When I lecture the first problem I face is not convincing the audience that I have the right answers but convincing them that they have been asking the wrong questions.  The conflict is not primarily about Genesis, nor does it involve a clash between science and religion, or between reason and faith.  It would be much more accurate to say that it involves a clash between two religions and two definitions of science.
— Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press, 2002), p. 60.

Plants Maximize Pipeline Efficiency   02/28/2003
Kate McCullough, a biologist at University of Utah, sliced 100,000 stems of plants and measured the diameters of their conduits, the xylem channels.  That’s a lot of tedious work, but she found that plants follow Murray’s law, an optimization principle that Cecil D. Murray formulated in 1926 to identify the best way to maximize flow in vessels.  The press release says “Plant plumbing is more human than once thought.”  McCullough’s results are published in the Feb. 28 issue of Nature.

How did the plant achieve this optimization?  Notice the flaky reasoning in the press release (emphasis added): [Co-author John S.] Perry says the plant also wants to minimize the energy and material it puts into building the water conduit system so it can conserve energy for the ultimate goal: reproduction.   ‘If you are an engineer building a plumbing system, you want to deliver the most water per unit of energy with the least amount of material – the cheapest and most effective conductance system you can design,’ he says.”  Let us ask, does a plant want anything?  Are plants engineers?  The quote only makes sense if an external Engineer made these things.  Plants are so good at doing what they do with the dew, because they do what they were designed to do.  Please do give due honor to Whom honor is due.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next amazing story.

We have the perfect solution.  Turn students on to Creation-Evolution Headlines and assign the Concise Guide to Evolutionary Theory and Baloney Detector as required reading.
    The paper promotes a “constructivist“ approach; i.e., avoid lecture and confrontation, and instead make the learning more interesting with games and historical sidebars (like Darwin’s voyage) and more student-student interaction.  Teachers should help students analyze and deconstruct their prior conceptions, and avoid presenting evolution as “unmitigated naturalism.”  The authors warn teachers that a “growing number of these students are well versed in the professional antievolution literature and practices” (e.g., creationism and intelligent design arguments), so they recommend helping students to compare their misconceptions with “standard science.”
    These ivory-tower elitists fail to put themselves onto the same playing field with eminent philosophers and scientists who disagree with them.  It would be beneath their dignity to have to debate the evidence in the open marketplace of ideas.  No; their mission is to facilitate the gentle dismantling of “misconceptions” that are causing the 90% of students who believe in God to have problems with the “fact” of evolution.  Never is the focus that evolution’s facts might be wrong.  If students just understood evolution, they would surely believe it.  They sound like Saddam Hussein saying “To know me is to love me.”
    As usual, the paper filled with philosophical arguments about what “science” is, compared to religion and other “prior conceptions” (as if Darwinism is never in that category).  To them, the truth of evolution is not at issue, because evolution is “science,” and anything else is irrational.  It is beyond their comprehension that intelligent people can be knowledgeable about Darwinism and fail to accept it.  So educators need to just facilitate their rehabilitation.  The evolutionary scientists already have the Ministry of Truth under control.  Alters and Nelson just want a more effective Ministry of Love.  (Keep those students away from black market copies of 1984.)
Next headline on: Schools. • Next headline on: Darwinism.

When every new find messes up the theories, it’s an indication the approach is wrong.  Do you notice, also, the ambition to find those illusive transitional forms?  The old 1891 Java Man is now just a historical footnote, a misinterpretation by an ambitious enthusiast, as this one appears destined to be.
Next headline on: Early Man.

• Given the relatively small number of working evolutionary biologists, the field receives a surprisingly large amount of media attention.
• Some of these [introductory] essays concern obvious organizing themes, such as the major transitions in evolution, macroevolution and the history of evolutionary thought.  Others are instructive but rather idiosyncratic choices.  The essays include pieces on motherhood, culture in chimpanzees, and darwinian medicine.
• What is more interesting [than the omitted topics] is the choice of some of the topics that have been included.  There are two articles on art, for example, an article on warfare, and even one on globalization.  Some of them have only tenuous connections to evolutionary thinking. . ... Maybe some of the more far-out articles will help to direct unique and energetic minds towards evolutionary pursuits.
• Many of the articles are written by researchers who have made key contributions to the areas about which they are writing.  This is good in that the authors are close to the cutting edge of their topics and are able to convey the latest findings.  The drawback is that, in some cases, the articles present an enthusiast’s view of each topic, rather than the more even-handed account that might be expected had the editors employed professional science writers rather than researchers.  Personally, I like the approach taken by the encyclopedia, but readers should recognize that they may have to read material from other sources to obtain a balanced view.
• Teachers will use it for preparing lectures and reading materials, but they will also need a copy to check for cheaters - this is likely to be one of the most widely plagiarized books in the history of evolutionary biology.

Plagiarized, perhaps, because bored students assigned to write term papers on evolution will probably parrot whatever these 330 soothsayers say, whether on art, warfare, ape culture, globalization, or motherhood, without questioning it.  To see how far evolutionary imperialism has invaded other territories, one need look no farther than a few pages down in the same issue of Nature, where two teams of evolutionary sociobiologists debate the evolution of religion and belief in supernatural punishment, based on evolutionary game theory.  (See the Sept. 3 2002 headline for a similar example and important commentary.)  One piece of Peck’s advice should be emphasized: you should read material from other sources (like you are right now) to obtain a balanced view.  How about Pascal’s version of game theory?
    There is only a “relatively small number of working evolutionary biologists” perhaps because the field is so useless.  What is evolutionary biology good for, except inventing just-so stories about everything and anything in nature, despite the evidence, based on theories that are continually being undermined by new observations?  See our Jan. 13 headline to judge whether Darwinian medicine is helping anyone.  Look through the chain links on Darwin to see how evolutionists wildly extrapolate their data, weave tales almost by magic, how they build their ideas on logical fallacies, how evolutionary ideas keep running into contrary evidence, how evolutionists keep changing their stories, and rely on flawed approaches and mechanisms that don’t work even though assumed for decades.  We should have known in the 1880s that evolutionary storytelling was a waste of time in vain and sophistical disputes, but now they have fossils that contradict evolution and molecular machines to contend with.
    To the extent any article in the Encyclopedia of Evolution talks about real data that is observable, testable, and repeatable, it may have some merit.  Otherwise, it is a treatise on the art of storytelling, written by “enthusiasts” on “far-out” and “idiosyncratic” ideas that, despite their entrenchment in academia, and the hot air of Darwin’s propagandists, are on the way out.  But the two-volume set is not a total waste of money.  4 kg is about right for a hamburger press.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Sexual Selection: Darwin Was Wrong   02/26/2003
Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden has found so many exceptions to Darwin’s ideas about sexual selection, she wrote a book about them: Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (University of California Press, 2003).  But she doesn’t have “a theory to address it all, by any means; I’m just trying to get the extent of diversity on the table,“ she said.  The Stanford report paraphrases her view: “A great deal of empirical evidence exists that refutes Darwinian sexual selection.  It’s difficult to tell just how many exceptions there are to the rule because observations may have been skewed by Darwinian biases” (emphasis added).  Other scientists are reluctant to go as far as Roughgarden’s assessment, but she is emphatic (emphasis added): “The whole context for Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is dissolving.  So Darwin is incorrect in the particulars, but more importantly, [his theory of sexual selection] is inadequate even as an approach.”
Update 03/26/2003: The March 26, 2003 issue of Nature has a news feature on Roughgarden’s claims.  Though not willing to throw out sexual selection entirely, it gives her ideas fair coverage.  It does ask, however, whether her political advocacy and homosexual activism might be coloring her views – a charge she, of course, denies.

We add a word of caution, that Roughgarden seems a little intent on rationalizing feminism and homosexuality by observing animal behavior, which is also “inadequate even as an approach” for humans.  Formerly Jonathan, transgender homosexual Joan Roughgarden has a lifestyle to whitewash.  Paul Vasey, not as revolutionary as Roughgarden, explains: “People often look to animals to decide for themselves what’s natural and what’s not natural.  I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing to do.  I mean, animals engage in cannibalism and infanticide.  They also don’t take care of elderly individuals.  Just because animals do something doesn’t make it right or wrong.”  To that we add that we are men, not beasts; we have a soul, and we have the Manufacturer’s operating instructions.
    But the point is, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection was not only wrong in the particulars (the observations), but in the whole methodology.  It had the effect of biasing the very way scientists looked at the evidence.  Could a similar phenomenon be happening with natural selection, and with Roughgarden’s own naturalistic approach?
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

A cell, like a metropolitan city, must organize its bustling community of macromolecules.  Setting meeting points and establishing the timing of transactions are of fundamental importance for cell behavior.  The high degree of spatial/temporal organization of molecules and organelles within cells is made possible by protein machines that transport components to various destinations within the cytoplasm.

To achieve law and order on the intracellular highways, the multiple cargo-carrying motors in a single cell must be regulated.  In the majority of animal cells, individual organelles switch frequently between anterograde (microtubule plus-end-directed) and retrograde (minus-end-directed) movement .... In most cells, relatively little is known about the regulation and coordination of bidirectional motion. ... individual cargoes move primarily unidirectionally in these extended processes, and a switch in direction occurs when cargoes reach the ends of these elongated structures.

The microscopic observations of cargo transport in axons and flagella raise a number of similar questions.  How do the opposite polarity motors, kinesin and dynein, coordinate their activities?  What kind of machinery processes the incoming cargo and switches motor direction at the ‘turnaround’ zones?  Molecular answers to these questions are beginning to emerge but are far from complete.

Vale’s article is another of many we have reported that seems schizophrenic.  On one side of his brain, he marvels at the engineering and design, and on the other side, attributes it all to chance.  Here is Vale’s storytelling about how this coordinated transportation system arose: “The complexity of these ‘Toolbox’ motors expanded in higher eukaryotes through gene duplication, alternative splicing, and the addition of associated subunits, which enabled new cargoes to be transported.”  Impressed?  Well, for crying out loud, how did the motors get there in the first place?  Marvel at this explanation: “Recent genomic and functional studies suggest that five cargo-carrying motors emerged in primitive eukaryotes and have been widely used throughout evolution.”  There you have it, folks.  They just “emerged”.  The miracle alarm just went off.  It’s time to declare an “emerge”ncy and kick the evolutionary gullibility out of science.
    Footnote: In the same issue of Cell, an Austrian team discusses the state of knowledge about meiosis (cell division for sexual reproduction).  They note that there is no evidence for evolution of this highly complex series of processes (emphasis added):

In summary, the behavior of chromosomes in meiosis is much more complex than in mitosis.  Additional demands such as chiasmata formation, mono-orientation of sister kinetochores, protection of centromeric cohesion, and prevention of DNA replication between the two divisions are imposed upon the chromosome segregation machinery.  These processes are discussed in detail in the following sections.  Despite its greater complexity, there is no clear evidence that meiosis evolved later than mitosis.  There are, for example, no extant lineages that appear to have split off the eukaryotic tree before the evolution of meiosis (Cavalier-Smith, 2002).

So here is another wonder that just “emerged.”  Evolution is the religion of miracles that emerge out of the foaming sea of purposelessness.
    Footnote 2: Another molecular motor story appeared on EurekAlert Feb 25.  Stanford scientists are studying kinesin, the “workhorse of the cell,“ which hauls chromosomes, neurotransmitters and other vital cargo.  Joshua Shaevitz describes it: “This is one of the most efficient engines anyone has ever seen.  Some estimates put it at near 100 percent efficiency.  It’s an amazing little thing.”  His colleague Charles Asbury chimes in with elegant prose, “Kinesin is an example where Mother Nature kicks our butt.  For me, I’m motivated just by understanding how this fascinating thing works.”  One thing is for sure.  It’s not the believers in intelligent design that are getting their butts kicked by the accelerating discoveries about molecular machines.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design. • Next amazing story.

This is so lame it hardly deserves a comment.  Evolutionists see the forces of destruction as the new creator gods.  Lightning, chance and meteor blasts are now the cosmic garden of Eden.  Should they teach this nonsense in the schools?
    Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, organic chemist, used to be outraged that students were never told that amino acids must be optically pure (single-handed), or they are biologically useless.  Miller’s results, and those of all other naturalistic experiments, are always 50-50 (racemic) mixtures of left and right handed forms.  Even one amino acid of the wrong hand is enough to ruin the enzymatic capabilities of a polypeptide.  It requires intelligence to separate them: information must be supplied from the outside to make them all one-handed.  But information is precluded by the presuppositions of naturalism.
    Along that line, the claimed slight excess of one hand seen in the amino acids found in the Murchison meteorite has been recently suspected as being due to earthly contamination.  No natural process ever produces amino acids of a single hand, because the two forms have equal entropy.
    Evolutionists have two monstrous hurdles right out of the starting gate with their naturally-formed amino acids and nucleotides: (1) achieving optical purity, which is astronomically improbable, and (2) producing a sequence that has any functional specificity; i.e., writing a coded language by chance.  It’s not going to happen, here or in 10¹⁰⁰ universes.  Chemical evolutionists need to stop spewing their nonsense about impacts and sparks breeding life, and tell the truth: all observational science demonstrates that information requires an intelligence cause.
Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next dumb story.

The discovery of rotary motors like ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellum in living cells has caused a great deal of excitement and astonishment, not just because they are cute, but they are extremely efficient (nearly 100%, utilizing the Brownian motion of the cell to their advantage), and absolutely essential to life.  Add this one to the growing list of molecular machines.  Did you notice it exists in Archaea and eubacteria, the most “primitive” of lifeforms?  How can evolution hope to explain rotary engines with highly efficient, fine-tuned moving parts, in the earliest cells?  They cannot.
    You never see an evolutionist giving a plausible sequence of steps from a random collection of molecules to a rotary motor like ATP synthase, because the machine is useless unless it is fully assembled.  Either everything works, or nothing works.  Yet life depends on the ATP generated by these exquisite molecular machines.  Don’t forget also that these machines are composed of parts all of one hand, and the motor requires an even more complex set of blueprints and assembly instructions that can be accurately reproduced from cell to cell.  Evolutionism retreats into fantasyland trying to explain such wonders without design.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry.

China has become one of the world’s hottest fossil collecting spots.  These fossils surely deserve careful examination and study.  The article here, however, is so impregnated with evolutionary assumptions that trying to get at the actual raw data without the assumptions is like trying to unsalt an egg.  The authors are totally convinced that the data support evolution, but some interesting aspects come to light when you read closely (emphasis added in quotes):

• “The dating of the Yixian and Jiufotang Formations [the primary geological strata housing the beds] has proved to be contentious.”  The authors make a case for early Cretaceous (110-125 million years), but other indications are late Jurassic (137-147 million years).  If late Jurassic, it pushes the origin of birds and mammals uncomfortably early in the fossil record.  One reason they doubt the Jurassic date is that “the evidence suggests that the samples used were either altered diagenetically or contained trapped argon, either of which could adversely affect the results of the analyses.”  How can we be sure their preferred dates are not similarly contaminated, considering their zeal to put the fossils into a certain time period that fits with their evolutionary assumptions?
• The fossils were buried in mass-kill catastrophic events.  The excellent preservation state of the fossils is due largely to volcanic tuff, which kept oxygen and burrowing creatures from decaying or disrupting the trapped remains.  Moreover, the deposits are intruded by basalt dikes and sills.  The authors describe the Yixian outcrop at Lujiatun near Beipiao, western Liaoning Province: “The fossil-bearing tuffs at this locality lack obvious bedding planes, suggesting that this deposit resulted from a single, catastrophic mass mortality event.”
      In addition, from their map, the catastrophe apparently occurred over a vast area.  The Yixiang and Jiufotang formations cover half of China, southern Japan, all of Korea, and most of Mongolia.  If such a large area contains similar fossil deposits, this represents a cataclysm too large to fit within uniformitarian assumptions.
• Although the authors present arguments for birds evolving from dinosaurs, it had to occur rapidly: “Body size and locomotory differences between sympatric Jehol taxa indicate that a rapid ecological diversification of avian taxa occurred during the early Cretaceous.”  Confuciusornis, a bird, “is represented by hundreds of specimens from the same locality, suggesting a mass mortality event.”  Another bird, Yanornis, “possessed an advanced flight apparatus, including an elongated, deeply keeled sternum and a coracoid of ‘modern’ appearance, both of which indicate strong flight capability.”  The stratigraphic scale provided as an illustration shows Confuciusornis at the bottom layers, indicating that numerous flight adaptations would have had to evolve simultaneously and rapidly.
      Interestingly, the authors make a case for the cursorial theory of the evolution of flight, but then in a late-news footnote, mention the new Microraptor gui fossil that “provides additional support for the hypothesis that this taxon was an arboreal glider.”  Thus the debate over dinosaurs learning to fly by running along the ground or jumping out of the trees continues unresolved.
• The authors claim early on that the beds provide clues to the origin of flowering plants, but further down say: “putative early angiosperms ... although rare, have been proposed as the oldest flowering plants, and have received disproportionate attention owing to their possible relevance to the origin and early radiation of angiosperms.  Most of these ‘angiosperms’ have now been discredited, and only Archaefructus is currently thought to represent a stem-group flowering plant.  In our view, however, the affinities of this taxon remain controversial.”  This plant lacks petals, but contains stamens, anthers, pollen sacs and pinnately compound leaves, and disputably, carpels.  Other important features that might resolve the controversy remain unknown.  “Therefore,” they conclude, “we cannot unquestioningly accept Archaefructus as an angiosperm.” 
• The authors cannot decide if the beds represent a refugium or a cradle; i.e., was it a ‘lost world’ of Cretaceous ecology insulated from the rest of the world, or a nursery of new species that evolved only in this locale?  “Why did east Asia host a combination of relicts, cosmopolitan taxa and endemics at this time?” they ask.  “The Jehol Group can be viewed as a window on succession in an Early Cretaceous terrestrial biome, in which an established biota merged with and was partially replaced by a novel biota composed of immigrants and new taxa that were evolving in situ.”  But this is a story imposed on the evidence.
• Illegal collecting is confusing the picture; the authors cannot distinguish the genuine from the fake.  “Advances in our understanding of the Jehol Biota have been hampered by illegal collecting, manufacture of faked and composite specimens (as in the ‘Archaeoraptor’ debacle), illegal sale and export of fossils, and difficulties in the acquisition of specimens by international scientific institutions bound by ethical collecting standards.”  Private collectors have not been accurately recording the context of their finds: the stratigraphy, locality, and sedimentology.
• Evidence for rapid burial is abundant.  “Freshwater and terrestrial organisms from the biota usually occur together within the same sedimentary horizon.  Preservation of complete articulated shells, arthropod exoskeletons, vertebrate skeletons and terrestrial plant stems with associated leaves, rootlets and other structures, indicates that all of these specimens originated in close proximity to low-energy lacustrine [lake] depositional sites and were not transported over extensive distances.  Individual elements are generally unbroken and display little or no abrasion.”

Clearly these beds are exciting and amazing, and much work remains to be done.  But so far, does a clear picture of evolution emerge?  The evidence indicates rapid burial by catastrophic events covering vast regions, burying hundreds specimens of a single species in one locale.  There is abrupt appearance of diverse plants and animals.  The dating is contentious.  Even with the cases they make for evolution, they need to make it happen fast, and fail to explain how or why a dinosaur would develop advanced flying technology.  The context of the fossils is unclear.  If true birds are found below the so-called ‘feathered dinosaurs,’ for instance, they cannot use the latter as precursors of the former.  From this article, it is also not clear if anyone can distinguish which fossils are genuine; it could be that some of the alleged transitional forms are fakes or composites.  It’s always wise to wait for the rest of the story, as we saw with the “Archaeoraptor debacle.”  A reader writes, “ What would these folks do if they saw a flying squirrel, flying fish, or flying snake?  I’ve seen all of those, but I haven’t seen any of them grow feathers, or change into birds.  They are kind of like the ‘jumping dinosaurs’.  Why aren’t they evolving?”
    The Nature authors are like evolutionary salt shakers, flavoring the data to their taste in every paragraph.  Yet the sample problems we have listed above cast doubt on their story and allow for different interpretations of the same evidence.  A few of the gaps (which are systematic in the fossil record) they claim to fill, but there’s another deposit in the region that throws the whole evolutionary story into disrepute: the Chengyiang bed in southern China.  Here, the Cambrian Explosion has been documented in fine detail; all the major animal phyla appear in the early Cambrian without precursors.  Even though conditions for the preservation of ancestral forms, whether soft-bodied or microscopic, are ideal (even sponge embryos are found in similar strata), the precursors are nowhere to be found.  Paleontologist J. Y. Chen said in the film Icons of Evolution, “Darwinism is maybe only telling part of the story for evolution.  Darwin’s tree is a reverse cone shape.  Very unexpectedly, our research is convincing us that major phyla is starting down below at the beginning of the Cambrian.  The base is wide and gradually narrows.  This is almost turned a different way.”  His colleague Zhou Qui Gin, a senior research fellow at the site, says (translated), “I do not believe that animals developed gradually from the bottom up.  I think the animals suddenly appeared.  Among the Chengyiang animals we have found 136 different kinds of animals.  And they represent diversity in the level of phyla and classes.  So they sudden appearance makes them very special.”
    If all the animal and plant types appeared abruptly at the Cambrian, then evolution is debunked right there.  Zhou, Barrett and Hilton cannot therefore make a case for Darwinism in the Cretaceous.  Perhaps with different glasses on, paleontologists will find the same ‘reverse cone’ in the Jehol strata.  Earlier epochs were much richer in species diversity.  By comparison, our world is impoverished.  This is devolution, not evolution.  Consider this in a creation context; if the antediluvian world were much richer in species than the present, and were buried in catastrophes, would we not expect to find apparent transitional forms?  I.e., some extinct species might be force-fitted by today’s evolutionists into the gaps, even when the original creatures had no phylogenetic relationship.  The observed species are the tips of branches; the tree is only inferred.  It follows that the more tips you have, the more trees you can draw.  We expect the Jehol specimens, when sifted of fakes and correlated, will preserve the world-wide ‘reverse cone’ picture, and confirm the general pattern that gave rise to the punctuated equilibria model: abrupt appearance of animals and plants, stasis, and extinction.
    The spectacularly preserved fossils in the Jehol Biota need to be interpreted in their own context, without evolutionary presuppositions adding a preferred seasoning.
Next headline on: Fossils. • Next headline on: Darwinism.

Why, though, should it be necessary to repair damaged RNA?  The answer could be that although DNA is the final arbiter of genetic information, RNA is essential for the most basic biological processes.  RNA-based primer sequences are required for DNA replication; and mRNAs, transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs) are all needed during the elaborate process of protein synthesis.  Even the formation of peptide bonds by ribosomes (the cell’s protein-making machines) turns out to require catalysis mediated by rRNAs.  Moreover, a battery of small, non-protein-coding RNAs regulates a variety of other cellular processes.
    So maintaining RNA integrity is important for proper cellular function.  And repairing damaged RNA may be more efficient than destroying it and starting again.  Ribosome assembly is a complex, energy-intensive process, and it is not hard to imagine that the thrifty repair of damaged rRNA would be preferable to disassembling or discarding an entire ribosomal particle.

A cell has a great investment in its RNAs – they are working copies of its genomic information.  The study of mRNA biogenesis in the last few years has revealed an elaborate surveillance mechanism involving factors such as the UPF proteins that culls aberrantly spliced mRNAs and mRNAs with premature termination codons.  There might be a hint that such RNA quality control mechanisms go awry in cancers, just as DNA quality control mechanisms do, where aberrantly spliced transcripts accumulate in a tumor.  Now that the gates are open, we may have a flood of studies on the RNome [the RNA genome] stability and cancer.

This aggravates the chicken-and-egg problem for evolutionists.  In the “RNA World” hypothesis for the origin of life, RNA performed both the information storage and enzymatic functions before these roles were outsourced to DNA and proteins.  But how could RNA repair itself?  If RNA needs to be protected from damage, the protein repair system would have needed to be there from the beginning.  Evolutionists might surmise that different primitive RNAs worked side by side to repair each other, but that strains credibility for a hypothesis already far-fetched.
    In typical evolutionary lingo, Begley and Samson blow smoke about what nature produced (emphasis added): “It seems that, for each human protein, parameters have evolved to distinguish between RNA and DNA,” they speculate, and in another place, “It might be that the RNA-demethylation activity of AlkB-like proteins evolved to regulate biological RNA methylation, and that the repair of aberrant, chemical methylation is fortuitous.”  Ask them how the cell evolved these things, and you’ll probably get a quizzical look, as if “Why are you asking such a dumb question?  I don’t know.  It just had to.  We’re here, aren’t we?”
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

Mitochondrial DNA Database Full of Mistakes   02/19/2003
Whoops; more than half of published mitochondrial DNA sequences contain mistakes, reports the Feb. 20 issue of Nature.  These sequences have been the basis of many evolutionary studies.  According to one analyst, “the problem is far bigger than researchers had imagined.”  Another is worried that “these errors could be compounded in the databases.”

Some of the stories we have been told about evolution in the genes may evaporate with this revelation.  The article admits, “The mistakes may be so extensive that geneticists could be drawing incorrect conclusions in studies of human populations and evolution. ... Forster’s error-detection method, which involves constructing evolutionary trees based on how sequences change, may even underestimate the extent of the errors.”  There is even a more ominous concern over nuclear DNA: “Forster notes that nuclear DNA sequences in public databases are also plagued by errors, and that this may be an even bigger problem, as such mistakes are more difficult to detect.”  Can we trust the phylogenetic trees evolutionists are building on flawed data?
Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

The “delicate filigree coating” in the shells provides strength and beauty.  Why must these attributes be mutually exclusive?  Gothic cathedrals were ornate but also structurally sound, and medieval chain mail provided protection as well as a display of artistic craftsmanship.  There is no reason to exclude “useless” beauty in the design of diatoms if they were created, and there is no reason for evolution to evolve beauty for microscopic organisms who only need to survive.  Look at the star-shaped example in the article and consider that this is just one of many thousands of geometrical shapes produced by these tiny algae.
    Who is there to appreciate these things if not man?  Diatoms surely could not care what they look like (ever seen a diatom looking in at itself in a mirror?).  Nor would evolution care to produce five-pointed stars and triangles and spheres with “lacework veneer of holes and grooves ... more intricately tooled than the finest suit of medieval armour,” as Philip Ball describes them, if durability were the only factor being winnowed by natural selection.  Consider also the wonder of how these single-cell plants undergo division and produce identical copies of themselves and their shells.  No Gothic cathedral can do that!
    Frisch and Ball cannot get away from personifying Nature for “her” ability to create beautiful designs, prodigal or not.  And they fail to provide a “sound evolutionary reason” for why or how impersonal laws and natural selection could combine strength and beauty into such miniature works of art.  Instead, it would seem the Creator hid a million wonders for humans to discover, some that awaited the invention of the microscope and telescope, to demonstrate His power and wisdom, His care for even small things, and the inability of human nature philosophies to explain them.  Wouldn’t that fit perfectly with what Psalm 96 says:
    “Oh, sing to the LORD a new song!  Sing to the LORD, all the earth.  Sing to the LORD, bless His name; Proclaim the good news of His salvation from day to day.  Declare His glory among the nations, His wonders among all peoples. 
    For the LORD is great and greatly to be praised; He is to be feared above all gods.  For all the gods of the peoples are idols*, But the LORD made the heavens.  Honor and majesty are before Him; Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.”
*e.g., Mother Nature, or Natural Selection.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next amazing story.

This is the language of intelligent design, not evolution.  Wilson’s talk must have provided an interesting contrast to Michael Ruse’s outburst (see next headline).
    For a fascinating animation of cellular processes, see the film Voyage Inside the Cell by Sardet, Larsonneur and Koch.  In the animation, you can view molecular machines at work as if riding on a flying carpet through a huge factory.  You glimpse what a fantastically complex process cell division is, with each gene being copied into two strands by motors.  Then they all get coiled and bundled into chromosomes that look like skyscrapers, then they are pulled apart by molecular winches.  This really happens.  It’s probably happening right now, in millions of cells in your body.
Next headline on: The Cell.

It’s good whenever students can hear both sides of this issue; this is a positive change from the one-sided indoctrination that has been the rule.  If Darwin’s advice was right, the fair result of watching the ranting and raving of his disciples will be bad for his theory.  Get your Baloney Detector out; here is Ruse’s statement for you to peruse [our comments in brackets]:

Scientific creationism is as dead as the dodo [bluffing, big lie, and ridicule].  Even ardent American evangelical Christians [generality, bandwagon] are starting to realize that there really is no good scientific evidence [generality] to take the early chapters of Genesis absolutely literally [straw man and equivocation; then why is Answers in Genesis so popular?]   God’s creative efforts took more than six days, and Noah’s flood did not cover the whole earth [bluffing, authority].  Unfortunately, [value judgment] "creationism lite," [ridicule] better known as intelligent design, continues to thrive like [analogy] a virulent [fear-mongering] social disease [loaded words, association].  Its supporters push it with enthusiasm and skill [should they not?], and by appealing to ignorance [big lie; that’s what Darwinists do] and to the American sense of fair play "If they can have their views expounded in schools, why shouldn't we have ours?" [straw man; students should learn critical thinking, not by indoctrination].  It is an ongoing threat [fear-mongering] to biology education [non-sequitur] in state-supported schools [the schools belong to the American taxpayers, not the Darwinists].  Therefore, I welcome [irrelevant] the sound [value judgment] endorsement of evolution and criticism of intelligent design by the [authority] American Association for the Advancement of Science [do you also support their teaching of native American religion?], and I am quite unmoved [who cares what moves you] by the mishmash of half reasons [bluffing, ad hominem] given in defense of intelligent design by William Dembski.

I have said it before [Saying something doesn't make it so].  I will say it again [Repetition does not establish validity].  The fact of evolution [equivocation] is as well established [big lie] as the heliocentric theory of the solar system [faulty analogy].  The evidence – fossils [ever heard of the Cambrian explosion?], homology, biogeography, systematics [three fields invented by creationists] and much more [bluffing] – is overwhelming [he needs to read Creation-Evolution Headlines].  As the great [authority] evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky used to say: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” [Saying something doesn’t make it so].  The theory of evolution is still much debated [you said it was a fact], but no one denies that natural selection is a very important mechanism [vague], explaining at the physical level the eye and the hand [big lie, bluffing] and at the micro level the various essential processes and parts of the body [big lie, bluffing], including those highlighted by the intelligent-design enthusiasts [no support provided for this statement, to be accepted on his authority; follow our links on The Cell or Darwin for contrary evidence from evolutionists].

Nothing – absolutely nothing [bluffing, generality] – the ID people have said in any way challenges this fact [monstrous lie].  The biochemist Michael Behe trots out blood clotting and more, despite the fact that the experts in the field [authority] protest that he has the science wrong (and much out of date) [bluffing; the shoe is on the other foot, as he has shown in his rebuttals].  Behe refuses [ad hominem] to answer questions posed by critics like Ken Miller [big lie] who point to the difficulties in his position, such as when and where did complex organisms get created and why [red herring; irrelevant] (if in the present) do we have no observational evidence [big lie] and why (if in the past) they did not degenerate if they existed (as they must have done) before they were used? [straw man; they have]  Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher, appeals to mathematical theorems [so do evolutionists], such as the No Free Lunch Theorem, which tells us that to get real design out we must put real design in.  Why does he not address the relevant issue [big lie; he has], namely that evolutionists claim [saying something doesn’t make it so] that, thanks to selection, [glittering generality] we can get apparent design out? [Dembski has repeatedly addressed this; it has been a primary focus of his writing].  What relevance does any of his mathematics have to this altogether-different [either-or fallacy] claim? [sounds like Ruse did not read the book.]

The real tragedy [loaded word] is not the exclusion of intelligent design.  It is that where ID succeeds politically [fear-mongering] and, if President Bush gets his way [irrelevant political red herring] over future appointments to the Supreme Court, I fear [fear-mongering] that it will succeed mightily [praise the Lord], politically students are not being taught the best of modern science [non-sequitur] and the methods to carry the enterprise forward [Ruse always stresses that evolution is directionless, so ‘forward’ has no meaning].  Good science means sweating it out with nature, trying to uncover her laws [personification], pitting your wits against the evidence [at which Darwinism fails miserably, clinging to dogma in spite of the evidence].  It does not mean appealing to miracles when the going gets rough [straw man].  This is neither good science nor good religion [Is Ruse now a judge of religion?].  For remember: there is nothing in Christianity (or Judaism) that demands the invocation of miracles to explain the wonderful world around us [straw man, appeasement, misrepresentation], and much that tells us that it is a denial of our God-given powers of sense and reason [we thought Ruse didn’t believe in miracles] to take such an easy route [straw man].  It is in the struggle for scientific understanding [non-sequitur] that humans do truly show that they are made in the image of their Creator [What does this line have to do with Darwinism?  Is Ruse a creationist?] and are not simply modified monkeys [appeasement].

Is there any light in this heat?  Are we to just accept this tantrum of baseless sound and fury based on his chutzpah?  (“I have said it before.  I will say it again” – find somebody who cares!)  Evolutionists must surely be embarrassed if this is the greatest philosopher on their team.  Read the book No Free Lunch, Dr. Ruse, this time with your eyes open.  (By the way, you’re cute when you’re mad.)
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Well, this is rich.  Not one mutation has ever been shown to be truly beneficial in the sense of creating a new organ or function, but here Klein has the humanities born in an instant by mistake.  We ask, did the man and his wife both get the lucky mistake at the same time so they could pass it on?  How can a paper like this get presented to an association dedicated to the advancement of science?  It is based on a lack of evidence, and built on a flawed view of human history and dating that assumes a position (evolution) from start to finish, even when it leads to absurdities.  First, he assumes humans arrived via evolution from lower animals, and that Neanderthals were other than human.  Then he thinks he knows when they and modern humans lived.  Then he assumes the foxp2 gene is responsible for the humanities, and that it mutated exactly 50,000 years ago (when according to him, it could have mutated “sometime between last Tuesday and 200,000 years ago.”)  Then worst of all, he attributes the richness of human culture to a mistake!
    We must rid our minds of this evolutionary foolishness and approach the data honestly.  What do we find?  Bones and artifacts, without dates on them.  A sudden explosion of art, jewelry, painting and culture.  Genes that are the epitome of complex specified information.  Looking at this evidence candidly, without evolutionary presuppositions, does it look like evolution?  Doesn’t it, instead, look like human history after Babel?
    You cannot have confidence in a scientific theory without observations.  Prehistoric, by definition, means lacking human observers, and Klein admits it: “Unless we get a time machine or eyewitnesses, there will always be some uncertainty about what happened in prehistory.”  OK, we call our First Eyewitness to the stand.
Next headline on: Early Man. • Next dumb story.

It is one thing to be a good listener, but it is another to act on bad advice.  Most native Americans are wonderful people, and they do have some things to teach westerners, but their traditional philosophy of nature is poison to science.  If the AAAS thinks that listening to the spirit of the coyote is going to help them understand the world, science will take an about-face.
    This editor once heard a Park Ranger at Navajo National Monument explain that in Navajo culture, it is taboo for a child to ask questions.  When the parent or shaman is ready, he will tell the child what to believe.  Some northern California Indians were afraid to enter the redwood forests, and some Wyoming tribes afraid to enter the geyser basins, for fear of evil spirits.  The great goal of a young Indian was to go on a vision quest, empty his mind, and learn from the spirits what to do.  How can anyone learn science without renouncing such blatant superstitions?  At a time when Christians are routinely bashed by certain establishment scientists (especially anti-creationists), why does native American religion get such good press, and such politically-correct deference, especially from the AAAS, whose mission is to overcome superstition? 
    This is by no means a blanket condemnation of native American thought – there is enough evil and stupidity to go around in any culture, because all are in rebellion against their Creator – but the gentle, environmentally-conscious, harmonious depiction in Dancing with Wolves with its anti-Western undercurrent was distorted with half-truths and whitewash.  Suffice it to say the native Americans did not invent modern science.  Believers in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures did, based on their belief in a law-giving God, linear time, and a universe that was other than God (see our chapter on the rise of modern science, with disclaimers and definitions).  Does the AAAS feel kinship with native Americans because of a common pantheistic world view, that invokes emergence and self-organizational principles to explain the origin of life, and game theory to explain the interactions between species?
    Here’s what we suggest.  Yes, listen to them, visit their lands, strive to build bridges and relationships, and avoid unnecessary confrontation.  That makes sense with any culture.  But don’t compromise truth with superstition.  Statements like the following are just patronizing:

He [a tribal professor] notes that physics, mathematics and astronomy use the circle to represent periodicity.  “In other contexts, it represents balance, wholeness, perpetuity and non-linearity.”

That is not going to help a student do math.  The AAAS could learn from missionaries who understand cross-cultural ministry.  They know it is important to build relationships, spend time and listen when making contact with another culture.  One must build trust, establish common ground, and understand the other person’s point of view.  It is even helpful to build from their vocabulary and traditions rather than jump in with foreign words and concepts.  But a good missionary will not compromise the message; she or he knows the people need to repent of their false beliefs and believe the truth.  Native Americans, for all the richness their culture brings, need to repent of anti-scientific superstitions.  The spirit of the coyote is going to keep them in darkness.
Next headline on: Schools.

It takes one to know one.  Is his brain a cut above those in the Pentagon, or shall we conclude his evolutionary thinking is still in the stone age, too?  He might have a point in the area of pop music.
    Some evolutionists sit in their ivory towers and pronounce moral judgments on the rest of us.  Roscoe seems to think his evolutionary views allow him to advise national security policy.  What Roscoe needs to do is learn to be consistent with his own presuppositions.  If war is what has evolved, then war is good.  If everyone else has a stone-age brain, then Roscoe has a stone-age brain.  If we are only glorified hunter-gatherers, then go hunt and gather more nuts (you are what you eat).
    People used to believe in antiquated ideas like moral absolutes that gave a somewhat different slant on war and peace, ideas like sin and the existence of evil, and the responsibility to oppose it.  We suspect that if a terrorist hit his campus with smallpox, and he watched his colleagues, students, and friends all succumbing to an agonizing death, he would have a quick change of philosophy.
Next headline on: Politics. • Next dumb story.

The data are not new, just improved.  Is there a Big Bang in the dots?  We just see some dots.  Actually, the dots indicate to some astronomers that their models were wrong.  The standard model of inflation, the one in the textbooks, is wrong.  But two wrongs don’t make a right.  If it is not A and not B, you cannot assume it must be C, unless C is the only other option.  By insisting on philosophical naturalism, cosmologists have ruled out a whole class of causes that might just be true, like design.  The WMAP press releases are full of hubris about what the dots mean.  We’ve seen many times before that the same data, using different assumptions, can be used to justify a totally different interpretation.  And how do they know these temperature fluctuations have no other cause?  Remember how gravitational lenses and cosmic acceleration came out of left field, catching cosmologists off guard?  What might be announced next year? 
    The pointillist artwork from WMAP is not the issue.  The scientists and technicians did a good job with their instruments.  It’s the interpretation; what do the dots mean?  Cosmologists still have massive gaps and anomalies in their naturalistic story: they do not know what dark matter is, they do not know what dark energy is, and they have a worse lumpiness problem now that stars formed half a billion years earlier than theorists had thought (assuming their assumptions).  Further, they do not know what would have ignited a big bang or what came before it, inflation theory is still ad hoc and metaphysical, they don’t understand how our universe attained such a low-entropy state, and the anthropic characteristics of our universe that allow life to exist remain fundamental philosophical mysteries.  (See our Nov. 2 headline for more problems.)  As John Hartnett has observed, “In short, the big bang is first assumed to be true and they adjust their parameters to get the theory to fit the data.  Because of this circular reasoning, it would be a miracle if it did not ’confirm’ the big bang.”
    The believing cosmologists do not even claim they are anywhere near to having a precise theory; Michael Turner called it “the first step in a long march” and just an opening of “the door to precision cosmology.”  So it’s futureware, and anything could happen, even a radical reversal of current accepted theories.  It’s a little premature for a triumphant parade.  The news media don’t know any better.  Cosmology is so abstruse to them, they just stand in awe of whatever they are told by the wizards.  You should read some of the telling admissions the wizards make in Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists.  Then cosmology would sound more like wizardry than science.  Add a pinch of data, some bat wing and spider eye under a full moon, dance around it with a rubber chicken, and you get a big bang.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

It is truly exciting to see the inner workings of cellular processes, long hidden from view, coming to light.  They are more wonderful than we could have imagined.  Burgess et al do not speculate about the evolution of the dynein machines other than to note that parts of the ring are “conserved” (unevolved).  Vallee and Höök, however, speculate that this highly-efficient system evolved from the family of AAA proteins which also have similar ring structures.  But this is pure guesswork.  The argument runs out of steam if you follow the logic.  In the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life, Scott Minnich rebutted this so-called “co-option” hypothesis, the idea that molecular machines evolved by borrowing parts from other machines.  First he pointed out that while some of the parts are similar to others, there are many that are unique, so where are you going to borrow them from?  He explained, “Eventually, you’re going to have to account for the function of every part as originally having some other purpose.  So you can only follow that argument so far, until you run into the problem of: you’re borrowing parts from nothing.”
    Minnich hastened to add something even more complex, that is never brought up by opponents of the irreducibly complex argument: the assembly instructions for these machines.  This is even more of a problem for evolution, because a host of genes and regulatory enzymes control the assembly of all the protein parts, and they of necessity are even more complex than the final product – just as the architect of a house is more complex than the house.  Genes and other protein machines carry out the assembly in a precise sequence analogous to home construction.  There is even remote signalling involving significant action at a distance.  So not only is the machine itself irreducibly complex: the genetic instructions that assemble the machine are even more complex.  Jonathan Wells adds, “What you have, then, is irreducible complexity all the way down.”
    Your ability to read these words right now depends on dynein motors at work in every cell of your body, zipping down monorail tracks at high speed, carrying zip-coded cargo to precise docking points throughout the cellular factory.  Do we really need an evolutionary story about how these systems came from nothing?  Can’t we just study them with sheer wonder and fascination at their design?
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.

Remember, Walking With Dinosaurs was mostly human imagination.  There are limits to what scientists can know from bones.  Would you have been able to describe the looks or lifestyle or behavior or capabilities of a skunk or porcupine or platypus, just from looking at the skeleton?  The Flintstones might be more accurate than Jurassic Park; Deeno welcoming the master home with slobbering kisses.  Maybe velociraptors were cute and dumb.  We’ve seen several paradigm shifts about dinosaurs recently (see this story, for instance).  This one, though still being debated, is surely not the last.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs.

I am in two minds about this hefty tome.  Should I be embarrassed for Stephen Hawking because an enterprising publisher has inveigled him into putting his name to a collection of superseded texts?  Or should I be outraged that an eminent scientist, but one with no track record in the history of science, has the arrogance to endorse historical introductions for five classics of science?

According to Hawking, Aristotle argued that the Earth was round because hulls of ships sailing out to sea disappeared over the horizon before the sails.  The argument was made by Ptolemy half a millennium later, but not by Aristotle.  Hawking’s introduction also says that Western Christendom placed Hell beyond the stars; that Copernicus became a professor of astronomy at Bologna; that he completed De revolutionibus in 1530; that Rheticus relinquished a chair in mathematics at Wittenberg to study under Copernicus; that Copernicus used equants to account for the motion of the Earth; that Osiander placed the word ‘hypothesis’ on the title page of Copernicus’ book; and that the world had scarcely become known to be round when Copernicus wrote.  None of this is true. No bibliography is provided, so it is difficult to ascertain the source of this disaster.

The most interesting part of this book is the general introduction; this is quintessential and thoughtful Hawking, clearly carrying his own stamp.  He writes about the anthropic principle: “If the ultimate theory made a unique prediction for the state of the universe and its contents, it would be a remarkable coincidence that this state was in the small subset that allows life.”  It is almost worth the price of the book to get this quotation.

Maybe he was having a bad day, but the brainy cosmologist clearly was just parroting things from memory without doing the kind of detailed research characteristic of Owen Gingerich.  (With all due respect, it’s much harder from a wheelchair, too.)
    Never take the word of a genius for authority.  Even smart people can pass along commonly accepted falsehoods.  There’s a whole book, The Dictionary of Misinformation, full of things we’ve been taught that aren’t true.  Try TruthOrFiction.com and UrbanLegends.com for research on those email stories that never die (but should).  But then, don’t even take these websites as the last word.  Paul wisely advised, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (I Thessalonians 5:21).  I.e., be diligent, but on the other extreme, don’t be a skeptic about everything.
    Notice how the statement Gingerich (a Christian) admiringly quotes is also a kind of friendly jab at the famous atheist.  Gingerich points out that out of Hawking’s own mouth, his quest for a “theory of everything” is really an argument for design.  Touchè.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

The debate also raises the question of how clean our environment really needs to be.  Some argue that billions of dollars are being wasted ridding the world of substances that are dubbed ‘hazardous’, when low levels could actually be a good thing.

It would be dangerous to go overboard with the ramifications of this story, either to start consuming unsafe substances or to think that small amounts are therapeutic without adequate experimental support.  No homeopathic remedies advocated by us (though advocates will try to appeal to this story for support); and yes, toxic waste dumps still need to be cleaned up.  Arsenic can kill, even with old lace.  We will not even attempt to gauge whether their hormetic model will stand up to scrutiny by other scientists.  But it is interesting to remember that toxic chemicals are not “evil” in and of themselves, despite the skull and crossbones image.  It is the concentration and balance of these substances that’s important, and how they interact with the proteins and DNA in our cells.  Obviously, it depends on the substance.  A tiny drop of cyanide can kill an adult.  But anything, even those things we deem healthy, like vitamins or water, can be toxic in excess.  Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring portrayed a horrifying image of insecticides ravaging our health and environment – and they certainly can – but the issue should be the concentration of these substances, not whether they are inherently bad.
    Chemical warfare is on our minds these days, and justifiably scary.  We’ve recently heard about how even natural toxins like ricin, when concentrated, can wreak havoc on a city .  But the thought arises, could some of these dangerous substances, in their naturally-occurring concentrations, have had a beneficial role in the original creation?  Is the problem that civilization, or the wear and tear of mutations and natural selection acting to amplify certain genetic traits, has upset the original natural balance and increased our vulnerabilities?  Notice how peanut butter or pollen cause misery to some but joy to others, and how skin lightness or darkness can be advantageous or disadvantageous depending on the climate.  Some dog breeds are so extremely selected for certain traits they are frequently ill.  Maybe the mutt covered with dirt catching the coon in the woods is better off than the pink pampered poodle winning the blue ribbon at the dog show.
    Our bodies were created to interact in a highly varied environment.  Chemicals, microbes, viruses, and bacteria all play a major role in our lives, most of the time without our awareness.  We have inherited a “Mr. Clean” attitude about keeping our skin and kitchen countertops spic-n-span with antibacterial soaps and disinfectants, but perhaps there is a downside to this.  Like firefighters, our immune systems need some practice to stay fit.  If we stay too clean and too isolated from the environment, are we letting our defenses down?
    In the film Icons of Evolution, Dr. Scott Minnich demonstrated that bacteria that have become immune to antibiotics are actually less fit in the wild.  Even the PBS Evolution series admitted that the drug-resistant strains of HIV reverted back to wild type after the drugs were removed (which means there was no net evolution, and the wild type were more fit).  Could it be that what are called “superbugs” in hospitals, resistant to vancomycin and other last-resort antibiotics, are just taking advantage of the artificially-induced, squeaky-clean environment that has eliminated their competition?  Is this why horses and elephants roll over in the dirt?  Just some food for thought.  Take a shower anyway.
Next headline on: Health.

Let them look, but don’t hold your breath.  Johannes Kepler speculated about life on other planets, but never doubted that the cosmos expressed the handwork of intelligent design.  Though he would have supported the exploration of space, he would have debated forcefully against any philosophy that natural causes alone, apart from design – from the infinite wisdom of the Supreme Architect described in the Bible – could ever have produced planets, stars, or life.
    Question: at what point would the believers in life in space concede defeat?  Since it is impossible to prove a universal negative, is this an open-ended metaphysical research program with no expiration date?  Astrobiology as a new discipline is, so far, devoid of data, and faces huge hurdles.  The believers are formulating some criteria for success, but what are the criteria for failure?
    Let’s imagine that 25 years from now there is still no sign of life, even primitive life, on Titan, Europa, or Mars; that SETI is still dry, and that no extrasolar planets show any biological chemistry.  What then?  Do we need another 100 years, or 1000 years, because we haven’t looked in the right places?  Viking seemed to shut the door on Martian life 25 years ago, but the search for life is still driving the upcoming missions.  Astrobiology initiatives are stronger than ever, despite the stern writings of some astronomers that conditions for habitability are so rare we might well be alone in the universe, and despite the growing conviction that life is information based, and that information does not arise without prior information.  What would it take to convince astrobiologists that life does not rise out of rocks and chemicals?
    If astrobiologists cannot define a reasonable point at which to concede that abiogenesis is too improbable to pursue further, then the search ceases to become any more scientific than looking for a perpetual motion machine.  Instead, it becomes a religious junket paid for by public tax revenues.  The public may become increasingly tired of having money diverted in this way.  It’s happened before; Congress cut off SETI funding in 1991, and strong voices periodically argue that the poor and disadvantaged need our tax dollars more.  NASA and ESA had better have a backup plan for their current prime directive to find life beyond.
    The Cold War pushed space exploration through the 80s, and Astrobiology is pushing it now.  Surely there is a better motivation somewhere that can inspire both young and old to keep funding scientific exploration.  Here is a vacuum for the Intelligent Design movement to fill.  It’s happened before.
Next headline on: SETI. • Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next headline on: Mars. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

This is another case of model-making with enormous tweak space that can produce opposite results depending on the parameters chosen.  The Uriarte-Reeve model also commits the personification fallacy of game theory applied to mindless plants, as if they are capable of wheeling and dealing and making “tradeoffs” with each other.  This paper contributes nothing to answering the question of why so many diverse kinds of plants coexist in the same ecosystem.  As usual, we have to wait for some sweet by-and-by when evolutionary soothsayers might someday interpret the message.  It’s interesting that the first act of God for man was to plant a garden, filled with an enormous diversity of plants bearing seed and reproducing (not evolving) after their own kind.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

“This is a motor with quite remarkable properties,” says Robert Macnab of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies the assembly of bacterial motors.  “It runs like a battery, moves like a ship’s propeller, has a gear switch so it can rotate in either direction, and it’s under the control of information from [the] environment.  These are biological functions at their most simplified form, and yet there are 60 different types of components in this little engine.”

The bacterial flagellum has become the unofficial mascot of the Intelligent Design movement, since the publication of Darwin’s Black Box and the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life.  And not without cause; this article does nothing to explain how evolution could produce such a molecular machine.  It doesn’t even broach the subject.  On the contrary, it underscores the point that this is an irreducibly complex system.  Macnab claims there are “60 different types of components in this little engine.”  See the picture in the article, and consider also that many bacteria have more than one propeller – this species appears to have eight – that work in coordinated movement.  In addition to all the complexity of each individual flagellum, having a system of eight requires fast signalling across the interior.
    This is just one of many molecular machines in the cell that argue for intelligent design.  As Bruce Alberts has said, “Indeed, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.”  Many of these structures are just as amazing, and more so, as the flagellum.  For a few examples, see the spliceosome, RNA polymerase, and ATP Synthase.  Another article posted yesterday on EurekAlert uses the word “machine” seven times as it discusses “an intricately complex protein machine” that adjusts the connections between neurons.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Wages of Sin Dept.  02/06/2003: The BBC News has a chilling report on “India’s Lost Girls”.  Abortion for sex selection has left such a shortage of girls for so long, that now young men are maturing with no one to marry.  Villages are full of frustrated bachelors; the young girls who would have been their brides never had the chance to be born.  Ultrasound, giving parents a view of the sex of their unborn baby, has become a death sentence for females, who are considered less desirable to many young couples.  “The ghosts of missing babies are closing in,” writes Jill McGivering, BBC South Asia correspondent.  “If newly-weds continue with this brutal practice of eliminating girls, this whole region is on course for catastrophe.”
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

Update 02/06/2003: National Geographic reports that the Eden Project has become the third most popular admission-charging tourist attraction in Britain.  The commercial enterprise transformed an abandoned industrial pit into a “virtual garden of Eden” with 4,500 plant species on display.
Next headline on: Plants.

The Lone Ranger in Science Is Sometimes the Good Guy   02/06/2003
Can you do good scientific work outside the establishment these days?  Consider the storybook case of Grote Reber (1911-2002).  Nature Feb. 6 published an obituary to this “father of radio astronomy.”  Reber went against the grain all the way, but was ultimately vindicated.  In 1933, the mainstream astronomers paid no attention to Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio waves coming from the galactic center, but Reber had the insight to discern this was significant.  Unable to get support or funding, he scraped together his own savings (partly by using public transportation) and built his own crude radio telescope in his backyard.  Though gaining success in detecting astronomical radio sources, he had difficulty getting his papers published.  Nature describes the establishment opinion at the time: “According to Reber, the professionals thought ‘the whole affair was at best a mistake and at worst, a hoax’.”
    But they were wrong.  Anyone who has seen the huge radio dishes at Arecibo or Jodrell Bank and around the world understands the phenomenal importance of radio astronomy today.  Grote Reber maintained his disdain for the ivory tower throughout his career, saying, “There were no self-appointed pontiffs looking over my shoulder giving bad advice.  The kinds of things I want to do are the kind establishment men will not have any part of.”  And they disdained him, too.  The obituary states, “Throughout his career, he was unable to secure funding from any of the conventional sources, such as the US National Science Foundation or the Department of Defense.  Instead, he relied on modest support from the New York-based Research Corporation, as well as his own personal funds.”  But wisdom is justified by her children.  Nature concludes,

Although Karl Jansky was the first to detect cosmic radio emission, it was Reber who, through his innovative experiments, forceful personality and stubborn persistence, finally convinced astronomers that it might be important and opened a new window on the Universe.

Until a few months before his death on 20 December 2002, two days before his 91st birthday, Reber continued to be active on a variety of scientific, political and social issues.  He argued, with equal enthusiasm, against the Big Bang Universe and the increasing use of fossil fuels, and took a public stand against ‘big science’.  He was described by some as a genius, by others as a crackpot; but he was ultimately recognized by the astronomy community with the award of most of its major prizes.

This is an interesting case study on many fronts, but caution must be exercised in drawing general principles.  It is true that it is nearly impossible today to succeed without a thorough scientific education, and very difficult in many fields to avoid pseudoscience without a PhD, peer review and collaboration.  (But New Scientist interviews a Royal Society physicist who thinks peer review is meaningless, corrupt, and disintegrating.)  Practically gone are the days of the generalist like Huygens or Pascal, or the home scientists like Leeuwenhoek.  There’s just too much to know before you can even start.  Often it takes funding and elaborate equipment and training to be a scientist, and usually that presupposes rubbing shoulders with professionals at a university or research lab.  Goodness knows there are self-appointed quacks around who think their pet theory is going to overturn everything everybody knows.
    Yet science did arise among individualists and creative thinkers who worked out of love for the truth.  It would be good for scientists today to remember those roots, and to look carefully at the recent case of Grote Reber.  Aside from his political or cosmological views, Reber’s story shows that the establishment can be wrong.  The troublemaking outsider can be right.  Science cannot predict where the next major discovery will come from, and scientists are sometimes the worst judges of their own biases.  Instead of being a culture medium for discovery, a scientific institution like a university or journal can sometimes stifle initiative and enforce conformity to the currently accepted views or priorities.  How many grad students have had their advisors counsel them not to work on a subject they were interested in, for other than noble reasons?  (For instance, Robert Gentry was not allowed to pursue a PhD on radiohaloes, because his advisor was afraid it might embarrass the school, so Gentry went on to do excellent work on this subject on his own.)
    Ivory tower scientific institutions can be so set in their ways, so resistant to new ideas, that they can sometimes actually hinder scientific progress while wearing the banner of Science – analogous to the religious institutions that Jesus criticized, saying “For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in”  (Matt. 23:13).  The door can become t