I can’t help feeling at the same time that this space effort of ours is bigger even than a rivalry between the United States and Russia.  The heavens beyond us are enormous beyond comprehension, and the further we penetrate them, the greater will be our human understanding of the great universal purpose, the Divine Will itself.
– Wernher von Braun, This Week magazine, 01/01/1961.

Warmth, water, what more do you need?  At least the pictures of Antarctic ice towers are interesting.
Next headline on: Mars. •Next headline on: Origin of Life.

The complexity of life and the credibility of Darwinian evolution are inversely proportional.  The complexity of life is increasing.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

That science textbooks would include false, fraudulent, and misleading information is scandalous, yet this survey shows that the largest textbook market in the country is being given only two choices: evil, and the lesser of evils.  Not one of these textbooks is telling the truth on any of these four topics.  The highest grade in any area was a C.  The best of the worst was Biology by Campbell and Reece; it only scored an overall grade of C because it didn’t mention peppered moths or Haeckel’s embryos, but it got a D on the Miller-Urey experiment, and a C on the Tree of Life because it at least mentioned the Cambrian explosion as a “mystery” although it didn’t explain why this was a challenge to Darwin’s theory.  Only one other got a C on this item, and only one other got a C on vertebrate embryos because it showed more modern, actual photographs of embryos instead of Haeckel’s fudged 1870s drawings – but even then it lied that the early stages of embryos are remarkably alike, which they are not.
    Critics will argue that the Discovery Institute is a special interest group that has an axe to grind.  Baloney.  The Discovery fellows are PhD biologists and philosophers and historians of science who are well qualified to gauge these presentations of the evidence (or lack of it).  They come from different religious persuasions, and are united only in the conviction that Darwinian evolution is not the whole story on origins.  Moreover, we have shown right here in Creation-Evolution Headlines that the professional science journals themselves do not accept these and many other alleged evidences for evolution.  Some evolutionary scientists have been appalled that these phony evidences are still being shown to students, such as peppered moths and Haeckel’s fakes.  As we showed May 2, even believers in chemical evolution recognize that the Miller-Urey experiment was irrelevant, but merely a “useful lie” to raise consciousness about the origin of life.  Most evolutionists believe implicitly in Darwin’s Tree of Life, as reported here June13, but only in spite of the Cambrian explosion, molecular mismatches, and other contrary evidence.
    Should not students know this?  Does this sound like a conspiracy of right-wing religious zealots trying to keep scientific facts away from the students?  The shoe is on the other foot entirely.  Science students are being sold a bill of goods, indoctrinated into false beliefs that once entrenched are hard to dislodge, even after they earn their PhDs and find out the real truth (if they ever do) about Haeckel, Kettlewell, Miller and Darwin.  Yet the ACLU and NCSE go ballistic when parents wish to insert warning labels in the textbooks.
    Here’s how evolutionary indoctrination works.  Hook the student with plausible-sounding glittering generalities about evolution.  (This tends to coincide with his/her tendency to want to think independently or rebel against the parents’ “religion,” if any).  Reinforce it with fraudulent evidence, and create a mood of dogma that this is science as opposed to “religion.”  As the student gradually becomes able to accept uncomfortable facts without losing new-found faith in Darwin, feed him or her a few problems and mysteries, using the positive spin that “science” is working to solve them.  Only late in the process, when the student is thoroughly brainwashed and ardently opposed to that bogeyman “creationism,” dare to mention the real damaging problems — the Cambrian explosion, thermodynamics, chemical evolution, embryology, etc. — with the promise that “we, the scientists, are getting warmer” and “it is our noble duty to protect science from those evil creationists.”  Wake up, parents!  Anybody reading the Discovery Institute’s document should become righteously angry.
Next headline on: Schools. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

• Edible Food Packaging:  EurekAlert says you may soon be able to about wrap your kids’ sandwiches in edible packaging.  Now that’s cool applied science, and good environmentalism, too.
• Dinosaur Demise:  New Zealand paleontologists claim the dinosaurs were doomed long before any meteor wiped them out.
• History of Science:  A book review in Science 07/25/03 claims the Greeks didn’t invent science, and Chinese “science” revolved around emperor worship and consensus, not free inquiry into the nature of nature.
• Molecular Phylogeny:  Mark Pagel et al in Science 07/25/03 studied 56 published phylogenies and believe they support punctuated equilibria.
• Evolution Conference:  Elizabeth Pennisi covered last month’s Evolution 2003 conference in Chico, California.  She brought back stories about weird life, like male bugs that piggyback on the female and slurp nutrients from her back, how a cultivated flower turns into a weed, and how bacteria might have driven evolution of certain species whose females have normal diploid genes while the males have haploid (half the female number).
• Dark Energy:  A Pennsylvania astronomer featured in Nature Science Update claims he found direct evidence for dark energy by analyzing WMAP data.  But his evidence appears to only indirect inference, based on predicted gravitational effects on photons.  The proof also requires the assumption of a flat universe.
• Deep Sea Vents:  A team that studied the “Lost City” Vent Field claims it is 30,000 years old, reports Science 07/25/2003.  Space.Com also reported on the Lost City, claiming it “is just the sort of place that might have spawned life on Earth or even other planets.”
• Solar System Formation Theories:  Jonathan Lunine and Alan Boss have a friendly debate about the “disk instability” theory for the origin of the solar system in the 07/25 issue of Science.  Lunine claims it won’t work and doesn’t fit the data, while Boss argues that the disk can’t last long enough for core accretion (the only competing model) to work.

Evolutionists like to speculate and argue endlessly, because it keeps them gainfully employed, but where is the really solid evidence?  Much of it is like a dime in a dryer.  It bounces around and makes a lot of racket in the hot air, but it doesn’t amount to much.  Real science lets you buy a sandwich where you can eat the wrapper.

This sounds similar to what Jason B. Wolf told us in March about indirect genetic effects.  Here an evolutionary myth has been promulgated for decades (Medawar proposed his aging theory in 1952), and it went virtually unquestioned for half a century.  All of a sudden, somebody says, “Uh, aren’t we overlooking something?”  The point is not that Ronald Lee has finally hit on the ultimate theory that explains all.  Undoubtedly his will be toppled in time as well.  The point is that, despite the integral calculus equations in an evolutionary paper, the assumptions make or break the story.  An astrologer could assign variables to signs of the zodiac and manipulate them with fancy derivations, but if the assumption that the stars influence human behavior is incorrect, who cares what follows?  Medawar manipulated fertility according to Darwinian assumptions, and Lee manipulates fertility + transfer effects according to Darwinian assumptions.  If the Darwinian assumptions are wrong, the conclusions are going to be wrong, too.
    Prior theorists on aging assumed that fertility was the only factor.  Lee and Wolf have emphasized that indirect effects can be just as important, if not more so.  Wolf, you recall, told us that indirect effects act like a governor on the engine of evolution, or like slippage on the treadmill – basically, that they undid the effects of classical natural selection!  It would seem that, similarly, Lee’s transfer effects would lead to conservative families rather than to profligate, promiscuous bedlams.  The fact that Lee’s evolutionary theory of aging accounts for everything from nurturing humans to egg-laying salmon, who leave the young behind, means it explains nothing it all.  The missing ingredient is design.  Without design, Lee is forced to explain every aspect of physical and psychological change by natural selection, but then Wolf’s paper shows natural selection is countermanded by indirect genetic effects.  It just won’t work.  You can’t get grandma by evolution.
    So you aging grandparents, uncles, aunts and older siblings, take heart.  You are not evolutionary leftovers.  You have a powerful role.  You influence the fitness of future generations.  The transfer effects you possess include teaching the young.  Let’s do a scientific experiment and see if it improves human evolution.  Teach the young abstinence before marriage.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Health.

So long as they follow sound excavation and preservation techniques, and document and report the findings with high standards, more power to them.  Dinosaur bones do not belong to evolutionists.  The evidence belongs to everyone willing to seek it out and gather it with integrity.  Technique does not correlate directly with interpretation.  Proper technique strives to accurately record and preserve what is there.  Any group that abides by high technical standards, therefore, should have a shot at the evidence.  What they are doing is certainly better than what some Chinese opportunists do, carelessly digging up fossils to sell, and even manufacturing fakes.
    What this group found, highly preserved details and skin impressions, with marine fossils in conjunction, speaks of a rapid, catastrophic burial, not slow fossilization over millions of years.  “The deposition of the animal, the fossilization and preservation of the skin, the full articulation of the animal, and the fact that it appears to be part of a fossil graveyard, all point to the relatively recent death of Ezekiel,” DeRosa says.  “We believe he died thousands, not millions, of years ago.”
    They have presented this evidence for all to see.  How ironic to have a dinosaur announced at a Christian Booksellers convention, when the public is so used to having dinosaurs associated with evolution.  This could be the start of a new era: the creationist dinosaur hunters.  Home schoolers are usually much better educated and motivated than their public school counterparts, especially those in the latter group who have only learned how to use a condom with high self-esteem.  Since there are property owners out West who are sick and tired of the evolutionary paleontologists coming onto their land and spinning the data into tall tales, this will probably not be the last major discovery from the DeRosas and their bright, young assistants.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs. • Next headline on: Fossils. • Next headline on: Dating Methods. • Next headline on: Education.

This is so dumb, and so devoid of scientific logic, that it is time to take up pens and write the BBC to complain.  Evolution is not a person that can tinker.  Hidden in this mass of fluffy-headed nonsense, like a pebble in a dust devil, there is a little bit of scientific evidence.  And what is it?  Complex systems already exist, down in the simplest of organisms.  Sophisticated tools and signaling systems are functioning in a thriving, complex organism that is well adapted to its environment.  Is that evolution?  Only the most gullible dogmatist could take that kind of evidence and spin it into the opposite of its clear implications.  If you love good science, don’t let the storytellers get away with this column of spinning hot air.  Force them to prove their belief, not assume it, and the pebble will fall back onto solid ground where it belongs.
Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next headline on: Darwinism. • Next dumb story

Perhaps the most critical question facing the field of extrasolar planetary science is whether solar system analogs (i.e., systems with giants planets in circular orbits beyond 4 AU and small rocky planets orbiting in the inner few AU) are ubiquitous or rare. ...
We report here a new extrasolar planet in an approximately circular orbit beyond 3 AU ....
Prior to the discovery of extrasolar planets, planetary systems were predicted to be architecturally similar to the solar system (Lissauer 1995; Boss 1995), with giant planets orbiting beyond 4 AU in circular orbits and terrestrial mass planets inhabiting the inner few AU.  The landscape revealed by the first 80 extrasolar planets is quite different.  Extrasolar planetary systems have proved to be much more diverse than imagined, as predicted by Lissauer (1995): “The variety of planets and planetary systems in our Galaxy must be immense and even more difficult to imagine and predict than was the diversity of the outer planet satellites prior to the Voyager mission.”
    The discovery here of a Jupiter mass planet in a circular orbit highlights the existence, but also the rarity, of giant planets that seem similar to the original theoretical predictions.

Lissauer’s comment recalls the astonishment planetary scientists had during the 1980s when the two Voyager spacecraft revealed moon after moon in the outer solar system with features unlike anything astronomers had imagined possible – volcanoes, complex surfaces, atmospheres, geysers and canyons.  Now more assumptions are being overturned by the data.  Believers in naturalistic philosophy can always respond that, even if planetary systems like ours are rare, there are so many stars out there that there still could be billions of earthlike planets in the universe.  That argument would be impossible to disprove even with Warp 20 spaceships.  Nevertheless, it is a valuable lesson to see a prediction, made in the absence of data, fall by the wayside once measurements became available.  We should always welcome measurements.  They have a way of turning idle speculations into idol speculations.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Stars.

These are important concerns that warrant attention, but paleontologists have been collecting fossils for hundreds of years.  Only rarely does a location yield anything remarkably new; mostly it is just “more of the same.”  Last Oct. 25 we headlined a report that the fossil record is better than expected, and essentially complete.  Evolutionists cannot hold out much hope that missing links in their tale will ever be found.  In fact, it is the chain that is missing, not the links.
    Another question that would make a good science project is: even assuming the rarity of fossilization, how many fossils would be expected in 500 million years?  Is the number actually found comparable to calculations that could be made, based on current fossilization rates and erosion rates, of the percent expected to be found as fossils from trillions upon trillions of plants and animals that lived over such vast periods of time?
    The “trade secret” of paleontology is that animals appeared abruptly, survived with little change (stasis), then went extinct.  This is what gave rise to the semi-heretical evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibria.  The late Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard paleontologist, evolutionary spokesperson and vehement anti-creationist, at least faced up more honestly than most evolutionists to the uncomfortable fact that the fossil record does not fit the standard Darwinian story of gradual transformation from one kind of creature into another.
    On top of that, when you see spectacularly observed fossils of action snapshots, like a fish swallowing another fish, or an ichthyosaur in the process of giving birth; or when you find billions of nautiloids buried in a single layer of sediment covering hundreds of square miles, billions of herring in diatomite (along with whales), vast regions of articulated clams (which usually open after death), and other spectacular fossil graveyards around the world, it is apparent that very unusual conditions prevailed at the time they were buried.  By contrast, relatively few bones are being fossilized today.  Despite Charlie Lyell’s mythoid, the present is not the key to the past.  The past requires a key science cannot provide.
Next headline on: Fossils.

This is so stupid.  Is it any wonder the Early Man and Dumb categories so often go together?  Even evolutionists have doubts about how relevant Donald Johannson’s self-promoted find is to the alleged human lineage (see April 25 headline.)  Paleoanthropologists are stretching what little data they have into imagination space, desperately seeking to find naturalistic causes for human psychology in our assumed apelike past.  This is fodder for a new comedy series, in which I Love Lucy is conveyed in grunts instead of words.
Next headline on: Early Man. • Next dumb story.

Although Earth and the moon inhabit the same cosmic neighborhood, our planet has far fewer scars from extraterrestrial impacts because incoming objects burn up in its atmosphere.  A new computer model suggests that Earth’s thin layer of air is an even better shield than previously thought.

One less thing for you to worry about.  Have a nice day.
Next headline on: Solar System.

If you can wade through the jargon, this is really quite amazing.  Remember in Star Wars how R2D2 could insert a sophisticated attachment into the ship’s computer, rotate it precisely, and get the information out?  That’s reminiscent of what is happening here in a nanometer scale.  There are three accessories that must mate precisely to the synthetase, and when they do, there are large rotations and movements that take place.  As a result, the tRNA gets bound to its appropriate amino acid so that it can fasten to a growing protein chain in the ribosome.  The specificity of these multiple parts leaves little opportunity for error, and also speeds up the reactions by orders of magnitude.  The parts slide, rock and rotate right on cue, but they won’t work without proper authentication; i.e., without all the necessary parts in place.  In addition, “proofreading” occurs at multiple checkpoints to weed out errors even among very similar components.  This all happens at a high speed: 40 amino acids can be assembled per second in the ribosome, including all the steps described and many more, with high fidelity.  This is astonishing.  How could something this precise and ordered be the result of chance?  Would you bet your life on it?
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next amazing story.

The failure of Evolution, Gender, and Rape does not lie in its wholly justified critiques of A Natural History of Rape, many of which are thoughtful, excellent, and well written.  Rather, having found a legitimate sociobiological target for attack, too many contributors suggest that all efforts to understand any potential for evolved propensities or tendencies in human behavior can now be dismissed--tarred with the “you support rapists” brush.  Politics are applied to damn all behavioral biology, even when issues such as power and mate choice can potentially be usefully explored in a biological context.  But then, as many of the contributors claim, the biological context does not exist--at least not for humans, though fruit flies are (barely) given the benefit of the doubt.  Evolutionary biology sensu Thornhill and Palmer (and probably that of some of the rest of us who work with the evolution of behavior) can be cast off as merely the rewriting of the political and gendered context within which we theorize.  This may indeed be valid when it comes to arguments about the “natural history” of rape, but to dismiss all such attempts as belonging to the same class of thinking does a disservice to evolutionary biology in general.

Females do choose.  They choose “nice” mates; parental mates; healthy, vigorous, mentally alert mates--be they fruit flies, blackbirds, zebra finches, elephants, or humans.  That female choice would exacerbate the violent, unpredictable, political, and thuggish tendencies of the human rapist seems unlikely at best.  Female choice is thus central to many of the arguments, both biological and sociological, here.  It is a pity that the book does not explore this concept for its feminist contributions.

Female choice?  What female choice?  A female does not choose to be raped.
    Chan is doing quick and vigorous spot-remover work.  He wants evolutionary sociobiology to look spotless, free from any stains of sexism, racism, just-so storytelling, and political incorrectness.  It’s interesting that Thornhill and Palmer’s book appears to have caused a reaction not just among evangelical Christians and feminists, but scientists who seem to be thinking, “This has gone too far!”  A strong current of evolutionists question whether evolutionary sociobiology is valid at all.
    Thus Politically Correct Chan, an evolutionary biological anthropologist, needs to work damage control, pronto.  Human evolutionary sociobiology is not this dreadful, male-chauvinist, evil thing: why look, we study motherhood and apple pie.  (One of his positive-spin examples is “John Bowlby’s ‘environment of adaptedness,’ a description of the dynamic process of interaction that establishes the relationship between mother and infant.”)  We’re all for female choice, he says, and for “nice” mates.  Don’t tar-and-feather all of us just because a few bad apples do bad work and write a bad book.
    Yet the faults of evolutionary sociobiology are not spots to be removed, but the core beliefs comprising its essential fabric.  If human behavior is no different in essence than that of fruit flies, blackbirds and elephants, and if we have all evolved from the same slime, two consequences ensue: (1) There is no ground for moral judgments that any behavior is wrong or evil; it is only adaptive or non-adaptive.  Theoretically, therefore, rape could be an adaptive behavior for humans in some contexts.  (2) There is no basis for knowing anything, because human intellectual analysis is no different in principle from chimpanzee or honeybee sensory stimulus and response.  So neither Thornhill, Palmer or Chan can say that their theories about sociobiology are true.  A corollary of this is that evolutionary descriptions of behavior are mere just-so storytelling.**
    Notably, Chan does not dismiss rape as evil, but only as inconsequential in most populations because of the power of female choice and societal pressure.  Then why be sensitive about charges of being tarred with the “you support rapists” brush?  The reaction bespeaks an inner voice that says, we all know rape is evil.
    The Natural History of Rape should have been a wake-up call to everybody that Darwinian thinking, at least as applied to humans, is dangerous.  Thornhill and Palmer may have been culpable for poor scientific analysis and technique, but their core assumptions are no different than those of Chan, E. O. Wilson, and the contributors to Evolution, Gender, and Rape.  Without a God on the throne saying Thou shalt not commit adultery and Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or anything that is thy neighbor’s, anything goes.  By granting pseudo-scientific rationalization for breaking the Ten Commandments, Darwin* becomes the class, gender, and societal enemy of not just the female people, but all the people.
*Darwin, in the sense of what his evolutionary theory has become, not the man himself.
**There they go again: Science Now just reported that a book on male transsexuals has created a firestorm between evolutionary psychologists, who praise J. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, and transsexuals, who say it does not portray them accurately as “women trapped in men’s bodies.”  Does anybody deny that the world has gone mad?
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

In their study of predator-prey cycles, investigators have assumed that they do not need to worry about evolution.  The discovery of population cycles driven by evolutionary factors will change that view.

Ecologists studying population dynamics prefer not to bother with the possibility of evolutionary change affecting their study organisms.  This is sensible, because understanding the results of interactions between, for example, populations of predators and prey is already a complicated task.  Making the assumption that evolutionary processes are too slow on ecological scales greatly eases the task of modelling the commonly observed population oscillations.  But an elegant study by Yoshida et al. (page 303 of this issue) decisively demonstrates that this simplification might no longer be tenable.

that evolution can be an intrinsic part of oscillations, raising an exciting possibility that some populations might rapidly evolve both towards and away from chaos.  Perhaps this is the explanation of the puzzling observation that some Finnish vole populations shift from a stable regime to oscillations, whereas others do precisely the reverse.

This is rank speculation, however, and will have to remain so because we cannot test it experimentally in natural systems.  But in the laboratory much more is possible, as the study by Yoshida et al. shows.  We can hope that in the near future we will see an experimental investigation of the possibility of rapid evolution to and away from chaos.

Let us understand that the lab rotifers are still rotifers, and the algae are still algae.  What has evolved?  Only the storytelling ability of the evolutionist.  Calling rotifers predators and algae prey is a stretch (is your salad considered the prey of the mighty hunter?).  Notice that the work was done in the laboratory, not in the field.  What environmental effects might nullify the hypothesis?
    These investigators have explained opposites with equal ease.  That is why we keep reminding readers that a theory that explains opposite results is not scientific.  No matter what happens, evolution is never questioned.  All this exercise in futility does is make them tweak their Darwinian models more, and produce more “rank speculation” about what happens out there in the wild, which “we cannot test ... experimentally.”  So like the speculations with computer life, these scientists subjected poor rotifers and algae (which have built-in compensatory mechanisms, though they remain rotifers and algae) to artificial stresses and speculated about how fast evolution occurs with their artificial models.
    Turchin feels Yoshida’s work “an almost textbook example of how science is supposed to be done,” but then has a twinge of conscience that the “rank speculation” that resulted needs to have an empirical base: “We can hope that in the near future we will see an experimental investigation of the possibility of rapid evolution to and away from chaos.”  One thing is clearly evolving toward chaos, and that is evolutionary theory itself.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Selection can only act on things that are developmentally possible.  In other words, developmental mechanisms constrain evolutionary possibilities, and they are often very conservative, carrying the “load” of previous evolutionary lineages, as Alessandro Minelli puts it.  Sometimes, however, as in the case of the direct and indirect development (without and with free-swimming larvae, respectively) of closely related species of sea urchin, development can also be surprisingly variable.  But how do developmental mechanisms themselves change during evolution, and how does evolution in turn affect development?

Recent comparative developmental and genomic studies have yielded the apparently paradoxical insight that many genes (particularly Hox genes: cf. Science 07/18/03) and their interactions in genetic networks are astonishingly conserved in evolution.  These results were unexpected and raised the question of how the diversity of body architecture in different phyla has arisen, given that genetically so much has remained the same during the past several hundred million years.  The historically static view of homology proposed in the nineteenth century by Richard Owen, and still widely taught today, [i.e., that similar structures which perform different functions imply underlying relationships] has also been revolutionized by these comparative developmental studies and, in my opinion, has been largely abolished.  Subsequent phylogeny-based theories of homology are increasingly being questioned because it is unclear whether developmental processes and mechanisms should be part of the definition of homology.

• Why are the genes governing front-to-back body patterning (Hox genes) “highly conserved in evolution, with similar expression patterns in animals as anatomically different as insects and vertebrates”?
• Was the common ancestor of vertebrates and insects like a hemichordate (e.g., an acorn worm) or something earlier? 
• How did the surface nerve-net architecture of hemichordates evolve into a centralized, interior nervous system? 
• Why are patterns of gene expression “nearly identical in hemichordates and vertebrates (and very similar to those in insects), even though vertebrates and insects have nervous systems that are vastly more complex anatomically than those of hemichordates”?  (This implies that “Thus, the genetic map for axial patterning is complex and apparently unchanged as far back as the earliest bilateral animals, irrespective of morphology.” )
• Does this mean the internal nervous system evolved separately twice, in vertebrates and insects, or that the hemichordates evolved their diffuse, surface nerve net subsequent to an earlier common ancestor? 
• How did insect nerve chords become inverted from that of vertebrates?  “There is now convincing evidence that this goes beyond anatomy to the molecular level.” Lacalli notes.  “When and how the inversion occurred in evolution, with the concomitant rearrangement required of other structures such as the mouth, remains very much a puzzle.”

That evolutionists are never alarmed at damaging admissions like this is a measure of their intellectual lethargy.  Since they already ‘know’ in their heart of hearts that Darwinian evolution is gospel truth and that no alternative is even worth considering, it doesn’t matter to them that Meyer and Lacalli have just pulled the data rug out from under them; they keep snoring away.  To our alert readers we ask, notice the significance of what he has just admitted.

1. Developmental genes are astonishingly conserved (i.e., unevolved) for hundreds of millions of years [sic] – that is a time span that encompasses (in their system) everything from worms to people.  He admits that this recent finding was unexpected; i.e., this was not a prediction the Darwinists would have made.
2. The definition of homology is under siege.  Homology is one of those icons of evolution that seems intuitively obvious in the high school biology textbooks, but Meyer reminds us that, since selection can only act on what is developmentally possible, if there has been little or no evolution in the developmental genes of vastly divergent organisms, talking about evolution of the end result (the morphology, such whale fins, bat wings and human arms) is meaningless.  Furthermore, the evidence doesn’t fit it!  Many vastly divergent organisms share similar developmental pathways, and some closely related species show “surprisingly variable” modes of development.
3. After all these years of evolutionary indoctrination, the Scopes Trial, Inherit the Wind and Supreme Court cases, evolutionists are still at square one trying to connect ontogeny, morphology and phylogeny.  The most Meyer can timidly say is that these fields “at long last, are beginning to be unified,” and Lacalli just hopes the roadway to a solution will soon be paved.  But do either of them provide any evidence that the check is finally in the mail?  None.  Meyer passes the buck to Gould and Minelli.  (But Gould believed large evolutionary jumps occur by unknown processes contrary to the reigning paradigm of gradualism, and Minelli, a specialist in arthropods, seems to provide, in this brand new book, more questions than answers.)  All Lacalli sees is ambiguity.  He whistles cheerfully in the dark that maybe a solution will be forthcoming.

Once again, both Meyer and Lacalli demonstrate that Darwinian evolutionary theory is vaporware and futureware.  You thought it was a fact, beyond any need of further checking, but the facts show conservation, the opposite of evolution!  For all this time, society, pressured by confident-sounding, high pressure Darwinian salespeople, have had their orders submitted for data demonstrating evolution, but it has been on back order for 180 years.  We have been going “there and back again” to the post office so many times.  When are thinking people going to get realistic and demand their money back?  It seems like the Darwinists’ tactic of keeping us Waiting for NoGodot is a slick version of the Nigeria scam.  Keep sending in the funding, and we promise, your millions of data points will come, eventually, no matter how unexpected, astonishing, and disappointing things seem now.
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Bugs, Arthropods, etc. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

A protein does not exist in a unique conformation but can assume a very large number of somewhat different conformations or conformational substates. ... If a protein had just a single conformation, it could not function and would be dead like a stone.

Proteins are not just submicroscopic rocks floating around in the cell.  They are like living, moving, breathing entities.  They act like flexible robots on factory assembly lines, grabbing and splitting and stuffing and poking and doing all sorts of complex acrobatics.  Here one of the simplest proteins is now found to have multiple functions, and the ability to adjust its shape to the function at hand. 
    Evolutionists might feel a little cocky if they were rapidly converging on solutions for how cells work, but it seems that the closer they look, the more complex and astonishing the parts become.  If this amount of complexity is true for the simplest, best-studied protein, what about the tens of thousands of other larger, more dynamic, more complex ones still to be understood?  As usual, no explanation is given for how myoglobin could have evolved its repertoire – only the assumption that it did somehow (emphasis added): “The identification of Mb in numerous bacteria and the human brain, together with the recent appreciation of the importance of small-molecule chemistry, such as NO and CO, in biology, suggest that Mb evolved [sic] in conjunction with life’s ability to control the most basic oxygen chemistry.”  Believe it, or not.
Next headline on: The Cell and Biochemistry.

Grand Canyon Sanitized of un-PC Religion?   07/14/2003
Psalms praising the goodness and wisdom of the Creator are no longer acceptable at Grand Canyon, reports

• All the earth worships Thee; they sing praises to Thee, sing praises to Thy name.  (Psalm 66:4, at Desert View)
  
• Sing to God, sing praises to His name; lift up a song to Him who rides upon the clouds.  His name is the Lord; exult before Him.  (Psalm 68:4, at Hermit's Rest)
  
• O Lord, how manifold are Thy works!  In wisdom Thou hast made them all.  The earth is full of Thy riches.  (Psalm 104:24, at Lookout Studio)

Political correctness has become bizarrely wacko beyond belief.  Just how many of the millions of visitors have ever been offended by these positive, cheerful, exalting, upbeat, artistic, joyful expressions of awe?  Get over it, liberals!  These verses do not preach who this awesome Creator is.  They do not stop anyone from believing what they want about Him, or It, or nothing at all.  They are just elegant statements of joy, over 3000 years old, that could stand on their own as great poetry regardless of any religious persuasion.  Who but the ACLU could possibly care?
    The comeback is to make them be consistent.  No fair picking on one religion, or playing favorites.  Surely the ACLU doesn’t want to appear anti-Semitic, right?  So, all native American idolatrous pantheistic symbolism must also go.  (Wouldn’t that make for an interesting backlash; the Indians have the pulpit now in the national parks.)  This includes, by the way, all the National Monuments that have Indian kivas in them, which were used for pagan worship.  Then for good measure, all evolutionary humanism must also go, because it, too, is a religion.  This gets both the Darwinists and the Indians on the warpath.  Keep it up until no one can even claim the canyon is really there, because it might offend Hindu visitors who deny reality.  But the Hindus will be offended anyway at the renaming of many features in the canyon named after their gods (Shiva Temple, Brahma Temple, etc.).  The Satanists and Mormons will fight over the renaming of Dirty Devil River and Bright Angel Creek.  But don’t let the ACLU make any of this the law, so that the anarchists and relativists and nihilists won’t be offended.  Eventually, everybody is so offended, and so offended that others are offended with them, that some exasperated leader cannot take it any more and shouts, “This is silly!  This is far worse than the good old days!  Let’s act mature about this!”  The fighting stops, and everyone, coming to their senses, makes amends and votes not to be so hypersensitive.  Then, we test their sincerity by putting the plaques back up.
    Maybe that’s the only way some people would read these plaques for the first time and appreciate them.  Maybe only then would they long for the joy and serenity and peace that accompanies worship in a spirit of thankfulness.  Offended by worship?  The ACLU might just as well be offended by the clouds, or the colors, or the storm, or the rainbow.  Pity them – these petulant ingrates who have nothing better to do than foment strife.  But don’t let their stuffiness quench your enjoyment of nature's wonders.  Something better than a bronze plaque read by a thankless pagan is praise written on a heart of flesh, expressed by a living, breathing soul overwhelmed by the majesty of Grand Canyon.  Even if the modern grinches succeed for awhile in their vindictive campaign to expunge any symbols of worship of a Creator from our land, they cannot expunge creation.  The stones will continue to cry out.
Next headline on: The Bible.

It’s easy to see why the Intelligent Design Movement has adopted the bacterial flagellum as a de facto mascot.  Even secular biochemistry textbooks show it as a complex rotating motor with all the usual motor parts: rotor, stator, propeller, etc.  Usually, the textbook is dead silent about how such a complex machine could have evolved.  It’s what caused Dr. Michael Behe at Lehigh University to ponder, as he saw the diagram in a textbook, “That’s an outboard motor!  That’s designed; that’s no chance assemblage of parts.”  These extremely efficient, rapidly rotating, true motors found in a simple germ call for a plausible cause.  If this were all evolutionists had to explain with their theory, it would be hard enough, but the flagellum is just the tip of a huge iceberg of molecular motors and machines, some even more complex, that work together in living cells.
    For a wonderful computer animation and description of the bacterial flagellum, be sure to watch the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life, now showing on PBS stations around the country.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

When you get enough observations out of sync with theory (see Maier’s Law), it’s time to question the assumptions.
Next headline on: Stars. • Next headline on: Solar System.

This has the potential to scramble phylogenetic trees and imply false relationships among unrelated organisms.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Anybody ever heard of sin?  The question is the either-or fallacy in action.  It’s like asking a school terrorist, “Did you murder your teacher because of low self-esteem or because you ate Twinkies for breakfast?”  The only two choices they can think of are biological evolution or cultural evolution.
    By implying that human behavior stems from ape in our ancestry, evolutionists deny that people have any personal responsibility for their actions.  That is the greater sin.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

It’s a dodge that he did not elaborate, because he would have laid himself open to being shot down.  Prigogine did important work that certainly merited the Nobel Prize, but he did not invent the free lunch.  The second law of thermodynamics applies to living systems just as much as it ever did, and Prigogine never claimed he had found a solution to the spontaneous assemblage of the high degree of order that a living cell would require to emerge from chaos.  In fact, he said quite the opposite: “Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the formation of biological structures.”  The kind of order in life is functional information, a different category of order altogether than that in a crystal or vortex.  Just as a dissipative structure will never produce a written text or a symphony, it cannot produce a living cell.  The defense of this intuitive argument is a technical subject, requiring sufficient background in physics.  Those interested are encouraged to read a detailed explanation by Timothy Wallace, with evolutionary rebuttals and the author’s counter-rebuttals, on TrueOrigin.org.  For the rest of us, don’t swallow the claim that Prigogine overcame the thermodynamic argument against evolution; respond that an open system is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the creation of functional information.  Again we recommend Dembski’s thorough treatment of the necessity for intelligence in his recent book No Free Lunch.  Another good but older book that dealt with this in detail is The Mystery of Life’s Origin by Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen.  Answers in Genesis on June 27 posted an interchange between a reader who apparently misunderstands the implications of Prigogine’s work, and a response by Jonathan Sarfati.
Next headline on: Physics. • Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Metaphors allow us to build on our experience when we extend familiar relationships to unfamiliar contexts, and help us to communicate new ideas to others who share our experiences and are therefore able to interpret the metaphors.  In science, much that we consider knowable is inferred rather than directly observed.  As a result, access to adequate metaphors can make the difference between comprehension and confusion.  Familiar as they are from common contexts and experiences, most such metaphors can readily be employed to communicate ecology to nonspecialists.  But ready recognition also carries a cost.  The contexts from which terms are borrowed are not static; the interpretation of specific terms will vary and evolve.  Therefore, common metaphors adopted to carry specialized meanings can lead us astray; they can constrain understanding as easily as they facilitate it, and may do both simultaneously.

What troubles us is that biology’s metaphorical abstractions all too easily become concrete objects and substitute for specific, describable processes.  Maximal diversity becomes evolution’s telos instead of its tendency.  Biogeographical frontiers become prescriptive and enforceable, rather than descriptive and conceptual.  Seasonal "disturbances" such as floods interrupt normal ecological processes, instead of exemplifying them.  Biological "productivity" and "diversity" become not only measurable, but virtuous.

Whether they mean Iraq or the Intelligent Design Movement is not clear in that last sentence, but either way, this article is thoughtful and well written, despite some weaknesses.  We have pointed out in our Baloney Detector the potential fallacies of analogies, explaining that these are can be helpful or misleading, depending on how they are used.  They should help illustrate a point, but not prove an argument.  Analogies and metaphors can stimulate the mind, but also the emotions.  It is fair to use metaphors and analogies, provided the strength of the argument rests on logic and facts, not loaded words.  When we find metaphors but not meat in evolutionary arguments, we point it out.
    The authors do not explain why natural selection is not a tautology, they just assert that it isn’t.  This is a frequent tactic of Darwinists.  They bluff their way around this problem, trying to pretend that anyone who disagrees just is too dumb to understand.  They also shift the meaning of terms (equivocation), in an attempt to throw the listener off balance.  For a thorough exposition of the sleight-of-mind tricks that Darwinists play with these concepts, read Walter ReMine’s excellent but heavy book The Biotic Message, especially chs. 4-7 and 13.  This will give you a graduate course in baloney detecting, and many examples of misused metaphors that confuse rather than enlighten.
    Chew and Laubichler also provide a service by trying to get evolutionists to think consistently.  In evolutionary biology, there is no good or evil; everything just “is.”  A flood is not a tragedy, a parasite is not a degradation, and sexual perversion is not morally wrong (see next headline for an example).  Carry Darwinian thinking far enough, and there is no basis to say either side of warfare is in the right: whether Hussein’s henchmen or the Americans fighting them, whether the Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up children in shopping malls and on busses or the Israeli army retaliating.  How many people are willing to let evolutionary-minded scientists and intellectuals provide the moral foundation for society?  Just wait till the next terrorist or criminal hits close to home and you will ask very deep and serious questions about whether good and evil are realities or just metaphors.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

We need a category in addition to dumb called dumb and dangerous.  Does anyone fail to see that Darwinian thinking has gone totally wacko?  All morality, all decency, all civility, all love must now be cast in Darwinian terms, as strictly utilitarian responses of genes to selection pressures.  Men have no conscience.  They are the pawns of evolutionary pressures that herd their selfish instincts for polygamy into monogamous relationships only because mystical, invisible forces of sexual selection act on the offspring, not on the individual.  But this illogical thinking is based on contradictory evidence, as shown in these papers, that do not fit the expectations of the theory.  No matter what evidence is given these materialists, they squeeze it into the Darwinian mindset.
    This is dumb, but it is dangerous, because it undermines any concept of anything being inherently decent, good, noble and humane – or true.  They deny this, of course, but on what basis could an evolutionist stop a college student from thinking he should be allowed to take human evolution into his own hands, and start a harem?  If thoughts are not meaningful anymore, what selective pressures acted on the materialist’s mind to make him write a paper that makes truth claims?  What is truth?  Mark Pagel, therefore, is only a pawn of the selfish genes of the population; his words have no intrinsic meaning.  Good!  So we can ignore them.  Just keep guys like this out of politics and education, for the survival of the species.
Next headline on: Ocean Creatures. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next dumb story.

Although no one has yet found a convincing and general explanation for how the terrestrial planets acquired their atmospheres, the present abundances, particularly of Earth's heavy noble gases (neon, argon, xenon and krypton), seem hard to reconcile with a nearly complete loss of atmosphere after the Earth was assembled.  The abundances of these gases and their isotopes in the present atmospheres of Earth, Mars and Venus (insofar as we know them) differ substantially from their abundances either in the Sun's atmosphere or in meteorites.  These differences have led atmospheric scientists to postulate a wide variety of mechanisms by which such gases may be acquired, partially lost and isotopically fractionated.  But the mechanical ejection of gases that was previously imagined for the giant impact is no help at all with this problem: in the impact scenario, the gases are ejected wholesale, without separation or fractionation.

Undoubtedly you have seen the computer animations of this impact hypothesis, but did you think about the air problem?  Did you worry about the whole earth melting and what that did to the crust, the core, and the atmosphere?  Did you hear Apollo 17 astronaut-geologist Harrison Schmitt arguing against the impact hypothesis last November?  “Much remains to be done,” as usual.  Planetary evolution hypotheses are always works in progress against insurmountable obstacles.  The little bit of enthusiasm expressed by Melosh is insufficient to cover the seriousness of the problems.  He didn’t even get into the question of where the Earth got its water.
    It is said that to someone who has only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  Impactors are the planetary evolutionists’s hammers that solve every problem.  An impact formed the moon, another brought the earth’s water (although that is the least likely of the unlikely hypotheses), another cleared the Permian world for speeding up evolution, and another cleared away the dinosaurs so mammals could take over.  Some even think impacts brought in the alphabet of life.  Of course, they have to fine-tune each hammer blow so it doesn’t do too much or too little damage.  If one’s philosophy requires too many fine-tuned hammer blows on the alphabet soup to come up with Shakespeare, it becomes a sort of convoluted mindless intelligent design theory in spite of itself, because at some point someone is swinging the hammer with a purpose.
Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Geology.

Notice what they say about modern cosmology in the first article (emphasis added):

The fact that the Universe is speeding up might be the biggest mystery in all of science.

Really big problems require crazy new ideas - and ours is right up there with the craziest.

We've blasphemed by changing Einstein's equations.

This could eventually lead to a more general theory for the evolution of the entire Universe.

...such theories [invoking dark energy] require "a preposterous amount of tinkering" to make them fit the observations. Does anyone have confidence in modern cosmological soothsayers with these admissions of mental illness?  With concepts like these running around in their brains, they’ve got them in a nutshell.  Maybe this is just the British Nature trying to steal the thunder of last week's American Science.
Next headline on: Cosmology.

Poor Dr. Scott had a tragic demise, but we are glad he brought a mystery to light that has stood the test of time.  This again illustrates that one cannot look at the world today and expect to understand it in the past by assuming uniformitarian processes.
See also the 03/02/2003 headline about fossil redwoods in the Arctic.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Fossils.

Be sure to read our continuing short biography of Wernher von Braun, a remarkable man and scientist.  If any readers met either of the von Brauns, and would like to send in anecdotes, please write here.
Next headline on: Solar System and Space Exploration. • Next headline on: Politics, Ethics and History.

What is the quartz arenite problem?  Foremost is the extreme compositional maturity of sandstones composed of more than 95% quartz.  Furthermore, the quartz consists almost exclusively of grains of unstrained, single-crystal units.  Very rare lithic [rock] fragments consist only of durable polycrystalline quartz types such as chert or vein quartz.  In addition, the extremely rare accessory mineral suite (generally <0.05% by weight) is dominated by durable zircon, tourmaline, ilmenite, and leucoxene.  Where present, associated conglomerates also consist only of durable clasts of vein quartz, quartzite, or chert.  How can we explain the complete disposal of at least 75% of any ultimate parent igneous or metamorphic rock to yield a residue that is at least 95% quartz sand?

Extreme textural maturity is also characteristic of many, but not all, examples.  A high degree of sorting has always been emphasized, with high rounding being common but not universal.  Both properties imply much abrasion by one or more of nature’s most physically vigorous processes, such as surf and strong eolian [wind] or aqueous currents.

1. Thin, tabular geometry: layers tens or hundreds of meters thick, very flat over vast regions, yet Paleozoic in age – i.e., prior to the emergence of land plants.
2. A paucity of associated shale, in contrast to other sandstones.
3. Interstratified with shallow marine carbonate strata.
4. A lack of volumetrically significant analogues forming today (i.e., nothing on that scale can be seen forming now).  This implies weathering processes orders of magnitude greater in the past.
5. Very rare body fossils, and some burrows.
6. Frosting of the grains, making the rough on microscopic scales.
7. Underlying mature shale high in kaolinite (clay) or illite.
8. Even more pure quartz arenites, even thousands of meters thick, in Precambrian strata.
9. Many of them underlain by paleosols (ancient soils) that show a high degree of chemical maturation.

This was an interesting paper about an interesting puzzle that some readers may wish to investigate further.  Does his explanation satisfy you?  He expects us to assume ad hoc conditions that remained stable for vast ages when continents were presumably splitting apart, volcanos were erupting, mountains were rising, and life was evolving, and in spite of all the commotion, these sandstones have survived to the present day nearly flat and unperturbed over vast regions for vast epochs.  Notice how these formations are huge, and exist on every continent.  Notice how thick and flat they are.  Notice how they are interspersed with clays and soils, yet are exceptionally pure, “nature’s finest distillate.”  Notice how they give evidence of being deposited via nature’s most vigorous and energetic forces.  Doesn’t this sound like global cataclysm?  Since catastrophism is back in vogue, should we not follow the evidence where it leads?
    Consider the tremendously thick sandstones in the Grand Canyon that cover hundreds of square miles (some of them much of North America).  Nothing comparable to this is happening anywhere in the modern world.  The present is certainly not the key to the past!  It seems many of the puzzles vanish if we can free our minds from the unnecessary and obstructive assumptions of vast ages and evolution.
Next headline on: Geology.