Amazing Animals     02/28/2011       Tweet
Feb 28, 2011 — Three recent articles about amazing animals and fossils deserve entries of their own, but due to lack of time, will be corralled here lest, like strays, they wander off.

1. Turtle navigation:  Wired Science has a beautiful photo of a marine turtle in an article about how they achieve a difficult navigational skill: determining longitude from the earth’s magnetic field.  By varying magnetic fields in research ponds with hatchlings, researchers at the University of North Carolina determined that, “Against reasonable expectation, the turtles clearly sensed differences in geomagnetic angle.”  See also New Scientist and Science Daily.
       Human efforts to determine longitude required accurate clocks.  The researchers didn’t explain precisely how the turtles do it, other than to rule out biological clocks.  They were clearly astonished by animal navigation in general: “That turtles and other migratory animals could detect such a small change was considered unrealistic, but experiments on animals released in out-of-the-way locations repeatedly described them finding home with unerring accuracy and efficiency, explicable only as a product of both longitudinal and latitudinal awareness.”
2. Cat bite:  The BBC News reported on new findings about how sabretooth cats like Smilodon were able to close their mouths with those long, dagger-like teeth.  Studies of the bones and neck muscle insertion points by a team at Aalborg University in Denmark “revealed how the cats’ jaw muscles were aligned to pull its jaws closed, very directly and efficiently.”  The article ascribed all this efficiency to evolution.
3. Charismatic behemoth:  A new sauropod species described on Science Daily had legs like bars of iron, by Job.  “Brontomerus mcintoshi, or ‘thunder-thighs’ after its enormously powerful thigh muscles,” found in Utah, may have kicked its attackers to kingdom come.  “‘Brontomerus mcintoshi is a charismatic dinosaur and an exciting discovery for us,’ said first author Mike Taylor, a researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London.”
       Less emphasized in the article was the worry that this discovery undermines previously-held beliefs about sauropods – i.e., that they were disappearing by the Cretaceous.  “It now seems that sauropods may have been every bit as diverse as they were during the Jurassic, but much less abundant and so much less likely to be found.”

Evolution was tacked-on to some of these stories like hot sauce on ice cream.  It had nothing to do with the facts of the story and created a bad aftertaste to otherwise interesting stories about amazing creatures.  Scrape off the hot sauce best you can.  (Don’t stir it.)
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Mammals • Dinosaurs • Fossils • Amazing Facts • Darwin and Evolution

Philosophy Roundup     02/27/2011       Tweet
Feb 27, 2011 — Philosophy of science is a broad discipline incorporating many sub-disciplines such as intellectual history, sociology, ethics, rhetoric, logic, demarcation of science from pseudoscience, classification, discovery, verification, explanation and more.  A dozen recent news stories discussed some of these topics.

1. Medical ethics:  PhysOrg reproduced an AP story about medical research on humans in the US in the 1940s to 1960s.  The details are quite shocking and were “unusually unethical, even at the time.”  They included giving diseases to prisoners and the disabled.  The news media largely ignored these stories, the article said.  This entry touches on the need to set ethical limitations on scientific inquiry.
2. Futurism, ethics, and health:  Should genetic interventions be used to create healthy babies?  This sensitive question, behind which lurks the ghost of positive eugenics, was discussed cheerfully in Science Magazine (25 February 2011: DOI: 10.1126/science.1204088) on the 10th anniversary of the Human Genome Project.
       “Genetics is a way of thinking.  Genomics is a set of tools,” Mary-Claire King wrote, glossing over the potential for abuse of thinking and tools.  “If we think rigorously about genetics and use these tools well,” she said, “the resolution of inherited disorders on behalf of our patients will be bounded only by our imaginations.  One healthy infant at a time is not a bad way to begin.”
       But how will babies born without genetic intervention be treated by society?  King assumed universal agreement on the meaning of well and spoke of rigor, good and bad as if bounded only by human imagination.  A quick look back at the 20th century shows some not-so-cheerful ways our predecessors applied their imaginations using thinking and tools.
3. Philosophy of discovery:  A story on PhysOrg exemplified how, in the philosophy of science, discovery is distinct from explanation.  Some mathematicians at Emory University were on a nature hike when a “Eureka!” moment hit them.  “So what is an ‘aha’ moment?” the article asked.  “The way I see it, it’s not something that happens to you instantly,” said Ken Ono.  “It just happens to be the moment that you realize the fruits of all your hard work.”  Article includes a video clip of Ono telling his story on the trail.
4. Paradigms and models:  Some European philosophers have tried to put Thomas Kuhn on a chip.  In “Emergence and Decline of Scientific Paradigms” described on PhysOrg, they produced a mathematical model showing how scientific paradigms rise and fall.  “Although many factors influence the emergence and decline of such scientific paradigms,” the article said, “a new model has captured how these ideas spread, providing a better understanding of paradigm shifts and the culture of innovation.”
       Like some meta-theory on theories, or observation of observers, their mathematical model had all the coldness of monitoring bacteria in a Petri dish.  Paradigms mentioned included “climate change, nanotechnology and chaos theory”.  Not apparent was how their model intersected any conception of validation, verification, or truth.
5. History of science:  An article at PhysOrg might be enough to make a modern scientist scream.  Dr. Lawrence Principe, historian of science at Johns Hopkins, is defending alchemy as legitimate research for its time.  In “Why many historians no longer see alchemy as an occult practice,” Phillip Schewe wrote that “the scholars who write the history of science and technology no longer lump alchemy in with witchcraft as a pseudo-science.”  Instead they view it as a precursor to chemistry.
       Alchemists, they said, should not be dismissed solely for failing their main mission to turn base metals into gold; “Alchemists ... were active in assaying metals, refining salts, making dyes and pigments, making glass and ceramics, artificial fertilizers, perfumes, and cosmetics” – i.e., skills useful for the emerging science of chemistry.  Famous practitioners of alchemy included Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.
6. Design detection:  “How nature’s patterns form” was the headline of a short article on PhysOrg.  With an image of a Fibonacci spiral pattern leading the story, the article mentioned how many universal patterns, seen in sunflowers, galaxies, animal coloration or sand dunes are the result of “some kind of stress, applied stress.”  Alan Newell at the University of Arizona was telling a meeting of the AAAS that “biological forms are controlled more by the laws of physics than by evolution,” i.e., “the products of physical forces, rather than evolutionary ones.”
       Further, “Patterns arise when the symmetry of a system is broken, Newell said.  The similarity in patterns from system to system occur when the systems have similar symmetry, rather than because the systems are made from the same materials.”  Newell believes patterns are impressed on nature mechanically, but as “a consequence of biochemically and mechanically induced pattern-forming instabilities” that can be described in mathematical models.
       The short article did not address why natural laws and instabilities should be symmetric, or finely tuned to reproduce a Fibonacci series, or why the human mind finds these patterns beautiful.  Newell did end, though, on a poetic note: “Mathematics is like a good poem, which separates the superfluous from the essentials and fuses the essentials into a kernel of truth.”
7. Verification and falsification:  Nature News reported that the Apex Chert in western Australia, thought to be evidence for the oldest life on the planet, may have formed by inorganic processes.  This incident touches on several areas in philosophy of science: verification, interpretation of evidence, ethics, and history of science: “Twenty years ago the palaeontological community gasped as geoscientists revealed evidence for the oldest bacterial fossils on the planet,” the article said.  “Now, a report in Nature Geoscience shows that the filament structures that were so important in the fossil descriptions are not remnants of ancient life, but instead composed of inorganic material.”
       This appears to be a case of scientists who “wanted to find life so badly that they ignored the obvious,” the article said.  Olcutt Marshall opened some philosophical cans of worms with his remark, “There is a willful blindness about these structures that sometimes has more to do with local politics than global truth.”  See also the PhysOrg write-up.
8. Paradigm backlash:  As successful as Newtonian mechanical philosophy was in the 17th and 18th centuries, it produced a backlash, wrote George Rousseau in a book review in Nature (24 Feb 2011, doi:10.1038/470462a).  Commenting on Stephen Gaukroger’s new book The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760, Rousseau noted that while most scientists are aware of Newton’s achievement, “Less familiar is the philosophical phase that followed – sensibility, the view of humans as organic creatures, incapable of reduction to the sum of their mechanical parts, especially in the affective, moral and political realms.”  Accordingly, “Stephen Gaukroger explains how the philosophies of mechanism collapsed over eight decades, to be replaced by a more sensory view of nature.”
       The review warned of simplistic views of mechanical philosophy (sometimes abbreviated mechanism): “Mechanism was never a single set of principles about machine-like systems,” he said.  “It comprised an array of disparate beliefs, experiences and practices that were followed in far-flung places and presided over by its principal architects: René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Newton.”
       Sensibility, likewise, “is a vague term,” he said.  According to Gaukroger, sensibility “allows connections to be made between natural-philosophical and moral, political, and psychological theories in a new way, shaping a new field of the moral sciences.”  While a strict mechanist or 20th-century positivist might take issue with that phrase as an oxymoron, the definition points out the necessity of philosophical judgments on the nature of science.
       The 1760s, the review said, was a watershed decade and the start of the so-called Romantic era with roots in sensibility stretching back a century or more:

   Imaginative literature, later codified as ‘Romantic’, also drove nails into mechanism’s coffin by postulating that matter was more complex than the mechanical natural philosophers thought.  A human is not a mere machine; a fly is much harder to study than a pebble.  By focusing on human nature rather than physical matter, the language of the new literature helped to alter the way scientists conceived their models, and enabled modernity to commence its work.

   It is ironic that the reviewer shares a surname with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), an icon of Romanticism.
9. Search for extra-terrestrial science:  Can scientists justify their work based on what they expect to find, rather than what they have found?  Rowan Hooper on New Scientist recouped the latest scoop on planet counts from the Kepler spacecraft, then launched into some philosophy: “Exoplanet findings spark philosophical debate,” he titled his article, noting that “What were once speculative and philosophical questions are now being tackled with real data, generated by NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope, Kepler.”  The word data is a philosophically-loaded question.  To what extent does data about extrasolar planets apply to the question of extraterrestrial intelligence?
       Hooper heard two speakers at the recent AAAS meeting discuss how Christians and Muslims might respond positively to detection of aliens.  “Both their arguments amounted to the (to my mind) rather dubious claim that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would pose no challenge or crisis to terrestrial religion.”
       Then he heard talks about the possibility of life detection by a pessimist, Howard Smith [Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics] and an optimist, Seth Shostak [SETI Institute].  Worried that it might take 100 generations to get in touch with aliens, Smith coined a new phrase: “the misanthropic principle says that intelligent life is so unlikely to evolve that we might as well accept that we’ll never know if we are unique or not.”  Hooper seemed to prefer Shostak’s enthusiastic prediction of successful detection within 24 years, even though it was couched in a philosophical statement, “Believing there aren’t ETs is believing in miracles.”
10. Demarcation:  According to Research Professional John Beddington, the President’s science advisor, made waves by calling for scientists to be “grossly intolerant” of what he perceives as pseudoscience.  As for what constitutes pseudoscience, Beddington referred to “the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.”  Particularly, he had in mind “politically or morally or religiously motivated nonsense.”
        Beddington apparently does not realize that the demarcation problem and the scientific method are issues that loom large in philosophy of science.  The assumption that science can be reduced to a bias-free method apparently motivated his sermon for scientists to be as grossly intolerant of that sort of thing as they are of racism or “homophobia.”  He views religious or political influence as “pernicious,” but he left begging the question of whether secular consensus science itself is free of such influences.
        Sensing a little unease with his own moral plea, Beddington told his audience, “I’d urge you, and this is a kind of strange message to go out, but go out and be much more intolerant”  That is clearly a moral judgment, not a scientific finding.  Beddington also did not distinguish “morally ... motivated nonsense” from his own moral judgments.  Whether or not one agrees with his opinions, the story illustrates how science is inextricable from moral values.
11. Sociology of OOL:  As a reporter at a recent conference of origin-of-life researchers, Dennis Overbye, writing for the New York Times, seemed amused by the curious sociology of his subjects:

    Two dozen chemists, geologists, biologists, planetary scientists and physicists gathered here recently to ponder where and what Eden might have been.  Over a long weekend they plastered the screen in their conference room with intricate chemical diagrams through which electrons bounced in a series of interactions like marbles rattling up and down and over bridges through one of those child’s toys, transferring energy, taking care of the business of nascent life.  The names of elements and molecules tripped off chemists’ tongues as if they were the eccentric relatives who show up at Thanksgiving every year.

    While not unkind to their ramblings, Overbye found plenty of confusion, disagreement, and ignorance to showcase.  His last quip was about Craig Venter’s intelligent design project to create synthetic life: “And so his genome is now in the process of acquiring its first, non-Darwinian mutation.”
12. Science and Meaning  What does science mean?  In the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson discussed information theory and the history of science under the headline, “How We Know.”  In the body of his book review of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick, Dyson, while trying to clear up some misinformation, exposed some embarrassments in science that call into question not only how we know, but what we know:

    The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths.  In fact, science is not a collection of truths.  It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.  Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries.  Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain.  Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate.  The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all.  The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness.  We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.
        Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries....

    Scientists get a kick out of the endless quest: “The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists,” he said, but not to artists, writers, and ordinary people.  Dyson worried about the flood of information around us being separated from meaning.  “Now we can pass a piece of human DNA through a machine and rapidly read out the genetic information,” Dyson noted, “but we cannot read out the meaning of the information.  We shall not fully understand the information until we understand in detail the processes of embryonic development that the DNA orchestrated to make us what we are.”
        Claude Shannon, who felt “Meaning is irrelevant” to his information theory, started a “flood of information in which we are drowning,” Dyson said.  Is our fate to look out upon, as Jorge Luis Borges portrayed the universe in 1941, a “library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors,” never knowing what it all means?  “It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland,” Dyson concluded.  “As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.”
        While Dyson examined the definition of information in detail in his review, he left dangling an even more important definition: the meaning of meaning.  Is meaning defined by the individual artist, writer, or ordinary person?  Who decides when something is meaningful?  Are islands of meaning grounded on a continent of truth, or are they adrift in an infinite sea of meaningless information?

Science was at one time defined by its method.  Carefully controlled experiments, provisional conclusions, and considered debate once defined the field.  But those days have passed.  Today, science is defined by public policy statements, consensus, and a set of metaphysical assumptions that cannot be directly tested.  Students are told that science is in conflict with “faith” or, worse yet, that faith operates in a different “magisterial” [sic]with no real application to the world we inhabit.

This is all interesting material with too much to comment on in each article.  Readers are encouraged to become knowledgeable about these controversies with the Baloney Detector in good working order and refine their philosophy of science in light of these real-world issues.  Science is what scientists do – unless they can defend aspiring to an unattainable goal.
    One overriding theme in all the above is how science and philosophy are both human enterprises, subject to all the biases, assumptions, limitations, mistakes, and changes of mind connected with any other human activity.  One can hope to approach limitations with more clarity in a systematic way, but they are still limitations.
    One thing we need more than science or philosophy is wisdom.  The writer of Psalm 119 offered a way up: “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.” (verse 99).  Indeed, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10), and of knowledge (Proverbs 1:7).
    Why is the fear of the Lord essential?  Why is it the beginning of wisdom and knowledge?  Because without it, science is impossible.  The Lord is the source of the morality, integrity, and wisdom needed to even hope for a clear scientific understanding about any subject – or a philosophy of anything.
    Atheists may do science, but they cannot justify what they do.  When they assume the world is rational, approachable, and understandable, they plagiarize Judeo-Christian presuppositions about the nature of reality and the moral need to seek the truth.
    As an exercise, try generating a philosophy of science from hydrogen coming out of the big bang.  It cannot be done.  It’s impossible even in principle, because philosophy and science presuppose concepts that are not composed of particles and forces.  They refer to ideas that must be true, universal, necessary and certain.
    It’s time science gets back to the beginning of wisdom.  You can help by rapping a scientist’s knuckles every time he steals from the Christian smorgasbord of presuppositions.  While bandaging his knuckles, encourage him with the upside of a scientific revolution based on the Bible: it makes genuine scientific knowledge, if not exhaustive, at least possible.
Next headline on:  Philosophy of Science • Mind and Brain • SETI • Origin of Life • Politics and Ethics • Media

So far we have narrowed the habitable zone to:

Galactic Habitable Zone, where a star must be located (09/29/2009);

Circumstellar Habitable Zone, the right radius from the star (10/08/2010);

Continuously Habitable Zone, because too much variety can be lethal (07/21/2007);

Temporal Habitable Zone, because habitable zones do not last forever (10/27/2008);

Chemical and Thermodynamic Habitable Zone, where water can be liquid (12/30/2003);

Ultraviolet Habitable Zone, free from deadly radiation (08/15/2006);

Tidal Habitable Zone, which rules out most stars that are small (02/26/2011).
Other constraints are bound to be realized from time to time, emphasizing the rarity of the sweet spot we inhabit.  This would be, of course, predicted from the Architect’s message that he formed the Earth to be inhabited (Isaiah 45:18), but today’s scientists have a bad habit of ruling out Architects from their master plan.  Make a good habit of studying the Architect’s plans whenever starting life construction on our habitable Privileged Planet.
Next headline on:  Stars and Astronomy • Solar System • Origin of Life • Intelligent Design

1. Convergent turnarounds:  A good example of an evolutionary parry can be seen in a post on Science Daily entitled, “Homoplasy: A Good Thread to Pull to Understand the Evolutionary Ball of Yarn.”  Homoplasy is a jargon term for convergent evolution – the idea that unrelated organisms can converge on the same solution to a problem via evolution.  Three evolutionists funded by the National Science Foundation came up with these whoppers:

   The authors provide many fascinating examples of homoplasy, including different species of salamanders that independently, through evolution, increased their body-length by increasing the lengths of individual vertebrae.  By contrast, most species grow longer by adding vertebrae through evolution.
       The authors also explain how petals in flowers have evolved on six separate occasions in different plants.  A particularly striking example of homoplasy cited by the authors is the evolution of eyes, which evolved many times in different groups of organisms—from invertebrates to mammals—all of which share an identical genetic code for their eyes.

   If evolving eyes one time is spectacularly hard for a random process, it would seem that multiple independent cases would falsify evolution big time.  Instead, these authors, with taxpayer funding, decided that the damaging evidence was really a triumph for Darwin: “These kinds of examples of genetic and developmental biology help scientists elucidate relationships between organisms, as well as develop a fuller picture of their evolutionary history.”
   
2. Victory in defeat:  Even when admitting mistakes, evolutionists are never ready to give up on their theory.  An example of unfeigned faith is seen in Live Science, where reporter Natalie Wolchover told how two headline-making fossils touted by their discoverers as human ancestors have turned out to have nothing to do with humans: “they’re probably just non-hominin ape bones.”  Readers might recall how headlines blared in recent years that Orrorin tugenensis,Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Ardipithecus ramidus were shedding light on human evolution (03/05/2004, 10/02/2009, 11/25/2009)  Now that Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison have debunked these claims (02/16/2011), is evolution in trouble?  Not according to them:

   Skepticism regarding these famous primate fossil finds seems to call into question the rigor of the scientific process within the field of paleoanthropology.  Wood’s and Harrison’s paper certainly makes one wonder: Are these isolated incidents of misinterpretation followed by media hype, or does the problem pervade the whole branch of science?  Is the human evolutionary fossil record a crapshoot?
       “No,” said Harrison.  There are reasons why this branch of science may seem messier than most, he said, but all things considered, it is doing extremely well.

   Harrison’s firm response to Wolchover’s worries recalls the cover story of National Geographic in Nov 2004, “Was Darwin Wrong?” with its confident NO inside (see 10/24/2004 and the resulting letters to the editor, 02/15/2005).
3. Polygamy games:  A particularly bizarre twist on evolutionary parrying was reported in PhysOrg about Mormon history: “Polygamy hurt 19th century Mormon wives’ evolutionary fitness.”  After stating that fitness of “sister wives” decreased in polygamous households (measured by number of children produced), the researchers at Indiana University were left with the conundrum of why evolution would produce polygamy in the first place, whether among human beings or bacteria.  Michael Wade was ready with a ring buoy for Darwin:

   So if polygamy (or the female equivalent, polyandry) is disadvantageous to most of the sequestered sex and most of the mate-sequestering sex, why should such systems survive?
       “The complete answer is still forthcoming,” Wade said.  “One thing we know now, based on rigorous studies in many species, particularly the fruit fly, is that selection can be so strong on males that it can drag the entire species off of a naturally selected viability optimum.”

   Aside from equating Mormons to fruit flies, Wade seems to have just said that natural selection can drag a species away from increased fitness.  WWDD?  What would Darwin do about that idea?

It’s sophistry.  See?  Our commentaries are not always verbose.
Aside:  Apparently the irony of #1’s headline was lost on the reporters: “...the Evolutionary Ball of Yarn.”  Apt description.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolution • Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Racial Evolution Education Proposed     02/24/2011       Tweet
Feb 24, 2011 — Skin color provides a “handy tool for teaching evolution,” says a anthropologist at Penn State.  PhysOrg reported that professor Nina Jablonski believes “The mechanism of evolution can be completely understood from skin color.”  She proposes using the easily-observed trait in humans to teach evolution to students.  “People are really socially aware of skin color, intensely self-conscious about it,” she told the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  “The nice thing about skin color is that we can teach the principles of evolution using an example on our own bodies and relieve a lot of social stress about personal skin color at the same time.”  PhysOrg did not elaborate on how evolutionary theory would relieve stress about skin color.

It is typical of Darwinists to try to prove their theory with simple examples of horizontal variation that are not controversial, then extrapolate the examples to say brains evolved from a primordial soup.  Perhaps professor Jablonski should take note of the fact that young-earth creationist Ken Ham uses Scripture and science to explain the human races (actually, just variations on the single human race) from a Biblical viewpoint (see AiG), and also shows the disastrous history of racial politics in of Darwinian thought (AiG).
Next headline on:  Human Body • Genetics • Darwin and Evolution • Education • Politics and Ethics

Maier’s Law says, “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.” (see corollaries, right sidebar).  A science that cannot fit observations to theory does not win the honor of being called a science.  It may be a job, a profession, an avocation, a hobby; but to be a science, there should be some concordance between theory and observations.  Has planetary cosmogony done any better than alchemy yet?  Let them play but come back later when they have something.  One theory they never consider is the top-down theory; that planets were created with stars, but have been fragmenting and interacting since then.  This theory has the advantage of fitting the observations of providential fine-tuning for our own Privileged Planet.
Next headline on:  Stars • Solar System • Physics

It was a highly unusual creature among many highly unusual creatures, to the extent that the unusual was usual.  Simultaneous diversity and morphological disparity is not evolution.  Diania is no more advanced or primitive than any of the many other animal body plans from the Cambrian explosion, so this fossil is not going to help solve the evolutionists’ magic act (see 01/07/2011), especially with vertebrates already present in the early Cambrian (01/30/2003).  Remember, it’s what’s inside that counts.  This creature may have look primitive through Darwinian eyes, but it had the ability to move its limbs, detect food, eat, digest, and reproduce its body.  Such things do not happen without a body plan.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution

Is Star Formation Understood?     02/22/2011       Tweet
Feb 22, 2011 — Astronomers often speak with apparent confidence about regions of active star formation in nebulae or galaxies.  A look at the fine print, however, shows plenty of wiggle room when observations don’t quite match theory.

1. Flocculent anomalies:  Astronomers expected more star forming regions in one of the “flocculent” spiral galaxies (spirals without large arms), NGC 2841.  But when the Hubble Space Telescope took its picture, Science Daily said it “currently has a relatively low star formation rate compared to other spirals.”  Several revelations in the next paragraphs indicated astronomers are not so confident about star formation:

   Star formation is one of the most important processes in shaping the Universe; it plays a pivotal role in the evolution of galaxies and it is also in the earliest stages of star formation that planetary systems first appear.
       Yet there is still much that astronomers don’t understand, such as how do the properties of stellar nurseries vary according to the composition and density of the gas present, and what triggers star formation in the first place?  The driving force behind star formation is particularly unclear for a type of galaxy called a flocculent spiral, such as NGC 2841 shown here, which features short spiral arms rather than prominent and well-defined galactic limbs.

   It would seem that if astronomers don’t understand what triggers star formation, or how it varies from place to place, they don’t understand it very much at all.
2. Dark matter anomalies:  Dark matter sometimes appears like a kind of cosmic flubber – an unknown quantity that is useful in various amounts (sometimes none at all) when theories need fixing.  Take this article from Science Daily about recent results from the Herschel Space Telescope as an example:

   Most of the mass of any galaxy is expected to be dark matter, a hypothetical substance that has yet to be detected but which astronomers believe must exist to provide sufficient gravity to prevent galaxies ripping themselves apart as they rotate....
       Herschel is showing us that we don't need quite so much dark matter as we thought to trigger a starburst," says Asantha Cooray, University of California, Irvine....
       Analysis of the brightness of the patches in the ... images has shown that the star-formation rate in the distant infrared galaxies is 3-5 times higher than previously inferred from visible-wavelength observations of similar, very young galaxies by the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes.

   And yet with these uncertainties, the article was confident that the star formation rate in this “starburst galaxy” had hit a “sweet spot” for star formation, even though the opening paragraph was puzzled that the region observed appeared too small for such luck: “The size challenges current theory that predicts a galaxy has to be more than ten times larger, 5000 billion solar masses, to be able form [sic] large numbers of stars.” 
3. Computers as alternate reality:  Meanwhile, in the computer center at Heidelberg University, astronomers concluded that “The first stars in the universe were not as solitary as previously thought.”  According to PhysOrg, whatever they programmed into their computer models was a blockbuster: it “cast an entirely new light on the formation of the first stars after the Big Bang.”  The next sentences described in graphic detail how a star is born.  Given the uncertainties in the first two entries, however, it appears their computer universe was a figment of the programmer’s imagination rather than a finding about nature.  The article contained at least six instances of may have, could have and other speculations: e.g., “It is also conceivable that some of the first stars may have been catapulted out of their birth group through collisions with their neighbours before they were able to accumulate a great deal of mass.”

OK, let’s take stock.  We’ve got star formation, about which we don’t understand how it gets triggered or why it varies from place to place, but somehow dark matter flubber has something to do with it – an ingredient that uses Skinner’s Constant.*  However it works, star formation, which no one has watched, bursts forth in galaxies 1/10 the size they should be for it to burst in, producing sociable stars after the Big Bang, in computers at least, contrary to expectations.  Are we still in the science lab? (cf. 04/13/2007).
    Astronomers are very smart people in terms of their ability to speak jargon and manipulate equations.  Whether they have a grasp on reality is a very different matter (01/15/2008) – a dark matter of a different sort.  It’s worth rereading Prophet Berman’s sermons every once in awhile (10/06/2004, 09/29/2007) to avoid being swept up into the cosmic euphoria that ensnared poor Amanda Gefter in Brian Greene’s fantasy bladderwort (02/17/2011).
Next headline on:  Stars and Astronomy • Cosmology • Physics • Philosophy of Science • Dumb Ideas
*Skinner’s Constant: That quantity which, when added to, subtracted from, multiplied by or divided by the answer you got, gives you the answer you should have gotten.

Human Genome Project Supports Adam, Not Darwin     02/21/2011       Tweet
Feb 21, 2011 — Science magazine last week had a special series of articles on the 10-year anniversary of the Human Genome project.  Most of the articles expanded on how different the findings were from predictions.  The publication of the genome did not identify our evolution; it did not lead to miracle cures.  What it did most of all was upset apple carts, and show just how complex the library of information behind our smiling faces really is..  A couple of excerpts are characteristic.
    John Mattick of the University of Queensland commented about how “The Genomic Foundation is Shifting” in his brief essay for Science.¹  “For me,” he began, “the most important outcome of the human genome project has been to expose the fallacy that most genetic information is expressed as proteins.”  He spoke of the Central Dogma of genetics – the principle that DNA is the master controller of heredity, translating its information into proteins that create our bodies and brains.  For one thing, the number of genes is far smaller than expected (only 1.5% of human DNA contains genes), and is overwhelmed by non-coding DNA (earlier assumed to be genetic junk) that generates RNA, that regulates the expression of genes, especially during development.  The histone code and other revelations have generated “aftershocks” to the initial tremor that undermined the Central Dogma.  He concluded,

These observations suggest that we need to reassess the underlying genetic orthodoxy, which is deeply ingrained and has been given superficial reprieve by uncritically accepted assumptions about the nature and power of combinatorial control.  As Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock wrote in 1950: “Are we letting a philosophy of the [protein-coding] gene control [our] reasoning?  What, then, is the philosophy of the gene?  Is it a valid philosophy?” … There is an alternative: Human complexity has been built on a massive expansion of genomic regulatory sequences, most of which are transacted by RNAs that use generic protein infrastructure and control the epigenetic mechanisms underpinning embryogenesis and brain function.  I see the human genome not simply as providing detail, but more importantly, as the beginning of a conceptual enlightenment in biology.

What is on the top tier?  Increasingly, the answer appears to be mutations that are ‘deleterious’ by biochemical or standard evolutionary criteria.  These mutations, as has long been appreciated, overwhelmingly make up the most abundant form of nonneutral variation in all genomes.  A model for human genetic individuality is emerging in which there actually is a ‘wild-type’ human genome—one in which most genes exist in an evolutionarily optimized form.  There just are no ‘wild-type’ humans: We each fall short of this Platonic ideal in our own distinctive ways.

Did you catch that?  These are phenomenal admissions in a secular science journal.  Mattick showed how many ways the evolutionary geneticists were wrong.  They expected to find the secret of our humanness in DNA – the master controller, honed by evolution, that made us what we are.  Instead, they were astonished to find complexity in a vast array of regulatory sequences beyond the genes (epigenetic, above the gene), including codes upon codes.  They appear to make DNA just a side show in a much more complex story that will require a “conceptual enlightenment in biology.”  This implies that pre-Human Genome biology was unenlightened.  By quoting McClintock’s prescient questions, he declared that the philosophy of biology that has ruled the 19th and 20th centuries is invalid.
    Olson’s revelations are even more shocking, and, in a way, delightful – for those who believe that the Bible, not Darwin, tells where man came from.  Olson essentially said that Darwinists should pack up and go home, because the factors that they have counted on to explain human complexity are minor players.  Then he said that most mutations are harmful, bad, deleterious, regressive, plaguing each individual person.  For the coup-de-grace, he said that there seems to be a “Platonic ideal” of the human makeup (wild-type referring to natural) from which we all “fall short.”  This is the opposite of Darwinian evolutionary ascent from slime; it is descent with modification downward from an initial ideal state.  Biblical creationists will shout Amen: we have all fallen from Adam!
    Paul the Apostle explained in the classic statement about Adam that the first man was the “wild type” after which things went terribly wrong when he sinned: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.  Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type [i.e., wild type, Platonic ideal in real human flesh] of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:12-14).  Isn’t that exactly what we see around us?
    Not to leave us in despair, Paul continued with the joyful good news about the second Adam, Jesus Christ – who by solving the sin problem through his death and resurrection, became the progenitor of all who could become righteous and inherit eternal life:

But the free gift is not like the trespass.  For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.  And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin.  For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.  For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
    Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.  For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.  Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.  (Romans 5:15-20).

To be sure, Mattick and Olson were probably not intending to agree with the Bible in their revelations about the Human Genome, but everything they said is consistent with Scriptural teaching, but is not consistent with what the Darwinists teach.  Their expectations have been falsified; their philosophy has been found wanting.  The Bible had it right all along!  If you are fallen from the ideal of Adam, Jesus Christ (not Darwin, not Plato) provides the pathway to a return to the Maker’s ideal.  It is a gift, through faith, thanks to the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  Paul, an early persecutor of Christians, who was transformed by seeing the risen Christ on the Damascus road, speaks to us all today: “We urge you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (II Corinthians 5:14-21).
Next headline on:  Human Body • Cell Biology • Genetics • Philosophy of Science • Intelligent Design • Bible and Theology

1. It’s a bird; it’s a plan:  Watch the video clip of Matt Keennon’s ornithopter at PhysOrg.  It’s a robotic mimic of a real hummingbird – size, shape, wings and all.  Like the real thing, it can hover and move in all directions.  The military wants to use such devices as “spybots” to enter buildings with tiny cameras.
       The hummingbird makes it look easy: “Manager of the project, Matt Keennon, said it had been a challenge to design and build the spybot because it ‘pushes the limitations of aerodynamics.’”
2. Moving plants:  Schoolkids are often delighted with touching the leaves of the sensitive plant, Mimosa, and watching how they instantly fold up.  PhysOrg reported that University of Michigan researchers are sensitive, too: they are leading studies of moving plants that are “inspiring a new class of adaptive structures designed to twist, bend, stiffen and even heal themselves.”
       Where could these efforts lead?  “When this technology matures, [Kon-Well] Wang said it could enable robots that change shape like elephant trunks or snakes to maneuver under a bridge or through a tunnel, but then turn rigid to grab a hold of something,” the article ended.  “It also could lead to morphing wings that would allow airplanes to behave more like birds, changing their wing shape and stiffness in response to their environment or the task at hand.”
3. Solar plants:  What uses sunlight better than a leaf?  Penn State researchers are trying to copy photosynthesis, reported PhysOrg, in order to make efficient fuels.  “Inexpensive hydrogen for automotive or jet fuel may be possible by mimicking photosynthesis,” the article said, “...but a number of problems need to be solved first.”  Thomas Mallouk at the university has only achieved 2-3% hydrogen so far.  He needs to aim for 100%.  His team is trying to figure out how to handle the “wrecking ball” of oxygen produced by his experimental solar cells, and how to channel electrons so they stop recombining.  Plants make it look so easy.
4. Hear thee:  Chang Liu at Northwestern is fascinated by the hair cells of the inner ear.  Like many researchers with the biomimetics bug, he “is using insights from nature as inspiration for both touch and flow sensors – areas that currently lack good sensors for recording and communicating the senses.”  He’s not all ears; “Hair cells provide a variety of sensing abilities for different animals: they help humans hear, they help insects detect vibration, and they form the lateral line system that allows fish to sense the flow of water around them.”
       This multi-application potential of nature’s design particularly impressed him: “The hair cell is interesting because biology uses this same fundamental structure to serve a variety of purposes,” Liu said.  “This differs from how engineers typically design sensors, which are often used for a specific task.”  Synthetic hair cells might be useful for anything from robots to heart catheters. 
5. Fly me a computer:  Last week’s Science (Feb 11) had an article by Jeffrey Kephart about “Learning from Nature” to build better computer networks.¹  What, in nature, did he have in mind?  Fruit flies.  “Studying the development of a fruit fly’s sensory bristles provided insight into developing a more practical algorithm for organizing networked computers,” the caption said on a photo of the little bug’s bristly head.
       Kephart explained that biomimetics has a long history.  “The tradition of biologically inspired computing extends back more than half a century to the original musings of Alan Turing about artificial intelligence and John von Neumann's early work on self-replicating cellular automata in the 1940s,” he noted.  “Since then, computer scientists have frequently turned to biological processes for inspiration.  Indeed, the names of major subfields of computer science—such as artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary computation—attest to the influence of biological analogies.” (Note: evolutionary computation is a form of intelligent design, in which a scientist or computer selects outcomes from randomly varying inputs according to purpose-driven goals.)
6. Crawl me a network:  Speaking of IT, ants are inspiring new ideas for computer networks.  According to PhysOrg, “Ants are able to connect multiple sites in the shortest possible way, and in doing so, create efficient transport networks,” scientists at the University of Sydney are finding.  Even without leaders, they solve this complex problem by making many trails and pruning them back to the best ones.
       Ants are not the only inspiration for the next generation of networks: “The findings sheds light on how other ‘simple’ natural systems without leaders or even brains – such as fungi, slime molds and mammalian vascular systems – are able to form efficient networks, and can help humans design artificial networks in situations lacking central control,” Dr. Tanya Latty said.
7. Firefly probe:  Science Daily told how scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs have made a probe of hydrogen peroxide levels in mice based on the chemical that makes fireflies glow: luciferin.  Their device seems reminiscent of Doc Bone’s hovering probe that could detect problems non-invasively: the new probe “enables researchers to monitor hydrogen peroxide levels in mice and thereby track the progression of infectious diseases or cancerous tumors without harming the animals or even having to shave their fur.”
       How did Christopher Chang come up with this neat idea?  “The fact that in nature fireflies use the luciferin enzyme to communicate by light inspired us to adapt this same strategy for pre-clinical diagnostics,” he said.  Their PCL-1 probe has already passed a milestone and has found that hydrogen peroxide, “nature’s disinfectant,” is continuously made even in a healthy body.  Now they are working to improve the sensitivity of the probe.
8. Roach model:  Hopefully your garden experience was not interrupted by seeing a cockroach in the kitchen when getting your tea out of the refrigerator.  Even so, Israeli scientists at Tel Aviv University are finding things to admire in the beasts: PhysOrg said, “Ask anyone who has ever tried to squash a skittering cockroach – they’re masters of quick and precise movement.”  That’s why “Tel Aviv University is using their maddening locomotive skills to improve robotic technology too.”  While we’s getting grossed out with bugs, the article added, “Cockroaches are not the only insects that have captured the scientific imagination.  Projects that highlight both the flight of the locust and the crawling of the soft-bodied caterpillar are also underway.”  Good.  Get them out of the house and yard and give them to the scientists.

As stated before, biomimetics provides a breakthrough that can bring scientists together.  Evolutionists do not have to worry about how these things evolved, nor waste time and energy making up stories or building their shrines to the Bearded Buddha.  Creationists do not have to mention God and risk alienating their colleagues who don’t want to hear the design argument for God’s existence.  Everyone can agree that the designs in nature, however they arose, are fascinating, important, and worth imitating.  The public will benefit from the inventions that result.
    Follow the biomimetic research lead, and pretty soon Eugenie Scott will be out of a job, because all scientists will be marching together away from Darwinland and into the promised land of nature-inspired technology, talking design without any need for help from those who already knew intelligent design is the inference to the best explanation.  The ranks of the Darwinists will shrink by attrition.  Why?  Nobody will be looking to them for answers (re: stories), when practical science based on design is winning the hearts and minds of everyone.  Books and lectures on garden-variety intelligent design will, by then, seem perfectly natural.
Next headline on:  Birds • Plants • Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design

Titan’s Methane Lakes Shallow, Dynamic     02/19/2011       Tweet
Feb 19, 2011 — Strange things are happening on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon: lakes are appearing and disappearing.  This can only mean that the lakes are shallow and the liquid hydrocarbons in them are moving around.
    Lakes were discovered a few years ago in the northern regions of the Mercury-size moon.  They consist predominantly of methane (CH₄) and ethane (C₂H₆).  Another large lake called Ontario Lacus (Lake Ontario, because of its similarity to Earth’s counterpart) was discovered near the south pole.  Then, in Oct 2004, new dark areas appeared in Arrakis Planitia near the south after a presumed cloudburst of liquid methane (picture); the lakes in this area have also shrunk considerably in 44 months between observations.
    A new paper in Icarus¹ presented observations in visible light, infrared and radar covering the period 2004-2009.  They indicate that Ontario has been shrinking rapidly between 2005 and 2009 (picture).  The southwest shoreline has retreated by 9-11 kilometers (5.5 to 7 miles).²  Though estimates are difficult due to the distance and resolution of some measurements, the authors’ best guess is that “The observed retreat represents a decrease in area of ~500 km² over almost 4 years.”
    Estimating volume loss is more difficult.  While impossible to calculate Ontario’s volume loss directly, they estimated how much Arrakis gained and lost as a proxy.  Based on estimates of methane-carrying capacity of the 2004 cloud system (about a million square kilometers), the cloudburst must have dropped 2.4 to 14 cm of methane rain into the Arrakis basin (upper limit 4.2 m).  This yields estimates that between 24 to 140 km³ of liquid was lost at Arrakis in 4 years from a combination of evaporation and infiltration; probably similar amounts at Ontario.
    There are clues that the lake bottoms might be impermeable.  The northern lakes are in Titan spring and have not shrunk between observations.  Earlier estimates expected one meter of seepage into the interior per year.  The rapid shrinkage at Arrakis and Ontario over a timescale of several months “strongly suggests either a shallow impermeable layer or that the local methane table lies close to the surface.”  It will be interesting to watch what the “methane cycle” does to the southern and northern lakes as the seasons change and more sunlight hits the north.
    One other interesting observation was that the exposed lake bottom is not dark, as might be expected from sedimentation of hydrocarbons.  Either wave action cleansed the bottom as the shoreline retreated, or any sediments are light colored.  The authors favor the latter, saying that “bright organic condensates may be deposited within the lakes and exposed as the liquid level drops (Barnes et al., 2009).”  This view is strengthened by the fact that the Cassini orbiter’s cameras saw numerous dark features in the south in 2004-2005, but light material as Ontario retreated.  It is not possible to know from albedo (reflected brightness) alone the composition of the bright sediments.

The study of Titan is a work in progress, so any conclusions drawn at this time are subject to revision as more data come in.  We can, however, step back and consider what planetary scientists expected to find and what they have found so far.  In the decades after the Voyager visits (1981), when scientists realized an irreversible erosion of atmospheric methane was precipitating hydrocarbons onto the surface (especially ethane, which has no way to get back into the atmosphere), scientists expected to find, over the course of 4.5 billion years, an accumulation of half a kilometer or more of liquid ethane in a global ocean.  That was a clear prediction that has been spectacularly falsified by Cassini observations (see list of previous articles).  In fact, the Huygens probe was designed to float on that ocean that failed to materialize.
    Instead, we found Titan to have paltry accumulations of liquid in scattered lakes near the poles, while the equatorial regions are largely covered in icy sand dunes.  Now we are learning that the polar lakes are probably shallow, could have impermeable bottoms, and move around so rapidly that they don’t deposit sediment on the lake floors (or else they deposit bright sediments).  But if the sediments are bright, which would be surprising in itself, is there enough sediment to account for 4.5 billion years of deposition?  In addition, Titan, the largest moon with the greatest gravitational attraction, has few craters (three to five) after all that time.
    You have to ask yourself whether it is credible these processes have been going on for billions of years.  Did 4.5 billion years ever exist?  Is it a fiction?  In order to save the blessed timescale so precious to planetary scientists (because Darwin depends on it), all kinds of evidence-free theory-rescue devices are being rigged: maybe the ethane seeped into the interior where no one can find it; maybe the interior has a methane reservoir that erupts through cryovolcanoes, replenishing the atmosphere; maybe this, maybe that.  If scientists stuck to the observations and drew reasonable conclusions from data alone, they would have to conclude that there are severe upper limits on how long Titan has been acting this way.  Let facts be submitted to a candid world.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods • Geology

1. Not till us:  The chambered nautilus is a “living fossil,” that uses “jet propulsion,” New Scientist said, with origins way back in the Cambrian.  Has its fitness improved over all that time?  “Its movement is ungainly and slow, but it has survived virtually unchanged for at least 450 million years, so it must be doing something right,” reporter Michael Marshall remarked.  “Its relatives the ammonoids dominated the oceans for millions of years before going extinct along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago – but the nautilus came through that disaster and is still with us today,” despite having “much simpler brains than other cephalopods.”  They also have weaker eyes and take longer to mature, and are currently endangered by overfishing.  Wouldn’t evolution get rid of adaptations that are inferior?  “Such jet power is a cumbersome way of getting around the seas, and most modern cephalopods have largely abandoned it,” Marshall explained in a personification of negative selection.  “Despite its primitive way of getting around, however, the nautilus is no mental slouch.”
2. Debunking neo-Darwinist genetics:  According to neo-Darwinism, beneficial genetic mutations become established by “selective sweeps” in a population.  “The selective sweep model was introduced in 1974 and has pretty much been the central model ever since,” Molly Przeworski [U of Chicago] said.  In an article posted by PhysOrg.  “It is fair to say that it is the model behind almost every scan for selection done to date, in humans or in other organisms.”
       Unfortunately, the model doesn’t fit the DNA.  Looking at the human genome in more detail, the article concluded, “The result suggests that classic selective sweeps could not have been the most common cause of these low diversity troughs, leaving the door open for other modes of evolution.”  Unfortunately again, no other mode was provided:

   “Phenotypic variation in humans isn’t as simple as we thought it would be,” [Ryan] Hernandez [UC San Francisco] said.  “The idea that human adaptation might proceed by single changes at the amino acid level is quite a nice idea, and it’s great that we have a few concrete examples of where that occurred, but it’s too simplistic a view”....
   Przeworski said... “These findings call into question how much more there is to find using the selective sweep approach, and should also make us skeptical of how many of the findings to date will turn out to be validated.”

3. Mystery of Mysteries:  What was Darwin’s “mystery of mysteries?”  Believe it or not, it was the thing his famous book set out to explain.  “Although Charles Darwin titled his book On the Origin of Species, speciation was one thing he could not explain,” wrote Bob Holmes in New Scientist.  “He called it the ‘mystery of mysteries’, and even a century-and-a-half later the mechanism by which two groups of animals become genetically incompatible remains one of the greatest puzzles in biology.”  That is a surprising statement, because in popular understanding, it was Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection that promoted evolution into a scientific theory over earlier speculations about common ancestry.
       Holmes went on to describe suggestions that a “speciation gene” named Prdm9 might be “evolution’s missing X factor” to solve the mystery.  It’s a rapidly evolving gene, he claimed – a virtual “evolutionary sprinter” on the basis of sequence dissimilarities between humans and chimpanzees.  After a convoluted tale about how this gene blinks on and off, and incompatible mutants make mice sterile, he proposed an “intriguing idea” that “Variation in this gene could be driving a wedge between different parts of our human population.”  But alas, “the evidence to date seems not to corroborate it.”  Evidence, however, should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story.  One expert he quoted said, “We can speculate that this could be some sort of universal reproductive-isolation gene in animals, which would be beautiful,” but, alas again, we shall have to wait, after waiting 150 years already since Darwin, to find out “If that turns out to be the case”.
4. Feathery evolution:  Ken Dial, the Montana man who watches the partridge family run up ramps (12/22/2003), got notoriety again in National Geographic’s story on the evolution of feathers.  Writer Carl Zimmer could never quite figure out if feathers arose for sexual display, or for insulation, or for flight, but they evolved somehow, he is sure.  Dinosaurs with imaginary feathers also made the final cut of the Darwinian script.  “The origin of this wonderful mechanism is one of evolution’s most durable mysteries,” Zimmer said.  Whatever happened, or why, “there is one natural wonder that just about all of us can see, simply by stepping outside,” he teased: “dinosaurs using their feathers to fly.”  From there he went on to describe the marvelous design of feathers:

   Airplane wings exploit some of the same aerodynamic tricks.  But a bird wing is vastly more sophisticated than anything composed of sheet metal and rivets.  From a central feather shaft extends a series of slender barbs, each sprouting smaller barbules, like branches from a bough, lined with tiny hooks.  When these grasp on to the hooklets of neighboring barbules, they create a structural network that’s featherlight but remarkably strong.  When a bird preens its feathers to clean them, the barbs effortlessly separate, then slip back into place.

   Most people believe airplane wings came from intelligent design, but all Zimmer could propose for the origin of those “vastly more sophisticated” feathers from simple scales were suggestive analogies.  “The long, hollow filaments on theropods posed a puzzle,” he said of the barbs on some dinosaur skins that lack the complex interlocking structures of flight feathers.  “If they were early feathers, how had they evolved from flat scales?  Fortunately, there are theropods with threadlike feathers alive today: baby birds.”  He then said that reptiles and birds both have tiny patches in their skins called placodes that produce bristles.  Did reptile placodes evolve into feathers via a “simple switch in the wiring of the genetic commands inside placodes”?  If so, “Once the first filaments had evolved, only minor modifications would have been required to produce increasingly elaborate feathers.”
       Obviously.  Stuff happens all the time in evolution.  Voila, said the viola: “In other words, feathers were not merely a variation on a theme: They were using the same genetic instruments to play a whole new kind of music.”  Unmixing of metaphors is left as an exercise.  Complete that exercise before tackling the more difficult assignment: understanding the evolutionary significance of another of Zimmer’s evidence-challenged plot lines: “So perhaps the question to ask, say some scientists, is not how birds got their feathers, but how alligators lost theirs.”  (Caution: do NOT visualize a magic dragon.)  It would seem that if the ancestor of all these animals already had feathers, the origin of feathers has just been pushed back into the unknown.  Ken Dial’s partridge family (05/01/2006, 01/25/2008) got the final exit pun, complete with an apparition of Haeckel’s friendly ghost: “Perhaps, says Dial, the path the chick takes in development retraces the one its lineage followed in evolution—winging it, so to speak, until it finally took wing.”  So to speak.

We could go on and on.  This borders on the criminal.  Taking data that falsifies evolution and using it to praise Charlie is like election fraud.  Unlike Dawkins, though, we will not stoop to calling our opponents ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked – just deceived.  So deceived, in fact, that they cannot even receive the sight to conceive their own deception.  The only remedy for the self-deceived is truth given with tough love.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Birds • Genetics • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Plant Accelerates 600 G's     02/17/2011       Tweet
Feb 17, 2011 — Among the fastest organisms in the world is – a plant.  The bladderwort Utricularia, a carnivorous plant that lives in the water, sucks in its prey in a thousandth of a second with an acceleration 600 times the force of gravity.
    New Scientist and Science Daily reported on work by the University of Freiberg, where scientists filmed the action with a high-speed camera because “the motion is too fast to observe” with the naked eye.  BBC News included a video clip showing the action in slow motion.  The “remarkable door” that acts like a “flexible valve” operates by “glands in the plant that continually pump out water, creating a depression inside the tiny bladder,” the BBC News explained.  “When a passing creature stimulates microscopic, super-sensitive hairs, this trapdoor buckles inward and opens, allowing the bladderwort to suck in water and any unsuspecting creature it contains.”  Science Daily said there are four trigger hairs.  The resulting response “ranks among the fastest plant movements known so far.”
    The BBC explained the scientists’ reaction to this phenomenon: “The plant’s tiny suction trap was much faster and more efficient than the scientists had predicted.”  Dr. Philippe Marmottant exclaimed, “The same trap can fire hundreds of times.  It is an amazing piece of mechanics.”  Science Daily explained, “Prey animals are sucked in with an acceleration of up to 600 times that of gravity, leaving them no chance to escape.  The door deformation involves a complete inversion of curvature which runs in several distinguishable intermediate steps.” 
    Marmottant and the other researchers would like to reverse-engineer this marvel: “the plant could provide a template to design miniature medical devices, such as a ‘lab-on-a-chip’, which samples tiny amounts of blood that could be used in diagnostic tests.”  None of the articles speculated on how this high-speed trap mechanism might have evolved, but Science Daily mentioned, “These so-called bladders have fascinated scientists since Darwin’s early works on carnivorous plants.”  It also shielded the question of origin of the bladderwort’s amazing design with the indirect, passive-voice statement, “This ultra-fast, complex and at the same time precise and highly repetitive movement is enabled by certain functional-morphological adaptations.”

The wonders of nature should inspire design and lead to appreciation of design – not to storytelling about how stuff happens by mistake (01/26/2011).  Logic quiz: what do you get when you add mistakes to mistakes, or multiply mistakes by mistakes?  Mistakes.  What do you get when you add or multiply mistakes to design?  Broken designs.  Where, then, do good designs come from?  Design that minimizes mistakes – i.e., intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Plants • Physics • Biomimetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Facts

New Ediacaran Fossils: Do They Ignite the Cambrian Explosion?     02/17/2011       Tweet
Feb 17, 2011 — Well-preserved fossils of seaweed-like colonies have been reported from China.  They are dated by the scientists at 600 million years old, from the Ediacaran period.  Can these be missing links, lighting the fuse of biodiversity that culminated in the Cambrian explosion?
    PhysOrg summarized the findings published in Nature.¹  “In addition to perhaps ancient versions of algae and worms, the Lantian biota – named for its location – included macrofossils with complex and puzzling structures,” the article said.  “In all, scientists identified about 15 different species at the site.”  Pictures of the seaweed-like fossils show fronds with a distinctive holdfast, like modern seaweed use to cling to the seafloor.
    The paper in Nature shows pictures of frond-like and tube-like organisms “with uncertain phylogenetic affinities,” but no clear Cambrian-like body plans.  A couple of them, Guy Narbonne speculated in the same issue of Nature,² are “probable ancestors of radial and bilaterian animals.”  The discoverers mentioned a hopeful case: “The axial structure in Types D and E is puzzling and it could represent the digestive structure of worm-like animals,” they hinted; “In an animal model, the holdfast and stalk of Type D would be alternatively interpreted as the proboscis of an early worm-like organism.”  The photos are not compelling.
    Both papers spent much of their space discussing what effects varying levels of oxygen in the oceans might have had on the evolution of life.  For instance, “To reconcile the conflicting geochemical and palaeontological indicators of palaeoredox conditions, we propose that the Lantian basin was largely anoxic but punctuated by brief oxic episodes,” the original paper said, harking back to the jargon of punctuated equilibrium, if that somehow helps evolution.  “These oxic episodes were opportunistically capitalized on by benthic macroeukaryotes that were subsequently killed and preserved by frequent switch-backs to anoxic conditions.”  Evolution did not seem to be going in any particular direction toward complex animal life.
    The paper claims the Lantian biota is “probably older than and taxonomically distinct from the Avalon biota,” the previous record setter for “earliest-known fossil assemblage with macroscopic and morphologically complex life forms” at 579-560 million years old.  That suggestion, however, does not create any evolutionary linkage between the two independent groups.  Even so, neither fossil beds show any of the complex organs seen in Cambrian phyla.  The paper calls them multicellular eukaryotes.  The focus of the research was not so much on evolution upward and onward from these seaweed-like impressions, but “suggests that morphological diversification of macroscopic eukaryotes may have occurred in the early Ediacaran Period, perhaps shortly after the Marinoan glaciation, and that the redox history of Ediacaran oceans was more complex than previously thought.”

Even with the most generous concessions to Mr. Darwin, these fossils do not help explain the Cambrian Explosion.  They are simple frond-like colonies of eukaryotic algae, with no clear differentiation or body plans typical of Cambrian animals.  No amount of acquiescence to the evolution-incestuous dating methods can link these imprints with trilobites and vertebrates by an evolutionary sequence.
    That’s why they changed the subject to talking about rising and falling oxygen levels in the oceans.  It’s a distraction and a red herring, intended to give a false impression that they are making some kind of progress solving this super-falsification of evolutionary predictions (01/07/2011). 
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution

1. Inside out:  “Too simple” and “not so fast” were complaints made about alleged human ancestor fossils by biological anthropologists from George Washington University and New York University.  According to PhysOrg, “the anthropologists question the claims that several prominent fossil discoveries made in the last decade are our human ancestors.  Instead, the authors offer a more nuanced explanation of the fossils’ place in the Tree of Life.  They conclude that instead of being our ancestors the fossils more likely belong to extinct distant cousins.”  Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison chided fellow paleoanthropologists for their jumping to conclusions: “to simply assume that anything found in that time range has to be a human ancestor is naďve.”
       Their article is published in this week’s Nature.¹  It should be kept in mind when evaluating the latest claim about human ancestry, such as the claim that a foot bone puts “Prehuman Lucy on a Walking Path” to humanity (e.g., Live Science), or that Lucy, a “human ancestor,” was no “swinger” but walked like us (National Geographic News).  Even in the most favorable possible light (e.g., that Lucy did walk upright), Bernard Wood says it is naďve to jump to conclusions that Australopithecus afarensis had anything to with human ancestry – an assertion the media invariably make (cf. 06/22/2010).
2. Upside down:  Science Daily’s coverage of the Nature article included a picture of an orangutan as an instance of false identification of human ancestry.  “Ramapithecus, a species of fossil ape from south Asia, was mistakenly assumed to be an early human ancestor in the 1960s and 1970s, but later found to be a close relative of the orangutan.”  A mistake like that could certainly not be made today... could it?
       The debunkers do not question human evolution itself, but their own more “nuanced explanation” requires believing that sister groups acquired human-like characteristics in parallel.  “The authors suggest there are a number of potential interpretations of these fossils and that being a human ancestor is by no means the simplest, or most parsimonious explanation.”  That would seem to leave a lot of room for speculation, to say nothing of upsetting textbook explanations that have been like gospel truth for decades.
3. In their own blurs:  The paper in Nature¹ behind the above two entries contains a strange mix of confidence in human evolution with diffidence about the details:

   The relationships among the living apes and modern humans have effectively been resolved, but it is much more difficult to locate fossil apes on the tree of life because shared skeletal morphology does not always mean shared recent evolutionary history.  Sorting fossil taxa into those that belong on the branch of the tree of life that leads to modern humans from those that belong on other closely related branches is a considerable challenge.

   A gaping question, though, is how, if the fossils cannot easily be sorted into a tree-like pattern, that one could know that a tree of life exists, without assuming it.  Subtitles in the paper indicative of trouble include Shared morphology need not mean shared history, Simplicity or complexity in phylogeny, Scale in phylogeny reconstruction, Cautionary tales from South Asia and Tuscany, and Implications for palaeoanthropology.
       Moreover, in the conclusion, they stated, “There is no reason why higher primate evolution in Africa in the past ten million years should not mirror the complexity observed in the evolutionary histories of other mammals during the same time period,” thus casting the same doubts on other evolutionary stories as well. 
4. The Geico fallacy:  Another PhysOrg had a paradigm-debunking headline, “Earliest humans not so different from us, research suggests.”  The subtitle reads, “That human evolution follows a progressive trajectory is one of the most deeply-entrenched assumptions about our species.  This assumption is often expressed in popular media by showing cavemen speaking in grunts and monosyllables (the GEICO Cavemen being a notable exception).  But is this assumption correct?  Were the earliest humans significantly different from us?”  The rhetorical answer is: negative.
       Indeed, John Shea of Stony Brook University says his colleagues have all been wrong about the measurement of “behavioral modernity,” the assumed identifier of when Homo sapiens emerged from animal to thinking man.  “There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability,” the article ended, casting doubt on the epistemic foundations of human evolution theories.  “Whether this range is significantly different from that of earlier and other hominin species remains to be discovered.”
5. Demotion from science:  In a kind of manifesto, Anthropologists, unite!, an appeal went out from Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks to rescue anthropology as a science in last week’s Nature.²  They were responding to a change of mission announced in December:

   In December 2010, The New York Times reported that the term ‘science’ had been dropped in a new long-range plan of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).  Where once the association had dedicated itself “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects”, it now promised rather “to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects”.

   Clearly, Kuper and Marks did not like this development.  “Anthropology isn’t in the crisis that parts of the media would have you believe,” Nature assured readers in damage control mode, “but it must do better.”   One internal memo stated, “we evolutionary anthropologists are outnumbered by the new cultural or social anthropologists, many but not all of whom are postmodern, which seems to translate into antiscience.”  So it appears the evolutionary anthropologists are the most concerned about appearing to be scientific.  Within the ranks, some are asking all over: “What is anthropology?”  The authors observe that “anthropology is a nineteenth-century discipline that fragmented, spawning a variety of specializations” with “relationships [that] are often distant.”
       The evolutionary anthropologists are miffed at their postmodern cousins: “Some do seem to feel that if only they could spare the time they would be able to knock some evolutionist sense into cultural anthropology,” Kuper and Marks complained, “But they are too busy.”  Busy doing what might be a good follow-up question: busy doing science?  The authors’ roster of embarrassing studies, from Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) to later questionable depictions of the Yanomami as sex tyrants, and ostensibly racist theories about intelligence, have marred the field.  Recent interdisciplinary efforts, they said, have left anthropologists in a “sadder but wiser default position,” in a “head-down posture,” afraid to embarrass the field further.  Human evolution suffers the most: “Only a handful still try to understand the origins and possible connections between biological, social and cultural forms, or to debate the relative significance of history and microevolution in specific, well-documented instances.”
   

Kuper and Marks made some pretty damaging admissions in their piece that was intended to shore up the scientific status of anthropology.  They thought that interdisciplinary programs might help; but can shared ignorance rise above ignorance?  Look at what they admit:

The obvious conclusion is that interdisciplinary research is imperative.  Yet too few biological anthropologists attend to social or cultural or historical factors.  A minority of cultural anthropologists and archaeologists do apply evolutionary theory, or cognitive science, or adopt an ecological perspective on cultural variation, or play about with the theory of games, but they feel that they are isolated, even marginalized.  And they do not feature in the front line of current debates about cognition, altruism or, for that matter, economic behaviour or environmental degradation, even though these debates typically proceed on the basis of very limited reliable information about human variation.

So where is the science in anthropology?  Is there anything in the above articles that points to something objective, true, and credible?  No; it is a hodgepodge of debunked ideas, ignorance masquerading as explanation, embarrassing episodes, and complex questions evading simplistic answers.  It is clearly a fallible human activity prone to category errors and misplaced priorities.
    If anthropologists were consistent, they should study themselves as a cultural tribe in evolutionary terms.  That would lead to a quick implosion of any pretences to being objective scientists on some higher plane than the rest of us.  To gain credibility, they should ditch evolution, which tries to explain walking and language emerging by mistake (01/26/2011), and study the Anthropology chapter in a good text on systematic theology, as long as it is consistent with the Operations Manual that came from the Manufacturer.
Next headline on:  Media • Early Man • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution • Human Body • Mind and Brain • Philosophy of Science • Theology

Case Study: Having a BLAST
An educational tool proposed in PLoS Biology can be evaluated for its effectiveness at teaching critical thinking.  Cheryl A. Kerfeld (Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, California) and Kathleen M. Scott (UC Berkeley) wrote on how to use software to teach evolution: “Using BLAST to Teach ‘E-value-tionary’ Concepts,” they titled their paper.¹  BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is a common genome-comparison tool used by geneticists and evolutionists.  Kerfeld and Scott described ways students can learn evolutionary concepts, such as “molecular evolution (e.g., gene duplication and divergence; orthologs versus paralogs)” using the software.  As for what “E-value-tionary concepts” are, BLAST makes use of E-values, defined as “the number of subject sequences that can be expected to be retrieved from the database that have a bit score equal to or greater than the one calculated from the alignment of the query and subject sequence, based on chance alone.”  E-values calculated from program runs can help students see homologies as evidence of common ancestry, they argued.  In addition, BLAST has a pedagogical benefit, they argued, by providing “an opportunity to illustrate how mathematics functions as a language of biology.”
    But does their teaching tool illustrate or obfuscate?  Does their method teach students to be critical of the method?  Apparently not, because when E-values show common ancestry, the authors assume it supports evolution, but when they do not, critical thinking must be suspended by tweaking the inputs:

Sometimes it is helpful to “mask” parts of the query sequence to prevent them from being aligned with subject sequences.  Masking is helpful when the query sequence has “low-complexity” regions, such as stretches of small hydrophobic amino acids that are commonly present in transmembrane helices of integral membrane proteins.  Because these features arose from convergent evolution, and their inclusion in BLAST searches could result in spurious hits, it is best to set the BLAST search parameters to eliminate these sorts of regions from word generation, as well as alignment scoring.

A meaningful alignment will facilitate the comparison of two sequences with a shared evolutionary history by maximizing the juxtaposition of similar and identical residues.  Sequences with a recent shared ancestry will have a high degree of similarity; their alignments will have many identical residues, few substitutions and gaps, and tiny E-values.  Conversely, sequences with an ancient common ancestor will be deeply divergent, with few shared sequence identities, many gaps, and larger E-values.  Furthermore, an alignment of two sequences can clarify which portions are conserved (e.g., active sites), and which are divergent, which helps cultivate students’ understanding of protein structure and function.

Students (and researchers as well) tend to draw an arbitrary line below which they consider E-values to provide convincing evidence that two sequences are homologs (e.g., E<0.00001).  It is informative to scrutinize this assumption, and ask the students to consider whether and when more stringent E-values might be appropriate (e.g., to assist in sorting paralogs from orthologs), or when larger E-values do not provide definitive evidence of evolutionary independence (as is the case when two sequences share an ancient ancestor).
    It is also informative for the students to discuss what their alignments “mean”, and whether the pairwise alignments between their query sequence and the subject sequences “prove” whether the sequences are homologs.  Indeed, it can catalyze a larger discussion of whether it is possible to “prove” that two sequences are homologs, and what other approaches (e.g., protein structure, gene context) might be used to strengthen or refute such an assertion.

In summary, deconstructing the BLAST algorithm and manipulating parameters systematically and evaluating the results with students helps them understand not only what the scores mean but also how to manipulate parameters to optimize their searches.... Finally, explicating the algorithm in this way allows students to explore research databases thoughtfully and illustrates the critical connection between mathematics and science, showing how numbers can be used to quantify biological relationships from the level of gene to organism....

Kerfeld and Scott provide another example of manipulating students’ impressionable heads with the illusion of scientific credibility in order to indoctrinate them into the cult of Charlie worship (cf. David Sloan Wilson’s “Evolution for Everyone” curriculum, 12/21/2005).  Evolution itself is never to be questioned; the objectivity of science itself is never under scrutiny.  This entry provides an opportunity for you to hear several points of view and evaluate which are credible with the fewest fallacies.

Exercise:  Apply your critical thinking skills to the following evolution articles:

• Science Daily: “New Research Changes Understanding of C4 Plant Evolution.”
• Science Daily: “Molecular Link Between Reproduction in Yeast and Humans.”
• Science Daily: “New View of Human Evolution?  3.2 Million-Year-Old Fossil Foot Bone Supports Humanlike Bipedalism in Lucy’s Species.”
• Live Science: “How Dinosaurs Handed Down Their Fingers to Birds.”

Next headline on:  Education • Philosophy of Science • Darwin and Evolution

Bubble Life Could Have Had Armor     02/14/2011       Tweet
Feb 14, 2011 — A headline posted by Science Daily is self-explanatory: “Clay-Armored Bubbles May Have Formed First Protocells: Minerals Could Have Played a Key Role in the Origins of Life.”  The operative words are may have and could have, which, being mere suggestions, are unfalsifiable.  If it didn’t happen here, it may have or could have happened on the planet Zorx in Sector 1906523-A.
    The claybubble theory of life is a new twist on Jack Szostak’s old fatbubble theory (see (09/03/2004).  That story also had plenty of mays and coulds.  This version by Howard Stone and Anand Bala Subramaniam (Harvard) imagines air bubbles armored with montmorillonite, a clay mineral.  The advantage of claybubbles is one-way osmosis, allowing small “building block” molecules to get in, but keeping the complex molecules evolving inside protected, assuming they could self-organize into life somehow (10/08/2010).
    “If there is a benefit to being protected in a clay vesicle, this is a natural way to favor and select for molecules that can self-organize,” Stone said.  He did not explore whether selection can operate without accurate replication (see online book).  He also did not speculate on how the building blocks became one-handed (see online book and 01/10/2011), or what might happen if a deadly toxin happened to grab the one-way key to the interior.
    Grad student Subramaniam hedged his bets with a few more could words: “Whether clay vesicles could have played a significant role in the origins of life is of course unknown, but the fact that they are so robust, along with the well-known catalytic properties of clay, suggests that they may have had some part to play.”  It does not appear either of them speculated on whether sand grains, soap bubbles, or lava might also qualify for the suggestion that they may have had some part to play.

Remember, these guys get paid for this.  Let’s sing verse 2 of the chorus introduced back in 09/03/2004 (read that whole commentary again, too):

Surrounding them with armor of clay
Gets building blocks in trouble;
They’re stuck inside forever to stay,
Flop goes the bubble.

Next headline on:  Geology • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

1. Cooling the flame:  Science Daily told how adult stem cell therapy can reduce inflammatory damage from stroke.  “We are seeing a paradigm shift in the way some types of stem cells may enhance recovery from stroke,” an excited researcher at the University of Texas said.  The adult stem cell therapy appears to dampen inflammation involving the spleen.  This new treatment holds promise to “improve clinical care, reduce long-term health care costs, and improve the quality of life for millions of people.”
2. iPS momentum:  PhysOrg reported that researchers at Harvard and Columbia have demonstrated that “many iPS cells are the equal of hESCs in creating human motor neurons, the cells destroyed in a number of neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s.”  Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) are a form of adult stem cell that does not involve the destruction of embryos (11/20/2007), as in human embryonic stem cells (hESC).  The article says that iPS cells meet the “gold standard” of pluripotency.  In addition, new methods are speeding the tests for pluripotency of iPS cells.
3. Hearty iPS:  Another story on PhysOrg highlighted research at Stanford that shows iPS cells can generate beating heart cells that carry a genetic defect under study, allowing “for the first time to examine and characterize the disorder at the cellular level.”
4. ESC economics:  PhysOrg also discussed the current disarray of patent laws surrounding stem cell lines, data, and treatments.  Some scientists warn of a potential “stifling effect of widespread patenting in stem cell field.”  Bioethicist Debra Matthews (Johns Hopkins) said, “Pervasive taking of intellectual property rights has resulted in a complex and confusing patchwork of ownership and control in the field of stem cell science.”  Although the article was unclear whether the dispute includes adult stem cell research, it mentioned one recommendation being “a centralized portal for access to existing databases, such as the UK Stem Cell Bank and the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry.”
5. Mixed bag:  Another article on PhysOrg discussed the new Massachusetts Medical School Human Stem Cell Bank, which opened with seven high-quality stem cell lines (5 embryonic, 2 iPS, with more to follow), and how they are being preserved in liquid nitrogen and made available to researchers around the world.  The article mixed these two sources of stem cells with no mention of ethics: e.g., “The Registry includes information on the derivation, availability and characteristics for more than 1,200 hESC and iPS cell lines developed in over 22 different countries, including more than 200 cell lines with genetic disorders.”
6. Sex cells:  Parthenogenetic stem cells are taken from reproductive cells (03/12/2005).  Lacking the full complement of chromosome pairs, they might contain a good or bad copy of a gene implicated in a disease like tuberous sclerosis or Huntington's disease.  Science Daily discussed how work at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is constructing good embryonic stem cells from parthenogenetic cells.  “These single-parent/patient-derived embryonic stem cells can theoretically be used for correction of a diverse number of diseases that occur when one copy of the gene is abnormal,” a research at the hospital said.

That Nature would print this story about Deisher is an encouraging sign that the momentum may be turning away from embryonic stem cell research.  Nature used to wield its editorial pen against the opponents the way it does against creationists, calling them ignorant moralists standing in the way of progress (02/11/2005, 09/27/2004).  Dr. Tracy Deisher certainly does not fit that description, nor does Dr. James Sherley, an adult stem cell researcher at Boston Biomedical Research Institute, the other remaining plaintiff in the lawsuit.  For sure, Wadman snuck in enough jibes about Deisher to titillate Nature’s leftist readers (calling her a “bundle of contradictions,” pointing out that she never applied for a NIH grant, pointing out that she studies the “pernicious” and “disproven” hypothesis that autism might be triggered by vaccines, quoting people who call her “polarizing,” remarking in a callout box that “she’s kind of the Sarah Palin of stem cells,”), but she gave Deisher a lot of room to respond, too.
    What was not said may be more telling.  Wadman did not point out any benefits of embryonic stem cells over adult stem cells.  She did not quote any leading ES researchers making a good case for cutting up embryos.  And she did not even attempt to defend ES research on ethical grounds.  Instead, she gave Deisher space to make two striking blows: (1) that many scientists are opposed to human embryonic stem cell research, and (2) that hESC researchers are not driven primarily by concern for the sick.  Researchers prefer to work on ES cells because they are convenient, Deisher argued; their science “is not about helping patients and it’s not about advancing the common good.”  Instead, she argued, “There is no commercial, clinical or research utility in working with human embryonic stem cells.”  That anecdote about the four-year-old girl born from a frozen embryo added emotional clout.  Here was a darling human being – obviously a great deal more than a clump of cells.
    These are signs that embryonic stem cell research is losing its hype-driven public mandate (cf. 01/02/2011).  After all the promises, it has produced no cures (while adult stem cell research is on a roll; see 11/18/2010 starting from initial promise in 01/24/2002).  It is superfluous, now that iPS technology is its equal, without the ethical qualms.  Its credibility has been marred by fraud (12/16/2005), while others worry about future abuses (10/21/2004; cf. 04/22/2004 and 07/30/2001 on eugenics).  Opponents within the scientific community are becoming more bold.  And it is hanging by a thread, waiting for the next court ruling that might end its federal funding for good (double entendre intentional).  But why should it get federal funding in the first place?  If the promises were credible, commercial and charitable support would be overwhelming.  That ES researchers have to lean on the government dole is a sign it is not commercially viable.
    Is this subject relevant for Creation-Evolution Headlines?  Maybe not directly, but one’s view of the origin of life and humanity has direct bearing on ethics.  The stem cell controversy of the past decade has been a direct outgrowth of competing views on the significance of human life.  If an embryo is “just a clump of cells,” then playing with those clumps because of their convenience or the temptation of a Nobel prize has no ethical consequences.  But if human life was created by God, it never loses its sanctity from conception to burial.  It will affect how we view a fetus in a jar, a plasticized body in an exhibit, an Alzheimer’s patient in a nursing home, a woman considering an abortion, the direction of scientific research.  It’s where the rubber of worldview meets the road of scientific practice.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Health • Politics and Ethics

“Oh,” the Darwinist says, “but you must give it millions of years.”  Don’t fall for that.  Evolution runs both fast and slow, don’t they tell us? (01/15/2002, 02/21/2003, 01/31/2011). If Charlie’s mutation magic can turn a cow into a whale in six million years, it could surely produce a measurably fitter bird brain in 25 years.  Let’s expand the population and ask how many human CAT-scan patients have gotten smarter and produced genius kids.  How many dental patients have grown new improved teeth or new organs after X-rays?  Tumors, maybe, but not some new sense organ or function.
    The Chernobyl bird populations have been under a steady dose of radiation for decades now, giving ample opportunity for mutations to help at least one chick get a lucky break.  Evolution fails another real-world test.  Don’t go to Chernobyl hoping to get fit.  Under mutational load (12/14/2006, 04/09/2007), you don’t get a choice of “Evolve or Perish”; just the latter.
Next headline on:  Birds • Mammals • Health • Darwin and Evolution

This Is Your Brain on Bytes     02/11/2011       Tweet
Feb 11, 2011 — It’s mind-boggling time.  Some recent articles have tried to quantify the information capacity of the eye, the brain, and the world.  Ready?  Think hard.

1. Eye boggle:  Your eyes contain about 120 million rods and 6 million cones each.  If each receptor represents a pixel, that is 2 x 126 million pixels, or 252 megapixels.  And remember – these are moving pictures, not stills (talk about high-def).  How can the brain transmit and process that much visual information?  The answer is, apparently, it uses compression – just like computers compress raw camera photos into more manageable JPEG images.  That’s the title of an article on Science Daily: “JPEG for the Mind: How the Brain Compresses Visual Information.”
       The article begins, “The brain does not have the transmission or memory capacity to deal with a lifetime of megapixel images.  Instead, the brain must select out only the most vital information for understanding the visual world.”  Researchers at Johns Hopkins found that certain cells in the image transmission pathway apparently focus on highly curved edges that are the most informative, dropping flat edges – resulting in an 8-fold compression ratio comparable to the JPEG algorithm.  Eyesight compression, though, is done in-line, in real time, during the image transmission process (see also the 05/22/2003 entry).  Geeks will enjoy the punch line:

   “Computers can beat us at math and chess,” said [Ed] Connor [Johns Hopkins], “but they can’t match our ability to distinguish, recognize, understand, remember, and manipulate the objects that make up our world.  “This core human ability depends in part on condensing visual information to a tractable level.  For now, at least, the .brain format seems to be the best compression algorithm around.”

   
   
2. Cerebellum boggle:  Your cerebellum (a portion of the brain near the brain stem) is important for motor functions, emotions and language.  Live Science claims that wiring in the cerebellum starts with “surprisingly bad wiring,” because axons seeking connections to granule cells of the cerebellum sometimes link up incorrectly to Purkinje cells.  But “bad wiring” may be in the eye of the beholder, because an international team found that “a substance known as bone morphogenetic protein 4, which plays a role in bone development, helped correct these errors.”
       One of the researchers publishing in PLoS Biology explained,¹ “What we demonstrate here is that you have a negative system that repels axons from an inappropriate target, thereby steering them to the right target.”  If it works, can it be called bad?  The authors said, “In summary, we show that the specificity of the synaptic connections in the ponto-cerebellar circuit emerges through extensive elimination of transient synapses.”  But that raises an interesting question: what regulates the regulators?

3. Memory boggle:  Get ready for the punch line on this one.  An article on Live Science discussed the tipping point of human information technology from analog to digital storage.  In 2000, the article said, about 75% of the world’s information was stored in analog form (e.g., paper, analog tape, analog sound recordings).  By 2007, 93% of that information was stored digitally (computer files, digital tape, digital recordings).  Digital information can be quantified in the familiar bits, bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, yotta yotta yotta....²
       Now that information can be quantified digitally, it’s possible to estimate all the human information in the world.  As of 2007, that quantity was 295 trillion megabytes (295 x 10¹⁸ bytes, or 295 exabytes), according to Martin Hilbert of USC.  Before divulging the punch line, let’s quote the article’s comparisons:

   Have a hard time imagining 295 trillion megabytes?  Hilbert suggests thinking of it this way: “If we would use a grain of sand to represent one bit each of the 295 trillion, we would require 315 times the amount of sand that is currently available on the world’s beaches.”

   For a better idea of what these numbers all mean, Hilbert and his colleague, Priscila López of the Open University of Catalonia, express the information through other analogies.

   295 trillion megabytes is roughly:

   Equivalent to 61 CD-ROMs per person on Earth.  Piling up the imagined 404 billion CD-ROM would create a stack that would reach the moon and a quarter of this distance beyond.

   Enough that, if printed in newspapers that sold for $1 each, the United States’ entire global Gross Domestic Product would not be enough to buy them all.  (The cost would be 17 percent beyond the GDP.)

   Enough information to cover the entire area of the United States or China in 13 layers of books.

   Now the punch line: that incredibly huge amount of information represents “still only enough for 0.33 percent of the information that can be stored in all DNA molecules of one human adult.”  Let’s do the math: multiply all the values in the quote above by 300, and you get into the ballpark of the information storage inside your body: 94,500 times the grains of sand of all the world’s beaches; 18,300 CDs for every person on Earth, enough to reach over halfway to Mars; 350 times the GDP of the US if printed in $1 newspapers; enough to cover the US in 3,900 layers of books.  Now you know.

4. Brain boggle:  If your mind is not sufficiently boggled yet, let’s finish with a measurement posted on Wired Science.  Author John Timmer of Ars Technica expanded on the work by Hilbert and López to estimate the processing power of the human brain.  After several more mind-numbing analogies of the combined processing power of all the world’s computers, storage and memory, the article ended with another surprise.  First, Hilbert and López estimated the combined processing power of all the world’s computers at 6.4 x 10¹⁸ operations per second.  Then, Timmer wrote:

   Lest we get too enamored with our technological prowess, however, the authors make some comparisons with biology.  “To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*10¹⁸ instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,” they write.
       Our total storage capacity is the same as an adult human’s DNA.  And there are several billion humans on the planet.

While reading this article, your brain just outperformed all the computers on the planet, and your body stored genetic information that, if stored on CDs, would reach over halfway to Mars.  And who could forget the stunning analogy we published nine years ago about the information storage capacity of one cubic millimeter of DNA? (see 08/16/2002).  Facts are powerful things.  The information in this article could be taught with some clever presentation slides or posters.  Nothing is more effective than facts like these to make people reconsider assumptions about how the human body and brain came to be (see 01/19/2011 commentary).
    Evolutionists want you to believe this all happened by chance, through mistakes, without purpose or guidance.  How about asking for a time out in your local high school biology teacher’s evolution spiel to write some of these facts on the board in front of the students?  Then say (nicely), “According to your textbook, evolution teaches that your brain, but not computers, got here by mistake.”  You don’t even have to put the school at risk of a lawsuit by setting off the alarms with the emotionally-charged phrase “intelligent design.”
Next headline on:  Human Body • Genetics • Mind and Brain • Amazing Facts

“We can no longer consider the acoelomorphs as an intermediate between simple groups such as jellyfish and the rest of the animals,” said researcher Max Telford of the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London.  “This means that we have no living representative of this stage of evolution: the missing link has gone missing.”

Being such simple creatures and yet still mixing and mingling on the family tree with us complex creatures suggests these marine worms were once complex themselves, Telford said.
    “This is an interesting evolutionary question,” Telford told LiveScience.  “Why do animals lose complex features, and how do they do it?  What genes have they lost?”

The rearrangement has triggered protests from evolutionary biologists, who are alarmed that they may lose their key example of that crucial intermediate stage of animal evolution.  Some researchers complain that the evidence is not strong enough to warrant such a dramatic rearrangement of the evolutionary tree, and claim that the report leaves out key data.  In any case, the vehemence of the debate shows just how important these worms have become in evolutionary biology.
    “I will say, diplomatically, this is the most politically fraught paper I’ve ever written,” says Max Telford, a zoologist at University College London and last author on the paper.

This is why you must read past the headlines and mute the Darwin Marching Band music and look at the data.  Evolutionists thought they had a missing link at a critical juncture in Darwin’s tree of life, only to find, according to their own apologists, that the genetics don’t fit.  To keep their story going requires more speculation about less evidence.  This is no happy ending; it turns Charlie’s bedtime story into a nightmare generator.
Next headline on:  Marine Biology • Genetics • Darwin and Evolution

How Bacteria Use Their Flagella     02/09/2011    
Feb 09, 2011 — Do an imaginary mind-meld with a bacterium for a moment.  Visualize yourself encased in a membrane, surrounded by fluid.  You have no eyes, ears, or hands.  You need to find where food is, and avoid danger, so you have organelles that can take in molecules that provide information about what is going on outside, where other bacteria can also communicate information to you.  To get around, you have a powerful outboard motor, called a flagellum.  Lacking eyes, how do you know where to go?  How do you steer and make progress toward food or away from danger?  These are the questions of chemotaxis – the ability to move toward or away from chemicals.  Two recent papers discuss how bacteria use their rotary motors to succeed in life.
    Some bacteria have only one flagellum (monotrichous, or “one-haired,” since the flagella look like hairs at low resolution).  One such critter is Vibrio alginolyticus, an inhabitant of the coastal ocean.  In a PNAS Commentary,¹ Roman Stocker discussed how this microbe uses its single flagellum in a “reverse and flick” movement to explore its environment.  This “newly discovered mechanism for turning,” he said, “....is part of an advanced chemotaxis system.”  The bacterium can actually make better progress toward or against a concentration gradient with this semi-random search method.  “How can a simple back-and-forth movement result in high-performance chemotaxis, rather than causing the bacterium to endlessly retrace its steps?” Stocker asked.  The answer is that the flick action, which involves a sudden kinking of the U-joint of the flagellum, combined with reversal of flagellar rotation, provides three times the chemotaxis efficiency of E. coli.  He showed this with mathematical models.
    Stocker attributed this to evolution: “Despite the limited morphological repertoire of the propulsive system, radically different movement strategies have evolved, likely reflecting the diversity of physicochemical conditions among bacterial habitats.”  But what he was really talking about was adaptation of different microbes to different habitats and conditions.  He ended with praise, not for evolution, but for the cleverness of microbe transportation: the study he cited “makes monotrichous marine bacteria an appealing model system to expand our knowledge of motility among the smallest life forms on our planet.”
    Other bacteria have 2, 4, or 8 flagella (“peritrichous”), like Escherichia coli.  When all 8 flagella begin turning in the same direction, they bundle into a kind of V8 engine that can propel the germ at around 30 micrometers per second (µm/s).  To change direction, they reverse one or more flagella, causing the bundle to fall apart, stopping forward movement in a strategy called tumbling, after which unified motion begins in another direction.  While not as efficient at chemotaxis as V. alginolyticus, it should be remembered that E. coli live in different environments – and they have other tricks up their sleeve.
    Flagellum specialist Howard Berg and colleagues figured out how to watch fluid movement around swarms of bacteria.  Reporting in PNAS,² they discovered that bacteria, by rotating their flagella counterclockwise in swarms, create small “rivers” of fluid moving clockwise ahead of the swarm that help them move faster as a group than they could be swimming alone.  They wrote,

we discovered an extensive stream (or river) of swarm fluid flowing clockwise along the leading edge of an Escherichia coli swarm, at speeds of order 10 µm/s, about three times faster than the swarm expansion.  The flow is generated by the action of counterclockwise rotating flagella of cells stuck to the substratum, which drives fluid clockwise around isolated cells (when viewed from above), counterclockwise between cells in dilute arrays, and clockwise in front of cells at the swarm edge.  The river provides an avenue for long-range communication in the swarming colony, ideally suited for secretory vesicles that diffuse poorly.

And these are “simple” or “primitive” organisms that were the first to evolve, they tell us.  The outboard motors alone are phenomenally complex, but when they work together with signal transduction mechanisms and group search strategies, it’s overkill for Darwin, who was dead anyway.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Physics • Biomimetics • Amazing Facts

Bizarre Fossils Raise Questions     02/08/2011    
Feb 08, 2011 — For decades, students have been taught that the fossil record shows a long, slow, gradual progression of increasing complexity over millions of years.  Scientific data are usually not so simple.

1. Surprising youth in old fossil:  When you see the word unexpected in a headline, expect the unexpected.  “Unexpected exoskeleton remnants found in Paleozoic fossils,” reported PhysOrg about chitin protein remains found in scorpion-like arthropod fossils alleged to be 310 million and 417 million years old.  The previous record was 25 to 80 million years.  The subtitle reads, “Surprising new research shows that, contrary to conventional belief, remains of chitin-protein complex — structural materials containing protein and polysaccharide — are present in abundance in fossils of arthropods from the Paleozoic era.”
       George Cody of the Carnegie Institution “speculates that the vestigial protein-chitin complex may play a critical role in organic fossil preservation by providing a substrate protected from total degradation by a coating waxy substances [sic] that protect the arthropods from desiccation.”  Is he claiming the proteins protected the rock impressions, and not the other way around?  Other than that, the article did not explain how proteins could last for over 400 million years.  Prior to the discovery, it was unexpected, surprising, and contrary to conventional belief.
2. Antarctic forests:  The caption of artwork in a BBC News piece reads, “Dinosaurs once foraged beneath the Southern Lights in Antarctica.”  It shows young dinosaurs admiring the skylights while grazing around conifers in the long polar night.  “It may be hard to believe, but Antarctica was once covered in towering forests.”  Fossil trees in Antarctica have been known since Robert Falcon Scott explored the frozen wastes of the south polar regions, finding evidence of a subtropical climate where no trees grow today.
       Jane Francis (University of Leeds) has spent 10 seasons collecting samples.  As she described her adventures, it was evident the surprise of fossil trees in ice has not worn off:

   “I still find the idea that Antarctica was once forested absolutely mind-boggling”, she told the BBC.
       “We take it for granted that Antarctica has always been a frozen wilderness, but the ice caps only appeared relatively recently in geological history.”
       One of her most amazing fossil discoveries to date was made in the Transantarctic Mountains, not far from where Scott made his own finds.
       She recalled: “We were high up on glaciated peaks when we found a sedimentary layer packed full of fragile leaves and twigs.”
       These fossils proved to be remains of stunted bushes of beech.  At only three to five million years old, they were some of the last plants to have lived on the continent before the deep freeze set in.

   The article says that this was not the only period of warmth.  Fossil plants dated 100 million years old indicate the area must have resembled forested areas of New Zealand.  “We commonly find whole fossilised logs that must have come from really big trees.”  One of the specimens found is Ginkgo biloba, a well-known “living fossil” that was thought extinct from the age of dinosaurs till living trees were discovered in Japan (cf. NW Creation.net article with links).
       How did the trees adapt to the polar light conditions, when long periods of darkness alternate with six months of light?  Francis did experiments growing trees in simulated polar light conditions and found they adapted remarkably well.  In addition to the trees, dinosaurs lived under these conditions.  One kangaroo-size vegetarian dinosaur had large optic lobes, possibly suggesting adaptation to the low light of the long winters.
       The article tried to tie this evidence into the current debate over global warming, but clearly the climate changes of those prior times were not caused by humans.  “Visiting the frozen wasteland of Antarctica today, it is hard to believe that rainforests haunted by small dinosaurs once flourished where 3km thick ice-sheets now exist, the article ended.  “However, the geological record provides irrefutable evidence that dramatic climate fluctuations have occurred throughout our planet’s history.”
3. Snakes alive and dead:  Fossil snakes show remnant hind legs, reported MSNBC News.  At first, this seems to support the belief that snakes descended from lizards, and lost their legs through evolution.  The snake fossil studied by Alexandra Houssaye (National Museum of Natural History in Paris), named Eupodophis descouensi, has “ultra tiny 0.8 inch legs” with “four anklebones but no foot or toe bones.”  It appears that calling these structures legs requires some interpretation; they were clearly not used for walking.
       Questions remain, however, about the evolution of snakes.  “The oldest snake remains are dated to 112 to 94 million years ago, and this snake is dated to around 90 million years ago,” Houssaye said.  Yet her evolutionary story seemed to allow opposite conclusions: “If something is not useful it can regress without any impact on the (animal’s) survival, or regression can even be positive, as for here if the leg was disturbing a kind of locomotion, like for burrowing snakes or swimming snakes.”  But why would useless structures remain for 4 to 22 million years?  It would seem millions of generations of snakes would have had to contend with useless structures getting in their way, if it took that long for legs to regress.  Houssaye was not prepared to announce a victory for evolutionary theory: “The question of snake origin should not be resolved in the next 10 years,” the article quoted her saying, ending, “She is, however, hopeful that all of the separate teams working on this puzzle can one day pinpoint what species was the common ancestor of all snakes.”  The lizard-like ancestor, if there was one, is not known from the fossil record.
       According to Live Science, which also reported the story, “the bones suggests that evolution took snakes’ legs not by altering the way they grew.  Instead, Houssaye said, it looks as though the limbs grew either slower or for a shorter period of time.”  PhysOrg’s coverage includes an image of the very simple structures.  According to this entry, “Only three specimens exist of fossilised snakes with preserved leg bones.”  None of the articles mentioned whether the structures had a function, or might have been developmental anomalies, such as when babies are born with an enlarged coccyx (cf. CMI).  What evolutionary stories could be told if a fossil two-headed snake were found?

Conventional wisdom is not always wise.  A better term might be conventional folly, or popular credulity.  Enough reports like this, and a consistent theme emerges: evolutionists are clueless about not only their own theory of common ancestry, but about the millions-of-years scheme on which their theory is built.  You can’t just read one BBC News or PhysOrg article to get the whole picture.  Individual articles present puzzles, but maintain the triumphal theme of the march of secular science toward Understanding Reality.  That is a false picture.
    Sites like CEH help document the reality, that secular scientists sold on an evolutionary world view maintain their belief system by telling stories in spite of the evidence.  And for you creation-bashing lurkers out there who lambaste CEH as anti-science, pay attention!  This is not anti-science, because we clearly honor and support legitimate scientific discovery and analysis (see yesterday’s entry, for instance).  This is anti-storytelling – anti- twisting evidence to support a belief system.  An honest rationalist skeptic should join with us in that goal.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution • Dating Methods

1. DNA railcar:  Researchers at University of Oxford have constructed a “programable [sic] molecular transport system” that travels like a railcar on DNA molecules, reported PhysOrg.  And that’s not all: they would like to build “synthetic ribosomes,” the article said.  “DNA origami techniques allow us to build nano- and meso-sized structures with great precision,” said Prof. Hiroshi Sugiyama.  “We already envision more complex track geometries of greater length and even including junctions.  Autonomous, molecular manufacturing robots are a possible outcome.”
2. DNA iPad:  More DNA origami is at work creating smaller components for consumer and industrial electronics like iPods, iPads and similar devices, reported another article on PhysOrg.  Japanese researchers at Arizona State University, familiar with their culture’s art of origami, work with “have discovered a way to use DNA to effectively combine top-down lithography with chemical bonding involving bottom-up self-assembly.”
3. Turbo dragonflies:  Imagine “micro wind turbines that can withstand gale-force winds.”  Such marvels are being prepared with inspiration from dragonfly wings, reported New Scientist.  Who would have thought that the energy source for powering your cell phone might some day owe its design to the dragonfly?
4. Flagella carnival:  Nanoscopic inventions being built at Rice University look like “a carnival ride gone mad,” said Science Daily.  Researchers want to build arrays of programmable rotating machines modeled after the bacterial flagellum (07/12/2010) and ATP synthase (see CMI).  Such devices could be used for “radio filters that would let only a very finely tuned signal pass, depending on the nanorotors’ frequency.”  The computers used to model the molecular rotors are not yet capable of characterizing ATP synthase found in all living things, “but as computers get more powerful and our methods improve,” a team member said, “we may someday be able to analyze such long molecules.”
5. Plankton armor:  Science Daily said that “The ability of some forms of plankton and bacteria to build an extra natural layer of nanoparticle-like armour has inspired chemists at the University of Warwick to devise a startlingly simple way to give drug bearing polymer vesicles (microscopic polymer based sacs of liquid) their own armoured protection.”  One goal is “stealth” armor that looks like water but can allow drugs to sneak past the immune system.  What were they looking at for inspiration?  “Organisms that particularly attracted our interest were those with a cell wall composed of an armour of colloidal objects – for instance bacteria coated with S-layer proteins, or phytoplankton, such as the coccolithophorids, which have their own CaCO₃-based nano-patterned colloidal armour.”

If these researchers succeed in getting DNA and rotating molecules to do the work of molecular machines already active in the living cell, will science finally admit that life shows evidence of intelligent design?  Notice that they cannot yet come close to doing what ATP synthase, a flagellum, mother-of-pearl, a ribosome or a dragonfly wing has been doing for millennia.  Ironic, is it not, that ATP synthase is powering their bodies and minds to imitate it.
    Intelligent design is revolutionizing science via biomimetics, promising amazing benefits for human health and society, forcing thinking along engineering concepts, challenging our best scientific minds, inspiring awe at natural capabilities, ignoring Darwin entirely.
Next headline on:  Biomimetics • Cell Biology • Terrestrial Zoology • Marine Biology • Physics • Intelligent Design

This comedy show is brought to you for your Superbowl halftime entertainment.  Imagine if the Steelers were able to set the rules so that no matter which goal the ball landed on, they would win – and they could get away with it, because they bought off all the referees.  The Packers can’t complain because if they don’t play according to those rules, they are accused of practicing religion instead of Football.  The cameramen aim the cameras to make the Steelers look good and the Packers bad, and the commentators have their talking points down to make it all look enlightened and progressive.  Anyone who complains this is unfair gets Expelled from the stadium.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwin and Evolution • Dumb Ideas

Intelligence as a Cosmic Reality     02/06/2011    
Feb 06, 2011 — The "I" in SETI takes "Intelligence" seriously.  It requires that intelligence is a recognizable, quantifiable property of nature.  The origin of intelligence is a question that separates theists from materialists – whether it is a fundamental or emergent property.  Before engaging that question, it might be instructive to see how scientists who are not necessarily theists are regarding it.

1. SETI protocol:  The Arecibo Message beamed to the stars in 1974 was a binary encoded stream of bits.  Subsequent messages have included graphical depictions of humans, and catalogs of human science and art.  PhysOrg recalled those attempts at communication with other intelligences and asked what would be the most likely protocol that aliens would recognize as intelligent on the receiving end.  This is the study of METI: messaging to extra-terrestrial intelligence.
       METI includes considerations of how to maximize communication effectively at the lowest cost.  What good would an engraving of human forms be for aliens without eyes?  An international team, PhysOrg reported, considered factors like “signal encoding, message length, information content, anthropocentrism, transmission method, and transmission periodicity” for an upcoming report in Space Policy.  Their current recommendation is to concentrate on “short, simple messages with minimal anthropocentrism, and which rely on simple physical or mathematical language....”
       “The scientists also emphasize that searching for and attempting to communicate with extraterrestrials is as much about understanding ourselves as it is about finding aliens,” the press release continued.  We need, in other words, to understand human intelligence.  The only way we have to calibrate a test message, though, is to try it on other human beings with other cultures and languages.  Whatever they decide to send for the next broadcast from Earth, they must assume intelligence is real at both the sending and receiving end.
2. Universal intelligence:  Science Daily expanded the concept with an article, “On the hunt for universal intelligence.”  The question is, “How do you use a scientific method to measure the intelligence of a human being, an animal, a machine or an extra-terrestrial?”  To plumb that question, Spanish and Australian AI researchers (artificial intelligence) devised a new intelligence test to replace the historic Turing Test that Allan Turing developed in 1950 to demonstrate intelligence in machines.  Their new “Anytime Universal Intelligence” test that “can be applied to any subject – whether biological or not – at any point in its development (child or adult, for example), for any system now or in the future, and with any level of intelligence or speed.”  Their model measures Kolmogorov Complexity, “the number of computational resources needed to describe an object or a piece of information,” yet they admit this is a first step in an ongoing evaluation of intelligence.
3. Language efficiency:  Philip Ball at Nature News reported on a new proposal in linguistics at MIT theorizing that longer words carry more information.  In contrast to a 1930-era model by George Kingsley Zipf that language speakers seek to minimize time and effort when speaking, Steven Piantadosi and colleagues propose that “to convey a given amount of information, it is more efficient to shorten the least informative – and therefore the most predictable – words, rather than the most frequent ones.”  While not speaking of intelligence directly, this article overlaps with the means of communication between intelligent agents.  The words informative and predictable presuppose intelligences able to discriminate those factors using abstract reasoning.
4. Mind matters:  At the threshold of mind and matter, neuroscientists continue to probe how intelligence is mediated by the physical brain.  PhysOrg reported on experiments at the University of Sydney’s Centre for the Mind that seemed to indicate electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobe produced “flashes of insight” that might lead to an “electronic thinking cap” some day.  Neuroscientists at New York University found, according to Science Daily, that memory storage and reactivation is “more complex than thought.”  Experiments on lab rats showed that “different effects of specifically inhibiting the initiation of protein synthesis on memory consolidation and reconsolidation, making clear these two processes have greater variation than previously thought.”
       Memory, however is a tool of mind, not mind itself – if the distinction is more than academic.  No SETI researcher, however, is expecting lab rats to attempt purposeful communication with alien civilizations.  If memory is more complex than thought, thought is also more complex than memory.

These are deep questions that have not been exhausted by philosophers despite millennia of trying.  But when you use your intelligence to define intelligence, or think about thinking, who is acting?  While intelligence is somewhat quantifiable in birds or dolphins or apes, our self-consciousness as beings, as persons, able to communicate and desiring communication with others, is unheard of in the animal kingdom.  Unlike bird chirps and ape grunts, we speak with meaning (semantics) using complex syntax, referring to abstractions in the conceptual realm.  We use codes and references.  We write philosophy books and symphonies with no survival value.  We can communicate the same message through entirely different physical media.
    Perhaps the better question is the search for extra-terrestrial personality.  Like the fire triangle (heat, oxygen, fuel), the triad of personality – intellect, emotions, and will – lights the fire of communication as only intelligent persons experience it.  It is doubtful today’s human SETI staff would be particularly thrilled if future intelligent robots made contact with alien robots, intelligent as they might be.  Even if emotions and will were programmed into the robots, we would recognize the robots to be just carrying out the program.  Similarly, if our self-conscious intelligence is to be accepted as real as we know it to be deep in our souls, it cannot be just executing a genetic program.
    If intelligence were an epiphenomenon of matter in motion, no scientist could ever know that to be true.  Truth implies morality (honesty).  If morality is also an epiphenomenon of matter in motion, the materialist soon multiplies epiphenomena upon epiphenomena, reducing his explanation to ghost stories.  The only self-consistent explanation for intelligence, personality, and truth is that they derive from a Creator who is intelligent, personal, and true: I AM.
Next headline on:  SETI • Cosmology • Human Body • Mind and Brain • Philosophy of Science • Theology

1. Planets – Why the moon is getting farther from Earth: BBC News.
2. Stars – First stars were not born solitary: PhysOrg.
3. Zoology – How do insects survive the cold winter?  Answer at PhysOrg.
4. Health – Exercising outdoors provides value added: PhysOrg.
5. Education – Colleges not teaching critical thinking: PhysOrg.
6. Physics – Information can be erased without energy: PhysOrg.
7. Geology – Dead Sea drill cores may illuminate Biblical history: PhysOrg.
8. Astrophysics – The waters above: measuring H₂O in space: PhysOrg.
9. Evolution – Cancer as an evolutionary process: PhysOrg.
10. Health – Discoverer of induced pluripotent stem cells wins top award: PhysOrg.
11. Planets – The MESSENGER spacecraft approaches Mercury orbit on March 17: PhysOrg.
12. Health – Popeye was right: eat your spinach for efficient muscle: PhysOrg.
13. Archaeology – Zechariah’s tomb found? PhysOrg; ask Todd Bolen.
14. Evolution – Lampreys provide clues on evolution of immune system: PhysOrg.
15. Biology – Why do fish sleep? PhysOrg.
16. Birds – Birds use right nostril to navigate: PhysOrg.
17. Geology – Finding gold by a new model: Science Daily.
18. Physiology – When the nose smells, the brain wants to know: Science Daily.
19. Genetics/Evolution – Jumping genes tangle Darwin’s tree of life: Science Daily.
20. Fossils – Eleven-foot bear fossil found in Argentina: Live Science.
21. Education – Kids believe literally everything they read online: Live Science.
22. History – Vikings could have navigated on cloudy days: Live Science.
23. Genetics – Lessons learned from the Human Genome Project: Live Science.
24. Anthropology – Man’s best friend, the fox: news at Live Science.
25. Marine Biology – Ocean in motion: how do squid hear? Live Science.
26. Evolution – Childhood diseases rooted in evolution: Live Science.
27. Early man – You could outrun Neanderthals in a race, says New Scientist.
28. Mathematics – Explore fractals in Google: New Scientist.
29. Politics – Climate forecasting is a form of soothsaying: New Scientist.
30. Origin of Life – Is this Dr Frankenstein creating life from scratch and bootstrapping evolution? New Scientist.

Although many subjects are touched on above, we only have space to categorize them in “Amazing Facts” or “Dumb Ideas”.  Some include both, perhaps some neither.  Readers are encouraged to analyze these articles with their critical thinking skills.  Write in if there is one you would like reported in detail.
Next headline on:  Amazing Facts • Dumb Ideas

1. Stay, sis:  Darwin portrayed a world in flux, with natural selection continually sifting and amplifying minute changes over time.  Why, then did Science Daily title an article, “Rare Insect Fossil Reveals 100 Million Years of Evolutionary Stasis”?  Sure enough, the article claims that a certain splay-footed cricket in rock alleged to be 100 million years old “has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period, a time of dinosaurs just before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.”  But is a phrase like evolutionary stasis an explanation, or just a term providing protection from falsification?
2. Goldilocks and the 3 Dinos:  According to PhysOrg, computer models show that dinosaurs can only leave footprints in strata that are “just right” for the mass of the animal.  “Now we can use this ‘Goldilocks’ effect as a baseline for exploring more complicated factors such as the way dinosaurs moved their legs, or what happens to tracks when a mud is drying out.”  But even if the model allows the scientist to tweak all the parameters in a computer, what happened to good old-fashioned field experiments?
3. Titanoceratops the granddaddy:  Analysis of a partial skeleton from New Mexico “could be the new granddaddy of horned dinosaurs,” National Geographic News teased.  It’s a big one, the biggest horned dinosaur found in North America, dated at 74 million years old, but hold on; they gave this bone a new name when they are not sure it isn’t a member of a previously-identified species called Pentaceratops.  No sooner was it given a titanic name but paleontologists were describing its Darwinian pedigree: “If indeed a new species, Titanoceratops’ discovery could also mean that triceratopsins—members of a family of giant horned dinosaurs—evolved their gigantic sizes evolved [sic] at least five million years earlier than previously thought, the study says.”
       It’s not clear why this specimen had anything to do with ancestry.  Does the smaller evolve from the larger?  Sometimes, perhaps, but clearly, much of Darwin’s story had to get things bigger than the last universal common ancestor, a cell.  A Yale paleontologist remarked, “It’s pretty surprising—I would have not have thought something this big and this advanced was living in this time period.”  But have faith: “I would like it to be real,” a paleontologist at Cleveland Natural History Museum said, struggling with his doubts.  Another brother helped his unbelief: “After all, Triceratops must have had ancestors in this earlier time, and this individual does show specialized traits that we see in the Triceratops complex.”

Pardon, your assumptions are showing.  Did you catch the slips?  The specimen must have ancestors during this earlier time – says who?  Darwin, that’s who.  The evidence may not show it, and claiming it may require willing suspension of disbelief, but the Bearded Buddha asks for unfeigned faith.  But then why not apply the same faith to Titanoceratops (if such a species even existed) that was applied to the splay-footed cricket, saying it showed “incredible stasis” for 100 million years?
    Evolutionists have come up with the perfect crime.  No evidence will ever convict Darwin, because he bought out the police, the researchers, the politicians, the teachers, and the judges.  Will any magistrate in his totalitarian regime ever pay attention to a citizen’s arrest of these scientist impersonators? (see 09/30/2007 commentary).  If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?  Tell the unvarnished truth to whoever will listen, that’s what.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Darwin and Evolution

Martian Chronicles     02/03/2011    
Feb 03, 2011 — Recent news stories about Mars can be categorized into past, present, and future.

1. Mars past:  How Mars formed is a convoluted story.  That is evident from a report on PhysOrg that might suggest Mars modelers are drinking too much to relieve stress: “‘Marstinis’ could help explain why the red planet is so small.”  Mars seems the right size for itself, but for modelers, it is too small for their theories.  The article describes a kind of complex billiard game requiring Mars to migrate outward before it could grow its expected size.  As it went, it perturbed smaller planetesimals, objects the modelers dubbed “Marstinis.”  Those, in turn, might have gotten perturbed by giant planets, which were also migrating at the time.  This complex scenario has the benefit of simultaneously providing source material to explain another mystery – the Late Heavy Bombardment, needed to explain cratering on the moon.
       Divining Mars history in meteorites was discussed in another article on PhysOrg.  Studying wafer-thin slices of meteorites thought to have landed on Earth from Mars, scientists look for clues indicating large impacts on the red planet.  From conclusions reached, they try to infer impact effects on subsurface water and the production of carbonates, serpentine, clay and methane.  A scientist promised, “We are now starting to build a realistic model for how water deposited minerals formed on Mars, showing that impact heating was an important process.”
2. Mars present:  Several sources reported the surprise that Mars’ sand dunes can change quickly: Space.com, the BBC News, and PhysOrg among them.  “Scientists had considered the dunes to be fairly static, shaped long ago when winds on the planet’s surface were much stronger than seen today,” according to analysis of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera.  “Several sets of before-and-after images from HiRISE over a period covering two Martian years – four Earth years – tell a different story.”
       Scientists are seeking to understand how carbon dioxide sublimation – a process not occurring on earth – contributes to the rapid changes.  “There’s lots of debate about whether features we see on Mars could be produced in the current Mars climate or whether they require different conditions,” one scientist commented.  “The numbers and magnitude of the changes have been really surprising,” another said.
       Meanwhile, the THEMIS infrared camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter, NASA’s longest-running Mars mission, is studying Mars dust.  Dull as that sounds, it is actually an important source of information on Mars, as PhysOrg explained.  Principal investigator Philip Christensen has a puzzle: “There’s a good question why Mars isn’t a billiard-ball planet covered by a kilometer of dust,” he said, considering that scientists believe it has been there 4.5 billion years.  Explaining why the dust layer is thin required imagination: “Well, maybe throughout most of its history, Mars has had too thin an atmosphere to make dust or initiate saltation or wind abrasion,” he said; “No dust devils, no storms.”
       Mars seems poised on the brink of global dust storms that occasionally obscure the entire surface of the planet with dust as fine as talcum powder.  Calculations show that 100 meters of dust should blanket the planet in 4.5 billion years given current estimated dust creation rates.  To wriggle out of that anomaly, Christensen imagined that the atmosphere cycles in and out, actively creating dust only 2% of the time.  Even so, that would have produced 2 meters of dust on Mars, which he says is “about right,” provided he be forgiven for tweaking an unseen history to match the observations.
3. Mars future:  Interesting missions are being planned for Mars.  The big one is Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s long-awaited Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), nicknamed “Curiosity,” scheduled for launch in the fall.  Science Daily talked about its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM), which, along with other instruments, “will check for the ingredients of life.”  Ingredients is the operative word.  MSL will be unable to detect life, but may be able to determine once for all whether organic molecules are found on the Red Planet.
       An article about future Mars missions on PhysOrg has illustrations reminiscent of sci-if comic books.  The Center for Space Nuclear Research at Idaho National Laboratory is working on fleets of “Mars hoppers” they feel would be more efficient explorers of the Martian surface than rovers.  CSNR’s mission design includes a method for sample return – delivering Martian material back to Earth for analysis.  “A single rocket launch from Earth could deploy several hoppers at once,” the article explained.  “A few dozen hoppers could map the entire Martian surface in a few years.... Hoppers could also serve as a network of weather stations monitoring the Martian climate and could collect a trove of air, rock and soil samples to send back to Earth.”

Mars exists in the present.  We don’t see Mars in the past, or in the future.  We see effects produced by an unobserved history, and can extrapolate current processes a reasonable amount forward.  When scientists tweak too many parameters in their imagined scenarios – moving the planet in and out, imagining lucky-strike impacts at certain times and places where needed for theory, turning the atmosphere on and off to maintain a belief in billions of years, we have good reason to doubt the infallibility of their science.  Remember that scientific explanation is an entirely different enterprise than scientific discovery.  Let’s discover!  Go forth and conquer with Curiosity and better instrumentation.  Hop to it.  Data clear the fog and put storytellers out of business.  But always keep a wary eye on the opinions of scientists who practice divination, or who make reckless drafts on the bank of time.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Geology • Dating Methods

I do.  If I had to bet – and this is now beyond science – I would say that intelligent, technological critters are rare in the Milky Way galaxy.  The evidence mounts.  We Homo sapiens didn’t arise until some quirk of environment on the East African savannah – so quirky that the hominid paleontologists still can’t tell us why the australopithecines somehow evolved big brains and had dexterity that could play piano concertos, and things that make no real honest sense in terms of Darwinian evolution.
    Why the high chaparral on the East African savannah would’ve led to a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, never mind the ability to build rocket ships – there’s no evolutionary driver that the australopithecines suffered from that leads to rocket ships.  And so that – and the fact that we had to wait four billion years without humans.  Four billion years?

SPACE.com: Yes, it took four billion years to get there.

Marcy: Since the Cambrian explosion, we had hundreds of millions of years of multi-cellular, advanced life in which, guess what happened with brain size?  Nothing.

We humans came across braininess because of something weird that happened on the East African savannah.  And we can’t imagine whether that’s a common or rare thing.

SPACE.com: People assume evolution is directed, and it’s always leading toward higher complexity and greater intelligence, but it’s not.

Marcy: It’s not.  Dinosaurs show this in spades.

Are you sometimes undecided whether to laugh or weep for the SETI cultists?  Both responses can make you shed tears.  Marcy and his interviewer both admitted they are clueless, surprised, ignorant, and resigned to “Stuff Happens” as their scientific explanation for everything.  Swallowing the whole Darwin baggage of billions of years of evolution, he could only say that “something weird that happened on the East African savannah” – a hominid got a brain, and presto: a Tchaikovsky piano concerto.
    Now, while Dr. Marcy and the Kepler scientists deserve honors for collecting data with intelligently designed instruments, they’re not likely to rank very high as philosophers or theologians.  If the best philosophy they can invent is “stuff happens,” they have flunked out.  And if they cannot be convinced they are hopelessly lost via the evidence of the Privileged Planet, the SETI silence, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, and a Tchaikovsky piano concerto, is there any hope for today’s secular scientists being rescued from self-deception?
    Remember, these are the same people who refuse to let criticisms of Darwinism be heard in the schools or research labs.  Emperor Charlie is not only naked himself, he is surrounded by naked soldiers arresting the clothed little boy for indecent exposure.  Added to that, when you hear of communist and Muslim radicals calling for the complete overthrow of Western civilization, and the brutal murder of Supreme Court justices (video) and the news media totally ignoring their hate speech while calling out peace-loving conservative Christians for alleged violent rhetoric, it is hard not to conclude that most of the world has gone completely crazy.
    Don’t be surprised; it has gone crazy many times before.  Escape the craziness with power, love, and a sound mind (II Timothy 1:7).  Then rescue a neighbor.
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Metaphors of Evolution     02/01/2011    
Feb 01, 2011 — If Will Rogers never met a man he didn’t like, science never metaphor it didn’t force.  The history of science is replete with examples of metaphors not only trying to explain phenomena, but actually driving scientific research.  Many times thoughtless metaphors have said more about current social values than science.
    So argued Mary Midgley, a “a freelance philosopher, specialising in moral philosophy,” in an article on New Scientist:

The trouble with metaphors is that they don’t just mirror scientific beliefs, they also shape them.  Our imagery is never just surface paint, it expresses, advertises and strengthens our preferred interpretations.  It also usually carries unconscious bias from the age we live in – and this can be tricky to ditch no matter how faulty, unless we ask ourselves how and why things go wrong, and start to talk publicly about how we should understand metaphor.

• Nature, the clock:  Scientists in Newton’s day envisioned the world as a mechanical clock wound up by God.
• Nature, the billiard game:  Early atomists interpreted everything as colliding billiard-ball atoms.  Rousseau applied this to “social atomism.”
• Nature, the war of all against all:  Thomas Hobbes’ metaphor of a war of individuals “accidentally launched a wider revolt against the notion of citizenship,” Midgley said.  “The slogan made it possible to argue later that there is no such thing as society, that we owe one another nothing.”
• Nature, the capitalist:  Laissez-faire capitalism, Midgley argued, is an application of atomism to economics.
• Nature, the competitor:  Spencer and Darwin used the metaphor of competition to interpret nature, although Midgley asserts that “Charles Darwin actually hated much of it, flatly rejecting the crude, direct application of natural selection to social policies.”  Whether or not his emotions against competition were derived from science or from his cultural milieu is another question.
• Nature as selfish genes:  “Evolution has been the most glaring example of the thoughtless use of metaphor over the past 30 years, with the selfish/war metaphors dominating and defining the landscape so completely it becomes hard to admit there are other ways of conceiving it,” Midgley complained.
• Nature as self-organization:  D'Arcy Thompson, Brian Goodwin, Steven Rose and Simon Conway Morris have worked on the metaphor of unfolding organic forms, “a kind of self-organisation within each species, which has its own logic.”  Contrary to the long-held view of nature red in tooth and claw, Goodwin has written that humans are “every bit as co-operative as we are competitive; as altruistic as we are selfish.”

Now the old metaphors of evolution need to give way to new ones founded on integrative thinking – reasoning based on systems thinking.  This way, the work of evolution can be seen as intelligible and constructive, not as a gamble driven randomly by the forces of competition.  And if non-competitive imagery is needed, systems biologist Denis Noble has a good go at it in The Music Of Life, where he points out how natural development, not being a car, needs no single “driver” to direct it.  Symphonies, he remarks, are not caused only by a single dominant instrument nor, indeed, solely by their composer.  And developing organisms do not even need a composer: they grow, as wholes, out of vast and ancient systems which are themselves parts of nature.

Metaphors bewitch you (07/04/2003).  If Mary Midgley wants to criticize earlier scientists for imposing their social values (like competition) on nature, then how can she avoid being criticized for imagining nature to be a self-organizing system?  The next philosopher in future years could just as easily sneer at Midgley’s own misguided conceptions of nature, just as she sneered at evolutionists for being guilty of the most thoughtless uses of metaphor.
    Is it even possible for humans to perceive nature without metaphors?  If you look at the list, all of the suggested metaphors have presupposed intelligent agency: clocks, billiards, warfare, competition, selfish genes, symphonies.  Intelligence in the atomistic view is a little harder to spot, until you recognize that colliding atoms presuppose natural laws: spherical shapes, and consistent physics of collisions.  Theists draw on the metaphor of a Creator as Architect, Designer, Maker, and Overseer.  That is how God describes himself.  So if every other metaphor already presupposes intelligent agency, then theism must be the most accurate one.  Metaphors, therefore, can be true.
    If metaphors are inescapable, the symphony one is a good one.  God becomes the composer and conductor, His creatures the obedient yet skilled musicians, the instruments the capabilities, skills and talents he has endowed on his works.  The music is extended in time, with moments of tension and relaxation, periods where the listener is uncertain where the work is headed, but all working toward a planned finale.
    Remove the sheet music and the conductor, though, and you get nothing but endless tuning exercises that all sound alike.  Eventually the musicians leave and the music stops, having gone nowhere.  John Cage might be happy, but not the rest of us, who know design when we see it and hear it.  The fact that audiences vastly prefer Mozart to John Cage just might reveal something about reality.
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