“Oh Lord, how difficult accuracy is!” Darwin said as letter after letter arrived at Down House disputing his statements.
– Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002), p. 356.

• DNA vs. Evolution:  A paper in the Royal Society Biology Proceedings¹ warned that pleiotropy, the antagonistic effect of genes that need to mutate together, inhibits natural selection more than is usually realized.  Sarah P. Otto writes,

  Pleiotropy is one of the most commonly observed attributes of genes.  Yet the extent and influence of pleiotropy have been underexplored in population genetics models. ... Under the assumption that pleiotropic effects are extensive and deleterious, the fraction of alleles that are beneficial overall is severely limited by pleiotropy and rises nearly linearly with the strength of directional selection on the focal trait.  Over a broad class of distribution of pleiotropic effects, the mean selective effect of those alleles that are beneficial overall is halved, on average, by pleiotropy. 

  Thus the simplistic notion that a beneficial mutation will be acted on by natural selection is “severely limited” by the effect of pleiotropy.

• Starbirth:  In an article in the 19 March issue of Science.² Robert Irion puzzles over why recent surveys of the heavens seem to indicate star formation was rapid in the early universe yet so slow today:

  As findings from these surveys cascade into the literature, they are shaking up notions about the evolution of star birth in the young cosmos.  Observers have found that some galaxies matured quickly after the big bang and then flamed out, forming giant blobs of stars that may have barely changed in at least 10 billion years.  Another population of galaxies kept evolving, churning out new stars for eons and gradually settling into mature but mildly fertile galaxies such as our Milky Way.

  But these claims seem to belie the uncertainty in the minds of modelers.  The following admissions of ignorance are startling, considering the ease with which the textbooks present the story of starbirth and galaxy evolution:

  Current theories of galaxy formation can’t explain why concussive waves of star birth swept through some early galaxies but not others--and why some of those fierce stellar fires got snuffed after a few billion years.  Startled by their own data, a few observers have implied that modelers of the cosmos need new ideas to describe our universe's combustive childhood (Science, 23 January, p. 460).
      Theorists aren’t yet ready to revise equations on their cluttered whiteboards, but they agree that the surveys illuminate serious flaws.  “We’re starting from a shaky foundation,” says cosmologist Carlos Frenk of the University of Durham, U.K.  “We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form.”  Fellow theorist Simon White of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, concurs: “The simple recipes in published models do not reproduce the star formation we see.  Theorists are now having to grow up.”

  Irion doesn’t contradict the predicament; he just hopes that new sky surveys will clear up the mess.

• Alfred Russell Wallace:  Nigel Williams reviews Michael Shermer’s bio of the man who independently “discovered” the “law” of natural selection.

  Wallace was a colorful but tragic character.  He went on some legendary adventures in Malaysia and elsewhere, and graciously played second fiddle to Charlie, but was also suckered by spiritualism and the fallacies of his own beliefs.  He was another victim of loss of faith in the credibility of the Bible during his youth.  Janet Browne, in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002) has many interesting insights into the Wallace-Darwin relationship, practically accusing Charlie of intrigue to prevent him getting glory for the discovery of natural selection.  Whether either of them deserved any credit is debatable.  In the March-May 2004 issue of Creation Ex Nihilo magazine, Russell Grigg argues that Charlie knew about and plagiarized the idea of natural selection from half a dozen predecessors and peers.

• Charlie Worship:  In the 23 March issue of Current Biology,⁴ interviewee Hugo J. Bellen (Baylor College of Medicine) is asked if he has a scientific hero:

  Yes: Charles Darwin.  His ‘Origin of Species’ is in my opinion the most important text in biology that has been published so far.  I have read The Origin three times and every time I am in awe at Darwin’s ability to integrate so many different facts in a simple coherent theory.  The principle of natural selection has stood for over 150 years now.  Its implications for biology and genetics are far reaching, and the theory still hugely dominates our thinking as biologists.

  Follow the chain links on “Darwin” for differing views about this hero.

• Another Thing You Can’t Live Without:  David Carling (Imperial College) provides a quick review of AMPK in the 23 March issue of Current Biology.⁵  If you don’t know what AMPK is (AMP-activated protein kinase), just be glad you (and everything else alive) has it:

  AMPK has been dubbed the cellular fuel gauge, because it is activated by a drop in the energy status of the cell.  If ATP is used up faster than it can be re-synthesized, ATP levels fall and this leads to a rise in AMP.  The increase in the AMP:ATP ratio triggers the activation of AMPK and leads to the phosphorylation of a large number of downstream targets.  The overall effect of AMPK activation is to switch off energy-using pathways and switch on energy-generating pathways, thus helping to restore the energy balance within the cell.  The conservation of AMPK throughout evolution emphasises its importance: homologs have been identified in all eukaryotic species examined to date, including plants.

  Other recent articles have focused on this cellular “fuel gauge” as a means of controlling appetite and obesity (see, for instance, Nature April 1, 2004).  When asked “Can we live without it,” Carlin answers immediately, “Almost certainly not.”  Mice without it die in embryo, and it cannot be mutated much: “Although a complete loss of AMPK activity is lethal, subtle changes in AMPK activity can lead to serious clinical consequences.”  You don’t say.  How the first organisms got about without it, he doesn’t say.

• Genome Size:  Also in Current Biology,⁶ Brian Charlesworth and Nick Barton examine the question of why genome sizes differ so much between organisms, and offer a suggestion:

  Genome sizes vary enormously.  This variation in DNA content correlates with effective population size, suggesting that deleterious additions to the genome can accumulate in small populations.  On this view, the increased complexity of biological functions associated with large genomes partly reflects evolutionary degeneration.

  But judging from the many puzzles, contradictory evidences and lack of observations mentioned in the article, it doesn’t appear that evolutionists or creationists quite have a handle on this one yet.

• Intron Origins:  Another paper in the same issue of Current Biology⁷ attempts to put forward a hypothesis about intron origin and evolution (see 09/23/2003 headline). Phylogenetic evidence indicates that these sequences have been targeted by numerous intron insertions during evolution , but little is known about this process.  Here, we test the prediction that exon junction sequences were functional splice sites that existed in the coding sequence of genes prior to the insertion of introns. Again, neither side seems to have scored a touchdown on this question.  What are introns there for?  If they evolved, why doesn’t the cell get rid of them, instead of using such complicated machinery to process them?  As to “phylogenetic evidence,” it is subject to evolutionary presuppositions.  Until we know more, we should not rule out the possibility that introns have a function.

• Integrating Your Eyes and Ears:  Martin S. Banks (psychologist, Berkeley), explores the interaction of eyes and ears to help us make decisions.  In Current Biology,⁸, he gives an example of this complex process we take for granted:

  You enter a crowded room and someone calls your name.  You turn to see who it is.  You now see several people in the general direction the voice came from.  Many are talking.  Which one called your name?  You hear it again and now the sound seems to come from straight ahead or nearly so.  There are still a handful of candidates in your field of view, so you look from one to the other.  Finally, you see one whose lips move as you hear your name once more.  Sound and sight have come together and you identify the speaker as your college roommate.  How does this work?  That is, how does the brain find the appropriate auditory-visual correspondence to determine that a sound and sight have come from the same source?

  He points to a recent study by Alais and Burr that produces an “important and seemingly pervasive rule for the combination of visual and auditory cues to spatial location.”  Whatever it is, it’s amazing.

• Thank God for Our Moon:  Lastly, an article in New Scientist argues that without a moon like earth has, life could not exist.

Plenty of research material above for the curious.  We hope Creation-Evolution Headlines demonstrates to young people that there are still many scientific puzzles to solve and will stimulate a few to become scientists.  Despite their bluff and bravado, the Darwin Party clearly doesn’t have answers to some of the most basic questions about stars, life, cells, and genes.  Let’s roll.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Solar System • Cell Biology • Genetics and DNA • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Human Body

   In fact the question of males raises not one, but many biological issues: the origin of sex, of distinct sexes, of why there are only two sexes rather than dozens.
   And how is that pastime maintained, given that it is so expensive?  A woman, it seems, could much increase the rate at which she copies her own genes if she avoided having them diluted by those of a man.
    Yes, men are a complicated lot, and there’s a lot we do not know.  As we look through the living world, one thing is clear: it is very hard to get rid of them.

If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you ...
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son.
-- Rudyard Kipling

These BBC articles would make Dr. Dobson hopping mad.  And they should make any red-blooded man or woman upset.  This is really ugly.  It illustrates the utter devastation Darwinian thinking has foisted on our culture.  Greenfield’s comments disparage the Royal Institution, which was brought to its pinnacle of prestige by an unselfish, honorable, God-fearing, hard-working man: Michael Faraday.
    Male chauvinism is wrong, but so is female chauvinism – what’s bad for the gander is bad for the goose.  Neither of these articles has restored any dignity to men or women.  Darwinism has reduced males and females to gene-propagating commodities.  Carl Sagan expressed the Darwinian view of humanity in black ink:

In a very real sense human beings are machines constructed by the nucleic acids to arrange for the efficient replication of more nucleic acids.  In a sense our strongest urges, noblest enterprises, most compelling necessities, and apparent free wills are all an expression of the information coded in the genetic material:  We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids.  This does not deny our humanity.  It does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful.  But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.
The Cosmic Connection (Dell 1960), p. 6.

Talk about schizophrenia; he just denied our humanity and then said it does not deny our humanity.  He used his free will to deny that we have free will.  He left “the good, the true, and the beautiful” as undefined terms, and reduced our noblest enterprises to the action of selfish genes.  This is the legacy of Darwinism, of which Sagan was one of the staunchest evangelists.  It leaves humanity as nothing more than gene-replicating machines accidentally emerging from nothingness and headed nowhere.  How can machines “attempt to determine where we are going”?  Want to know where we are going if Darwinism is true?  To the grave, where consciousness and intelligence and noble enterprises are extinguished, returning to the nothingness from which they emerged.
    Had enough?  Good.  Forget Sagan’s cynical and depressing view, because he contradicted himself.  The only way he could make his point was to cheat: he borrowed words from a Christian vocabulary (good, true, beautiful, noble, information, free will, etc.).  Thus, he shot his straw man in the foot.  If he really believed what he was saying, he would cry “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” in despair.  He would realize that his own noble enterprises, whether writing books, exploring Mars or appearing on the Johnny Carson show, were all emptiness and striving after wind.  He would just have sex (to help out the selfish genes) and then die.  And forget the BBC’s rant against maleness, which would have even robbed him of the joy of sex.  Forget, too, Jones’ wimpy comeback.  All these ideas are worthless, built on a foundation of Darwinian shifting sand.  Darwinians cannot answer any of the questions they raised: the origin of sex, of distinct sexes, of why there are only two sexes rather than dozens, and why sex persists when it is so expensive (see 04/14/2003 headline, for example).  Sex and gender roles are incomprehensible to a Darwinian, because they have no solid foundation for ultimate meaning.
    Here’s the first step for restoring your worth as a real man, or a real woman: keep your head, like Kipling warned.  Don’t fall for Darwinian propaganda.  It’s contradictory, unsupported by evidence, and leads to despair.  You have a soul, brother; you have a soul, sister; and being a man or woman is all about soul.  Souls did not evolve.
    To the degree Darwinism degrades humanity, the Bible restores it, and then some!  God Himself took our physical bodies He had formed by His intelligent design, and breathed into them the breath of life, and we became living souls.  Human beings, both male and female, were inscribed with the image of God, unlike anything else He had made.  Your purpose is not just to pass on your genes and die.  You have worth as an individual.  You are responsible as an individual for what you do with your life.  You, as an individual, will face the judgment of your Maker.
    Physically, God made men and women to need and desire one another.  All higher animals propagate by sexual reproduction, but with humankind, God instituted the family as a means of passing on His commandments to future generations, and gave sexual reproduction a spiritual and emotional meaning beyond mere procreation, as a picture of love – something animals, without God’s image, cannot experience.  He assigned roles to men and women appropriate to our natures.  But spiritually, He made us much more than mere sexual dimorphisms of an animal species.  Because of His image we bear, we have minds, and language, and the possibility of meaningful relationships.  We can think, reason, speak, write, communicate, and love.  His two great commandments are for men and women: to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
    As His creations made in His image, we are going to live forever.  Eternity will be either with or without our Creator, depending on our response to His call.  By default it will be without Him, because we have all sinned.  But because the Lord loved us, He offered His Son as a sacrifice to redeem us from our sins.  This is the good news of the Word of God to us:  He offers us reconciliation, without penalty, as a gift.  You can receive this gift by turning from your sin and placing your trust, your empty hands of faith, into his strong hand of salvation.  That can be the start of a new life, a new relationship with your Maker.
    Just how great His love to us was only hinted at in the recent blockbuster movie The Passion of the Christ.  The movie quoted Jesus’ proverb and promise from John 15, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.  Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.”  The remembrance of that passion of Christ, and the subsequent glorious resurrection, is approaching.  The contrast between the two world views – the dismal, meaningless, gene-propagating Darwinian world expressed by Sagan and the BBC articles, and the rich relationship between men, women and a heavenly Father taught in the Word of God – could hardly be more stark.  One leads to death, one to life.  So choose life: won’t you repent of your sin, and receive Him today?  Then you can find fulfillment and abundant life as a man or woman of God.

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Homework: Watch The Passion of the Christ, then come home and read how it was prophesied 700 years before it happened by Isaiah (read Isaiah 52-54, esp. ch. 53).  Then read Jesus’ explanation of why He came and the importance of being born again by believing (trusting) in Him, in John ch. 3.  To take your belief to the point of commitment, read the Apostle Paul’s instructions in Romans 10.  Then for a real encouragement, and in preparation for Easter, read what is in store for those who trust in Christ by reading I Corinthians 15, the great “resurrection” chapter of the Bible.  When you get to the last verse, you will see why pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful, is indeed a noble enterprise for the redeemed: whether man or woman, boy or girl.
If you have any questions understanding these things, write here.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Bible and Theology

No need to feel lonely.  There is someone out there attempting to make contact.  It’s your Creator.  Read the uncoded message in Isaiah 55.  He uses a private wavelength called prayer.  You don’t need expensive instruments.  You don’t need to send coded messages, and you don’t need to wait thousands of years for the answer.  It’s the fastest medium of communication in the universe, faster than light: so fast, in fact, that the Recipient answers before the call.
    All Carl Sagan could hope for in Contact was a temporary fellowship of commiseraters waiting for the heat death of the universe.  The living God offers a fountain of eternal life.  Choose today.  Don’t hesitate; seek the Lord while He may be found.
Next headline on:  SETI

OK, so they get their publication in one journal before someone shoots it down somewhere else.  You can pick the genes that give you the results you want, if you massage them thoroughly with heavy doses of imagination while under the influence of Darwin whiskey.
    What a crazy way to do science.  Now anybody with a PhD and a knowledge of fancy jargon and mathematical hand-waving tricks can build a fictional account of the unobservable past that can never be proven.  As long as it might be true (provided we can massage away the protruding bones) it’s good enough to be published.  Should this be called science, which most people assume has something to do with discovering truth?  Look at this example of what these authors do in their paper when one of their methods doesn’t produce the desired result.  The details don’t matter, the medium is the massage:

The ML-based [Maximum-Likelihood] method (QP) shows generally high support values for all inferred branches, with three exceptions: (i) the nodes supporting the monophyly of lungfishes, (ii) the node supporting the sistergroup relationship of tetrapods and lungfishes, and (iii) the node supporting the monophyly of the Sarcopterygii (44%).  Part of the problem can be explained by the surprising result that TREE-PUZZLE supports an obviously artificial monophyletic group of Neoceratodus and the coelacanth with the highest value of 48% in this region of the tree.  It is known that the TREE-PUZZLE program is rather sensitive to pronounced differences in evolutionary rates because of the quartet approach.  The African and the South American lungfishes evolve quite fast , and the Australian lungfish and the coelacanth sequences evolve comparatively slower.  This constellation of pronounced differences in evolutionary rates may lead to an artificial grouping of sequences with similar evolutionary speed (usually the slowly evolving ones).  Often a more basal position of the fast evolving lineages due to long branch attraction effects will result, because these faster sequences are “pulled” toward the faster evolving sequences at the root, i.e., outgroup of the tree.  This explains why the highest support of QP among basal Sarcopterygii (48%) seems to favor a clearly incorrect grouping of Neoceratodus and the coelacanth, again supporting the notion that QP might not be the most appropriate method for this phylogenetic problem.

So we’ll just explain away the data that don’t fit our preconceived “notions” and adjust the imaginary parameters (evolution rates) till we get a semblance of congruence.  Tweak, tweak, tweak.  The rest of the article uses copious wiggle words – might, probably, possibly, support, etc.  Molecular phylogeny is just a game Darwin Party members like to play, because it has no possibility of a winner (see 07/25/2002 headline).
    For more on the winless game of guessing tetrapod evolution, see 07/30/2002, 12/03/2003 and 08/09/2003 headlines.
Next headline on:  Fish and Marine Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

They found methane hissing out of crevices in deep mines on Earth, too (see 04/08/2002 headline), and thought it was a missing link in the evolution of life.  The same comments apply.
Next headline on:  Mars • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

If you swallow this line, we’ve got a resort vacation to sell you on the Isle of DeBris.  The reaction of Ralph Holloway, a physical anthropologist at Columbia University, is more calm and rational: “To suggest that the brain is constrained by chewing muscles is just rubbish.”
    This tale is a pinhead balanced on a house of cards in a windstorm.  It relies on mythical dating methods and flexible estimates of mutation rates, all supported by the assumption of evolution.  We are not impressed by one putative mutation that might have made miracles possible (Stedman sidestepped in the Science article, “We’re not suggesting that this mutation alone [buys] you Homo sapiens, but it could make possible brain growth”).  We want to see the catalog of 50,000 or more lucky rolls of the die that supposedly turned a gorilla-like knuckle-walker into a philosopher.
    Pete Currie has the gall to open his report in Nature, Darwin’s mouthpiece (see 03/04/2004 commentary), with this distortion:

Ever since Bishop Wilberforce famously ridiculed the possibility that man was descended from apes, and T. H. Huxley bravely chose primate ancestry rather than ignorance , the debate over our origins has claimed a special place in evolutionary theory.  With the acceptance by most of us that we are indeed a product of natural selection , discussions surrounding the issue have cooled somewhat.  But exactly how natural selection acted to produce the modern human form has remained hotly contested. 

Fact is, no one recorded the actual words spoken in the famous interchange before the British Association at Oxford in 1860, and many if not most in the crowd sided with Wilberforce.  The debate has become somewhat of an urban legend, more symbolic than substantial (see Janet Browne’s account, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, ch. 3).
    “Most of us”?  Speak for yourself, Pete.  Only a few elitist Darwin Party members think the intricacies of human soul, spirit and body can be produced by natural selection.  But of course, they have far more faith and more vivid imaginations.  That’s why they are evolutionists.  If you think this is an unfair tirade against the X Clubbers, look what Currie himself confesses at the end of his article about not just the fossil record of human evolution, but of all evolution:

What is the significance of these findings, and do they shed any light on human origins? Although there is a rough consensus [see 12/27/2003 headline] about the individual features that define fossil species within the genus Homo, the sequence in which individual traits were acquired during hominid evolution remains controversial.  Furthermore, the definition of which character traits were essential for the appearance of the modern human form is equally contentious.  The reasons for this are familiar to anyone who tries to explain morphological transitions over large evolutionary distances based primarily on the fossil record.  Such explanations hinge on finding so-called ‘transitional forms’, where a particular fossil is so indelibly etched with the tell-tale signs of what something was, and what it was going to become , that an inescapable evolutionary theory simply tumbles out of the dirt.  Not unsurprisingly, such fossils are very rare indeed, and fossils charting the course of hominid evolution are no exception.

There you have it.  He has just admitted that transitional fossils are “rare indeed.” – so rare that a senior paleontologist at the British Museum once laid it on the line: “there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”  Though an evolutionist, Dr. Colin Patterson continued by criticizing a bad habit of his brethren: “It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection.  But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.”^a
    Deliberately and connivingly, the Darwin Party injected just-so storytelling into science (see 12/22/2003 commentary).  It’s time to vote the rascals out.
Next headline on:  Human Evolution • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

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^aThe mockers at talk.origins lambaste creationists for using this old quote, accusing them of taking it out of context.  But read the entire quote, and then watch them squirm their way around it, trying to make us believe Patterson really didn’t mean what he clearly said.  If they want to dredge up Huxley and Wilberforce in 1860, why not Patterson in 1981?  As an evolutionist, of course Patterson could afterwards claim his words were taken out of context, so as not to embarrass his comrades, but look at the words!  There is no way to make them mean the opposite, that the fossil record is filled with transitional forms, or that storytelling has any value in science.  Even the mockers agree that the quote was accurate, at least in the Revised Quote Book.  You can listen to the entire lecture and read the transcript (available from Access Research Network).  Patterson was very hard on Darwinism, and accused it of being positively “anti-knowledge.”  It was an honest and damaging series of admissions he made in front of leading pro-Darwin colleagues.  Trying to make Patterson’s words concern only “systematics” and not “evolution” is a smokescreen, an example of sidestepping the issue with the either-or fallacy.  Systematics is to evolution what accounting is to business; you cannot separate them into watertight compartments.  Patterson’s backpedaling sounds no different than a politician explaining a flipflop to the press.  The entire context is available to anyone who wants to check it out; the rebuttal is full of bluffing and ridicule.  Mock.origins can label Carl Wieland’s response “ almost comical,” but if words mean things, Wieland was right to claim that “Reading the entire address, it would scarcely matter if it were a girl guides meeting, the comments are valid.”
    For more on Colin Patterson, see Paul Nelson’s comments and the ARN Colin Patterson Sampler.

• Hypsolophodontids: “small, speedy, plant-eating dinosaurs that ran on two feet.”  They had large eyes, apparently adapted to low light levels, and bones that grew throughout the year, suggesting they were warm blooded.  The plants on which they fed apparently did not drop their leaves during the winter.
• A horned dinosaur named Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei (no kidding) must have looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.  NG claims this is “one of the oldest horned, or frilled, dinosaurs known, which suggests that horned dinosaurs may have originated in the southern polar region.”
• A sauropod, possibly the largest found in Antarctica, is being analyzed.  It was found at 13,000 feet elevation.
• An allosaurus-like meat eater named Cryolophosaurus ellioti was 22 feet long.

Throughout the world there are mysteries.  Fossils give silent evidence of a very different world in the past; a world with polar regions that must have supported lush plant life and rich ecologies of diverse plants and animals larger than those living today.  Large redwood stumps have also been found in the Arctic circle (see 03/22/2002 headline), and there are the legendary frozen mammoths of Siberia.
    This article suggests that “the climate was warmer then than it is now,” but puzzles over the fact that these dinosaurs must have “endured months of darkness and temperatures that plunged below freezing.”  For plants to have supported herbivores and carnivores of this size near the poles, it would seem there must have been atmospheric conditions that evened out the lighting and temperature.
    As for horned dinosaurs originating near the south pole, we laugh, ha ha, at this funny joke.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils

Dr. Brown (see January featured scientist) has been one of few makers of scientific models to put his reputation on the line and make predictions.  This is not the only one of dozens he made in his book In the Beginning that have been confirmed.  If detailed predictions of a model seem to be corresponding to reality on repeated occasions, it should cause other scientists to take notice.
Next headline on:  Mars • Geology

1. Spectral Breadth:  Early researchers assumed that animals were limited to our own human senses, but found out they can utilize a shopping list of cues invisible to us: ultraviolet light, infrared light, magnetic fields, electric fields, chemical pheromones, ultrasonic sounds and infrasonic sounds.  We were “blind to our own blindness,” he says, “and there is no reason to assume the list is complete.”
2. Complexity: Another “crippling tendency” of early investigators was “what navigation pioneer Donald Griffin called our innate ‘simplicity filter’: the desire to believe that animals do things in the least complex way possible.”  Perhaps it was from our own pride of place, but according to Gould, we should be humbled:

   Experience, however, tells us that animals whose lives depend on accurate navigation are uniformly overengineered.  Not only do they frequently wring more information out of the cues that surround them than we can, or use more exotic or weaker cues than we find conceivable, they usually come equipped with alternative strategies – a series of backups between which they switch depending on which is providing the most reliable information.

3. Recalibration:  Early studies assumed animals just needed to learn a trick once (a phenomenon called imprinting, true in some short-lived animals.)  Then they found out that some animals are able to recalibrate their instruments.
4. Cognition:  The school of psychology known as behaviorism, which denies instinct, “puts a ceiling on the maximum level of mental activity subject to legitimate investigation,” Gould chides.  As a result of this bias, “most researchers deliberately ignored or denigrated the evidence for cognitive processing in navigating animals.”  Not all animals exhibit cognitive intervention, Gould admits.  But he then makes a very unDarwinian countercharge: “However, the obvious abilities of hunting spiders and honey bees to plan novel routes make it equally clear that phylogenetic distance to humans is no sure guide to the sophistication of a species’ orientation strategies.”
       He gives an example: “One of the problems we inherited from behaviorism was the assumption that exploratory behavior must be rewarded.  However, many species examine their surroundings voluntarily and, in fact, do so in detail.”  (See example on mice below.)

• Honeybees:  Here is an example of switching inputs to get the most reliable information.  “A honey bee, for instance, may set off for a goal using its time-compensated sun compass.  When a cloud covers the sun, it may change to inferring the sun’s position from UV patterns in the sky and opt a minute later for a map-like strategy when it encounters a distinctive landmark.  Lastly, it may ignore all of these cues as it gets close enough to its goal to detect the odors or visual cues provided by the flowers.”
• Mice:  Here is an example of the “overengineering” Gould spoke of.  Many field animals, like mice, have a strong drive to acquire information about their home range in advance of need, whether or not (as behaviorism would expect) they get an immediate reward.  “Consider mice,” he says,

  which not only gallop endlessly in running wheels, but actually prefer difficulty, such as square ‘wheels’, or wheels with barriers that must be jumped.  Given a 430 meter long opaque three-dimensional maze of pipes, mice will work out the shortest path within three days, and without reward.

  Navigation requires determining direction:

  This can be achieved in two ways, and mice use both: they can use another landmark from their mental map and triangulate the direction of the goal, or they can use a landmark-independent compass like the earth’s magnetic field.

  --and they never joined the boy scouts.  What’s more, mice “can also navigate perfectly well, even if the habitat fails to provide useful landmarks.  They will remember the direction and length of each leg of their outward journey and integrate the result when they are ready to return and set off home,” even without a trail of bread crumbs. 
• Pigeons:  Daytime provides celestial cues.  “...once the relationship between azimuth and time of day is memorized,” Gould says, “the animal has a highly accurate compass.”  We’ve all heard about the navigational feats of homing pigeons.  They can discern ultraviolet (UV) light, which accentuates polarization patterns of scattered sunlight, for drawing their mental map, and add to it individual data points like “the average of a night’s attempts to escape from a cage, or some other directional measure.”  The cues help them derive a mean vector, with direction pointing to the goal, and length representing scatter.  When all the cues line up, they’ve got their bearing.
• Migratory birds:  Birds who migrate between nesting grounds and wintering grounds can use sun cues, star cues, magnetic fields and landmarks to find their way.  Not only that, they can recalibrate the cues for seasonal changes, latitude, and longitude.  This requires recalibration:

  To infer the pole point through broken clouds, the animal’s map of the sky must be updated.  And as the migrants move south in the fall, new sets of stars in the southern sky appear, while northern stars slip below the horizon.  Clearly, changes in both season and latitude make relearning the stars essential.  Only fairly recently has this constant updating been demonstrated.”

  In fact, for unknown reasons, “nocturnal migrants calibrate their star pole to the magnetic pole.  Instead of simply taking the pole point as the true guide, the birds constantly recalibrate the magnetic pole to the geographic pole, and then the geographic pole to the magnetic pole.”
• Latitude: Fish, turtles, lobsters, and birds all determine their latitude by the angle of the magnetic field.  “In theory,” Gould says, “animals could obtain the same information from the sun’s noon elevation, but I know of no case in which this traditional human solution is used.”  The critters must know something we don’t.
• Longitude: house wrens, pigeons, sharks, salmon, sea turtles and spiny lobsters have all conquered a navigational problem that “bedeviled human navigators until very recently,” the problem of determining longitude.  How do they know distance east from west?  How can house wrens find their way back, unerringly, to the same nest box after a long flight at a different time of year from when they left?  “The apparent answer to this conundrum is provided by a map sense,” Gould answers.  The earth’s magnetic field provides both a map and a compass – just the tools you would need if released in an unfamiliar area. 
• Pigeons again:  When homing pigeons circle around before heading home, they are reading the local map of magnetic gradients and extrapolating it from the one they learned at home.  How do pigeons detect the earth’s magnetic field?  They actually have magnetite grains in their heads, in the ethymoid sinus.  Experiments have shown that magnetic anomalies make the birds disoriented.  A sharp pulse of magnetism can severely impair their compass.  But remagnetize the organ by putting it into a magnetic field, and the bird is back to normal

Wow.  Thank you, Dr. Gould.  This article contains absolutely no hints about how such abilities could have evolved; in fact, it contains a couple of off-handed swipes at the notion that natural selection could explain them, or that skill correlates with “phylogenetic distance.”  This is surprising, considering that James L. Gould is a member of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton.  It could just as well have been written by Dr. Gary Parker at the Institute for Creation Research.  It’s a wonder the editors of Current Biology let this one get by without the required pinch of incense to Emperor Charlie.
    Notice that these highly refined and accurate navigational skills are possessed by a wide variety of animals: mammals (e.g., mice), insects (e.g., Monarch butterflies -- see 05/23/2003 and 07/09/2002 headlines), birds (e.g., Pacific golden plovers, which can navigate over open sea to the Hawaiian islands without having ever seen them), reptiles (e.g., sea turtles), crustaceans (e.g., lobsters), and fish (e.g., salmon).  Skill does not scale with presumed evolutionary advancement: for instance, the spiny lobster wins the prize for magnetic mapping (see 01/06/2003 headline).  Even bacteria and plants can orient themselves with respect to environmental cues.  Humans were given ability to build tools that can navigate a spacecraft to Saturn, but we must surely stand in awe of a God who could put technology that outperforms NASA into a bird brain.  This article goes to show that the film “Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution” could become an infinite series.  Click your way back through the “Amazing” chain links for many more examples.
Next headline on:  Mammals • Birds • Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Facts

Congratulations to the winners of this week’s Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  Bravo.  Now call the schizophrenia ward.
    They may actually have a point.  In the church, Christians are more likely to survive, and are easier to be modified, augmented, adapted and combined with others for new functions and new environments in the body of Christ if they are more “evolvable” (malleable) in God’s hand.  Strength can be perfected in weakness, but only by intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Dumb Ideas

Nice observation, but another example of the Darwinian bad habit of assuming what ought to be proved.  Plants don’t evolve protective strategies.  That requires intelligence.
Next headline on:  Plants

The pages of any bird guide reveal a spectacular diversity of colors and color patterns.  Although color patterns vary within species, often they also distinguish closely related species.  Variations in color are thought to have evolved through the interplay of sexual selection and natural selection.  What is less obvious--because the birds are on different pages of the guide--is the repeated appearance of similar color patterns among distantly related species (parallel evolution).  A list of 9672 of the world’s bird species includes a black-capped chickadee, a black-capped pygmy tyrant, and a black-capped kingfisher as well as 26 other species whose most conspicuous feature--at least prominent enough to prefix their common name--is a black cap.  There are 41 black-throated species (in 40 different genera), 8 that are blue-capped, 9 that are orange-breasted, and 29 that are red-billed.  There are many such examples of parallel evolution in birds , but the molecular underpinnings of similar plumage patterns among distantly related or unrelated species are still not clear.  

The Natural Law of the Medes and the Persians in their model is evolution, even when it contradicts other laws.  Evolutionists cling to their mythical phylogenetic trees like astrologers to horoscopes, but the data suggest a different paradigm: a sharing and sorting of information among different species, leading to traits like black caps, wing stripes, crests, speckles, throat patches, iridescence (see photonic crystals, 01/29/2003) and much more – traits that look designed.  The observations do not support a common ancestry cosmology, tweaked with epicycles like “convergent evolution” and “parallel evolution”.  When you see common design, why not postulate a common designer? 
    The authors freely admit that just to get dark color requires a complex set of molecular machines:

The melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R) resides in the membrane of specialized cells known as melanocytes, which are the site of melanin synthesis in birds and mammals.  Circulating melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) binds to MC1R, turning on the cell’s melanin-making machinery.

Are we being asked to believe that up to a hundred molecular machines that control just the melanin pigment all evolved in parallel to produce nearly identical species?  What about the hundreds of other genes that produce throat patches, wing bars, and other plumage patterns and colors?  Visualize the exquisite patterns on a peacock, bird of paradise, crane, red-winged blackbird, parrot, ostrich, ruby-throated hummingbird, bald eagle, emperor penguin, magpie, rooster or the songbird in your back yard.  These patterns don’t just happen; they all require genetic information.  This information is transmitted reliably, with only rare slight variations, for many generations.
    Mundy et al. are confident that they have identified a “rare example where the major molecular genetic determinant of a quantitative trait has been identified in wild populations,” and that their work on snow geese and Arctic skuas provides “strong support for the notion that, at least in the case of melanism in birds, evolution is driven by mutation rather than selection on existing standing genetic variation.”  Nevertheless, to make their story work, they have to wave three hands: “This presumably reflects some combination of a high mutability to functionally novel MC1R alleles, a relative absence of deleterious pleiotropic effects of these alleles, and the visibility of dominant or codominant melanic MC1R alleles to natural selection.”  OK, if you want to call that science, let’s put some quantitative numbers in the equation and test it, instead of bluffing about “some combination” of multiple unknowns.  On top of all their other contradictions, they expect us to swallow their line about “a conserved mechanism of plumage color evolution through many tens of millions of years of avian history,” after they just told us the gene they studied must have been highly mutable!
    The phylogenetic explanation clearly has serious problems, and this one hyped correlation is trivial.  Even if these evolutionists could establish that orioles diverged from a common ancestor, they are still orioles: still able to fly, eat, lay eggs, and do all the things birds are so good at, whether or not their feather colors are a little darker in one population than another.  Sorting of existing traits has nothing to do with Darwinian evolution in the sense of producing new genetic information.  Something has sorted and distributed pre-existing complex specified information in bird feathers, creating beautiful patterns and colorful artwork.  That something could be intelligent design.  “Parallel evolution” is just a hand-waving term to describe an observation, not explain it.
Next headline on:  Birds • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

This is a perfect time to review the correct procedure for reading a science article.  Always separate the data from the interpretation.  The data are five amber nuggets containing the “best-preserved fossil of any butterfly” yet found.  The species is almost identical to “its closest living relative” on the Mexican mainland.  The dates, and the stories about drifting islands and dinosaur wipeouts at such and such a time with butterflies fluttering about their heads, is all interpretive fluff.  Brush it away like cobwebs.  What remains?  Butterflies have always been butterflies.  No transitional form was found.  No date came on the samples.  No evolution was demonstrated – only beautiful design.  Does this discovery provide “vital clues to the evolution of butterflies”?  Does it explain why delicate butterflies, with wings like tissue paper, survived whatever killed macho, muscular dinosaurs?  We report – you decide.
    Dick Vane-Wright’s comments would almost make one think that Creation-Evolution Headlines is having an impact.  Scientists seem more sensitive lately about the charge of just-so storytelling (see also 04/01/2004 headline).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology

Humans are the virtuosos of cultural diversity.  We fish, hunt, shepherd, forage and cultivate.  We practise polygyny, polyandry and monogamy, pay bride-prices and dowries, and have patrilineal and matrilineal wealth inheritance.  We construct or inhabit all manner of shelters, speak about 7,000 different languages and eat everything from seeds to whales.  And this is not counting many unique, and sometimes bizarre, belief systems and behavioural practices.

If the picture of human cultures is one of variability, the human genetic landscape is one of homogeneity.  All of humanity varies less genetically than does a typical wild population of chimpanzees.  This may reflect our youthfulness as a species.  Anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged only about 75,000-100,000 years ago , and may have suffered a demographic ‘bottleneck’ in the recent past, meaning that in evolutionary terms we are all descended from a not-so-distant common ancestor.  Also, of course, we can interbreed throughout our entire worldwide range.  Add the facts that we regularly trade, migrate across each other’s territories and wage war against each other, and a puzzle emerges: where does our extreme cultural diversity come from, and what maintains it?

Putting these forces together, we get a picture of humans as a highly social and group-focused species.  None of this is to say that selfish behaviour has been erased or that all cultures survive intact.  The all-too-common ‘tragedies of the commons’, in which individual over-exploitation of common resources results in their collapse, remind us of the price of selfishness.  But this picture of the nature of cultures suggests that they are surprisingly robust against outside influences (although not invincible) and that, at least for large cultures, worries about cultural swamping are overstated.  Nevertheless, our ancient cultural practices may also be telling us that, in a world in which mass movements of people from poorer to richer areas will become ever more common, we must be especially vigilant about our own tendencies to protect the status quo ante.

We assume the authors were excepting themselves when mentioning “unique, and sometimes bizarre, belief systems.”  These authors have just pulled the foundation of meaning out from under all human communication, interaction, art, science and government, but it doesn’t seem to bother them at all.
    Social Darwinism is still around, as you can see.  Modern day Marxists will feel warm fuzzies with this article.  When scientists omit the reality of intelligent design, all they have left is matter in motion.  That matter might be molecules, cells, or people, but never life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  It is not self-evident truth to a Darwinist that humans are endowed by a Creator with anything.  Thus government, culture and language must all be just artifacts of matter in motion.  Human culture obeys the same Darwinian laws as bacterial culture.
    Left without design, their pet theory of evolution has to fulfill the role of designer.  Darwinians are always up to the challenge; in fact, it is their form of entertainment (see 02/22/2004 commentary).  The basic Darwinian plot provides an endless, malleable storytelling platform for explaining anything (see 01/15/2004 commentary), and since the Starving Storytellers got on King Charlie’s welfare programs and grew obese (see 12/22/2003 commentary), they no longer have any motivation for hard scientific work.  One outcome is predictable: Nature, that megaphone for Darwin (see 03/04/2004 commentary), will be eagerly poised to shout the latest propaganda to the masses.
Exercise  Did you catch the admission that the entire human population seems to have gone through a demographic bottleneck in the recent past?  And that we all might have descended from a not-so-distant common ancestor?  Can you a describe a historical event that fits this observation?  Extra credit: name the ancestor.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

That’s until you read the fine print.  Can such things be known?  Listen to the disclaimers in the NSU article:

Although the two groups seem to have been genetically separate, the fossil record is too patchy, and dating methods too unreliable, to say whether this was because they never met, or because they simply didn’t consider each other an enticing proposition.
    Given the small number of fossils studied, it’s also possible that interbreeding did occur, he [David Serre] adds, but that we have not found the evidence yet.
    Such a match-up would have been genetically feasible, says Stringer.  The two groups were closer in genetic terms than other primates that happily breed today, he says.

If these were potentially interbreeding humans, then forget the racism going on in all this Neanderthal/modern dichotomizing.  All scientists can observe is that there were a few distinct physical characteristics among the Neanderthals, such as prominent brows and thicker bones.  What can we know but that early wrestlers and bikers just got together and formed their own societies?
    There are groups of modern humans even today who prefer to associate with others like themselves.  They can and do form distinctive populations, like pygmies or Watusi.    The Bible speaks of the sons of Anak and the Nephelim who were giants in their time.  Did the Israelites interbreed with them?  Probably not.  Was either group non-human?  Of course not.
    Dead men tell no tales.  Living ones, however, often tell whoppers, especially those in the Darwin population.
Next headline on:  Early Man.

This is not a typical creationist book or film.  To the extent it argues that our universe and earth appear designed for life and discovery, it makes an old anthropic argument stronger, adding an intriguing original point that our position makes science and discovery possible, as if that were the Creator’s intent.  Don’t expect it to argue for a view of special creation by the Judeo-Christian God, or to argue for a Biblical history or chronology.  It should, however, be a valuable resource to impel knowledgeable skeptics to consider the evidence for design.  Dr. Gonzalez and Jay Richards have impeccable credentials and know their specialties well.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Solar System • Physics • Media • Intelligent Design

The case for the crops was boosted by a scientific review, released last July, which found no reason to rule out carefully managed cultivation of the plants.  The review was discussed at a cabinet meeting last month.  Leaked minutes of the meeting state that ministers acknowledged public opposition, but thought that it “might eventually be worn down by solid , authoritative scientific argument”.

Plainly, these findings may affect the U.S. ethical debate.  Leon Kass, the chairman of the President’s Council of Bioethics, sees them as a downward step on a slippery moral slope: “tomorrow,” he predicts, “cloned blastocysts for baby-making.”  After the recent purge of two pro-stem cell members, Kass has his commission under control.  But science is, after all, an international activity.  The Korean success reminds us that stem cell research, along with its therapeutic promise, is under way in countries with various cultural and religious traditions.  Our domestic moral terrain is not readily exportable: U.S. politicians can’t make the rules for everyone, and they don’t have a special claim to the ethical high ground.

They could do it; should they?  Could is technology; should is ethics.  Not everything possible is advisable.  Scientists are involved in many activities that could have profound societal effects: tampering with supergerms or nanobots that, if released accidentally or by terrorists, might evade all our defenses; producing chimeras, even combining human and non-human characters; toying with human genes in ways that might redefine what it means to be an individual.  To whom are these scientists accountable?  Does wearing a white lab coat mean someone knows the difference between could and should?  Are scientists subject to the rule of law as defined by duly-elected representatives?  Does the international scientific community comprise an elite oligarchy, granted global powers that supersede the rights of voters?  What constitution gave them this authority?
    The American founding fathers made government accountable to the people.  The purpose of government was to protect individual, unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  These rights were to be secured through the ballot box and due process of law.  Elected representatives were to be entrusted with decision-making power only with the consent of the governed.  Here, however, we see political and scientific elitists making sweeping, dramatic decisions on risky practices riddled with huge ethical concerns, just because they can, and they think they know what is good for us.
    The point of this commentary is not to debate the specific ethical dilemmas posed by GM crops or therapeutic cloning of embryonic stem cells.  It is not to get embroiled in the emotional arguments about slippery slopes, countered by utopian promises of better health or productivity.  The point is that the decisions on these highly-charged ethical issues are being made by elitists who have utter disdain for the voice of the people.  Giles acknowledged the public outcry but seemed satisfied that if scientists said it’s OK, then it’s OK, even though serious questions remain unanswered about protecting the environment or human health.
    The prior week in both Nature and Science, editorials expressed outrage that the Bush administration had dismissed Elizabeth Blackburn from the President’s Council on Ethics, presumably because she was so outspoken in her opposition to the administration’s position on stem cell research.  The concern seemed to be more about Big Science getting their consensus opinion represented on the council, not whether an elected representative had the right to select his advisors.  And no one was asking the obvious question, what do the voters feel about stem cell research?  How much voice and authority should an unelected council of scientists have to tell the voters the difference between could and should?
    Kennedy’s editorial makes it clear he is much more interested in could than should.  The bulk of his argument rests on pragmatism, if not utter selfishness.  Ethics, shmethics: Melton wants a piece of the action.  The Americans don’t want the Koreans and other pinnacles of ethical civilization to get all the Nobel prizes, whether or not such research leads to designer baby-making down the road.  Voters are idiots.  Scientists know what is good for them.  (Now read the 03/04/2004 headline again.)
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Given the current surge in scientific attention to alien life, it is easy to think that recent developments constitute a revolution of sorts.  However, our actual knowledge of alien life remains the same as it has been for centuries and can be summarized by a single word: nothing.  Nonetheless, in Lonely Planets David Grinspoon provides a masterful synthesis of the history, science, philosophy, and even theological implications of extraterrestrial life.

Grinspoon uses the Gaia hypothesis (that Earth can in some sense be considered a “super-organism” of interconnected biogeochemical feedback mechanisms) and complexity theory to argue for a more generous definition of habitable worlds.  He holds that a key characteristic of “living worlds” should be chemical disequilibrium, with large flows of energy and/or matter.  By these criteria , he suggests, we should also be searching for cloud creatures on Venus and sulfur-based critters on the volcanic Jovian moon Io.

His emphasis continues to be on keeping an open mind.  SETI assumes that aliens would continuously broadcast radio transmissions for thousands of years.  Anti-UFO skeptics argue that UFOs are not alien spacecraft, because “aliens just wouldn’t act that way.”  But both assumptions are based on preconceived notions of alien behavior , about which we actually know nothing.  (Grinspoon falls into his own trap as well, dismissing popular ideas about UFOs basically because they are so “B-movie.”)

The book becomes increasingly personal in the final chapters as Grinspoon delves deeper into more speculative ideas regarding spirituality and the nature of intelligence.  He muses that humans are not yet truly intelligent and that to become so will require much better collective behavior as a species.  He seems overly pessimistic in his assessment of our likelihood of becoming such a species, based on our propensity for perpetrating violence on one another.  I would argue that such developments as the global eradication of certain diseases and the advent of international courts to try war criminals paint a more optimistic picture than the examples he gives of SETI@home and world music.  The author closes with even wilder speculation regarding species immortality and machine civilizations.

We didn’t say the book was about nothing: he did.  We didn’t say the book contained wild speculation: he did.  We didn’t say the author was selectively open-minded: he did.  We didn’t call it a “tale” of cosmic evolution: he did.  We didn’t use the phrases “intellectually squishy” and “wishful thinking” to describe Grinspoon’s ideas: he did.  Cloud creatures on Venus, sulfur critters on volcanic Io, machine civilizations, international courts as a measure of intelligence... good grief.  Yet Nittler calls this book a “masterful synthesis” of ideas on – well, nothing.
    That makes Nittler a co-conspirator, an accessory to the crime of allowing stupid ideas to get good press in America’s premiere science journal.  If a creationist made claims on this level, they wouldn’t get past the National Enquirer.  The code of silence in the Darwin Party requires that none of the brethren are to be publicly humiliated.  Even if lightly tapped with padded gloves, they must be praised as defenders of the “tale of cosmic evolution.”
    Don’t be fooled by the talk about “spirituality” and “theological implications” of finding alien life.  We know what they mean, and it’s not asking “what must I do to be saved?” (see 03/11/2004 headline).
    Both men unfairly attack Kepler (see our online biography).  Nittler lets him get away with libel: “Grinspoon reminds us that Johannes Kepler was a “philosopher/freak who walked the fine line between genius and delusion.”  Speak for yourselves.  Both of you would do well to read the life and writings of the father of planetary science, and learn to respect his integrity and intelligence.  His wildest speculations were tame compared to these.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life  SETI • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Discoveries like this make exciting news.  Only the underground environment provides opportunities for 21st century explorers to discover virgin territory.  Click the photo gallery link in the article to view beautiful pictures of the interior of this cave.  What other magnificent caves on this vast planet remain to be discovered?
    What is uncalled for in such reports is the obligatory reference to millions of years.  If you read the scientific report on nearby Kartchner Caverns (available in the bookstore), you find that the dating methods are compromises of conflicting measurements based on prior assumptions.  Think about it; if there had been 9,990,000 years available for animals to stumble into this cave, wouldn’t it be totally filled with bones?  The long ages that tour guides and reports typically spout are usually stated in a glib, matter-of-fact way, without revealing the many assumptions that go into the estimates, or the many evidences around the world that contradict the dates.
    Ball park figures for cave dates are usually established beforehand from uniformitarian and Darwinian assumptions, so that they fit into the evolution-based geologic column (but see the 03/05/2004 headline).  Furthermore, the dating methods commit the fallacy of extrapolation of current processes far beyond what is justifiable.  Check out the following three articles, two by Ph.D. geologists, that explain how cave and speleothem formation do not require such vast periods of time: Snelling, Oard, and Austin.
    Next time on a cave tour, politely ask the guide how he or she knows the cave is x million years old.  Unless trained in anti-creationist tactics, the guide will usually stutter and stammer, admitting that he/she is just repeating what the script says.  Then, for fun, show the guide this picture.
    Here is a great new DVD to expand your mind about cave formation and geology in general, by a world-class caver and PhD geologist, Dr. Emil Silvestru: Geology and Cave Formation.  It contains stunning photographs and just as stunning facts, by someone who knows caves better inside and out than most people.  Just as good is another DVD by Dr. Silvestru entitled, Rocks & Ages: Do They Hide Millions of Years?
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

Are there Mormons on the board of National Geographic?  They would love this cosmology.  It’s not new; Barrow and Tipler propounded it in their books, such as The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.  Actually, it is as old as the serpent who told Eve, “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
    Pay no attention to the details of this “selfish biocosm” story, because despite what Roach claims, it is not based on “serious research.”  No human could ever observe or measure prior universes and ultimate realities.  What is notable in this foolish article is the effort unbelievers will expend in running from the obvious.  Does this syllogism make any sense?  Major premise: design implies intelligence.  Minor premise: our universe shows exquisite design.  Conclusion: It must have evolved.
    Also notable is the common practice of marginalizing people of faith by ignoring them.  This article sidesteps centuries of profound intellectual thought about the existence of a transcendent, infinite, eternal God, as if no scientist or philosopher of any merit, from any culture, had anything worthwhile to say about the subject.  Instead, a radical fringe “lawyer who moonlights as a scientist” gets the spotlight in one of the most popular magazines in the world.  This tactic parallels those on network news programs that grant friendly interviews to Gavin Newsom to make him appear mainstream, or American history books that spend pages on Marilyn Monroe but ignore George Washington.  We don’t mind NG mentioning this guy’s beliefs, but it should have been followed up by hard-hitting questions or rebuttals by reputable opponents, or else relegated to the funny pages.
    Ol’ Charlie probably had no premonition of the exaggerations his disciples would commit.  Evolutionist radicals have out-Darwinized the Mosstah (see 02/04/2004 headline), and made his guesswork into a full-fledged religion (see 02/13/2004 commentary).  When the light of evidence shines at them, they run further back into the darkness, bragging about how enlightened they are.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • SETI • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

What are the Darwinians afraid of?  This is only an optional lesson.  There is no test on it.  A student’s grade does not depend on it.  The Darwinians get 478 pages out of 500 to tell their side of the story.  Come on, Darwin Party loyalists, give us your best shot.  We regularly debate the best Darwinian arguments from the best Darwinian mouthpiece journals right here on Creation-Evolution Headlines.  We’re not afraid to examine the evidence; why are you?  You assume students are smart enough to understand Darwinian doctrines in high school, so why do you assume they are not smart enough to judge evidence?
    Check out this analogy by Stephen Weeks (U. of Akron biologist), trying to explain why only Darwinians should teach Darwinism: “If someone’s an expert and they’re telling you they need a brain tumor removed in a certain way, that’s weighted more than your mechanic’s opinion.”  Try one of our analogies instead:

• Instead of hearing news of the Iraq war only from Al-Jazeera, students should also have the opportunity to watch Fox News.
• Before submitting to a risky brain tumor operation, one should get opinions from several independent experts and also read the medical literature.
• Before buying a used car from a used car salesman, check Consumer Reports.
• Members of the jury, listen carefully to both the prosecutor and the defense attorney before making up your minds.  Don’t be swayed by the personality or prestige of the attorneys; base your decision solely on the law and on the evidence.

Analogies are fun.  Make up one of your own depicting this controversy, and send it here.

• If a drunk really wants to know if he has a drinking problem, should he only solicit his buddy’s opinion down at the ‘yall come back saloon’ -or- should he also seek the professional opinions of licensed counselors, trained to detect alcohol-related disorders?  [from a reader in Texas]
• If a person wants to know how all the microscopic motors and machines work in a cell maybe they should start with a diagnostic test from the mechanic.  [from a reader in Arizona]

Next headline on:  Education • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

Some images are so evocative, any attempt at description would spoil the moment.  Just stare at this one for awhile.  It would be odd not to be awed, nor to consider the power of God.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology

No series of gradual transitional forms was suggested in the article.  And forget it; there’s no way this creature could have evolved from a fast-talking salesman.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Amazing Facts

Although this is a technical subject for mathematically-inclined geologists, it seems to represent a daring break from conventional wisdom.  Some creationist geologists have already demonstrated with experiments that layered deposits can be laid down rapidly in horizontal fashion, forming what look like fractal patterns, in one stage (see the work of Guy Berthault, for example).  Similarly, fine-grained laminations have been found in thick deposits at Mt. St. Helens, where the rates of deposition were known (e.g., one day!).  The old thinking was that each layer represented a long passage of time.  Now, we have observed examples that this is not necessarily true.
    Schlager is clearly not proposing a young-age geology; his article assumes millions of years for some deposits.  Nevertheless, his model seems to reinforce the notion that a pattern in the rock layers, no matter how thick, could be a function of “rate of change in accommodation and rates of sediment supply,” not necessarily a long, gradual passage of time.  In simple, creationist-geology terms, were the layers of Grand Canyon laid down by a little water over a long time, or a lot of water over a little time?
    Look at the philosophical baggage that Lyell’s vision of gradualism generated.  It appeared intuitively obvious to him, and then to Darwin, that the rock layers must have required many millions of years for their formation.  Darwin’s philosophical voyage from Christianity to agnosticism floated on this belief, which subsequently flavored all his investigations and writings.  Now we see geologists questioning the basic assumption.  The Titanic had a lot of baggage, too.  When the hull was breached, it no longer mattered how ornate the furnishings.
Next headline on:  Geology. • Dating Methods • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

It is tempting to see evidence of anagenesis (unilinear evolution) in the late Miocene hominin record in part because continuity is suggested by claims for some evidence of bipedalism in all known taxa.  The evidence from Orrorin is ambiguous ... whereas that from Sahelanthropus is indirect, based only on the position of the foramen magnum.  The region is severely distorted in the only cranial specimen of Sahelanthropus, and even the describers recognize the uncertainty.  A. kadabba is interpreted as a biped on the basis of a single toe bone, a foot proximal phalanx, with a dorsally oriented proximal joint surface, as in more recent hominins.  However, the same joint configuration occurs in the definitely nonbipedal late Miocene hominid Sivapithecus, and the length and curvature of this bone closely resembles those of a chimpanzee or bonobo.  In addition, the specimen is 400,000 to 600,000 years younger than the rest of the A. kadabba sample, 800,000 years older than A. ramidus, and from a locality that is geographically much closer to Aramis than to Asa Koma.  It may or may not be from a biped, and if it is, which biped?
    Another issue is the canine/premolar complex....
 

Why the different interpretations?  Evidence is scarce and fragmentary, and uncertainty predominates.  Interpretations rely especially heavily on past experience to make sense of incomplete evidence.  Haile-Selassie and colleagues interpret diversity in fossil hominids in terms of variability and gradual evolutionary change in an evolving lineage.  Others see cladistic diversity as opposed to ancestor-descendant relations....  Ancestor-descendant relations must exist , but adaptive radiation and cladogenesis also must exist , or organic diversity would be the same today as it was at the beginning of biological evolution.  Rather than a single lineage, the late Miocene hominin fossil record may sample an adaptive radiation , from a source either in Eurasia or yet undiscovered in Africa, the first of several radiations during the course of human evolution....  Regardless, the level of uncertainty in the available direct evidence at this time renders irreconcilable differences of opinion inevitable.  The solution is in the mantra of all paleontologists: We need more fossils!

Combined with last month’s article by Leslea Hlusko (see 02/19/2004 headline), this has to be one of the most damaging admissions on the subject of human evolution, among dozens of damaging admissions on the subject of human evolution, we have been publishing in Creation-Evolution Headlines for four years.  If you can wade past the jargon, the whole tale is one of debate, uncertainty, lack of evidence, controversy, contradiction, dispute, wishful thinking, implausibility, and storytelling, all held together by the glue of faith.
    For example, pay special attention to the sentence above where Begun believes that evidence for both descent and diversity must exist, “or organic diversity would be the same today as it was at the beginning of biological evolution.”  Aha!  Did you catch that?  He just said, in effect, if there weren’t any evolution, there wouldn’t be any evolution!  He wants it both ways: evidence of diversity, but also evidence of descent, and he has neither.  As an admission of blind faith in contradiction to the evidence, one would be hard pressed to find a better example.  Without the evidence of evolution in the fossils, in other words, they would have to admit that nothing has changed--the creationists would be right!  Gasp!  Anything but that!
    These blind guides have just made it crystal clear that after 140 years of trying to prove Darwin right, there just is not any fossil evidence for “the descent of man.”  What story did you grow up with?  Java Man?  Peking Man?  Heidelberg Man?  Those stories are all out the window, and all the new bones are up for grabs for anyone’s interpretation.  The creation story, that man has always been man and ape has always been ape, certainly has nothing to fear from the fossil record.  Darwin, the latecomer in the origins debate, has the burden of proof.
    Much of the futile searching for fragmentary evidence to prop up Charlie would stop if evolutionary paleoanthropologists really took to heart two articles, reported here recently, that portray the hunt to be vanity of vanities, a chasing after wind.  Leslea Hlusko last month (02/19/2004 headline) questioned the basic presuppositions of human evolution, showing how visible variations between bones tell nothing about genetics and development or descent.  And Tim White (a member of the team publishing this week’s paper) reminded his colleagues a year ago that natural variation and deformation can mimic diversity (03/28/2003 headline).  Both these realizations fog up any real evidence of human ancestry.  No matter how many bones they dig up, these two articles emphasize the problem we have emphasized all along: anyone can make up any story they want with the evidence, based on their own bias.  The confusion that reigns today, after decades of changing stories, shows the folly of trusting false assumptions.  As Hlusko rebuked, the answer is not “We need more fossils!”  What we need is repentance from the sin of storytelling – and calling it Science.
Next headline on:  Early Man

Scientists did not design this sugar from scratch.  They found it, already working as a dehydrating agent, in yeast and shrimp.  Nature already has the best designs.  Evolutionists often admit this.  They just don’t admit they were designed.
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Do we really need scientists to tell us the obvious?  Everyone seems to know this except secular researchers.  Solomon and Paul can tell the University of Washington all they need to know.
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At the beginning of mitosis, the process of cell division, chromosomes are organized randomly – like jigsaw puzzle pieces spread out on the floor.  Their constituent two ‘sister chromatids’, each of which contains one of the two identical DNA molecules produced by replication, must be oriented such that they will be pulled in opposite directions into the two newly forming cells.  Like a jigsaw, the solution for correctly orienting all chromosomes comes partly through trial and error.  Mechanisms must exist to eliminate wrong configurations while selecting the right ones.

First of all, think of how many parts are involved in this process.  Then realize that without high fidelity duplication and segregation during cell division, an organism would be subject to cancer, genetic disease or death.  Furthermore, any alleged evolution would quickly come to a grinding halt, because natural selection is highly dependent on accurate replication for selected traits to be preserved.
    To visualize what goes on in mitosis, think of the following analogy.  (Analogies, though never precise, and inadequate as proofs, can help make complex processes approachable.)  Let’s head out West and picture a team of cowboys who need to split a herd of cattle for market.  The cattle in our hypothetical herd all have identical twins that are yoked together.  They are wandering aimlessly in a corral, and two teams of cowboys are standing at opposite ends of the corral with lassos in hand.  On cue, the corral fence (the nuclear membrane) drops.  The cowboys immediately go into action, lassoing every cow in sight.
    Their goal is to split the herd into identical halves.  To accomplish this, each team has to catch one of each pair: Bob, on the north team, lassos one of the twins, and Joe, on the south team, lassos the other.  As soon as a cow is caught, the cowboy starts pulling.  Sometimes, however, two guys on the same team catch both twins.  That’s when wrangler Chuck (Aurora B kinase) rides through the herd, looking at ropes that aren’t taut, indicating pairs hitched to the same team.  Chuck removes one of the ropes and lets the other team lasso the twin.  As the ropers keep applying tension, the boss makes sure all the pairs are lined up, each with one rope pulling a cow north and another rope pulling its twin south.  Then another wrangler breaks the yokes, and the cowboys wind in their ropes, pulling their half of the herd into the new north and south corrals.
    The difference in cells is that they don’t have sentient cowboys with eyes and ears doing the work by using their brains and roping skills.  Instead, cables called microtubules extend outward blindly at random from the spindle poles, looking for attachment points on the kinetochores at the middle of the chromosomes.  Tension is applied by molecular motors (see 02/25/2003 headline), like winches, that pull the chromatids into the daughter cells.  How can a cell make sure one and only one cable gets attached to each chromatid?  This is awesome.  Consider also that all the machinery, all the ropes, all the winches, all the corrals, all the procedures and everything else is produced by the DNA in the chromosomes, as if the cattle were the master controller and supplier for the cowboys!  For photomicrographs of mitosis, see the illustrations at the Florida State University and the University of Maryland websites.
    Mitosis is a coordinated team project that is done exactly right by the cell every time it divides.  Mistakes by cowboys might mean a lawsuit or the loss of business, but in the cell, a mistake can mean death.  The process is amazing enough as described, but then the authors throw in “the rest of the story” to boggle Darwinian minds beyond all hope of recovery.  What they described was for yeast – a “primitive” form of life.  What happens in vertebrates, like us humans?  Get ready:

In contrast to budding yeast, kinetochores of other eukaryotes bind multiple microtubules (about 20 in humans).  These larger kinetochores must coordinate all these microtubules and also deal with incorrect attachments in which microtubules from opposite spindle poles connect to a single kinetochore (termed ‘merotely’).  Another study, in this month’s Nature Cell Biology, found that Aurora B does not merely detach syntelic kinetochores from microtubules in vertebrates – it orchestrates the coordinated disassembly of all the microtubules that are bound to each kinetochore, so that the syntelically oriented chromosomes move towards the spindle poles before they are bi-oriented.
    Although sister kinetochore geometry seems to be dispensable in budding yeasts with their single-microtubule-connected kinetochores, it could contribute to reducing merotely, as implied by the conservation of this aspect of chromosome architecture throughout eukaryotic evolution.  Tackling the extra dimension that the multiplicity of microtubule-binding sites at kinetochores introduces will undoubtedly be another brain-teaser – and a particularly important one, too, because the loss of a single chromosome can be lethal, and aberrant numbers of chromosomes can contribute to birth defects and cancer.

Isn’t evolution wonderful.  It blindly found a way to solve multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzles correctly every time, and hung onto its invention for millions of years.  It started a successful cattle ranching business, employing blind cowboys.  Its advertisement boasts, “Satisfying customers since 2 billion years B.C.”  Would you trust such hype?
    One last thought.  Remember the 02/13/2003 headline last year?  It reported that meiosis (cell division for sexual reproduction) is even “much more complex” than mitosis, but there was no evidence it had evolved from the “simpler” process of mitosis.  These are bad days to work for Charlie on the Lazy E Ranch.  Better quit the outfit while you can and join up with the Boss who knows the business.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics and DNA • Amazing Facts

“Like everybody else, we are much more interested in other people’s accountability than we are in our own,” explains Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), who helped to draft the new code.  “Editors are perhaps some of the most unaccountable people in the world.”

You thought that peer review kept science journals honest, and that science was a self-correcting process in which peer review kept bias out of the journals, didn’t you?  How come after centuries of science publishing, here in 2004 they are admitting that editors are some of the most unaccountable people in the world?
    Some of the proposed guidelines, if followed honestly, would put the Darwin Party out of business:

Data Analysis:
• “The discussion section of a paper should mention any issues of bias which have been considered, and explain how they have been dealt with in the design and interpretation of the study.”
  Duties of Editors:
• “Studies that challenge previous work published in the journal should be given an especially sympathetic hearing.”
  How come Darwinians can speculate freely beyond the evidence, but rebuttals from ID scientists are systematically excluded? (see 05/13/2003 headline, for example).  How come pro-Darwin book reviews are published, but only negative reviews are published of intelligent design books, if at all?
• “Studies reporting negative results should not be excluded.”
  OK, let’s publish some of the many dates that conflict with the standard geological column.
• “All original studies should be peer reviewed before publication, taking into full account possible bias due to related or conflicting interests.”
  Does philosophical materialism count as bias?
  Media Relations:
• “Authors approached by the media should give as balanced an account of their work as possible, ensuring that they point out where evidence ends and speculation begins.”
  This one guideline alone would put the Darwinian just-so storytelling enterprise out of business.

COPE says that “These guidelines are intended to be advisory rather than prescriptive, and to evolve over time.”  So who or what is going to hold the editor of Nature accountable?  Sales records?  Guidelines might evolve by intelligent design, but if ethics evolve, they are not ethics.
    Speaking of bias, did you know that the journal Nature was originally formed to be a propaganda outlet for the Darwinians?  Look at what Janet Browne wrote in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, 2002):

The Reader [a first-attempt Darwin mouthpiece] was to expire in 1867.  Not long afterwards, Norman Lockyear, one of its editors, put up the idea of founding a periodical which they would call Nature, to be owned and published by Alexander Macmillan, a journal that would provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge.  Lockyear brought Nature into existence in November 1869, fronted by an introduction by Huxley (“as if written by the maddest English scholar,” said Darwin indulgently).  To command the periodical market was a shrewd tactic in any contested cultural arena but one as yet little exploited in science, and while Lockyear was never a member of the X Club [a group of radical antireligious naturalists and Darwin-supporters, founded by Huxley] he displayed similar strong, progressive liberal opinions.  Far more than any other science journal of the period, Nature was conceived, born and raised to serve polemic purpose.  In the first year of its existence, there were six or seven articles urging Darwin’s scheme, two of which were written by Darwin himself.  Darwin became a lifelong subscriber, claiming he got a kind of “satisfaction” in reading articles he could not understand.
(p. 248)
[Otto] Zacharias also asked if he could use Darwin’s name on a new journal he wished to start in Germany, called Darwinia.... Such journals, as they all recognized, played a fundamental role in distributing evolutionary ideas.  The story of Nature’s conception in 1869 was prime evidence of the value of having a tightly-controlled, well-distributed mouthpiece.... One of the first journals to take up Darwin’s views in Germany had been the weekly magazine Ausland (“Abroad”), a heady mix of biology and society, pumped up with a stream of articles from Haeckel and other evolutionists.  During the Franco-Prussian War, the editor, Friedrich von Hellwald, claimed Darwinism as proof that warfare between nations was a natural law, a standard view of the time that did not prevent his journal’s expiry a few years afterwards.
(pp. 438-439).

These and many other tidbits from Browne’s book reveal that the Darwinian revolution was largely a propaganda coup.  It would have been more honest for Nature to have been named Naturalism.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Don’t just look for water.  Look for information (see 12/30/2002 headline).
    Note: organisms in salty environments on Earth can survive because of specialized adaptations to deal with the salts, which normally would be harmful.  One would not expect life, especially lipid membranes, to evolve in a salty environment (see 09/17/2002 headline).
    Finding evidence of past water is a geologically fascinating discovery, interesting in its own right.  It is disgusting, however, to watch the press assume that water equals life.  They did it at Europa, and you can just hear it coming on all the popular news outlets and TV shows.  Water is the simplest and easiest molecule to get.  In its solid and vapor forms, it is abundant in the solar system (whole moons of Saturn are made of ice).  What sets life apart from rock, dirt, sand and water is the way the material is organized into instruction-directed molecular machines, filled with information.  Given the periodic table and the laws of physics, one can derive the existence of water.  Information – codes – machinery – these are the hallmarks of intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Mars • Geology • Origin of Life

1. Focus:  “Other interesting design elements include terminal lens-like extensions located proximally and barb-like spines located along the spicule shaft.  The presence of these lens structures at the end of the biofibers improves the light-collecting efficiency [that] offers an effective fiber-optical network with selected illumination points along the length of the crown-like fibrous network surrounding the cylindrical skeletal lattice.”
2. Cool:  “Second, the formation of the biosilica fibers occurs at ambient temperatures and pressures.”  Man-made glass fibers are made at high temperatures.  “Their complex structure and composition are encoded in the organism and are controlled by specialized organic molecules and cells.  The low-temperature formation of silica in organisms, as an alternative to the high-temperature technological process, is a subject of extensive studies.”
3. Dope:  “The low-temperature synthesis brings about an extremely important feature: the ability to effectively dope the structure with impurities that increase the refractive index of silica.  Our elemental analysis showed, for example, the presence of sodium ions in the entire fiber, particularly in the core.  Sodium ions (and many other additives) are not commercially viable optical fiber dopants because of manufacturing challenges, including devitrification at high processing temperatures.  In the case of these spicules, however, the presence of sodium ions results in the increase of the refractive index to values approaching and even exceeding that of vitreous silica.
4. No Stress:  “Another advantage of the low-temperature synthesis is evidenced in the lack of the polarization dependence on the refractive index.  Birefringence in commercially prepared fibers often occurs as a result of the residual thermal stresses in the fibers upon their cooling.  Ambient condition formation of the spicules in biological environments prevents the development of any residual thermal stress.

In conclusion, we have demonstrated an example of nature’s ability to evolve highly effective and sophisticated optical systems, comparable and in some aspects superior to man-made analogs.  High fracture toughness arising from their composite structure, the presence of index-raising dopants, the degree of silica condensation, and the absence of residual stress in these fibers suggest an advantage of the protein-controlled, ambient temperature synthesis favored in nature.  Whether these optical properties are biologically relevant or not, the mechanisms of the formation of silica spicules in E. aspergillum are inspiring to materials scientists and engineers.  We believe, therefore, that this system represents a new route to improved, silica-based optical fibers, constructed by using a bottom-up approach.

Mother Nature, being blind, would not make a lamp.  Let’s object when scientists use the word “evolve” as a synonym for “engineer”.  Nature cannot “evolve” a “highly effective and sophisticated optical system.”  Highly effective and sophisticated systems are products of engineering.  Engineering requires intelligence and purpose.
    This sponge, first named by creationist Richard Owen in 1841, is a natural wonder.  Another wonder is how Darwinists think Nature Inc. can get any manufacturing done, with their pointy-haired boss (chance) managing a crew of blind, deaf and dumb Dilberts (natural selection).  The competition, Intelligent Design Unlimited, puts out a catalog that is a work of art.
Next headline on:  Fish and Marine Biology • Amazing Facts