid, but for the purposes of reporting, comets make nice objects that “suggest” benign effects on earth history, though seeing a cyanide jet coming out of Hartley 2 causes a minor problem.
3. Axe-ing a question:  Observation: some stone tools in a South Africa cave show that the inhabitants had pretty good craftsmanship.  Conclusion: “Our ancestors had to grow bigger brains to make axes,” said Catherine de Lange at New Scientist.  She took the word of scientists at Imperial College London that “putting together more complex language requires you to have more complex structured thoughts, in the same way that making more complex tools requires more complex actions” – true enough, though she left it unclear how the need to grow a bigger brain led to the correct sequence of random mutations to bring it about.  Perhaps it was a decision by the cave council.
4. Universal warming:  Live Science announced, “Black Holes Gave Our Baby Universe a Fever.”  PhysOrg followed up with a trendy headline, “Astronomers find evidence of cosmic climate change.”  Let’s hope they don’t blame humans for that.  The focus of the articles might have been on the quandary facing cosmologists for detecting anomalous heat in distant galaxies, and for invoking unobservable black holes to account for it.
5. Lively Mars:  Is it even possible for a science reporter to write about Mars these days without using the L-word life?  Maggie McKee at New Scientist couldn’t break the habit.  The mere presence of hydrated silica on the sides of a Martian volcano was enough to set off the hallucinations: “Silica deposits on Mars could entomb possible life.”
6. Missing blink:  “Missing link” is second only to “survival of the fittest” as a phrase capable of conjuring up the bearded visage of Charles Darwin.  The missing link in PhysOrg’s story, though, was not an apeman, but a chemical element: phosphorus.  It was apparently enough floss for us to be told, “Phosphorus identified as the missing link in evolution of animals.”  Just add phosphorus, and presto: animals.  According to a geochemist at the University of Alberta, who claims he divined a rise in phosphorus in the world’s oceans 750 million years ago, “That establishes our link between phosphorus and the evolution of animals.”

Since mainstream science reporters have proven themselves utter dupes of the Darwin Party, drunk on Darwine and acting like court jesters gulping toads in the Darwin castle, it’s up to us readers to do the critical thinking.  The ultimate irony in all this is that these very reporters and Darwin-worshipers think of themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment, rationalism, science, and free speech.  If the town drunk fancies himself the reasonable man, what are the truly reasonable to do in a town run by the drunks?
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Solar System • Origin of Life • Darwin and Evolution • Early Man • Dumb Ideas

All Kingdoms of Life Have Ideas We Need     11/04/2010    
Nov 4, 2010 — Inventors aren’t partial.  They are willing to find inspiration in plants, animals, and microbes.  Here are three examples showing that all kingdoms of life have great engineering ideas that researchers involved in biomimetics are seeking to understand.

1. Plants:  We don’t fight walled cities with catapults any more, but storing elastic energy can still be useful.  According to Science Daily, Dr. David J. Ellerby at Wellesley College studies plants for ideas.  “While plants are generally thought of as immobile organisms, many of them are capable of spectacularly rapid movements,” he said.  One species catapults its seeds with rapidly-uncoiling valves.  “The entire coiling and launching process is completed in around 5 msec – faster than the blink of an eye,” the article said.  Why does Dr. Ellerby think it is worthwhile to study how plant tissues store such impressive amounts of energy?  “This could inform the design of human-engineered structures for absorbing or storing elastic energy,” he said.
2. Animals:  Spiders are still the envy of modern-day spidermen who want to mimic their strong, flexible webs.  PhysOrg reported on work going on at Arizona State – just one of many institutions eager to tap the secrets of this wonder material.  Think about the wonder of the web coming out of the spider’s spinnerets: “They’ve taken this aqueous protein solution and they’ve pulled an ultra-strong fiber that is no longer soluble in the medium it was in,” exclaimed Jeff Yarger of ASU.  “When it rains outside, webs don’t dissolve.”  His team is throwing all man’s high-tech imaging equipment at the stuff – MRI, NMR, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction – to understand it.  ASU is not only interested in the final product, but understanding how it is produced by the spider, because “Imitating the natural process will allow scientists to create products in an environmentally friendly way.”  One of the environmental hazards, though, is having to work close to black widows in addition to the friendly garden orb spinners.
3. Cells:  Proteins and DNA include structures called coiled coils.  According to a paper by a European team published in PNAS,¹ “Coiled coils are extensively and successfully used nowadays to rationally design multistranded structures for applications, including basic research, biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials science, and medicine.”  Consequently, they want to understand better how cells produce them.  Using a transcriptional factor from yeast, they announced, “We found an unexpected, general link between coiled-coil oligomerization-state specificity and trigger sequences, elements that are indispensable for coiled-coil formation.”  Multiple states can coexist in the trigger sequences and give rise to different structures, they found, “revealing a delicate balance of the resulting oligomerization state by position-dependent forces.”  The resulting ability to predict the oligomerization state “should have major implications for the rational design of coiled coils and consequently many applications using these popular oligomerization domains.”

Rational design: is that the same thing as intelligent design?
Next headline on:  Plants • Terrestrial Zoology • Cell Biology • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Think about these findings, and then realize that by thinking about them, with a true sense of self and conscious direction of your mind, you distance yourself from other primates, with which we share many physiological characteristics.  Then think about how our upright posture, opposable thumbs, and language equip us to stand in a special position in nature.  These important issues have everything to do with our actions and attitudes about the value of human life.  If apes are just as smart as us, then what’s the big deal? – although it is ironic that many of those who support abortion on demand are vehement about animal rights.  If, though, a developing baby has the full mental equipment to operate as a human being in the world of the mind, what gives other humans the right to deny that person the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness endowed by its Creator?
Next headline on:  Mammals • Human Body • Mind and Brain • Amazing Facts • Politics and Ethics

In a sense, the two competing storylines about Judith Curry—peacemaker or dupe?—are both true.  Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt, and in that charged environment, what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason—especially since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along.  But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance.  They feel they have all been lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments.  The whole thing has become a political potboiler, and what might be the normal insider debates over the minutiae of data, methodology and conclusions have gotten shrill.  It is perhaps unreasonable to expect everyone to stop sniping at one another, but given the high stakes, it is crucial to focus on the science itself and not the noise.

That’s all we need – another use of the word naturalist.  Riddle: What is a naturalist naturalist naturalist naturalist?  Answer: A materialist who worries about human cultural affects on science while categorizing wildflowers and munching an organic banana.  When using the equivocal word natural, be sure to define your terms.
    These issues are crucial for understanding the origins debate.  While CEH does not take a position on the human-caused global warming controversy, issues of philosophy of science and history of science deeply infect the origins debate as well.  One cannot understand evolutionary theory and the behavior of its consensus supporters and outsider critics without taking into account “science as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority.”
Next headline on:  Philosophy of Science

Are Saturn Rings Like Galaxies?     11/01/2010    
Nov 1, 2010 — Dramatic photos of dynamic processes in Saturn’s rings have been released by the Cassini mission at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  The photos, taken near Saturn’s equinox last year, show ruffled edges of the B ring made of particles lofted as high as 2 miles above the ring plane, casting long shadows across the rings.  By watching the action over time, scientists have noticed waves of particles reflecting off the ring edges and oscillating in waves and arcs.  This is helping explain some of the complexity noticed 29 years ago when Voyager 1 first showed more processes at work than could be explained by resonances with nearby moons.
    Some of the scientists are extrapolating the interpretations far beyond the Saturn ring system.  Imaging team lead Carolyn Porco, for instance, thinks the observations provide “visibility into the mechanisms that have sculpted not only Saturn’s rings, but celestial disks of a far grander scale, from solar systems, like our own, all the way to the giant spiral galaxies.”  One counter-intuitive process is the effect of viscosity.  “Normally viscosity, or resistance to flow, damps waves,” said Peter Goldreich (Caltech), “...But the new findings show that, in the densest parts of Saturn’s rings, viscosity actually amplifies waves, explaining mysterious grooves first seen in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft.”
    The press release, accompanied by three Quicktime video clips showing the action, agreed that these phenomena, “the first large-scale wave oscillations of this type in a broad disk of material anywhere in nature,” are applicable to “spiral disk galaxies and proto-planetary disks found around nearby stars.”  The popular press eagerly snatched up this idea with headlines like, “Cassini sees Saturn rings oscillate like mini-galaxy” (PhysOrg) and “Saturn's Shimmying Rings May Be Imitating Galaxy” (Space.com).
    Anecdote about the mission: It looks like Hollywood has a new movie coming out that will feature the Cassini mission in a prominent role.  An interview with the writer-director of Quantum Quest can be found at New Scientist.

Saturn’s rings may elucidate processes in circumstellar disks and spiral galaxies, but those notions need to be proved, not assumed.  A circumstellar disk is six orders of magnitude larger than Saturn; a spiral galaxy, 12 orders of magnitude.  The particle sizes involved are correspondingly larger.  What other forces and influences lacking in Saturn’s rings might come into play at larger scales?  Are gravitational, electrical, mechanical, and magnetic influences comparable?  Perhaps.  Quantum mechanics should have taught scientists that one cannot recklessly extrapolate phenomena at all scales.  Scale-invariant laws may indeed operate throughout the universe.  If a system incorporates some that are scale-independent and some that are not, the physics gets messy.  Whether processes can be applied at all scales is as much a philosophical question as an observational one.  The phenomena in a galaxy, for instance, may be analogous without being physically the same.  We have no overriding reason to doubt that applying Saturn processes over 12 orders of magnitude are legitimate, but would that science reporters would ask these kinds of questions instead of acting like toadies, barfing out whatever the mandarins say.  It’s a bad habit that spills over into other subjects.
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