I may say with truth that whenever I consider in my thoughts the beautiful order, how one thing issues out of and is derived from another, then it is as though I had read a divine text, written into the world itself, not with letters but rather with essential objects, saying: Man, stretch thy reason hither, so that thou mayest comprehend these things.
– Johannes Kepler, in his calendar for the year 1604

City of Gilgamesh Found in Iraq   04/30/2003
A German-led expedition has found Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh, reports the BBC News.  The Gilgamesh Epic has long been noted for its flood story with many parallels to the Genesis account.  Gilgamesh was said in the clay-tablet legends to have been buried under the Euphrates River, and where the river once flowed, they found a building that might have been the king’s burial site.  Uruk appears to have been a Venice-like city with canals. 

Now that Iraq has been liberated, we hope many discoveries will follow in this region of the cradle of civilization.
    This BBC article does not discuss the Gilgamesh flood story, but many skeptics have claimed that since it is earlier, the Genesis account must be derived from it.  But to say that the Bible is an adaptation of the “older” Gilgamesh epic ignores the possibility they had a common source in true history, the Bible being an accurate record, and the Gilgamesh epic being a corruption from oral tradition.  This interpretation is borne out by the major difference in style and credibility of the two accounts, the Bible emphasizing the Creator’s righteousness and grief over the moral evil of man’s sin, as would be expected of a divine source, and the Babylonian account exalting its human king and the vagaries of its pagan gods, as would be expected of a degenerate human source.
Next headline on: The Bible.

Interesting, but the RNA World story is irrelevant because it would not work.  RNA neither forms spontaneously in nature, nor is durable enough to survive in a primordial soup, where it would rapidly hydrolyze and degrade.  Moreover, it cannot copy itself.  We have the optimum base for our genetic code because it was designed to do what it does, and it does it very well.  See also another recent evidence of good coding design in our genetic code: the bases used in DNA are even parity.
Next headline on: SETI. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Our bodies were made for vigorous physical activity, but today’s ease of sitting in front of TV screens or computer monitors for long hours requires will power to make time for exercise.  Diet is important, too, but no pill or food can compensate for lethargy.  The Proverbs of Solomon satirize the sluggard, and honor the diligent.  Exercise does a body good – and a mind, too.  Along with physical fitness comes improved attitude, happier outlook on life, endurance, reserves of energy, and ability to accomplish more.  Exercise rewards a person with terrific-feeling endorphins and a sense of satisfaction.  Your body is a marvel of design that feels and looks great when working at optimum performance.  Use it or lose it.  Start at your own level and make some gains.  Recommendation: Instead of using a boring treadmill at a gym, go take a hike surrounded by the wonders of creation.  There’s no better time than right now.  Go fill those lungs with the delicious fresh air of spring.  Then come in for a good cup of tea for your immune system and some creatine with whey protein for your fatigued muscles.
Next headline on: Health.

Man-made aircraft could only survive that much airtime with constant maintenance.  Birds have all that upkeep technology built in.  The Manx shearwater is also a champion navigator.  Birds transported to New England and released have found their way unerringly to their exact nesting sites on tiny islands off the coast of Wales.  One wonders what stories this Olympic bird could tell from its long and busy life.
Next headline on: Birds. • Next amazing story.

This system hardly needs comment.  It speaks so loudly about intelligent design that only willful unbelief could claim such a system evolved by random, undirected natural forces.  Language translation, quality control, triple-checking failure analysis, pre- and post-translation authentication, error disposition, precision parts, irreducible complexity ... what more needs to be said?
    This paper makes no mention of evolution, except in one sentence: “Subsequent biochemical analysis determined that a number of other aaRSs also have highly evolved proofreading mechanisms.”  Gag me with a spoon.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Growth and organ formation in plants occur post-embryonically, mediated by meristems located on the tips of growth axes in shoots and roots.  Meristems are unique structures made up of pluripotent stem cells, a transitory population of indeterminate cells and determinate organ primordia formed at the periphery.  Secondary growth, which increases the girth of stems, is mediated by cambial cells, which continue to add vascular cells to the circumference of the central, vascular cylinder of the plant.

Meristems mediate plant growth and hence are dynamic structures in which cells transit through zones with distinct developmental potential.  The coordination of growth with development in such dynamic structure requires extensive short and long distance intercellular signalling.  A conceptual framework for meristem function must include at least the following elements.  First, meristems must have a capacity to specify an indeterminate cellular ground state.  Second, a subset of these indeterminate cells must acquire stem cell identity, ultimately replenishing cells lost to organs and maintaining genetic integrity..  Cells in this stem cell niche must self-regulate their activity to not disappear or overproliferate.  Third, indeterminate cells must have the ability to acquire determinate fates associated with organogenesis.

One of the first “amazing” stories we reported back in July 2001 was that plants have their own internet, and plant cells talk to themselves in email.  This updated report shows that the interplant internet is even more mysterious and wonderful than we imagined.  Without a brain, without a general, without a headquarters, a beehive of activity functions with goals and coordination and timing.  Flowers appear on schedule.  Leaves unfurl with mathematical precision.  Roots dive into the dark soil, fruits ripen, seeds disperse, water and minerals flow through the vessels, and dozens of other functions work not haphazardly but with “astonishing” levels of dynamic equilibrium and effectiveness.  Two wonders are evident in this paper: (1) Epigenetic mechanisms are at work.  This means that DNA is not a master control; something is controlling the DNA itself.  (2) Elaborate signalling takes place.  The micro-RNAs are like email messages delivering the orders to local indeterminate cells, causing them to became flowers, leaves and fruit.
    Analogies break down when we try to picture what happens.  The military analogy presumes a central command, which the plant lacks.  Are cells like groups of settlers moving out west, that decide when they get there who will do what job?  If there are too many Indians or other settlers nearby (negative feedback loop), do they move into the next valley to settle?  Do they use their homesteader’s guide (DNA) to figure out how to dig a well and build a blacksmith shop?  Do they keep in touch with other settlers (signalling) with telegraph lines and code (miRNA)?  This analogy also has drawbacks.  Somehow a plant pulls it all together: a system of semi-autonomous, fully-equipped cells cooperates in a distributed network that gives the appearance of being coordinated by some central command.  We hope you never look at a tree, or even a weed, quite the same again.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next amazing story.

Check with your local PBS Station to find out when they plan to air it.  If it is not on their schedule, call or write and encourage them to show the film.  Why should television partly supported by public tax funds present only a one-sided view on this subject, so foundational to all people believe and think?  We applaud PBS’s move, but it is only partial penance for the Evolution series and decades of biased reporting on evolution.
    This is a wonderful film, beautifully edited and shot on many locations, including the Galápagos Islands, and scored to original music by Mark Lewis.  People are not only buying it for themselves, but buying extra copies to show to friends and co-workers.  Unlocking the Mystery of Life available here on our Products page in VHS and DVD formats.  The film is about an hour long and includes vivid computer graphics of DNA in action.  The DVD version includes an extra half-hour of bonus features, including answers to 14 frequently-asked questions about intelligent design, answered by the scientists who appear in the film.
    This is a must-see video.  Get it, and get it around.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design. • Next headline on: Movies.

Can an understanding of brain science ever uncover the answers to the “big” questions of life: Who are we?  How did we become who we are?  And what does it mean to have an individual self different from other selves?  Many scientists think so.  Francis Crick, for example, has suggested that “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”.  He even went as far as to state that the seat of the soul was located in the anterior cingulate cortex.  And there is a constant stream of new research that attempts to answer these fundamental questions using sophisticated neuroimaging techniques.  A recent trawl through the cognitive neuroscience literature reveals studies of the neural bases of cooperation, self-recognition, gender stereotyping, romantic love, humor appreciation, facial attractiveness and aesthetics, and the attribution of others’ mental states.  But at a fundamental level, one wonders whether the attempts of such research to demystify the mysteries of life are futile.  If we found the location of “self” in the brain, would that discovery tell us any more than we already know from our individual experiences?

At the end of the book, I was left wondering what the authors had actually said about “how we become who we are” and about how we can use the knowledge of personality development that we already have.  I expected to find such uses addressed in the afterword on the terrorist attacks of 11 September, but there I found nothing except a politically charged statement.  As I write this, another suicide bomber has killed 20 in Israel, and the United States and the United Kingdom are preparing to go to war with Iraq.  I ask myself what could be done about such problems if we had the kind of information this book purports to present.  Terrorists do not tend to have a defined psychopathology, and therefore they are unlikely to have a biological deficit in their psychological makeup.  Does this mean that many of the flaws in human (and individual) nature are due to culture alone?

Did you catch the lesson of this reductionist dialogue?  If so, you found the Achilles’ heel of materialism.  It is the crux of the debate about who we are, and how we became who we are: it is the inescapable reality of conscience.  These materialists have an innate sense of good and evil, that evil is bad and should be stopped, but they do not know what to do with it.  Their own materialism ties their brains in knots.  On one side, everything evolved, so the brain evolved and evil evolved.  No moral standard exists; everything can be reduced to nature and nurture.  Whatever is, is right.  On the other side, both Emery and the authors cannot live with this philosophy.  Evil happens, and it should be stopped!
    Notice how all of Emery’s bluff about “brains are parties to evolutionary processes” unravels in his last paragraph.  He sees an afterword about September 11, and looks forward in anticipation that Quartz and Sejnowski are going to provide a reasoned explanation for evil.  But then he sees them producing “nothing but a politically charged statement.”  Whatever position they took is irrelevant, because if the brain is only nature + nurture, on what basis can they claim any position is right or wrong?  (To be consistent, they would have to believe that their environment, upbringing or the groupthink of their culture made them feel the way they do, but their feeling is not morally superior to anyone else’s views; but then how could they advocate their own?)  Then Emery glances over at the newspaper and reads about another suicide bombing in Israel that killed 20 people, its perpetrator most likely deluded into thinking this was a ticket to paradise.  Emery’s soul is stirred within him, a soul that refuses to be reduced to neurons, chemistry, or environment.  The fact that he even asks these questions and thinks these thoughts, employing the conscience-directed functions of reason and logic, is the key to understanding that there is more than evolution or “cultural biology” at work here.  There is a conscience that refuses to stay imprisoned in a materialistic box.
    Emery looks down on Crick as overly reductionist.  He thinks adding nurture to nature is one step better than trying to locate the soul in the anterior cingulate cortex.  But this is a fool’s paradise.  If every human is a material assemblage of atoms undergoing chemical reactions, then an assemblage of material assemblages of atoms is no less reductionist.  You can put a hundred computers on a network, but they are not going to create chat rooms and emails by themselves unless souls use them.  The soul is not nature (materialism), and it is not nature + nurture (materialism + materialism).  It has a conscience.  Our brains are strongly influenced by their material and cultural parts, and our consciences can be deceived and deadened, but the conscience refuses to be classified in the periodic table.  Without real, true souls inhabiting our bodies and brains, there is no valid concept of self, of evil, or of moral imperative.  Emery’s twinge of conscience in the last paragraph is the dead giveaway.
    This little book review, hidden away in a weekly science journal, is not likely to attract a great deal of attention.  It reveals, however, the utter moral bankruptcy of a system that on the one hand tries to say we are matter in motion, but on the other hand makes moral statements that the U.S. should either get out of Iraq or should stop terrorism, or anything in between.  Don’t let an evolutionist use should in a sentence.  That word is not in the Darwin Dictionary.
    See also Daniel Dennett’s attempt to explain free will by evolutionary principles (Apr. 2 headline).
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Methane, the second most abundant atmospheric constituent (0.05 bar) detected after N₂ (1.4 bar), is continually and irreversibly destroyed by solar ultraviolet photolysis, a process rapid enough to require a recent supply of methane.  Two end-member scenarios are possible.  Ongoing geologic activity supplies atmospheric methane (and leads to an atmosphere that varies in size with supply), or ocean reservoirs of methane exist as a result of past geologic activity.  The products of methane photolysis, a variety of simple and complex organic compounds, precipitate to Titan’s surface, leaving a history of Titan’s atmospheric composition.  If Titan’s atmosphere has existed in its present form since its formation, ~800 m of organic liquids and solids blanket Titan’s surface.

This is one of many phenomena in the solar system that argue against the commonly-accepted age of 4.6 billion years.  (1) In the first place, all the methane should have eroded by now into products blanketing the surface.  (2) In the second place, if organic compounds have been raining down to the surface for that long, there should be a blanket over half a mile thick covering any water-ice surface, yet today, water ice is detectable.
    To keep the long age, scientists have to propose a continual source of new methane to replenish the atmosphere that we see, from the interior or some unknown external source, or have to find a way for the methane products to disassemble back into methane in some kind perpetual cycle.  But this is storytelling without evidence.
    Methane is eroding in the Titan atmosphere, which should blanket the moon with dark organic residues, yet water ice is visible from the surface.  These are the data, folks.  Make up stories of billions of years at your own risk.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

The Darwinists are never done with their stories.  It’s always going to take more studies (and more funding, and more Caribbean cruises).  Here you have a study that undercuts one of Darwin’s pet theories, sexual selection, but demonstrates no clear cause-effect relationship between variation and fitness, or between morphology and the species responsible for the variation: the flower, insects, or the other sex of the hummingbird.  There are enough loopholes in the tale to drive a tank through.  Even if the birds and flowers are coevolving, the birds are still birds and the flowers are still flowers.  So what does this story have to do with Darwinian evolution, the origin of hummingbirds and flowers from bacteria?  Nothing.  Even creationists unabashedly affirm this amount of variation, and are the first to exhibit, in their lectures, colorful montages of dogs, horses and people in all their varied glory.  One cannot extrapolate recklessly a function that is not known to be linear.  Some functions rise gradually and then fall sharply to zero.  All observable, repeatable studies show that variation has limits.  If it stays within limits, it is variation, but not evolution in the sense most people understand the word.  Writing a paper as if small-scale microevolution has anything to do with Darwin’s theory of common ancestry is equivocal and misleading.
    Philosopher of science Karl Popper once took heat for stating that evolution is like a metaphysical research programme.  It gives evolutionists something to do to look busy and publish or perish.  They never want to finish their stories, because then they would have to go out and get a real job.*
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

*The real job could be being a real biologist, in the tradition of John Ray or Carl Linnaeus.  Here’s a suggestion for any biologist readers: try the “Darwin-free” diet.  Study those hummingbirds and flowers, and their relationships and diversity, and publish papers as before.  Just leave out the phylogeny fables, which are worthless.  You don’t have to publish intelligent design or creationism; you don’t have to change or add anything – just subtract the parts that are untestable, unobservable, and unrepeatable.  That would be good science, would it not?  We’re all for good science.  We love hummingbirds here at Creation-Evolution Headlines, and we love scientists willing to travel, explore, and bring us the facts about creatures we might never see or hear about.  So try it.  Leaner scientific papers without the evolutionary flab will increase your scientific fitness.

So the hominid wars carry on.  As usual, shaky method + shaky assumptions = shaky story.  If contemporaneous australopithecines showed significant diversity, on what basis can scientists arrange them into an evolutionary relationship?  See also Tim White’s damaging assessment of assumptions used in interpreting hominid bones in our March 28 headline.
Next headline on: Early Man. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

I.e., those stars have not been discovered yet.  We think people should know that the simplistic story of nucleosynthesis, leading to Carl Sagan’s oft-quoted line “we are all made of starstuff” is not so simple when you look at the actual data.  If the big bang started with only hydrogen, why do virtually all stars already have heavy elements?  Notice that even HE0107-5240 contains nine elements: H, C, N, Na, Mg, Ca, Ti, Fe, and Ni, which Beers admits “present a dizzying array of possible explanations for their origin.”  It’s not that scientists are unable to concoct a story around the data, it’s the data require a story to fit a belief.
  Got metals?  Click here to see the latest Hubble Space Telescope image of the Omega Nebula.  Look at the colors “metals” add to an otherwise boring hydrogen cloud.
Next headline on: Stars. • Next headline on: Cosmology.

Geology is a fascinating science.  Researchers have to get out into some wild country, some of it remote and harsh, and describe phenomena ranging from microscopic grains to vast regions covering several states or sometimes continents.  Needless to say, geology theorizing is also an art.  A geologist can often find similarities to current processes, but many times there are formations “without an obvious modern analog,” as here.  What then?  The geologist proposes a theory that tries to explain as many details as possible, but it can never be thoroughly tested, because the true story is hidden in the unobservable past.  It can only achieve a certain measure of plausibility.
    The vast extent of the Navajo Sandstone is remarkable.  It lies far above the strata of the Grand Canyon, and varies in color from white to rich reddish-brown, sometimes intermingled.  It erodes rapidly into the narrow slot canyons popular with photographers and adventurers.  These geologists claim its deposition could have required anywhere from 4000 years to 5 million years.  If so old, would it have remained sand, without some having turned to sandstone?  Would not the monsoons have riddled the region with thousands of deep gorges, filled in with subsequent deposits?  If a slot canyon can form within one heavy flash flood or within a few hundred years, and if most of the entire Grand Canyon could have been carved in one or several brief floods, where are the gorges in the Navajo Sandstone, if the sand sea were being inundated with long ages of heavy rain?  Why the vast extent of crossbedding, and strata that are traceable at the same level over hundreds of square miles?
    No one can replay the video of what really happened; neither can we.  But at least consider the plausibility of visualizing this vast region being deposited rapidly and catastrophically, instead of slowly and gradually over aeons.  The main reason geologists seem to reject rapid deposition of deposits like the Navajo Sandstone is their predilection to view earth history as ancient, requiring millions and millions of years of slow, gradual evolution.  Interesting that Venus does not fit that pattern.  In The New Solar System (4th ed.), R. Stephen Saunders says the doctrine of uniformitarianism does not apply to Venus, because the first 90% of the planet’s history appears obliterated by more recent events (p. 110).  Similar claims are made for Io, Europa, Miranda, Enceladus, Titan, and large portions of Mars – why not Earth?  Maybe it’s time to ditch Lyell like they ditched Freud.  The credibility of his famous line, “the present is the key to the past,” has eroded.
Photos courtesy David Coppedge, Creation Safaris.
Next headline on: Geology.

Self-delusion is tragic, but it is doubly so when one thinks it’s the other guy who is deluded.  If Coyne has accurately summarized Dawkins’ views in this book, the two of them espouse self-defeating claims.  Coyne admits plainly that Dawkins is a fierce advocate of scientism (similar to logical positivism), an outdated 19th-century philosophy that shoots itself in the foot with the self-referential fallacy.  I.e., scientism was not discovered by the scientific method, so it is not scientific.  If we are only to accept what has been found through the scientific method, then we must reject scientism with the same ferocity we reject other “further impassible routes to knowledge (such as homoeopathy, crystal worship and postmodernism).”  As one of our readers pointed out, their position is also self-defeating in that it judges things as good or bad, when evolution provides no moral standard.  Hey, if religion evolved, then it must be good.  Why knock it?
    Furthermore, we must reject passion itself, which is neither rational nor objective.  Scientism also errs in thinking that everything is subject to the scientific method.  There are many things in life that we assume, believe, and have confidence in, that we have not investigated scientifically ourselves, nor are amenable to measurement or testing: history, art appreciation, ethics, and even logic.  Scientism makes a patently unscientific assumption that a method limited to certain observable, repeatable natural phenomena is a path to absolute truth, and is always superior, in all cases, to other ways of knowing.  On what scientific basis does Dawkins pound his pulpit, calling religious wars “ludicrously tragic,” while being strangely silent about the Gulag and other horrors perpetrated by atheistic regimes?  To Dawkins, whose book has displayed as much emotional, non-scientific passion as that of any crusader, we challenge, “Scientist, heal thyself.”
    Coyne mentions three pillars on which Dawkins builds his case against religion.  Let’s look at them in turn.

1. “First, because different faiths make very different claims about the world, they cannot all be true; and none of the claims (such as the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven) can be scientifically verified.”  This is a hypocritical half-truth that attempts to divert attention from the atheist’s own exposure.  As we show here almost daily, from their own words, Darwinists cannot scientifically verify evolution, nor the origin of universe or life.  So in principle, scientism is not in a separate category; it is just as much a religion as any other.  Dawkins and Coyne need to put themselves into the same courtroom and decide which witnesses are more credible.  It would quickly become apparent that the pool of clamoring witnesses would quickly diminish into just a handful worth further questioning.

   For instance, put creation stories to the test: e.g., (a) Two gods had a fight and one cut of the other’s head, which became the earth, and the body became the sky.  (b) Nothing times nobody equals everything.  (c) In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
       Similarly, who would judge the following destiny beliefs as morally equivalent?  (a) Kill as many women and children as you can at a shopping mall, and you will get 70 virgins for eternity.  (b) Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.  (c) Be not weary in well doing, for in due season you shall reap, if you faint not. 

       The true part of Dawkins’ first point is that different faiths make very different and contradictory claims and cannot all be true.  But it is a non-sequitur to conclude, “all are equally false or irrational.”  Dawkins would do well to live up to his own creed, and investigate the evidence scientifically.  To the extent possible, he should apply logic and historical investigation to the major religions.  There are those that consider such investigation taboo, and there are ones that welcome critical scrutiny.  That’s a good starting filter.  It does not appear Dawkins has done his homework with those in the latter category.  Simultaneously, he fails to look in the mirror at all the inflammatory disputes between denominations in the Darwinist religion.
2. “Second, the choice among faiths is not based on rational consideration: the vast majority of people simply practice the religion of their parents.”  This is a glittering generality with counter-claims and exceptions for both sides of the aisle.  Some critics have claimed that many universities today are assembly lines producing ducks that quack the same way about politics (political correctness, you know), philosophy and evolution without rational consideration of the opposing evidence.  Michael Behe’s testimony is a case in point: he became angry when confronted with sensible arguments against evolution, feeling that all through the university, his doctoral program and faculty assignment, he had been led down a primrose path about evolution, never having heard of these arguments.  Cases abound for those who rejected religion for irrational reasons (wanting sexual freedom, for instance) or who embraced it precisely because of rational consideration.
3. “Finally, Dawkins considers religions to be vehicles of evil because they facilitate the labelling of people as either ‘us’ or ‘them’, fostering xenophobia and its attendant horrors — Northern Ireland and the Middle East come to mind.”  What rank hypocrisy is this?  That is precisely what Dawkins has just done: put himself and his fellow logical positivists as “us”, against anybody including a fellow evolutionist like Stephen Jay Gould as “them,” with enough emotional rhetoric to make his disciples take up arms.

   Case study: an atheist utopia.  Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union of the 1980’s an Evil Empire not because it was religious.  It provides a recent example of a society built on a foundation of atheism.  As such, its atrocities outnumbered all religious wars combined, including Northern Ireland and the Middle East and any others you want to name.  Does 100 million casualties make the point?
       Georgi Vins, the late Russian Baptist leader, a gentle and compassionate man who merely tried to distribute Bibles in Russia in the 1970s, was sentenced to decades in prison, incarcerated with murderers, and kept in solitary confinement in the Siberian cold with one paltry meal a day.  His captors told him he would never get out until he was 76 (he was in his 40s at the time).  Speaking later in America after he was rescued in a prisoner exchange deal, Vins rightly attributed the evil of this regime to its atheism, which was the central and core doctrine underlying communism.  He spoke, from personal experience, about the systematic destruction of religion in that Evil Empire, the closing of churches, the imprisonment and torture of pastors, the constant propaganda and indoctrination of students into atheism.  Similar stories abound from Cuba, China, and one of the worst today – North Korea.  This is not to deny that evil has been done in the name of “religion,” but if a raw statistic like body count means anything, atheism has the worst record on human rights of all of time, all perpetrated within the last 100 years of Darwin’s Century.

Let’s mop up a few of Dawkins’ other criticisms of religion.

• “No rapprochement is possible between those whose beliefs derive from evidence and those whose beliefs either do not depend on evidence or are unshaken by contrary evidence.  This is why science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.”  If this either-or fallacy were true, then scientists would be quick to discard Darwinian evolution, because the supporting evidence is flimsy, and the contrary evidence is damning.  (If any doubts about this, take a trip through the Darwin chain links on this page.)  If this were true, why also is the Darwin Party so adamant about prohibiting teachers from presenting scientific evidence that contradicts evolutionary theory?
      Disregarding the multitudes for whom pleasure is more a priority than love of the truth, there are many who have rejected evolution or embraced their faith (or both) precisely because they were convinced by the evidence (C.S. Lewis, Richard Lumsden, the numerous scholars interviewed by Lee Strobel in The Case for Faith, etc.)  Conversely, there are dogmatic evolutionists who refuse to listen to contrary evidence – the history of creation-evolution debates provides many examples.
• “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in,” Dawkins quips.  “Some of us just go one god further.”  Cute, but irrelevant.  This is the extrapolation fallacy.  Some doctors are quacks, therefore I will not see any doctors.  On the contrary, if there is only one true God, one must necessarily reject all false gods to know the truth, but to reject the true God because others are false is as illogical as disbelieving in the existence of a right answer to an equation because there are so many wrong answers.
• That religion is useless and only produces groups that hate each other.  (As if Darwinian evolutionary theory is useful.)  What is perhaps most egregious in Dawkins’ and Coyne’s tirade is their broad-brush categorization of everything religious, the good, bad, and ugly, into one category “ugly” – “Modern theists” mixed in with “Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra” and presumably Christ and Satan.  Apparently Dawkins would have no hesitation putting Heather Mercer in the same category with an Islamic terrorist, Jim Elliott bringing food and medicine to a jungle tribe with the Auca animist who would thrust a poison-tipped spear into his heart, or Jesus Christ (“Love your enemies, and do good to them who persecute you”) with the pagan Roman nailing his hands to the cross.  Things are so simple to these atheists: all religion is bad, science is good.  Just don’t define your terms or get into the details.

Thus Dawkins leads his passionate xenophobic charge against xenophobia, and his moral crusade for moral equivalence.  Throughout this pathetic book review, the hypocrisy of atheism leaves both Coyne and Dawkins pitifully deluded.  Both advocate an intellectual standard they are incapable of reaching (that all truths must be subject to the scientific method), and a moral standard they are incapable of obeying (that it is a sin to believe you are right).  Both angrily point their index finger at religion, blind to the fact that three fingers are pointing right back at them.

Recommended reading for anyone who still thinks evolutionists are intellectually and morally superior to believers in God: in the current Creation Research Society Quarterly (39:4, March 2003), “The Galileo Myth and the Facts of History,” by Jerry Bergman.  He catalogs the intolerance of university professors and secular scientists from Galileo to the present day.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

• The giant squid caught in Antarctic waters fuels debate about ancient sea monsters.
• Crows are better than chimps at making tools.  Not only that, they seem to share their technology among one another and pass it on to the next generation.  (See our Aug. 9, 2002 headline.)
• A Caltech scientist is trying to discover how fruit flies can make sudden 90-degree turns.

Garbage (and Almost Anything Else) In, Oil Out   04/22/2003
The May issue of Discover Magazine has a pretty remarkable article about a rising technology, the Thermal Depolymerization Process (TDP), that sounds almost too good to be true: it can change almost anything containing carbon into oil.  That includes turkey offal, tires, ground up computers, plastic, garbage and sewage.  Not only that, it cleans the air, prevents global warming, kills germs, and provides benefits to the coal and oil industries by cleaning up their waste.  Brad Lemley, reporter for Discover, interviews Brian Appel of Changing World Technologies in Philadelphia and tours the prototype plant that produces a variety of petroleum products from bones, feathers, and offal from nearby turkey farms.  TDP can even produce clean, usable products from tar, muck, used motor oil, municipal waste, sewage – anything but nuclear waste.  The output water is clean enough to discharge into a municipal sewage system.  By working at the molecular level, the process also destroys pathogens.  Entrepreneurs expect to be able to produce oil at $10 a barrel soon, and less than that in the future.  Lemley compares TDP with natural oil production:

Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth mastered long ago.  Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and animals that die, settle to ocean floors, decompose, and are mashed by sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction.  Under pressure and heat, the dead creatures’ long chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons.  However, Earth takes its own sweet time doing this--generally thousands or millions of years--because subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic.  Thermal depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock’s long molecular bonds.

This sounds like a superb example of applied science with benefits for all.  Anything that reduces our dependence on foreign oil and can make useful products out of waste is good stewardship of the environment.  Can it really be that this process is all good news and no bad news?  We’ll have to wait and see.
    Notice that oil is produced naturally by a similar process.  What Appel and the other entrepreneurs are trying to discover is how to speed up the process and make it efficient.  Their secret has been to super-hydrate the ingredients initially, unlike earlier failed attempts that drove the water out; this seems to make the difference.  If the entrepreneurs can get product in just 15 minutes, on what basis do they think the earth needs millions of years?  It’s just basic chemistry.  The rates are dependent on ingredients, temperatures, and pressures.  Long ages are not required in the earth, provided the right conditions are present.
    Anyway, this is a technology worth watching.  Maybe someday you’ll pour your garbage directly into the car’s fuel tank.  Next job: what to do with nuclear waste.  Perhaps the generation after that will run on spent nuclear fuel, something like the Mr. Fusion device Doc had attached to his DeLorean in Back to the Future II.  Ample energy for our needs is all around us if we just learn how to use it.  Clean-running hydrogen fuel cells are also an active area of research.  Science for the public well-being is one of the goals our Creation Scientist of the Month, physicist James Joule, promoted. 
    A final thought: what’s the difference between a turkey and a flask of oil?  Certainly not the ingredients.  The difference is the way those ingredients are arranged into information-rich structures, like feathers, lungs, a brain, eyes, and wings.  The way of nature is to grind things down into their simple components, not to drive them up into complex, coordinated systems.  Heat and pressure can make oil from complex hydrocarbons, but it cannot make a turkey, or a whale, or a platypus or human from atomic elements.  This is the irreversible arrow of time, the increase of entropy.  You cannot run the TDP machine in reverse by inputting a flash of oil and outputting a turkey.
    Next time someone claims you are just a few pounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, a little phosphorus and some trace minerals, remind them that they left out information.  That’s the key ingredient that can make Mars colonies out of Lego blocks and computers out of raw materials dredged from mine shafts.  This observational principle is consistent not with evolution, which attempts to breed information out of nothing, but rather with an information-rich origin of life: God, the Word, took simple dust from the earth, fashioned it into a body, then breathed into it the breath of life, and man became a living soul.
Next headline on: Geology. • Next amazing story.

Let this be a lesson in the unreliability of dating methods and in the implausibility of evolutionary assumptions about the rise of man.  See also our July 2001 and Oct 2001 about Chauvet Cave.  What about the Italian cave art National Geographic reported November 2001 that was claimed to be 35,000 years old and just as good?
Next headline on: Dating Methods. • Next headline on: Early Man.

How Long Can Fossil DNA Survive?   04/21/2003
Nature Science Update has reported that a Danish team recovered 400,000 year old DNA in Siberian permafrost.  Science News also highlighted the story in this week’s issue, describing the work of Eske Willerslev who analyzed core samples 31 meters long that they believe covers a two million year period.  At the 30,000 year mark, they found DNA from eight living and extinct animals, like hares, reindeer and mammoths.  At the 400,000 year mark they found genetic signatures of 28 modern and ancient trees, shrubs and mosses.  The team also identified DNA of extinct birds and plants from a cave in New Zealand dated to 3,000 years old.
    Science News says the scientists do not know how the animal DNA ended up locked in permafrost, unless it came from their feces.  The article also cautions that “at some sites, the mixing of soil layers over time could complicate attempts to reconstruct ancient ecosystems.”  The work by Willerslev et al is to be published in an upcoming issue of Science.

Why do these scientists believe these samples are 400,000 years old?  One word: evolution.  They dated their samples on the presumption that animals have slowly evolved over millions of years from flatworms to mammoths, and with that assumption guiding everything, made their claim.  They used index fossils to date these samples, a method dependent on evolutionary assumptions – that is how they determined what a 30,000 year mark is, and so forth.  But there are good reasons to believe DNA could not survive that long.  The fact that the DNA of leafy plants and moderate-temperature animals like horses is locked in permafrost should make one think of alternatives.  The samples do not show evolution; they show extinction, and stasis of some plants and animals that were fortunate to survive whatever drove their fellow critters under.
    An organism constantly repairs its DNA, but outside the body, that repair stops.  The DNA should then degrade relatively quickly, especially within warm road apples.  The circumstances of burial in permafrost are consistent with rapid burial and preservation under extraordinary circumstances.
    Science writers routinely rattle off long ages as matter of fact, but none of these samples come stamped with dates on them certified by Father Time or any other eyewitness.  Science is supposed to be about observable, repeatable, testable phenomena, but how are you going to repeat 400,000 years?  If mixing of soils can occur, how can you know the exact circumstances of deposition?  It is more credible to set an upper limit on dates, such as a few thousand years, based on human observation, than to set a lower limit like hundreds of thousands of years, based on extrapolation or philosophical preference.  For this reason, the younger dates have a far better observation-to-assumption ratio.  There is no reason to think that these samples are as old as claimed except for the prior assumption of evolution.  It makes more sense to conclude that the samples are not that old, and that animals went extinct but did not evolve.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

One must also keep in mind the strong religious and political feelings on both sides, such as the desire by Jews to validate claims to the temple mount and the Arabs’ desire to contradict it.  There are also opportunists seeking to take advantage of these desires, and to fake spectacular finds (this also is a danger in the Chinese fossil market).  A rush to judgment or lack of care in analysis can sometimes backfire by giving an impression of lack of objectivity.  Nothing has ruled out these two artifacts from being genuine, but keeping a cool head is hard to do in such a highly polarized emotional atmosphere.  Let the experts do their analysis and let all sides be heard.  As interesting as these artifacts are, their authenticity (or doubts about it) should not in any way diminish the serious study of the Scriptures.
    Previous headlines: Jan. 14 for the Joash inscription; Oct. 21 for the James ossuary.
Next headline on: The Bible.

You won’t get any fair analysis on the SciNews link, which is another example of the kind of fawning, gullible, gutless, mousy science reporting that cannot bring itself to ask any hard questions, but takes whatever a scientist says as if it were a Delphic oracle.  So we will rise to stand in the gap.  What does this story prove about evolution?  Zilch.
    The paper is a fine example of science at work – unless used as support for Darwinian evolution, because that it surely is not.  Some biologists went out on a field trip and collected mice.  Fine.  They noted which colors lived in which habitats.  Dandy.  They took them back to the lab and tried to associate genes with hair color.  Wonderful.  They have demonstrated Darwinian evolution in the wild.  Whoa!
    If anything, this paper points out serious problems with evolution.  In the first place, nothing evolved: they started and ended with not just mice, but pocket mice, and not just pocket mice, but rock pocket mice, and not just rock pocket mice, but one species: C. intermedius.  We assume this all means that these mice could interbreed.  No speciation has occurred.  We have dark-skinned and light-skinned people, too, that are all Homo sapiens sapiens, but it is very un-PC to claim that any particular color is more highly evolved than another.  The same is true for mice. 
    It is probably a fair inference that an owl will go for the contrasting-colored mouse more often than one that blends in with its background.  But they did not prove this by observation.  Assuming this is true, it only involves a weeding out of varieties within existing populations of mice.  There is no evolution in the Darwinian sense of getting something new to arise from a simpler precursor.
    What these scientists did not accomplish is what they set out to prove: a genetic basis for the observed color differences.  In one of the Arizona populations, they did find a correlation between patterns in the gene Mc1r and dark coloration.  But this correlation did not hold true for the New Mexico population.  For that, they had to invoke the hand-waving argument of convergent evolution; the New Mexico mice found a different means to the same end.  The scientists did recognize that without a genetic explanation for phenotypic changes (external appearance), there is no Darwinian natural selection, only the discredited Lamarckian concept of inheritance of acquired characteristics.  But even if they found a gene linked to fur color, it is oversimplifying not to assume that other factors, such as gene expression, the environment, and inter-species relationships are not involved in the observed distributions of pocket mice color.  And where do some evolutionists’ pet theories like kin selection and sexual selection fit in?  Did they ask Minnie Mouse if she preferred a light or dark Mickey?
    So those are the pros of this study.  Now for the cons.  Look at the damaging admissions this paper makes about Darwinian evolution:

1. “Identifying the genes underlying adaptation is a major challenge to evolutionary biology,” they say, and repeat, “A key problem in evolutionary biology is to connect genotype with phenotype for fitness-related traits.” One would think, from the hype evolution receives about what a fact it is and how it can make philosophers out of goo, that such a basic problem would have been solved after 144 years of trying. 
2. According to this paper, the old peppered moth tale is still “one of the best known cases of adaptation.”  But the peppered moth myth was exposed by evolutionists as an overly-hyped story, not justified by the data, and in some particulars even involving fraud.*  We will not accuse these biologists of gluing mice to the rock to take their pictures, but if there existed a better example than peppered moths, so widely debunked and discredited, these scientists surely would have mentioned it instead.  (None of the other examples, such as insecticide resistance, refer to increases in genetic information, either, and notice that they were responses to human disturbance.)  Even if the peppered moth story had a fragment of credibility left, they say that the genetic basis for the coloration change remains unknown to this day.  Are we to conclude that no better example of evolutionary adaptation has been found since 1859 than peppered moths and pocket mice?  Will these pictures of dark and light mice on light and dark rocks become the new icons of evolution in public school biology textbooks?  Will the news media rise up and applaud this wonderful new example of natural selection in action?  Probably.
   (*For documentation, see Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells and Of Moths and Men: An Evolutionary Tale by Judith Hooper). 
3. The scientists call this a an example of “convergent phenotypic evolution on a relatively short timescale,” i.e., one million years.  Are they implying that in a million years, all evolution could do for these mice was change their hair color?  We thought they expected to get a whale from a wolf-sized land creature in just 50 million.  If change in a few nucleotides in a mouse gene for hair color is all we can expect to get out of one million years of waiting for natural selection to work its wonders, we’re waiting in the wrong line.

We wish to express our sincere appreciation to scientists like these for continuing to provide us fresh material for exhibiting to the public the strongest evidences for contemporary evolutionary theory.  Keep up the good work.
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

No long comments this time, since this is more of the same intellectual schizophrenia we have discussed so many times before.  Interestingly, the other authors, who describe the fine details of molecular machines, have very little to say about evolution, but Pollard waxes eloquent about it.  His remarks are characterized by sweeping generalities of bluff so characteristic of evolutionary prose, authoritative pronouncements that the peasants are supposed to just accept with awe because he, a scientist, says so.  Examples: (1) “Genes for actin and tubulin arose in prokaryotes.”  How?  He doesn’t say.  They just “arose” (the miracle of emergence).  Does he have any idea how mathematically improbable that is, that a mindless one-celled organism could invent the complex three-dimensional parts of a railroad system?  Shh!  It’s not polite to interrupt a scientist during his oracle.  (2) “In a fascinating role reversal early in eukaryotic evolution, actin filaments took over cytokinesis and microtubules assumed the partitioning of the genome.”  Awesome!  Those little mindless molecules sure are smart!  (3) “Moreover, nematodes evolved completely different cytoskeletal polymers for their amoeboid sperm.”  Wow!  Worms are even smarter.
    You get the idea.  Suggestion: print these articles out, soak them in clear water, run them through the squeegee to remove the evolutionary acid, and you’ll learn some wonderful things about the mechanical workings of the cellular factory.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

We think students and the public should know that after over two centuries of the nebular hypothesis, planetary scientists are still at square one explaining our solar system by natural causes.  If they thought finding extrasolar planets would complete the picture, it has only compounded the problems.  Perhaps future observations will lend support to one hypothesis over another, but if history is any guide, the number of new puzzles will outpace simple answers.  They certainly are not confident at this stage, as this article makes clear.
    Our earth is blessed by a multitude of “anthropic” characteristics: the nearly circular orbits of our planets, the placement of our moon and Jupiter, our atmosphere, our magnetic field and many other factors that combine to make our solar system a haven for life.  Without even one of these, there would be no one here to wonder.  Maybe that is the most difficult thing of all for a naturalist to explain: the origin of wonder.
    Ironically, in the same issue of Nature, Stanford geophysicist Norman H. Sleep haughtily repudiates the one alternative that does explain all the data.  In a review of two books on catastrophes and extinction, including Ward and Brownlee’s pessimistic book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, he sneers, “Reaction to the rank odour of biblical catastrophism and creationism has prejudiced serious consideration of extraterrestrial affairs in geology and biology.”  In other words, there is evidence for catastrophism, but let me make it crystal clear I do NOT mean Biblical creationism – that stinks!
    Maybe that’s what drives some of these planetary scientists: not the observations, but an irrational hatred of the Bible.  Notice how Biblical creationism is the target, not the creation account in any other religious document.  Can you imagine anyone in these PC days getting away with a remark like that about the Quran or the sacred text of any other religion, or saying the creationism of native Americans, Eskimos, aborigines or Hindus exudes a rank odour?  Such a slur would mean instant vilification on the front pages of world newspapers, and angry demands for a retraction.  Stanford would undoubtedly ask him to resign.  But with the Bible – that’s another story: it’s always open season here; fire away!
    In a way, that’s kind of a back-handed endorsement.  There must be something there worth investigating if it makes certain people so mad.  Didn’t Jesus (who was a Biblical creationist) say that the world would hate his followers?  “Therefore let us go forth unto Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach” (Hebrews 13:13).  As the writer of Hebrews encouraged early Christians to leave the majority camp and endure the shame that would result, scientists who fear God and respect His word need to be ready when leaving the majority camp of naturalistic science.  The reaction behind you may not be rational, but the company in front of you is wonderful.
Next headline on: Solar System.

Weeping is a good sign, even anger.  Now, what are you going to do about it?  Have you ever considered what people in 1945 must have thought when the unspeakable cruelties of the Holocaust became known?  Did you ever prejudge the indifference some showed?  Now it’s our turn.  And remember, Iraq has been just one of many places around the world where people suffer unspeakable atrocities and are denied basic human rights.  Personal or armed intervention may not always be possible, but anyone can do these: get informed, support those who can intervene, speak out, and pray.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

Their theory envisions that during or after speciation different alleles will evolve in different species.  These alleles can reach fixation by either positive selection or neutral drift, but during this period, there is no selection against potentially deleterious interactions with derived alleles that are evolving in other species.  These deleterious interactions will be observed only in hybrids between the species.

These findings raise important questions about the mechanism of species incompatibilities.  If the rapid evolution of speciation genes is found to be typical, it might suggest that multiple substitutions with synergistic effects are required before a gene becomes functionally diverged enough between species to cause a hybrid phenotype.  Alternatively, a few substitutions, or even a single substitution, might be sufficient to create a hybrid incompatibility allele, with their high divergence rates reflecting the fact that many substitutions must occur before one has functional significance in hybrids.  These possibilities can be addressed by investigating the mechanism of hybrid lethality by using the powerful genetic resources of D. melanogaster.  Identifying the genes that interact with or are downstream of Hmr will also help to answer whether hybrid incompatibility genes are in general evolving rapidly.

Judge: You may now question the witness.  Prosecutor: Thank you, your honor.  Mr. Roote, what led you to conclude this gene had evolved rapidly?  (We found homologues in other species with numerous substitutions, insertions, and deletions.)  And yet these genes were functional, correct?  (Yes.)  How did you know they were homologous?  (Presumably they derived from a common ancestor.)  How do you know they had a common ancestor?  (Because they have these homologous genes.)  I see.  How did you calibrate the speed at which this gene diverged?  (We used the molecular clock, the rate at which mutations accumulate.)  And how is the molecular clock calibrated?  (By invoking the time of the last common ancestor, and counting the changes since then.)  In this exhibit, I show two family trees of arthropods from two scientists that differ radically in their placement and timing of the last common ancestor.  Can you tell me which one I should use to calibrate the molecular clock?
Defense Attorney: Objection!  Teasing the witness!
Judge: Sustained.
Prosecutor: Did the rapidly-evolving gene you describe run on a different molecular clock than other genes on the same chromosome?  (Apparently, probably because it was being acted on by positive selection.)  Did you discover any evidence of positive selection, or that the gene led to any increase in information or improvement of function in the new species?  (No, but we assume it must have, because the nature of the changes appeared to be non-random.)  Yet all species of fruit flies are still fruit flies, correct?  (Yes.)  Did you start and end with fruit flies?  (Of course.)
    Are you aware of any species of Drosophila that has a new organ or function that is in some way superior, or more fit, than another species?  (Well, some are adapted to different habitats or food sources.)  But they all have the same basic structures and functions: wings, mouth parts, and so forth, is that correct?  (I suppose so.)  Nothing that might involve new genetic instructions that would require an increase in information or function?  (Adaptation does not always have to be upward...)  I understand, but what I’m asking is, do you have any evidence from your observations of fruit fly genes that one species has evolved a new organ or function that a previous species did not have?  (I suppose if you ask it that way, the answer is no.)  And yet your paper says that multiple substitutions would have had to occur in synergy to produce new function?  (Yes.)  Any evidence that has happened?  (No, except that the substitutions did not appear to be random.)  But you could not determine if these changes occurred together?  (No.)  Is synergy permissible in evolutionary theory?  (What do you mean?)  I mean, having several random changes occurring synergistically – wouldn’t that be teleological?
Defense Attorney: Objection!  Leading question.
Judge: Sustained; rephrase the question without the T word.
Prosecutor: Mr. Roote, you stated in your conclusion that multiple substitutions with synergistic effects would be required, or that many substitutions must occur before the gene has functional significance.  Do you have any evidence that this occurred?  (No, other than that the genes do show a marked degree of divergence now.)  Do you know of a way that unguided mutations could produce this synergy of effects?  (Only via natural selection.)  And yet each mutation would have to confer a functional advantage in some way to be selected, is that right?  (Yes, that is my understanding of how natural selection works.)  Did you and your colleagues map out any plausible sequence of changes in this gene, and calculate any fitness benefit or cost of each substitution?  (No, that would be highly speculative and nearly impossible to test.)  Is there any other functional part of a fruit fly for which this has been done?  (Pause... Not to my knowledge.)
    Do you feel your paper lends support to the theory of common descent?  (Absolutely; I mean, it’s not like there isn’t a lot more work to do, but we are slowly putting the pieces of a vast puzzle together to attack this major question of how species originate, which will take a great deal of time and the efforts of scientists around the world for a long time to come.)  So Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species 144 years ago, but even in our age of genomics, the puzzle remains to be solved?  (Well, I think we have made a lot of progress, but then again, different schools of thought have different ....)
Judge: Answer the question.
(What was the question again?)  Prosecutor: Has Darwinian evolution been able to explain the origin of species?  (Well, in general, I would say yes, but in the particulars, not yet.)  Did you ever consider how your data might fit into any alternative paradigm?  (Like what?)  Like design, for instance.
Defense Attorney: Objection!  Irrelevant.  Religion has no place in a scientific courtroom!
Judge: Overruled; counsel did not imply religion in his question.  Please restate the question.
Prosecutor: I assume you believe that all living things, including fruit flies, derive from a common ancestor, is that right?  (Yes, that is the only scientific approach.)  Did you ever take your raw data and consider whether it might fit with any alternative approach that does not use common descent as a starting assumption?  (Long pause and quizzical look ... We did not consider that possibility, no, but...)
Prosecutor: No further questions, your honor.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Bugs.

If this is the queen of evolutionary problems, then the king is how you get life at all without intelligent design, and the joker is the evolutionary storyteller.
    Good parents warn their children that if you tell one lie, you usually have to tell additional lies to back up the first lie, until you get caught in your own “tangled web” of deceit.  Here, evolutionists have told the whopper that you can get a universe and life without design, and now they’ve devised 20+ tales in response to the interrogation, “If what you told me is true, then why did sex evolve, when it costs far more than any supposed selective advantage it would give an organism?”  The only way out of this web is to go back to square one and start over with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

All this, and no need for traffic reports every six minutes on the radio.  How many commuters have any conception of the fact that deep inside their bodies, a transportation network vastly exceeding the freeway system of a large city, functions smoothly, night and day, without accidents?
    Out of mercy, we will spare you a description of the complex procedures involved in getting a new protein into a mitochondrion, described in another article in the same issue of Current Biology.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry. • Next amazing story.

Stratified radiocarbon dates provide an independent chronological link between archaeological layers and historical data.  The invasion by Pharaoh Shoshenq I (Shishak) is a key historical synchronism, ~925 B.C.E., mentioned in both Egyptian inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible.  The list of places raided by Shoshenq, mentioned at Karnak (Egypt), includes Rehov (Israel).  The site yielded a consistent series of radiocarbon dates from the 12th to 9th century B.C.E.  Our results (i) suggest a revised Iron-Age chronology; (ii) date an archaeological stratum to Shoshenq’s campaign; (iii) indicate the similarity of “Solomonic” and “Omride” pottery; and (iv) provide correlation with Greece and Cyprus.

The radiocarbon technique quickly loses its validity for prehistoric dating, but as a tool to double-check events within a few thousand years, it has some value.  This publication is interesting in that it comes from a secular science journal with an international reputation.  It fits in with a long pattern of skepticism against the authenticity of the Bible being overthrown by further investigation.
    David’s name has been found on a contemporary inscription, but why are there so few inscriptions from this period?  We must remember that in subsequent history, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans and Crusaders repeatedly wreaked havoc throughout the land of Israel, destroying monuments, burning, looting and pillaging.  Archaeology is like trying to read a blackboard that has been repeatedly erased and written over.  In addition, the Jews did not carve inscriptions in stone as often as other nations such as Egypt, so there is not much blackboard to read.  The surprise is that so much is left.  The Jews did leave, however, an impressive body of writing that was meticulously copied with utmost care, as would be due what they considered to be the very word of God.  In the Old Testament (and the New Testament which takes its authenticity as a given), there is a superabundance of information from the period.
    In addition, the archaeologist’s spade has turned up evidence all over Palestine from before and after Solomon supporting the written Biblical accounts.  Examples include the Ras Shamra tablets, the site of Sodom’s destruction, evidences of Joshua’s campaigns at Jericho and Hazor, the Tel Dan inscription that mentions Israel and the house of David, the recent discovery of an inscription supporting Joash’s repair of the temple, Hezekiah’s tunnel, Sennacherib’s stele, the Moabite stone, the Lachish letters, and much more.  Biblical archaeology is a lively and active enterprise with many successes, considering only a small fraction of sites have been fully excavated.  Now, the case has been strengthened that many of the massive gates, palaces and stables that skeptics have claimed are 9th century are rightly attributed to Solomonic times.  This reinforces the traditional Biblical chronology.
    Although this paper is interesting and important, the Bible itself bears its own internal marks of authenticity.  Anyone who has read the accounts of David and Solomon would have a hard time believing them to be made-up accounts of mythical heroes.  For one thing, what myth-maker would include all the embarrassing details of the heroes’ mistakes and sins?  For another, the amount of descriptive detail in names, places, and events, the extensive genealogies, and the correspondence with other known events from secular history – these all put the burden of proof on the skeptic.  Both internal and external evidences on many fronts demonstrate that the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes, are historically accurate.  Why is it that skeptics will more readily accept the writings of other nations, like the Egyptians, Greeks, Mayans or Babylonians, than the Old Testament?  Those who come at the evidence without a skeptical ax to grind are often convinced by the sheer weight of evidence.  For a recent and very interesting example, read The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, a former atheist skeptic himself, an investigative reporter who knows how to ask the hard questions.
    Skeptics are like useful idiots who end up strengthening the case for the historicity and authenticity of the Bible.  Without hammers repeatedly pounding and breaking on the Biblical anvil, we might not know how strong the anvil really is.
Next headline on: The Bible. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

Coalition forces had specific orders to protect antiquities.  They did not bomb museums, and now they are trying to help in the recovery effort.  Certain individuals are quick to blame the Americans for this “inexcusable and avoidable” loss, but it was not Americans who looted; it was Iraqi citizens, and some of it may have been the work of organized professional thieves.  It didn’t matter to the perpetrators that these are treasures that belong to all mankind, that these priceless artifacts for understanding history are Iraq’s pride.  The evil of the human heart just needs the restraints to be lifted for a short time to reveal its ugliness.
    Just a short distance south of Ararat, Iraq is the heartland of where Semite nations settled after the Flood, as listed in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.  The whole country is an archaeological treasure trove that for decades under Saddam Hussein has been too dangerous politically to explore.  We can only hope some museum employees with higher values rescued items for safekeeping, and that others will turn them in when the new government takes hold.
    Anti-Americans need to realize that Hussein was no benefactor to archaeologists and things could have been far worse without American intervention.  Hussein was about to dam the Tigris River and drown dozens of sites, including the ancient Assyrian capital of Ashur.  It remains to be seen whether the new government stops the dam project, takes better care of its treasures, and allows more freedom for archaeologists to bring the past to light.  Free governments have a far better record of preserving their heritage.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: The Bible.

How many times do we have to point out the fallacy of this kind of argument?  This is not evolution; it is intelligent design!  Liu is preprogramming and strategizing and coaxing and filtering and selecting and choreographing a desired result.  These are attributes of mind and purpose, not chance.  Even if you outsource the production of building blocks to a quasi-random source then select what you want, you are not “evolving” products, you are designing them.  Nature has neither the desire nor the power to select optimum designs unless you personify her as a goddess.  This kind of directed evolution is anathema to the purist naturalist, and should have been scorned by Science magazine and condemned by Cardinal Ruse.  Without a choreographer, you won’t get a ballet.  The blind, undirected dancers will step on each other’s toes until a dogpile results.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

Funny; no mention of evolution in the whole screenplay.  Wasn’t Darwin voted Best Director of this cast of thousands?
Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

Did you want freedom fries with that?
Next headline on: Early Man. • Next dumb story.

It would certainly be better to find this out now rather than having to face endless debates with naturalistic scientists, who have no absolute foundation for morals, on why cloning is immoral.  Unfortunately, this news will probably not stop certain ones from continuing to try.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

We can’t let the impact theory go extinct.  Just think of all the great cartoons made over the last 25 years.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs. • Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Geology.

The replication of eukaryotic chromosomal DNA requires the initiation of replication forks from thousands of replication origins.  These must be regulated so that none fires more than once in each cell cycle.  The cell achieves this by breaking the initiation process into two nonoverlapping phases.  In the first phase, occurring in late mitosis and early G1, replication origins are “licensed” for replication by assembly of a prereplicative complex (pre-RC) of initiation proteins.  When replication forks are initiated at licensed replication origins during the subsequent S phase, the pre-RC is disassembled, converting the origin to the unlicensed state incapable of supporting further initiation.  In order for this system to work properly, the licensing system that assembles new pre-RCs must shut down before S phase starts.

What amazing and wonderful mechanisms are being discovered at work in the basic unit of life, the cell.  Think of it: quality control, checks and balances, high-availability, redundant hardware and software, security procedures, ultra-high fidelity, homeland security – all at the nanometer scale.  Can the totalitarian dictatorship of Darwinism in the sciences handle this flood of new discoveries?  Scientists need the freedom to think outside the box of the current reigning philosophy of naturalism.  There is no mention of evolution in this paper.  Perhaps scientists are afraid to say anything if they cannot pay homage to Darwin.  It’s time for regime change, and there will be dancing in the labs.
    For a good visualization of DNA packaging, operation, and repair, including the histone code, see this cool illustration at New Scientist.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

Expression and function of many genes have apparently been conserved over evolutionary time.  This observation has led to suggestions that all organisms, at least those in the same kingdom, may work with the same basic genetic toolkit.  Although this is undoubtedly true in general, polyploidy provides a way to diversify the basic set of tools, and plants in particular have taken advantage of this opportunity.  By copying their genomes, they retain the tool kit and at the same time generate a garage full of spare parts.  Gene duplication can provide the raw material for expression changes to occur, and polyploidy itself can trigger epigenetic changes. 

So the article ends with another promissory note for an evolutionary story.  You will read in vain to find some hard evidence that polyploidy is a major mechanism for the origin of species, like some evolutionists claim.  “The origin of species,” Darwin’s famous title, is Kellogg’s last phrase, but only in reference to unfinished business.  No connection between polyploidy and the origin of species is provided; it’s always “the next step” for evolutionary theory to explain.
    Furthermore, the changes in differential gene expression do not require millions of years; they occur immediately.  Kellogg gives no hope that studying polyploidy will help produce trees of common ancestry.  Though sequence similarities appear to be orthologous (related), “because the term ‘orthologous’ is defined solely with reference to a gene tree, orthology can only be demonstrated with a molecular phylogeny.”  That’s it.  You have to already know the tree to call something orthologous – a case of circular reasoning.
    If any evolutionary conclusions can be drawn from this paper, it is only that downhill or horizontal variation occurs, not the kind of variation that leads to new organs, functions, and complexity.  Copies either degenerate into pseudogenes, or (if subfunctionalization occurs), they divide the functions that already existed.  Nothing novel or better arises; the Hughes citation makes the point.  All said and done, Kellogg ends with a reference worthy of intelligent design theory: organisms have a toolkit, and they maintain spare parts.  Use of the toolkit depends on epigenetic mechanisms even more complex than DNA that we are just beginning to uncover.  Where is the evolutionary explanation for all this design?  As usual, “Oh—that’s the next step.”
    If you’re sick and tired of waiting for the UN (United Naturalists) to come to a resolution, study DNA from an intelligent design perspective.  It’s good for a dose of shock and awe.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

This paper illustrates dogmatism that will spin any collection of data, no matter how contradictory or counter-intuitive, into support for its assumptions.  Evolutionary theory is so flexible it can explain anything.  In Texas, the species counts are stable, so Doherty’s findings don’t hold.  The conclusions are all based on inferences from statistical counts, not actually watching species go extinct because they weren’t the fittest.  There is no net evolution, because dichromatic species don’t decrease in numbers.  Doherty presents no evidence that any one species evolved into something else, or that colorful males got more and more extreme till they went extinct (we still have peacocks, don’t we?).  If sexual selection is a basic principle of nature, why does it produce dull-colored birds where the sexes look the same?  Why don’t the females get colorful half the time – is this a kind of chauvinism on the part of male evolutionary biologists?  There are so many conundrums with the theory of sexual selection, and so many exceptions to the “rule”, it should be tossed out as Charlie’s little pet theory that couldn’t stand up to scrutiny.
    A Commentary on this study published May 5 in PNAS by James P. Calvet reveals that, despite Calvet’s optimism, the data are open to various interpretations, and understanding the role of sexual selection is still futureware.
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Bacterial Fossils Challenge “Snowball Earth” Hypothesis   04/08/2003
Three University of California earth scientists found alleged microfossils in Death Valley that left them puzzled.  Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they present evidence of a rich community of prokaryotes and eukaryotes that appear to have been healthy and diverse both before and after the assumed deep-freeze that evolutionists say occurred around 750 million years ago.  “No significant changes are noted between older, presnowball biotas and the synglacial snowball biotas,” they conclude:

The fact that heterotrophic and autotrophic eukaryotes appear to have survived unscathed through this interval leads one to question the severity of glacial environments in the tropical marine realm during these glacial times, the amount of ice-covered oceans, and the inhospitable nature of the snowball aftermath.  While we must accept the credibility of low-latitude glaciation in Neoproterozoic time, and accept that these conditions represented a stressful environment on many parts of the globe, the extend of ice-covered oceans, and thus the ability to affect severely the course of evolution, is less clear.

If earth were ever a snowball, it very likely could never have recovered.  Raw data again challenge an evolutionary story.  “The snowball Earth hypothesis predicts a ‘freeze-fry, double-whammy,’ to have affected the course of evolution in a bottleneck and flush style (a complete global freeze followed by an intensely hot and inhospitable aftermath),” they explain.  “The Kingston Peak Formation microbiotas contradict these hypothesized extremes.  Taxonomic and trophic complexity does not appear to have changed significantly during the glaciation.”
    These scientists opt for a soft, smushy snowball instead of a hard bunker-buster.  But the fossils indicate that complex eukaryotic bacteria, including photosynthetic types that rely on sunlight, were doing just fine the whole time, enjoying the balmy weather (it probably wasn’t like present-day Death Valley when they lived).  Where is the evidence for any snowball fight?  There were glaciers, there are fossils, but an ice-covered globe is just a story somebody made up.  How long will it take for this theory to be tossed into the dust bin, and the picturesque phrase “snowball earth” drop out of the vocabulary?
    The ability of a stressful environment “to affect severely the course of evolution, is less clear,” they say.  You don’t say.
Next headline on: Fossils.

It is a slight improvement to see two sides of a controversy presented, but there is a third side totally ignored: those who think the dating is unreliable and the assumption of abiogenesis is irrational.  All the scientists in the story believe life arose by chance from chemistry.  The only question is when, and whether or not these particular rocks support one believer’s incredible claim.  The article shamelessly prints a date of four significant figures without error bars, without any hint of the assumptions on which the the dates were calculated, as if they are rock solid and indisputable.
    For other examples of obfuscation on Space.com, see another article today on Space.Com that calls water “the elixir of life.”  (Try our experiment: take sterile dirt, just add water, and watch it, for a lo-o-o-o-o-ng time.)  The article displays photos of earth organisms with the suggestion similar life-forms may have evolved on Mars – no evidence whatsoever – just the assumption that if there is water, life must be inevitable.
    Fair and honest science reporting needs to expand its horizons beyond the Darwin Party line.  The astrobiologists at Space.com give a false appearance of impartiality by having only evolutionists debate the evidence.  This would be akin to the Chaldean Tribune of 604 BC reporting a debate between leading soothsayers on the meaning of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, while refusing to grant an interview to Daniel.
Next headline on: Fossils. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Blood is probably one of the most versatile tissues.  It transports nutrients, metabolites, signaling molecules, and immunoactive compounds throughout the body.  When shed, it quickly clots.  Clotting is induced by the thrombotic cascades, in which a fast, successive activation of enzymes ultimately transforms soluble fibrinogen into solid fibrin.  The intricate pathways of these cascades allow rigorous checks and bounds, resulting in tight regulation, not only to prevent the loss of blood, but also to prevent the formation of inappropriate clots.

Michael Behe used blood clotting to illustrate irreducible complexity in his book Darwin’s Black Box.  To show he was not exaggerating, we want to quote one paragraph from this secular paper to give readers a glimpse into all the tightly-regulated events involved in blood clotting.  Don’t expect to understand it; just marvel at the level of irreducible complexity involved in this common repair mechanism:

Thrombin is one of the most downstream actors of the clotting cascades, where it cleaves fibrinogen into fibrin to induce its coagulation.  Thus, thrombin also starts a positive feedback loop as the resulting clot further activates more upstream actors of the cascade.  Thrombin’s activity and concentration levels are tightly regulated.  In complex with thrombomodulin, thrombin switches its specificity and instead of cleaving fibrinogen, it activates protein C, which downregulates the thrombotic cascade.  Furthermore, thrombin is irreversibly inhibited by antithrombin, a serpin that also inhibits the upstream activator factor Xa.  Each of these regulatory mechanisms serves a specific purpose: (1) at the site where clotting is required, thrombin not only cleaves plasminogen, but also indirectly promotes the local activation of new thrombin molecules; (2) thrombin that has diffused away from the clotting area can bind to thrombomodulin, a membrane protein exposed by intact epithelial cells; (3) in complex with thrombomodulin, thrombin is prevented from cleaving plasminogen and instead activates protein C, thus indirectly preventing the local formation of new thrombin molecules; and (4) subsequently, escaped thrombin is rounded up by antithrombin, which for its activation requires a specific pentasaccharide motif within the heparan sulfates that line the surface of epithelial cells.
    In addition to these mechanisms, thrombin’s activity is also regulated allosterically through a conformational switch that is activated by sodium ions.  At low sodium concentrations, the “slow” form of thrombin dominates, which changes into the “fast” form at high concentrations.  Intriguingly, the sodium levels in blood are tightly maintained at concentrations that promote thrombin’s fast form.

Got that all down?  There will be a quiz Monday.  Fortunately, your cells have this procedure down pat, or you would die the next time you prick a finger.
Next headline on: Human Body. • Next amazing story.

“It’s been known for a long time that females of many species choose to mate with the flashiest males,” says Jonathan Blount at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.  “Quite what they stand to gain from mating with these show-offs has been puzzling ecologists since the time of Charles Darwin.”

Well then, by now evolution should have produced supermales that have beaks that glow in the dark.  How come some birds have black or dull beaks?  How on earth do crows and ravens survive so well?  Is this the sequel to the just-so story about bright feathers correlating with immune systems?  Why doesn’t the bright beak attract the predators?  Doesn’t the male care about the immune system of the female?  Does a bird know what an immune system is?  How could a female bird care whether its offspring have its father’s genes?  Are they claiming that carotenoids are the only measure of fitness?  Was Rudolph the Reindeer sexy?  How come women aren’t attracted to men with red noses?  Should GQ start advertising carrot juice to single guys?  Why are we the only ones asking the logical follow-up questions to this tale, instead of swallowing the plastic worm and giving a cuckoo-bird grin like the other science news outlets?
    Stories like this make it plausible to imagine our descendants wondering how so many intelligent people could be so birdbrained.
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

According to Charles Darwin, the origin of species was “the mystery of mysteries”.  If so, then the Neotropical (Central and South American) forests, which harbor more plant species than the tropics of Asia and Africa combined, are the most mysterious of all.  On page 122 of this issue, Wilf et al. show that this massive diversification was active by the early Eocene, 52 million years ago.  High plant species diversity in the Neotropics is clearly ancient.

Rethinking its origins – does that mean design?  Never.  It means believing that mindless chance works faster and better than they thought.  Do the authors provide any evidence that any one of these species evolved from another?  No; they just assume it.  Do they prove that largeness of area is more important than geographical isolation?  No; they just hope it might.  There is no mention of evolution, phylogeny or ancestor in Wilf’s entire paper.  The evidence points to a wide assortment of species already there.  If anything, there were more species then compared to the present, and some that have gone extinct.  In addition, the fossils studied were buried in volcanic catastrophes and floods.  This paper is another blow against the long-assumed principle of allopatric speciation, and lends support to the heresy of sympatric speciation.  How can any of these data make Darwin’s ideas nearer the mark?  When everywhere they look, organisms burst onto the scene fully formed and already richly diverse, where does the evidence itself lead?
    Darwin’s idea is nearer the mark only like 175 degrees off is better than 180.  The essence of the evolutionary speculation in this story is a debate over which myth is the stupidest: allopatric or sympatric speciation.  Which one has more evidence, i.e., which has the least below zero?  (Forget their dates, which are based on unverifiable assumptions about the unobservable past.)  Darwin did not explain the origin of species despite making it the title of his book.  The origin of species is a “mystery of mysteries” only to those who refuse to take God’s word for it, that He filled the earth with diverse plants that reproduce after their kind, and instead feel obligated to invent a story where nature pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.  If a man can’t do it, why would nature do it, or even want to?
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Fossils.

No amount of name-calling, bandwagon and bluffing can save the Darwinian Big Science Enterprise from intellectual bankruptcy.  It needs an Information Fund bailout from the Intelligent Design movement.
    Nature seems in a quandary how to spin this story.  Which is the lesser of two evils for a liberal, intelligent design or censorship?
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Interesting that Konner takes refuge in subjectivity; i.e., I just “feel” like I have free will, even if I don’t understand it.  Hardly an answer you would expect from a rational scientist.  Let not the materialists think they have an advantage over theologians if their “parallel” problem is “more difficult.”  Surely Occam’s Razor would favor the simpler explanation that from the sovereign free will of a Creator comes some concept of limited free will for His creatures.  But from hydrogen?  Out of nothing, nothing comes, including subjective feelings.
    Daniel Dennett is the one who described Darwinian evolution as a “universal acid” that eats through all traditional beliefs, so here he is illustrating it by delving into a domain usually reserved for theologians.  He looks like a philosopher (or like Santa Claus, one of the two), but does his attempt at explaining free will deliver the goods?  Nigel Williams writes like a hopeful kid looking up the chimney.  Assuming he has accurately summarized Dennett’s thesis, there seems to be a fatal flaw in the tale destined to leave believers disillusioned.  Namely, having more degrees of freedom does not necessarily relate to having the ability to use them.  A rock, for instance, may have more degrees of freedom in the air than it does in the ocean, and on a library desk it has many more, but without genetic instructions, it’s just going to sit there, or fall, or otherwise be the puppet of natural forces.  Living organisms are characterized by information.  Their ability to use the degrees of freedom available requires genetic instructions and the functional machines that can respond to that information.  If organisms like jellyfish and birds and people are the products of blind, naturalistic forces, where did the genetic instructions come from?  Assuming that freedom generates free will is a non-sequitur.  As you cannot get blood out of a turnip, you cannot get information out of natural law, and you cannot get free will out of naturalism.  Sorry, kids, this Santa is a mere mortal.
    Although Dennett’s version of free will seems Arminian, it also has a Calvinistic aspect.  The reference is not to John Calvin, the reformer-theologian of Geneva, but to the fictional character of cartoon fame, Calvin and Hobbes.  Michael Behe explained the play on words in his book Darwin’s Black Box.  In a chapter entitled “Calvinism,” Behe reminds the reader of Calvin’s adventures with the transmogrifier, a cardboard box that becomes a time machine, a cloning lab, or anything else he wants to imagine.  Natural selection is the evolutionist’s transmogrifier.  It performs any miracle the evolutionist needs: transforming a bacterium into a orchid, a reptile into a bird, or a shrew into a philosopher.
    By using natural selection to create free will out of hydrogen, Dennett has shown himself to be a hyper-Calvinist.  His five points of TULIP could be denoted: (1) Total Depravity, (2) Unconditional Selection, (3) Limited Argument, (4) Irresistible Force, and (5) Perseverance of the Fittest.  Of these, Limited Argument is the key to defending hyper-Calvinism; keep those pesky intelligent design philosophers out of the debate.  Williams only quotes radical evolutionists who gush on Dennett’s saintly wisdom.  We’d sure like to hear Stephen Meyer review the book Freedom Evolves.  It might reveal whether Dennett is really the biologist’s thinking man, or just a guy with a Santa beard promising the impossible to his trusting, gullible disciples.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

This indicates that major paradigm shifts are still possible.  The picture of magma ascending from deep within the earth and spilling out over the surface may be incorrect; perhaps the heat is shallow, in the crust.  Notice how little is understood from the questions they are asking: “How much do we know about the temperature of the mantle and of volcanic regions?  Are ‘hotspots’ hot?  If not, where does all the melt come from?”
    If such basic questions are being asked in 2003 about something long accepted as common knowledge, what other conventional ideas in geology might be fundamentally flawed?  What other alternatives are being suppressed by “terminological limitations” – mental straitjackets imposed by the very words that geologists use?  Just because a museum or national park has a story and a diagram doesn’t make it a fact.
Next headline on: Geology.