One of the most conspicuous findings from a census of bones is the near absence of complete skeletons.

In a result that counters intuition, bones of predators were almost seven times as common in Pit 91 as were those of prey.  Overall, an estimated 80 percent of the mammals were carnivores, and 60 percent of the birds were birds of prey.  That’s a surprise, says [John] Harris [curator of the museum at the site], since the number of herbivores in a stable ecosystem always outnumbers the predators by a wide margin.
    Presumably, Perkins suggests, “Each herbivore entrapment probably triggered a feeding frenzy that resulted in up to a dozen predators being trapped as well.”

Of the seven mammal species that the team analyzed from Pit 91, skulls and jawbones were collected most often.  Only half as many limb bones were recovered as would be expected from the number of heads retrieved.

Even carnivores became sitting ducks; the predators’ limb bones don’t show up in the pits in the proportions expected if their carcasses had escaped scavengers.  Dire wolves, an ice age predator larger than today’s gray wolf, appear to have been scavenged less often than the saber-toothed cats.  However, the large numbers of missing bones among any of La Brea’s meat eaters is surprising, says [Blair] Van Valkenburgh [of UCLA].  Modern carnivores rarely feed on other large carnivores, even when carcasses are available, she notes.

The carbon-isotope ratios found in the bones of dire wolves that lived 30,000 and 15,000 years ago have proved mysterious because they can’t be explained by the consumption of herbivores, such as bison, horses, and turkeys, known to be living in the La Brea ecosystem at that time.
    A hypothesis is offered is that the wolves had eaten seafood, perhaps sea lions, at the coast – but that is nine miles away.

Several characteristics of the fossil bones suggest that the remains of trapped animals sank quickly into the tar, the researchers note.  First, 93 percent of the bones show no sign of exposure to the weather.  Almost half of the specimens show little or none of the outer-surface abrasion that indicates, for example, the scouring action of sediments.  Finally, only 2 percent of the bones show any evidence that they had been gnawed or chewed by scavengers.

Perkins ends with an anecdote about 60 cedar waxwings getting stuck in a tar seep last November, indicating that animals still get trapped.  The problem is, cedar waxwings are not birds of prey.  The fossil birds of prey outnumbered non-carnivorous birds 60% to 40%.  In this case, he surely would have mentioned if 90 eagles or vultures had been seen swooping onto the trapped songbirds.  The facts indicate that the present is not the key to the past.
   There’s always a story one can weave to explain away hard facts, but La Brea exemplifies a sticky situation for evolutionists.  In fact, there are even more serious problems at La Brea that Perkins did not mention.  (Thanks to William Weston for the following, from results of his independent research involving many visits to the site for years; you can read parts of his report at the Creation Research Society website.)  Add these pieces to the puzzle:

1. Hard-packed asphalt.  From the earliest days of discovery, no large pools or lakes of asphalt were ever reported at La Brea.  Only small tar seeps, too small to trap large mammals, were ever seen.  Most of the site consisted of hard pavement-like asphalt that could easily be walked on by a mastodon or bison or camel.  The large lake seen there today was artificially produced later from an asphalt quarry operation that was filled in with water.  (Yet plastic mastodons were later installed as if sinking into the lake, to mislead the public.)  Visitors today can find a couple of small oozing seeps, but no large expanses of tar that presumably trapped millions of prehistoric animals.  Perkins suggests that the asphalt softened during hot seasons, but that does not happen today, and is just a story without observational support.
2. Narrow pits.  The notion of tar ‘pits’ is a myth.  The ‘pits’ are narrow, funnel-shaped assemblages of fossils embedded in asphalt and sand.  Of the pits excavated, only seven showed dense concentrations of fossils.  None of them is large enough to imagine trapping a huge mammal, yet mammoth and mastodon bones have been found in them.  (Weston shows a cartoon of a mammoth on a high platform trying to dive into one of the funnels and scrunch his body into it.)  They give the impression of being blowholes from oil shale underneath.  Weston describes one of them:

   The seven major fossil-bearing pits were of various sizes.  On average, they were about 15 feet in diameter and tapered down 25 feet to a hole several inches wide. ... One unusual pit was only four feet wide.  Designated as Pit 16, it had vertical sides that went down 21 feet before it tapered three more feet to the typical three-inch-wide chimney.  Somehow numerous animals including dire wolves, saber-tooth cats, coyotes, camels, bison, horses, and even the bulky mastodon had managed to squeeze themselves into a hole not much wider than a bathtub.

3. Radiocarbon date improbabilities.  Carbon-14 dates in Pit 9 were claimed to indicate 38,000 years old at the bottom and 13,500 years at the top.  For the pit to be a death trap, that means the tar would have had to remain liquefied for about 24,000 years.  Yet crude oil emerging from the ground begins to thicken and harden immediately when exposed to the air, forming a crust.  Sunlight, heat and oxidation all harden tar relatively quickly.  Therefore, “the existence of open pits of tar that could trap animals over a period of thousands of years,” Weston says, “must be regarded as highly improbable.”
4. More on the carnivore ratios.  Weston’s figures show 85% of the total number of animals as carnivores, and 70% of the birds as being flesh-eating.  “The uncontested leader is the eagle,” he points out.  “It is puzzling why eagles would be so vulnerable to entrapment.  Not only are they quite rare when compared to such teeming populations as pigeons and doves, but they are also larger and more muscular and thus less likely to be victimized.”
5. Observational ratios.  When modern animals and birds are found to become stuck in tar seeps, they match the expected carnivore to herbivore ratios.  Weston provides a reported example from 1934 with 131 birds of 13 species trapped.  The non-carnivorous birds outnumbered the birds of prey 22 to 1, similar to the expected balance in nature.
6. Few waterfowl.  Wading birds like ducks and geese would presumably be the most likely to suffer entrapment (picture a whole flock settling down together into an oily lake and, surprise!).  But the largest category of non-predatory birds found was the turkey – a land-roving bird.
7. Dense packing.  The bones were tightly packed together, and even insect parts, including wings and antennae, were found in the eye sockets of the skulls.  Finding any connected parts of an animal, even an insect, was extremely rare.  “In addition,” Weston writes, “the bones were in an entangled mass, closely pressed together, and interlocked in all possible ways.”  Most showed breakage and grooves or depressions.  Presumably bubbles in the tar agitated the fossils, but again, that is not observed happening today.
8. Waterlogged wood.  Stumps of water-saturated wood were found in some pits.  Bones were found adjacent to “uprooted stumps or torn branches that were heavy with water.”  An early excavator said, “The disposition of this brush and associated material as well as markings on the brush itself, indicate that this stuff was all washed in.”

These facts indicate that something is seriously wrong with the entrapment story being fed to the public at the George C. Page Museum at the site.  Taken together, the observations seem to point to a catastrophe of some sort.  Weston has a version: he believes carnivores were concentrated on hilltops as flood waters were rising, and were the last to drown.  Their bones, last to settle to the bottom, were disarticulated and concentrated by currents and washed into depressions where gas and oil seeps had formed from underwater blowholes.
    Whether or not you find this scenario more plausible than the entrapment story, why shouldn’t the public be told all the facts, including the many problems with the standard model?  This case fits the evolutionists’ propaganda strategy we see so often.  They start by assuming evolution and long ages, and then weave a just-so story around the facts that caters to the imaginary idea of long periods of slow, gradual evolution.  Uncomfortable facts are swept under the rug or dismissed with just-so subplots.
    The last exhibit at the Page Museum is especially grievous.  A large wall mural portrays the grand drama of cosmic evolution, starting with a presumed origin of life from random chemicals at the top, down through millions of years of biological evolution, a recorded voice reciting the whole glittering generality to the enraptured visitors.  They look and listen in reverence as more and more complex life emerges, until finally, an astronaut at the end of the imaginary timeline leaps out into the cosmos from which he ultimately sprang.  Now for crying out loud, the La Brea story does not even cover millions of years.  Even assuming the Darwin Party’s own time scale, the Pleistocene epoch represents only the last one tenth of one percent of the geologic column.  Yet this is the mythology with which millions of visitors, including a large percentage of public school children on field trips, is indoctrinated, in spite of the facts.  Is there a righteous cause here?
    P.S.  By the way, word has it that the late benefactor, George C. Page, whose largesse paid for the museum, was a creationist.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Mammals • Birds • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

“It’s not quite time for theorists to panic, but we’re getting there,” said astronomer Roberto Abraham of the University of Toronto, Canada, after announcing his group’s discovery of a startling number of mature galaxies in the young universe.  But although the finding seemed to undermine the standard view of how matter assembled, theorists have respectfully declined to sound the alarm.

It’s not a problem.  Everything is under control.  Our model can handle it.  (The last words of a dying paradigm.)
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology

The first benchmark improvement proposed by the minority report requires students to be able to distinguish between changes existing within species (microevolution) and the emergence of new species and changes above the species level (macroevolution).  The second would require students to be able to describe “how scientists continue to critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.”

“The debate over how best to teach evolution has devolved into an either-or argument that threatens science education in our schools,” said Cooper.  “But there is another approach laid out in the minority report --teach the scientific controversy.  Instead of pretending there is no debate over Darwin’s theory we should use it to further educate students about the scientific controversy surrounding evolutionary theory.”

“Last fall, Commissioner [Cheri] Yecke [Education Commissioner] received a letter from Congress stressing that this guidance in the No Child Left Behind Act Conference Report was the official position of Congress on science education.  The letter was signed by Minnesota Congressman John Kline and Congressman John Boehner, chairman of the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee.

What’s so wrong with that?  Who could disagree with that?  The Darwin Party, that’s who.  They know that their position can only survive in a vacuum, in which data supporting their position is carefully selected and deceptively presented, without rebuttal.  Since the Darwinian revolution, they have the power, and power corrupts.
    If you are a student, you have power, too.  No matter how hard the NCSE fights, no matter how much the Darwin Party schemes, and no matter how the vote goes, you can always raise your hand.
Next headline on:  Education • Politics and Ethics • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The work is “another nail in the coffin” of the idea that gender identity is determined by the environment in which children grow up, says endocrinologist Daniel Federman of Harvard Medical School in Boston.  He says the finding lends support to current thinking that aspects of gender identity are set up during intrauterine development.

To be happiest, be what you were created to be.  Don’t blame God or bad science for your problems.
    There is another identity we all have, male and female, that cannot be extinguished by coercion, environment, or misdirection: we are creatures made in the image of God, and our hearts are not at rest till they find rest in Him.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Health.

Best wishes to the team for the resolution of the problem with Spirit and a happy landing for Opportunity.  If worse comes to the worst for Spirit, at least it got two weeks of spectacular images, including this rear shot of the landing platform.  The landing caught the attention of the whole world.  Hits at the JPL Mars Exploration website surpassed all previous records, with traffic reaching 7 Gb/sec.
    All humans who prefer data over speculation should support these heroic efforts to explore space.  An ounce of data is worth a pound of speculation.  Getting that ounce from the surface of Mars is very, very challenging.  It also makes for a great adventure story on this 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Next headline on:  Mars

Don’t feel guilty about sleep.  Everything has its purpose, even letting your mind wander as your body goes limp in horizontal position once a day.  A lot is going on in that brain.  So now you have new justification for that power nap.  But sleep after the boss’s meeting, not during.  (Same rule applies to the Sunday sermon.)
Next headline on:  Human Body

Mastery of the underlying rule of recursion is the key to human flexibility, Premack believes, allowing humans to think in the abstract, use metaphors and comprehend concepts such as time.  It probably arose as the brain evolved into a more complex organ, but is not located in a single brain region.

Whatever it is about the brain that allows such linguistic flexibility may also be key to the human imagination, according to Premack.  Unlike other animals, which specialize in various skills, humans are supremely adaptable, able to learn new tasks and develop new technologies.  “Human intelligence and evolution are the only flexible processes on Earth capable of producing endless solutions to the problems confronted by living creatures,” Premack writes.

That line makes Premack winner of Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  The BBC News is runner-up with its very misleading headline, “Monkeys ‘grasp basic grammar’,” which the body of the article debunks.  But hold the presses!  Should we give it instead to National Geographic News for this line attributed to Premack?  “Evolution, being endlessly clever, might produce words that don’t require teaching, but until it does, it is not clear how any species other than humans could evolve language.”
    The whole experiment is pretty suspect.  How can a trainer know what a monkey is thinking just by watching bodily reactions, when their little pea-brains are in a constant state of flux, switching attention to whatever provides instant gratification?  The distance between their comprehension and that of speaking human is enormous, with no intermediates.  Yet article after article just assumes that mindless processes of evolution bridged this gap somehow.
    Don’t you just get sick of it?  The evolutionists blow smoke rings around readers’ necks that strangle by suggestion.  There’s nothing of substance here to choke off debate, but suckers are so awestruck by the wizards that they pass out as if slain in the spirit of Charlie.  It’s all a trick.
    Evolution is an idol, savvy?  Having no eyes, it sees not, and having no ears, it hears not.  Evolution has no power to evolve language or any complex system.  It is not, standing alongside human intelligence, “a flexible process that can produce endless solutions to problems.”  This is playing word games; it’s an unmitigated myth based on association and bluffing.  Natural selection is the opposite of intelligence.  It is the opposite of problem-solving.  It is the opposite of flexibility.  It says “survive or perish” but not “evolve or perish”, because it contains no mechanism for producing beneficial variation.  And you want beneficial variation to come from mutations – mistakes?  Get a life.
    Evolutionists never explain how natural selection could do such a thing as evolving recursive language skill; they merely claim that it did do it.  If you can’t accept it, well obviously, you just don’t have the faith, brother.  Don’t put your faith in an idol that is toppling (10/14/2003).
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Read his essay for the reasons.  Some moderns think the immensity of space argues against a Biblical cosmology, but does it?  He makes an interesting point: materialists would use opposite findings to discredit Christianity.  They say, if we were alone in such a vast universe, how could God care about us?  But then they say, If the universe were filled with life, how could God care about us?  Maybe materialists want to avoid God no matter what the evidence.
    The Bible teaches a vast universe, and stars as numerous as the sand on the seashore.  That’s different from the mythological universes of other ancient peoples.  But to Bible characters, the immensity of space only magnified the character of God.  The heavens declare His glory and should humble us, as taught in two classic Bible passages on cosmology, Psalm 8 and Psalm 19.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • The Bible.

It wouldn’t be surprising if this neurological response is active all over the body, even in human skin.  Skin has tiny vellum hairs all over, even on the palms of the hands.  Consider how your skin is sensitive to the slightest brush, even without touch if static electricity is about.  Probably similar neurons are involved.  All these sensations require specialized neurons and a brain that can process them.
    Wonder how touch sensation differs between women and hairier men.  Wonder what beards are for.  Are they just for looks, or do they have functions related to typical male roles?  They do seem to amplify the touch response.  Do they provide sensory data when crawling through dark caves?  Protection from the cold while hunting mammoths?  Are they wind indicators?  Love handles?  Maybe this will stimulate some experiments to prove they are not just vestigial leftovers of ape ancestry but have a function.  If it’s there, there’s probably a reason for it.  Maybe you shavers should stop depriving yourself of vital sensory information.
    Kids might want to experiment on the pet cat (gently).  Watch how much the cat whiskers twitch in wake and sleep.  Observe different reactions to touch, temperature, prolonged touch, stroking, and release.  Tell the kid that pulling is not allowed, on the cat or Dad.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Amazing Facts

Prof. Zvi Livneh and Ph.D. student Ayelet Maor-Shoshani of the Biological Chemistry Department cut a DNA strand — from the bacterium E. coli — and inserted material similar to that which composes crude oil in between both its ends.  As expected, the regular DNA polymerase stopped working when it reached the foreign material.  Yet to the scientists’ amazement, a specialized DNA polymerase jumped in to rescue the stalled replication process, and continued the copying process, inserting nonexistent genetic components into the “printout’ when it encountered the foreign material.  This can be compared to a person who forgets some words in a song and makes up new ones to be able to continue to sing.

True, when DNA polymerase improvises a tune, errors (i.e. mutations) may occur in the new cells’ DNA.  Yet Livneh explains that the body cannot feasibly let all cells with damaged DNA die, for there are too many of them.  “Only if the DNA contains a very high level of damage will the cell’s machinery ‘give up’ and let the cell die.”

The number of coded mechanisms keeping us alive is astonishing.  Given all the things that could go wrong, it makes you wonder how the human race survives for even a few generations, let alone thousands of years.  Molecular machines in the cell are multi-talented and well trained, and now even skilled at improvisation.  Be thankful your gene readers know all that jazz.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Amazing Facts

The fundamental issue here is Darwin’s bold claim that “numerous, successive, slight modifications” are sufficient for all of evolution (Fig. 1 [a photo of a group of chimpanzees]).  This can be paraphrased, in later terms, as “microevolution is sufficient to explain macroevolution”.  The historical context is that evolutionary biology can be divided into two phases: first, the acceptance in the 1860s that evolution (macroevolution) had indeed occurred; second, the realization in the mid-1900s that the processes of microevolution (natural selection working through genetics) were necessary for evolution to occur.

Use of the mouse genome as an outgroup allows estimates of the number of synonymous (silent) mutations and non-synonymous (replacement) mutations.  The ratio of the two permits the potential identification of genes that have been under positive selection in humans as opposed to chimpanzees, and vice versa.

This is concordant with the generally high proportion of meat (and thus protein) in the human diet, at least in comparison with the more herbivorous chimpanzee and gorilla.  The increased capacity to break down amino acids is not surprising in another respect.  For example, failure to catabolize phenylalanine has several adverse effects, including brain damage.  Overall, the finding lends support to theories that an increased proportion of meat in the diet of early humans was important for an increase in brain size.  Regardless of that, there could also be ethical implications.  If early humans ate meat ‘naturally’, then for example being vegetarian could be considered a personal choice rather than a universal ethical decision.  But all that can be claimed here is that scientific knowledge will be necessary, even if not sufficient, for solving such ethical questions.

These results illustrate how genome-wide information will stimulate new experiments, both at the level of gene expression and with the aim of making physiological comparisons.  What, for instance, is the comparative sensitivity of humans and chimps to a range of olfactory stimuli?  Do humans have an improved receptivity to odours from the increased proportion of meat and/or cooked foods in our diet?  Such tests will allow us to see how genetic differences manifest themselves at the level of the organism, and we can expect a burst of experiments to that end.

The full sequence will be available later this year, and further comparative analyses should lead to a definite answer as to whether there is anything in the human genome that is not accounted for by the normal microevolutionary processes.  Is there a genetic continuum between us and our ancestors and the great apes?  If there is, then we can say that these processes are genetically sufficient to fully account for human uniqueness – and that would be my candidate for the top scientific problem solved in the first decade of the new millennium.

Ahem.  Why are you asking this question?  Here we are, 150 years after Darwin remade the scientific world, and you still don’t know whether numerous, successive slight modifications could make a man out of an ape?
    Notice the wild, unconstrained, bluffing imagination of David Penny.  He takes a few genes that seem to differ in their ability to break down some amino acids, and suddenly we have scientific information on (1) diet, (2) evolution of the brain, and (3) ethics.  Incredible.  In any other field of inquiry, such unjustified extrapolation from meager data would be scorned.  But since Penny is an evolutionary biologist, he gets away with it and his tall tale gets published in all seriousness in Nature, the most esteemed scientific journal in the world.  Why?
    It’s important to know something about the Darwinian Revolution.  What happened in 1859 was not just the announcement of a new scientific theory.  It was a fundamental change in the way science is done.  Prior to Darwin, scientists (mostly theists and creationists) believed strongly in proof.  “Nothing on mere authority” was the motto of the Royal Society.  Scientists were careful to distinguish between speculations and facts that were demonstrable through experiment.
    But with Darwin, the standards were lowered.  It became permissible to just speculate about a natural phenomenon (see quotation at top right of this page).  Proof was no longer required: Darwin elevated the esteem of the hypothesis in science.
    Despite the outrage of many scientists of the period, Darwin’s admirers, including John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, recognized the essence of what Darwin had done: he had opened up a new framework for storytelling.  They freely admitted that Darwin had not proved his case.  Darwin himself understood that his theory lacked an explanation for variation, for inheritance, or for speciation, and that he had not actually demonstrated any transformations.  Most of the alleged evidence that was adduced in The Origin in support of his hypothesis of natural selection was (1) circumstantial, (2) based on analogy with domestic breeding, or (3) negative theological argument (i.e., “a Designer would not have done it this way”) – an example of the either-or fallacy.  But none of this lack of scientific proof mattered, because Darwin had changed the rules of science to incorporate mere speculation.  Notice what John Stuart Mill said:

Mr. Darwin’s remarkable speculation on the origin of species is another unimpeachable example of a legitimate hypothesis. . . . It is unreasonable to accuse Mr. Darwin (as has been done) of violating the rules of induction.  The rules of induction are concerned with the condition of proof.  Mr. Darwin has never pretended that his doctrine was proved.  He was not bound by the rules of induction but by those of hypothesis.  And these last have seldom been more completely fulfilled.  He has opened a path of inquiry full of promise, the results of which none can foresee.  (cited in Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place [Princeton, 2002], p. 186.)

Some of those results we see with hindsight: eugenics, communism, and Nazism.  Wake up, people!  Don’t you see what has happened?  The rules of science were changed!  Proof was out.  Hypothesis (read: speculation, imagination) was in. 
    Let’s get something straight.  Hypothesis is not science.  Hypothesis comes before science.  A hypothesis is merely the hunch, the guess, the heuristic device a scientist uses to begin his experiments that, hopefully, will prove or disprove the hypothesis.  Yes, it takes a good hypothesis to produce good science; Faraday might not have achieved such success without the hunch that the forces of electricity and magnetism were related.  But the hypothesis is not blessed as science until it is proven.  What Darwin did was to create the open-ended hypothesis that no longer required proof.  As emphatically and clearly stated above by John Stuart Mill (the economist whose theories found support in Darwin’s view of a competitive, dog-eat-dog world), Darwin had opened a path of inquiry.  The means was now the end.
    Darwin’s hypothesis freed up writers’ block for lots of storytellers in other fields.  Economists like Mill and Marx (for different reasons) were attracted to the image of cutthroat competition.  Politicians found justification for colonialism and expansion of the British Empire.  Racists liked the idea of survival of the fittest (themselves being, of course, the fittest).  It gave artists new themes for sweeping dramatic landscapes.  It gave poets like Tennyson and Browning new themes for probing the human condition.   Composers, psychologists, industrialists, comedians, novelists, journalists, cartoonists and the man on the street all began to look at the world with this new framework.  It didn’t matter whether the framework was supported on a solid foundation of fact.  The play was the thing.
    The problem with Darwin’s anti-Baconian New Atlantis was that hypotheses and speculations can be infinitely varied, endless yarns that, unless nailed down with factual proof, are no better than dreams and myths.  They may be dressed in scientific terms, but can be 180 degrees wrong.  Science was supposed to be a reliable methodology for obtaining truth about the natural world.  It was supposed to require not just a hypothesis, but a large accumulation of facts that actually supported the hypothesis, not just might support it.  But Darwinism brought in grand, sweeping glittering generalities incapable of proof.  It is also the reason most Darwinian stories in the journals are futureware: empty promises that the proof is out there, still waiting to be discovered, someday over the rainbow, once we find water on Mars, or once the chimp genome is finished, or whatever.  When the promised data are not helpful, no matter; just push the envelope a little farther out, and the story goes on.
    Now clearly, Darwin’s redefinition of science did spawn a lot of experimentation.  Darwin himself was almost obsessive-compulsive in his observations of orchids, barnacles and pigeons, as Janet Browne describes in her highly-acclaimed biography (recommended reading).  But most of this was a hunt for tidbits of data that might lend support to his hypothesis of natural selection.  None of it was proof.  Nothing he found demonstrated great transformations between any plants or animals: it just might have.  He was an advocate looking for support, no better than a cultist trying to proof-text his heresy with snippets of Bible verses that might be consistent with his preconceived hunch, whether or not the context justifies it.
    For instance, when Darwin eagerly sought evidence that honeybees had varied (Browne, p. 203), the evidence was negligible.  Did this falsify his hypothesis?  No way.  “In desperation,” Browne writes, “Darwin turned the question on its head: if there were no physical differences, perhaps there might be variations in behaviour?” (Ibid.)  Darwin set the example of having a hypothesis that was so flexible and imaginative, no amount of negative evidence could ever falsify it.  He opened the scientific world to storytellers, providing them welfare and job security (see 12/22/2003).
    That is why David Penny can write nonsense and get it published in a scientific journal.  That is why after 150 years, Darwin’s “path of inquiry” is still asking fundamental questions you thought Darwin had already answered.  This explains why Eugenie Scott, Michael Ruse and all the other Darwin Party advocates can bluff about the “rules of science” that guarantee perpetuation of Darwinism and exclude alternatives, no matter how much evidence contradicts it.  That is why most debaters against creationists focus so much time on either (1) circumstantial evidence, (2) analogies, and (3) negative theological arguments, instead of trying to prove Darwin’s hypothesis that numerous slight, successive modifications have indeed added up to major changes, from bacteria to man.  And that is why Darwin Party members are gainfully employed in their endless quest for tiny pieces of data that might be consistent with what has become the reigning mythology of our time.  Evolutionism itself evolves.  Like an animal presumably varying without purpose or design, evolutionary storytelling proceeds by mutation and selection (selective evidence, that is), wandering aimlessly in storyland.
    Unless the scientific community raises its standards and gets back to the requirement that a hypothesis is not science till proven, then this welfare state of storytellers will persist.  The public has been hoodwinked.  The charlatans have become the shamans.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

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Exercise:  Are there other hypotheses masquerading as science these days?  Characterize the following and others that come to mind as either supportable science or hypothetical storytelling: astrobiology, plate tectonics, the big bang theory, global warming, stellar evolution, dark matter, radiometric dating, sexual selection, game theory of altruism, phylogenetics, etc.  Support your answers.

These fossils raise several questions, to say the least.  First, how could they possibly be preserved?  Second, why are they concentrated in a period (600-500 million years ago) that is already unfairly overstocked with exceptionally preserved fossils, such as those of the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies?  Third, do they tell us anything about animal evolution?

Ask yourself how soft tissues could be exquisitely mineralized and preserved for 600 million years, when many later fossils have been reworked by storms, glaciers, moving continents and asteroid impacts.  More interesting than the data that seem to fit the reigning myth are the anomalies that do not.  This find does nothing to help evolutionists in their Cambrian explosion predicament (08/21/2002).  Graham Budd has been pushed by the disconnect between his expectations and the facts to the ultimate no-no in science: invoking miracles.
Next headline on:  Fossils

Where’s the evolution?  If you start with genes and end up with more junk, you’re going downhill.  He should be celebrating that junk DNA is not junk after all.  Only a committed Darwin Party member could make an evolutionary spin out of this data.  Just the facts, ham.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA

Antonelli seems to be a member of the Margulis sect of the Darwin Party.  The Woese sect will probably respond with their champion.  Numbers will crunch, but will the truth come out?  Don’t count on it.  Math could also distinguish which of any two mythologies are more likely.  We have a mathematical model that trumps all evolutionary myths with a sober reality check: click here.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Enzyme-transition state and enzyme-intermediate complementarity help to stabilize the transition state of tyrosine activation and to shift the chemical equilibrium by seven orders of magnitude in the direction of the intermediate.  Loop motions induced by the chemical process are essential in creating these interactions and permitting access to the active site.   (For more on the tRNA-synthetase family of enzymes, see 07/21/2003 and 06/09/2003 entries.)

It takes great faith to be an evolutionist.  In fact, their faith is so great, evolutionists could co-opt Jesus’ phrase to his disciples to admonish the average Christian: “O ye of little faith.”  Here, these scientists have just described protein machines so efficient and so accurate, they can speed up reactions by a factor of 10 quintillion.  They have described precise hand-and-glove fit of these protein machines, knowing that proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids whose sequence is critical to function.  They have described some that actually bend and twist as part of the mechanism, and listed numerous diverse ways they can work.  But then they attribute all this complexity and specificity to chance and unguided natural processes, saying “Evolutionary selection” makes it all possible.
    We had hoped they would help explain how these mechanisms arose from a random pool of chemicals.  After all, they had said in the introduction that an overview of enzyme catalysis was timely because of all the interest about its origins.  But you can search this paper for any explanation, and all you get are assumptions that natural selection did it somehow.  For instance: (1) “Studies of enzymes show that natural selection has developed many ways for lowering the quasithermodynamic activation free energy,” and (2) “Evolutionary selection makes possible the development of enzymes that use a wide range of molecular mechanisms to facilitate reactions.”
    It appears, therefore, that genuine faith in natural selection requires no theory or explanation.  It is an article of doctrine in which they can place implicit, child-like trust.  This is another example of the ubiquitous credulity of evolutionists.  These scientists are obviously smart people as evidenced by their skill at math and chemistry, but they show the most insipid easy-believism when bowing down to worship their idol in the Temple of Charlie, chanting “natural selection, natural selection the omnipotent, who alone works wonders.”  Talk about checking your brain at the door.
Suggested reading: Evolution: Possible or Impossible?, portions of which are available online here.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology and Biochemistry • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

“We are not claiming that this is how life started,” Benner stressed.  “We are saying that we have demonstrated a recipe to make a key part of life without any biochemical machinery.  The more recipes of this type that can be found, the more clues we have about how life could have actually gotten started on the primitive Earth.” (EurekAlert, emphasis added)

Need we remind anyone that recipes are written by intelligent design?  These scientists did not use chance and mutations in their experiments.  They applied mind to make matter do what it would not do naturally.
    If I told you a tall tale, that was so implausibly funny it would make you laugh yourself sick at the campfire, would you believe my story if I added one little observation that might make it slightly more plausible?  Let’s say I told you the story of why fire engines are red:

A fire engine has eight wheels and four crew.  Four plus eight is twelve.  Twelve inches make a foot.  Most rulers are a foot long.  Peter the Great was a ruler.  He was also Russian.  Red is the symbolic color of Russia.  Therefore fire engines are red, because they’re always rushin’ all around.

Now suppose that one flaw of my story was that the color red had not been clearly identified as a national color in pre-Soviet Russia, but I found an old painting of Peter the Great that showed a prominent red ruby in his crown.  Are you now convinced of my story?  If not, would you at least acknowledge that I am making progress?
    This is why chemical evolution tall tales are so lame.  Evolutionists are already convinced life arose from chemicals in some unknown way, without any intelligent guidance, and they feel no need to prove their case.  This is, of course, circular reasoning, or assuming what needs to be proved.  But since NASA is fond of giving away our tax money to storytellers who can explain away an intelligent Creator, there will always be volunteers.  Astrobiologists (a.k.a. Bio-alchemists) feel that they can justify their expense reports if they can add one tiny little experimental detail that might, just might, in some way, support the Darwin Party’s official Origins myth.
    Here is how Benner et al. clothe their naked materialism in scientific jargon: “Because neither borate minerals nor interstellar organics are excluded from the early Earth, we also cannot exclude the availability of ribose formed prebiotically at the time when life emerged on Earth” (italics added).  Well, we cannot exclude the possibility of the proverbial tornado in a junkyard causing the emergence of the proverbial 747 either, can we?  There’s that magic word “emerged” again.  It’s a stealthy propaganda trick.  It pulls the wool over unsuspecting readers’ eyes, by embedding within it the assumption that chemical evolution succeeded somehow, against astronomical odds.
    Our readers are encouraged to count the number of implausible elements in the “RNA World” scenario as reported in the 07/11/2002 entry.  If there are two dozen show-stoppers preventing the curtain from rising, dreaming up a possible way to remove one (temporarily, under special conditions) does not make the show go on, especially when there is not even a script or actors yet.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

The Darwin Party’s spin doctoring that students should be protected from the controversy over Darwinism is unpopular and unsupportable, and should be exposed for what it is: political and religious bias.  If it were about science, well then, science thrives on controversy.  Science is about pitting evidence against evidence and logic against logic.  Wouldn’t that be a healthy science lesson?  Read this testimony and see what you think.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Education

Vail says that an alternative to evolutionary science should be offered to members of the public visiting the canyon.  “Who is to say whose material should be or shouldn’t be in the bookstore?” he asks.  That’s the tricky question that the NPS review will seek to answer, as it weighs issues such as the display of sound science, the right to free speech and the avoidance of censorship charges.

This would be a good time to reread Michael Crichton’s tirade against “consensus science” (see 12/27/2003 entry).  The upshot of this decision is: only atheists, particularly members of the Darwin Party, are allowed to speak for science.  “Millions of years” is now the new standard of “accepted science,” even though secular geologists have been coming around lately that the creationist claims of a young canyon are correct, at least in part (07/22/2002).
    Tom Vail is a creationist and Bible-believing Christian, yes, but he quotes other creationists who have PhDs in geology who present scientific evidence that the Grand Canyon is not as old as claimed.  Having led numerous raft trips down the Colorado River, Vail knows the canyon like the back of his hand.  He can personally vouch for all the scientific claims made.  Anyone with an open mind who looks at the evidence would surely realize that there are major, serious problems with the “accepted science” view, and the youthful canyon view deserves a fair hearing, whether or not one ties it to a Biblical flood (12/24/2002).
    One shouldn’t have to subscribe to politically-correct ideology or swear allegiance to “accepted science” to be able to present scientific evidence to support a viewpoint.  One should only make the case that it’s correct.  Ironically, it is the creationists who argue for letting both sides of the controversy be heard.  The evolutionists want to censor any opposition, then grin for the cameras and say, “Controversy?  What controversy?  I don’t know of any controversy, do you Dr. Joe?  There’s no controversy here; why, we all agree.  The consensus of scientists is unanimous.”  Why not let the public see all the evidence and decide?  Nobody at Grand Canyon is shoving the books into visitors’ backpacks.  They can pick it up, look it through, and decide whether it is good or bad, without big brother deciding what kind of politically correct science is best for them.
    The National Park Service is so hypocritical.  On the one hand, they fill our parks with exhibits that promote the “consensus science” approach, with its millions of years of slow and gradual evolution.  But on the other hand, they have become evangelists for the most anti-intellectual, anti-scientific religion of all: Indian animism (10/10/2000).  Hey Mr. Barna: if you are going to allow Native American superstition to have a prominent pulpit in the national parks, why not also allow Bible believers, who respect scientific evidence and logic, to make their case?  Either do that or toss out all the Indian myths, and for that matter, any mythology that makes claims about unobservable prehistoric events.  The myths that cloak themselves in the term “accepted science” are the most pernicious of all.
    Visit Grand Canyon before the book is banned.  Just the photographs in Vail’s book are worth the price, and who knows, your mind might be opened up a little, if you were raised under Darwin Party teachers.
    Don’t you just love the PAC titles: “Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.”  Being translated, this probably means, the Government Payroll Lobby Group United Against Bush, Conservatives, the Religious Right, the Iraq War and Free Speech, Who Believe Establishment Science and the United Nations Are the Pathways to All Knowledge and World Peace.
Next headline on:  Geology • Bible and Theology • Politics

We hope this makes your gardening more thought-provoking.  Inside a cell, there’s a flurry of activity.  If one gene were expressed freely, it would never stop.  Suppressors turn them off until they are needed, then other molecules remove the suppressors.  Cues from the environment and signals from other genes can trigger switches in the genes in the right sequence.  How could the cell, without a brain, “know” how to handle these signals, if it were not preprogrammed?  The cell responds to feedback from the environment, monitors protein levels, and can branch to different pathways depending on conditions.  Everything acts as if programmed with loops, switches, and conditional procedures designed in advance.  The proof of the programming is in the results: a crocus emerges out of the last snow, showing forth its delicate beauty, unafraid of the clouds, knowing that sunny days filled with pollinators are just ahead.  This is so amazing it should make us stand in awe of the Almighty Programmer.
Next headline on:  Plants • Cell Biology • Genetics and DNA • Amazing Facts

Charlie is the evolutionists’ little idol, and it’s surprising why this should be so, considering he had no science degrees and was not that admirable a person.  The biography Nigel Williams refers to must be the highly-acclaimed work by Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002; see quote at top right of this page).  The Charlie Browne describes is a bit of a wishy-washy blockhead.  He seems to be standing cross-eyed with his hands over his stomach most of the time, ailed by gastric pains caused by worry over what people would think of his book.  Considering the strident opposition of leading scientists of the day, (Agassiz, Owen, Sedgwick, John Herschel and many others), his ideas wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for the political savvy of his “Four Musketeers,” as Browne calls them (Huxley, Lyell, Hooker and Asa Gray), who took his ball and ran with it (see 10/24/2002).
    In fact, Darwin was often startled and anguished about how everyone did take his ball and run with it.  He was trying hard to avoid talk about apes as human ancestors, to avoid the subject of the origin of the first life, and to avoid offending theologians directly.  But all his politically-leftist, antireligious, radical disciples understood exactly what his theory meant, and declared war on religion, with The Origin of Species, to Charlie’s horror, as their banner.
    Creationists can look to founding fathers much more accomplished, who did far more to advance science than weave just-so stories: men like Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell and many others (see our online book in progress)  Read also Browne’s account of Charlie; it’s an eye-opening look into the life and times of the gray-bearded idol who made it possible for a modern scientist to be an intellectually-foolfilled atheist.
Next headline on:  Darwin and Evolutionary Theory

The mechanism behind the superior persistence of DNA from the non-spore-forming-GP Actinobacteria is currently unknown.  Slow but continuous metabolic activity and DNA repair at subzero temperatures is one possibility.  Adaptations connected to dormancy might be another explanation.  Finally, the DNA could simply originate from dead bacteria, whose DNA for some reason, e.g., structural features, survived better.

Do any of those possibilities sound plausible to you?  Actually, DNA probably degrades much faster than they estimate.  There’s no way they could verify the 400,000 year figure; it’s a pure guess, based on certain assumptions.  At most, it is just an upper limit.  If DNA could survive the onslaughts of nature for so long, it would speak of designed mechanisms to fight the degrading pressure of entropy.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Dating Methods

Few are the representatives on the list who regard the Word of God as authoritative.  Most of the opinions expressed are just that: opinions.  Liberal scholars and scientists have lots of opinions, but are there any, especially among those calling themselves Christians, willing to affirm that the Word of God is the final authority, even over science?  Without that anchor, the fogginess of talk about “spirituality” could leave people in the dark as much as any materialistic religion.
    It is simplistic to treat science and religion as separate realms (this was Stephen Jay Gould’s final campaign), because the Bible, and most religions for that matter, deal with natural phenomena, and science frequently makes philosophical and religious assumptions about origins and destiny.  The battle in the 18th century was really not about natural selection or evolution specifically, but about whether philosophical naturalism had sole authority to explicate the creation myths of the culture.
    For naturalism to usurp science, it had to invade the unseen past and future with imagination instead of observation.  The strategy that enabled Darwin’s defenders to take over a scientific enterprise that had largely been under theological dominion was to elevate naturalistic storytellers to the ranks of scientists.  This was illustrated in the contest between Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley in the 1860s.  Science used to be about proving things and demonstrating things.  One of Richard Owen’s first criticisms of Charles Darwin’s book was about this very point.  As a leading scientist in Britain in 1859 and a very religious man, Owen was not interested in what Charlie believed or thought had happened in the history of life, but what he could prove.  With the help of agenda-driven insurgents like Huxley, Lyell, Hooker and Asa Gray, (Janet Browne dubs them the “Four Musketeers”^*), Charlie’s Just-So Storytelling Club gained the ascendancy, and science has been stuck supporting a welfare state ever since (12/22/2003).  Huxley, out of a personal anger at God for allowing the death of his son, was on a personal crusade to rid all science of consideration of God, and even startled Darwin with his brashness telling everyone, even working men, that they were evolved monkeys.  Huxley worked like a political revolutionary, not an impartial scientist.  He had an agenda.  He wanted empire: unsatisfied with natural phenomena that were testable, observable and repeatable, he worked fervently on a hostile takeover of the origins and destiny business.
    Think beyond the collapse of the Darwinian regime, which appears inevitable.  Will it be replaced by something better?  Probably not, as long as humans refuse to acknowledge the authority of their Creator.  That’s been the basic human sin since Eden.  If the scientific just-so storytellers ever get shamed out of science, what we don’t need, any more than another brand of cigarettes, is another group of storytellers from the religious side.  Liberal theologians and spiritual leaders have lots of opinions, but who cares what they believe or think is true, if they cannot prove it?
    This leads directly to the question, what is the source of ultimate authority?  We learned it is not Aristotle, but neither is it any other mortal, including a scientist.  If science returns to its empirical roots and gets out of the spheres of origins, destiny and ultimate meaning, that question may well prove to be the intellectual battle of the 21st century.  Unfortunately, Bible believers may find it more difficult to debate liberal theologians than materialistic scientists on this point.  At least materialistic scientists claimed to respect objective truth and logic.  But liberal theologians tend to become hypnotized on spirituality or their own imaginations rather submitting to the authority of the Word of God.  Getting them to prove their opinions, rather than tell religious just-so stories, will be like trying to nail jello to the wall.  Creationists might get nostalgic for the good old days.
Suggested reading:  Jer. 9:23-24, Rom. 3:4, and I Cor. 1:18-2:16.

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^*Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002, ch. 4).
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Intelligent Design • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The landing of rover Spirit tonight was a phenomenal achievement by many talented and hard-working people.  It is no less exciting than great journeys of exploration from history, such as the Lewis and Clark expedition (celebrating its 200th anniversary this year).  Getting new data from a new terra incognita on another world takes our mind for a moment off war and terrorism, evil and folly.  All who gave the world this moment of wonder deserve international kudos.
    What you probably won’t hear on the news, amid all the storytelling about the possibility of life on Mars (just because there might have been water), are the Christian testimonies.  A fair number of the scientists and engineers on the Mars project teams at JPL, some in high places, are Christians and creationists.  Most just quietly go about their work contributing to the excellent success of these missions.  As you listen to the news, keep in mind that the official spokespeople may not represent the views of everyone on the team.
    Watch for the latest Mars headlines, now that we are on the surface.  Congratulations also to the European orbiter Mars Express, and best wishes for recovery of the lost British lander Beagle 2.  (We don’t think they will find any finches, though.)
Next headline on:  Solar System • Mars

As expressed in similar headlines in the past, we congratulate those who succeed in risky missions to gather data, and we can hardly wait to see what the particles in the collector show, but the public should be “taught the controversy” when there is one.  If not all scientists agree that comets are made of pristine material, that should be mentioned, rather than making matter-of-fact statements to the press that comet material has been unprocessed for 4.6 billion years.
    The phrase “we are made of starstuff” is a misleading half-truth.  Yes, our bodies have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other elements found in stars, but we know what Sagan and Brownlee mean.  They want us to believe that stardust aggregated into the Earth, and from the atoms on Earth, life arose and evolved upward into human beings by unguided, purposeless, undirected natural processes.  Such myths should be distinguished from science.  They would not get smiling nods at press conferences if scientists were expected to use disclaimers when preaching naturalistic philosophy: “According to my atheistic, naturalistic opinion, and according to the teachings of my tradition’s creation myth, we are all made of stardust.  Won’t you please join me in singing my favorite hymn, Godless Philosophy.” 
Next headline on:  Solar System

“The cluster RDCS 1252 looks like a present-day cluster,” said Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., and co-author of both research papers.  “In fact, if you were to put it next to a present-day cluster, you wouldn’t know which is which.”

Observations such as these are on the bleeding edge of the possible, so one must be cautious interpreting the results.  Sweeping aside the embedded assumptions about ages and evolutionary histories, there is nothing in these latest images to encourage old gradualistic cosmologies, and much to discourage them.  The lumpiness problem in cosmology (i.e., too much structure too soon) has been a theoretical challenge for decades.  Here is the lumpiness problem intensified.  Not long after the origin of the universe, whenever that was, galaxies seem to be already mature enough to have black holes, heavy elements and grandchildren.  This latest finding is another in a continuing trend of observations that show almost instantaneous structure from an assumed smooth beginning.
    Hear the astronomers’ admissions.  No one thought it was even possible to have so much structure so early.  Not long ago, even an 8 billion year old cluster would have been thought impossible, and now 1.5 billion?  How far can you stretch a theory before it breaks?
    A similar situation is found in the fossil record, and in the observed complexity of the most “primitive” life on Earth.  What is the common denominator in these three predicaments?  Naturalistic philosophy: the belief that our universe is just unguided matter in motion.  It’s not working.  The Cambrian explosion in paleontology, the discovery of advanced molecular machines in bacteria, and the discovery of mature stars in the early universe were not predicted by evolutionary philosophers, and effectively falsify their assumptions.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Dating Methods

This sounds strikingly similar to the tale about mammal evolution in Africa (12/03/2003).  The criticisms there similarly apply here.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Detailed spectroscopic and photometric observations of the most massive galaxies in dense environments show that their globular cluster populations are generally old and coeval to within a couple of billion years.  But the age distribution of globular clusters remains an open question, as several recent studies have found a wider spread of globular cluster ages in some galaxies, including the presence of some intermediate-age metal-rich clusters.  The findings to date suggest a complex picture of globular cluster formation in galaxies, with the formation histories of no two galaxies being exactly alike.

These are exciting times in the study of extragalactic globular cluster systems.  Disentangling the myriad processes that may have contributed to the formation of nearby galaxies is a formidable challenge, but the potential reward is spectacular: a glimpse into the evolutionary histories of individual galaxies.

We don’t know where we are, we don’t know how we got here, the territory is far more complex and formidable than we thought, and we don’t know where to go from here, but at least we can imagine how nice it would be to find our way some day.  How much do you trust this bunch?
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Dating Methods