Year-End Closeout     12/31/2010    
Dec 31, 2010 — The sun is rising on 2011, but we need to clear the deck from 2010.  Here are ten 2010 headlines to acknowledge as the ball drops in Times Square, to avoid dropping the ball completely before moving on to 2011.

1. Cells:  Many cancer cells have an “eat me” tag, said Science Daily.
2. Early Man:  “Rodents Were Diverse and Abundant in Prehistoric Africa When Our Human Ancestors Evolved,” said Science Daily.  Is that why they left?  (But see 12/29/2010, where Adam was already in Israel.)
3. Health:  Hire a plant as your therapist, suggests work on “indoor plant intervention” reported by Science Daily.
4. Fossils:  How did the Komodo Dragon’s ancestor get from Africa to Indonesia?  Do some baloney detecting work on Science Daily’s tale about how the reptile’s “ability to swim may be key to figuring out how more than 30 million years later its ancestors turned up on the other side of the world.”
5. Evolution:  The arms race is on between maize and smut, says Science Daily.
6. Bird evolution:  Figure out who has the bird brain in Live Science’s story, “Fossilized Bird Brains May Yield Secret of First Flights.”
7. Cosmology:  If a star is born and dies into a black hole, is the black hole born?  Untangle the claims on PhysOrg.
8. Philosophy of science:  Diviners are finding climate change messages in the strangest places: like in broken glass (PhysOrg), floods (National Geographic) and the taste of tea in India (PhysOrg).
9. Ethics:  “Scientists Peer Into the Future of [Embryonic] Stem Cell Biology,” said Science Daily.  Search on the words ethics and cure.
10. Intelligent Design:  Evolution News and Views, the blog of the Discovery Institute, reported four recent papers indicating that Intelligent Design is making waves in scientific journals: #1, #2, #3, and #4, all peer-reviewed scientific papers arguing for design over Darwin.

We’re going into 2011 strong with ten years of reporting behind us on a wide variety of subjects.  Resolve to tell your friends about Creation-Evolution Headlines.  The easy-to-remember address is “crev.info” – type that in your browser and read, learn, influence.  Happy News Year!
Next headline on:  Amazing Facts • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Plants Outsmart Darwin     12/30/2010    
Dec 30, 2010 — There are wonders in plants that continue to be uncovered with the tools of science.  Two recent papers in PNAS lend support to the feeling that plants are smarter than assumed.

1. Trash collection:  Humans usually only employ one trash collection service, but plants have two.  Four Chinese investigators found redundant pathways in plant cells for removing misfolded proteins.  Writing in PNAS,¹ they characterized endoplasmic reticulum associated degradation (ERAD), “an integral part of the ER quality-control system that removes toxic misfolded proteins via ubiquitin/proteasome-mediated degradation” (see 11/24/2010).  They found two genes that “function redundantly” to ensure this essential process does not fail.  The genes are conserved (unevolved) in yeast, plants, and humans.
2. Portable generators:  Humans know it is handy to have a power source, like a battery, when you’re away from the power grid.  Plants know that, too.  German scientists found that plants use potassium as a local energy source in their vessels.  Here’s what their abstract said in PNAS about how plants exploit the multi-functional potassium ion.²

   The essential mineral nutrient potassium (K⁺) is the most important inorganic cation for plants and is recognized as a limiting factor for crop yield and quality.  Nonetheless, it is only partially understood how K⁺ contributes to plant productivity.  K⁺ is used as a major active solute to maintain turgor and to drive irreversible and reversible changes in cell volume.  K⁺ also plays an important role in numerous metabolic processes, for example, by serving as an essential cofactor of enzymes.  Here, we provide evidence for an additional, previously unrecognized role of K⁺ in plant growth.  By combining diverse experimental approaches with computational cell simulation, we show that K⁺ circulating in the phloem serves as a decentralized energy storage that can be used to overcome local energy limitations.

   They called this the “potassium battery.”  They described how the model plant Arabidopsis “taps this ‘potassium battery,’ which then efficiently assists the plasma membrane H⁺-ATPase in energizing the transmembrane phloem (re)loading processes.”

These results underscore the distinct and evolutionarily relevant molecular threat of protein misfolding, independent of protein function.  Assuming that most misfolded proteins impose similar costs, yeast cells express almost all proteins at steady-state levels sufficient to expose their encoding genes to selection against misfolding, lending credibility to the recent suggestion that such selection imposes a global constraint on molecular evolution.

These papers have intelligent design shouting and Darwin whimpering.  Respect your garden by acknowledging the design so clearly evident, and honoring the Designer.  Don’t insult your plants by thinking they got where they are by unguided, directionless, chance processes of evolution.  It would be like insulting professionals for a job well done by shrugging your shoulders and saying, “Stuff happens.”
Next headline on:  Plants • Cell Biology • Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Prof. Gopher and Dr. Barkai noted that the findings related to the culture of those who dwelled in the Qesem Cave – including the systematic production of flint blades; the regular use of fire; evidence of hunting, cutting and sharing of animal meat; mining raw materials to produce flint tools from subsurface sources – reinforce the hypothesis that this was, in fact, innovative and pioneering behavior that may correspond with the appearance of modern humans.

This is a lesson for us [paleoanthropologists] all to learn.  But in spite of the evidence there are those who will resist.  A hallmark, for the archaeologists, of modern humanity has been the Upper Palaeolithic technology.
    In recent years the boundary between this technology and its makers has become increasingly diffuse and I would argue that technology can no longer be used as proxy for human taxa.

Postscript.  Speaking of Melanesia and the Pacific islands, a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (see abstract) by Wilmshurst, Hunt, Lipo and Anderson presented a new “high precision” chronology using radiocarbon dating that indicates “recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia,” centuries more recent than previously believed.  They said, “Our empirically based and dramatically shortened chronology for the colonization of East Polynesia resolves longstanding paradoxes and offers a robust explanation for the remarkable uniformity of East Polynesian culture, human biology, and language.”  These islands were not settled by humans till beginning 1025 A.D. – remarkable if modern humans had been on earth for 400,000 years, considering that the DNA of the Denisovans resembles that of Melanesians.  “Models of human colonization, ecological change and historical linguistics for the region,” they said, “now require substantial revision.”  Such revisions might also be in order for theories about human migration in general, considering how quickly humans spread throughout Polynesia once the migrations began.

If you thought any more major revisions to the evolutionary story of early man would only make the rubble bounce, you were right.
    Finlayson should be sticking his jib in his own ribs.  He is still an evolutionist in spite of this devastating series of falsifications to the evolutionary tale.  It’s not just his colleagues who are guilty of manufacturing invisible evidence whenever needed to prop up a myth.  Notice how he accused scientists of sometimes ensuring the status quo prevails against attacks by the evidence, or coming up with “reasons” for portraying certain groups of people as less clever than we are – a kind of historical racism based on social Darwinist ideology.  People fall for this because of the clever ways evolutionists manipulate words and thoughts to lend an aura of “science” to their tall tale telling.  It’s like falling for the seductive “missing link” game without realizing that what’s missing is the chain.
    This latest episode in the parade of paleoanthropology ignorance is brought to you by Creation-Evolution Headlines, to show that evolutionary storytelling is not only misguided and depraved, it’s funny.  This is the 610th entry in the “Dumb Ideas” category, meaning that if you peruse back through them all, you can have a wickedly good time grinning at Man the wise trying to figure out where he came from without help from the history book.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Fossils • Dating Methods • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Christmas Stocking     12/24/2010    
Dec 24, 2010 — Christmas is upon us, and then the new year.  Many interesting news stories have come prancing from the roof with too little time to unwrap them.  We leave them hanging on the mantle, with our astute readers able to pick the fresh oranges from the fruitcakes, the hot picks from the lumps of coal.

1. Morality:  You’d never guess that couples that wait for sex till after marriage have more benefits later.  PhysOrg seemed surprised.
2. Morality:  People lie to manage communications, PhysOrg claims, but then can you trust their reporters?
3. Anthropology:  A chilling site of child sacrifice has been found at an archaeological site in Peru, reported National Geographic.
4. Anthropology:  Claiming that “Shopping Differences Between Sexes Show Evolution at Work” seems overboard, even for a Science Daily holiday prank, which the editors apparently took seriously.
5. Mammals:  National Geographic got all excited about chimpanzees playing with sticks as if they were dolls.  OK, so?
6. Origin of Life:  National Geographic also got excited about “life ingredients” in a superhot meteorite.  Like what, charcoal?
7. Evolution:  by heat shock?  You figure out what Science Daily is saying.
8. Biomimetics:  A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, said BBC News.
9. Biomimetics:  Make like a trilobite eye and get the thinnest camera ever, New Scientist says.
10. Solar System:  The reality of Rhea is coming to light from Cassini’s latest flyby, reported JPL, and it’s got the blues and a surprising oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere, reported Science.
11. Solar System:  Speaking of Cassini, dramatic new images of the geysers of Enceladus were also posted by JPL from its 13th flyby on Dec. 20.  If you look quickly, the Cassini website is temporarily decorated for Christmas.
12. Solar System:  Before leaving the Saturn system, Space.com said Titan’s southern lake is very shallow and virtually flat, holding far less liquid than hoped.  And the best hope for an ice volcano was reported by BBC News.  In its coverage, National Geographic couldn’t resist teasing with the L-word.
13. Atmospheric Science:  If biting winters are caused by global warming, as PhysOrg claims, when does the warming arrive?
14. Mind and Brain:  Placebos work, even when you know they are fake.  That was a surprise reported by PhysOrg.
15. Sociology:  PhysOrg is all worried about how the Muslims are coping with the aftermath of 9/11.  How about the rest of us?
16. Geology:  Israeli scientists are digging cores in the south end of the Dead Sea looking for evidence of earthquakes and climate change, reported Science Daily.
17. Health:  For those needing tissue reconstruction, there’s a good source of stem cells: fat.  See PhysOrg.
18. Health:  Many cancer cells carry an “eat me” signal, said PhysOrg.
19. Physiology:  There appears to be an optimum temperature for keeping fungi away and yet not running so hot as to have to eat constantly.  That temperature is – sound familiar? – 98.6°F.  Read about it on Science Daily.
20. Early man:  Science Daily summarized a paper from Science that alleges a previously unknown human relative that interbred with us, but aren’t they making a big deal out of a finger bone?

These are just a few of the recent stories that could have earned in-depth reporting and analysis.  Come back when the calendar turns the page into 2011.  The need for critical thinking about science news has never been greater.  In the meantime, may the message of Christmas send light into a dark, lost world.
Next headline on:  Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

Brain Synapse Machinery Is Finely Tuned     12/23/2010    
Dec 23, 2010 — The New York Times published a brief article on brain facts that is astonishing, when you think about all that goes on in thinking.  Nicholas Wade reported on a new inventory of the proteins involved in the synapses, the key junctions between neurons. 

The research team, led by Seth Grant of the Sanger Institute near Cambridge, England, compiled the first exact inventory of all the protein components of the synaptic information-processing machinery.  No fewer than 1,461 proteins are involved in this biological machinery, they report in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience....
    Each neuron in the human brain makes an average 1,000 or so connections with other neurons.  There are 100 billion neurons, so the brain probably contains 100 trillion synapses, its most critical working part.
    At the side of a synapse that belongs to the transmitting neuron, an electrical signal arrives and releases packets of chemicals.  The chemicals diffuse quickly across the minute gap between the neurons and dock with receptors on the surface of the receiving neuron.
    These receptors feed the signals they receive to a delicate complex of protein-based machines that process and store the information.
    The 1,461 genes that specify these synaptic proteins constitute more than 7 percent of the human genome’s 20,000 protein-coding genes, an indication of the synapse’s complexity and importance.
    Dr. Grant believes that the proteins are probably linked together to form several biological machines that process the information and change the physical properties of the neuron as a way of laying down a memory.

Are you thinking that Darwin doesn’t have a prayer explaining this?  Look: machines made of other machines, information processing, fantastic complexity, very fine tolerance.  If you are thinking rightly, you will be thanking the Maker of your designed brain.
    This is the 700th “Amazing Facts” entry in Creation-Evolution Headlines brought to you in over 10 years of reporting.  Putting all of them together would make a sizeable book.  If you appreciate this amazing information made available here for free, consider supporting our site with a year-end donation.  Click the Donate button on the right-hand column.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Mind and Brain • Genetics and DNA • Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Soft Tissue Fossil Treasure Trove Found in China     12/22/2010    
Dec 22, 2010 — Live Science announced a major new fossil find in China with some 20,000 fossils.  It was found in a 50-foot thick layer of limestone

The fossils are exceptionally well-preserved, with more than half of them completely intact, including soft tissues.  Apparently they were protected across the ages by mats of microbes that rapidly sealed their bodies off from decay after death....
    Ninety percent of the fossils are bug-like creatures, such as crustaceans, millipedes and horseshoe crabs.  Fish make up 4 percent, including the “living fossil” known as the coelacanth, which is still alive today nearly 250 million years later.  Snails, bivalves (creatures including clams and oysters), squid-like belemnoids, nautilus-like ammonoids and other mollusks make up about 2 percent of the fossils.

Once again, a fossil graveyard is found, indicating rapid burial and exquisite preservation.  What they didn’t mention about coelacanth is that it is a classic living fossil that was thought to have gone extinct at the end of the Cretaceous (65 million years ago), only to be found in 1938 swimming comfortably off the coast of South Africa.  And that’s not the only case of so-called “Lazarus taxa,” rising from the dead.  Who can really believe that (1) coelacanths never left another fossil for 65 million years, and (2) the soft tissues in these fossils were never disturbed for 250 million years?
    Evolutionists keep the fogma machines (05/14/2007) running to distract the real message of the bones.  They bring in imaginary dinosaur feathers, slowly migrating continents, mass extinctions and hundreds of millions of years.  If we had not been so brainwashed into accepting this weird stretched-out chronology founded by Sir Lyell Lot and his cronies, we would laugh at such notions.  Look past the Darwin promissory notes (06/26/2010, 02/24/2010) and reckless drafts on the bank of time (07/02/2007), and let the collateral earn its own interest.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Marine Biology • Dinosaurs and Extinct Reptiles • Dating Methods

You, too, can have a satisfying career making up stories, looking at divining bones, and watching movies and playing music.  Not only that, everyone will like you and treat everything you say like an oracle from the gods.  Whenever necessary, you can change the story a little to keep your adoring followers (the science reporters) on the edge of their seats with each new twist of the plot.  Why have everybody hate you?  Don’t associate with those despised ID people who insist on evidence.  That’s no fun.  Follow the crowd through the gate that is wide and the way that is broad.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution • Philosophy of Science

Evolution As Assumption     12/20/2010    
Dec 20, 2010 — Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted.  Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.”  They used an evolutionary assumption to reason to an evolutionary result.  Isn’t this circular?
    The article was about trying to put together a picture of life before the Cambrian Explosion.  Their reasoning included “the ways that genes evolve: new gene families can be born and inherited; genes can be swapped or horizontally transferred between organisms; genes can be duplicated in the same genome; and genes can be lost.  Only the first in that quartet, though, can sing of innovation.  The other factors can only process or lose existing information.  How, though, are new gene families “born”?  It’s so improbable for a single gene to be “born” by chance (online book), let alone a whole family of genes, that the notion of chance giving birth to a gene is essentially falsified.  Evolutionists cannot merely assume evolution to think that evolution can solve this problem.
    More circularity is evident when they assumed an evolutionary timeline to determine when genes came into existence:

The scientists traced thousands of genes from 100 modern genomes back to those genes’ first appearance on Earth to create a genomic fossil telling not only when genes came into being but also which ancient microbes possessed those genes.  The work suggests that the collective genome of all life underwent an expansion between 3.3 and 2.8 billion years ago, during which time 27 percent of all presently existing gene families came into being.

What is remarkable is that intelligent people with PhDs can commit such logical sins with impunity.  You can’t assume evolution, then use the assumption of evolution to trace evolution and prove evolution.  Evolution is the issue at issue!  The Cambrian Explosion has falsified evolution.  Dr. Alm cannot turn around and use the assumption of evolution to try to un-falsify it.  What’s even worse, he completely ignored the criticisms, and invoked chance miracles to fill in the evidential gaps.
    When will evolutionists realize that they cannot invoke miracle words like genes “coming into being” and “arising” and “gaining access to a larger energy budget” and becoming “enabled to evolve larger and more complex systems”?  This is what the charlatans do that skeptic James Randi debunks.  They claim that miracle water can be produced with mental electricity, but it only works if you truly believe in it.  Evolutionary explanations are like a Mobius strip – circular, with a twist.
    There was no independent test of evolutionary theory anywhere in this futile exercise of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Evolution was invoked as a divining rod, as if the spirit of a white-bearded wizard told Eric that with this magical device, he could achieve enlightenment.  Whatever enlightenment he gained was the reflection of flashes of imagination inside his own willfully blind mind.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Genetics • Fossils • Philosophy of Science • Dumb Ideas

Secular Evolutionists Are a Small Minority     12/19/2010    
Dec 19, 2010 — A new Gallup poll shows that only 16% of Americans subscribe to the view that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process.”  About 40% believe in Biblical creationism (recent creation within 10,000 years); that percentage climbs to 60% among churchgoers.  Another 38% believe God guided the process of evolution.  These results were summarized by Live Science, republished on MSNBC.
    The Gallup site shows the questions that were asked and how the results have varied over the years.  The Biblical creationist and secular evolutionist numbers have changed since similar polls starting in 1982, while those in the middle ground have varied, but remain right where they were in 1982 (38%).  The number espousing secular evolution has climbed 9%, and the number of Biblical creationists dropped about 7%, but has wobbled between 47% and 40% over the last 12 years, and is only 4% lower than its 1982 value.  Secular evolution remained fairly low for 17 years since 1982 (9-11%), but has seen a slow, steady climb since 1999, from 9 to 16%.
    Biblical recent creationism was highest among Republicans (52%) compared to Democrats and independents (34%).  Secular evolution was lowest among Republicans (8%) and highest among Democrats (20%) and independents (21%).  “Gallup officials wrote that it’s not surprising some 80 percent of Americans hold a view of human origins that involves God,” the article ended, “since most Americans believe in God and about 85 percent identify with a religion.”
    Jeanne Brynner in her Live Science article claimed that “The findings also stand in stark contrast to another announcement Friday, this one by John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy” about scientific integrity.  That document, however, said nothing about evolution or human origins.  One of its opening tenets said, “Scientific progress depends upon honest investigation, open discussion, refined understanding, and a firm commitment to evidence,” principles rarely encountered in evolutionist handling of issues involving creation and intelligent design.
    In addition, the Holdren announcement called for “openness and transparency with the media and the American people,” and was very clear about transparency over scientific uncertainties in particular: “Agencies should communicate scientific and technical findings by including a clear explication of assumptions; accurate contextualization of uncertainties; and a description of the probabilities associated with both optimistic and pessimistic projections, including best-case and worst-case scenarios where appropriate.”  The document further called for scientists working for the executive branch of the Government to be selected based on merit, free of political influence, with protection for whistleblowers in a culture that fosters “free flow of scientific and technological information....”  If these principles were applied in an unbiased way with regards to the question of origins, Republicans and intelligent design proponents would not be such outsiders in today’s lopsided scientific community, where policy makers, journalists and leaders of scientific societies are overwhelmingly pro-evolution members of the Democratic party (see 12/05/2010).

If Brynner and Holdren really believed in integrity, they would have to become creationists, because integrity that evolves is not integrity – what counts for integrity today could morph into dishonesty tomorrow if it produces more offspring.  Must be consistent.  (Actually, evolutionists feel no need to be consistent, either, except when appearing to be consistent or honest aids their cause.  That’s why you have to watch these guys.)  As could be expected, Brynner regurgitated Live Science’s standard creation-mocking links at the bottom of her article.  While Biblical creationists can be encouraged at their strong showing in spite decades of merciless, one-sided indoctrination, there is cause for alarm at the slow rise of secularism with its roots in Darwinism.  The Battle for the Beginning still rages (02/17/2002). 
    The middle group, whom we could call compromisers, actually includes quite a few Bible-believing creationists, too – including proponents of the day-age theory, gap theory, progressive creation, and other schemes that subscribe to the rest of the Bible after Genesis 11, including the fundamental doctrines of the deity of Christ, God’s sovereignty to work miracles, and Christ’s second coming – and hold to a literal creation of Adam and Eve.  Members of these subgroups are just uncomfortable with trying to put Genesis 1-11 in 10,000 years or less.
    The compromise category also includes theistic evolutionists, who accept gradual natural selection after a fashion, but believe either that all the variations were front-loaded to produce humans, or that God superintended the variations to work out His plan for the arrival of humans.  Many of these also are Christians with sincere faith, misguided and inconsistent as we would think them to be.  And even the “secular evolution” group could include some proponents of intelligent design, though not ones ready to concede the designer is God (notice the way the Gallup question was worded: “but God guided the process”).  Evolution News commented on the ambiguities of the categories.
    One should beware of the assumptions in the word religious.  The impression is given of a dichotomy between those with “religiosity” (whatever that big tent zoo includes) and the secular purists, devoted only to evidence and reason.  Don’t be fooled.  That’s a category error.  The “secular evolutionists” are just as religious as anyone in the species Homo religiosens, even if they don’t hold hymnals in a church.  They are just as religious as other pantheists, like the animists who envisioned spirits in the trees and animals, only our modern academic pantheists are better at math and more sophisticated in their ignorance.  It’s impossible to be truly secular, because either one steals from the smorgasbord of Christian assumptions (02/09/2009) about the nature of reality and the preconditions for intelligibility (03/18/2009), or ends up ascribing creative powers to material stuff and imbuing it with all the attributes of God (05/20/2002).
    No, the faithful in the Church of Darwin can best be described as pantheists and polytheists, meditating on their own scriptures (The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man), chanting their mantras Ummmm, Stufffff Happpppennnnzzz (09/22/2009), singing their favorite hymns (It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus [10/06/2005] and others), encouraging one another (Onward EugenieScott Soldiers), and bowing at the shrines of their idols in the Evolutionary Pantheon – Emperor Charlie (the Bearded Buddha), Sir Lyell Lot, and Tinker Bell – those all-wise spirits empowered (given enough time) to call out the life-potential in stuff and make life “emerge” from particles.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Bible and Theology • Education • Politics and Ethics

The millions of years exist only in their imagination.  So tenacious are these moyboys* in their faith, they cannot see the trees for the forest, or the forest for the trees, because the fogma** is so thick.  These trees are not that old.  Neither are the dinosaur bones with blood vessels intact (04/09/2009).  Why do they tell such tales?
    They must keep the tale going, because they live in a fantasyland, the world of Blarneya, where it is always winter and never Christmas.  They like it that way, because they serve the White Beard, who rules Blarneya with an iron fist.  The Chronicles of Blarneya stretch backward and forward billions of years, they teach the children, turning their minds to stone.  They fear global warming because it will portend the day the lyin’ will be revealed.
*See definition in the 03/31/2007 commentary.
**See definition in the 05/14/2007 commentary.
Next headline on:  Plants • Fossils • Dating Methods • Geology • Amazing Facts

What was the Big Bang and what happened before it?  Scientists from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw have attempted to answer the question.  Within the framework of loop quantum gravity they have put forward a new theoretical model, which might prove useful for validating hypotheses about events prior to the Big Bang.  This achievement is one of the few models describing the full Einstein’s theory and not merely its greatly simplified version.

The equations, models and schemes of a blind man can be all self-consistent in his own imagination, without having any connection to reality (07/29/2010, 06/17/2010).  “Materialistic reductionalist nihilism” is a trap that leads to a dead end (10/05/2010).  It cannot satisfy.  It leads to a comedy of absurdities (03/19/2010).  Embrace the only world view that is not only consistent but connects with reality.  Start with that profound passage Sandage recommended (Romans 1:19-21) and continue reading from there.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Stars and Astronomy • Physics • Philosophy of Science • Bible and Theology

Plant Wonders Are in the Details     12/16/2010    
Dec 16, 2010 — When you step on a weed growing out of a crack in the sidewalk, do you have any idea what kind of amazing machinery you stepped on?  Maybe a closer look will help.

1. Communications and switching systems:  When a seed sprouts, it needs to first grow upward in the dark while trying to protect itself.  Then when it reaches the air and light, it needs to spread out leaves and collect sunlight.  Science Daily talked about work at Carnegie Institute on the chemical signals taking place at these critical junctures, saying that “Many components are involved in this developmental switch....”  One of them, a hormone called brassinosteroid, works antagonistically to sunlight in the soil-to-air transition, but only in the presence of another regulator called GATA2.  “The Carnegie team’s new research identifies a protein called GATA2 as a missing link in this communications system,” the article said, not using “missing link” in an evolutionary sense, but in a signal-transduction sense.  “This protein tells developing seedlings which type of growth to pursue” by switching certain genes on and off.  “....It also serves as a communications junction between internal plant systems that are turned on by light and those that are turned on by brassinosteroids.”
2. Wallbuilders:  Cell walls keep seedlings and large trees standing upright with a molecule called lignin – a complex molecule that requires multiple steps, like a recipe, to make (10/26/2001, 05/30/2008, bullet 2).  But lignin cannot be assembled in the kitchen of the cytoplasm.  It has to be assembled in the cell wall.  That means that the ingredients, called precursors, which are manufactured inside the cell, have to migrate outward through the cell membrane to the construction site.  Some of them are temporarily stored in vacuoles (organelles that store substances), requiring additional transport through vacuolar membranes.
       It wasn’t clear if the precursors just float to their destinations by diffusion.  Scientists at Brookhaven National Labs found out that, instead, energy-driven molecular machines called transporters ferry the precursors to the construction sites.  PhysOrg reported on a paper in PNAS¹ that described how these transporters actively take the materials where they belong, spending ATP energy like fuel.  “The range of assays revealed that pure monolignols move across the cellular membrane while monolignol glucosides move preferentially into vacuoles,” the article said.  “But most importantly, very little of either precursor would move across either type of membrane without the addition of ATP, the molecular ‘currency’ for energy in cells.”  The paper described how the transporters are very selective in their actions: “In the presence of ATP, the inverted plasma membrane vesicles preferentially take up monolignol aglycones, whereas the vacuolar vesicles are more specific for glucoconjugates, suggesting that the different ATP-binding cassette-like transporters recognize different chemical forms in conveying them to distinct sites....”
3. Upward mobility:  Did you ever think about what is required to pump sap from the roots to the tops of trees?  Scientists at the University of Madrid are some of many who have.  Students probably remember the terms xylem and phloem; the former transporting water, the latter, nutrients.  Science Daily described “The objective: to discover the keys to the movement of sap in order to apply these advances to new hydraulic systems or to suction pumps.”
       “The main conclusion of this study is that the sap in the trunks of trees is in a pressurized situation,” the article said.  “It demonstrates, then, that when the pressure is positive in the conduits of the xylem as well as in those of the floem [sic], the model expands in the radial direction.  However, when the pressure is negative in the xylem and positive in the floem [sic], which is what is believed to occur during the day, the model contracts in the radial direction.”  What can they learn from this information?  Better ways to extract water or pump it against gravity, for a couple of things.  One of the professors remarked, “Currently – the expert points out – there is no water suction pump capable of raising water more than ten meters at normal atmospheric pressure, but a sequoia tree can raise water to a height of 100 meters, which I think means that anything we can learn from plants is going to be of great interest to people working in this field.”
       Scientists at Princeton are also hot on this trail.  Publishing in PNAS,² they first said, “Plant vascular networks are central to botanical form, function, and diversity.”  Then they described how transporting material requires tradeoffs between hydraulic safety and efficiency.  They developed a model that made “predictions for sap flow, the taper of the radii of xylem conduits from trunk to terminal twig, and how the frequency of xylem conduits varies with conduit radius,” and compared their model with various trees like, oak, maple and pine.  Somehow these trees know how to taper the radius of their vessels from bottom to top for maximum efficiency.
       The authors spoke of “evolutionary drivers” in their paper, but really were talking about design requirements – i.e., “(i) space-filling geometries to maximize carbon uptake by leaves and sap flow through conduits; (ii) increasing hydraulic conductance and resource supply to leaves; (iii) protection against embolism and associated decreases in vascular conductance; (iv) enforcement of biomechanical constraints uniformly across a plant; and (v) independence of terminal twig size, flow rate, and internal architecture with plant size.”  Nowhere did they describe a plausible sequence of mutations that might produce the necessary structures; they merely assumed that “selection” would somehow fulfill the requirements.

A new law of nature, the DAM law, is hereby described.  Any article or paper on the evolution of flowering plants will be accompanied by the phrase, “Darwin’s Abominable Mystery” (DAM).  This is a time-invariant law describing the predicament of not only Darwin, but his disciples down to the present.  For evidence, see entries over the last decade like 11/08/2000, 04/03/2001, 01/30/2002, 05/03/2002, 06/07/2002, 01/17/2003, 03/15/2007, 12/21/2007, 04/28/2008, 09/15/2009, 12/04/2009 bullet 4, and 09/22/2010.
    Darwinists are MAD about the DAM law, too; showing the law is commutative: the Mystery’s Abominable Darwin.  Notice that the DAM Law does not assert that the plants themselves are abominable.  No; they are wonderful.  They are incredibly well designed.  The mystery of their origins is only abominable when the premise, Darwinism, is the seed plot of abomination, watered by the toxic rhetoric of things “arising” and “developing” apart from design.  In such explanatory gardens, nothing grows – no mystery there. 
Next headline on:  Plants • Cell Biology • Genetics • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

1. Corruption:  Victims of corruption may have a different outlook on what Science Daily told its readers:

   Francisco Úbeda, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Edgar Duéñez of Harvard University found that power and corruption may play a role in maintaining overall societal cooperation.
       A report of their research is published in the journal Evolution.

2. Gossip:  In evolution, gossip is no longer a sin.  In the wake of WikiLeaks, Live Science asked, “Is Gossip Good?”  The answer is found in Darwinian theory:

   Some researchers have argued that the tendency toward jawing about our neighbors is rooted in our evolutionary past.  In his book “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language,” (Harvard University Press, 1998), Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that gossip and language evolved as primate groups got too large to bond by grooming.  In other words, instead of picking lice off each other, humans buy “US Weekly.”

Darwinism is not just superfluous; it is downright evil.  By turning good and evil into amoral illusions, and by making people pawns of a mythical evolutionary past, evolutionists open the door to a flood of vices.  Some of Darwin’s contemporaries understood the danger his theory posed.  Adam Sedgwick, his geology professor, wrote:

There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical.  A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.  ’Tis the crown and glory of organic science that it does through final cause, link material and moral; and yet does not allow us to mingle them in our first conception of laws, and our classification of such laws, whether we consider one side of nature or the other.  You have ignored this link; and, if I do not mistake your meaning, you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it.  Were it possible (which, thank God, it is not) to break it, humanity, in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.

Two world wars and a host of secular totalitarian dictatorships in the 20th century are the result.  See What Hath Darwin Wrought? as described in the 09/27/2010.  After all the social wreckage they have caused, Darwinists remain unrepentant, as the above articles show, still committed to preaching amoral ideas from the mire of folly.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Compare this story with the one above it.  You shall know them by their fruits.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Terrestrial Zoology • Physics • Biomimetics

Plenty of Time for Evolution?     12/14/2010    
Dec 14, 2010 — A mathematician and a biologist have calculated that there’s “plenty of time for evolution.”  Why?  Evolution has a spy: natural selection.  Darwin’s spy vastly decreases the amount of time that “doubters” have argued it would take to create a complex organism like a butterfly.  Will their argument fly?
    The short paper by Herbert Wilf and Warren Ewens was published in PNAS with the simple title, “There’s Plenty of Time for Evolution.”¹  The gist of their argument is that evolution, contrary to the ideas of critics who envision everything having to evolve sequentially, works like a parallel processor: “Evolution is an ‘in parallel’ process, with beneficial mutations at one gene locus being retained after they become fixed in a population while beneficial mutations at other loci become fixed,” they said.  “In fact this statement is essentially the principle of natural selection.”  They used some equations to show that their model drastically reduces the time required for the evolution of complex systems,² without referring to any biological cases in particular.  Their model, however, assumes that every beneficial mutation will become fixed during the random mutational search.
    PhysOrg accepted their claims uncritically, even saying in the headline, “New mathematics research proves there’s plenty of time for evolution,” and that “the idea that evolution would require ‘too much time’ to be true is proved false.”  Proof is a strong word.  For support, PhysOrg quoted Wilf comparing evolution to a hacker.  If a hacker tries to guess a complex password, it would take a very long time to do a random search.  But if a spy tells the hacker every time a correct character is found, the time plummets dramatically.  The article tries to clinch the argument:

But what does hacking have to do with the evolution of species?
    Simple, Wilf said.  In the case of evolution, the hacker is evolution itself.  The password is the string of codons that describes, for example, a butterfly.  And the spy is natural selection.

“If, when we guess the full string of letters [for a new species], one of the letters is correct – for instance, one that describes correctly the eyes of a butterfly – then that letter has survival value,” he said.
    “It will not be discarded as future mutations take place because the intermediate creatures are seeing very well, and they will live and reproduce.  So although it seems at first glance that the process of random mutations will take a very long time to produce a higher organism, thanks to the spying of natural selection, the process can go very rapidly.
    “In the paper, these ideas are precisely quantified, according to this model, and the extent of the speedup is found.  It is enormous, and shows that there is indeed plenty of time for evolution.”

This paper might have attracted attention in 1860, when Darwin’s X-Men were on a roll (03/04/2004), but not after a century and a half of thought about natural selection and multiple revolutions in genetics.  These guys seem oblivious to all the counterarguments made against similar notions in the past.  Where have they been?  What is most instructive is that such an easily-refuted idea was published by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, and was offered as “proof” of Charlie Daddy’s story by the popular press.  If this is the best they can offer after so much time, spilled ink and spilled blood, take heart.  Darwin’s totalitarian regime is nearing intellectual collapse.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Genetics and DNA • Dumb Ideas

1. Fin dragon:  The fin-backed reptilian Dimetrodon is not new, but the most complete skeleton of one was found in a sinkhole in north Texas, reported Live Science.  The site has more bones of this species than any other location in the world. 
2. Horse dragon:  “A shield-toothed horse-dragon may sound like a mythical creature, but the newly described dinosaur once roamed the U.S. West, a new study says.”  That was the opening line of an article on National Geographic News about Hippodraco, a scientific name that translates to horse dragon.  Then there’s Iguanacolossus (colossal iguana) found nearby: a member of the iguanodon family with members found worldwide.
       Hippodraco is shaking up the family tree of this group of dinosaurs, for reasons explained in the article.  Scientists claim its skull bones are more primitive than members of the group found in Europe, but “Even so, any visible differences between living iguanodont species would have been subtle.... regardless of their locations, the creatures all looked pretty much the same,” the article admitted.
3. Koreaceratops:  Every kid’s favorite dinosaur, triceratops, had cousins in Korea.  Live Science reported on a “mini triceratops” that is the first horned dinosaur found in South Korea.  The animal would have been about 6 feet long, weighing 100 pounds, the discoverers estimate. 
4. Crocodile cat.  After awhile, crocodiles looked different than their ancestors, reported PhysOrg and the BBC News.  This is based on odd shaped fossils found in Madagascar and elsewhere, one looking squat like a cat.  “Recently discovered ancient ancestors include small cat-like specimens, giant ‘supercrocs’ and a pug-nosed vegetarian species,” the BBC said, although how they decided it was vegetarian was not due to direct evidence, but inference about the overall body shape – a risky business if comparing human vegetarians to meat-eaters by body shape alone is any guide. 

Scientists do not watch creatures evolving.  They look at present-day bones, and make inferences according to a paradigm they feel comfortable working in.  But feeling comfortable is no guide to the truth.  Think of how many different ways a group of disinterested people could arrange furniture into evolutionary relationships, if they were given starting assumptions about which ones evolved first and had an elaborate tree showing the ancestry of branching relationships and common ancestors, and a time scale allowing millions of years.  In fact, parents or teachers should try that as an experiment to show how much assumption plays a role in scientific explanation.
    The outward shape (morphology) of an animal is the least informative part of the evolutionary tale.  Getting all that structure and function in the first place is the challenge.  Each creature was exquisitely suited to its habitat and equipped with amazing structures that provided all the functions of life.  Dimetrodon, for instance, had a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth.  Do you realize how many design specifications are required to get teeth to develop, grow, and work in the real world, so that an animal can eat?  Moreover, the teeth, jaw, brain, and senses all have to work together for capturing food, and then the mouth has to pass the material on to elaborate digestive systems to make use of it (see 10/14/2008).
    In piecing together their tale, evolutionary paleontologists cannot escape paradigm bias in taxonomy, dating, and relationships (e.g., 05/19/2010, bullet 5; 03/05/2010; 02/09/2010, 12/11/2009).  Many dinosaur fossils thought to represent different species have recently been shown to be the same species in different life stages (09/17/2008, 07/14/2010).  When trying to understand relationships of extinct animals, the situation is even more fraught with potential for misinterpretation.  If they were asking the right questions, like where did all this complexity come from, they would not focus so much on connect-the-dot games, but would come face to face with the question of design.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs and Extinct Reptiles • Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution

Sunday Potluck     12/12/2010    
Dec 12, 2010 — Here’s a list of quick headlines with minimal comment for mental snacking.  Then it will be time to clear the kitchen for another week of more deep-fried reporting.

1. Magician fools scientists:  Skeptic/magician James Randi tricked a group of scientists, then warned them to doubt their own infallibility (except when it comes to atheism); see Live Science.
2. Louisiana bows to Darwin:  Despite misleading headline, school board blocked challenges to evolution (see Fox News).
3. Lucky strike:  New theory for earth’s mineral wealth: meteor bombs from outer space brought it (New Scientist and National Geographic).  How else could it have gotten here?
4. Evolution of the scientific method:  Chart on The Scientist makes development of scientific method look progressive, ignores many pitfalls along the way and conflicts still with us.
5. Cell wonders:  Details of microbes’ extraordinary maintenance and repair system revealed (Science Daily).
6. Ratatouille:  With human brain cells implanted, will rats cook better? (New Scientist).
7. Leftist slant:  Headline on legal efforts to restrict late-term abortions focuses on “abortion rights foes” and those who want to “outlaw” abortion (PhysOrg).
8. Say what?  Our brains are wired so we can better hear ourselves speak (Science Daily).
9. Death and taxes:  It’s state government tax dollars, not private investment capital, that is funding most embryonic stem cell research (PhysOrg).
10. Whale of a mouthful:  Foraging strategies of blue whales are super efficient (PhysOrg).
11. Ant social justice:  Leaf-cutter ants take care of their elderly and disabled via job swapping (PhysOrg).
12. Evolve or perish:  Powdery mildew is at an evolutionary dead end, claimed PhysOrg. 
13. The eyes have it:  U of Nebraska researchers say you can tell liberals by their eye movements, because they don’t see eye to eye with conservatives (Science Daily).  Cause, effect, or shifty-eyed science?
14. Climate exit gate:  “Ice-Age Reptile Extinctions Provide a Glimpse of Likely Responses to Human-Caused Climate Change,” reported Science Daily.  Whose fault was that?
15. Brain glue:  Molecule helps stitch brain cells together and affects how we learn (PhysOrg).
16. Hairy riddle:  What do you call a fly that can’t fly?  A walk? asked New Scientist about a weird hairy fly (er, walk) found in Kenya.
17. Theory breakdown:  Four exoplanets dance in a way that defies theories of planet formation, reported Live Science.  Story on New Scientist includes video animation.
18. Nice birdie:  New Scientist and the BBC News claimed giant storks had hobbits for breakfast.  Either that, or a successful hunt could feed a family of five for a month.  Or the figure is exaggerated.  (So much for the island dwarfism hypothesis.)
19. Something from nothing:  Science Daily said it is theoretically possible to get matter and antimatter from nothing.  But if it is really nothing, that’s something.  Until they do, it’s nothing.
20. Evolution of multitasking:  Early man invented the list of things to do all at once, according to Science Daily.  Not clear who Monica Smith of UCLA interviewed or observed to find this out.

Get your Baloney Detector on and read, laugh, frown, gasp, groan, weep, or cheer commensurate with the subject and its interpretation.  Otherwise you might just cheer for everything, including the evil, or succumb to the verbal manipulation of scientists and reporters.  The more you practice discernment, the less you will need to rely on our commentaries, which you shouldn’t be doing anyway.
Next headline on:  Philosophy of Science • Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

The pattern is the same everywhere.  If you have watched Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled, you’ve seen how the Darwin funDOmentalists (Darwin-Only) refuse to debate the evidence, but instead retreat to character assassination, association, glittering generalities, fear-mongering, and sidestepping and subversion to keep out anyone who dares to defy the Darwin Party Line.
    It’s going on in the case of the American Freedom Alliance right now, where the California Museum of Science broke a contract rather than allow two pro-I.D. groups access to the facilities, lest it tarnish their pure-Darwin image.  Evolution News broke the story about how internal emails showed that despite their public statements, the real issue was preventing intelligent design from getting any publicity by the museum.
    In this story, Gaskell lost a prestigious job even thought he was the best qualified, because of worry that he could be “potentially evangelical” – an unlawful prior restraint on free speech.  Would the opposite situation have concerned his colleagues, if a staunch atheist were to be judged “potentially evangelical” about his theological position?  (Of course not; such a candidate would probably be honored by academia and the media.)
    Even the “potential” exposure was enough to expel this man, without any evidence he had actually tried to influence anyone at the university or observatory about his views.  This can only mean one thing: the Darwin Party, whose hardcore stance on secular evolution represents a small fraction of American opinion, is running scared.  The DODOs cannot afford to give a platform to anyone who might potentially expose to the public the existence of alternative views other than 100% materialism.  They will destroy careers to keep ideological purity in their ranks.
    This tactic cannot work forever, because it is self-refuting; it violates academia’s own ostensible commitment to the Enlightenment ideals of reason and tolerance (and, ironically, it also fights Darwinian fitness itself – by imposing goal-directed behavior against whatever unguided “mutation” supposedly led to the accidental emergence of religion/creationism in early man’s rise from the apes, that was somehow preserved by natural selection; see 10/26/2008 and 05/27/2008).
    If Darwinists’ beliefs are so fragile that they worry exposure to alternative viewpoints is intolerable, then their beliefs are not worth believing.  And if they think that the public must be protected from such exposure, they disparage the intelligence of their fellow Homo sapiens.   No scientist should fear openness about the evidence.  Bring it on.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Darwin and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education • Philosophy of Science • Bible and Theology

1. Bird gloss:  Ravens have what scientists at the University of Akron in Ohio want: glossy materials.  Nevermore shall ravens be despised members of the bird order; according to PhysOrg, their feathers have thin layers that cause light interference, producing a sheen that glistens even though the surface is rough.  That could be useful to inventors needing a glossy look for materials that cannot be polished.
2. Honeybee aerobatics:  By imitating the optical flow of honeybee eyes, researchers at the University of Queensland are inventing plane navigation systems that can perform complex maneuvers, PhysOrg reported.
3. Fly navigation:  With help from the Air Force, Caltech scientists, similarly, are studying fly vision to learn better flight attitude control.  It would be enough to improve flight stabilization and navigation from our tiny winged neighbors; “However, with a tiny brain they are able to perform a variety of tasks such as finding food and mates despite changing light levels, wind gusts, wing damage, and so on.”
4. Bird-o-soar:  Soaring is better than flapping, reported PhysOrg.  Researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem are equipping birds with transmitters to learn more about their flight efficiency.  They are finding that small birds benefit from gliding as much as large birds.
5. Bacterial biofuel:  A subset of biomimetics is employing organisms directly.  Science Daily said that scientists at Concordia University are trying to engineer Lactobacillus lactis, the organism that helps make cheese from milk, into a workhorse “to transform plant material into biofuels or other chemicals.”
6. Bacterial sensors:  Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are recruiting bacteria to test water quality.  According to Science Daily, their “revolutionary Swimming Behavioral Spectrophotometer (SBS) ... employs one-celled protozoa to detect toxins in water sources.”  The contraption, which monitors the swimming ability of the germs as indicators of water quality, could some day monitor all the drinking water in the world, with instantaneous feedback and continuous response.  The Department of Defense is very interested. 
7. Butterfly medic:  “Butterfly-Inspired Patch May Alert Soldiers to Brain Injury” reads a headline on Live Science, describing how “A color-changing patch modeled after the iridescent wings of butterflies could give soldiers a heads-up on the severity of injuries sustained on the battlefield,” thanks to work at the University of Pennsylvania.
8. Silk drop control:  Remember how spider webs collect dew by causing water droplets to bead up due to the nature of the proteins in the silk? (see 02/04/2010).  Nature reported that Chinese scientists are trying to imitate this trick with synthetic silks.
9. Earthworm biohazard sensors:  Why build electronic sensors to detect hazmat (hazardous materials), when earthworms can be hired to do it?  Science Daily reported that researchers in Venezuela and Argentina are studying the “viability of using earthworms to process hazardous material containing high concentrations of heavy metal for the bioremediation of old industrial sites, landfill and other potentially hazardous areas.”  This offers an “alternative to complex and costly industrial cleanup methods, the team suggests.”
10. Neuron computers:  Live Science reported how researchers at Boston University are bringing the world closer to silicon-free computers that use memristors, which “behave like neurons in many ways,” toward new digital brains.
11. Bacterial computers:  Imagine being able to program bacteria to act as logic circuits for organic computers.  That’s what researchers at the University of California at San Francisco are counting on, according to Science Daily.
12. Ant computers:  How do ants solve puzzles so well?  They can always find the shortest route to a target, even when a barrier is put in the way.  Scientists at the University of Sydney are curious, so they have built mazes to learn how the “humble ant is capable of solving difficult mathematical problems.”  The headline reads, “Next generation of algorithms inspired by problem-solving ants.”  Supercomputer programmers who humble themselves like the ant might learn how to adapt to changing conditions and barriers, both by exploratory behavior and signals left in the path, such as the pheromone molecules that help ants remember previous trials without backtracking.  One team member commented, “Even simple mass-recruiting ants have much more complex and labile problem solving skills than we ever thought.”
13. Viral batteries:  “Viruses have a bad rep--and rightly so,” began an article on PhysOrg, but researchers at the University of Maryland are “turning the tables, harnessing and exploiting the ‘self-renewing’ and ‘self-assembling’properties of viruses for a higher purpose: to build a new generation of small, powerful and highly efficient batteries and fuel cells.”
14. Starfish medical breakthrough:  Watch a video at BBC News to learn how asthma, hay fever and arthritis may get new effective treatments, thanks to starfish.  Imitating the slimy goo on starfish surfaces could help reduce inflammation on blood vessels, researchers at King’s College London said.  “The starfish have effectively done a lot of the hard work for us.”
        This is just one example of promises from sea creatures.  The article said that scientists envision an “underwater pharmacy” of useful medical products coming from organisms as diverse as sea cucumbers and seaweed.  “Some of the most widespread, widely used medicines come from nature,” said David Hughes, an ecologist from the Scottish Association for Marine Science.  “Penicillin is a mould that grows on bread, aspirin comes from willow trees, so it’s not too surprising turning to nature to find useful drugs.  But we’ve only very recently begun to look to the sea for a useful source of medicines.”  The huge diversity of life in the oceans that cover nearly 3/4 of the earth’s surface promises a vast research area for years to come.
15. Bones and cones:  From the spiral cones of molluscs to the bones and teeth of vertebrates, biominerals form a variety of lightweight yet tough materials.  Science Daily discussed how researchers at the Ohio Supercomputer Center are studying “nature’s ability to form complex structures, such as bones, teeth and mollusk shells, from peptides.”  This could lead to breakthroughs in “bone replacement, sensing systems, efficient energy generation and treatment of diseases.”

Go biomimetics!  The biomimicry revolution is making science fun again.  Reporters and scientists who are tired of Darwin, this is a way for you to get out of the kingdom of the DODOs (Darwin only, Darwin only) without jeopardizing your career.  Just study the living subject and apply it to real world problems.  Storytelling about “billions of years in evolution” is superfluous and will not be missed.
    Parents and teachers: consider inspiring your precocious students’ next science project with biomimetics.  It could be a first-prize winner and open up a young person’s mind to an exciting, productive career that could improve human life and health without harming the environment.
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Birds • Terrestrial Zoology • Marine Biology • Cell Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

SETI Ignorance Gets Stronger     12/09/2010    
Dec 09, 2010 — “Science is not about blind faith” begins a video posted on MSNBC about SETI.  Part of an article by AP reporter Seth Borenstein, “Evidence for E.T. is mounting daily, but not proven,” the video explains Frank Drake’s famous equation that tries to quantify the probability for extraterrestrial intelligence (09/29/2010, 11/24/2008).  Though Drake confidently asserts the probability that 50,000 advanced communicating civilizations exist in the Milky Way, Borenstein’s subtitle asserts, “So far, first signs of life elsewhere are more likely to be closer to slime mold.”
    Confidence exudes like a strong perfume from both the video and the article.  “Lately, a handful of new discoveries make it seem more likely that we are not alone – that there is life somewhere else in the universe,” Borenstein began, diving immediately into Wolf-Simon’s claim that some microbes can imbibe arsenic as a substitute for phosphate in their proteins and DNA (12/02/2010).  Then Carl Pilcher, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, was given the microphone to say, “The evidence is just getting stronger and stronger” that “There’s got to be life out there.”  After a brief caveat that “Since much of this research is new, scientists are still debating how solid the conclusions are,” Borenstein reassures the reader that even if something simple, like slime mold, is detected first, “It can evolve from there.”
    Borenstein’s confidence is based on the premise that the search for E.T. is based on “Some science, some pure guesswork.”  Since every non-scientist has access to guesswork, to what science does he refer?  Admitting that the Drake Equation includes guesswork factors, “such as the likelihood of the evolution of intelligence and how long civilizations last,” Borenstein strips it down to two factors: “How many places out there can support life?  And how hard is it for life to take root?”  Bolstered by Wolf-Simon’s arsenic microbes, he beamed, “That means the probability for alien life is higher than ever before, agree 10 scientists interviewed by The Associated Press.”  He said additionally, “nothing topped last week’s news of a lake bacterium that scientists could train to thrive on arsenic instead of phosphorous.”
    Perhaps Borenstein celebrated too soon.  Live Science said, “Many skeptical scientists not involved with the study have raised questions about its methods and findings.”  Later, Karl Tate on Live Science included the arsenic claim as #10 in his list of top ten “Kerfuffles” – “The debate over arsenic-based life is just the latest example of science -- blown out of proportion or just plain misunderstood -- exploding across the news media.”  (Others included Martian bacteria and overhyped human ancestors).  And Nature News said that the announcement got a “toxic response” from other scientists, who called it “premature at best” and complained about the way it was publicized.  Steve Benner, an origin of life researcher, “used the analogy of a steel chain with a tinfoil link to illustrate that the arsenate ion said to replace phosphate in the bacterium’s DNA forms bonds that are orders of magnitude less stable.”  Not only that, the NASA Astrobiology team failed to show that the microbes actually incorporated arsenic into their molecules.  Some scientists were upset that NASA’s teaser to the press had them thinking life had been discovered beyond Earth; indeed, even Fox News reporters were expecting an announcement that life had been discovered on Titan.
    Did Borenstein have any other science, less dubious, to amass in favor of his contention that the evidence for E.T. is getting stronger and stronger?  Indeed he did.  Calling on SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak, who “ticks off the astronomical findings about planet abundance and Earthbound discoveries about life’s hardiness,” he agrees that these points “have gone in the direction of encouraging life out there and they didn’t have to,” – so much so, that denying the existence of extraterrestrial life, Shostak alleged, is tantamount to believing in miracles (i.e., that life only exists on earth).  Time out for a brief reality check:

Astronomers, however, do believe in proof.  They don’t have proof of life yet.  There’s no green alien or even a bacterium that scientists can point to and say it’s alive and alien.  Even that arsenic-munching microbe discovered in Mono Lake in California isn’t truly alien.  It was manipulated in the lab.

Got odds?  We do.  Read our online book, especially chapters 6-7.  How convenient to bet a cup of coffee when he won’t have to pay up for 16 years, by which time he may well need embalming fluid instead, if there’s a difference.
    Let’s unpack this reasoning about odds in this SETI coffee klatch.  “The odds, he figures, have never been more in his favor.”  What are the odds when your sample size is one?  You have one example, and you want to extrapolate the odds to 100 billion planets in the galaxy.  This is like winning the world’s biggest lottery on your first draw the only time you play, and thinking the odds are great of winning many more times because there are a lot of convenience stores where you can play the game.  But even that is overly gracious to this gratuitous line of thinking that depends on fortuitous causes (11/14/2010).
    Statisticians like to think about urns with colored marbles, so let’s say you are walking on your terrace, and discover an iPhone, not yet aware of its purpose or function; also on the terrace you find an urn with marbles in it, but you know nothing about what kind of marbles are inside.  You reach in and pull out an orange marble, then a red one, a pink one, another orange one, and a white one (these represent Venus, Mars, Europa, Titan, and Enceladus), along with a lot of black marbles.  Because your iPhone contains some of the same colors that are in the marbles, you concoct a theory that iPhones evolve out of marbles.  Then you look off into the distance and see many more urns you think must have marbles, too – billions of them.  You get all excited, thinking that the odds of finding more iPhones must be astronomical.
    In your ecstasy, you produce an equation you call the Flake Equation, and calculate your odds: N is the number of iPhones that must exist in all the urns.  R(u) is the rate of formation of urns, f(m) is the fraction of those urns with marbles, n(i) is the number of urns large enough to contain iPhones, f(c) is the number of urns where circuits begin evolving from the marble material; f(i) is the number of marbles that evolve into iPhones (after all, once the process starts, “It can evolve from there”), f(c) is the number of iPhones capable of calling you up, and L is the lifetime of the average iPhone battery.  According to your calculations there could be 50,000 iPhones out there – even though the only one you have ever seen is in your hand.  So great is your faith, you organize a Search for Extra-Terracetrial iPhones, and try to find rich suckers to fund it, assuring them that it is not silly to be optimistic.  (A quote from David Berlinski comes to mind: “Wearing pink tasseled slippers and conical hats covered in polka dots, Darwinian biologists are persuaded that a plot is afoot to make them look silly.”)
    Even if there is an iPhone out there that calls you up some day, it would not support your theory that the device evolved out of the marbles, even if it calls itself a Droid Evo.  It would validate the view that both devices were intelligently designed.  But in our day, such reasoning is disallowed a priori, because it’s not “science.”  Thus, science has devolved into absurdity, where sophisticated ignorance is glorified, because intelligent causes have been excluded from the very definition of science.  The cult of Darwin has given birth to the cult of SETI (11/13/2010), where marbles evolve into iPhones, and molecules evolve into minds.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • SETI • Origin of Life • Darwin and Evolution • Media • Philosophy of Science • Dumb Ideas

Are You Too Clean?     12/08/2010    
Dec 08, 2010 — You shower, you put on clean clothes, you wash your hands with antibacterial soap, you keep the house spic and span, you work in a clean office – and you set yourself up for disease and depression.  That’s what some scientists are proposing with the “hygiene hypothesis.”  By depriving yourself of access to your bacterial helpers, you’re living unnaturally.
    Dr. Charles Raison of Emory University explained the Hygiene Hypothesis in a short video interview on PhysOrg.  Earlier studies had implicated allergies and other problems with over-cleanliness, but now he is conducting experiments with the hunch that genetic dispositions to depression are also linked to deprivation of “ancient relationships with microorganisms in soil, food and the gut” that our ancestors had that helped keep inflammation at bay.
    Science Daily reported on studies at Michigan University that suggested antibacterial soaps can make you sick.  Triclosan and BPA could “play a role in changing the micro-organisms to which we are exposed in such a way that our immune system development in childhood is affected.”  One of the researchers remarked, “It is possible that a person can be too clean for their own good.”
    In another article on PhysOrg, Professor Mark Viney at the University of Bristol has conducted experiments with mice to show that the immune system is boosted by life in the wild.  And if you can handle the yuck factor of a story on Science Daily, New York University researchers are studying a new treatment for inflammatory bowel disease: “worm therapy.”  These articles suggest that we need to reduce our hesitancy to the elements and ecology of the out-of-doors a little, and while not rolling in the mud with pigs, understand that we have a living environment that can do us good.  For more on the hygiene hypothesis, see 01/13/2010 bullet 3, 03/09/2008, 04/11/2007, and 08/02/2006.
    On a different but somewhat related subject, why are African nations so far behind in food production?  Don’t they have more exposure to the outdoors and their fellow creatures?  Some westerners can only think of malaria, ebola, guinea worms, lion attacks, starvation and other horrific trials the inhabitants of the African continent face in their struggle to survive.  But the BBC News reviewed a new book called The New Harvest, by Harvard University professor Calestous Juma, that points the blame on something else: the lack of political will.  There would be no need for those endless appeals to feed the starving children; Africa could feed itself in a generation, Juma says, and even export food to other countries.  With modern equipment, better roads, crop improvements and other factors, African agriculture could grow like it has in the west, rather than fall, like it has 10% since 1960.  What is “needed above all else was the political will at the highest level.”

“Political will” is a euphemism for “getting rid of tyrannical, selfish dictators.”  Africa has tremendous natural resources, but is held in its grip of poverty by lack of benevolent leadership based on Judeo-Christian principles.  Get rid of the Mugabe types and the continent could prosper every bit as much as other countries.
    Do you get outdoors enough?  Take more walks outside.  Enjoy the trees, plants, animals more – they are your fellow creatures.  Evolutionists explain that we evolved with them, and that’s why we need them; but creationists can better explain that God gave us the ecology we need to be healthy.  While it has run amok since the original creation due to judgment on sin, the creation still exhibits God’s sustenance and providence (e.g., Psalm 104).  There are still roles for our bacterial travelers, both inside and outside, to give us healthy balance, buffer against stress, and keep our immune systems well trained in the recognition of good and bad agents.  We could not even digest our food without their help.
    Think of how many people for millennia worked closely with the earth, camped out of doors, and got more exercise.  We neglect those things at risk of loss of not only good health but good attitudes.  Looking at our world as a purposeful creation enhances the experience of connection with nature.
Next headline on:  Health • Human Body • Politics and Ethics

1. Enceladus eruptions:  The geysers of Enceladus continue to erupt out the south pole.  The parallel cracks, dubbed “tiger stripes,” from which the eruptions occur, are longer and more complex than originally thought.  This comes from new data taken November 30 during the 12th flyby at 45,000 altitude at closest approach – the last good look at the south pole in sunlight.  This was E12: the twelfth targeted encounter with Enceladus.  JPL and the Cassini Imaging Team released images of the bright jets shooting gas and dust outward at supersonic speeds.  Particles reaching escape velocity create the E-ring around Saturn; others fall back onto the moon and brighten its surface.
       Live Science reminded its readers that the heat energy per unit area coming out of this small icy moon, “once thought to be cold and geologically dead,” is five times that in Yellowstone.  That’s heat, of course, not temperature, since the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) measured highest temperatures of 190 Kelvin (-120° F), cold enough to be intolerable to humans.  Live Science remarked, “While that sounds cold, it is actually quite warm for this icy moon around Saturn.”  Temperatures at other regions of Enceladus are typically around 80 Kelvin (-315° F) and as low as 33 K (-400° F) at the north pole.  Yellowstone obviously has scalding hot temperatures localized to its geysers and hot springs, but overall, Enceladus’ geysers emit more heat energy per unit area – an astonishing discovery for a small icy moon separated from significant external heat sources.
       Earlier flybys had measured temperatures of 170K.  Scientists are trying to understand if the new high of 190K represents increased activity along the fissure observed in the greatest detail, named Damascus Sulcus.  More likely, it results from the higher resolution possible on this flyby by the CIRS instrument, allowing it to focus in on the inner regions of the channel.  The observations also revealed forks at the end of two cracks where heat emission continues past the main channel, and an isolated warm spot not associated with a tiger stripe (see JPL story and image).  Space.com, PhysOrg and Science Daily all reported the story.
2. Hyperion pox:  The geometry of the Enceladus flyby allowed Cassini to make another non-targeted flyby of Hyperion from about 72,000km.  Since the pock-marked potato-shaped moon has a chaotic rotation, engineers cannot predict what side will face the camera.  The best image was posted by JPL and SpaceRef; on YouTube, someone colorized 61 of the images and made them into a video sequence.
3. Saturn hex:  Atmospheric scientists have modeled in the lab how the mysterious hexagon at Saturn’s north pole might remain stable as a standing wave; see abstract on Icarus.¹  The shape was first observed 30 years ago by the Voyagers and continues unabated to this day.  “Why the jet stream takes the characteristic six-sided shape and how it is stably maintained across multiple Saturnian seasons are yet to be explained,” they said.  They came up with a model and simulation that partly fits the observations; “However, our results also show that a vortex street model of the Hexagon cannot reproduce the observed propagation speed unless the zonal jet’s speed is modified beyond the uncertainties in the observed zonal wind speed, which suggests that a vortex street model of the Hexagon and the observed zonal wind profile may not be mutually compatible.”  It remains a work in progress.
4. Rhea gas:  Last month Cassini scientists were surprised to find a tenuous atmosphere at Rhea composed of oxygen and carbon dioxide.  Though 5 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere, it is 100 times more dense than the exospheres of Mercury and Earth’s moon, according to Science Daily.  Scientists believe the oxygen comes from bombardment of the surface by Saturn’s magnetic field, causing decomposition of surface ice; “The source of the carbon dioxide is less certain.”  “The new results suggest that active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe,” said lead author Ben Teolis of Southwest Research Institute; but it’s not quite clear how he connected the dots with his next statement: “Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life.”  Rhea is not exactly a lively place, as he well knows: “All evidence from Cassini indicates that Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it.”  Life as we don’t know it is purely imaginary at this point.
5. Dione donut:  The Cassini site released a photo of Dione from its Oct. 17 non-targeted flyby, showing off the donut-shaped crater Erelus with a central peak 75 miles across.  Cassini keeps a public diary of its activities on the Significant Events page.
   

Warning: Eyes on the Solar System and Eyes on the Earth 3D can be addicting!  Get your kids off the blood-and-gun video games and introduce them to these real-world visualization tools.  Reality can be so much more interesting than fiction.  These websites have the potential to inspire the next generation of space navigators, planetary scientists and aeronautical engineers, and are fascinating interactive adventures for everyone.
    None of the Enceladus articles talked about how this little moon could be putting out so much energy for 4.5 billion years.  That’s because they don’t have a clue.  The geysers remain exciting, but not as wildly improbable, without the Law of the Misdeeds and Perversions, which cannot be altered, known as the A.S.S. (age of the solar system).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods • Education

News on the Mind     12/06/2010    
Dec 06, 2010 — Here are a dozen recent stories dealing with brains, the mind, perception, motivation and other aspects of psychology and neuroscience.

1. Nature and nurture:  PhysOrg claims that scientists at SMU have resolved the nature vs nurture debate with a hybrid approach.  Whether it satisfies critics remains to be seen.  Perhaps they are still thinking inside the box by overlooking factors outside those two.
2. Profit motive:  A Caltech neuroscientist wrote in PNAS that removing financial incentives demotivates the brain.¹  He commented on a paper by Murayama et al. that indicates that “extrinsic incentives (e.g., pay) can undermine intrinsic incentives (e.g., fun).”  He cautioned, “Increased incentives should be applied carefully, because removing them might damage or destroy a preexisting intrinsic incentive.”
3. Aspire to be Neanderthal:  My, how anthropology has changed its view of Neanderthal Man.  “They were technologically savvy, creative and cultured,” began an article on New Scientist.  “So maybe it’s time we accepted that Neanderthals were people just like us.”
4. Believing is seeing:  Science Daily reported on work by the Wellcome Trust that indicates our perception of the world is a function of the size of our visual cortex.  Since the size of that part of the brain can differ by a factor of three from one individual to the next, we may each see the world differently to some extent.  An optical illusion accompanies the article.  “Optical illusions mystify and inspire our imagination, but in truth they show us that how we see the world is not necessarily physically accurate, but rather depends a lot on our brains.”
5. False witness:  Americans exaggerate about church attendance, an article on PhysOrg claims.  A U of Michigan researcher said, “In the U.S., and to a lesser extent in Canada, the gap between what we say and what we do is substantial, and has been so for the last several decades.”  Some people may claim church attendance more as a statement of identity and self-concept than behavior.
6. Walk for life:  Taking walks may stave off Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline, radiologists said in Science Daily.
7. Color me blue:  Matt Crump, a cognitive psychologist at Vanderbilt, was interviewed by Live Science.  He talked about his work on learning, attention, memory, and learning to play the blues.
8. Easy cheating:  Science Daily talked about game experiments by U of Toronto psychologists that made it easy to cheat, and headlined, “Why Do People Behave Badly?  Maybe It’s Just Too Easy.”  The article made no mention of conscience.
9. Rapid aural convergence coding:  “Coding” is a word becoming more frequent in papers about sense perception.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin analyzed how rapidly listeners can correlate acoustic inputs.  The abstract in PNAS stated,² 

   Natural sounds are complex, typically changing along multiple acoustic dimensions that covary in accord with physical laws governing sound-producing sources.  We report that, after passive exposure to novel complex sounds, highly correlated features initially collapse onto a single perceptual dimension, capturing covariance at the expense of unitary stimulus dimensions.  Discriminability of sounds respecting the correlation is maintained, but is temporarily lost for sounds orthogonal or oblique to experienced covariation.  Following extended experience, perception of variance not captured by the correlation is restored, but weighted only in proportion to total experienced covariance....  Predictions from the principal components analysis model also match evolving listener performance in two discrimination tasks absent passive listening.  These demonstrations of adaptation to correlated attributes provide direct behavioral evidence for efficient coding.

10. Hunting for nature:  Why do hunters hunt?  At least in Wisconsin, connecting to nature is one top motivation, reported PhysOrg.
11. The speaking brain:  Language cannot be isolated to just one region of the brain.  Researchers found “rich connections throughout the brain that have not traditionally been associated with language, but are now found to tie together key areas important for understanding language,” said Science Daily about work by the Society for Neuroscience.  “The results revealed a far more extensive network for language functions than current models would predict.”
12. Spider eyes:  They’re not just for magical potions any more.  Elizabeth Jakob at the University of Massachusetts is tracking the eye movements of spiders to learn about how their brains process sensory information.  According to Science Daily, she shows videos to jumping spiders and monitors their eye movements.  “It’s like having a window into a spider’s brain,” she said.
        “Densely packed with photoreceptors, the retina gives the spider high-resolution vision rivaling that of primates,” the article said – only jumping spiders have eight eyes, each equipped with muscles that allow them to focus on objects like aiming a flashlight beam.  Their vision is very effective, too: “they need to quickly sift all sorts of visual information and decide whether they are seeing a threat, a potential mate or a delicious treat,” the article continued; “This sorting through incoming stimuli is the same problem other animals face, including humans.”  They do all this with a brain that could fit on the head of a pin.

We can use our brains to study the brain, just as we can study the eye using the eye, or think about thinking.  But to think about where thinking came from, we need to think outside the materialistic box.  Then, the brain, the eye, and the senses make sense, and are seen for the designed wonders they are.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Terrestrial Zoology • Early Man • Mind and Brain • Intelligent Design

1. WikiLeaks:  Most conservatives feel that WikiLeaks poses a real threat to national security, and that the perpetrator, Julian Assange, should be prosecuted.  Yet PhysOrg cast the story that as a freedom of speech issue – the leftist view.  “WikiLeaks fights to stay online amid attacks” was the headline of a story that gave prominent quotes to Assange claiming history is on his side, that he is just trying to make the world a better place.  Does this article even belong on a science-reporting website?  PhysOrg did post another A.P. story that at least quoted some conservatives, but it tended to air only the most inflammatory statements, like those of a Canadian advisor who said, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually.”
       Live Science cast the story as a matter of old fashioned innocent gossip, no different than Facebook.  Ignoring entirely the issue that WikiLeaks plays into the hands of terrorists, the reporter even called on an evolutionist to tell us it’s just part of our ape ancestry: “Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that gossip and language evolved as primate groups got too large to bond by grooming.”
2. Rich vs poor:  Conservatives do not have a problem with wealth per se, provided the money has been earned honestly.  The rich, after all, pay the bulk of taxes, provide jobs, and are often benefactors.  Leftists are for redistribution of wealth.  PhysOrg reported that the rich in Canada are getting richer.  While the trend may be a matter of statistical analysis, the subtext of the article was that this is bad; letting rich keep their money involves an “inequality gap”.
3. Minimum wage:  Conservatives argue that minimum wage laws hurt the people they are designed to help, by forcing businesses to close their doors to entry-level job applicants.  PhysOrg took the leftist position that “Minimum wage hikes don’t eliminate jobs.”  Either political party could certainly amass its own statistics and expertise to make its case, but the article did not even acknowledge that a conservative view exists.  It portrayed the liberal position as a scientific finding, leading to some heated comments by readers.
4. DREAM Act:  Conservatives find the DREAM Act, now being debated in Congress, as an abomination, not only because it rewards people who broke the law, but will stimulate even more illegal immigration, and actually gives them something that U.S. citizens cannot have: lower rates on college tuition.  Yet again, PhysOrg gave the leftist arguments only, arguing on quasi-scientific grounds that the act would benefit the economy.
5. Funding scrutiny:  Conservatives agree that taxpayers should be protected from careless funding of frivolous projects, scientific or otherwise – especially in a time of economic crisis when the national debt is at a historic high many fear is unsustainable.  When Live Science reported about Republican majority leader Eric Cantor’s reasonable request for scrutiny of NSF grants, however, the reporting staff focused on explaining why one apparently wasteful project (a $3/4 million grant to study soccer players) was not really wasteful, but had spinoffs that might help society more broadly.  Cantor was only asking for self-scrutiny at this point, but the undertone of the article is that Republicans pose a threat to science and must be monitored carefully.  Did that same moral imperative apply when liberals were driving the country to the brink of economic collapse with irresponsible spending?
6. Climate:  Many conservatives are fearful, if not outraged, by U.N. proposals at international climate talks (currently at Cancun) that they feel can destroy economies, send society back to third world status, and hurt most of all the poor who need economic opportunity the most.  Many of them also feel “global warming” is based on dubious science (02/06/2010) and provides a cover for socialist plans to redistribute wealth.  When PhysOrg went to report on the talks, however, it focused on a specific case of dubious science: “Cancun’s eroding white sand beaches are providing a note of urgency to the climate talks being held just south of this seaside resort famed for its postcard-perfect vistas,” implying that political action on global warming (now euphemised as “climate change”) must be taken now – the left’s view.  But needless to say, it would be very difficult to prove that the beaches of Cancun are eroding because of man-made global warming, especially when the UK is currently suffering under a “Narnia-like winter” as seen in images from the TERRA satellite.
7. Food bill:  Many conservatives were outraged at the lame duck Congress passing a food bill that gives enormous new powers to the Environmental Protection Agency, an unelected body possessing already near-dictatorial powers over business.  Yet PhysOrg presented the “bill to boost food safety” as a wonderful, progressive thing – all good, except for some compromises that had to be made to placate doubters who worried about the impacts on farmers and businesses in their home states.  Live Science went even further in its advocacy, calling the bill a “significant achievement,” announcing with its headline, “Senate Finally Passes Food Safety Bill.”  Totally ignored were any conservative arguments that private enterprise and a free market possess inherent powers of self-regulation without having to further erode the liberties of taxpayers.  Whether the conservatives or liberals are right is not the issue here.  The point is that the media, once again, rather than debating the bill with any pretense of balance, acted in advocacy of one political position on a “science” website.
8. Ending racism:  Without doubt, concerns of racism loom large on liberal agendas, whereas many conservatives feel that government victimization by race actually does more harm than good.  In a nearly shameless reference to Obama’s political slogan, PhysOrg gave good press to academics at Georgia State and the Association for Psychological Science with the headline, “Motivation to end racism relies on ‘yes we can’ approach.”
       The merits of their arguments are, again, beside the point; certainly, empowering the disadvantaged in any culture with positive motivation is worthwhile, regardless of their race, and no respectable conservative has anything but contempt for racism.  But it is almost inconceivable that academics and science reporters would, for a minute, give positive press to the views of prominent black conservatives on the issue of how to deal with racism.  The list would include such luminaries as Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, J. C. Watts, Condi Rice, Walter Williams, Alan Keyes, Michael Steele, Bill Cosby, Ward Connerly, even Martin Luther King’s daughter, Dr. Alveda C. King, and others, whose views, though nuanced, informed, and varied, are routinely excluded from “science” articles.
9. Health care:  Conservatives were outraged last year when a nationalized health care bill, in spite of a blockade by every Republican in congress, overcame near-certain defeat through political shenanigans, backroom deals, broken promises and outright lies, finally getting pushed over the goal line against the wishes of a majority of Americans, like a foul play of a cheating football team getting awarded a touchdown by a corrupt referee.
       Conservatives before and since that date have stood vociferously for private control of health care.  As could be expected, though, once again, PhysOrg gave favorable press to a Canadian Medical Association press release that promoted expanded use of publicly funded health care.  Only arguments in support of public funding were stated; nothing of the conservative arguments against it were even noted in this “science” article.
10. Right to life:  Conservatives are more often than not the lone stalwarts for the right to life, opposing abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, human cloning and experimentation, and embryonic stem cell research.  This is an odd situation, since liberals traditionally portray themselves as voices for the disadvantaged and helpless – and what humans are more helpless, and need a voice more, than those in the womb, infants, and the elderly?  Yet Science Daily spoke about a new “Reliable Culture of Human Embryonic Stem Cells” positively in terms only of their potential (not actual) provision for medical breakthroughs, ignoring the deep ethical concerns of many about the use of human embryos for research or treatment, whether or not the treatments ever fulfill a decade of unkept promises (11/18/2010, 09/26/2010, 09/03/2010, 01/18/2010).

Readers are challenged to submit exceptions to the rule to our Feedback line.  Show us a “science” article from a mainstream academic source that advocates a conservative position on any of the issues in the list above.  We predict readers will have trouble finding even examples that give a balanced treatment of both sides.  Unless the response is overwhelming, any exceptions found will prove the rule.  It has been our experience at Creation-Evolution Headlines that science reporting presents a perennial onslaught against conservative values.
    Science wasn’t supposed to be like this.  It was supposed to restrict itself to natural phenomena, to controlled experiments on observable, repeatable processes governed by natural laws, seeking to follow the evidence and be most critical of its own claims.  How did science journalism ever get so deeply embedded in politics, ethics, economics, and global advocacy?  The scientific data do not entail leftist politics; often, leftist political positions are maintained in spite of the data (02/27/2010).  Think about the now-discredited work by Margaret Mead, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Kinsey, whose left-supporting “science” claims were made on the basis of flawed data samples and agenda-driven methods (many more shameful examples exposed in Ann Coulter’s book Godless: The Church of Liberalism, 08/15/2009). 
    The ideological left has co-opted science for its political agenda, which now threatens to become a global agenda.  Science does not even belong in many of these fields (08/25/2010, 05/13/2010).  While many individual scientists are honorable citizens, focused on their narrow fields, seeking understanding about this or that molecule or organism or star, the scientific societies (06/25/2010) who presume to speak for them, and the majority of mainstream science journalists who convey the mystique of science to the general public, have stolen science’s presumed authority to promote a secularist, leftist, materialistic, evolutionary world view, to the point where many in the public are oblivious to the ideology, so thick is the fogma in which it is enveloped.  (For definition of fogma, see the 05/14/2007 commentary.)

Exercise:  You can have a voice!  Many science sites allow comments.  If time permits, become a regular commentator on left-leaning science sites, and provide some balance to the reporting.  Be sure to be well-informed, winsome, and persuasive.  Often readers are attracted to the comments – and reporters may learn to fear the adverse publicity of one-sided reporting.  Rule #1: Don't be a blowhard, or you will be blown off as a crank.  Let the blowhards be on the other side, exposing the weaknesses of their arguments – and resist the temptation to get dragged into the mud with them.  Command the respect of your readers, and you can make a difference.  This is the age of instant interactive media.  Let’s raise an army of skilled responders to biased science reporters.  They don’t have to get away with it like they did in the newspaper/magazine/radio era.  Play fair, but let them know, it’s a new ball game now.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Philosophy of Science • Media

Cells Manage Stress and Death     12/04/2010    
Dec 04, 2010 — Like soldiers in a foreign land, cells sometimes find themselves in unexpected situations.  Key equipment breaks down, or the environment puts stress on their resources.  Without the ability to adapt, they could perish – and in worst-case scenarios they must, like a squadron under ambush with no way out.  In such cases, like spies carrying cyanide vials, cells commit orderly suicide for the good of the organism.  Two papers in Science describe how cells do it.
    DNA damage is like an emergency in the field.  Fortunately, cells have elaborate procedures for dealing with it, like a flowchart, where remaining resources adapt and fix the damage.  Israeli scientists Friedman and Schuldiner,¹ summarizing a paper in the same issue of Science,² described the “DNA Damage Road Map.”  Bandyopadhyay et al had “discovered widespread changes in genetic interaction among yeast kinases, phosphatases, and transcription factors as the cell responds to DNA damage.”  The technique they used was like turning still pictures into a movie: “Differential interactions uncover many gene functions that go undetected in static conditions.”  Notably, “The data also reveal that protein complexes are generally stable in response to perturbation, but the functional relations between these complexes are substantially reorganized.”
    Friedman and Schuldiner described how the team had put yeast cells under stress by adding methyl methanesulfonate, a DNA-damaging agent, and watched how they behaved differently from those in a stable environment.  The genetic networks reorganized themselves to handle the situation; “A bird’s-eye view of the dE-MAP reveals that protein complexes tended to remain stable across the two conditions,” they said.  “The relationships between these complexes, however, were reprogrammed to assist the cell in dealing with stress.”  For instance, a transcription factor affected “cell cycle checkpoints (which ensure the fidelity of cell division).”  Being able to see networks respond in sequence represents a new frontier in biochemistry, they said.  What’s more, “There are hundreds of such stories in the data.”
    Sometimes, when the stress is too great, death is the only option.  Every day in your body, millions of cells die due to stress, injury, infection, or “the natural cell turnover process that is essential to optimal tissue functioning.  That’s what Seamus J. Martin said in another Perspective piece in Science,³ describing how Ren et al, in the same issue,⁴ helped to resolve how cells execute the orderly process of cell suicide, called apoptosis.  “A cell must commit suicide at the appropriate time, otherwise malfunctioning or damaged cells could accumulate and lead to tumor development and other pathological conditions,” Martin said.  “Thus, sensors are needed to monitor the integrity of cellular functions and relay this information to the cell death machinery.”
    What Ren et al found is a “battery of sensors” that “detect cellular stress or damage through transcriptional or posttranslational mechanisms,” Martin said.  He described what happens when the suicide alarm sounds:

Upon activation, Bh3-only proteins provoke permeabilization of the mitochondrial outer membrane, allowing release of cytochrome c to the cytosol.  This efflux triggers assembly of the apoptosome, a structure that sets in motion a proteolytic cascade that coordinates cell death through destruction of hundreds of proteins (see the figure).  Because of their ability to unlock this cellular poison cabinet, Bh3-only proteins have come under intensive scrutiny.  How do these proteins provoke cytochrome c efflux?
    Bax and Bak, proteins that either reside in or insert into mitochondrial membranes, constitute the pore or channel that permeabilizes mitochondria.  Loss of Bax and Bak renders cells resistant to permeabilization (and subsequent apoptosis) caused by Bh3-only proteins.  Upon activation, Bh3-only proteins promote oligomerization of Bax and Bak within the mitochondrial outer membrane.  Thus, opening of the resultant channel effectively constitutes the decision to commit cellular suicide.

Did you have any idea of the drama occurring inside your body millions of times a day?  Your cells are constantly struggling against real foes: genetic mistakes, toxins, environmental stress, injury, infection, and overcrowding.  Fortunately, there are elaborate policies and procedures, with police and programs, knowing how to handle each situation.  None of these papers said anything about evolution.  No wonder; this all sounds so much like intelligent design, it brings to mind images of cellular governments with documented foreign policy and homeland security systems.  And the first paper was talking about yeast cells!
    How on earth can anyone continue holding on to a doctrine like Darwinism that was concocted by a guru (02/15/2004 commentary) who knew nothing of what was happening in the little globs of protoplasm mischaracterized by the scientists of his day?  Martin talked about information being conveyed by these cellular agents, leading to decisions.  The other papers talked about whole networks of information adapting to change by adjusting their interactions – including assessing the extent of damage, accelerating or repressing gene translation, and striving to maintain stability in response to stress.  Only two things on earth we know of do that kind of thing: human minds, and robotic systems programmed by human minds.  But human minds did not program the cell.  What does that imply?  Think, now, those of you who consider yourselves heirs of the Age of Reason.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

Science Done by Humans Is Mushy     12/03/2010    
Dec 03, 2010 — Discoveries in science must be mediated by flawed agents: human beings.  Though the most hardened scientific realists maintain strong beliefs in external reality, the perceived reality is mediated by senses, then interpreted by minds that are not omniscient.  Those are some of the reasons that science keeps changing, as illustrated by some recent examples:

1. Endangered what?  Scientists can have profound economic impacts on people when they help government agencies decide that certain species are endangered and need protection.  PhysOrg told about species of coral that might be designated for protection.  Then it asked, “But are all the ‘species’ on this list really species?”  It turns out that classifying corals, and deciding which kinds interbreed, is not always so clear.  “Surprisingly, researchers found that colony shape, color, and growth form can vary wildly, and may be misleading as to their species identity.”
2. Nova novelty:  Some novae (exploding stars) can be witnessed by the naked eye.  Astronomers thought they had them pretty well figured out, but now a new instrument on a satellite is revealing flickers, pauses and flares not predicted by theory, reported PhysOrg.  One phenomenon called a pre-maximum halt was confirmed by the new observations.  “The reality of this halt as found in all three of the fast-declining novae observed is a challenge to detailed models of the nova outburst,” an astronomer said.
3. Perfuming the myth:  For over a half century, we’ve been told that, like insects, humans give off faint odors called pheromones that induce responses like sexual attraction.  Problem is, it’s a myth, says Richard Doty (Penn State School of Medicine).  PhysOrg told about his research that culminated in a book, The Great Pheromone Myth.  Mammals don’t have them, he claims – which has “reignited the debate over the science of these supposed smells.”  But that’s not the only problem: “Even the definition of the word is controversial.”
4. Climate science clashes with politics:  Reporters have descended upon Cancun, Mexico, at the intersection of cloudy science and nationalism.  Live Science said that the climate talks hit snags early on.  The tenor of the talks seems far less confident about the science than before the Climategate scandal hit last year.  Nature News agreed that it is a climate of confusion.  This may be one of the best examples in recent times of a clash between scientists and politicians over how much confidence can be put in human-mediated conclusions about external reality, when the economic stakes are potentially crippling either way – whether the scientific consensus is right and nothing is done, or the consensus is wrong and too much is done.  The world awaits the outcome of decisions by fallible people.

Isn’t it pretentious that several of the evolutionists in the responses picked on creation and intelligent design as examples of debunked science?  What they should have done is recognize that their own faith in evolution could be tomorrow’s debris in the dustbin.  Thaler, co-author of leftist utopian Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge, which tries to program human beings according to leftist ideology, is even more pretentious, presuming that he, a mere mortal, has the insight and understanding to look down on members of his own species as sheep that can be manipulated.  There is no more scary prospect to a civilization than an oligarchy of the self-appointed wise.  For the survival of humanity, teach humility to your local scientist!
    See also last month’s related entry on 11/02/2010, “People Doing Science, Sometimes Badly.”
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Stars • Mammals • Politics and Ethics • Philosophy of Science

It didn’t help Astrobiology’s cause to call Wolf-Simon.  Calling Wolf-Simon too often can make the public distrust scientism.  This is not astrobiology; it’s intelligent design.  Artificial selection is intelligent design.  It may be a nefarious kind of I.D. – like giving poison to prisoners and seeing which ones die last.  It doesn’t prove that the survivors will go out and live on the poison in the real world.  While interesting that arsenic got incorporated into the actual biomolecules of the microbes, the authors admitted up front:

Arsenic (As) is a chemical analog of phosphorus (P), which lies directly below P on the periodic table.  Arsenic possesses a similar atomic radius, as well as near identical electronegativity to P.  The most common form of P in biology is phosphate (PO₄ ^3-), which behaves similarly to arsenate (AsO₄^3-) over the range of biologically relevant pH and redox gradients.

This means that arsenic can be a stand-in for phosphorus – almost:

The physico-chemical similarity between AsO₄^3- and PO₄ ^3- contributes to the biological toxicity of AsO₄^3- because metabolic pathways intended for PO₄ ^3- cannot distinguish between the two molecules and arsenate may be incorporated into some early steps in the pathways [(6) and refs therein].  However, it is thought that downstream metabolic processes are generally not compatible with As-incorporating molecules because of differences in the reactivities of P- and As-compounds.  These downstream biochemical pathways may require the more chemically stable P-based metabolites; the lifetimes of more easily hydrolyzed As-bearing analogs are thought to be too short.

In you or me, the consequences would surely be fatal; but in microbes, whose lifetimes are short anyway, it is not all that surprising that some could survive.  So this was a worthwhile and interesting experiment to find that they could, but it really has little to do with astrobiology or evolution.
    If arsenic were such a good substitute, some cells would surely use it.  Since it isn’t, the experiment should have provided a lesson on the narrow tolerances of life, not what the reporters are imagining: that “Deadly arsenic breathes life into organisms” (PhysOrg) or that “Life as we know it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine” as Felisa Wolf-Simon told New Scientist.  Let’s not cry wolf or play Simple Simon with the media, OK?
    Rob Sheldon on Uncommon Descent and Casey Luskin on Evolution News had additional comments on the story, claiming it is really bad news for Darwinists.  Sheldon continued his take on The Procrustean with additional atomic details about the differences between phosphorus and arsenic.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Origin of Life • Darwin and Evolution • Media

See?  Good science can be done without Darwin.  Whether Taylor believes in evolution or not is beside the point; the guy was observing, cataloging, and studying the effects of the above-ground environment on the creatures below ground.  He was adding to our knowledge and understanding.  Evolution had nothing to do with it (see quote, top right of this page).
    Caves are fascinating environments that can provide interesting insight into ecology and natural variation and genetic drift (e.g., loss of vision in cave fish; see 04/09/2010, 01/08/2008), without any requirement to believe cave creatures are evolving upward in complexity.  In fact, there are good reasons to doubt Darwin when studying caves (e.g., 10/18/2004, 02/16/2007).  For a creationist view of cave formation and cave ecology, be sure to get The Cave Book by Dr. Emil Silvestru, a geologist who has spent much of his life studying caves (see Resource of the Week for 03/13/2010).
Next headline on:  Geology • Terrestrial Zoology