“And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.  But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end.  Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”
—Message to Daniel, Prime Minister of Iraq, c. 539 B.C. (Dan. 12:3-4)

• Aurora varialous:  Saturn’s auroras (picture) show unique spiral structures and persist unusually long.  Unexpectedly, they do not appear intermediate between those on Earth and Jupiter (see EurekAlert for summary).  Saturn’s aurora can brighten by a factor of 4, depending on solar wind activity.  Like the roar of a campfire in the wind, Saturn’s radio emissions increase when the solar wind blows harder (see explanation on EurekAlert).
• Ring spokes (picture) that were discovered by Voyager and detected by Hubble have not yet been seen by Cassini.  Apparently the phenomenon is a function of low sun angle.  If so, it may be a couple of years before Cassini can detect them.
• Ring irregularities:  At closest approach, Cassini was able to get the highest resolution scans across the rings ever taken (pictures).  These show unexplained irregularities in some narrow and broad rings.  Some may be due to non-Keplerian and non-resonance forces, such as shear stresses or undulations caused by meteoroid impacts (picture).
• Click here to continue—

Dating Disaster: Is Neanderthal the New Piltdown?    02/25/2005
We all know it by heart: Neanderthal Man was a big-boned, hairy cave-dweller that got pushed out of northern Europe 40,000 years ago by the smarter modern humans.  Could this all be wrong?  Did some bones actually belong to real people living in recorded history?
    The man who dated some of these bones, a carbon-14 dating specialist at Frankfurt University, Reiner Protsch von Zieten, has just resigned in disgrace after being investigated for fabricating data and plagiarizing the work of others, reports World Net Daily.  Last August, the UK News Telegraph broke the news about the investigation of Protsch.  Growing skepticism over his dates for Neanderthals were causing concern that a “dating disaster” was going to force anthropologists to “rewrite prehistory,” because dates he published, that they all trusted, were way off the mark.  Some famous skeletons he had dated at 36,000 years old turned out with independent tests to be only 7,500 years old, and another claimed by Protsch to be 21,300 years old was only 3,300.  Another specimen Protsch claimed was the oldest early human found in a region of Germany, which he dated at 27,400 years old with radiocarbon, turned out to belong to an elderly man who died around 1750 A.D.  Professor Protsch, who was fond of Cuban cigars and Porsches, has also been accused of illegally selling university fossils to American buyers, and of shredding documents relating to “ gruesome scientific experiments done by the Nazis in the 1930s.”
    Apparently this professor has “forged and manipulated facts for 30 years.”  The president of Frankfurt University apologized for not curbing his misconduct for so long, admitting that “A lot of people looked the other way.”  Now that the perpetrator has resigned, what lies in the wake of this latest paleoanthropolical hoax?  Chris Stringer, the head of human origins studies at the London Natural History Museum, put it bluntly: “What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside.  We are having to rewrite prehistory.”  Robert Todd Carroll on The Skeptics Dictionary has a picture of Protsch and more details about his misdeeds.

The legacy of Darwinian paleoanthropology has been one of dating disasters, hoaxes and misinformation.  What did you expect?
    This story does not prove that every Neanderthal date is bogus (many more skeletons are known) but casts serious doubt on the whole evolutionary tale of modern humans in Europe.  We need to ask some hard-hitting follow-up questions.  Why did a lot of people look the other way?  Was it because the results provided by this dishonest man fit into their preconceived notion of human evolution?  Did some Neanderthals actually live among us in historical times?  If so, does this not throw the whole Neanderthal classification into disarray?  What other hoaxes are being promulgated right now by other dating labs and bone hunters?
    Carroll reminds us that, like Piltdown, this fraud was “discovered by scientists, reported by scientists, and it will be scientists who will work to correct the record.”  This is how science works, he preaches like a good positivist.  He understates, however, the fact that it took 50 years for Piltdown and 30 years in this case, and that the desire to believe in evolution had a lot to do with delaying the victory of the truth.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dating Methods

The before-and-after pictures are shocking, looking like the difference between the Everglades and a desert.  It wasn’t the Biblical Garden of Eden, but let’s hope most of this paradise can be restored.  The lovers of freedom seem to be the ones leading the effort: the authors of the main paper were three Americans, one expatriated Iraqi-American, and one Iraqi national. 
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

What?  The textbooks are wrong?  But the pictures were so artistic, and the TV programs were so convincing, how could this be?  Take your pick: current theory is either entirely wrong or insufficient to explain the observations.
    See also the 04/02/2004 and 11/02/2002 entries about the hotspot paradigm shift going on.  What this one adds is that there is no good replacement theory, and the admission “there are very few arguments or clues that positively identify any particular explanation.”  So shouldn’t the geological community be open to some fresh out-of-the-mainstream perspectives?
Next headline on:  Geology

As prompted elsewhere, homoplasy is a common problem in coelurosaurian phylogeny.  In this regard, the arctometatarsalian metatarsus shows a complex evolutionary history, and the basal position of Neuquenraptor provides useful information to test the monophyly of arctometatarsalian theropods.  Our analysis is consistent with recent interpretations that evolutionary transitions between the arctometatarsal and non-arctometatarsal foot occurred multiple times both in basal Coelurosauria (for example, Tyrannosauridae, Ornithomimidae) and maniraptorans (for example, alvarezsaurids, some oviraptorosaurs, derived troodontids and basal dromaeosaurids).  The arctometatarsalian condition thus constitutes one of the homoplastic features most frequently evolved between Coelurosauria.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

“Convergent evolution” is a cop-out term, a non-explanation, that hides the ignorance of Darwin Party members behind jargon.  We see it all the time, whether talking about plants, vertebrates, bacteria, or what have you: the magic wand of convergence does the miracles.  Does it explain how similar features in very different groups converged on the same solutions?  No: it multiplies the improbability that these groups would all get the same lucky mutations to develop similar structures and functions independently.  This new find also pushes back the origin of this group of dinosaurs much farther back in their timescale, giving the Darwinists less time to evolve these mobile, agile hunters from their presumably less-capable ancestors.  The BBC News states, “Neuquenraptor argentinus is slightly different from its Northern Hemisphere relatives, having had several million years of isolated evolution.”  Can they tell this from a few foot bones?  The story, like a weak fence, is breaking down; don’t fall for linguistic tricks to whitewash the rotting timbers.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Fossils • Evolutionary Theory.

By now, you expect our next observation: “The authors made no reference to evolution in their paper.”  They are treating these devices as actual mechanical motors, with stator, rotor, camshaft, and purposeful function, achieving performance stats beyond the dreams of human engineering.  Eat your heart out, David Hume.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Stories

Is Darwinism a Free Lunch Scam?    02/18/2005
Neurobiologist William H. Calvin commented at the AAAS meeting this week about the claim that modern humans lived much earlier than thought (see 02/16/2005 entry).  To him, it means that we need to rethink our assumptions that bigger brains are smarter, according to a report on EurekAlert.  If “Homo sapiens was walking around Africa 200,000 years ago with a brain of our size,” the article paraphrases his comments, “we spent – with a few exceptions – the next 150,000 years doing more of the same.”  Something must have happened that suddenly caused a “spectacular” burst of cultural innovation.  “This creativity probably marks the emergence of the whole suite of higher intellectual functions, each of which requires some structuring to fit everything together,” he said.  What could have triggered it?  Was it the evolution of syntax, multitasking, logical thinking, games with arbitrary rules, or fondness for discovering hidden patterns, or some combination of the above?  “It’s likely that they all are sharing some neural machinery for handling structure and judging coherence.  Improve one by natural selection, and you may improve the others too.  The free lunch is alive and well in biology.”

The very thing that should have made him realize Darwinism is so rotten it needs to be tossed overboard caused him, instead,to wave the magic wand of “emergence” and toss it into the salad bowl.  Now, he’s trying to sell this free lunch to his starving Darwin Party comrades.  There ain’t no such thing.  Let’s hope the attendees brought their own, with meat, and that it was intelligently designed.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinism • Dumb Stories

Venus was supposed to be a tropical Jurassic paradise of swamps and dinosaurs, but now it is known as a lead-raining hell (see 11/26/2003 entry).  Mars was once envisioned as the home of intelligent beings who engineered advanced water projects.  Then it was demoted to a land of beachfront bacteria.  Now, it looks like an freezing-cold, desiccated, acidic, toxic waste dump (see 12/03/2004 entry).  Mission planners had better think of a new sales pitch to get the public interested in further exploration.  How about a non-evolutionary angle?  It would sure be a cool place to study catastrophism.  And it sure provides a nice foil to our own world, so that we appreciate and care more for our privileged planet.
Next headline on:  Mars

Once thought of as genetic junk, introns are bits of DNA that can activate their own removal from RNA, which translates DNA’s directions for gene behavior.  Introns then splice the RNA back together.  Scientists are just learning whether many DNA sequences previously believed to have no function actually may play specialized roles in cell behavior.   (Emphasis added.)

Who was it that thought many DNA sequences had no function and were genetic junk?  It wasn’t creationists.  It was evolutionists who looked at treasuries of complex information with their distorted Charlie glasses and saw discarded leftovers of a slow, wasteful, careless evolutionary process.  Now they’re having to play catch-up as the truth sinks in.  Boot out the Darwin Party, the obstacles to scientific progress.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Darwinism

In this period evidence was found of construction of massive fortifications and industrial scale metal production activities, as well as over 100 building complexes.....
    These results push back the beginnings of Edom 300 years earlier than the current scholarly consensus and show the presence of complex societies, perhaps a kingdom, much earlier than previously assumed.  Previous investigations in Edom had been carried out in the Jordanian highland zone and had put the rise of the Edomite kingdom during the 8th to 6th centuries B.C.  But the new work presents strong evidence for the involvement of Edom with neighboring ancient Israel as described in the Bible.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Prominent archaeologists like William Dever and Israel Finkelstein had claimed that the Biblical record was inaccurate because no such Edomite kingdom existed back in the times of David and Solomon.  The Tribune article reminds us that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”  But why should not the Bible be considered evidence?  It has proven correct so many times and places, and proven critics wrong so often, the burden of proof should be on the critics who would deny its accuracy.  Dever himself (a friendly but vociferous rival with Finkelstein over Palestinian chronology) finds this revelation revolutionary, and says it supports the Bible’s credibility about the kingdoms of David and Solomon.  According to the Tribune, he still doubts the historicity of the Exodus, however.  He needs to doubt his doubt.
    This announcement is another blow to the “minimalist” school of archaeology (championed by Finkelstein) that considers the Bible just a religious text written much later, and not a reliable guide to the history of the Middle East.  If archaeologists would use the Scriptures as a guide, they might find a lot more out there.  Read the Old Testament for yourself and see: no other ancient book has such detail about events, names, and places.  Unlike the Koran and other religious texts, the Bible is loaded with them – names and events we know thoroughly from independent sources and observation, and some that haven’t been discovered yet.  These references can be considered on their own merits and put to the test of the spade, without making judgments about the spiritual lessons of the Bible.  Over and over again, as here, the Bible passes the test.  Its reliable historical record provides a foundation for the credibility of its other truth claims, because it was clearly written down by men with a high regard for accuracy.
Next headline on:  Bible and Theology • Dating Methods

A more damaging admission by a Darwin Party spokesman could hardly be found.  The entire spectrum of life, from the earliest reproducing sack of chemicals to modern human astronauts, is supposed to be the product of natural selection acting on numerous, slight modifications.  Natural selection is an icon in our civilization, the stuff of myth and legend.  The phrase Darwin grew to prefer, survival of the fittest (whatever fitness means; see 10/29/2002 entry) represents the most powerful force in the universe, a materialistic creator omnipotent enough to evolve not only an Earth filled with millions of diverse organisms – from sponges to penguins to dragonflies to dinosaurs to horses to mushrooms to petunias to oaks – but potent enough to fill unknown worlds with alien biology and weird life beyond our wildest imaginations.  Natural selection is the staple of science fiction movies; it is the cardinal doctrine of the state secular religion.  And now they tell us they don’t even know how to measure natural selection, or to tell if it is weak or strong, fast or slow, or even detectable by statistical methods.
    So if the centrepiece of evolutionary theory is this sickly, how do you like the rest of Charlie’s table?  Better not swallow anything he puts in front of you.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

“It may have helped in species recognition or for attracting a mate, the paleontologists speculate.”  Whatever works is cute by definition.  Speculation is fun.  It’s especially fun when it overturns the previous speculation.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Media and Movies

Brown says that pushing the emergence of Homo sapiens from about 160,000 years ago back to about 195,000 years ago “is significant because the cultural aspects of humanity in most cases appear much later in the record – only 50,000 years ago – which would mean 150,000 years of Homo sapiens without cultural stuff, such as evidence of eating fish, of harpoons, anything to do with music (flutes and that sort of thing), needles, even tools.  This stuff all comes in very late, except for stone knife blades, which appeared between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, depending on whom you believe.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

We already knew that judgments about who is primitive and who is not are highly subjective (see 01/01/2005 entry).  The labeling game amounts to a kind of paleoanthropological racism.  Primitive is in the eye of the beholder.  Since Mr. Omo II can’t show off his intellect, the Darwin Party racists are free to categorize him as “less highly evolved,” like the early Darwinians used to classify non-Englishmen.  Even with the new dates that make him a contemporary of Mr. Modern Omo I, Fleagle says, in effect, “well, what do you know; primitives and moderns lived at the same time.”
    The other inference about the culture gap is so incredible, so absurd, it calls into question the intelligence, if not the sanity, of anyone who would accept it.  They are claiming that human beings, virtually indistinguishable from us, went for up to 150,000 years without learning how to make a tool, catch a fish, harpoon a mammoth, ride a horse, plant a farm or drill holes in a reed to make even a simple flute.  What did these brethren do for amusement?  Look how much humans have accomplished in the 6,000 years of recorded history, from cuneiform to Saturn spaceships.  To think that fully-endowed humans could not think of even the simplest cultural advances for 25 times that length of time is patently ridiculous.  Even crows and chimps show more capability than these humans who are supposed to have walked the earth for eons without leaving a trace.  Pile this absurdity on top of that: “Brown says the fossil record of humans is poor from 100,000 to 500,000 years ago....”  Let’s build conclusions on evidence, not the other way around, OK?
    If it were not for the Darwin Party’s total commitment to millions of years of evolution, and their totalitarian control over the media, this claim would be laughed off the stage as the funniest thing since the Dean scream.  This is another one of the aspects of evolutionary theory that will some day make history students wag their heads in disbelief that so many educated people could be duped for so long by the teachings of a primitive-looking guru named Charlie.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Darwinism • Dumb Stories

1. Pro:  delighted with the article, glad NG not “compromising its scientific objectivity to gain subscriptions from the religious right.”
2. Con:  accuses article of being arrogant and condescending, yet providing no new evidence nor addressing “gaping holes in the theory that lead so many reasoned people to question evolution.”
3. Compromise:  “I hope that in my lifetime the theories of evolution and creation will merge, because the truth in each is overwhelming.”
4. Pro:  A science teacher commends the lucid writing about this “seminal concept of biological science.”
5. Con:  Offended by NG claim that disbelief in evolution is due to ignorance; “I always considered by thoughts on the subject as based on facts and science.”  Reminds editor that Nazis “used evolutionary and survival-of-the-fittest arguments as justifications.”
6. Con:  A father writes he is not surprised that half of Americans believe in God alone, and not evolution: “when I look at my three beautiful children, it is hard to believe they are the end result of evolving Eocene pond scum.”  He throws in a one-liner: “My father-in-law, on the other hand, may be the evidence you’ve been looking for.”  (Hopefully the relative is not a subscriber.)

Without access to all the letters, we have to take it on faith that NG printed an honestly weighted sample.  If so, half were strongly opposed, one was wishy-washy, and only a third were supportive.  That’s impressive.  If any pro-evolution letters were sent in by scientists, they didn’t mention it.  The two printed seemed more dogmatic than informed.
    Only an insider to the boardroom discussions would know what impact, if any, these letters had on editorial policy, the choice of editor, and the new directions the magazine should take.  It seems entirely possible that the number of passionate letters to the editor on the subject of evolution have had some impact.  Consider the letter from Kelly Olson of Los Angeles:

I must congratulate you.  Your article on evolution manages to be confrontational, arrogant, inflammatory, and condescending, all without being particularly illuminating.  You surmise that an intelligent individual should quickly realize evolution’s veracity, yet you fail to provide any new evidence.  Worse, you do not address any of the gaping holes in the theory that lead so many reasoned people to question evolution.

If you were Chairman of the Board, what would you tell your Editor-in-chief after reading this?  Wouldn’t it be a picture of poetic justice to envision a board member reading Kelly’s letter, then glancing askance at Mr. Allen and saying, “Aren’t you the one that rushed to press that story about Piltdown Chicken a few years back that got us into so much trouble?” (see 09/27/2000 entry).  We’ll leave the look on Bill’s face to your imagination.  Good luck truck driving, Mr. Allen.
    A mere fictional flight of fancy, the above; the magazine honors Bill Allen and wishes him a fond farewell.  We are not privy to the reasons for his leaving.  (If Chris Johns sticks to his principles, the number of in-your-face evolutionary sermons should decline.)  But it bears repeating: never underestimate the power of a cogently-written letter to the editor.  We’d like to know if our coverage here at Creation-Evolution Headlines prompted you to join the ranks of the Brigade of 600, armed with the mighty pen.  Write here and share your letter.  If NG didn’t print it – and you think it was a finely crafted piece of work – maybe we can.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Look at how much ability is stored in a tiny bee brain.  If insects weren’t so small (most of them) we would certainly consider them some of the most awe-inspiring creatures on earth (see Bob Jensen Photography for incredibly beautiful insect photos).  Too bad some of them went bad after the initially harmonized creation.
    We rely on honeybees, our good friends.  Be nice to them.  They usually won’t resort to stinging unless they feel threatened, because for them it is a last resort.  Don’t swat at them if they are hovering over your picnic.  Relax and don’t panic; they are not after you.  Just wave your arms gently and continuously over the food, and eventually they will go somewhere else.  Let them be free to go pollinate flowers and get their own natural food.
    This article could stimulate a science project for an enterprising and fearless youngster, under proper care and supervision.  How long does it take the bee to realize it is off track?  How long does it take to find home?  What senses might it be using to re-orient itself?  Required introductory research should include the Moody Science classic, City of the Bees.  See also our 05/31/2001 entry about bee navigation.
Next headline on:  Zoology • Amazing Stories

Take out the word “evolutionary,” because the findings only show reproductive success.  Survivability does not necessarily imply advancement in complexity; it could just as well reflect good design.
    Lichens are often the pioneer organisms in a new habitat.  They contribute to the breakdown of rock and formation of soil.  Mosses, ferns and other organisms follow sometimes, and before long, a whole community of plants and animals can come to town.  In the fjords of New Zealand, for example, this happens on sheer cliff faces of rock.  After some years or decades of initial colonization by lichens, large trees can take root in the near-vertical cliffs.
    Lichens show tremendous variety in form and structure.  Some are beautifully colored.  The Dec. 2004 Creation Research Society Quarterly has a photo essay about lichens and their microscopic structure.  The internet has some nice photo galleries like this one at lichen.com.
Next headline on:  Plants and Botany • Amazing Stories

Kidwell believes that this is good news for evolutionists, but only because it removes a possible source of sampling bias.  But how can it be good news?  It removes an excuse.  Evolutionists cannot claim that the gaps are due to harder shells surviving better in the rocks.  It means the gaps, the trade secret of paleontology, are real.
Next headline on:  Fossils

She’s barking up the wrong tree.  No informed critic is advocating ignoring or discarding evolution.  Whether it can be classed with “fundamental understandings of the natural world” must not be merely assumed, but those on the design side of the controversy (see 01/24/2005 and 11/30/2004 entries and Evolution News blog) want evolution to be taught.  You can’t understand 20th century history or science without it.  Charlie’s little world cruise makes a nice story, and Haeckel’s little drawings make nice cartoons to get the teens to laugh.  Yes, teach evolution – all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly (see 01/17/2005, 12/30/2004, 11/29/2004, 11/19/2004 and 12/14/2004 entries, and more going back 5 years in these pages).  Teach especially the parts the Darwin Party doesn’t want you to know.  Here; we’ll help.  Try our draft outline of a suggested eight-part comprehensive curriculum on evolution:
Click here to continue—
Next headline on:  Evolution • Education • SETI

1. Cloning and Stem Cell Research: (see 02/08/2005 entry):  Leshner notes that “Some members of the public are finding certain lines of scientific research and their outcomes disquieting” (emphasis added in all quotes).  He elaborates:

   Examples of these strains in the relationship include sharp public divisions about therapeutic or research cloning and stem cell research.  Although many understand the potential benefits of such research, they also are troubled about scientists working so close to what they see as the essence and origins of human life.  Last year, ideology came dangerously close to publicly trumping science when the U.S. Congress failed by only two votes to defund a set of grants from the National Institutes of Health on sexual behavior, HIV/AIDS, and drug abuse that made religious conservatives uncomfortable, even though the research was critical to solving major public health problems.

   Speaking in the collective first person, Leshner apparently sympathizes with the attitude of many scientists: they should be able to do whatever they want....

   For many scientists, any such overlay of values on the conduct of science is anathema to our core principles and our historic success.  Within the limits of the ethical conduct of science with human or animal subjects, many believe that no scientifically answerable question should be out of bounds.  Bringing the power of scientific inquiry to bear on society’s most difficult questions is what we have done best, and that often means telling the world things that it might not initially like.

   What “ethical conduct” is, and what its limits are, Leshner seems to assume are common knowledge and need no definition.

2. Intelligent Design:  Since Leshner deems this subject hardly worth discussing, he dismisses it with a wave of the rhetorical hand:

   And, of course, the scientific community is enmeshed in a continuing battle to keep the nature of science clear in debates about whether schools should be allowed to teach non-science-based “intelligent design theory” [quotes in original] alongside evolution in science classrooms.

The common thread linking these examples is that science and its products are intersecting more frequently with certain human beliefs and values.  As science encroaches more closely on heavily value-laden issues,  members of the public are claiming a stronger role in both the regulation of science and the shaping of the research agenda.

Independence and objectivity in the shaping and conduct of science have been central to our successes and our ability to serve society.  Still, our recent experiences suggest that the values dimension is here to stay, certainly for a while, and that we need to learn to work within this new context.  Protesting the imposition of value-related constraints on science has been the usual response, but it doesn’t work because it doesn’t resonate with the public.
    An alternative is to adopt a much more inclusive approach that engages other communities assertively in discussing the meaning and usefulness of our work.  We should try to find common ground through open, rational discourse.  We have had some success with programs such as the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Ethical, Legal and Social Implications program.  Another example is the AAAS’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, which brings scientists together with religious leaders and ethicists to discuss scientific advances and how they relate to other belief and value systems.

For fun, reread his comments, and replace each instance of science and scientists with elitism and elitists.
    Leshner’s attitude toward his fellow citizens, and toward his fellow members of the human race, is disgusting.  He assumes what he thinks is sensible makes sense to everybody else.  He assumes that whatever he believes is science, and what anyone else believes is stupidity.  Irritated by having to spend an ounce of energy considering what anyone else thinks, he feels obligated to patronize them briefly enough to appease them, then get back to the business of “science” – i.e., complete freedom to do anything he wants, at taxpayer expense.  He has no idea what the “limits of ethical conduct” are, other than perhaps a vague recollection that some guy named Mengele did a few things he maybe should not have, a long time ago.
    Instead of talking about Mengele, let’s look at what is going on in North Korea, as reported by Priya Abraham in World Magazine Feb. 5.  Read and shudder at the horror of science gone berserk:

For one experiment, officials told her to hand out liquid-soaked cabbage in white buckets to 50 women.  “After the women ate it, blood came out from their mouths and their rectums,” she wrote.  “It looked like something had exploded inside them.  In just a few minutes, they were all kneeling and falling forward.  The blood that came out of them went for five to six feet.  There was pandemonium and screaming.”
    Officials did similar tests on other men and women, in all about three times a year, Ms. Lee said.  Other experiments involved poisonous gas once or twice a year.  Officials donned protective suits and threw what looked like paintballs on the ground, forcing 30 to 200 prisoners to walk through the gas they emitted.  The prisoners fell over and cramped up.
    Eventually the death toll from the experiments was killing off too many prisoners and hampering camp officials’ ability to meet work quotas.  When the director complained to the state security bureau, they sent a terse reply, Ms. Lee said: “‘It is a Kim Jong Il directive: The chemical and biological weapons are needed for the battlefield.  It is meaningless to conduct these experiments on animals.’  The head of the camp was left speechless.”

Undoubtedly, such science would cross the ethical line in Leshner’s mind.  But how so?  Are not humans just animals?  What’s the essential difference between experimenting on fully-grown humans and on human embryos that have the full complement of human genes?  Where in the continuum of life and growth do you draw the arbitrary line?  To think that “science” knows but “religious conservatives” do not is the height of arrogance.
    What might “resonate with the public” is a little humility, for a change.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

Don’t let the Darwin Party charlatans get away with hiding their personification fallacies in passive-voice verbs and subjunctives.  Who transitioned the cellular technology from analog to digital?  How did this entity do it?  Who enabled the evolution of complex organisms?  Who designed the A-to-D converter?  How was the digital programming done, without a Programmer?  Who designed the advanced controls, to control what?  Who embedded the networking?  Were advances in aviation brought about by mutations and natural selection?
    This quotation is so utterly silly it defies comprehension, yet Science printed it, while permitting another Priest of Charlie to vituperate against intelligent design theory (see 02/11/2005 entry)  This shows that the Darwin Party network dynamics result in signal degradation.  Their closed infrastructure doesn’t need an upgrade; it is hopelessly outdated and broken.  The signal-to-noise ratio has gotten worse than TV snow.  Donate the hardware to the Cartoon Network; maybe they can have fun with it.  Plug into ID Net for state of the art, high-definition, crystal-clear viewing.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Stories.

Many paleontologists have doubted that such a seemingly complex adaptation could have originated more than once in mammals, but according to the authors of the paper, the evidence of T. trusleri [the reported shrew-size fossil] indicates that it did.
    “Nothing like that has ever been found before,” said Tom Rich, PhD, lead author of the paper and curator of vertebrate paleontology at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

“Recent studies of jaw and ear function in primitive mammal-like reptiles indicate that the larger angular bone may have supported an eardrum while still part of the lower jaw,” Hopson said.  But once the dentary bone made a new jaw hinge with the skull in the immediate predecessor of mammals, the accessory jawbones may have abandoned their job of supporting the jaw and evolved exclusively into the middle ear sound-transmitting function.

As always, the independent variable in this equation is Darwinian evolution.  Everything else must adjust to keep the story going.  Improbabilities?  No problem; just create new words like homoplasy that sound scientific, and toss a little pixie dust of natural selection to corral the lucky mutations for engineering complex systems as required. 
    This story looks uglier and uglier the more you peer below the surface to see the shenanigans the Darwin Party is pulling to make their pet theory look good in the face of monstrous problems.  Take away the assumption of evolution and they have no leg to stand on.  Time to blow the whistle on this scandal.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Mammals • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

The mangrove has an amazing capacity for regeneration with its floating seed pods that can cross continents like rafts, then orient themselves upright and plant themselves in shallow water.  The story is told in an excellent family film about seed dispersal, Journey of Life.  Mangrove forests create lush habitats for many species of animals and birds.  Now, we find that they also create safety nets for humans.
Next headline on:  Plants and Botany • Amazing Stories

It seems unlikely that ants would lose their wings through evolution, then re-evolve this behavior as a poor substitute.  Surely the power of natural selection would have favored wings evolving again to let the ants fly back home rather than forcing them to walk straight up against gravity.  Why select lucky mutations for controlled descent when wings were so easy to evolve?  It must have been a piece of cake if they showed up in reptiles, mammals, birds and insects.  Didn’t these ants have Haeckel’s recapitulation memory for how to evolve wings all over again?  After all, walking sticks did, we are told (see 05/28/2003 entry).  “Ah,” young disciples,” Exalted Master Charlie gently scolds, “One must not presume on the path Mother Nature will take.  A bumbling tinkerer is She.”  So in her toyshop, she apparently forgot how to produce rubber-band airplanes, and decided to make miniature Buzz Lightyears, who mastered the art of “falling with style.”
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Animals • Evolutionary Theory • Physics • Amazing Stories

Copying animal designs – biomimetics – is one of the hottest topics in engineering, for good reason.  Here is a creature that has the capabilities of a comic book superhero.  Sadly, both articles attribute this feat to evolution: “octopuses have evolved the optimal design,” says National Geographic, and the neurobiologists say in a wordier way,

Fetching seems to be an example of evolutionary selection of solutions that are similar even though they are based on quite different mechanisms – on morphology in arthropod and vertebrate limbs, and on stereotypical motor control in the octopus.  This functional convergence suggests that a kinematically constrained, articulated limb with two segments of almost equal length is the optimal design for accurately moving an object from one point to another.

This illustrates again how many countless times the scientific community and news outlets merely assume evolution is capable of any miracle needed, without telling us how the blind forces of nature could ever produce engineering design that humbles our best robotics experts.
    Some amazing footage of a particular octopus that can mimic many other animals can be found in a recorded lecture by Carl Kerby, “What is the best evidence God created?”, available on DVD from the Answers in Genesis bookstore.  The new film Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution III has startling footage of a similar marine creature, the cuttlefish, with some other fantastic capabilities.
Next headline on:  Marine Life • Physics • Amazing Stories

Governments are ramping up funding for both basic and applied stem cell work, setting up new institutes, programs, and grant schemes, and providing incentives for private companies to join the effort.  Giving these efforts a further boost, the region also has legions of lab workers willing to log long hours, and increasing numbers of expatriate scientists are returning home to work in the flourishing environment.

If you thought abortion was bad, and should have been stopped at the starting gate, wait till you see what the mad scientists might do with their latest tinker toys, genetically modified human embryos.  What started as moral compassion for poor women in the early debates over abortion has turned into a multibillion dollar industry, replete with lawyers and SIGs who fight any attempt to restrict their business, as concerned citizens gasp at bags full of unborn babies in trash bins, and senators investigate black markets for body parts.  How many of you believe that, this time, the proponents of this new crusade really have the interests of the suffering in mind?  Oh – and which religious tradition, did they say, is the only one “hesitating” at the sight of the leaking dike?
How will we explain this to our children?  Will they even care?
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Which side wants to air the debate?  Which side wants to shut off debate?  What does that tell you?
    Sample line from Behe’s op-ed: “Still, some critics claim that science by definition can’t accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there.  But we can’t settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore....”
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design

Bateson quotes someone who thought the results of Gregor Mendel were too good to be true, but for research done with the integrity and care he exercised, maybe it was too good for the typical Darwin Party scientist who trades in myths and stories.  It’s hard to know if Mendel was careless with exceptions or not; one thing is for sure, his laws of genetics have stood the test of time.
    Good advice, but can one get “old virtues” out of Darwinism?  Did honesty evolve?  Does integrity correlate with fitness?  We know who followed the values that sprang from Darwinism (see 02/03/2005 entry).  Science gained nothing ethical from the Darwinian revolution and the totalitarian regime that followed.  On the contrary, Darwinism liberated scientists to maintain their philosophy in spite of the evidence.  It allowed them to cover up the data of design with the thumb of imagination.  Most of their data are exceptions (Cambrian explosion, complexity of the cell, inadequacy of natural selection), such that their thumb covers the whole slide.  Even the thumb is an exception.  Scientific integrity would mean abandoning Darwinism; it’s amazing Science would print such a sermon.
    The scientific method is essentially codified integrity.  The study of any natural phenomenon presupposes a love of the truth, a desire to avoid bias and carelessness, and a commitment to follow the evidence where it leads.  Honesty, skepticism and integrity are just as necessary for any intellectual endeavor, whether history, theology, research, journalism, leadership, and dealings with oneself and others.  These values derive from the Bible, not The Origin of Species.  Bateson should reference his sources.
Next headline on:  Politics and Ethics

Dr Christophe Fraser, from Imperial College London, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and one of the authors, says: “Microbiologists have assumed for some time that some disease strains spread more successfully than others.  In fact we found that the variation in the communities we studied could be explained by chance.  This was surprising, especially considering all the potential advantages one pathogen can have over another, such as antibiotic resistance and differences in host immunity.”
    Dr Bill Hanage, from Imperial College London, and also one of the authors, says: “When we look at a sample and see that some strains are much more common than others, it’s tempting to think that there must be something special about them.  In fact, they could just be the lucky ones, and that’s what it looks like here.  Most of the variation in the spread of these pathogens can be explained by chance alone.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Would survival of the luckiest generate all the richness and complexity of the living world?  This seems to be a very non-Darwinian way of looking at biology.  It also seems to undermine one of the key evidences of evolution in the Darwin Party’s debate arsenal: the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
    The second story reminds us that if biologists are still surprised by things happening right under their noses that have been studied for over a century, how can we trust their confidence about millions of years ago?
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The researchers discovered that in yeast, key components needed to create a machine are produced ahead of time, and kept in stock.  When a new machine is needed, a few crucial last pieces are synthesized and then the apparatus is assembled.  Holding off on the last components enables the cell to prevent building machines at the wrong times.  That’s a different scenario from what happens in bacteria, which usually start production of all the parts, from scratch, whenever they want to get something done.
    “We saw a clear pattern as to how the complexes are assembled,” says Søren Brunak from DTU.  It’s unusual to find such concrete patterns in biology, compared to physics for example, due to the evolutionary forces that change living systems.  But using this new model, the underlying principle became very clear.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

What would you want to bet that they will find out bacteria have assembly processes just as complex as those in eukaryotes?  Planning ahead for future need, machinery, assembly; that doesn’t sound like the language of chance.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Amazing Stories

Basically, there are two approaches to the ‘minimal cell’: the top-down and the bottom-up.  The top-down approach aims at simplifying existing small organisms, possibly arriving at a minimal genome.  Some research to this end takes Buchnera, a symbiotic bacterium that lives inside aphids, as a rewarding example (A. Moya, Univ. Valencia).  This analysis is complemented by an investigation of the duplication and divergence of genes (A. Lazcano, Univ. Mexico).  Remarkably, these approaches converged on the conclusion that genes dealing with RNA biosynthesis are absolutely indispensable in this framework.  This may be linked to the idea of life’s origins in an ‘RNA world’, although such an inference is far from immediate.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

There was general agreement that a top-down approach will not take us quite to the bottom, to the minimal possible cells in chemical terms.  All putative cells, however small, will have a genetic code and a means of transcribing and translating that code.  Given the complexity of this system, it is difficult to believe, either logically or historically, that the simplest living chemical system could have had these components.

The bottom-up approach aims at constructing artificial chemical supersystems that could be considered alive.  No such experimental system exists yet; at least one component is always missing.  Metabolism seems to be the stepchild in the family: what most researchers in the field used to call metabolism is usually a trivial outcome of the fact that both template replication and membrane growth need some material input.  This input is usually simplified to a conversion reaction from precursors to products.
    Even systems missing one or the other component can, of course, advance our understanding.  Such systems could be called ‘infrabiological’, because they are not quite biological but are similar to living systems in some crucial respects: elementary combinatorics suggests that out of metabolism (M), boundary (B) and template (T) three dual systems can be built – MT, MB, TB.  In particular, coupling of compartment formation with some form of template replication (TB) is the subject of many experiments.

Clearly, there is a divide between the top-down and bottom-up approaches, and between theoretical and experimental investigations.  In the future, for example, one would like to see more realistic models of the primordial genome and, conversely, an experimental approach to the lipid world.  An aim in the coming years will be to bridge those gaps — hence the great value of meetings such as this.

In the movie Back to the Future, Doc had mere seconds to connect two ends of an electrical cable before Marty hit the wire.  When they became accidentally disconnected, he slid down the cable in a desperate attempt to reconnect them, only to find they didn’t quite meet.  At the climactic moment, when the predicted lightning bolt sent 1.21 gigawatts of power through the wire, Doc himself momentarily became the conductor: the circuit was closed, and all lived happily ever after.  How he survived to celebrate by dancing in the street – well, that’s Hollywood.
    Anything is possible at the Universal Studios back lot, but biologists have to live in the real world.  Doc Szathmáry is dealing with two ends that are not inches apart, but light-years apart.  To make up for it, he has the long arms of imagination to promise a happy ending back in the future, where the story always ends, “To Be Continued....”  But as the plot becomes increasingly convoluted and implausible, how many sequels will the spectators tolerate?  They’ll go watch Rudyard Kipling’s action adventure drama instead: “East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet” – except by intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Dumb Stories

Sorry, Charlie, you can’t have it both ways.  If the law of the jungle is right for biology, then what is, is right.  After all, don’t the physicists say nature selected the universe we were born in?  And don’t the chemists say nature selected the building blocks of life?  So even if it means philosophical suicide, you can choose your path, but you can’t choose the consequences.  You can’t appeal to the nobler motives, because they are illusions in your view, so give it your best shot on the Malthusian dogpile (see 02/03/2005 entry).
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

Excuse me, but after a hundred years of forcing selection to go one way, which nature does not do, are you saying that corn still only produces corn oil, and not something else?  Are you hinting that breeders have hit a plateau at 20%?  That with all the tools of genetics to look for a known effect, they are not sure which genes are producing it?
    Corn with more oil is still corn, and chickens with more meat are still chickens, but natural selection is very different from artificial selection.  You can’t claim that these experiments are going to fuel “natural” selection.  Let’s put these hyper-specialized breeds out into the wild to compete, and see if they keep getting oilier and meatier.  That would be like expecting a poodle to become more poodly in the dog-eat-dog world of the Yellowstone wolf-pack ecosystem.  Stop equivocating with the word selection.  Artificial selection is intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Botany • Genetics and DNA • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Why were the Jews the target of Nazi genocide?  Weikart says the historical evidence is inconclusive, although it appears that Hitler drew more from a popularized street Darwinism than from the scholarly tracts of intellectuals.  Although anti-Semitism was always a feature of Darwinian social dogma, Hitler made it the centerpiece of Nazi social policy.
    Weikart concludes by reiterating that Darwinism alone does not explain the German descent into Nazi darkness.  Political and social factors come into play, as well as the nihilism of Nietzsche and others.  Nevertheless, the dependence of the Nazi social vision upon Darwinian ethics is so great that Hitler cannot be properly understood apart from it.   (Emphasis added.)

In an online article by professor Weikart, Does Darwinism Devalue Human Life?, he discusses Darwinian ethics in relation not only to Hitler, but to modern trends in medical research and social policy.  Read the first two paragraphs to get hooked.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Politics and Ethics

This team may not have the last word, either.  Readers should learn from this story that even among secular geologists, interpretations can contradict one another by orders of magnitude.  This is not just a story about dating methods, but also feeds into the debate about global warming.  Their paper begins, “The recent history of East Antarctica is key to understanding the response of large ice sheets to climate forcing.”  Beware political decisions based on advice from geologists who read present data and weave stories about things that happened millions of years ago, as if it will help forecast future events.  Considering revisions this large, politicians might be better off forecasting climate from analysis of layers in a calf’s liver.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

Can your pet cat or dog sing?  Fly?  Talk?  Migrate across the world?  Solve a puzzle as fast as a bird?  Don’t let the small size fool you.  Birds are compressed packages of extreme design that are a wonder to behold.  The diversity of skills found among birds is mind-boggling.  A dinosaur couldn’t figure all this out if it wanted to, even if it knew how to select those rare lucky mutations.
Next headline on:  Birds • Amazing Stories

Introns and the complex molecular machines that process them (spliceosomes – see 09/12/2002 and 09/17/2004 entries) are still mysterious, but does anyone see a neat picture of evolution here?  Why would some introns be ultra-conserved (see 05/27/2004 entry), and others be removed?  Evolutionary theory is not helping explain introns or spliceosomes, and may be missing entirely the picture of what is going on.  Why not approach the data from the perspective of intelligent design and entropy?  The complexity was apparently present from the start.  Where did it come from?  The notions of ancestry in this picture are fictional.  The assumed trees are filled with gaps.  What seems apparent is devolution, not evolution.
    Some have suggested that introns provide opportunities to expand the genetic code through alternative splicing, so that more information can be gleaned out of a compact code.  Others have pointed to robustness and repair as possible functions.  Let a new generation of geneticists approach this problem without fogged-up Darwinian glasses on.  They certainly cannot see things any worse than the Darwin Party has done so far.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA

Dean quotes someone who claims “the practice of avoiding the topic was widespread, particularly in districts where many people adhere to fundamentalist faiths.”  But why would teachers fear discussing it because of that?  It’s open season on “fundamentalist” faiths (loaded words for Bible-believing Christians).  Most teachers have no problem with attributing everything bad in the world to Christianity.  Maybe the students from those districts are better at asking the hard questions that give Darwin Party biology teachers stomach aches (see 06/14/2004 commentary).
    Most creationists support the teaching of evolution, as long as the problems and controversies are taught instead of one-sided indoctrination.  Teaching evolution can be a valuable lesson on how smart people can believe dumb things.  So don’t avoid it; let’s open the Darwin Hall of Shame and talk about Piltdown man, pigtooth man, peppered moths, doctored drawings of embryos, National Geographic misinfomercials and all the rest.  Students need a little humor to break up the day.  Be creative; with February 12 coming, you can celebrate Darwin Day with games and contests, and even sing some evolution songs.  Evolution teaching can be fun!
    Sweeping such an important controversy under the rug is not a healthy educational policy.  Like it or not, evolution has had a major influence on the world for 140 years.  Today, the subject is in a state of major ferment and reconsideration.  The teacher doesn’t have to take sides.  Many bright young people will actually wake up to science if evolution is taught as a controversial subject: that is, if they get a chance to exercise critical thinking about the evidence for and against it, and can debate the issues in class openly without ridicule, rather than hearing a borrrrrring one-sided sales pitch.  It’s only the teachers on a mission to indoctrinate blank slates into the Cult of Charlie that have anything to fear.
    For those teachers still afraid, we have a simple solution; get the film Where Does the Evidence Lead? and show it as a six-part series (10 minutes each).  It will take you off the hook, and teach the students sufficient information to cover the curriculum requirement, without worries about religion in the biology class.
Next headline on:  Education • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

• Wake up call:  The moon Pan sets up wakes along the edge of the Encke gap that persist long after it has passed, and interact with other wave trains in complex ways.  The image shows a sort of “corduroy” pattern that results (picture).  “The persistence of the wakes far from Pan and the inferred lack of damping may signify the importance of collective effects and self-gravity in maintaining coherent structure far from the moon,” because there is less wave damping going on than dynamical models predict.
• Straw poll:  A new ring phenomenon called “straw” was observed at fine scales in some A ring regions (picture).  It consists of narrow, quasi-parallel variations in brightness that “may be evidence of different physical manifestations of particle aggregation, caused by either gravitational instabilities or kinematical effects or both.”  In addition, “mottled” and “ropy” features were observed in the A ring and on the outer edge of the Encke gap, respectively (picture).  “We surmise that the straw and ropy features are a product of enhanced kinematical and self-gravitational effects associated with passage of ring particles, and the consequent squeezing of their streamlines, through the crests of density waves or wakes.”  The mottled features may be traffic jams among particles that spread into the straw and ropy features.  More pictures
• Prometheus steals ring fire:  the potato-shaped moonlet Prometheus, just inside the F-ring, causes some of the kinks and clumps seen by Voyager, and steals fine material from the ring (picture).  “These observations indicate that Prometheus has swept material from the region occupied by its orbit.”
• Phoebe jeebies:  The outermost retrograde moon Phoebe is dirty with a layer of dark material over ice (pictures).  The big crater, recently named Jason (picture), shows landslides of the dark material uncovering bright ice.  The dark regolith (soil) is more porous than that on Jupiter’s moons.  No eruptions of material were detected in UV (picture), as would have been expected if Phoebe used to be a comet. 
• Iapetus myopitus:  Whatever darkened the leading side of Saturn’s third largest moon happened after the craters formed, because it left a thin dark layer on them without disturbing them.  The bright side looks the same age.  Feathery edges on the transition zone suggest the dark material is less than 1 km thick, and appears emplaced by ballistic transport.  The fact that the transition is equidistant from the equatorial ridge suggests a connection; did dark material eject from it?
      Its equatorial ridge stretches for 110 degrees in longitude and reaches 20km (12 mi) and more in height, with steep walls and parallel ridges in places (gallery; see also 01/07/2005 entry).  Parts of it show impact craters, meaning it is not the most youthful feature on the moon.  If the dark material erupted from this ridge, why are the walls so steep, and where did the heat come from?  Since “there is no presently known heat source (such as conventional tidal heating) large enough for such extensive resurfacing of an entire hemisphere postdating the cratering epoch,” scientists favor a source outside the moon.
• Winds of change:  Saturn has slowed by 1% since Voyager flew by, for unknown reasons.  Its equatorial winds are also 20 to 45% slower.  This might be due to extreme seasonal changes caused by varying shadows from the rings, that leads to vertical wind shear.  Scientists cannot account for the high winds in terms of Saturn’s angular momentum.  No one predicted that Saturn’s rotation period could slow down due to storm activity, and “the physics involved are far from understood.”
• Saturn and Thor:  Saturn has cyclonic storms with powerful lightning discharges that last for 5 hours or more (diagram).  Big storms spin off little storms, and little oval-shaped storms can merge together (picture).  Saturn’s lightning is a million times more intense than Earth’s biggest thunderbolt.
• Sooty air:  Saturn has twice the carbon as Jupiter in its atmosphere, and seven times that of the sun, in the form of methane.  Scientists feel this is consistent with the core accretion model of the formation of the giant planets, but without knowing Uranus and Neptune better, it might be coincidence.
• Thick, bright rings are cool:  Surprisingly, the denser rings were cooler than the thinner ones (picture).  One would expect more collisions, and higher temperatures, in the thicker regions.  The infrared instrument scientists could not figure out, also, why the lit side of the rings were cooler than the unlit side, compared to Voyager measurements.
• Ring dirt:  Fine radial structure in the rings, seen in UV (picture), indicate “collisional transport and recent renewal events” within the last 10 to 100 million years, a tiny fraction of the assumed age of Saturn.  The scientists suggest that bright ringlets are formed when small moonlets with fresh ice inside are shattered by impacts.  The bright rings then gradually darken and spread out.
• Age limit of E-ring:  The amount of oxygen lost in the E-ring during late 2003 and early 2004 measurements (see 07/02/2004 entry and diagram) imply an upper limit for the age of the ring: “Over a period of 100 million years, the loss rate inferred from these observations would consume the entire E-ring mass, even including postulated parent bodies” (italics added).  This limit would be much lower without the parent bodies.  The mass loss rate is 10 times higher than earlier estimates.
• Energy punch:  Saturn’s magnetosphere is smaller than Jupiter’s, but the UV instrument showed a surprise:

  The UVIS data show that the neutral gas in the magnetosphere is subject to transient phenomena that insert large amounts of icy ring material into the central plasma and deposit a large amount of energy into the plasma.  Our results emphasize the completely different states of the Jupiter and Saturn magnetospheres: Saturn’s neutral/ion mixing ratio is 30,000 times greater.  The energy-deposition rate in the Saturn inner magnetosphere that is required to maintain the state of the system in the 3 to 6 R_S region is estimated at 1.4 x 10¹⁰ W.  This energy is mainly consumed in removing mass from the system. (Emphasis added.)

• Radio Saturn:  Saturn whistles and hisses in radio waves, indicating powerful electrostatic effects in the rings and atmosphere.  Radio and plasma wave scientists (website) listened to impacts during the ring plane crossings (audio).  Microscopic particles hit the spacecraft at rates of 2000 per second or more, depending on the sizes of the particles.  To listen to Saturn radio on the air, go to the team’s audio library at U of Iowa.
• Ring air:  The mass and plasma spectrometers sniffed neutral oxygen around the rings.  This means the ring system has a persistent oxygen atmosphere of its own.  The oxygen forms from the dissociation of water in the icy ring particles; ions tend to stick to the ring particles, but neutral oxygen does not.  This proves that oxygen alone cannot be an unambiguous biomarker (i.e., a sign of life) when astrobiologists probe the spectra of nearby stars and planets; see EurekAlert and SaturnDaily articles.  The plasma spectrometer scientists remarked, “We have observed important features in the plasma distributions, dynamics, and composition of Saturn’s magnetosphere that challenge current models.”
• Dust fling:  The dust analyzer (picture) found large amounts of 20-nanometer particles streaming away from Saturn at 100 km per second (216,000 mph).  They seem to be made up of carbon, silicon, oxygen and iron impurities from the rings, mainly the A ring.  Collisions create the dust particles.  They are accelerated by Saturn’s magnetic field and flung out of the system.

For anyone who was intrigued by the Voyager discoveries back in 1981, these are great days indeed.  The Saturn system is a far more dynamic and complex panorama than anyone could have expected.  Did you enjoy getting this much detail in this entry?  If so, write us and let us know whether the effort to summarize all this material was helpful and interesting; thanks to those who have written in already.
Next headline on:  Solar System
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Without inflation, this large-scale smoothness appears quite puzzling.  According to ordinary (noninflationary) big bang cosmology, these photons should never have had a chance to come to thermal equilibrium: The regions in the sky from which they were released would have been about 100 times farther apart than even light could have traveled between the time of the big bang and the time of the photons’ release.  Much like the flatness problem, inflation provides a simple and generic reason for the observed homogeneity of the CMB: Today’s observable universe originated from a much smaller region than that in the noninflationary scenarios.  This much-smaller patch could easily have become smooth before inflation began.  Inflation would then stretch this small homogeneous region to encompass the entire observable universe.

The union of string theory and cosmology is barely past its honeymoon, but so far the marriage appears to be a happy one.  Inflation, from its inception, was a phenomenologically very successful idea that has been in need of a fundamental theory to constrain its many variations.  String theory, from its inception, has been a very well-constrained mathematical theory in need of a phenomenology to provide contact with observation.  The match seems perfect, but time will be needed before we know for sure whether either marriage partner can fulfill the needs of the other.  In the meantime, ideas are stirring that have the potential to radically alter our ideas about fundamental laws of physics.

Although the rules of string theory are unique, the low-energy laws that describe the physics that we can in practice observe would depend strongly on which vacuum state our universe was built upon.  Other vacuum states could give rise to different values of “fundamental” constants, or even to altogether different types of “elementary” particles, and even different numbers of large spatial dimensions!  Furthermore, because inflation is generically eternal, one would expect that the resulting eternally inflating spacetime would sample every one of these states, each an infinite number of times.  Because all of these states are possible, the important problem is to learn which states are probable.  This problem involves comparison of one infinity with another, which is in general not a well-defined question.  Proposals have been made and arguments have been given to justify them, but no conclusive solution to this problem has been found.

Another possibility, now widely discussed, is that nothing determines the choice of vacuum for our universe; instead, the observable universe is viewed as a tiny speck within a multiverse that contains every possible type of vacuum.  If this point of view is right, then a quantity such as the electron-to-proton mass ratio would be on the same footing as the distance between our planet and the sun.  Neither is fixed by the fundamental laws, but instead both are determined by historical accidents, restricted only by the fact that if these quantities did not lie within a suitable range, we would not be here to make the observations.  This idea—that the laws of physics that we observe are determined not by fundamental principles, but instead by the requirement that intelligent life can exist to observe them—is often called the anthropic principle.  Although in some contexts this principle might sound patently religious, the combination of inflationary cosmology and the landscape of string theory gives the anthropic principle a scientifically viable framework.

There are both positive and negative contributions, but physicists have been trying for decades to find some reason why the positive and negative contributions should cancel, so far to no avail.  It seems even more hopeless to find a reason why the net energy density should be nonzero, but 120 orders of magnitude smaller than its expected value.  However, if one adopts the anthropic point of view, it was argued as early as 1987 by Weinberg that an explanation is at hand: If the multiverse contained regions with all conceivable values of the cosmological constant, galaxies and hence life could appear only in those very rare regions where the value is small, because otherwise the huge gravitational repulsion would blow matter apart without allowing it to collect into galaxies.
    The landscape of string theory and the evolution of the universe through the landscape are of course still not well understood, and some have argued that the landscape might not even exist.  It seems too early to draw any firm conclusions, but clearly the question of whether the laws of physics are uniquely determined, or whether they are environmental accidents, is an issue too fundamental to ignore.

Even with the evidence in favor of inflation now stronger than ever, much work remains.  Inflationary cosmology has always been a framework for studying the interconnections between particle physics and gravitation—a collection of models rather than a unique theory.  The next generation of astronomical detectors should be able to distinguish between competing inflationary models, whittling down the large number of options to a preferred few.

We had to show you in their own words what these MIT eggheads are saying.  Guth, whose name stands for Grand Unified Theory Huckster, has been propounding his “framework” for 25 years now, and has become famous for it.  But what is inflation, other than an untestable, ad hoc proposal invented to get around insurmountable obstacles in the Big Bang cosmology of the 70s?  Astronomers were well aware of the flatness problem and the horizon problem; with a sweep of the hand and some abstruse math, con artist Guth in his magic show wagon said “no problem,” we’ll just stretch the universe and the problems will no longer be visible.  A viewer objects that he has just diluted the particles to negligible density.  “No problem” again; we’ll pick the right vacuum state to make quantum fields resonate, such that their energy produces new particles out of nothing.  Another viewer objects that one cannot determine the conditions by chance to rig the outcome.  ”Well, then,” the huckster chimes, “if it were not so, we would not be here arguing about it now, would we?  Hmmmmm?”
    Don’t be fooled by Guth’s shameless claims that observations are confirming his little something-from-nothing trick (see 06/23/2001 entry).  When he invented inflation to get around known problems, he cannot turn around and say that his trick predicted that it would solve them.  The fact that he turns to the “patently religious” anthropic principle is a clear sign of desperation.  His model does not account for the finely-tuned parameters of the universe that permit galaxies, stars and life, and invoking an infinity of universes to keep chance in the running is patently unscientific.  Don’t be fooled by the math, either; it just means he got good grades in calculus and knows how to move Greek symbols around according to some rules.  No amount of mathematical manipulation can save a proposition from bad assumptions.  When your math is off by 120 orders of magnitude and forces you to compare infinities, you have lost all contact with reality; you’re just playing games.
    Guth and Kaiser need to take up truck driving.  That would get them out of their ivory towers at MIT and into the real world, where they would be forced to look at trees, mountains, weather, ecology and all the other observable things on our privileged planet that are inexplicable by chance: realities that proclaim design, purpose, intention.  While driving down the road, Guth should pop in a cassette of Bob Berman’s hellfire sermon (see 10/06/2004 entry).
Next headline on:  Cosmology
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