The world view of the scientist, even the most atheistic scientist, is that essentially of monotheism.  It is a belief which is accepted as an article of faith that the universe is ordered in an intelligible way.  Now you couldn’t be a scientist if you didn’t believe these two things... that is a theological position; it’s absolutely clear when you look at history [that it] comes from that theological world view.”
—Paul Davies, theoretical physicist, in the Q&A portion of the new film The Privileged Planet.

“A likely story” can have opposite meanings depending on the tone of voice.  Is the phrase, “subtle and complex” descriptive of a truth, or a euphemism for a dodge?  Suppose you were a teacher, and your student’s story about the origin of his term paper, which was clearly a hodgepodge of plagiarisms from several internet sources, he described as “subtle and complex.”  Suppose a politician described his flipflops over the years as being subtle and complex.  Suppose your husband’s disastrous room addition project was defended with a story he said was subtle and complex.  One thing is clear about this evolutionary story, as admitted by Pennisi: it is not simple and straightforward.
  The PBS Evolution series tried to claim in 2001 that the eye followed a simple and straightforward progression from simple to complex, using the visual power of suggestion that a series of pictures of animal eyes in a progression from apparently simple to complex suggested an ancestral relationship.  Evolutionists love the word “suggest”.  Scattered similarities between distant organisms, all thriving in their own environments, all using highly-complex functional systems only “suggest” an evolutionary story when you have put yourself under Charlie’s spell and have opened yourself up to the power of suggestion.  Snap out of it.
    Read this evolutionary story with the wide-awake understanding that opsins are very complex proteins (see 10/01/2004 headline and Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 15-25).  But their complexity alone is useless without even more complex organs and neurons that can interpret their responses.  Evolutionists want to hypnotize us into the suggestion that stories relating worms to humans by common ancestry are scientific.  Be a clear-headed judge of the evidence.  When missing links have to be invented out of thin air, and when complex functions have to be presumed to have “arisen” [a miracle word] earlier than previously believed, the burden of proof is on the storyteller that the statement, “evolution stories are subtle and complex,” is not just pulling wool over the eyes. 
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Bugs, Crawlers, and Lower Life Forms.

Nature Science Update relates the Darwinian tale as, “Monotremes were the first group to branch off after mammals evolved [sic] 210 million years [sic] ago.  Their egg-laying shares a common origin [sic] with birds and reptiles, although the bill is thought to have evolved independently.”  Any proof?  No.  Any transitional forms?  No.
    One researcher said, “Mammals are pretty boring when it comes to sex chromosomes.  The platypus is a huge exception.”  Who said sex was boring?  It keeps the Darwin theorists awake at night, but with more pain than pleasure.
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

The claim that the sticker restricts the teaching of evolution, requires the teaching of creationism or discriminates against particular religions should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered, unless the courts make it against the law to do so, at which time all students must assimilate into the Charlie Borg.
Next headline on: Schools.

As reported before, Titan is the moon to watch (see 10/16/2003 headline).  It has many bizarre features that are sure to fascinate scientists and threaten pet theories.  One of the scientists interviewed, who has been studying Titan for 23 years, said two of the biggest questions are, (1) why does Titan have an atmosphere, and (2) what is the source of its methane?  We know that the methane in Titan’s upper atmosphere breaks down in the presence of sunlight and is lost to space, forming a large hydrogen cloud around the huge moon.  Since it is being depleted, why is there any left, if the moon is over four billion years old?  Is the methane resupplied by volcanic outgassing, are there methane lakes or oceans on the surface that evaporate, or was the current methane supply brought in recently by comets?  Till these historic measurements are analyzed, this is a major puzzle on this alien world.  The methane keeps the nitrogen in the atmosphere in a gaseous state, else the entire atmosphere would collapse to the surface in frozen nitrogen snow.
    Some of the Cassini scientists have said that, when giving public talks about the mission, the question they get asked most often is, “Is there life on Titan?”  Sad.  The question reflects indoctrination of a gullible public in evolutionary assumptions.  Even Neil Cavuto at Fox News fell for it.  What do you expect when all the TV science programs keep using misleading phrases like “the building blocks of life” and “early earth in a deep freeze.”  We expect the Titanians will say, “Nobody alive down here, Mate.”
Next headline on: Solar System.

These films are a lot of fun to watch.  The producers have hit on a winning formula: amazing facts, a little humor, good visuals, and challenging thoughts.  Jobe Martin bubbles with excitement at each creature: mussels, horses, ostriches and much more.  He not only explains why evolutionary theory cannot account for these animal champs, he shows how their abilities enrich the world and our lives, and has a way to explain complex things in a way even kids can enjoy.  This terrific family film is nearly twice the length of the original.  Get the whole set and turn off the Charlie-worshipping science channels with their endless just-so stories.  You’ll learn facts with these films and have fun watching.
Next headline on: Movies.

People don’t have to be 5 to 6 feet tall to be people.  There are little people and big people today, yet they show an uncanny commonality in average intelligence, sociability, language, and understanding that Francis Schaeffer used to call the “mannishness of man” (i.e., the set of universal distinctives that separate people from the animals).  Calling something a “hominid” or “hominin” is just a word game to make scientists appear to know more than gullible reporters.  Nothing primitive or transitional about these creatures was found; they have all the marks of full humanity.
    National Geographic and its allies in the news media should be excoriated for the racist artwork they published.  With only bones to draw from, they made Mr. Floresiensis have a protruded chimp-like jaw, an ape-like squat nose, and black skin.  Everything else about the drawing looks fully human, including the proportion of skull size to body size, musculature, walking posture and hunting skill.  Any black person, any respecter of black persons, should be outraged not only at the racist overtones of the picture, but the evolutionary spin put on the data.
    Evolutionary paleoanthropology was in such a complete upheaval of confusion already, what’s another skeleton going to hurt?  It’s just making the rubble of evolutionary storytelling bounce at this point.  The only progress to be hoped for is that they will start calling themselves creationists (see 09/23/2004 headline).
Next headline on: Early Man. • Next dumb story.

The hook region surely appeared to be one of the simplest-looking parts of the complex molecular motor.  Now, even that little item, something that just bends at an angle, is shown to be exquisitely designed, with exacting specifications to allow bending without twisting.  If all the amino acids in this one protein element were not in the right places, the protein would not work.  And if all 120 were not joined together, and were not assembled at the right time and in the right place, the flagellum would be useless.  Inside that hook is an entire highway of molecular trucks that build the propeller (see 06/14/2004 headline).  No wonder Jonathan Wells remarked, “What we find is irreducible complexity all the way down.”
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Vote for what works: vote for adult stem cell research.  Embryonic stem cell research – having no track record, no investors, and huge ethical concerns (see 10/21/2004 headline) – makes this vote a no-brainer.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: Health.

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week, easily.  At the rate the Darwin Party is turning up the propaganda, we’re going to have to make this a daily award.  So plants invented something because they needed it when they crawled out of the water onto the land, and used existing machinery that just happened to be in their toolbox.  This is going to sound so stupid to everybody some day, just like it already does to anybody that cleans his ears of Charlie Ear Wax.
Next headline on: Plants. • Next headline on: Darwinism. • Next dumb story.

Yes, Darwinites, change your way of thinking.  Think intelligent design.  Thinking itself is not even possible without it.  As could be expected, this section is a treasure trove of juicy quotes and findings of design that leave the Darwinites squirming in their naturalistic straitjackets.  They only have themselves to blame.  They were the ones who said they had to be worn.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

Can a schizophrenic psychologist understand human language?  He sees the “amazing gift of speech,” with all its mystery and wonder, but wants to attribute it to a goddess tinkering with parts cobbled from whatever is at hand (shall we name the evolutionary goddess Charlotte, the fairy godmother of Charles Darwin)?  He can’t have it both ways.  Either language is an amazing gift, designed by intelligence, or it is a meaningless end product of a mindless, undirected natural process.  How much evidence does Mr. Marcus have for his speculation about language arising by evolution?  (Dead silence.)
Next headline on: Human Body. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Who wouldn’t expect it?  Evolutionists.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs.

We can’t speak to the validity of this claim or its interpretation, but what stands out in the article is the awe over the computational abilities of the human brain:

“We’re interested in studying how brains compute,” said Thomas DeMarse, the UF professor of biomedical engineering who designed the study.  “If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information.  That’s a tremendous capacity for memory.  In fact, you perform fairly simple tasks that you would think a computer would easily be able to accomplish, but in fact it can’t.”
    While computers are very fast at processing some kinds of information, they can’t approach the flexibility of the human brain, DeMarse said.  In particular, brains can easily make certain kinds of computations – such as recognizing an unfamiliar piece of furniture as a table or a lamp – that are very difficult to program into today’s computers. (Emphasis added.)

Hmmmmm... think about your brain.  The brain is thinking about me, and I’m thinking about it.  I’ll have to think about that one for awhile.
Next headline on: Human Body. • Next amazing story.

NG has provided a valuable article.  For historians, it will illustrate the desperation of the Darwin Party right before their buddha collapsed.  For logicians, it will provide a classic case study on how to promote a failed theory with logical fallacies, selective evidence, spin doctoring and propaganda.  Thank you, National Geographic, for providing this documentation for future researchers.
    This article has it all: fear-mongering, glittering generalities, analogy, straw man, bluffing, sidestepping, card stacking, big lie, half truth, non-sequitur, extrapolation, equivocation, visualization, personification, and everything else in the whole baloney arsenal.  It won’t work any more.  A new generation of discerning students and adults has arisen.  They are no longer intimidated by bluffing and evasion from the Darwin Party propagandists.  Many of them are readers of Creation-Evolution Headlines and follow the debate closely.  It doesn’t work any more to bluff about the “mountainous accumulation of peer-reviewed scientific studies,” because they are mountain climbers: they read the journals.  They know that evolution is only assumed when mentioned, and that the evolutionary storytelling is inversely proportional to the detail in the observations.  (As a result, they never get much of a workout from climbing said mountains.)  They know how to separate observation from interpretation.  This kind of quick lie in passing, for instance, won’t fool today’s informed readers:

Can we see evolution in action?  Can it be observed in the wild?  Can it be measured in the laboratory?
    The answer is yes.  Peter and Rosemary Grant, two British-born researchers who have spent decades where Charles Darwin spent weeks, have captured a glimpse of evolution with their long-term studies of beak size among Galápagos finches.

Sorry, NG, we examined the Grants’ original papers (see 04/26/2002 and 09/03/2004 headlines) and they showed no such thing.  The best they could do was to find a minor variation in beak size among interfertile finches that reversed when the weather changed, and showed no long-term trend; in fact, the Grants admitted that 30 years is far too short to demonstrate any evolutionary trend.  And your own article showed that no clear example of speciation has been observed (p. 30), and that 999 out of 1000 frames in the “film of evolution” are missing links (p. 25).  The only way to get the attention of today’s informed anti-evolutionists is to stop the propaganda tricks, which are ineffective because we filter them out on the front end, and talk real, objective evidence, addressing the best arguments on both sides.  Since you never do this, we assume you can’t.
    Every one of the other evidences in the National Geographic piece has been contradicted by other scientists, or is irrelevant because it fails to address the main issue Darwin claimed, that everything is related by common descent.  No example of natural selection creating new functional information by an undirected natural process was presented without merely assuming evolution did it – somehow, left unexplained.  Can you believe that they would still dredge up the old stuff about the horse series, vestigial organs and embryologic recapitulation as evidences for evolution?  Come on, you guys, this is 2004.  At least they didn’t showcase peppered moths and Haeckel’s embryos.
    The use of 250-point bold font to shout “No” to the question of whether Darwin was wrong can be interpreted either as (1) a patronizing disdain for the intelligence of the average reader of the magazine, as if they cannot judge the validity of evidence but have to be told the answer (“Evolution is a fact, do you hear?  It’s a fact; are you listening to me?”), or (2) positive self-talk to stave off depression, like a coach’s pep talk to a discouraged team facing formidable odds.  It exudes a flavor of, “Darwin was right, wasn’t he?  Wasn’t he?  We’re losing 82-12 in the polls, but ol’ Charlie boy was right, don’t you think so, Tom?”  “Sure, boss.  Charlie was right.  Don’t let those anti-evolutionist PhDs with all their evidence make you question your faith.  Just ignore them and stick to the playbook: finch beaks prove humans had bacteria ancestors.  Show a picture and maybe they’ll go away and stop bothering us.”
    The worst violation in this propaganda piece was a sin of omission: none of the best arguments against Darwinism were addressed or even mentioned, and intelligent design theory was completely ignored.  Poor Mr. Quammen; he probably wrote his piece before neo-Darwinism was falsified last week (see 10/19/2004 headline).  Should we pressure him for an Archaeoraptor-style retraction? (see 09/27/2000 headline).  Why not, if “a trait that’s valuable in a scientist” is “a willingness to admit when he’s wrong”? (p. 31).
    Read the critiques of this article by Jonathan Wells and Terry Mortensen.  Knowledgeable and articulate readers may wish to take National Geographic up on its offer: “...join our forum and share your thoughts on “Was Darwin Wrong?” at nationalgeographic.com/magazine/0411.  And never underestimate the power of a succinct, informed, articulate letter to the editor.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Fossils.

---

Note to Pastors:  Quammen ends with an interview with an evolutionist who said, “I grew up in a conservative church in the Midwest and was not taught anything about evolution.  The subject was clearly skirted.”  Now, this evolutionist gets “a spiritual experience” by pulling up fossils to piece into his evolutionary just-so stories.  “The evidence is there,” he claims; “It’s buried in the rocks of ages.”  Just thought you would find this little anecdote inspiring.

Researchers at the meeting agreed on a lot: that the use of human embryonic stem cells to produce a baby should be banned, for example, and that stem-cell researchers should adopt guidelines to reassure the public that their work is ethically sound.  But they differed on how to handle chimaeras, which mix cells and DNA from different species....
    Scientists could even construct a mouse whose entire brain was made of human-derived cells....

If anyone should have a voice in the ethics of stem cell research, it should be Joni Eareckson Tada, the advocate for the disabled who has spent the last 37 years in a wheelchair herself.  She has done far more than the TV celebrities to help the afflicted.  Her organization “Joni and Friends” has supplied over 25,000 wheelchairs to the disabled poor in Africa and other third world countries.  Moreover, she could certainly be expected to look with hope over any therapies that might allow her to walk again.  Yet she remains a staunch opponent of embryonic stem cell research, for good reasons, as explained on the bioethics page of her website JoniAndFrends.org.
    Joni has appeared on radio talk shows and TV interviews, such as in a debate last week on Faith Under Fire.  The clarity of her logic is unimpeachable.  Yet it is unlikely that she can overcome the tear-jerking, emotional commercials by celebrity actors that tug at the heartstrings with empty promises that embryonic stem cells might cure your grandmother of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, despite no track record and many problems (while adult stem cells are flourishing: for another example, see EurekAlert report this week about skin cells fighting brain tumors).  Meanwhile, beneficiaries of Prop. 71 stand to make a killing on taxpayer funds.  Follow the money trail: why don’t private investors support ES stem cell research?  Yet the taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill for a possible boondoggle that may take decades to show any results– maybe never, while a class of human beings will be created to be destroyed for scientific research (a good time to re-read John Durkin’s letter; see 09/03/2004 headline).  Since California voters never seem to find a bond issue they didn’t like, even when living in a state climbing out of near bankruptcy, the world is staged to see the next chapter in our brave new world opening on November 2.  Maybe the scientists will figure out how to be “ethical” while they’re laughing on the way to the bank.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

The tendency for genetic architectures to exhibit epistasis among mutations plays a central role in the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology and in theoretical descriptions of many evolutionary processes.  Nevertheless, few studies unquestionably show whether, and how, mutations typically interact.  Beneficial mutations are especially difficult to identify because of their scarcity.  Consequently, epistasis among pairs of this important class of mutations has, to our knowledge, never before been explored.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Interactions among genome components should be of special relevance in compacted genomes such as those of RNA viruses.  To tackle these issues, we first generated 47 genotypes of vesicular stomatitis virus carrying pairs of nucleotide substitution mutations whose separated and combined deleterious effects on fitness were determined.  Several pairs exhibited significant interactions for fitness, including antagonistic and synergistic epistasis.  Synthetic lethals represented 50% of the latter.  In a second set of experiments, 15 genotypes carrying pairs of beneficial mutations were also created.  In this case, all significant interactions were antagonistic.  Our results show that the architecture of the fitness depends on complex interactions among genome components.

The results reported here have two important implications for theories seeking explanations for the evolutionary advantage of recombination and sexual reproduction.  First, according to the Fisher–Muller argument, sex and recombination are advantageous because they combine into a common genotype beneficial mutations that arose in different ones, speeding up the rate of adaptation.  However, if the genetic architecture of RNA viruses determines that, in general, antagonistic epistasis and, in particular, decompensatory epistasis among beneficial mutations is the norm, then recombination would not necessarily imply a benefit in terms of adaptive evolution.  Second, sex might still be beneficial for RNA viruses as an efficient mechanism for purging deleterious mutations.  However, according with the Mutational Deterministic Hypothesis [i.e., the suggestion that sex enables a population to purge deleterious mutations from the genome], if this is the case, an excess of synergistic epistasis among deleterious mutations is required to compensate the 2-fold advantage of clonal reproduction [i.e., asexual reproduction].  Our first data set shows that synergistic interactions among random mutations are neither stronger nor more common than antagonistic interactions.  Indeed, the existence of variability among loci in the sign and strength of epistasis, and especially the dominance of antagonistic epistasis, decreases the parameter space over which sex may evolve.

Any scientific hypothesis must be testable and subject to falsification by experiment.  It is not enough to tell just-so stories, and describe things in glittering generalities with armchair scenarios.  Neo-Darwinian theory, the idea that natural selection acting on “scarce” beneficial mutations can produce all the diversity of life, from diving cormorants to catapulting chameleon tongues to sponge fiber optics to high-tech fruit fly aircraft to supersonic high-jumping froghoppers to efficient penguin, whale and dolphin flippers to fish physics students to glass-sculpturing diatoms to self-propelled motors, must be testable if it is to be declared scientific.
    So there.  These scientists finally put neo-Darwinism to the test in a microcosm that should have shown, if the principles were correct, a clear case of fitness increasing as a result of natural selection acting on beneficial mutations.  It failed.  It failed miserably.  Not only were no instances of synergistic beneficial mutations detected, the beneficial mutations that were artificially inserted worked against each other!  Neo-Darwinism is falsified!  And it was falsified not by creationists, but by evolutionary biologists working in the lab at an institute for the study of biological evolution!
    Now all we need to do is get the word out.  Stop the propaganda machine, stop the NCSE and ACLU threats at the school boards, stop the PBS NOVA programs and the media spin doctors.  Rearrange the museums, gather up the pro-Darwin displays and national park signs and toss them, along with neo-Darwinian theory itself, and by implication all of Charlie’s baggage that was already obsolete before 1940, onto the dumpster of discredited ideas.  Darwin’s Century is now a mere footnote of history, an unfortunate detour that killed 100 million people, but at least now we know better.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Sorry, appeasement will not work.  The King will not negotiate with unrepentant mythmakers.  He demands unconditional surrender.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: The Bible.

When a body part is no longer needed, scientists usually assume that mutations accumulate in the genes controlling the structure, eventually preventing it from working or being made.  “That was the dogma,” says Stephen Ekker of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.  But because the cave fish eyes are actively killed, natural selection is probably doing its thing [sic], says Jeffery.  And that, he adds, might come as a surprise even to Darwin, who thought the cave fishes’ loss of sight might be an exception to the rules [sic] of natural selection.  The next step, of course, will be to figure out what the fish gain by losing their sight.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Creationists have argued that natural selection eliminates things, rather than constructing them, so this is no surprise.  What is surprising is that the eyes did not merely degenerate through disuse, and that the response could have occurred quickly through changes in the regulation of one gene during development.  Maybe there is a functional reason why this gene is being switched off in the darkness of the cave environment.  Maybe with eyes not in the way, it helps enhance the other senses the fish will need when sight is not possible.  Whatever the reason, natural selection cannot be credited with creating new function, because both eyes and mouths already functioned well. 
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next headline on: Fish and Marine Life.

Anyone see a solar system or planet or organism forming in the data?  The only thing Spitzer sees is heat from crashing bodies, not a process leading to planets and life.  “When embryonic planets [sic], the rocky cores of planets like Earth and Mars, crash together, they are believed to either merge into a bigger planet or splinter into pieces.”  There is indirect evidence for the latter, but the former is merely a belief. 

According to the most popular [sic] theory, rocky planets form somewhat like snowmen [sic].  They start out around young stars as tiny balls in a disc-shaped field of thick dust.  Then, through sticky interactions with other dust grains, they gradually accumulate more mass.  Eventually, mountain-sized bodies take shape, which further collide to make planets.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Most people make snowmen by intelligent design.  When they have snowball fights, nothing creative emerges out of the mess – only pain for the impactee.  None of this evidence matched the evolutionary expectations: not the dates, not the timeline, not the formation of planets.  All Spitzer sees is colliding projectiles – no snowmen, no planets, no life.  Whaddya say we stick to the evidence, OK?
Next headline on: Stars. • Next headline on: Solar System. • Next headline on: Dating Methods.

As to how much water was on Mars, the researchers do not know if there was a great deal for a short time or a little for a longer period.  However, they can say there was a geologically short window in which liquid water was present, suggesting there also was a limited time period when conditions may have been hospitable for life, [Donald] Rimstidt said.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The wet-Marsers are losing, and the Mars-lifers are down for the count.  The place reeks with sulfur and is bombarded by death rays.  The solar wind is dehydrating the whole planet.  Sorry, Percival.
Next headline on: Mars.

Aminoacyl tRNA synthetases are ancient [sic] proteins that appeared [sic] before the split [sic] of the tree of life [sic] into its three great kingdoms—archae [sic], eukarya, and bacteria.  The 20 enzymes—one for each amino acid—catalyze aminoacylation of tRNAs and thereby establish the rules of the genetic code by associating each amino acid with a nucleotide triplet (the anticodon of the tRNA).  The transition from the RNA world [sic] to the theater of proteins [sic] was thus made possible by the development [sic] of specific aminoacylation reactions.  While the central connection between synthetases and the code has long been recognized, the modern enzymes have surprised us with novel functions beyond aminoacylation.  They are key regulators and active components in a wide range of cellular functions from RNA splicing and transcription to apoptosis and angiogenesis....
    .... we now see that tRNA synthetases in mammalian cells have more diverse and comprehensive connections to the inflammatory system than was previously appreciated.  The diverse functions of these essential enzymes never cease to amaze!   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

To be an evolutionist, you have to take the Crick brainwashing class.  This involves repeating the following quote by Francis Crick over and over until it is engraved on the heart with an iron stylus: “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but evolved.”
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next dumb story.

Many of the most important issues in medical ethics today – from genetic testing and stem cell research to caring for prisoners of war are directly affected by the experiences of medicine leading up to and during the Holocaust.  Physicians need to explore these issues without getting caught up in political agendas or the results can be something we never intended and cause great harm.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Adolf Hitler spoke of Germany as a body with himself as the doctor.  He wanted to make Germany ‘healthy’ by eliminating diseased, unhealthy [sic] parts of the body.  At first this meant killing the disabled.  But because the Nazis also believed that Jews possessed ‘bad’ genes, they, too, came to be portrayed by public health ‘experts’ and ‘scientists’ as a threat to racial purity and a healthy nation.

A grave cause for alarm is that people are forgetting.  First of all, let’s clear up the distortion that eugenics was a distortion of Darwin’s theories.  The subtitle of Charlie’s book was the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.  What does “favoured races” mean when speaking of the human race?  In later editions of his book, Darwin moved from the term “natural selection” to Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest.” The Victorian British were caught up in the myth of progress, and many, including Darwin and his friends, held racist beliefs, some of them radical.  The success of their empire surely proved they were the fittest, did it not?  The “father of eugenics” was Darwin’s own cousin, Francis Galton.  Ernst Haeckel took the core beliefs of survival of the fittest and eugenics to Germany, where they were taking hold before Hitler came to power.  Hitler merely lifted constraints on trends that were already established, the article says:

Some eugenics programs, such as laws sanctioning the sterilization of the ‘feeble minded’ [sic], initially met with resistance throughout the world, including in Germany.  But when the Nazis came to power, and particularly during World War II, these constraints disappeared as the Nazi regime was able to implement its radical version of medicine.

Lest anyone think the evil was constrained to the German borders, eugenics and anti-Semitism was widespread throughout Europe and America at the time; America itself had a pre-Hitlerian forced sterilization program (see 10/21/2001 headline).  There is a direct line philosophically from the ideas of Darwin to the actions of Nazi Germany, as historian Richard Weikart has documented.
    Nazi Germany provides a classic case study that bad ideas can have horrific consequences, and that “good” doctors and scientists can be hoodwinked into letting their talents be co-opted for evil.  How could we forget?  Yet that is exactly what Nature suggested last month (see 09/27/2004 headline), that we need to get over our ethical hangups stemming from Nazi abuses, and move forward with today’s medical technologies.  Notice how pre-Hitler eugenics started with killing the disabled.  Sound familiar?  (Clue: Terry Schiavo.)  Hitlerian medicine also justified killing of those that it defined as not really human (clue: human embryos).  Peter Singer has advocated killing senior citizens and children based on Darwinian principles.  Now we are on the verge of synthetic biology, whose horrors can only be imagined (see 10/11/2004 headline).  Hitler may be gone, but the core beliefs of Darwinism still reign supreme in the halls of academia.  Another holocaust may await a new madman rising to power and promising Big Science all it wants, as he steers it to his agenda.
    Welcome to 2004.  On one side we have radical Muslims wanting to disconnect our heads and nuke our cities.  On the other we have Big Science ready to endorse the New Eugenics.  If we don’t want evil to triumph, doing nothing is not an option.  As J. Gresham Machen warned in the pre-Nazi, pro-eugenics days of 1913, “What is today matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires.  In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combatted; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate.”  Will the archival footage of World War II help us learn from history this time?
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics. • Next headline on: Health.

Despite telling members of Congress and the public that the legality and appropriateness of the National Park Service offering a creationist book for sale at Grand Canyon museums and bookstores was “under review at the national level by several offices,” no such review took place, according to materials obtained by PEER under the Freedom of Information Act.  Instead, the real agency position was expressed by NPS spokesperson Elaine Sevy as quoted in the Baptist Press News:
    “Now that the book has become quite popular, we don’t want to remove it.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

“Promoting creationism in our national parks is just as wrong as promoting it in our public schools,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, “If the Bush Administration is using public resources for pandering to Christian fundamentalists, it should at least have the decency to tell the truth about it.”

The Darwin Party can only thrive in a totalitarian regime.  They are so threatened by other interpretations of the scientific evidence, they must resort to intimidation, the courts, and lies to try to stop the other side from being heard.  The book in question is not a flaky mythology like some native American stories that get evangelistic support at many national parks.  Grand Canyon: A Different View was written by scientists (at least 13 with PhDs) and canyon explorers with a lot of experience studying the canyon.  They just don’t subscribe to the reigning uniformitarian myth, but neither do some non-creationist geologists (see 07/22/2002 headline).  Many of the evidences supporting the Flood model are well known within the scientific community.  The secularists have no explanation for these things, such as 160 million years of missing strata with no evidence of erosion, and all they can offer is just-so stories that assume the ages anyway.  It is perfectly legal for any scientific viewpoint to be heard, especially one that explains these things in a superior fashion.  Why should it be “legal” and “appropriate” for the Bush Administration to “pander” to the atheists?  Promoting atheism in our national parks is just as wrong as promoting it in our public schools.  PEER should at least have the decency to tell the truth about it.  Buy the book AT the Grand Canyon visitor center if you can.  It’s not only a vote for fairness, it’s a worthwhile book to read and enjoy.
Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

Prolonged stasis in a world of change is a puzzling biological phenomenon.  Extremely long-lived or geologically long-ranging taxa have been a popular subject of discussion for paleontologists and neontologists alike ever since Darwin ([1859] 1964) coined the term “living fossils.”....
  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Simpson implicitly took a comparative approach when he wrote about the “rule of the survival of the relatively unspecialized” (1944, p. 143).  He thought that unspecialized subgroups of a clade seem to persist for longer periods of geologic time but did not explicitly define “specialization.”  Here, I quantify specialization by comparing individual morphologies to a group mean; the closer a morphology is to a group mean, the less specialized it is.  I ask whether long-lived genera ... in any given crinoid order occupy regions of morphospace that are random with respect to the mean morphology of that order.  Could survival be correlated with morphological bizarreness or a deviant morphology ...?  Or would long-lived genera have morphologies close to the mean morphology...?

Similarly, but from a completely different conceptual perspective, I ask whether long-lived crinoid genera in any given crinoid higher taxon (e.g., suborder, order) occupy regions of morphospace that are random with respect to a basal morphology of that higher taxon.  I find that mean morphological distances of long-lived genera from basal morphologies are seldom distinct from those of their shorter-lived relatives.

There is no available phylogenetic framework for comparing rates of character transformation in the global pool of fossil crinoids.  Likewise, there are no detailed samples of crinoid lineages in a stratigraphic column for investigating character reversals, convergence, or the lack thereof.

Just as in previous analyses when genera are grouped according to orders, genera in each period are mostly short lived.  However, rarefied samples of shorter-lived genera through each period inform us that the long-lived taxa can be more, less, or equally deviant compared with shorter-lived taxa of an equivalent sample size (table C2).
    Genera that are extremely long lived within each order are also more likely ... than other genera in the database to have passed through one or more mass extinctions even though passing through mass extinctions does not necessarily ensure persistence.

1. “First, most taxa (genera and families) are short lived and ‘average”.... which implies that experiments in morphology [sic] are usually not long lived.”  This seems to suggest Mother Nature is a bumbling tinkerer.
2. “Second, long-lived genera within orders are often less morphologically deviant or less specialized than expected when compared with rarefied samples of corresponding shorter-lived genera.”  This was apparently a big surprise.  “In other words, long-lived genera are not only not unusual, some are unusually average!” (exclamation in the original).
3. “Third, patterns of morphological deviations from basal morphologies versus durations are unclear.”  Enough said.
4. Fourth, there appears to be an increase in long-lived groups through time, but this appears to be an artifact of the assumptions of phylogeny and geologic ages.
5. “Fifth, taxonomic ranks and inclusiveness of higher taxa are critical factors when discussing longevity because identities of long-lived taxa may dramatically change according to these factors.”  This suggests that previous investigators failed to see the big picture.
6. “Last, identities of long-lived taxa may change with respect to which definitions of longevity are used.  This may or may not (as was the case for this article) change conclusions being drawn on long-lived taxa.”  This seems to say that conclusions are a function of definitions, not data.