Save your November 1999 issue of National Geographic as a collector’s item, along with the October 2000 retraction.  At least it only took a year for Piltdown Chicken to be exposed, instead of the 45 years for Piltdown Man.  I suppose that’s progress.  National Geographic probably felt no need to dredge up their own shame today after printing the retraction, but millions of people rely on their magazine for scientific news.  The hoax did not make them more reticent to make extraordinary claims; in fact, this article shows them more brazen than ever to link birds and dinosaurs, despite the fact other paleontologists disagree.  They give prominence to two believers but no critics, quoting Julia Clarke saying,

“The really unfortunate aspect of the Archaeoraptor forgery was that it was used to suggest that other feathered dinosaur fossils were also faked, and added a layer of confusion to public understanding that shouldn’t be there,” said Clarke.  “There’s an abundant amount of evidence that the lineage leading to birds is nested in Dinosauria,“ she said.  “There are many feathered flying and non-flying dinosaur fossils from these two regions that are not forgeries.”

Let’s have the evidence instead of the verdict, please, especially from an institution with a track record of weaving tall tales out of minuscule evidence, and rushing to judgment, as long as some data point supports evolutionary assumptions.
     For a fun science project in psychology, someone should put a whale skull on a cow skeleton and hide it in a gravel pit near Washington, DC.
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Dinosaurs. • Next headline on: Fossils.

1. Particles don’t stick: they bounce.  “Everyday experience tells us that dry silicate particulates of millimeter and larger size, such as sand, do not stick at almost any speed of attempted assemblage,” they say, and measurements confirm this.  Even ices at the outer fringes of a protoplanetary disk do not accrete much better.  How could microscopic solids ever accrete into planetesimals?
2. Gas drags particles into the sun.  The gas in a protoplanetary disk is going to quickly draw small solid particles into the star.  Bodies must reach a threshold diameter of 1 km to escape the pull: “even if a mechanism could be found to grow chondrule-sized particulates to meter-sized bodies, one would have to worry about the rapid inward orbital drift associated with gas drag that would carry such bodies from 1 AU into the proto-Sun on a timescale of only 10² yr.”  How could planetesimals grow before being swallowed?
3. Meteorites do not contain large particles.  Carbonaceous chondrites, supposedly the most primitive remnants of solar system evolution, are composed of chondrules a millimeter in diameter and smaller, and show evidence of melting and refreezing, perhaps several times.  Meteorites do not show a continuous range of particle sizes from microns to meters, so where is the evidence for planetesimals?
4. Electrostatic attraction for small particles is unlikely.  “In order to be a relevant growth mechanism, it must be shown that tribocharging, the balance between collisional charging and ion/electron discharging, yields electrostatic attraction at much lower particle densities.”  Static electricity won’t keep small particles from bouncing off each other.
5. Cosmic abundances of dust to gas are too low.  In a solar nebula with these abundances, there is not enough dust to concentrate.  If one assumes the particles will stick together (but they won’t), inner planetesimals would form too fast (10,000 yr) and giant outer planets would take too long (over 1 million yr), longer than the disk would survive erosion by the solar wind.  How can the dust be concentrated?
6. Earth-sized planets migrate into the sun in a gas disk.  “Another troubling aspect of planet formation theories is the ‘type I’ migration of Earth-sized and larger (but not large enough to open a gap) bodies due to density wave torques exerted on the gas disk.”  This could happen to any earth-sized planet as far out as Jupiter within 100,000 years.  How do we get rid of the gas to keep the rocky planets in orbit?

1. Chondules formed according to Shu’s “X-Wind hypothesis.”  This proposes that shock waves heated the particles and re-melted them into chondrules at a certain radius from the sun, from which they were drawn inward; a third were launched into the bipolar jets and landed back out on the disk.
2. The chondrules form not all at once.
3. The temperature was not too high.
4. The gas depletes enough to keep rocky inner bodies from spiraling in, but leaves enough for gas giants to form.
5. Particles pile up as they spiral inward.  “For the somewhat arbitrary parameters we have chosen, we conclude that aerodynamic drift provides a significant amount of concentration, but not definitively enough to cause midplane GI.  Thus, in the case of our own solar system, one of the other solid/gas ratio enhancing mechanisms discussed in the introduction may be necessary.”

Just as with biological evolution, planetary evolution requires a little bit of data and a lot of imagination.  And as with biological evolution, whatever gave birth to our solar system was an unobservable, one-time occurrence that cannot be repeated.  Neither biological or cosmogonical evolution is laboratory science; it is the art of storytelling, bounded only by certain laboratory constraints.  We like to give our readers the unvarnished stories straight out of the science journals, before they get sanitized for the popular press and virtual reality by the animators.  Notice how many parameters had to be carefully chosen to get the model to work against known forces opposing planet formation.  They didn’t even get into the problems with Uranus and Neptune, and much more.  Sure, one can produce a story that may or may not sound plausible, but is it true?  How can they ever know?  Whatever happened to Occam’s razor?
The Bible states that God created the heavens and the earth.  This implies that the parameters were fine-tuned for habitability, with purpose and design for us to have a relationship with Him.  The critics complain that if you believe that, science grinds to a halt; you just say “God did it” and your work is done.*  But if it’s true, is it not chasing after wind to seek a natural explanation?  Maybe it makes a materialist feel better, because he can construct his nothing-to-man universe in an unbroken chain of natural causation, without singularities like a God intervening.**  If it feels good, do it.  But call it a feeling – a preference – not science, because you will never know that is how it really happened, and you will be forced to tweak your way around major difficulties (if in fact the world was designed).  You will have your metaphysical research programme that gives you endless opportunities to speculate and write your just-so stories in the Astrophysical Journal.  But in so doing, you will deny the validity of historical reasoning from Eyewitness accounts, and you will have turned science into scientism, which is idolatry.
*“God did it” may be the short answer, but How did He do it? provides an abundance of research potential.  This was the approach of Kepler and Newton, which proved fruitful, one might say.
**Materialists are not without their singularities, too: black holes, the big bang, the origin of life, etc.
Next headline on: Solar System.

In summary, we find no evidence that two measures of sexual selection, which potentially lead to variance in multi-male gene flow and sexual conflict, are associated with the degree of speciation across mammalian, butterfly and spider genera.  If sexual size dimorphism and/or measures of mating pattern are predictors of the strength of sexual selection, and the level of multi-male gene flow or status of male-female conflict, we find that speciation occurs independently of sexual selection, and rather via naturally selected processes of speciation that are well recognized (Mayr 1963).

It has been noted that in The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote about everything except the origin of species.  He talked about artificial selection and proposed a natural counterpart, but never really solved the problem of how new species arose.  He just assumed that extrapolation of variation could lead to speciation, even though empirical examples were lacking.  His theory of sexual selection was another heuristic proposal, and to this day, evolutionists imagine “choosy” females and competitive males driving the accentuation of sex differences, and presumably, new species.  These four scientists, surely evolutionists themselves, looked at the data objectively, and found no evidence of speciation via sexual selection.  While assuming speciation occurs by other Darwinian processes, (note that “well recognized” is not the same as “established”), they deny it occurs by sexual selection.  The origin of species must be happening some other way.
In his recent book Darwin’s God (not to be confused with Ken Miller’s book with a similar title), Cornelius Hunter accuses Darwin of pulling off an intellectual coup, changing the rules of science, by shifting the burden of proof to his critics.  If he could just imagine a sequence of intermediates that might have resulted in an eye, or any other “organ of extreme perfection”, he felt he had done his job, and it was up to his critics to prove it could not happen that way.  In other words, he put his critics in the hopeless position of proving a universal negative.  Through cleverly-contrived “thought experiments” (how’s that for an oxymoron), he had no problem envisioning the origin of species, even if hard evidence was lacking.  Thus was born the Just-So Story Method of evolutionary explanations.  This tradition flourishes among evolution defenders to this day, as we demonstrate often in these pages.  Instead of evidence, the Just-So Story Method suffices to explain How the Peacock Got Its Tail, How the Elephant Got Its Snorkel, How the Camel Got His Hump, and anything else you ever wanted to know.  But when predictions are made based on Darwinian theory and tested, like in this article ... Evidence?  Evidence?  Who’s got the evidence? 
Cartoonist Bil Keane used to include in his Family Circus strips a little ghost named “Not Me.”  When Mom asked who broke the window or let the dog out, the kids would invariably blame Not Me for the crime.  Who’s holding the evidence for evolution?  The theoreticians say Not Me.  The biologists say Not Me.  The geneticists say Not Me.  The paleontologists say Not Me.  The zoologists say Not Me.  The biochemists say assuredly, Not Me.  All in favor of exonerating Not Me, say Me.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

We encourage people to study the arguments on both sides, and have their Baloney Detector handy.  It appears to us that the Darwinists are quick to oppose ID with metaphysical and religious arguments, but low on supply of scientific evidence to argue whether Darwinian evolution is actually true.  Ruse, for instance, relied on negative theological arguments (for detailed treatment of this tactic, see Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s God.  Notice also his not-so-graceful sidestepping of a student’s question.)  Also notable was the air of “contemptuous condescension” on the part of the evolutionists, particularly Frank Steiner, biology professor and Dean of Natural Sciences at Hillsdale – who had the last word, and ended on that kind of note.  Regular readers of this column will not be impressed by what he marshaled as evidence to support his views, but may find it startling that he would quote George Orwell’s 1984 to promote the wisdom of believing in two contradictory ideas simultaneously.  Does he mean evolution is doublethink?  War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.  One would hope his colleagues cringed at such a suggestion.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design.

The development of most phenotypic traits involves complex interactions between many underlying factors, both genetic and environmental.  To study the evolution of such processes, a set of mathematical relationships is derived that describe how selection acts to change the distribution of genetic variation given arbitrarily complex developmental interactions and any distribution of genetic and environmental variation.  The result is illustrated by using it to derive models for the evolution of dominance and for the evolutionary consequences of asymmetry in the distribution of genetic variation.

Dr. Rice obviously is a whiz at math, so we hate to break the bad news, but garbage in, garbage out.  If the assumptions are wrong, no amount of mathematical hand-waving is going to provide a valid conclusion.  Unless you have a fitness function that is better than blind chance, you are not going to get the evolution of new organs or functions that will improve an organism, except by chance.  William Dembski deals with this extensively in his latest book No Free Lunch, and proves that no fitness function is superior to blind search, because it would require additional information from the outside (i.e., cheating) to distinguish a given fitness function as better than any other – including blind search.  Dr. Rice assumes that organisms are going to trend toward fitness, but how is that to be measured?  If fitness is measured by survival, then it is a tautology.  Recall a recent entry here by a biologist trying to explain what fitness is.  First, Dr. Rice needs to define fitness in terms other than survival, then needs to find a fitness function other than chance (without sneaking in outside information) that will generate directional selection.  Otherwise, all these fancy equations are just smoke and mirrors.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

Researchers think meteors might have showered the Earth with the molecules necessary for life’s origin. A two-aircraft campaign, led by astronomer Dr. Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., will investigate this possibility.  “We are looking for clues about the diversity of comets and their impact on the chemistry of life's origin on Earth,” Jenniskens said.

Get out and enjoy nature’s fireworks shows whenever you can.  Just don’t expect to evolve into something better.  If one hits you (highly unlikely), it might punctuate your equilibrium.
Next headline on: Solar System  •  Next headline on: Origin of Life.

Perhaps the most unprecedented conformational change involves residues 160 to 190, which not only extensively refold, but move about 70 Å from one side of the polymerase to the other. This region refolds from a short helix and an extended loop into a pair of antiparallel helices (H1 and H2/3). The newly formed compact structure, named subdomain H, forms part of the RNA-transcript exit tunnel and contacts the 5' end of the RNA transcript on one surface and the nontemplate DNA on the opposite surface.

One might ask why the abortive synthesis of short oligonucleotides exists and why the enzyme might not be “designed” to carry out the stable RNA synthesis that occurs in the elongation phase right from the start. The initiation of RNA synthesis at a particular site that is required for specific gene expression and regulation as well as the need for de novo, unprimed synthesis necessitates binding of the polymerase at a specific DNA location, the promoter. Furthermore, the binding of T7 RNAP to both the promoter and the downstream DNA appears to be essential for opening the bubble. Because short transcripts (2 to 4 nt) cannot form stable heteroduplexes, polymerase leaving the promoter prematurely would presumably lead to bubble closure and transcript displacement by the nontemplate strand. An enzyme locked in the elongation mode conformation seems unlikely to be capable of specific initiation and bubble opening. 

This is all so mind-boggling.  It’s like these little robots can reorganize themselves, like something in an animated sci-fi movie (or a kid with an advanced Lego set).  These incredibly tiny machines have moving parts that twist and turn and form tunnels and zippers and clamps and presses right on cue, and they are programmed with the know-how to handle every contingency.  How could this evolve by chance? When you see such a marvelous coordination of highly-specific parts, how can you conclude anything less than that a skillful Artist and Engineer designed it?  The rules have changed.  Biochemists have opened the black box, and shown us what really goes on deep inside the fundamental units of life.  It gets more amazing as the focus sharpens.  There is essentially no mention of evolution in this paper. As we show so often, evolutionary storytelling is inversely proportional to the amount of detail available for study.  (For contrast, see next headline.)
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next amazing story.

Scientists have long sought the genetic imprint of natural selection to understand the forces that have shaped human traits. But it’s been a bit like trying to solve a crossword puzzle in which the clues have been scrambled. Other demographic events such as migrations, population contractions and expansions, and mating traditions have also left their mark on our genomes, making the effects of selection and history hard to untangle. ...

The effort to understand human traits and diseases in terms of natural selection began with Darwin, who sought in his last book, The Descent of Man, “to see how far the general conclusions arrived at in my former works were applicable to man.”  But as the quest moved to the genetic level in the 20th century, the task proved more difficult than expected. To detect selection, researchers first must determine how a genetic sequence would change under neutral conditions in which selection was not a factor. That’s easy to do for an infinitely large, randomly mating population—but human populations have never met those conditions.

This entry and the one prior to it illustrate a common theme in these pages, that while evolutionists engage in guesswork and wishful thinking, the real hard evidence points to design.  Here we are in 2002, with 1.4 centuries of Darwinism directing biological thought, but where is the evidence for natural selection in the genes, where it should be most obvious?  We have the entire human genome sequenced, but nobody can find it.  The examples he cites in his table are almost ludicrous.  Surely they are nothing to crow about as evidence to support a belief in macroevolution, the origin of some new and complex function.  If anything, they are relics of conservative responses by the genome to maintain the complexity it already had.  “Balancing selection” (getting your enemies to fight each other) is not making you stronger.  Anybody want to inherit the gene for sickle-cell anemia?  That’s devolution, not evolution.  It’s like getting a lucky break because a gunman missed you, and by mistake shot the carjacker who was holding you up.
     One gets the impression these brilliant men have been snookered into a snipe hunt.  Darwin sent them into the woods with their bags and told them there were snipe all over the place.  Some of them are beating the bushes, and others are holding the bags to the ground, while they encourage one another that things are looking up, now that they have been given bigger bags and more helpers to beat the bushes.  Meanwhile, Phillip Johnson and Jonathan Wells are back in the lodge by the fire, chuckling over a hot cup of coffee.
Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

We’ve reported several times about ATP synthase and its marvels.  The fact that nanotechnologists are able to operate these devices blurs the line between mechanical and biological worlds.  This is a cogent argument against Hume’s criticism of natural theology.  David Hume argued that one could not compare artificial machines with biological machines to prove the existence of God (e.g., Paley’s divine Watchmaker argument).  But Montemagno is using ATP synthase as a model for nanodevices that might be made of different molecules.  If a man-made motor works on the same principles as the natural one, what’s the difference?  If a human engineer is required to make the artificial one, why not deduce a supreme Engineer as the Maker of the natural one?
Next amazing story

In the late 1960s, with the advent of the theory of plate tectonics, geophysicists finally seemed to have made sense of earthquakes.  The surface of the Earth is covered in a mosaic of rigid plates, and earthquakes, in this theory, occur only in narrow zones where the plates rub against each other.  This was good news, because it provided a basic understanding of why there were earthquakes in the first place.  But in the 1980s, there were second thoughts.  The plate theory worked well in the oceans, but across the continental land masses, earthquakes seemed to occur all over the place.

A more fundamental problem is that geologists have surprisingly little to go on when it comes to understanding the mantle, and there is an embarrassingly large gap between laboratory experiments and the behaviour of rocks under real geological conditions.  To compound the problem, McKenzie and Fairhead’s results fly in the face of scores of other studies: studies conducted in northern India and elsewhere suggest much greater values of beam thickness, up to several times the thickness of the crust, plunging geophysicists into an intense argument about the significance of this discrepancy.

Welcome to the world of real geological science.  It’s not as straightforward as those computer animations on the Discovery Channel and displays in the national parks, is it?  The take-home lesson from this headline is how little they really know.  As Simon Lamb admits, “Looking below the crust is not easy.” Models are built to explain certain phenomena.  They gain in popularity for awhile, then sometimes collapse under the load of anomalies they can’t explain.  Maybe plate tectonics theory is on the way out, or maybe it will just be modified, but never assume that what is science today will not be myth tomorrow.
For example, a sign in Yellowstone, posted in stone for decades, explained to clueless visitors that the petrified forests of Specimen Ridge took over 50,000 years to form, as 27 or more forests grew sequentially on top of each other.  The sign is now gone.  When Mt. St. Helens exploded in 1981, geologists saw with their own eyes that catastrophic mudflows could create similar features in one episode.  Some see this as the way science progresses: over time, we are gathering and sifting data and converging on the truth.  But if the dominant explanation for a surface feature open to hands-on study could undergo such a turnover, how can we have any confidence about explanations for unobservable features miles under our feet?  Often the geological stories are the foundation for the evolutionary stories.  If the foundation be destroyed, what can the popularizers do?
Next headline on: Geology.

The method is built on the assumption of evolution, so it is another case of circular reasoning.  They calibrate the survivability of osteocalcin on the evolutionary belief that the extinct bison lived 55,000 years ago.  But ask the obvious question: how could fragile amino acids survive anywhere near that long, or especially 120 million years as is claimed for dinosaur protein?  Wouldn’t that call into question the ages that are claimed for these bones?  Also, the protein amino acid of the extinct bison was identical to that of living bison, and only 1 amino acid different than that of living cattle.  This caused them to make the ad hoc assumption that “osteocalcin sequences diverge slowly.”  If they are calibrating a clock based on the assumption of evolution, they cannot then turn around and use it as evidence for evolution.  The article only offers this dating method as a possibility for future study.  It proves nothing except that there has been no evolution to speak between the extinct and living bison.  But like molecular phylogeny, this method will doubtless give evolutionists another useless tool to make artificial trees while appearing to back it up with empirical measurements.  Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Next headline on: Dating Methods.

To an evolutionist, mutations are the source of new information and novelty that can be acted on by natural selection to produce eyes and brains and wings and all the other wonders of nature.  But this experiment shows what is intuitively obvious, that throwing mistakes into the works causes death.  It would seem more likely that nature is degenerating, not getting better, as mutations take their toll.  In a perfect world where the error-correcting mechanisms work properly, there wouldn’t be any cancer.  But machines break down, cars rust, and information degrades in a world subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Cancer is a sign we are not evolving, but devolving.  Unless it can be shown that new mutations could actually improve the proofreading capability of DNA polymerase and other error-correcting enzymes, it would be fair to conclude that the human genome is slowly degrading under the mutation load.
Aside from that sobering possibility, ponder the amazing fact that our cells have multiple levels of active processes to keep the DNA code accurate.  At every stage of translation from DNA to protein, molecular machines are there to catch the mistakes and fix them.  Their success rate is far better than any human police or fire department.  They are your heroes.  Instead of blaming God when cancer strikes, how about a little thanksgiving for systems He designed that work well, silently and unselfishly, 99.x% of the time.  He has already told us “it is appointed unto man once to die, and after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).  If you are trusting in Christ, and if cancer is the means by which God allows you to exit this life, there is a glorified body, free of cancer, awaiting you in heaven.  But if you are not trusting in God’s plan of salvation, then fear: you can work out religiously and be fastidious about eating the right things, but all it takes is one cosmic ray aimed at your DNA polymerase to bring you down.
Next headline on: Health. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA.

Answers in Genesis rightly chides Time for including these false and misleading allusions to a defunct theory, perpetrated by a fraud (Ernst Haeckel), that humans go through stages of their evolutionary past during development.  If you can stomach these portions of the article and read from a viewpoint of intelligent design, you will marvel at the complexity and beauty of the programmed development process that each of us once went through.
Next headline on: Human Body. • Next headline on: Darwinism. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design. • Next amazing story.

Oh, well, survival of the fittest, you know.  Why worry; most things are extinct anyway.  They say roaches will probably inherit the earth.  If parasitic flies are the fittest, then long live parasitic flies*.  (But those finches sure are cute.)
Next headline on: Birds. • Next headline on: Darwin.
*The reader surely realizes this is only intended as a parody.  We love birds, especially these ones, since they make such a good illustration against Darwinism.

This theory really says nothing about evolution.  Just like a passing wave makes a float bob up and down but not travel with the wave, certain organisms may have benefited or suffered from changes in chemistry, without evolving.  Animals and plants bloom where the resources are plentiful; even humans move out of drought regions into lands of milk and honey without evolving into other species.  The evolutionary talk in this article is pure conjecture (storytelling), based on a priori assumption that evolution occurred.  Dickson’s paper does not even mention evolution; he only discusses the magnesium/calcium ratio in starfish skeletons.  It’s a stretch for Kerr to pull an evolutionary tale out of this data, and he admits it (emphasis added):

“It’s a really interesting idea,” says paleontologist David Jablonski of the University of Chicago, “that ocean changes could drive these major turnovers” of marine animals or even facilitate shelled animals’ bursting on the scene.  The trick, he says, will be refining the patterns of evolutionary and ocean change so that cause and effect can be firmly linked.  Then geophysics and life might be joined for good.

Instead of another “really interesting idea” (read: pure conjecture) about evolution, how about some evidence?  Why not a different conjecture?  Try ours: large formations might have formed rapidly, not slowly and gradually, under different conditions.
Evolutionary writings usually have some data in them.  Dickson provided detailed measurements of Mg/Ca ratios, and that’s fine, but they have nothing to say about whether a starfish could evolve out of something simpler.  These kinds of data are smokescreens to give the illusion that the evolutionary tale has some basis in empirical observations, when the direct evidence for macroevolution is missing or imaginary.  Evolutionists no longer feel the need to prove evolution with evidence.  Since evolution is already a “fact,” a story will do (see next headline): find a tiny piece of data somewhere, assume it fits evolutionary theory, weave a monstrous conjecture out of it, then tell the reader they might be onto something big about evolution and hope to figure it out someday.  This is how scam artists work.  “Your investment looks promising, but we need another $30K before we can send you your million.”  The poor sucker keeps being led along until s/he realizes one day the million is never coming, and the money invested is lost forever.  This is not an unfair comparison, because as we have been reporting for over two years from primary pro-evolution sources, major aspects of evolutionary theory are poorly understood (recent example), and often contrary to the observations recent example).  Invest at your own risk.
Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

For some reason–the availability of a food source that no other creature was exploiting is one possibility–elephants, over time, developed legs that were strong enough to support their huge body weight and enabled them to become land creatures. ... elephants also evolved trunks so they could breathe with their heads underwater.  To this day, elephants remain powerful swimmers.

But teacher, why?
Next headline on: Mammals. • Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory. • Next dumb story.

But some observers say that no matter what the intentions behind the change are, the move is still alarming for scientists and many other groups, such as those who wish to keep abortion legal.  “It’s a dangerous precedent to characterize a cluster of cells as a human subject,” says Kevin Wilson, director of public policy for the American Society for Cell Biology.

A cluster of cells.  You and I were once just a cluster of cells.  That cluster of cells has all the coding and potential for full adult life.  There is an unbroken chain of humanness from one generation to the next.  The first step in rationalizing atrocities against a helpless group of humans is to say they’re not really human.  Reductionist evolutionism has made us into just a cluster of cells; adults are just a bigger cluster.  Where do they draw the line?  Not even a fetus’s ability to feel pain has stopped the abortion industry from carrying out their grisly deeds all the way to term and even beyond in some cases.  Here’s where the view of God and man comes to a clear dividing line: the image of God, or a cluster of cells?  Human embryos have become experimental playthings for scientists who expect to be paid for their Frankenscience using American tax dollars.  The reasons always sound so noble, but is it right to do wrong to do right?  The principle used to be that medicine would not harm one subject to aid another; that’s why we don’t carve up scientists to give their organs to people suffering from genetic diseases.  Scientists are playing with fire.  These are major moral issues, with ominous implications for any helpless group of individuals.  Scientists pretend they are politically neutral, even benefactors doing pure research for our good.  But scientists were once a cluster of cells, too, and they kid themselves to think their positions do not involve religious, political, and even economic motivations (such as NIH funding).  Science can inform the law, but scientists are not above the law.  If they want unrestricted access to human experimentation, let them go to North Korea, where no such inconvenient moral stipulations will get in their way:

He was told repeatedly of an island in the northeastern part of North Korea, in an area near Chongjin so highly restricted it does not appear on official maps, where prisoners are used as laboratory test material for anthrax and other bacteria, food poisoning, or medical experiments–how long they can stand freezing, or how long they can live underwater–“the cruelest experiments you can imagine,” Dr. Vollertsen says.

So reported Anne Morse just this year in World magazine, March 9, 2002.
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics.

The heritage of Hubble has been a dynamic universe, where stars don’t just sit there and twinkle, but explode and die.  Like fireworks, they’re pretty when they go.
Next headline on: Stars.

This is great news.  The Darwin Party is so scared that somebody is finally calling their bluff, they have to resort to intimidation and executive order to maintain their stranglehold on education.  What if they called a war and nobody showed up?  What if enough people realize this is a political power play, not a search for the truth about nature?  We mustn’t “confuse” the students, he says.  Good grief.  High school readers, are you offended that he says you aren’t smart enough to hear evidence on two sides of a question and decide which has better support?  Teachers, are you offended that the AAAS has to tell you what science is?  The resolution piously calls for a “fact-based, standards-based science education for American schoolchildren.”  Great.  Remove the evolutionary storytelling and we’ll be making progress.
Members of the AAAS, stand up for your right to do science the old fashioned way, by observation, testable hypothesis, logic, and open debate about the evidence.  Don’t let organizations require your scientific work to maintain a philosophical party line.  If you’re tired of the union bosses telling you how to think, write them to get out of politics and enter into reasoned discussion about the evidence.  That’s what the intelligent design movement is all about.
To understand how Leshner can call evolution one of the most robust products ever to come out of scientific inquiry, you need to take William Dembski’s short course in Evolutionary Logic.  See also our Concise Guide to Understanding Evolutionary Theory and our Baloney Detector on bluffing and bandwagon.
For our readers who support teaching the controversy, realize that nature is not going to obey the AAAS board resolution.  It will continue silently proclaiming intelligent design, whether or not the AAAS succeeds in intimidating school boards.  (Look at our recent headline on the histone code, for example; the author made no mention of evolution, and Darwinism would have been an impediment to understanding the observations.)  That’s reason to take heart and just keep holding up the evidence and letting it tell its own story.  In the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life, Dr. Paul Nelson made a statement at the transition between the “old” Darwinian story (that natural selection creates all the beauty and diversity of life) and the “new” intelligent design evidence in molecular machines and DNA.  He said, “Evidence is very powerful, and all of have the sense that if we let that evidence speak for itself, that it would lead us in a very different direction, away from natural selection, and toward a different conclusion about the origin and nature of life on earth.”  Now click on the link below for an example.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design. • Next headline on: Politics.

It doesn’t hurt to look, but they have been looking for a long time, and so far come up empty.  Every proposed habitat to date has proven to be hostile and dead.  Venus was once thought to harbor life but turned out to be like an inferno at the surface, to the surprise of many.  Likewise, the dreams of Percival Lowell (and the fears of H. G. Wells) of finding advanced life on Mars died in 1965 when Mariner 4 first imaged its dusty, cratered surface.  Now, 38 years later, the red planet still shows no evidence of even microbial life, past or present; moreover, its exposure to deadly radiation makes the habitat extreme to say the least.  Jupiter’s moon Europa may have water, and Saturn’s Titan may have organic chemistry; but so far, Earth is still the only known abode of life – all based on the A, G, C, T alphabet of DNA.  Would weird life prove anything?  It’s pretty weird already; just look at the election results.
Next headline on: Origin of Life. • Next headline on: Mars. • Next headline on: Solar System.

Head measurements have been used to lend a quasi-scientific respectability to racism in the late 19th and early 20th century, when Darwinism was on the rise.  But even recently, Margaret Mead’s book, now discredited, was required reading for many college students and for years was held up as a model of good scientific research.  (It also tended to justify free sex as normal and healthy.)  Isn’t science supposed to be objective?  Isn’t it based on unbiased measurement?  An alarming exposé on the history and fallacy of using craniometry to justify xenophobia, racism and eugenics is Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (Gould, a staunch anti-creationist, never hesitated to lambaste his fellow evolutionists when he felt they were wrong).  The Boas data have been used by evolutionary anthropologists to propose that head shape and size have been evolving since Mesolithic times, but what if the measurements are invalid?  This story shows that assumptions based on faulty data, with political fallout and all, can go unchallenged for decades.  Science marches on.
Next headline on: Human Body. • Next headline on: Early Man.

Good attitude, but it should go farther.  Alternatives to naturalistic philosophy should also be considered.
Schmitt’s suggested alternative, the capture theory, is highly unlikely.  No naturalistic theory for the origin of the moon is without serious problems: see our Aug. 2001 headline on this.  One thing is clear; without our moon, life on earth would be under great stress, maybe even non-existent.  The moon keeps ocean currents moving and tides rising and falling, so that shorelines do not stagnate but are cleansed daily.  And the glory of a solar eclipse is due to highly improbable coincidence that the apparent lunar diameter matches the apparent solar diameter, even though the moon is orders of magnitude smaller than the sun.  We are either extremely lucky to have our moon, or it was designed.  Evolutionists have no choice but to trust dumb luck.
Next headline on: Geology. • Next headline on: Solar System.

Davies, author of The Fifth Miracle and other writings that grapple with the complexity of life, is usually pretty honest about the problems in origin of life theories.  But this is really illogical.  Like many evolutionary tall tales these days, there is no evidence for it, only evidence that it could not have happened the conventional evolutionary way.  If you have ruled out the good, and all you have left are the bad and the ugly, which would you choose?
For fun, read William Dembski’s satire on Evolutionary Logic on DesignInference.com.
Next headline on: Mars. • Next dumb story.

It is an obvious but easily forgotten truth that cells must have a mechanism for remembering who they are.  A cell’s identity is defined by its characteristic pattern of gene expression and silencing, so remembering who it is consists of maintaining that pattern of gene expression through the traumas of DNA replication, chromatin assembly, and the radical DNA repackaging that accompanies mitosis [cell division].  The mechanisms by which around 2 m [two meters, about 6 feet] of DNA is packaged into the cell nucleus while remaining functional border on the miraculous and are still poorly understood.  However, we do know more about the first stage in this packaging process, the nucleosome core particle.  This structure comprises an octamer of core histones (two each of H2A, H2B, H3, and H4), around which are wrapped 146 base pairs of DNA in 1 3/4 superhelical turns (Luger et al., 1997 ).  The reduction in DNA length produced by this histone-induced supercoiling is modest, but is an essential first step in the formation of higher-order chromatin structures.  In recent years it has become clear that the nucleosome has an additional role, perhaps equally important and conserved, namely regulation of gene expression.  Particularly exciting is the growing probability that the nucleosome can transmit epigenetic information from one cell generation to the next and has the potential to act, in effect, as the cell’s memory bank.

It has been suggested that specific tail modifications, or combinations thereof, constitute a code that defines actual or potential transcriptional states (Jenuwein and Allis, 2001; Richards and Elgin, 2002; Spotswood and Turner, 2002).  The code is set by histone modifying enzymes of defined specificity and read by nonhistone proteins that bind in a modification-sensitive manner.  In order to realize its full information carrying potential, the code must use combinations of modifications.  This requires not only proteins that can read such combined modifications, but mechanisms by which they can be put in place and maintained.  Recent papers have provided new insights into how specific combinations of tail modification might be generated and revealed mechanisms by which the modification of one residue can determine that of another.

This is wonderful and amazing stuff.  The trend of increasing complexity as more is uncovered at the basic unit of life shows no sign of abating.  When you consider just how DNA in the nucleus has to be bundled safely to avoid damage during the “trauma” and “radical repackaging” that occurs during cell division, that alone is cause for astonishment.  Click the link for an illustration from Eastern Michigan University showing how the six feet of DNA, so thin and fragile as to be invisible without an electron microscope, is first wrapped around the nucleosome, then supercoiled into chromatin, then bundled into chromosomes, without breaking a link anywhere (most of the time) in 60,000 genes – that’s a feat.   A reader sent in this link from Technical University of Denmark – check out the great illustrations of DNA packaging, and realize that this all has to be done over and over, quickly, every time the cell divides.  But now to realize that the components are actually maintaining codes and libraries, and have the mechanisms to read and act on the codes, all independently of DNA, is almost too much to fathom.
We’re witnessing a revolution.  The “Central Dogma” of genetics has been that DNA is the master control of the cell and the basis of heredity.  Now, it is becoming increasingly apparent that DNA is more a passive library, and that other master controls (epigenetic factors) that can be inherited independently of DNA are using the code as part of a more complex system, made up of proteins, enzymes, RNA, and DNA, that are all interdependent.  Turner makes only one single-word, vague, indirect reference to evolution in his entire paper, but it’s no comfort to a Darwinist: he says these DNA packaging systems and controls are all conserved, i.e., unevolved from the most primitive bacteria.  This means that not only the DNA, but the histones, the histone code, and the enzymes that read and translate them, had to all be present and working from the very beginning.  Life did not start simple; it started complex!
Ponder his statement that these processes “border on the miraculous.”  Turner does not mean, of course, that they are miraculous, nor do we.  It just means that they comprise such a wonderful and amazing system, it is like watching a world-class circus act or magic show or performance that leaves you gasping and clapping and standing up to cheer.  It is like incredibly rich and robust software controlling a coordinated series of automated events that is breathtaking in its complexity and function.  Remember that Darwin and his evangelists knew nothing about this.  If biochemistry had preceded phylogeny, one wonders how history might have taken a radically different turn around 1859.
Next headline on: The Cell. • Next headline on: Intelligent Design. • Next headline on: Genes and DNA. • Next amazing story.

The saga of the Big Bang is the scientific origin story for all of modern astrophysics and the language by which astronomers explain nearly all they see with their telescopes.  It is to an astronomer what evolution is to a biologist – and even more unpopular with the public.  So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you’re on the fence about the theory, read on – the following five exhibits will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe was created in the Big Bang.

1. Exhibit A: The night sky.  The Big Bang solves Olber’s Paradox that the sky is dark by showing the universe had a beginning and has a history.
2. Exhibit B: The expanding universe.  Red shifts prove that the galaxies are flying apart; the light from the Andromeda galaxy left “two million years ago, when Homo habilis, the earliest species of our genus Homo, fashioned Earth’s first stone tools.”
3. Exhibit C: Background radiation.  The Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB) is the echo of the Big Bang.  Recent measurements show the CMB was hotter in the past, as predicted.
4. Exhibit D: The light elements.  Ratios of hydrogen and helium fit the Big Bang; “The prediction of the exact abundances of the light elements ... together with the expansion of space and the CMB, clinched the Big Bang theory.”
5. Exhibit E: Evolution of stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies.  As we look deeper into space, as in the Hubble Deep Field, we see different generations of objects, indicating a universe that is steadily changing over time.

Astronomy should be ashamed to print this simplistic, high-school pep talk.  It reminded us of a Sydney Harris cartoon; we couldn’t find a copy on the Web to show you, so we’ll have to use word pictures.  Harris portrays an outdoor