“In the place of the contemporary conception of God, a personal God, God as a Spirit, God as a Being, Triune, or even a unitary God, the conception of a ‘holy law of evolution’ will emerge.... The thought of pure materialism cannot satisfy; we need something that will meet our desire for imagination and that does not contradict serious and honest thought.  We have this in the conception of a ‘holy law of evolution,’ a concept, which we piously call Providence”
Moritz von Egidy (1895), evolutionary ethicist, quoted by Richard Weikart in From Darwin to Hitler, p. 62.

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07/29/2005 Update on “young” Enceladus has just reported: go to 7/14/2005 story and read about the new claim of icy volcanos!

New Planet Discovered Beyond Pluto; Another Has a Moon   07/30/2005    
A 10th planet, the biggest since Pluto was found 75 years ago, has been discovered.  Late Friday, a JPL press release announced the find made in January by Dr. Mike Brown of Caltech in research partly funded by NASA.  The planet, temporarily designated 2003 UB313 until a name is approved, is three times farther than Pluto and is estimated to be 1.5 times as big, though its actual size is uncertain.  Brown is confident it is bigger than Pluto.  The object is currently 97 times farther from the sun than Earth.  It has a highly-inclined orbit in a region known as the Kuiper Belt.  See also the Space.com, Spacedaily.com, BBC and Planetary Society reports.
    Another smaller Kuiper Belt object (KBO) announced the same day, though smaller than Pluto, has a moon.  Designated 2003 EL61, it was actually discovered in 2003 but took awhile for its orbit to be determined.  The discovery of both these objects will probably revive the debate over the definition of a planet.  There seems to be a continuum of sizes of KBOs out there; it is even possible larger ones than the new one remain to be discovered.  Alan Boss is not sure tiny Pluto and its kin deserve to be in the same class as Jupiter and Saturn.

Since so many Kuiper Belt objects have been discovered in the last couple of decades, this is not quite the big news it might have been; still, new planets have historically been considered spectacular discoveries.  Uranus launched William Herschel to fame in the late 18th century, and Neptune led to a well-known priority dispute between Adams and Leverrier in the the 19th.  Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930 was a monumental task of searching through photographic plates.  Now, we know there are many other rocky bodies out there beyond Neptune and far past Pluto.  Having a 10th planet will certainly change the textbooks and might turn out to be one of those historical announcements you will tell your grandchildren about.  Just hope they don’t name it Darwin or Huxley or something.  (After Pluto, is another Disney character in the lineup?)
    The intriguing thing about the other object is, why does it still have a moon?  One would think that, after four billion years, a tiny object 1% the size of its parent, in orbit around a small object having low gravity to begin with, would have been swept away long ago.  The shortage of objects to form it by collisions and the unlikelihood of its being captured contribute to the puzzle.  Yet it is one of several (including Pluto) to have a satellite, according to Space.com.  We’ll have to scrutinize their explanations for this unexpected pairing (see also 10/05/2003 and 05/14/2003 entries).
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

Bad news for the Darwin Party.  What will they do when his racist writings become public (09/13/2002), and the world can see exposed his connivances with the Four Musketeers to shut off opposition to his little black book? (See 10/24/2002 and 01/06/2004 entries).  What will they do when the intelligent design movement puts links everywhere to their favorite quote? “A fair result can only be obtained by balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”  Great idea by Cambridge.  Now Charlie can be caught in his own web.
Next headline on:  Darwin

It takes a desperate Darwin junky to get high on tailpipe exhaust.  They should be weeping over their sins, seeing complex advanced molecules far too early for their cosmological models, but what are they doing instead?  Hallucinating with poison, making deadly molecules come alive in their imaginations.  How and when did science ever sink to this level?  Hydrogen is a building block of life, for goodness’ sake, and so are electrons.  Do we conclude that we have found the “building blocks of life” in a CRT?  Publicists go out of their way to put the L word in any cosmological story because they think it’s sexier and will attract the public attention.  If so, the Great Unwashed have only themselves to blame for giving birth to new suckers every minute.  Actually, they probably don’t even read this stuff.  The problem is with the Washed on the outside but not on the inside.
Next headline on:  Cosmology • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

Did that little paean to evolution warm your bosom?  More importantly, did it contribute one whit to this article?  Cochella and Green, bless their Darwinista hearts, have illustrated again the freakish juxtaposition of intelligence and nonsense that characterizes evolutionary jargon.  It seems like a kind of schizophrenia or mystery religion to the uninitiated to hear high fidelity, quality control, optimization, genetic code and other design words ascribed to mindless processes of evolution.  Do they explain how this incredible system evolved?  Of course not; being brainwashed materialists, they just assume it had to, so it did.
    Everyone who has DNA should learn something about those aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (see 09/16/2004 entry and links in the commentary).  It’s a shame these high-tech machines in our bodies and in all living things have been given such geeky names; they are really remarkable in their specificity and accuracy.  More importantly, they constitute a classic logical proof of design, because they know two languages and are able to translate one into the other.  Here’s how Cochella and Green introduce them:

While the accuracy of DNA replication and transcription depend only on cognate base pair selection, translation depends on an additional, base-pairing-independent reaction that must be carried out with high specificity.  Each tRNA must be covalently attached to a specific amino acid – aminoacylated – preserving an unambiguous codon-amino acid correspondence known as the genetic code.  This reaction is carried out by aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases specific for each amino acid and a corresponding group of tRNAs (isoacceptors).  These enzymes must therefore recognize two substrates: first, a group of tRNAs which share a collection of ‘identity elements’ and second, an amino acid that may be distinguished by small differences in side-chain properties.

Having one language or code is proof enough of design, but possessing the ability to translate one into another requires a language convention – something never observed to be a product of chance or natural law, but always known to be the result of intelligence: whether with two intelligent beings communicating, or interacting programs that were produced by intelligent agents.  This should be clear to anyone not lobotomized by Darwinian education, but look how these authors explain it by just waving the evolutionary magic wand.  They are discussing how these machines can distinguish between very similar amino acids.  Watch the hocus pocus:

How do synthetases deal with this?  The aminoacylation reaction, which takes place at a site of the enzyme called the synthetic site, occurs in two steps.  First the amino acid is activated by adenylation (consuming ATP) and then it is transferred to the tRNA (releasing AMP).  Steric exclusion of amino acids with larger side-chains and recognition of specific properties of each amino acid generally make this synthetic site specific enough so that only the correct amino acid can be activated and transferred.  But amino acids having similar properties to and a smaller size than the cognate amino acid can be misactivated at frequencies that are too high to maintain an unambiguous code.  As a consequence, enzymes facing this problem have evolved a second active site, distinct from the synthetic site, called the editing site, where misactivated amino acids or misacylated tRNAs are hydrolyzed.

Did you catch that?  Astonishing! (see the Fairy Godmother song, 06/27/2005 commentary.)  Here were machines already accurate enough for most instances, but since there was a “need” for an “unambiguous code,” and some amino acids were so similar that mistakes leaked through, well – we are told, no problem– evolution to the rescue: they just “evolved” an editing site (Selah) with the ability not only to distinguish threonine from valine and serine, but to send the imposters to the recycle bin (Selah).
    It is therefore with great sadness to have to tarnish the reputations of these otherwise bright scientists with the SEQOTW prize, but they earned it.  Ignorance is no excuse.  They can gain absolution by removing the Darwinspeak and rewriting their article with more intelligent design.
Next headline on:  Genetics and DNA • Cell Biology • Amazing Stories • Dumb Stories

While this feat was evolving, we wonder if it was like the early fighter planes trying to shoot machine guns through the propeller.  Until engineers figured out how to synchronize the firing between the propeller blades, how many test pilots shot themselves down?  (Uh, whoops....)  How many cheetahs in a full gallop had to learn to coordinate their attacks when the lights were on, till they got frustrated and sent their brains back to Tinker Bell’s workshop for an upgrade?
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Stories

McKay ought to know better.  He knows chemistry, and he knows thermodynamics.  If life is information made flesh (see 06/25/2005 article), where is he going to import that ingredient?  Astrobiologists are going to lose their last smidgeon of credibility totally if they keep pushing the myth that life just happens everywhere just because they need to justify their careers.  Honesty is the best policy.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life • Mars • Solar System • Dumb Ideas

Ironic that Julianna Kettlewell has the same surname as the infamous researcher of peppered moths (see 06/25/2004 entry).  This article doesn’t improve much on evolutionary storytelling.  Who is asking how or why the little flying bugs developed team spirit?  Can they even see their own wing patterns, let alone care whether that attractive, sweet-smelling female over there has identical strips?  Seems to be another case of imputing human aesthetic values on bugs.  As long as we’re speculating about butterfly fashion fads, why wouldn’t they just as easily be saying, vive la difference?
    The authors of the paper note that “empirical evidence has been sufficiently scarce to raise doubts about the importance of reinforcement in nature.”  Their own case is full of speculation and doubt.  So is this the best that evolutionists can do, 146 years after The Origin of Species supposedly settled the issue?  Look how excited they all get over a few wing styles, and how eagerly they want to invoke the magic phrase natural selection to help Charlie get a little credit.  They should be worried (see next entry).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

The three mechanisms gene duplication, regulatory sequence expansion and diversification, and alternative protein isoform expression accomplish essentially the same general result—they increase the sources of variation and minimize the pleiotropy associated with the evolution of coding sequences.  The global question of the genetic basis of the evolution of form then boils down to the relative contribution of gene duplication, regulatory sequence evolution, and the evolution of coding sequences, over evolutionary time.  I will first examine what is known about the role of regulatory sequences and then discuss the contributions of coding sequences and gene duplication to the evolution of anatomy.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

1. Regulatory Sequences:  Non-coding regions of DNA can affect the expression of coding regions (genes) during development, sometimes with dramatic effects.  Typical examples are extra or misplaced limbs in fruit flies or changes in pigmentation patterns.  Are changes to regulatory sequences fodder for evolution?  Carroll argues that while mutations in genes have pleiotropic effects, mutations in regulatory sequences do not, and as such, “enable a great diversity of patterns to arise from alterations in regulatory circuits through the evolution of novel combinations of sites for regulatory proteins.”  But can what is observed in pigmentation patterns account for the “more complex traits” like “body organization, appendage formation, and other, more slowly evolving characters”?  Carroll thinks so, but the only examples he provides,² from a “handful of studies” on this subject, are pigmentation patterns in fruit flies and reductions in pelvic fin armor in stickleback fish (see 06/18/2004 entry).  Nevertheless, these examples are enough for him to draw attention to what he considers a key point:

   The crucial insight from the evolution of Pitx1, yellow, and Hoxc8 is that regulatory mutations provide a mechanism for change in one trait while preserving the role of pleiotropic genes in other processes.  This is perhaps the most important, most fundamental insight from evolutionary developmental biology.  While functional mutations in a coding region are usually poorly tolerated and eliminated by purifying selection, even complete loss-of-function mutations in regulatory elements are possible because the compartmentation created by the modularity of cis-regulatory elements limits the effects of mutations to individual body parts.

   He seems to be emphasizing that mutations to non-coding regions have the advantage of permitting “tinkering” without damaging the machinery as a whole.  “Does this mean that coding sequences cannot contribute to morphological evolution?“ he asks, then answers, “Not at all” –
2. Coding Sequences:  Carroll discusses examples of Hox genes in fruit flies that have apparently diversified by duplication and selection into new forms.  Some apparently retain Hox function and some do not; these have taken on other functions, such as new dorsoventral patterning in some lineages of fruit flies.  “These arthropod Hox proteins demonstrate that some of the most conserved proteins can, under certain circumstances, evolve new and different activities.”  Yet, at best, these seem to be examples of genes that have modified existing anatomical parts rather than generated new ones de novo.  Further, they cannot represent the whole evolutionary bag of creative tricks, because “these events are, in the long span of the history of these lineages, rare relative to the extensive diversification of body forms.”  One case in point is that a change in the Ubx protein “has been well preserved throughout the course of more than 300 million years of insect evolution.”  Clearly there must be mechanisms for more rapid evolution.  Again, Carroll is confident: “Are there more common and rapid means of evolving morphological diversity via coding mutations?  Definitely,” he boasts.  OK, like what?  Like mutations in the MC1R gene, that “are associated with scale, fur, or plumage color variation and divergence in a wide range of species,” indicating that “the MC1R gene has evolved under natural and sexual selection.”  But again, this seems to assume that evolution rather than demonstrate it.  Another example about repeat sequences on a gene that differ between dog breeds, while interesting, might not help the evolutionary explanation: “this variation may have accompanying deleterious, pleiotropic effects that, while manageable under domestication, would limit its contribution to evolution under natural selection.”
3. Gene Duplication:  While gene duplication is certainly in the explanatory toolkit for the evolution of anatomy, there is a limitation: “Empirical evidence suggests, however, that while gene duplication has contributed to the evolution of form, the frequency of duplication events is not at all sufficient to account for the continuous diversification of lineages.”  The rate is estimated to be one duplication per gene per 100 million years, far too slow to produce changes at the rate expected by evolutionary theory, yielding “the 300,000 known species of beetles, or 10,000 species of birds” in far less time.  Furthermore, there is such dramatic stasis observed even in genes where past duplication is inferred: “the number and diversity of Hox genes in highly diversified phyla, such as the arthropods and tetrapods, appears to have remained fairly stable for very long periods (perhaps approximately 500 million years).”  Why, also, are some gene families found far back, among the most primitive multicellular organisms?  “Such deep ancestral complexity,” Carroll says, with apparent repudiation of long-assumed evolutionary mechanisms, “is much greater than would be expected under the hypothesis that diversity evolves primarily through the evolution of new genes.”  Why also did the human genome fail to fulfill expectations that it would contain more genes than lower forms of life?  And why do many of our genes have syntenic orthologs in the mouse?  For these reasons, Carroll rejects the idea that gene duplication is the essential part of the story of anatomical evolution.  The story must lie more in the way regulatory mechanisms evolve.
4. All Three in the Mix:  Now that changes in genes and the regulatory sequences that affect them are players, is Carroll prepared to stick his neck out and announce which mechanism is the leader in the evolution of form?  To do so seems to require working up one’s courage:

   The more subjective issue is whether, from the small sample of case studies mentioned here and in the literature, one can make (and defend) statements about the relative contribution of regulatory and coding sequence evolution to the evolution of anatomy.  We are, after all, in much better position now to do so than King and Wilson were 30 years ago.
       While the agnostic, “wait and see” position would appear safer, that would not at all be in keeping with the bold spirit of the pioneers who first wrestled with the question.  Moreover, I argue that a trend is evident, and that that trend should, of course, inform ongoing and future work.  Based upon (i) empirical studies of the evolution of traits and of gene regulation in development, (ii) the rate of gene duplication and the specific histories of important developmental gene families, (iii) the fact that regulatory proteins are the most slowly evolving of all classes of proteins, and (iv) theoretical considerations concerning the pleiotropy of mutations, I argue that there is adequate basis to conclude that the evolution of anatomy occurs primarily through changes in regulatory sequences.

   Carroll hastens to say this should come as no surprise to most theorists, but he chides the people working in comparative genomics and population genetics who seem to downplay the importance of the regulatory factor.

Any statements or claims, then, about the genetic changes that “make us human” must be weighed critically in light of the power and limitations of the methodology employed, and the scope of the hypotheses being tested.  While it is understandable that some biologists have reached for the “low-hanging fruit” of coding sequence changes, the task of unraveling the regulatory puzzle is yet to come.

If you thought Charlie had figured this all out 146 years ago, wake up and smell the bitter coffee.  Here we have The Theory of Evolution, that rock-solid foundation for all of law, ethics, philosophy, art, science, education and even religion, so secure that no student in public school should ever be allowed to hear anything else, and now they tell us that everything you thought you knew about it was wrong, and the biologists have to start over.  This can make one mad enough to spit the bitter coffee back into the face of the Darwin Party waiter who handed it to us and said there was nothing else to drink.
    The conceptual nakedness of evolutionary theory at the genetic level, where all the action is supposed to take place, cannot be clothed by small stitches of Hox cloth.  This is shameful.  Despite his bravado, did Sean Carroll provide any evidence strong to convince a skeptic that random changes in regulatory genes could produce an Einstein from Bonzo, or a from a flatworm for that matter, in any conceivable universe?  Assuredly not: the most solid items in his discussion were arguments against the evolution of anatomy: (1) pleiotropy, a phenomenon that resists change, (2) ultraconserved elements (see 05/27/2005 entry), which show no evolution for 500 million imaginary years, and (3) his utter silence on how a change to a regulatory element could ever produce a wing, eye, brain or any other complex system.  How can a regulatory element regulate something that is not already there, for crying out loud?  For all the case he makes for regulatory mutations in development providing the most important, fundamental insight into evolutionary mechanisms (evo-devo), other evolutionists disagree (see 06/29/2005 review of Carroll’s book by Jerry Coyne).  These opposite Darwinian perspectives essentially falsify each other on theoretical grounds; then there is the data, which falsifies them both.  If the complex regulatory mechanisms were already present at the beginning, what does that tell you?
    Carroll’s specific examples – stickleback fish fins and fruit fly pigment spots – are sad and poultry excuses for real evolutionary change, and I mean poultry, not paltry, because they are mere chicken feed.  Not only that, he pulled the roost out from under those who earlier had clucked the spring egg song over the FOXP2 mutation explaining Shakespeare (see 05/26/2004 entry).  Whether you call it gene duplication, gene regulatory mutation or gene coding mutation, it’s all chance in Old McDarwin’s chicken coop.
    This entry was longer than most because of its significance.  Here we listened to a faithful lord in the Darwin Party, giving the Allan Wilson Memorial Lecture at Berkeley, which he would not be in position to do if he didn’t know the score, and all he could say is that everyone has been on the wrong track for 30 years, and we should have turned when Wilson and King said so back there and checked out that other dead end.  Talk about being lost in a cave of their own making, and watching shadows on the wall.  Come to the light.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Genetics

In this timely book, Michael Ruse interprets the last 200 years of conflict between biology and religion as a struggle between evolutionism and creationism.  Evolutionism is not merely an endorsement of the scientific theory of evolution.  It consists of “the whole metaphysical or ideological picture built around or on evolution,” including a belief in progress and attempts to reduce cultural and ethical values to evolutionary biology.  As such, it constitutes a “secular religion.”  Thus, for Ruse (a philosopher of science at Florida State University), the debate over creationism is more a conflict between two religions than one between religion and science.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The Enlightenment offered a vision of progress based on human effort.  The emerging pre-Darwinian views of evolution (such as those of Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, and Robert Chambers), although hardly professional science, co-opted this vision in their accounts of organic change.
    Charles Darwin, in contrast, attempted to convert evolution into science by elaborating a material mechanism for it—natural selection.  Darwin was at best ambivalent about the ideology of progress.  (Alfred Russell Wallace was more convinced of its reality—strangely, he receives scant attention in Ruse’s story.)  Moreover, natural selection acting on blind variation was antithetical to the idea of progress with its implied directionality.  In spite of Darwin’s efforts, Ruse argues, evolution did not become established as a professional science in the 19th century or even during the first two decades of the 20th.  Instead, it remained popular science.  Given the generally accepted ideology of progress, natural selection was often abandoned in favor of directional mechanisms of organic change. According to Ruse, during this period, almost all of those who endorsed evolution also endorsed evolutionism.  The social Darwinism of the late 19th century only exemplifies the worst excesses of such an evolutionism.

On Ruse’s account, evolution became a professional science following the modern synthesis of the late 1920s and 1930s.  Ruse argues, though not very convincingly, that the architects of the synthesis continued to uphold an ideology of progress and endorse evolutionism.  He ignores the fact that, with the exception of R. A. Fisher, these architects largely rejected attempts to deploy evolution in the political arena.   (Some, such as J. B. S. Haldane, whom Ruse ignores, often explicitly rejected progress.)  Ruse’s sketch of contemporary evolutionary theory is also idiosyncratic,  with sociobiology presented as that theory’s most significant achievement.  Because the sociobiologists W. D. Hamilton and Edward O. Wilson are the heroes of this story, Ruse claims that contemporary evolutionary biology endorses evolutionism and not merely evolution.

The final chapters of The Evolution-Creation Struggle turn all too briefly to the contemporary debates over creationism.  Ruse offers a short and cogent critique of intelligent design that concentrates on its failure to spawn any serious scientific research.²  But the book ends with an unfortunate whimper: we are told that we should try to understand the other side; we are not told how Ruse’s understanding of that side will help us prevent the reintroduction of religion in our science classes.

Wow: this is quite telling.  Michael Ruse seems to be evolving toward rapprochement with I.D. with each new book.  Although he has been adamant against the cult of progress for quite awhile (see 06/12/2003 commentary), he is making even more startling claims now: (1) most historical evolutionists were more religious than scientific in their embrace of the cult of progress; (2) evolutionism is just as religious as Christianity, (3) the religion of evolutionism continues to the present day, and (4) evolutionists need to understand the other side.  Point (1) is clear to any halfway objective historian of science and should not be all that controversial.  But points 2, 3, and 4, though flimsy concessions from a creationist view, are almost fighting words to an evolutionist.
    To maintain their hegemony, the Darwin Party needs its supporters to be devoted to the doctrine that their position is based on science, not religion.  They need to keep the onus of religion on the other side where it can be swept aside as faith-based, irrational, dogmatic and irrelevant.  It must sting like acid for them to hear a Party member claim their views are just as religious as that of their opponents, and that we should try to “understand” the other side instead of fighting them with the full arsenal of Big Science.
    Based on this review, this new book by Ruse must be highly disappointing to those who have lived with the religion-vs-science paradigm embedded in their heads since high school biology class.  If Ruse keeps this up, it won’t be long before the Party condemns him as a heretic and throws him overboard.  If that happens, the creationists and ID community need to be prepared to rescue him and show him what true Christian (unevolved, real) altruism is like (see 06/12/2003 commentary).  They need to provide him clean, clear designer glasses with which to see the world in a new light, a revelation that brings joy, thankfulness and meaning.
    Undoubtedly the softening of Ruse’s hardline position is partly due to his historical research into the unsavory personalities and empty lives of some of Darwinism’s staunchest bulldogs (see 09/02/2004 entry) compared to the friendliness and logic of I.D. supporters with whom he has interacted, like Phillip Johnson.  Creationists need to be careful not to shoot those waving a white flag.  Some of the best allies for design-based science, like Dean Kenyon and Richard Lumsden, were once adamant evolutionists.  Give people space to see the light.  Whether they do or not, keep those Christian graces shining through.  Who knows; maybe Eugenie Scott will be next (see 05/25/2005 entry).
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design

What follows is not to be taken in any way as a disparagement of Dr. Becerra and her efforts.  Unless proven otherwise (which seems highly unlikely), we should assume her a bright, active, diligent scientist, respected among peers, fulfilling her career as an evolutionary biologist with exemplary field work and analysis.  Her paper looks like standard research fare, complete with dozens of references, graphs, diagrams, equations, and all that would be expected in a scientific paper.  She made observations, proposed a hypothesis, tested it, and made conclusions.  Who could possibly criticize such a constructive enterprise, undertaken simply with the desire to shed light on the history of a particular group of plants?
    We want to explore this otherwise ho-hum paper that, for the majority of the population, will pass unnoticed into the growing corpus of scientific literature, where it will rest in peace except to a few specialists.  We want to use it as a case study in how the theory of evolution has become a self-perpetuating job security program with no necessary connection to the truth.
    Read this paper carefully, and you will find many useful facts about Bursera, but none that substantiate the two requirements to convince someone of evolution: proof of (1) long ages and (2) the creative powers of natural selection to produce novel structures.  On the contrary, every support for these claims comes from evolutionary assumptions, so it is inbred reasoning, like asking a Wahabi if the Koran is the word of Allah.  Would her support convince a creationist, or a neutral juror with mind uncluttered by evolutionary assumptions?
    The phylogenetic tree-making depends on assumptions of evolution.  The calibration of millions of years depends on evolutionary geological assumptions.  The story of diversification depends on the belief that niches create innovation: the “if you build it, they will come” theory of evolution.  This paper is shot through with evolutionary assumptions from beginning to end; evolution calibrates itself by evolution.
    Whenever there is an anomaly in the data, she patches up the evolutionary story with additional ad hoc assumptions: the diversification rate changed here or there, in this region but not that one because maybe the mountains were building faster there, etc.  She picks and chooses data based on evolutionary assumptions so as not to clutter the picture she is trying to present: for instance, ignoring certain species to avoid contamination of the story.  She used two separate equations to cross-check each other, ignoring the fact that both depend on evolutionary assumptions; whenever their results don’t agree, there is enough tweak space to get them to line up.  Fossils?  “Due to a scant fossil record,” she admits, “the history of the Mexican dry forest is still sketchy.  Although the floral affinities with other parts of the world, as well as the importance of the endemic elements, have been well established, little is yet known about the timing of the origin of this vegetation and the directions of its historical expansion or contraction.”  No matter – the story is the thing.
    Again, this is not to pick on Dr. Becerra; this paper can be considered a rather ordinary sample of evolutionary research.  Being largely a story of microevolution between members of a single genus, it isn’t even all that controversial.  The point is, it underscores the contention (see 12/22/2003 commentary) that Darwinian evolution has become job security for storytellers.  When you see an evolutionary story, no matter how professionally typed, no matter how many references, now matter how many nice graphs and charts and equations, you need to ask yourself how on earth the researcher knows what happened millions of years ago when he or she was not even there to observe it.  To an evolutionist, it doesn’t really matter.  It gives academics and naturalists something to do.  It supports the publishing industry.  It gives Darwinism an air of scientific respectability.  Why, every evolutionist agrees this is the way science is to be done (don’t ask non-evolutionists for their opinion—they are disqualified by definition).  This policy protects Darwinism from cross-pollination of ideas, so that the inbreeding can continue.
    Thus, evolutionary biology marches on.  The idea that 30 million years ago, this particular genus of plants began to diversify as mountains were rising, till around 7.5 million years ago it had filled all the available niches, makes a nice, plausible-sounding, self-consistent, albeit malleable, story.  Some of us have the gall to ask, Is it true?
Next headline on:  Plants • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Creationists are good for evolutionists.  Otherwise, who would keep their rampant speculations in check?  If evolutionists were really interested in truth, they would welcome debate over interpretations of evidence from anyone who argues with sound logic, integrity and respect for the brute facts.  Since the scientific establishment will not even consider any opinion coming from outside the Darwin cheerleader’s club, it’s up to individuals to hear both sides and judge who is providing the better interpretation.
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils

The Laetoli prints are identical to modern human footprints.  The only reason paleoanthropologists claim they were made by A. afarensis is the dating: they are too “old” to have been made by modern man.  That’s why the artist’s rendition shows the tracks being made by a family of evolving creatures with an upright gait, human feet and ape-like faces.
    Data are just pawns in the evolutionary chess game.  The King is Charlie Dumpty.  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men must protect him from falling.
Next headline on:  Early Man

Evolution’s newest defenders, who came together in frustration after the November elections, have little political experience, apart from hoisting Kerry-Edwards signs in morning traffic.  They mostly are middle-class people with day jobs.  Some had protested the Vietnam War but had rarely felt inspired to undertake political activism since.  Together, they call themselves the Message Group and depict themselves as “determined and balanced” voters worried about social conservatives.
    “I fear for my country.  That sounds like a radical notion, something from the ’60s, but there is a pervasive fear, a scariness,” said Richard Lawrence, 63, a retired Environmental Protection Agency employee who voted for Nixon.  “We’re just a small group, maybe with a powerful idea.  We don’t have a clue, but we’re not letting go.”....
    The Message Group was created out of its members’ disappointment.  After President Bush was reelected and Republicans strengthened their hold on Capitol Hill, the group’s future comrades were among millions of demoralized Kerry voters who had invested fresh emotional energy and elbow grease in politics, only to fall short.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Now, though their aim of defeating intelligent design is explicit, their strategy is, well, evolving.
    They selected evolution after deciding that other issues, such as Social Security revisions, were well-covered by bigger, richer groups.  The emerging duel over the teaching of science, they reasoned, was important, local and manageable, an area in which they could make a small impact – and if they got lucky, a big one.

This is really funny.  It almost makes you feel sympathy for these old Vietnam hippies with their tie-dye shirts and long gray hair.  There must be something they can do.  Ah!  Here’s a flag we can send up the pole to see if anyone salutes: “Keep Virginia evolving!”  Yes, Virginia, there really is a Charlie Darwin.
    One of the leaders said, “I’m just a citizen, not a scientist.  I’ve even had to do a lot of reading to catch up.”  We could suggest some books.  We could also suggest a strategy.  Forget the Scopes sit-in, the chants and incense, and come up with a plausible Darwinian mechanism to explain the origin of life and the molecular machinery of the cell.  Explain the explosively abrupt appearance of all the major body plans in the fossil record simultaneously.  Prove that mind is nothing more than an emergent property of brain chemistry (without committing a logical fallacy in doing so).  Explain the fine-tuning of the universe by chance.  Provide solid scientific answers to these and the other questions the ID community are raising, and you will steal their thunder.
    Doesn’t this story just nail the connection between Darwinism and political liberalism? (see 12/02/2004 entry).  When liberal Democrats, who supposedly emphasize free speech, look for a cause in science to land on, it is predictably pro-evolution and the stifling of dissent about Darwin and his materialist philosophy.  Historically, this has usually been the case.  The pro-evolutionists throughout the 19th century were predominantly leftist or radical in political ideology, whether German materialists like Vogt and Buchner, or Karl Marx in London, even Darwin himself and his most ardent supporters.  Liberalism and evolutionism are inextricably linked.  The question is, which is the cart, and which is the horse?
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Said co-author Daniel Morse, director of UCSB’s Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies: “It’s especially exciting for us to find the profound medical significance of our discoveries for human bone.”  He described the discovery of “molecular shock absorbers” providing a kind of self-healing glue holding biological mineralized structures together when studying the abalone shell six years ago.  “It’s truly remarkable to find the same fundamental mechanisms operating in bone,” said Morse.
    He noted that these mechanisms give young healthy bone its tremendous resiliency and resistance to fracture, and actually help heal small microcracks soon after they’re formed.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Since no evolutionists believe people evolved from abalones, their only recourse is to wave the magic wand of convergent evolution to explain built-in molecular shock absorbers.  Remember that improbabilities are multiplicative, not additive – and so are credulities.
    This story illustrates a difference between living and non-living objects.  In general, the closer you look at an inanimate object, like a rock, the simpler it appears.  For living structures, the complexity keeps apace with the magnification.  Some of the most amazing aspects have been invisible to human perception till recently.  If macroscopic things like an eye gave Darwin cold shudders, he could never have been prepared for the view under the atomic force microscope.  Let’s hope his shock absorbers are in good working order as we envision him collapsing in a dead faint.
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That such poor reasoning and lousy science would get prominent coverage in the leading popular geographic magazine in the world is an illustration of the pernicious influence of evolutionary thinking on our society.  This hypothesis downplays the intellectual and moral factors involved.  Consistently followed, it would lead one to believe that anti-Semitism has been a good thing, if it led to the genius of Einstein.  If this kind of sloppy research, based on faulty assumptions and selective statistics, were published in some other field, it would be quickly scorned by academics.  The phrase “natural selection” is like a free pass around the security guards of science.  Should evolutionary anthropologists watch an Auschwitz as detached observers, measuring what genetic traits are being naturally selected by the process?  It’s time to call moral evils evil instead of rationalizing them on evolutionary grounds.  Let’s see how they explain it when the public has had enough, and there is a widespread outcry against Darwinian thinking.  Would that prove survival of the fittest ideas?
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If you read only Mencken’s account, dripping with big-city Northern snobbery, or remember Fredric March’s semi-hysterical performance as the fictionalized Bryan in “Inherit the Wind,” you could be forgiven for believing Darrow demolished Bryan and, with him, the biblical account of creation.  But the trial transcript and more objective contemporary coverage tell a different tale.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Go to this article and give it a good vote.  It was refreshing to see, for a change, a reporter helping dismantle the myths about the Scopes Trial rather than perpetuating them.  Johnson’s treatment actually made the northern liberals look bad and Bryan look good.  He showed how the perception of the Scopes Trial was due more to propaganda and the media circus surrounding it than to the actual record of what happened.  He pointed out that historians give a much more favorable impression of Bryan than is commonly assumed.  For those of us raised in public school with mandatory viewings of Inherit the Wind, it’s about time.  See The Monkey Trial site for a comparison of portrayals in the movie with the historical record.  Inherit the Wind deserves to be thrown into the bin along with Birth of a Nation as an egregious example of twisting history.  (Surprisingly, the play and movie was written to satirize the McCarthy era, not the actual Scopes trial, according to Johnson.)
    One unfortunate part of Bryan’s testimony during cross-examination by Darrow is that he waffled on whether Genesis should be treated allegorically, and compromised on the idea of long ages.  This made it seem that Christians were prepared to capitulate before the evolutionists over assumed evidence for long ages and transitional forms – evidence that was later shown to be flawed or even fraudulent.  Overall, though, he gave it his best shot and was prepared to put Darrow on the hot seat before the defense decided to plead guilty, thus undermining his chance to similarly grill Darrow.  The fact that this was the “first trial to be covered with the full arsenal of modern media – broadcast live on the radio, filmed for newsreels in the theaters, chronicled by hundreds of newspapers that printed the daily transcript,” made it a setup for any spin desired.  As such, the Scopes Trial provides a fountainhead of case studies on propaganda, logical fallacies and smokescreen tactics (see the Baloney Detector for examples).
    Teachers: teach Scopes!  Show your students the differences between the movie portrayal and the facts.  They will learn some valuable skills in how to interpret the media.  Many facts about the Scopes Trial should be resurrected to embarrass the Darwin Party.  Did you know, for instance, that the textbook Darrow was defending taught racism?  Did you know that Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man, both hoaxes, were going to be used as proof of evolution?  Did you know that John Scopes, a football coach and substitute teacher, could not even remember if he had taught evolution in the classroom at all?  Did you know he agreed to help the ACLU test the Butler Act by agreeing to lie that he had taught evolution?
    The whole event was a media circus from the get-go.  Poor Judge Raulston tried his best to keep the trial on the issue of whether Scopes had violated the statute or not, and so did Bryan, but they were no match for the spin doctors around the world who took what they wanted and ran with it.  Political cartoonists had a field day with this southern American phenomenon.  History should be kinder to the southerners than to the elitist reporters and scientists who printed unspeakable diatribes against Bryan and his supporters, such as: “he is still engaged in battling earnestly for organized ignorance, superstition, and tyranny... He has illuminated vividly for the rest of us the essentially bigoted position of himself and his followers, and the degree of religious intolerance which they will undoubtedly enforce upon the country if they ever get the chance.”  Have they no shame?
    Bryan only agreed to the cross-examination because he was promised he would have his chance to grill Darrow in return, but Darrow’s strategy was to hit and run, thus scoring points with the world media.  This strategy has served them well ever since (see 07/11/2005 and 06/13/2005 entries for recent examples).  Darwinists who have used Scopes for 80 years to push their myth should be put on the witness stand.  It’s about time.
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The story of creation is in your hotel room drawer.  Starstuff is just stuff, but it takes a mind to know one (see 07/15/2005 entry).
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Since reporters often fail to do their homework and repeat the propaganda of the Darwin Party, it is important as always to have one’s Baloney Detector in good working condition.  Notice, for instance, how the Wichita Eagle labels the pro-evolutionists with the mild term “moderates” as opposed to the “conservative” members arguing for change.  What other political labels can you come up with for these opposing groups that could spin the story either way? 
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Microglia continually extend ... and retract ... processes, surveying their immediate environment within the brain.  The processes move rapidly toward a site of injury, such as a damaged blood vessel in the brain, in response to the localized release of a chemoattractant ... from the injured sited.  Once at the target site, the processes form a barrier to protect healthy tissue.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Similar to the story on junk DNA (see 07/15/2005 entry), this goes to show that nothing in biology makes sense apart from design.  If we would approach biology with a design perspective (see 06/25/2005 entry), we might really begin to understand what life is all about.
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Man’s solutions to both these problems have been clumsy, polluting and expensive.  It’s humbling to have to imitate supposed lower forms of life.  (Good.  Nothing like a little humility for us humans.)  Maybe the new biomimetics trend (see 02/09/2005 and 09/21/2004 stories, for example) will teach us how to cooperate with the environment instead of fighting it.  Need we point out that biomimetics operates on an implicit intelligent-design assumption.
    Shark facts are ubiquitous on the TV nature shows these days, to a fault (they seem to satisfy the peasants’ lust for gore).  How many more Shark Week specials can we take?  Time out, Discovery Channel and National Geographic TV.  If you can find the 1988 IMAX film Beavers, though, it’s a classic, fun for the whole family.
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Hicks believes the Tulsa Park and Recreation Board that originally approved the creation display for the zoo ultimately caved in to the demands of a vocal minority.  He contends that the Interfaith Alliance, Tulsa Metropolitan Ministries and others of “these groups that claim to be all about tolerance and inclusion” are actually “more like political action committees affiliated with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.”

Tolerance in our culture has a very specific meaning: it means forcing Christians, with their hands tied behind their backs and their mouths gagged, to endure witnessing every weird, depraved or wicked viewpoint paraded in front of them, without recourse, with the mantras “separation of church and state!” or “evolution is a fact!” shouted endlessly if they appear tempted to resist, to see how much they will tolerate.  When the victims appear ready to burst their bands and fight back, they smile and pretend that they didn’t really mean it and only wanted to be inclusive.  Pacified, the victims relax for another round.  Now that you know this, you will understand liberalism much better.
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Gazzaniga is a lot less cautious when it comes to the implications of neuroscience for ethics in general.  As he puts it in his preface, “I would like to support the idea that there could be a universal set of biological responses to moral dilemmas, a sort of ethics, built into our brains.  My hope is that we soon may be able to uncover these ethics, identify them, and begin to live more fully by them.  I believe we live by them largely unconsciously now, but that a lot of suffering, war, and conflict could be eliminated if we could agree to live by them more consciously.”
    This conclusion would follow if our universal moral sense had been implanted by an all-knowing and all-loving God.  But biological evolution is a notoriously amoral force.  Innate moral universals would have been shaped by the selective advantages that arise from caring for our kin and cooperating with our neighbours, but nothing in our genes tells us that slavery is wrong, or that men and women deserve equal rights.  Such insights emerge through individual and group processes that engage all of our faculties, including our innate moral sense, but also the capacity to appreciate abstract arguments, formulate analogies, learn from experience, take other’s perspectives and so on.  Much of moral progress consists of using reason to override our gut feelings.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena.  The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data.  Contemporary physical theory brings directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices made by human agents about how they will act.  This key development in basic physical theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists with an alternative conceptual framework for describing neural processes.  Indeed, owing to certain structural features of ion channels critical to synaptic function, contemporary physical theory must in principle be used when analysing human brain dynamics.  The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics.  It is able to represent more adequately than classic concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing number of empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain function.

Bloom properly distinguished the stark contrast between theological and evolutionary explanations for ethics, but he committed logical fallacies in supporting the latter.  He borrowed Christian words like innate moral sense, appreciate, reason and progress which are undefined terms in the Darwin Dictionary.  How can he decide that the amorality of evolution is “notorious” without making a value judgment?  His argument shoots itself in the foot and thus leaves the alternative, the proposition that “our universal moral sense had been implanted by an all-knowing and all-loving God,” the logical choice.
    The paper by Schwartz does not establish the theological origin of our innate moral sense, but undercuts one more materialist assumption for the alternative – at least temporarily.  Since science is tentative, today’s quantum theory may not be a final theory: it cannot serve as an ultimate foundation.  Any ethical system not based on absolutes and the assumption of an all-knowing and all-loving God is doomed to become merely a matter of personal opinion and social convention, and thus not a moral system at all.  The Bible offers a sure standard, a bulwark of moral confidence for troubling times.
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The land of the Bible remains a buried treasure.  Only a small percentage of potential sites have been explored, and only a small fraction of artifacts have been uncovered.  Each fragment found in this politically-troubled land has enormous potential to shed light on the greatest story ever told.
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The relative constancy of the rate at which DNA sequences evolve has been a treasured icon of molecular evolution for nearly 40 years.  The occurrence of such a stochastic ‘molecular clock’ was initially quite unexpected, and was explained by Motoo Kimura by assuming that most changes to amino-acid and nucleotide sequences were neutral – “neither beneficial nor injurious”, in Charles Darwin’s prescient phrase.
    However, there have been several inklings that the rate of molecular evolution accelerates when measured over evolutionarily short timescales.  As they report in Molecular Biology and Evolution, Ho and colleagues have now put the evidence together.  Their analyses of primate and bird data sets reveal that there is indeed a decided acceleration of molecular evolution on short timescales.  This is an effect that demands explanation; moreover, estimates for the timing of recent events in population biology will need to be reconsidered.

For some reason, the continuum between population heterozygosity and long-term evolution has not been adequately studied.  Although it is a continuum, the techniques required may change as the timescale decreases.  For example, some concepts from long-term evolution (binary evolutionary trees with sequences studied only at the tips) have been extended into populations where trees are no longer binary, and ancestral sequences (at internal nodes) are still present in the population.  There are hints that a formal multiscale study is necessary, because even though the same underlying process is occurring, different features of trees are observed as the timescale changes.

Another evolutionary assumption has been overturned by more careful analysis; keep up the good work.  Next time, though, remove the assumption of evolution before making the observations.  Relativity applies to physics, not biology.  An evolutionary tale that requires relativity to keep its plot together has left the science department for the theater class (see 11/29/2004 entry).
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