If the intellect has agreed to contemplate what God has made, it also agrees to do what God has bid.  Should this be attained by all, then there would be nothing further to desire for the human race than that all people in the whole globe should live together in one city and, already in this world far from every strife, have pleasure in one another, as we hope of the future.”
—Johannes Kepler, from a letter expressing his view of science and society.  Max Casper, Kepler (Dover 1993 ed.), p. 376.

Five years ago this month, Creation-Evolution Headlines began bringing you news and amazing discoveries of science, and explaining how they relate to the creation-evolution controversy.  There are now thousands of stories at your disposal on over two dozen topics, chained together for easy browsing and linked to the original sources.  Most of them come right out of the leading scientific journals.  These five years have been a momentous period, from 9/11 and the war on terror to the publishing of the human genome, the exploration of Mars and Saturn, and much, much more.  Now, with the growing interest in intelligent design, this page can be your daily source for the latest information on important developments around the world.     Readership has doubled each of the last two years.  We know there are prominent people – scientists, educators and publishers – who check CEH regularly.  We also know there are many of you who visit often but have never given us any feedback.  What better time than now, at this 5th Anniversary milestone?  Please write here and tell us your city and occupation, how you came across the service, what you think of it and how you use it.  Obviously this website takes a great deal of volunteer time and effort to maintain.  If Creation-Evolution Headlines has been a help to you, it would be a tremendous encouragement to hear from you.  Your anonymity will be protected, and you will not be put on a mailing list.  Thank you, come back often, and help spread the word about the liveliest origins site on the internet – the one with the easy-to-remember address, CREV.INFO.

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Bullahalloo: The Jerusalem Post reported that a Solomon-era clay seal (bulla) has been found in the Arab dump outside Jerusalem – the first inscription from the First Temple period.  (See 04/17/2005 story.)

Far Out: Cassini just took the best-ever pictures of Saturn’s moons Tethys and Hyperion.  The latter is one of the most bizarre-looking moons yet seen around Saturn (see press release, color mosaic and zoom movie).  It has deep, steep-sided craters coated with dark, smooth material at the bottoms.  One crater is almost the size of the moon itself.  For official images with captions, go to JPL’s Planetary Photojournal, click on Saturn, then the moon of your choice.  The first place to find new Cassini images is on the Raw Images gallery.  The Planetary Society usually posts detailed interpretive guides fairly quickly, and some amateurs beat the pros to the punch by creating mosaics and animations on the Unmanned Spaceflight Forum.
Coming Up:  Scientists await close up images of Dione, October 11, and Rhea, November 26.

Spider Blood Survives 20 Million Years – So They Say    09/30/2005  
EurekAlert announced, “Spider blood found in 20 million year old fossil.”  Science Daily repeated the story.  The articles even tell how the spider died (it was climbing a tree and was struck on the head by fast-flowing sap).  The BBC News said, “Spider is ‘20 million years old.’” At least they put quotes around the date, but they quoted Dr. David Penney of the University of Manchester scratching his beard and saying, “It’s amazing to think that a single piece of amber with a single spider in it can open up a window into what was going on 20 million years ago.”  The date comes from the Miocene deposits in which the amber was found in the Dominican Republic.  Those deposits rank at 20 million years according to the evolutionary dating scheme.

How could blood survive decay for 2000 years, let alone 20 million?  Suggested revision for Penney’s thoughts: “It’s amazing to think that a single piece of amber with a single spider in it does not open minds to the realization that 20 million years is implausible fiction.”
    Let’s remind readers of the way evolutionists reason about fossils and dates.  How do you know this spider is 20 million years old?  Answer: it was found in a 20-million-year-old rock.  How do you know the rocks are 20 million years old?  Answer: because, stupid, it has this 20-million-year-old spider in it!
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Dating Methods

Can a Robot Build Itself?    09/30/2005  
The news media got a load of Joseph Jacobson’s toy robots that could make copies of themselves.  Ker Than on LiveScience, for instance, called these “biological” robots:

Inspired by biological systems, scientists have developed miniature robots that can self-assemble using parts that float randomly in their environments.  The robots also know when something is amiss and can correct their own mistakes.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

But the new robots mark the first time a mechanical system has been created that can self-replicate from random parts using the same principles as biological systems, which assemble structures from disordered building blocks using error correction.
    “We identified two ingredients about the biological process,” Jacobson said.  “One is that it can make these copies from random parts that are distributed throughout the environment, and second is that it can do so with very high fidelity [accuracy].”

One wonders of anti-ID apostle Ker Than lept onto this story during the week of the Dover trial to show that the problem of the origin of life may not be that bad.  He could show pictures of “self-replicating robots,” just like DNA.  The devil is in the details.
    This experiment supports ID and defeats chemical evolution theory in many important ways.  (1) It illustrates the extreme differences in complexity between Jacobson’s simple 2-part, 5-length strings of nonsense and the luxuriously ordered forms of DNA and proteins.  (2) It shows that intelligent guidance is required to make the parts fit together according to rules.  (3) It overlooks the problem of left- and right-handed forms.  (4) It requires a suitable environment for the parts to come together (here, a frictionless surface with ample spare parts).  (5) The error correction derives from the parts themselves.  In the cell, DNA errors are corrected by multiple proofreading machines.  (5) It makes the yield for lengthier strings of more parts appear hopeless.  (6) It demonstrates that no language convention arises by the attractive forces of components.  Jacobson got strings of GGYYG and YGGYY.  What does that spell?  What function or meaning does it convey?  Nothing.
    In living cells, the DNA is a code that specifies parts that have function.  These codes are translated by machines into another code.  Multiple machines and pathways exist to maintain and correct the DNA language.  Any resemblance, therefore, of these so-called “error-correcting robots” to DNA is as superficial as bits (0 and 1) are to an encyclopedia.  Don’t allow such things to be used as propaganda for evolution when they are really strong arguments for intelligent design.  According to Dembski’s no free lunch principle, any semblance of complex information achieved by this “evolutionary” algorithm was only made possible by the insertion of intelligent design on the front end.  Naturalism can permit no such luxury.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Origin of Life

Let’s think this through.  If this theory were correct, 80-ton dinosaurs, fast-running velociraptors, and pterosaurs as large as fighter jets (09/09/2005) were able to live on 10% oxygen, yet mammals could only survive as small rats, and as time went on oxygen levels increased.  So the already big dinosaurs died off and the miniscule mammals grew in size due to the more oxygenated environment?
    According to prior evidence, some mammals were at least medium sized during the time of the dinosaurs (see “This badger ate dinosaurs for breakfast,” 01/12/2005).  The authors note this but simply dismiss it: “Data show a rapid increase from small to medium-sized mammals in the first few million years after the K-T event (Fig. 2).  This size contrast is blurred slightly with the recent discovery of larger Cretaceous mammals, but this trend does not appear to be driven by oxygen.”  Blurred slightly?  It falsifies their basic idea that oxygen drove the development of large placental mammals.  Whatever data they dislike are thus simply discarded as irrelevant.  Many other life forms, such as plants, insects, shellfish and crustaceans, grew to enormous sizes during the supposedly low-oxygen periods.
    Notice how they also placed their trust in the K-T meteor hypothesis: “Whereas a bolide impact at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary and the ensuing extinction of dinosaurs provided ecological opportunity for the radiation of placental mammals,” la te dah, dum de dum dum, etc.  This is more of the opportunistic theory of evolution: if you clear the ground of big dumb dinosaurs, large mammals will evolve, as if by magic, to fill in the space.  Opportunity is thus the necessary and sufficient cause for the emergence of complete revolutions in body organs, body shapes, decorations, behaviors and capabilities, from bat flight to whale sonar, in hundreds of new kinds of animals.  The Darwinian Density: “Well, they’re here, aren’t they?  Since evolution is a fact, they must have evolved.”
    The researchers didn’t seem to notice that the carbon-isotope measurements contradict direct measurements of oxygen from amber.  According to an article on the USGS website, air trapped in prehistoric amber was claimed to have 30% oxygen in it – not 10%.  Were the “300 analyses by USGS scientists of Cretaceous, Tertiary, and recent-age amber from 16 world sites” wrong?  Or did these researchers forget to cross-check their measurements with the amber data?  How about a little classic lab experimentation?  They could grow mice in different amounts of oxygen and see if that affects body size.  Once they find the magic oxygen formula, they could breed elephant shrews into elephants.
    The hypothesis is based on circumstantial evidence, comparing oxygen with the geologic column, which is itself based on evolutionary assumptions.  One would think that a few more requirements beyond oxygen would be necessary for the “success story” of the mammals.  Why the news sources all repeated this wild idea uncritically is a study in itself.
Footnote:  It turns out that National Geographic, bless its evolved heart, did consider other requirements for mammals to flourish.  After indulging in the myth of “mammalian opportunism,” they quoted Robert Asher of the Berlin Museum of Natural History who, though impressed by the “fascinating correlation” of oxygen levels with mammal size and diversification, thought more had to be involved.  Of all the other “causative factors” he could have listed, he mentioned only the one that Darwinists love most, because it intuitively explains the rise of specified complexity without a Designer.  Listen carefully:

But is global oxygen is the magic bullet that explains the evolution of mammals 50 to 40 million years ago?  “My guess,” Asher said, “would be no. ... Like most other issues, there are a number of causative factors involved, including chance.”

Next headline on:  Dinosaurs • Mammals

This shows more of the trend reported last week (see 09/21/2005).  Notice which camp is always surprised.
Next headline on:  Cosmology

• Nature had two pieces this week, claiming the Dover trial represents Do or Die for Design.  This editorial ended, “Scientific organizations are well aware of this case’s significance, and many have lent public support to the plaintiffs [i.e., the ACLU and the 11 parents suing the school district for allowing alternatives to Darwinism].  A ruling in their favour will be welcomed not just by scientists and teachers but by American parents, whose children need to be protected from an injection of superstition into science teaching.”  (Emphasis added in all quotes; “sic” means “thus in the original”; our usage is intended to point out the assumptions and biases of the source.)
• Nature writer Geoff Brumfiel titled his report, “School board in court over bid to teach intelligent design.”  Even though the school board did not require teaching intelligent design, but only mentioning that an alternative source was available for the students, Brumfiel focused on the testimony of the pro-Darwinists, Ken Miller, Eugenie Scott and Eric Rothschild.  He reported that when Ken Miller was asked about problems with the origin of life, Miller responded, “I would rather say that Darwin was incomplete, not that Darwin was inadequate.”
• Science reporter Constance Holden wrote about “Darwin’s (First) Day in Court.”  She also highlighted Brown U professor Kenneth Miller, describing him in terms of a prize fighter: “Even the flagellum got its moment in the spotlight.  Miller tore into a favorite example used by biochemist and ID proponent Michael Behe....”  She made a short reference to the co-option argument; i.e., that the flagellum resembles a simpler molecular syringe, presumed to be a precursor.
• Kansas University:  Chancellor of KU, Bob Hemenway, wrote a letter to colleagues asking them to hold their ground against the ID movement.  “The United States cannot accept efforts to undermine the teaching of science,” he said, although he hastened to mention that no one is attacking people’s religious beliefs.  Creationism and intelligent design, he said, “are most appropriately taught in religion, philosophy, or sociology class, rather than a science class.”
• Citizen War Invades Museum  The Lawrence Journal-World reported about growing numbers of patrons entering the Sternberg Museum of Natural History angry about the pro-evolution exhibits.  Pro-ID advocate John Calvert claims there is no organized effort, but the museum director says the following scenario is becoming increasingly common: “A person or group will come in and confront one of the guides with rapid-fire questions for which the person is not qualified to respond” (see 09/22/2005 story).  The museum is counterattacking with more evolutionary displays and pamphlets, but Calvert, who thinks the museum is not educating but rather indoctrinating, predicts a backfire: “These exhibits are not going to work,” he said.  “People are going to wind up laughing at them.”

Hey; great idea.  Laughter may be one of the best medicines for chronic Darwinism.  Give it a try after the pepper spray of rapid-fire questions (be nice, of course—see 09/22/2005 commentary).  Let’s get the museum directors, the docents, the scientists, the lawyers and the reporters all laughing and having a good time.  Hire comedian Brad Stine to come into the dinosaur exhibit and give his wacky impressions of Dr. Noah Tall.  Stroking his goatee, gazing into the air, he could say, “Yes, children, this Diplodocus slowly morphed into your parakeet, over millions and millions of years.”  Somebody could hang a sign on the stuffed cow, “Whale Under Construction.”  Hold a karaoke contest of the Evolution Songs.  Find more ideas on the Darwin Day Top Ten (02/13/2004 commentary).
    Face it; evolution is funny.  It’s the craziest thing you ever heard.  “Hydrogen: a light, odorless, colorless gas, that given enough time, turns into people.”  Wah-hoo!  Hey, this could be just the thing: a positive, constructive strategy to heal the cultural rift in society.  It might even be good therapy for the Darwin Party leaders, who take themselves way too seriously.  Visualize Eugenie Scott and Ken Miller at the mike, hamming it up with Gory, gory evolution, 'tis ruthless marching on while the party is cracking up uncontrollably under the Charlie poster with the caption, “O, my sick stomach; I just looked at my eye in the mirror again.”
    One wonders if Hitler would have gotten anywhere if the crowds packed into his beer hall speeches not to be swayed, but for a rollickin’ good time at Amateur Comedy Hour.  Embarrassed at everyone mocking his antics, he might have slinkered away back to a career in art.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Education

1. Messages from Heaven:  Richard Kerr in Science¹ reported on work by Strom et al. in the same issue² that the asteroid belt was the source of the so-called “late heavy bombardment” that is said to have pummeled the early solar system 3.9 billion years ago.  One researcher who had been working on this “problem” for 35 years completely changed his view based on the study.  Strom’s team hypothesized that the gas giants rearranged themselves, and then modeled how impactors might have been flung inward from the asteroid belt as a consequence.  Kerr writes, “Cratering specialists suspect that Strom and his colleagues are on to something, but they say the case remains open.”  Another said they could be right, but “we have to be careful.”
2. Crystal Balls:  A Purdue University press release says “meteorites offer glimpse of the early Earth.”  Purdue scientists measuring the isotopic ratios in Antarctic meteorites think they can deduce the temperature of their formation.  From this, they believe, they can tell whether they formed at the same time Earth formed, or later.  It’s not like reading a book, exactly; one scientist said, “There are still quite a few unanswered questions about the earliest periods of the Earth’s history, and this study only provides one piece of the puzzle.”
3. Treasure Chest:  As if to one-up the previous claim, EurekAlert printed a Florida State story that an “unusual meteorite unlocks treasure trove of solar system secrets.”  The Tagish Lake meteorite that fell in Canada in 2000 led a FSU “geochemist to a breakthrough in understanding the origin of the chemical elements that make up our solar system,” the press release claimed.  What did he find?  An unusual ratio of isotopes of osmium.  From this, he believes he can tell what kind of star produced the element, and when.  His hypothesis, however, flies in the face of earlier suggestions that the element came from dust from a nearby star.  No, the leader of the team says: his findings “reveal that the raw materials from which our solar system was built are preserved in a few exceptional meteorites, from which we can now recover the prehistory of our solar system.”

Several things stand out from stories of this genre.  (1) The new finding contradicts earlier beliefs.  (2) The new finding is put in the context of a vast field of unanswered questions.  (3) Evolution is a given.  (4) The accepted age of the solar system (4.6 billion years) is a given.  (5) Most of the work remains to be done.  (6) The check is in the mail (e.g., from this tiny tidbit of hypothesis, “we can now recover the prehistory of our solar system”).  (7) Once we figure this out for our solar system, we will unlock the keys to other stars and planets, and to the whole universe.  (8) This finding is the greatest thing since primordial soup.
    This is the way evolutionists kid themselves that they are doing science.  They envelop themselves in periodic tables, lab instruments, and equations.  So far so good.  But since the Big Picture of Evolution has already been decided to be fact by decree, every piece of data must be forced into it.
    Working this way requires adding whatever ad hoc elements are needed to keep the story going, as well as ignoring uncomfortable facts.  Dr. Walt Brown, for instance, who has a very different theory for the origin of impactors (see website), said this about Strom’s theory:

Without explaining how asteroids formed in the first place, Kerr and Strom try to explain why asteroids in the main belt were shaken up by moving the giant planets around, and appealing to the extremely weak Yarkovsky effect and planetary resonances.  (The radiometer effect is much stronger, because water molecules are much more massive than photons.)  Showing that the size distribution of MBAs [not accountants, but Main Belt Asteroids] corresponds to the early craters in the inner solar system does not mean that the early impacts came from the asteroid belt.

Each scientist working under evolutionary, naturalistic assumptions is a willing accomplice to this game of self-deception.  Their motive is to contribute a brick for the Temple of Charlie, which produces gratification that one is doing his part to advance the cult.  Whether the cult matches the real history of the universe, well – how could they ever tell?  Of course, you’re only likely to hear the evolutionary side in the media, because they are all part of the cult, too.
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Solar System

Wait for this story to play out before jumping to conclusions.  If like most early man claims, it will be debunked in time.  Never be swayed by initial claims.  Wait for “the rest of the story.”
Next headline on:  Early Man

Oh good.  Now we can all laugh again as Sagan shows people, cities, spaceships and everything in the zoo and tells us, with all seriousness, “These are some of the things hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.”  Maybe the series should be renamed Cosmics.
Next headline on:  Media • Cosmology • Evolution

• LiveScience.com is posting a strongly anti-ID series by Ker Than:
  • Part 1 claims ID is trying to “drag science into the supernatural.”
  • Part 2 calls ID “the death of science.”  This article was reprinted on MSNBC.
  • Part 3 calls ID “belief posing as theory.”
  • Part 4 looked at the history of court cases that supposedly ruled “creationism” unconstitutional.
• MSNBC reporter Alex Johnson wrote about the trial.  Discovery Institute thought this article was fair-minded enough to reprint on their pro-ID site.
• New York Times printed a story with pictures.
• Wall Street Journal calls the case “Scopes 2005” (but this time, the Darwinists are the ones trying to outlaw their opposition).
• Fox News, along with other major news sources, reported on the trial.
• Lou Dobbs had Eugenie Scott of NCSE and Frank Sherwin of ICR face off for a few minutes, but the short time slot did not allow for much more than a few sound bites.
• Pressbox.co.uk last week tried to make the strange case that “intelligent design is blasphemy.”  They appealed to some religious people who think I.D. is blasphemous to science, and some who thought it is blasphemous to Christianity (because it declines to identify the Designer).
• York Dispatch wrote about the Discovery Institute’s refusal to back Dover.
• Discovery Institute did not approve of Dover’s policy, but nevertheless denounced the “Orwellian” attempts of the ACLU to stifle scientific inquiry.
• EvolutionNews, a media-watch blog of the Discovery Institute, has Jonathan Witt on the scene who is providing blow-by-blow coverage.  John West listed media myths to watch out for.

Saturn’s moon Titan is shrouded in smog that obscures its surface, but scientists have a trick: at certain infrared wavelengths, light travels unhindered through the haze, letting the complex geography be seen clearly.  We’re going to give you some wavelengths to see through the haze of rhetorical smoke that is obscuring the real atmosphere around the intelligent design movement.  The smoke is coming out in billows from certain Darwinistas.  Look at this big lie Ker Than tells, for instance: “Yet no true examples of irreducible complexity have ever been found.”  Are we to just take his word for it?  No elephants have ever been found in his living room, either, despite the smell and the fact he can’t move or see anything, because Big Science ruled that elephants cannot be invoked in explanations.  He follows it up with the old bandwagon gimmick: “The concept is rejected by the majority of the scientific community.”  With this kind of smoke in the air, a well-tuned Baloney Detector is a must for navigating through the media without following the blind into the ditch.  Learn to use well these penetrating wavelengths:

• Science and religion, not science vs. religion:  If you have been told that science and religion are two non-overlapping domains that have nothing to do with each other, you have been sold a bill of goods, and should demand a refund.  Philosophy of science has a long and varied history.  Up until the Darwinian usurpation, it was primarily religious people who did science.  They were the ones who categorized the fields of inquiry, devised the scientific method, founded the branches of science, and were motivated by their philosophy to do scientific work.  The word scientist did not even exist till William Whewell invented it in the 19th century; it was natural philosophy, restricted to the study of tangible, observable natural phenomena.  Scientists were committed to proof by observation, experimentation, and repeatability.  There was no conflict between the pursuit of knowledge (what science means, by definition) and religion.  This is not controversial.^*  Of all religions, in particular, it was the Judeo-Christian worldview that was the patron and best friend of science.  The supposed warfare between science and religion is a myth that was promulgated by anti-religious Darwinists in their efforts to make science a secular replacement for religion.
  ^*For support from disinterested scholars (which is always encouraged here), check out, for instance, the two Teaching Company college-level lecture series on the history of science, where you will find two reputable secular professors making this point emphatically.  You can also read our online book, or the new book by Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God.  Also, notice this line from John Tresch in Science 09/30/2005 in a book review of Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey by Bowler and Morus: “... the book shows that the history of science itself has a rich and varied history--how, for instance, in the 1870s and 1880s the idea of a longstanding ‘war between science and religion’ was invented to bolster budgets in new research universities....”
• Limits of science:  Science cannot know everything, because not everything can be tested in the lab.  History, for instance, is a branch of knowledge that deals with non-repeatable events of the past; consequently, the methods of investigation are different – eyewitness testimony, artifacts, journals, textual criticism, and the like.  This limitation becomes extreme when dealing with prehistory.  Without observers, one can only make inferences that are more or less plausible.  The farther back one goes, the more these inferences overlap heavily with assumptions, presuppositions and philosophical preferences.  In the limit (when considering ultimate origins), evolution and theology are indistinguishable; the story of origins becomes the science of one religion against the science of another religion.  Here, “science” loses all hope of testability and repeatability, and reduces to its core values: honesty, integrity, love of truth, submission to laws of logic, carefulness and other traits that are essentially religious values.  To suppose that Darwinists, who presume that honesty is a mere emergent property of matter in motion, are more capable of it than theists is as arrogant as it is self-refuting.
• Natural, Supernatural and Intelligent Causation:  Much of the smog in the debate comes from the Darwinist straw man habit of calling intelligent design “supernatural” and calling it “giving up on science.”  Penetrate this fog with your light saber and you will see much.  Intelligent design is not based on what we don’t know, but on what we do know.  It is not an appeal to a god-of-the-gaps or theological explanation, but the very approach science uses all the time to discern between intentional and non-intentional effects.  I.D. proponents argue that it is a superior explanation of complex, specified, information-rich phenomena, based on the uniformity of experience, than appeals to chance and blind natural law.
      Not all phenomena have intelligent causes, but ruling them out by definition is an arbitrary and potentially show-stopping limitation on science.  Intelligent causes can be discerned from natural causes through rational analysis of the causal resources available.  But it is an exercise in futility to rule out intelligent causes when an intelligence has, indeed, acted.  When one is trying to make an inference to the best explanation about Mt. Rushmore, for instance, or about an archaeological inscription or stone tool, it is foolish to restrict one’s thinking to natural forces like wind and rain.  The ID takes well-known and fruitful methods of design inference and applies them rigorously to biology – not with theological pronouncements from prophets, but with rigorous mathematical and logical reasoning – the same kind used in forensics, cryptography, archaeology, and even SETI.
      If the Darwinists did not have such a political and emotional stake in defending their religion of naturalism, they would find this perfectly acceptable and reasonable.  In short, ID is not a cop-out answer or escape clause the way the Darwinists portray it: “We can’t figure it out scientifically so God must have done it,” but rather a positive affirmation about something we can know from the uniformity of experience.  Any time we find a language – especially one that can be translated into another language and maintain its meaning – we know that a mind produced it.  To say otherwise in order to maintain one’s philosophical preference is the cop-out.  To promise “the check is in the mail” and “it’s an unsolved problem, but we’ll figure out some day” is the escape clause, and the Darwinists are red-handed guilty.
• Darwinism, R.I.P.  An assumption clouding up much of the reporting is that Darwinism works, or at least that it works better than any other scientific theory (see best-in-field fallacy).  If you have read Creation-Evolution Headlines for any time, you know that Darwinism is positive anti-knowledge (to borrow Colin Patterson’s phrase).  It cannot explain the origin of life, the development of the embryo, speciation, abrupt appearance of new body plans, anything.  It is a dismal failure, a lame, crippled, half-dead horse at the starting line where the rules prohibit the I.D. Seabiscuit from entry.  There is not a single part of evolutionary theory that is not controversial among evolutionists themselves.  The Darwinian method of science has two parts: (1) declare evolution a fact by fiat, and (2) hunt for corroborating evidence (that is, if you feel up to it; none is really necessary, since by #1, evolution is already a fact).  Darwinism has grown into an unwieldy, just-so storytelling empire built on Charlie’s flimsy heuristic (unguided, purposeless natural selection) that is tautological at its root, and fraught with a history of evil fruit.  Darwinists spend their time connecting distant dots of data with pure fiction.  They think that by extrapolating submillimeter changes in beak size they can explain the vast diversity of life, from whales to magnolias.  It’s time to call the Darwinists to accountability after 146 years of failure and open the field to fresh ideas.
• Design vs. non-design exhausts the possibilities.  LiveScience.com mocked anyone who disagrees with Darwinism by posting its “Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)” with the implication that if alternatives to Darwinism need to be permitted, then we must decide if schools should teach the Norse creation myth, the Egyptian creation myth, the Zoroastrian creation myth, etc., or all the above.  Luring the unwary reader in with nude art was a cheap trick, but they forgot to include the most lurid fable of all – Darwinism.  The display assumes all these creation stories are on a level playing field.  Any reasonable person could rank them in order of plausibility, but that is beside the point.  Even with the historical fact that it was Christian Europe that gave birth to science, not Persia or the Norse or the Egyptians, that is also completely beside the point.  No one in the I.D. movement is asking that a specific religious account of creation be taught as science.  The issue is about design, not the Designer or how he designed – just whether the phenomenon under investigation was, in fact, designed.
      Either life was designed, or it was not.  Those options exhaust the possibilities.  Design can be inferred by the methods of science without making any claims about who did it, or why.  Even the Darwinists like Richard Dawkins admit that life looks designed for a purpose.  Their approach is to explain away the design, and tempt us away from our common sense and logic, to chase a phantom story that in the misty past design just “emerged” (their favorite miracle word) out of disorder.  Should this mythology have sole rights to be heard in science class?  Intelligent causes are known to be the only explanation for certain classes of phenomena capable of scientific investigation.  No one has ever seen a complex information-rich system, like the DNA language and translation factory, complete with error-correcting mechanisms, arise by chance or natural law.  Why should the philosophical naturalists, like snarling Dobermans, keep healthier bloodhounds, with a nose for design, at bay?  Why should science be arbitrarily restricted from unlocking the mystery of life with a key that works?  More ominously, why should philosophical naturalism be established as a de facto religion guised in the sacred name of science?

The Darwinist strategy is to attach the label “scientific” to their beliefs and label their critics “religious.”  In this way, they hope to protect themselves from scrutiny by framing the legitimate controversies about their storytelling empire in terms of religion vs. science.  They arrogate to themselves the euphemism “scientific” and try to pigeonhole anyone who disagrees with their fable with the meaningless and contemptuous label, “people of faith.”  By inference, they assume for themselves the contrasting ribbon, people of reason.
    Since we are immune to bluffing here, after evaluating their rhetoric and performance, we suggest a counter-label to describe the rabid Darwin defenders: People of Froth.  Foaming at the mouth, these merciless warriors emit masses of fearsome-looking, bubbling matter from their lips, making reporters wilt with awe.  But what is froth upon closer inspection, but a mere agglutination of thin, vulnerable membranes enclosing hot air?  Realizing this can inspire the next thing that is needed after confidence in one’s own intellectual weapons: courage.  Fear thou not the course of the wroth; go forth against froth with the force of truth.  Say that five times real fast, then act on it.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Education

One of the best-attended sessions of that meeting consisted of papers from leading scholars who pondered the daunting challenges of reconstructing alien civilizations – at interstellar distances....
    “The approaches we take as archaeologists in our search for peoples from another time and place may well offer some useful analogy to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” suggested archaeologist Paul Wason, one of the participants.  “Our work is conducted without the benefit of direct contact with living beings,” he observed, which is akin to SETI’s attempt to detect intelligence around distant stars.
    But how can analogies help us anticipate contact with extraterrestrials?
    For starters, by providing a case study of Homo sapiens encountering an alien intelligence, Wason explained.  “The meeting of Neanderthals and sapiens may be a good example for analogy—for it was a meeting of two different kinds of consciousness,” he added.
    But be forewarned as we start to draw lessons for SETI from such encounters, Wason urged.  The analogy may be humbling.
    “It may be that in such a comparison of us with ETI, ... we are the Neanderthals,” he said.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

“Planned efforts to communicate beyond Earth should force us to step back and look at the big picture,” said Harrison, a professor at the University of California at Davis.  “Deciding what might be important for another civilization forces us to move beyond our pathologically narrow time span and develop a long term perspective.”
    Even if we never make contact, Harrison observed, we might reap significant benefits by pondering these issues now.
    “Determining what we should say and who should say it could be a useful self-study that fosters self-contemplation and encourages consensus,” Harrison noted.  “These deliberations should encourage us to think about what makes us human, where we are going, and how we conceive of our place in the universe.”

Does anyone need further proof that SETI is a religion? (See Michael Crichton’s allegation, 12/27/2003 link).  This psychologist, enamored with dreams and visions of contact with aliens, believes these super-beings will be able to help us answer the big questions of life, questions typically addressed through philosophy or religion.  Not only will they teach us wisdom, but we will learn to bow humbly before their eminence.  Even if they never show up, we can gain wisdom by contemplation of their existence.  Next thing you know, Harrison will have us all repeating some mantra, like seti, seti, seti, to help us meditate.
    Harrison and his fellow believers are converging on Fantasyland from both directions.  From the past, they misinterpret the bones of Neanderthal Man by relegating him to racial inferiority (see 09/23/2005 commentary).  From the future, they expect that beings will have evolved by natural means far beyond us, like gods.  A system that relies on myths and legends, teaches morality (e.g., humility and contemplation), tries to answer the big questions of philosophy, and encourages charitable giving to support the priesthood and infrastructure necessary to support them is indistinguishable from a cult.  SETI has come full circle.  Attempting to replace belief in a Creator God, they have become, to borrow Maxwell’s wordcraft, an enterprise to “curry favour with beings who cannot exist, to compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist.”  (See 08/10/2005 commentary; try re-reading Maxwell’s entire poem with SETI in mind).
Next headline on:  SETI • Early Man • Theology

We also analyze the distribution of splice variants across different classes of genes.  We find that tissue-specific genes have a higher tendency to undergo alternative splicing than ubiquitously expressed genes.  Furthermore, the patterns of alternative splicing are only weakly conserved between orthologous genes in human and mouse.  Our studies reveal extensive modification of the stem cell molecular repertoire by alternative splicing and provide insights into its overall role as a mechanism of generating genomic diversity.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

These findings add to the growing realization that the genome contains much more embedded information than mere gene count would suggest (see 09/08/2005 entry).  If the introns themselves (02/18/2005, 02/02/2005) transcribe into RNA regulatory elements, then nothing is wasted, and nothing is junk.  If all parts of the system can be shown to produce function, it becomes harder to claim evolution built this tight ship.  These authors’ weak attempt to produce an “evolutionary argument” did not demonstrate that any heritable, functional advantage derived from mistakes in alternative splicing, but only that it could have.  Did they demonstrate an example of a new function arising from a mistake?  No; they just expressed faith that randomness creates the possibility space for order.  This is a doctrine of pantheism (a religion).
    On the other hand, the high degree of conservation found in ubiquitously-expressed genes and at intron-exon boundaries are anti-evolutionary observations.  To argue evolution out of this data is to rely again on slippery homology vs. analogy arguments (see “Homology for Dummies,” 05/05/2004).  Because such arguments depend on embedded evolutionary assumptions, they are inherently circular.  It is just as logical to conclude that a common Designer built the system around two principles: (1) modular construction, wherein commonly-needed functions are coded similarly between different organisms, and (2) robustness, in which regulatory networks can maintain stability in changing environments.  The design inference has the added advantage of an adequate cause for the high degree of information involved.
    Whatever geneticists continue to uncover about the particulars, the system works.  Somehow, a human genome gives rise to a human, and a mouse genome gives rise to a mouse.  Unless mutations disrupt the program, the mouse will have all the parts in the right places.  It will be covered with the right kind of fur, have the right teeth in the right order, have feet and muscles and eyes and a brain and every organ necessary for its little life.  The molecular processes may seem disorganized to us.  We see that one gene can be alternatively spliced into several products, some which can produce opposite functions.  How does the right one get selected at the right time it is needed?  There are wonderful mysteries here that could be illuminated by a scientist looking for intelligent design.  If the DNA is not the master controller of its own transcription, what is?  What controls the spliceosome? (09/17/2004).  Can protein-protein interactions really be responsible for regulating the splicing, or is there another layer of genetic information directing their interplay?  What do all those short non-coding RNAs do?  How can so many competing processes and such a multiplicity of molecules guarantee a working mouse at the end of the assembly line?  We see only glimpses of how the plethora of processes at the molecular level leads invariably to the right result.  There may be more information and more design operating than we can possibly imagine.
Next headline on:  Genetics

The time has come to discard the evolutionary stories about Neanderthals being some sort of primitive, less-evolved ancestors of Homo sapiens.  In terms of physique, intellectual capacity and every other measure, they fell within the range of variability of modern humans.  They would probably be indistinguishable from Inuits or other stocky-build populations alive today.  Absence of tools or art could be merely a function of materials used.  Some jungle tribes today, for instance, make spears and blowguns that would rarely survive with their bones.  Assuming the hypothesis that Neandertals learned how to use longer-lasting materials from other people, this does not reflect on their intelligence.  Even modern humans learned how to work with different metals over different times and places.  If Neandertals picked up on new ideas that their slightly-different brethren were doing, this further proves their human nature.  They were capable of plagiarism.
    The fable of “Neanderthal Man” as a beetle-browed, stoop-shouldered, brutish human precursor, slowly evolving into today’s businessman has been known now for decades to be incorrect.  That myth served the propaganda of early Darwinists, but did a lot of damage by promoting the dark art of ranking humans on racial scales.  We owe brother Neandertal an apology.  Let us welcome Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, with a big hug and handshake, as peers in the neighborhood cave.
Next headline on:  Early Man

The evolution of complex and physiologically remarkable structures such as the vertebrate eye has long been a focus of intrigue and theorizing by biologists.  In work reported this week in Current Biology, the evolutionary history of a critical eye protein has revealed a previously unrecognized relationship between certain components of vertebrate eyes and those of the more primitive light-sensing systems of invertebrates.  The findings help clarify our conceptual framework for understanding how the vertebrate eye, as we know it, has emerged over evolutionary time....
    Fish, frogs, birds and mammals all experience image-forming vision, thanks to the fact that their eyes all express crystallins and form a lens; however, the vertebrates’ nearest invertebrate relatives, such as sea squirts, have only simple eyes that detect light but are incapable of forming an image.  This has lead to the view that the lens evolved within the vertebrates early in vertebrate evolution, and it raises a long-standing question in evolutionary biology: How could a complex organ with such special physical properties have evolved?   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The conservation of the regulatory hierarchy controlling beta-crystallin expression between organisms with and without a lens shows that the evolutionary origin of the lens was based on co-option of pre-existing regulatory circuits controlling the expression of a key structural gene in a primitive light-sensing system.

This strongly suggests that prior to the evolution of the lens, there was a regulatory link between two tiers of genes: those that would later become responsible for controlling lens development, and those that would help give the lens its special physical properties.  This combination of genes appears to have then been co-opted in an early vertebrate during the evolution of its visual system, giving rise to the lens.

Let us hope the highly-complex DNA-snipping protein emerged simultaneously (08/28/2003) to keep the lens from becoming opaque out of the factory, as well as mechanisms for stacking the crystallin cells and making them interlock, and supplying them with nutrients from the edges without blocking the light, rewiring the brain to receive and process the new sensory data, and a dozen other things that would make expression of raw crystallin useless to the unidentified, mythical “early vertebrate” that first decided to co-opt sea squirt technology.

A programmer wrote in and observed, “I can take code that performs the same or similar function and use it in a completely different program.  Sometimes I have to change things a little to make it work, sometimes virtually no changes are required.  That is economy of effort.”  Reusability does not demonstrate common ancestry without assuming it, nor does it explain the origin of the crystallin protein and the genes that regulate its expression.  He continued, “I can take 2 bicycle fenders, hammer them into one and make it into a motorcycle fender, but that doesn’t explain how the bicycle got to be a bicycle or how it got fenders.”

Co-option is just a fancy word for the Tinker Bell theory of evolution.  Evolution is a tinkerer, they tell us.  She cobs existing parts to build new things.  Aside from the gratuitous personification fallacy this commits, the idea requires that Tinker Bell be blind, dumb and indifferent.  In Darwinese, there is no teleology: Tinker Bell is not trying to invent an image-forming lens.  She flits from sea squirt to sea squirt with her mutation wand, zapping various individuals recklessly and carelessly.  It’s a lottery which sea squirt will find some benefit in the damage instead of dying from the genetic bomb.  Remember, no functional advantage, no natural selection – except the negative kind (Yikes! Eliminate this mutation before it kills us!).
    Can we get real?  One girder hanging over the canyon does not make a bridge (05/22/2002 commentary).  There is no smoothly graded sequence of transitional forms.  Whenever an organism is suggested as a primitive ancestor, as in the case of the box jellyfish (see 05/13/2005 entry), closer inspection shows the organism has eyes perfectly suited for its habitat and lifestyle.  Each visual system is too different from those of other organisms, and too complex to imagine having evolved on its own.  So the follow-up question to the EurekAlert Darwinist propaganda celebration is, where are science reporters exercising freedom of the press, freedom of conscience and critical thinking skills?  Keep reading.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Mammals • Terrestrial Zoology

The question of whether evolution occurs is separate and different from the question of how evolution occurs.  The evidence is overwhelming that evolution has occurred – that it is a satisfactory explanation for the observations we make about the history, order, and diversity of life....
    Questions or debates about evolutionary mechanism have nothing to do with our confidence in whether evolution occurred.   (Italics in original, bold added.)

No.  Essentially all available data and observations from the natural world support the hypothesis of evolution.  No serious biologist or geologist today doubts whether evolution occurred; debate continues, however, among scientists about the mechanisms by which evolution occurred.

Science deals only with material causes of material phenomena.  Nothing we can observe in nature requires a supernatural designer; we therefore defer to material processes to explain what we see in nature.

This is a golden opportunity for informed visitors.  The Darwin Party has published all their Talking Points, and all that is needed is to formulate good follow-up questions aimed at them.  The Talking Points are so vapid and uninformed, this should be easy.  For instance, look at the way they treat this question: How do you know evolution happened a long time ago?

By examining fossils and comparing them to organisms alive today.  In the Museum exhibits, for example, a short film about Cornell professor Amy McCune shows how she uses fossil fish to study how evolution happened in what is now the Connecticut River Valley around 200 million years ago.  She collects fossils from different layers and compares them to fish alive today and tries to conclude how evolution may have produced the patterns of similarity and difference she observes.

This is a non-answer.  One has to assume evolution and long ages to believe it.  At most, it only demonstrates microevolution, which is not the issue.  The same fossils, layers and comparisons with live fish could be used by a knowledgeable creationist to argue against evolution and long ages and, instead, for a worldwide flood that sent many species into extinction.  The Darwinist answer confirms that evolutionary “science” is merely a storytelling enterprise by ideologues intent on force-fitting fragmentary observations into a preconceived belief system.  The blindness of evolutionists to their own circular reasoning is astounding.  The question was, How do you know evolution happened a long time ago?  The answer was, “Because evolution happened a long time ago.  See these 200-million-year-old fish?”  Surely the Darwinists could do better if better answers were available.
    The talking points provide nothing new (see 09/02/2005 commentary).  Most of them revolve around “science” vs “faith.”  The published guide perpetuates the myth that evolution is a fact of science (even if the mechanism is hotly debated), and anything that doubts naturalistic explanations is ipso facto “religious.”  This is a setup for any logical thinker, because it is another circular argument.  Ask, how can a theory without a mechanism be considered scientific?  How can one call evolution, a hypothesis (their own word) with no agreed-on mechanism, a fact without first assuming it is a fact?  How can one declare what is scientific and what is not with mere definitions?  If I discuss only scientific evidence in rebuttal, how can you assume I have a religious motivation without reading my mind?  How can I know you don’t have an equally philosophical motivation to deny design?  Surely you are not insinuating that a Christian is incapable of reasoning from evidence or caring about the truth, or that materialists are more unbiased, are you?  What if the true answer lies outside natural causes – what if it really was designed?  Wouldn’t that prevent naturalism from ever finding the right answer?  Eventually, the discussion must return to the observable evidence.  That is not where the Darwinians want the discussion to go.  When forced, the museum curator may point to all the exhibits of intelligently-designed organisms on the wall, and say, “See?  There is the evidence, right there.  Look at those peppered moths, for instance.”  Now we can get somewhere.
    In the film The Triumph of Design, Phillip Johnson looks forward to the day when students will respond to the evidence for peppered moths, finch beaks and the other usual Darwinist propaganda fare, with informed follow-up questions like, “Yes, we know about that.  We know the peppered moth story was a fraud, and that it did not really prove anything about macroevolution.  We know about Darwin’s finches, and that the changes to beak size showed no long-term trend; that does not demonstrate macroevolution, either.  Where is the evidence that macroevolution occurred?”  One can sympathize with a teacher’s sudden urge to go to the restroom.
    All this being said, the last thing any reasonable person wants is for a poor, well-meaning docent to end up sobbing in the restroom over an “extremely argumentative or confrontational” visitor.  Want to destroy any chance for progress against Darwinism?  Just be a mean-spirited, dogmatic, unkind, loudmouth disputer trying to make the docent or curator look foolish in front of other people.  For a Christian, who believes in loving one’s neighbor and sharing good news, nothing is uglier, and nothing will backfire faster.  The goal is to encourage discussion, to build bridges to other people – to appeal to their sense of logic and integrity.  Long-shut doors need to be opened so the fresh air and sunshine can come in.  Let the Darwinists be the ones culpable of shutting off discussion.  Let them be the dogmatists.  Let their tactics backfire against the evident congeniality and reasonableness of their opposition.  The firm but gentle pressure of an increasing number of thoughtful, informed visitors will have its healing effect over time.  Many of these docents are volunteers or poorly paid workers just trying to do their job.  (This is true, sometimes for summer hires, or leaders of cave tours who, without any formal training in geology, simply parrot scripts that glibly describe formations as x million years old.)  If such workers are merely repeating what they were told to say, it’s not fair to pin the blame for all of Dogmatic Darwinism on them as individuals.  Yet unwarranted claims should not go unchallenged, either, whether from trained curators or untrained volunteers.  What to do?
    One productive approach might be to speak with the docent alone, before the tour.  Let’s call the docent Linda.  Introduce yourself with a friendly greeting (it must be genuine, not forced), and let her know your point of view.  Reassure her that you are not there to argue; instead, say that both of us know that Darwinism is a controversial subject.  Let Linda know you respect scientific evidence.  Explain that many times evidence can be interpreted in more than one way, and that you just want the scientific evidence to be able to speak for itself as much as possible, and for problems or controversies to be acknowledged.  Ask Linda’s permission to present an alternative explanation for the fossil series, rock layers or whatever.  If she agrees, this takes the pressure off her to talk about it (and possibly misrepresent it) in front of the group.  If you are given the chance, be brief and accurate.  Don’t steal the show.  Hopefully you came prepared with knowledge specific to the display.  If she doesn’t want you to speak, at least she will know that an informed visitor is present, and that awareness may temper her dogmatism.
    Whatever happens, express kindness, appreciation and diplomacy at all times.  Show respect.  Compliment the things that are good about the museum.  Most people are more influenced by the way you say something than what is actually said.  Be real and transparent.  Don’t speak beyond your knowledge, but don’t settle for pat answers, bluffing or evasion, either.  The normal civil manners – waiting one’s turn, not interrupting, not attacking another’s character or motives – these should all be second nature.  If you can communicate an informed, knowledgeable position in a winsome manner, you may find others in the group – maybe even Linda – crowding around you after the tour wanting to hear more, and thanking you for speaking up.  Another unobtrusive way to influence the museum is to write polite but firm statements on response cards about dogmatic exhibits.  Here’s another: infiltrate the ranks.  Sign up to be a museum docent and ask the hard questions to the trainer in the “dealing with creationists” class.  This could neutralize Dogmatic Darwinism before it affects hundreds of visitors.  If the museum retaliates by forbidding non-Darwinists from joining the museum volunteer docent staff and requiring a statement of faith, call the ACLU.  When they decline, well, you have a story for the local newspaper, and perhaps a case for the ADF.  Readers may wish to write in with their own suggestions and experiences.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Bible

More and more structure earlier and earlier – does this sound like evolution or creation?  Evolutionary biology has a Cambrian explosion.  Evolutionary cosmology has a structure explosion.  Creation has abrupt appearance intelligently guided and designed by an adequate cause.  Explosions?  We have no need of that hypothesis.
Next headline on:  Astronomy • Cosmology • Dating Methods

Manna from heaven.  So yet more violence, with the Earth subject to cataclysmic destruction?  Indeed yes, but there is a silver, or rather organic, lining.  It appears that Earth’s position, relatively close to the Sun, was highly precarious.  This was because the light elements, essential for life, were swept by solar radiation far beyond our planet, out to the so-called snow-line.  So no oceans, and life is cancelled?  Yet help was on the way, with a delivery system that via asteroids and comets resupplied Earth with both an ocean and a fertile brew of organic molecules.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The only redeeming quality in his mythoid is an offhand reference to the fact that our earth occupies an unlikely and privileged position.  Let’s offer simple Simon our Comet Cocktail Blaster and see if he thinks he will remain fertile: a teaspoon of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (07/21/2005), one microgram each of L-glycine and one of D-glycine, carbonated with HCN in ammonia with water ice.  Delivered inside a rock thrown at 120,000 mph.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Solar System • Dumb Ideas

Why should Darwin be mentioned in this article, except as a historical embarrassment?  There is no evolution here.  Heap big iguana is still iguana as much as peewee.  Size is not a “complex trait” in the sense of evolving wings or some new organs; it is just a modification of parts already present.  There is no long-term evolutionary trend here, but rather only oscillations around a mean that reflect climate conditions – otherwise we should see iguanas the size of Godzilla by now.  If natural and sexual selection work against each other, then stasis rules, not evolution.  Charlie won’t get anywhere with slippage on the treadmill (see 03/17/2003 entry).
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Puzzles are good for scientists, and better observations are welcomed like rain in a desert, but scientists also need to learn to think outside the box.  One question never asked is whether these stars really are 200 million years old.
Next headline on:  Stellar Astronomy • Dating Methods

Although a positive relationship between male status and offspring count has been predicted by evolutionary theory and found in animal species and “traditional” human societies, in modern societies, most studies found no or even a negative relationship.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

There are so many things wrong with this study, Darwinists should silence these researchers so as not to embarrass the Party.  (1) When you have to use subsamples instead of representative samples to get the results your theory predicted, what does that tell you about your theory?  (2) What kind of bizarre sample is university male employees, anyway?  Perhaps it could be compared to the jungle, so we might grant that possibility.  (3) More offspring is not better.  In the university milieu they might all be gay.  (4) Evolution is not a force.  Suggestion: replace o with a, then it works.  (5) Men in high and prestigious positions don’t have time to have kids.  If their fable were true, why is the country being overrun with low-income workers with big families who grow up to repeat the cycle?  (6) Women don’t marry such men to have kids.  They marry them to divorce them and take their money.  (7) Feminists are going to get mad about this sexist idea, because it will appear to give scientific justification for male ambition.  (8) The argument is self-refuting, because if being a scientist is an example of a high and prestigious position, then these scientists did not come up with their fable to discover a truth, but to pass on their genes.
    That should do for starters.  “Evolutionary explanations” is an oxymoron, like vanilla fudge, rock opera or Microsoft Works.  O, for reporters who would not let the Darwinists get away with unadulterated tripe.  Nobody on a school board is going to read Ethology, but the Darwinists hope their little bugle calls on EurekAlert will make everyone salute as a conditioned response.  Sorry, those days are over.  Since the Baloney Detector went online, the prisoners in the Darwinist concentration camps (i.e., high school biology classes) have seen the outside world, and are no longer afraid of the authority figures behind the Bamboozle Curtain.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

This system presupposes other systems in place.  If one cell extends a TNT, the other cell has to be prepared to receive it.  When a package arrives, the other cell needs to know what to do with it.  One must also ask how or why, before this system existed, any cell in a community of cells would even venture to send a message outside itself.  Here we have another method of communication (see also 09/14/2005 entry) that allows cells, long thought to be rugged individualists, to be cooperative members of society.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Human Body • Amazing Stories

Sorry, chimps were already out there, too (see 09/01/2005 story).  They didn’t evolve into anything like us.  Try again, and this time, let’s see some equations (see 08/22/2005 and 08/19/2005 entries) with the fables.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Ideas

Odd.  Biology got along just fine without this indispensable foundation for a long time.  In fact, it could be argued that evolution is only a naturalistic facade on a creationist superstructure.  John Ray, Carl Linnaeus, Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur and many others did just fine biologizing without evolution.  Their Christian faith was their motivation to do excellent scientific work.  Had the Nobel prize existed in their day, they certainly would have been among the most distinguished and honored recipients.  Any such lists of authorities are therefore contrived political statements.
    What Elie Wiesel endured under the Nazis is horrendous, but it did not have to make him lose his faith and go haywire over evolution.  The faith of Corrie ten Boom and other Holocaust survivors was their beacon of hope despite experiencing the darkness of human evil, and gave direction and purpose to their lives.  Wiesel has dedicated his life to helping people never forget what happened there.  Why then, instead, does he not point to the roots of that evil – the evolutionary ethics rooted in Darwinism that Haeckel took to Germany and spread like a dark evangelist?  How ironic that he would exalt the very foundation of two political ideologies – Nazism and communism – that have caused more inhumane treatment and death than the world has even seen.  Over 100 million deaths in less than a century can be traced to the actions of evolution-inspired dictators, and that doesn’t begin to describe the suffering of many millions more who survived their lies, tortures, brutalities, deprivations, midnight arrests, hard labor camps, gulags, and associated nightmares.
    We agree with Wiesel that mankind should never forget, but for even stronger reasons.  Our reasons give moral impetus to the debate over evolution today.  One should not presume that Nazism and communism have exhausted the potential evils inherent in Darwinian thinking.  One only has to think of today’s ethical tensions over stem cells, clones, chimeras, abortion, genetically-engineered humans and other controversies to envision horrors that would make Stalin look like a playground bully (see Apologetics Press for a recent example).  Learning from history is an important start.  That’s why we strongly urge readers to learn twentieth century history, and read accounts of those who survived the brutality of Nazi Germany and endured the unspeakable horrors behind the Iron Curtain.  That such atrocities continue to exist in North Korea, Cuba, China and other communist countries is a stern reminder that there is still much to do to combat this evil at its root.  For a scholarly treatment of the Darwin-based teaching on evolutionary ethics between 1859 and 1932 that fed Hitler’s views on racial policy, read From Darwin to Hitler by historian Richard Weikart.  And since many historians omit the Darwinian assumptions and motivations behind Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, it’s vital to review Jerry Bergman’s paper on “The Darwinian foundation of communism” and first-person works like Solzhenitzen’s The Gulag Archipelago and Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ.  A tree is known by its fruit and is fed by its root.
    The Kansas school board member rightly said, “I don’t think anything should be taught as dogma.”  The debates over evolution and intelligent design cannot be won by appeals to authority.  Nobel laureates are smart people in their specialties, but that does not make them experts on politics, ethics, education and philosophy.  Look at the dumb things two of them said a couple of years ago (see 08/24/2003); some of their remarks demonstrate that they don’t even know that much about biology, let alone history or logic.  Maybe most of us can’t split an atom or learn how reverse transcription works, but anyone can learn common sense.  How ironic that scientists, supposedly committed to observation and verification by experiment, want us to accept their word on evolution as dogma.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolution • Intelligent Design • Education

This report demonstrates that the beta sliding clamp of E. coli binds two different DNA polymerases at the same time.  One is the high-fidelity Pol III chromosomal replicase and the other is Pol IV, a low-fidelity lesion bypass Y family polymerase.  Further, polymerase switching on the primed template junction is regulated in a fashion that limits the action of the low-fidelity Pol IV.  Under conditions that cause Pol III to stall on DNA, Pol IV takes control of the primed template.  After the stall is relieved, Pol III rapidly regains control of the primed template junction from Pol IV and retains it while it is moving, becoming resistant to further Pol IV takeover events.  These polymerase dynamics within the beta toolbelt complex restrict the action of the error-prone Pol IV to only the area on DNA where it is required.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Evidence is provided that efficient repair of a single mismatch requires multiple molecules of MutS-alpha-MutL-alpha complex.  These data suggest a model for human mismatch repair involving coordinated initiation and termination of mismatch-provoked excision.

How could evolution ever devise a mechanism like an automatic toolbelt?  This is uncanny.  Here is a set of molecules that are programmed to act like a multi-faceted assembly line with a built-in, automatic-switching, multipart repair kit.  Neither the press release nor either paper made any attempt to explain how Tinker Bell and her mutation wand could have produced wonders like these.  Who would dare?
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Amazing Stories

It is indeed lamentable that a scientific dispute, one that should be aired in the open marketplace of ideas, may come down to the decision of one or a few judges.  Because courts do not generally have the kind of knowledge about these subjects to rule wisely, it becomes almost a matter of luck for either side, depending on which judge winds up on the bench.  Will the court be swayed by the sheer numbers of alleged experts, or by the force of the arguments?  If a judge rules that “ID is not science” will that make it so?  Scientific positions are supposed to be evaluated on the preponderance of evidence, not by majorities of experts or judges.
    Any parents, school board members, public officials, activists or writers interested in giving ID a chance should learn to be very careful in their approach.  Charging out with well-intentioned but misguided enthusiasm can do more harm than good.  The strategy that is likely to succeed in these matters is defensive, not offensive.  No one wants to hear authorities “mandating” anything – certainly not a position on a controversial issue.  What makes sense to courts, politicians, and the public is defending students’ rights against indoctrination.  The Darwinists have had unrestricted power to pour their philosophy into student heads without challenge.  A large majority in the public feels that is wrong.  Science is not supposed to be about indoctrination, but about critical thinking.  That is the strong point of the “teach the controversy” approach to the origins issue.  Progress in that strategy will bring much-needed fresh air into one of the most important issues facing the country.  It is likely to garner the most supporters willing to fight past the Darwinist gestapo to open the doors and windows.  Fresh air has tremendous healing potential.
Food for thought: Based on their actions and proposals, which side is apparently the most confident that an open and fair examination of the evidence will lead to vindication of their views?
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Education

• Depending on what guide book we read or what ranger talk we listen to, we might learn that the Colorado River is perhaps 30 million years old...
• The author moves on to describe the observations of later generations of geologists, including the observations and reasoning that completely revised the early explanations of how the Grand Canyon formed.
• The evidence is scattered and incompletely preserved, and geologists today are still unclear about details of the Colorado River’s development.  But these gaps are relatively minor—a few million years of missing evidence here or there...
• He also offers readers a taste of modern speculation and the uncertainties surrounding these generally accepted notions.
• Until a time machine is invented, we will never know for sure how the Grand Canyon formed.  Nonetheless, we do know that the rocks forming the canyon walls are of immense age and that the cliffs and slopes exposing those rocks are features of the last instants of their history.

In telling the Canyon’s story, Powell provides an honest and open description of geological detective work and the rethinking of ideas.  At a time when the National Park Service sells a book describing a creationist explanation of the Grand Canyon’s formation little different than the ideas from which modern geology emerged more than 150 years ago, the book reminds us of the timeless contrast between the methods of modern natural science and the power of myth.

The book to which he refers as “myth” is, of course, Tom Vail’s Grand Canyon: A Different View that became the center of controversy when geologists found it in the bookstores and tried to censor it (see 01/08/2004 and 10/14/2005 entries).  This attractive book, filled with beautiful photographs, also contains entries by 15 PhD scientists, many of them geologists, who disagree with the “generally accepted notions.”  With a sweep of the hand, Schmidt dismissed their opinions as “myth” while assuming all the paradigm shifts and uncertainties of modern geology constitute “science” – even though he confessed that, without a time machine, we could never know for sure how the canyon formed.  There are many good reasons, however, for doubting the “immense age” of the canyon walls and the canyon itself.  Here is a short, but not exhaustive, review:

• Gaps: The gaps are much larger than Schmidt admits; one gap is 10 million, another 60 million, and another 100 million.  Above the Great Unconformity is a gap of over a billion years, with no soil between it and the overlying sedimentary layers.  These gaps give no evidence of large passages of time between the one below and the one above, suggesting the gaps are fictional: no long ages did elapse.  The ages claimed for the layers come not from the onsite observations, but from the a priori belief that they must be fitted into a pre-existing construct, a model constructed and later Darwinized in England: the Geologic Column.
• Flat contacts: The contacts between many layers are knife-edge thin and straight for hundreds of square miles, with no evidence of erosion between.
• Flat layers: The “generally accepted notions” expect us to believe that the Colorado Plateau rose and sank above and below sea level repeatedly, yet kept the layers flat and undisturbed, a preposterous notion.
• Gravity: The Grand Canyon traverses the Kaibab Plateau, a mile higher in elevation than the river upstream.  Clearly, rivers do not flow over mountains.  Something caused the canyon to scour through this region after a catastrophic period of sheet erosion and rapid downcutting.
• Source of material: secular geologists don’t know where all the sedimentary material came from.  Some have speculated that it was transported somehow over long distances, from as far as Appalachia (09/15/2003).  On the other hand, a flood could have scoured and pulverized great quantities of lime mud and sand, and deposited it rapidly underwater.  The characteristic layers could represent material brought in from different directions as the currents changed.  (This could also imply that the similarities to Appalachian sediments indicate that similar processes were occurring there also).
• No evolution: Squirrels on the north rim are subspecies of those on the south rim, with smooth gradations of varieties in between (CRS).  They differ mainly in fur color.  If these species were geographically isolated for at least five million years, why did they not evolve further apart?  In that same length of time, evolutionists claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors.
• No evolution II: Investigations of organisms inhabiting the forests of Shiva Temple, a forested butte isolated from the north rim, found no differences between species on the rim, even though they, too, should have been geographically isolated for millions of years.  (CRS.)
• Downstream: no large river-delta deposits can be found downstream that would be expected if the Colorado River carved the canyon over a long time.
• Upstream: large basins that could have held enough water to carve the canyon by a dam breach can be discerned upstream.  Also, portions of the canyon (Marble Canyon, inner gorge) are convincing secular geologists that it was carved quickly (see 07/22/2002) entry).
• Tectonics: faults intersect the canyon all the way from top to bottom at multiple points, but not part way up.  This indicates the layers were deposited rapidly, then faulted together as units.
• Folding: The layers fold together as if they were still soft and unconsolidated at the time.  Some folds, such as in Carbon Canyon, show more than 90° fold with no evidence of cracking or crumbling.
• Volcanos: Volcanic dikes and cones poke up through all the layers from bottom to top, but not part way up, casting doubt that millions of years transpired during sedimentation.
• Fluting: The inner gorge rocks are only fluted at river level, indicating the river has not been cutting downward through the igneous rocks for long.
• Sheet erosion: Vast quantities of rock above the canyon were swept away by sheet erosion before the canyon itself was carved.  Evidence for this can be seen at Cedar Mountain and other buttes which protrude above the canyon, displaying remnants of the thousands of vertical feet of sediments that had been swept away before the downcutting of the canyon began.
• Sand Dunes, Not: The Coconino Sandstone, long claimed to be sand dunes turned to rock, are too fine-grained to be aeolian (wind-blown) sands, and cover too a vast an area (much of the Southwest: 100,000 square miles, with a volume 10,000 cubic miles) for this scenario to be plausible.  The crossbedding could have been laid down as sand waves by deep ocean currents.  The fossil trackways could have been made in shallow water and would have had to be buried suddenly to be preserved.  All other layers in the canyon are indisputably water-deposited.  To believe the Coconino was wind-deposited, the entire region would have had to be lifted above sea level without cracking or folding, yet the contact with the water-deposited Hermit Shale below it is flat and smooth.  This indicates that deposition of the Coconino in the Grand Canyon began immediately after the Hermit formation, without 10 million years between them.
• Monsoons: a type of 3-D crossbedding called hummocky cross-stratification, visible in numerous places in the canyon, gives evidence of gigantic cyclonic storms on scales larger than anything observed today.
• Sapping: The Redwall shows evidence of sapping (rock fall occasioned by springs weakening the rock above).  The large amphitheater-shaped alcoves characteristic of the Redwall suggest that the layers were still soft and unconsolidated and impregnated with water when they formed.
• Dam Break Redux: Large lava dams that formed in the lower canyon are known to have backed up the Colorado River into a huge lake since the canyon formed, yet broke and catastrophically drained quickly, perhaps multiple times.  Why not suggest the same mechanism for formation of the canyon itself?  In recent years, this idea – first proposed by creationists – has become popular among secular geologists (05/31/2002).  Why have they not given the creationists credit?
• Lava Dates: Radioactive dates from the lowest lavas in the canyon (underneath all the sedimentary layers) show up “younger” than those on the top at Vulcan’s Throne, indicating that radioactive dating methods that yield millions of years cannot be trusted.  Another falsification is that different radiometric methods applied within the same formation yield widely divergent dates.  In addition, carbon-14 has been found in coal seams around the Grand Canyon.  Since the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years, none should remain if the coal were really millions of years old, as claimed.
• (For more detail on these evidences, see Tom Vail’s book, ICR’s Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, and Walt Brown’s analysis.)

You will notice that this list contains only scientific evidences – no references to the Genesis Flood.  Any similarities with the Flood account have nothing to do with the point that the observational evidences suggest a very different story than the “generally accepted notions” of modern (i.e., secular, Bible-discrediting) geology.  Science is not supposed to consist of “generally accepted notions” (see 12/27/2003 entry), nor indeed “notions” at all, but rather proofs rigorously demonstrated based on observation and experiment.  Based on the observations listed above, it would seem more scientifically justifiable to place upper limits on the age of the canyon and its walls than to extrapolate today’s slow processes recklessly into the past by many orders of magnitude, and to introduce ad hoc scenarios when the story doesn’t fit the observations.
    Schmidt arrogantly applied the word myth to the creationist view, but what is the “power of myth,” if not speculating about unobservable millions of years that left no trace?  If it were not that the creationist interpretation discredits uniformitarianism and hurts the feelings of the moyboys^*, most of the other books in the Grand Canyon bookstore would similarly be following the evidence where it leads.
^*Moyboys, n. pl.: secular scientists who toss around the phrases “millions of years, billions of years” with reckless abandon, simply because Charlie & Charlie^** needed the time.
^**Lyell, Darwin.
Next headline on:  Geology • Dating Methods

The animals in the Zagreb Zoo appear to be safe and well treated, but what about the people?  They are subjected to a series of accusations and then put into a substandard cage as if to say, “You are guilty, and you deserve to be caged.”  They are then free to tour the rest of the zoo, basking in shame for enjoying the experience.  Maybe there should be a dispenser of complimentary Prozac at the front gate.
    The Agence France-Presse press release was accompanied by a file photo only identified as “a lion in his cage at a zoo.”  Pictures from the zoo’s web site and the statement from Animal Friends Croatia indicate that this was a stock photo and was probably not taken anywhere near Zagreb.  AFP was trying to add a little more drama to the story.
    There is no doubt that people have done some very irresponsible things in regard to the environment and the treatment of animals, however Genesis is clear that humans are not merely another species of animal, but distinctively persons, made in the image of God.  If people have done some stupid things in the past, the answer is not to do more stupid things.
Next headline on:  Media • Politics and Ethics • Dumb Ideas

In the primordial soup that produced life on earth, there were organic molecules that combined to produce the first nucleic acid chains, which were the first elements able to self-replicate.  According to one of the more accepted theories, these molecules were ribonucleic acid (RNA) chains, a molecule that is practically identical to DNA and that today has the secondary role in cells of copying information stored in DNA and translating it into proteins.  These proteins have a direct active role in the chemical reactions of the cell.  In the early stages of life, it seems that the first RNA chains would have had the dual role of self-replicating (as is today the case with DNA) and participating actively in the chemical reactions of the cell activity.  Because of their dual role, these cells are called ribozymes (a contraction of the words ribosome and enzyme).  But there is an important obstacle to the theory of ribozymes as the origin of life: they could not be very large in length as they would not be able to correct the replication errors (mutations).  Therefore they were unable to contain enough genes even to develop the most simple organisms.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

An investigation led by Mauro Santos, from the Department of Genetics and Microbiology at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, alongside two Hungarian scientists, has shown that the error threshold, that is, the maximum number of errors that may occur during the replication process of ribozymes without this affecting its functioning, is higher than was previously calculated.  In practice, this means that the first riboorganisms (protocells in which RNA is responsible for genetic information and metabolic reactions) could have a much bigger genome than was previously thought: they could contain more than 100 different genes, each measuring 70 bases in length (bases are the units that constitute the genes and codify the information), or more than 70 genes, each measuring 100 bases.  It is worth remembering that tRNAs (essential molecules for the synthesis of proteins) are approximately 70 bases long.
    The discovery, published in Nature Genetics, has greatly relaxed the conditions necessary for the first living organisms to develop.  “This quantity of genes would be enough for a simple organism to have enough functional activity”, according to the researchers.

In recent origin-of-life literature, three hopeful-sounding claims have been made.  First, atmospheric scientists revised upward the amount of reducing hydrogen and methane – gases essential for natural formation of amino acids – that could have existed on the early earth (06/16/2005).  Second, a natural mechanism for producing a slight excess of same-handed chiral molecules – about 2.5% – was described.  Third, this announcement has relaxed the threshold for error, long thought to be too stringent to expect a minimal genome to survive the error catastrophe.  Taken together, just how positive are these developments for encouraging belief that life could have arisen by chance in a primordial soup?
    It’s time to review the helicopter-in-the-canyon analogy from our 05/22/2002 commentary.  Evolutionists think they are making progress if they can add little bits and pieces to their tall tale that make it sound more plausible.  But the outcome of the story has already been determined in their minds: life did evolve by chance, somehow, somewhere.  Since they will not even entertain any other possibility (i.e., that life was designed by a Creator), then some kind of scenario like this RNA World ribozyme story must have taken place – no matter how many the problems, no matter how wide the canyon between non-life and life (02/06/2005).  Since Pope Charlie ruled the plausibility criterion legal in science (12/22/2003 commentary), no more rigorous proofs were required to consider a claim scientific.  The legalization of storytelling opened up the current welfare state for storytellers.
    Each of these three hopeful suggestions has monstrous problems:

1. A reducing atmosphere would have been necessary but not sufficient to produce some – but not all – of the so-called “building blocks of life.”  RNA itself, you recall from 08/23/2005, is horrendously difficult to produce, especially in a watery primordial soup.  Beyond that, the concentrations of the ingredients would have been negligibly dilute, and even if that obstacle were overcome, toxins and competing chemicals would quickly overpower the desirable ones.  Furthermore, the lack of an ozone shield would subject the ingredients to destructive radiation that would quickly annihilate them (amino acids, you recall, have a half-life of 8 hours on the Martian surface with even less radiation dosage—see 05/18/2005 and 01/28/2005). 
2. Chiral molecules must be 100% one-handed to produce useful biomolecules.  Close enough is not good enough, and a 2.5% excess is not even close.
3. The amount of genetic information necessary to produce a self-replicating entity that could (theoretically) evolve by natural selection is still a sky-high hurdle.  These Spaniards agree that 200 genes was too high, but presume that 70 of length 100 is approachable.  When even one is astronomically improbable – so much so that a success could never be expected in this or multiple universes (see online book), that’s like hoping that we can leap over Alpha Centauri with a pogo stick (but no map) just because we no longer have to leap over Sirius.

These are just three of many problems.  Taken together, they amplify each other’s implausibility to the extent that continuing the discussion is futile.  That’s being gracious about it.
    In totalitarian regimes like those of Hitler and Stalin, it was a standard propaganda technique for the newspapers to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.  Since the state controlled the media, no dissent was ever heard.  The citizens might be starving, cold, poor, miserable and destitute, but their ignorance was the media’s bliss.  Day after day, the people would hear messages of progress, hope, joy, and success on the radio and in the papers.  Photographs of smiling faces and public works assured the populace that the latest 5-Year Plan was on schedule, and things were looking up.  Atrocities committed by the regime, of course, were shielded from view.  In addition, the propaganda machine had free reign to tell big lies about the opposition.  Party leaders painted the enemy as evil monsters, and described awful conditions in enemy lands, giving the impression that, however bad things appeared, the citizens were living in utopia compared to the rest of the world.^*  Since no one could ever get a dissenting letter to the editor printed (and if they tried, they were usually never heard from again), the peasants often just accepted what was told them – unless they had a radio that could hear unjammed broadcasts from free lands, or happened upon an air-drop package from the outside world.  Do you see some parallels with the Darwin Party elitist establishment?  Thank God for the World Wide Web.
Next headline on:  Origin of Life

---

^*This calls for a Russky joke heard on an old comedy album called The Other Family by Larry Foster and Marty Brill (1962).  In one scene, Kruschev is holding a rare press conference.  A reporter asks, “Premiere Kruschev, I have heard about a place the Americans have called Disneyland.  Why can’t we Soviets have a place like Disneyland?”
    The premiere replies, after a long pause, “What is... Disneyland?”  (he pauses again, so reporters can think about the question).  “Incredible – fantastic – beyond our wildest imagination – We have always had such a place.  Siberia!!”

Many bacteria socialize using diffusible signals.  But some of these messages are poorly soluble, so how do they move between bacteria?  It seems they can be wrapped up in membrane packages instead.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

This is an interesting phenomenon that deserves further investigation by science and medicine.  Since humans are sometimes targets of the toxins delivered by these vesicles, interrupting or targeting the bacterial UPS might lead to cures for disease.  Was this system originally a beneficial delivery service that got co-opted for harm?  It seems unlikely that a mindless bacterium could come up with such a complex system of interacting parts once, let alone several times, by an evolutionary process of trial and error.
    It’s a stunning thought to envision lowly bacteria with a social life and a coordinated, effective package delivery system.  Rather than assuming it arose spontaneously as an opportunistic mechanism for serving the bacterial “self,” perhaps it is best to look at this phenomenon from the vantage point of systems biology (06/15/2005, 06/20/2005).  What role might it play in the bigger picture?
    “Attacking and killing enemies” is a metaphor with metaphysical baggage (see “Metaphors Bewitch You,” 07/04/2003).  Another way of thinking about the “parcel bombs” might be with the give-and-take metaphor of action/reaction, feedback/feedforward, agonist/antagonist – i.e., a sensory mechanism of messages and responses that keeps a larger dynamic system in balance (homeostasis).  Such balancing interactions take place at many levels in biology, from interactions between molecules and proteins within the cell all the way up to interactions between higher organisms.  If too much of one side causes pain and suffering, that does not preclude the possibility that, in balance, the operation had a beneficial role.
    An evolutionist would undoubtedly study this bacterial UPS as a byproduct of selfish genes at work trying to ensure their own survival.  A design theorist could continue investigating it with just as much curiosity and enthusiasm, but without the tunnel vision of Darwinian self-centeredness.  He or she would ask, in the big picture, what role does it play, and has that role gone awry? 
Next headline on:  Cell Biology

Self-assembly—the tendency of certain structures to fall naturally into patterns—is one of nature’s most common occurrences. On a grand scale, for example, wind direction, temperature and moisture in the air result in predictable types of storms.
Now think smaller—much smaller. Certain molecules combine without guidance in predictable ways.  “Some molecules recognize each other and find natural low-energy states,” says W. Grant McGimpsey, a biology professor and director of the Bioengineering Institute at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Certain molecules in nature recognize each other and combine into predictable patterns as they settle into low-energy states.  This fits very nicely with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the formation of snowflakes, but is exactly the opposite of what evolutionists claim happened three or four billions of years ago on Earth at the origin of life.  Biological RNA and DNA are not mere crystals or repetitive patterns.  They are highly volatile and energetic, requiring cellular machinery to build and maintain.  Most important, they contain genetic information not derivable from the atoms of which they are composed nor from the laws of physics that describe how their parts interact.  In contrast, “Self-assembled materials form very simple patterns,” said one of the engineers.  Though ordered, these materials do not specify anything.  Though the article spoke of “natural self-assembly,” there was no mention of evolution – good, because evolution and engineering don’t logically mix.  Neo-Darwinian evolution is unguided and purposeless; the engineers here were harnessing natural processes toward intelligently-designed, functional ends.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Physics and Chemistry • Origin of Life

When the leading model is called ungainly by its own supporters (06/18/2003, 05/15/2003, 05/02/2003, 03/06/2003), and has to invoke three major fudge factors (inflation, dark matter and dark energy) to stay in business (06/20/2003), how long before the theory itself goes bang?  Remember the prominent commentator who said the majority cosmologists are clueless (10/06/2004)?  In science, majorities are not always right (see 02/06/2003 on Grote Reber); but that doesn’t make these particular minorities right, either.  The mavericks are very vocal and confident, though (see 12/06/2004).  It should be an interesting year to see whether the empire strikes back (see “Dork Side of the Farce,” 06/20/2003 commentary).
Next headline on:  Cosmology

No evolutionary talk, discovering new things – science can be good.  The deep sea organisms didn’t seem to notice the hurricane.
Next headline on:  Marine Life • Amazing Stories

Mars and Moons Shed Cocoons   09/13/2005    
With so many spacecraft touring our solar system, there’s almost too much news to process.  Here are a few highlights, starting with Mars, then comets, asteroids, a Titanic puzzle, and what Cassini found mini moons ago.

• Mars Ice Age:  Mars Express may have found evidence for deep ice deposits on Mars around the equator in the past, reports BBC News.  The article also states that, unlike Earth, Mars is subject to changes to its tilt axis of up to 15° due to the lack of a large moon.
• No Mars Life from Methane:  “Forget microbes or Martians,” begins an article on Science Now.  According to veteran planetary scientist Sushil Atreya, the methane comes from a natural geological process called serpentinization.
• Mars Gusev Crater Had Water:  A team analyzing Spirit data believes they have chemical evidence that water moved and deposited some of the rocks, according to a U of Washington press release.
• Mars Missing Carbonates:  Sky and Telescope proposed a solution to the Martian missing carbonates problem: they never had a chance to form in the first place.  This is one of the “great mysteries” about Mars.  “Thus far, geologists have yet to find more than small amounts of carbonates on the Martian surface,” the article said.
• Comet Tempel 1, a Gutless Wonder:  “Comet reveals crumbly guts” says News@Nature.  The texture appears to resemble “a loose collection of particles, like a weak sponge held together only by its own gravity.”  Investigator Michael A’Hearn thinks you could dig from one side to the other with your bare hands.  Science News made the Deep Impact mission its cover story for Sept. 10, and it also made prominent press in Science last week.  The presence of carbonates and other minerals on the comet, thought to require formation in liquid water, is also puzzling.  More detail on the spectral analysis can be found at Earth Files by Linda Moulton Howe who interviewed Dr. Carely Lisse of the Deep Impact team.
      Now that Comet Tempel 1 looks soft and crumbly, the mission planners of Rosetta are worried their spacecraft won’t find a solid surface to land on when it encounters another comet in 2011.  New Scientist is asking why in the last four comet encounters, the scientists’ predictions were all wrong.  In “Comet Tails of the Unexpected,” Stuart Clark begins, “We have now had four close encounters with comets, and every one of them has thrown astronomers onto their back foot.”
• Cowabunga, Hayabusa:  A little-known Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa has arrived at an asteroid.  The Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science has its first close-up picture of asteroid Itokawa. If successful, it may become the first sample-return mission of an asteroid.  Find links to more images at Space.com.
• Cigar Moon:  A planetoid on the outskirts of the solar system is spinning so fast, says Nature Sept. 8, that it is stretched into a cigar shape.  If orbital calculations are correct, its day is under four hours.
• Spoken For:  Ring scientists have finally detected the elusive spokes in Saturn’s rings, reports the Cassini imaging team.  Their manifestation is apparently a function of solar incidence angle on the rings: the lower the sun angle, the more they appear.  With these facts, scientists are working on new models of spoke formation.
• New Titan Landscape:  Cassini photographed a new region of Saturn’s moon Titan on Sept. 7.  The JPL press release shows an H-shaped region of contrasting dark and light areas named Fensal and Aztlan.  The dark patches are littered with light-colored “islands” that may be upwellings of water ice surrounded by hydrocarbon precipitates.  Individual images can also be found on the imaging website.
• Titan Moonsoons:  A suggestion by Dr. Ralph Lorenz that Titan may have rare “monsoons” of liquid methane rain generated a headline on New Scientist.  (For context, see the Planetary Society blog by Emily Lakdawalla, who attended the meetings of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Cambridge last week, and reported what she heard.)  The idea is that Titan has long periods of dryness punctuated by heavy downpours, similar to American southwest deserts.  Govert Schilling wrote a short report for Science Now, called “Your Outdoor Adventure Guide to Titan.”  It’s a world of cryovolcanos, convective clouds, outgassing and condensing methane, and other strange things.
• Titan Canyonlands Seen in Radar:  The radar data swath from the latest Titan flyby, feared lost due to a commanding error to the solid state recorder, was partly recovered and released Sept. 16 – and what a beauty.  In three stunning panoramas, scientists detected a methane-lake shoreline, a system of channels most likely scoured by methane rain, and a region of deep canyons up to 650 feet deep and 0.6 miles wide.  Some of the canyons can be traced for 120 miles.  As noticed before on other parts of the moon, there is a dearth of impact craters in all three frames.  See the Cassini press release for the full scoop, images and captions.  Space.Com also has a writeup.
• Splash of the Titans:  Southwest Research Institute thinks that an exotic form of life may inhabit Titan, now that evidence for liquid hydrocarbons has been found.  BBC News reported on Jonathan Lunine’s contention that Titan, like Earth, occupies a “sweet spot” in terms of temperature and mass that drives active geological and atmospheric processes.  Liquid of any sort is all that is needed to get speculations about life flowing (see 07/26/2005 also).
• Enceladus: Me Too:  Science Daily reported a claim by Robert Brown about the results from Saturn’s little moon Enceladus, that the “building blocks of life” could have formed in subsurface liquid water.
• Miller Time Hangover  Back at Earth, Washington U scientists are speculating that there actually was a reducing atmosphere on the early earth, just like Miller and Urey supposed back in 1953 when they generated a few amino acids with their famous spark-discharge apparatus.  They deduced this by complex models about minerals in chondrites that they think made up the infant earth.  Geologists dispute the scenario, they admit, and getting a reducing atmosphere is not the only requirement for resurrecting the Miller scenario (see 08/15/2005, 06/16/2005).

Brown gets Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for trying to stimulate funding by appeals to the L word:

So you’ve got subsurface liquid water, simple organics and water vapor welling up from below.  Over time – and Enceladus has been around 4.5 billion years, just like Earth and the rest of the solar system – heating a cocktail of simple organics, water and nitrogen could form some of the most basic building blocks of life.  Whether that’s happened at Enceladus is not clear, but Enceladus, much like Jupiter’s moon Europa and the planet Mars, now has to be a place where we eventually search for life.”   (Emphasis added.)

This is known as the JAWS theory of life (just add water, stupid).  We can enjoy the discoveries in the Golden Age of Planetary Science better without the mythoids and the noise of banging crutches on the funding trough (see Berlinski quote).
    Readers who appreciate more substance than the usual newspaper fluff are encouraged to go nugget hunting on the Planetary Society blog, provided one knows how to separate data from opinion.  There are very strange goings on out there (not only at Cambridge, but throughout the solar system).
Next headline on:  Mars • Solar System • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

....in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses.  But they are almost never as guilty as the right.
Reagan’s self-appointed state board of education had pushed to weaken the teaching of evolution and endorsed creationism.... The Reagan administration’s sympathies with creationism signaled a new development for the Republican Party and conservatism more generally.  From this moment forward, many of the party’s leaders willingly distorted or even denied the bedrock scientific theory of evolution, and encouraged pseudoscientific thinking, to satisfy a traditionalist religious constituency.

The book and the review are exercises in hypocrisy.  Mooney argues that Republicans are more guilty of selective science than liberals (notice that Democrats are not specifically named in the article) who support “bedrock scientific theory of evolution.”  Just how important is unvarnished science to someone who thinks evolution rocks?
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

OK, now that we know that planets can form in far less time than textbooks have claimed for centuries, can we finally ditch the mythical age of our solar system?  Can we entertain the notion that many phenomena in our solar system look young, because they actually are?  (See 08/30/2005, 09/06/2005, 06/30/2005, 03/22/2005, 03/11/2005, 06/05/2003 and other chain links on Dating Methods).   The only one who needed the billions of years was Charlie, and he’s dead.
Next headline on:  Dating Methods • Planetary Science • Stellar Astronomy

My judgment is that the log of Social Darwinism will disappear again under the toxic flood waters of New Orleans.  The corpses floating face down in the muddy overflow from broken Mississippi levees are too shocking a sight for Americans of all classes and parties.  They are too kindly a people.  They will look once again for vigour and compassion in government, even at the price of higher taxes.   (Emphasis added.)

It’s always welcome to hear Social Darwinism get badmouthed, but Evans, clearly a British liberal seeing government as the solution to everything, makes some historical and logical flaws in his arguments.  He portrays Social Darwinism as a primarily conservative/capitalist phenomenon, when actually it was embraced not only by laissez-faire capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, but just as much – if not more so – by political liberals and materialists in the eugenics movement.  (Laissez-faire capitalism actually had roots in Adam Smith, long before Darwin.)  He also wrongly conflates belief in individual responsibility with Social Darwinism; the two overlap somewhat at a pragmatic level, but are clearly pointed in nearly opposite directions.  Belief in individual responsibility is as old as Moses; it’s a matter of character, not evolution.  Individual responsibility and compassion are Christian virtues.  Christianity and Social Darwinism are polar opposites.  Many Christians and political conservatives who have nothing but the utmost disdain for Social Darwinism do not feel it is solely the government’s job to bail people out of all their mishaps.
    The amount of government aid that is proper, compared to private charity, is hotly debated in both parties.  Social Darwinism enters very little into the discussion nowadays.   Evans thus creates a false dichotomy that one is either a compassionate Democrat who believes government is the primary provider of disaster relief, or a laissez-faire Republican who lets people die in floods.  Isn’t that a switch.  Many conservatives arguing for limited government are the first rushing to help the New Orleans victims, illustrating that compassion and responsibility are not mutually exclusive values.  Evans also commits a non-sequitur that big government equals effective aid.  Some would argue that some of FDR’s well-intentioned reforms caused more and bigger problems than they solved.  The New Deal created lots of activity, motion and emotion, and many touching stories, but the court is still out on whether its policies or World War II actually ended the Depression.  And just who is the government, anyway?  Who pays the bills?  Taxpayers!  Government is not some independent benign Father, dispensing its own largesse with magnanimity and impunity.  When it steers the people’s money toward disaster relief, it is supposed to be acting as a steward, managing the people’s compassion with the consent of the governed.

  Some of the New Deal alphabet agencies, long past their period of usefulness during the Depression, have become eternal bureaucracies.  Drawing on the finite pool of wealth available for disaster relief by a process Frederic Bastiat called “legal plunder” (i.e., taxation), agencies like FEMA do provide relief in the name of Government, but this begs the question whether they do it faster or cheaper than private charities.  Go to any disaster center and you are just as likely (if not more so) to see aid being dispensed by local churches, the Red Cross, World Vision, the Salvation Army, Samaritan’s purse and many other non-governmental groups funded by charitable contributions, not by taxes – and with typically far less overhead than government.  The main contributions of government to disaster relief are mobilizing the armed forces for civil defense, providing protection from disease epidemics, and rebuilding the infrastructure.

For Evans to use Reagan or Bush as exemplars of a Social Darwinist attitude, therefore, is absurd.  A Christian and advocate of intelligent design (08/02/2005), Bush is no more a Social Darwinist than Richard Dawkins is a Pentecostal.  The heirs of Spencer and Sumner are not Republicans, but the overwhelmingly-liberal elitist scientists in the AAAS, NAS and Smithsonian who remain committed to the principles of “the great man himself” to this day.  For consistent Darwinists, disasters have opened up new evolutionary niches for billions of years.  Altruism is just a game to them (03/07/2002, 02/22/2004), with no moral content whatsoever.  If disaster has produced such biodiversity, who are we to get in the way of progress?
    If it weren’t for the historical fact that Social Darwinism produced the likes of Hitler and Stalin, Darwin’s disciples would still be advocating it today, and some are, with the prospect of a New Eugenics (10/12/2001), 10/18/2004, 10/21/2004).  Evans should look not to the Americans but to his British brethren – Spencer, Darwin and Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin, the father of eugenics) – as the instigators of the worldview that would rob civilization of civility, and passion of compassion.  Social Darwinism has only preceded its intellectual forebear onto the ash heap of history.  Meanwhile, churches all over America, without government pressure or assistance, are rushing into New Orleans and Mississippi with aid (example), and with messages of hope, comfort and salvation (example.  Let’s see the Church of Darwin put its rubber on the road.  What are they going to tell victims: “Tough luck”? 
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Politics and Ethics

Are Brains Evolving Bigger, or Fatter?    09/09/2005  
Two papers in Science Sept. 9 claimed that human brains may still be evolving.  According to the authors, two genes related to brain size appear to be under “positive selection” in certain people groups.  One team said their variant occurred the same time as the emergence of art, music, religious practices and sophisticated tool use, though such inferences are subjective (see 11/12/2004 entry).  Michael Balter, commenting on these findings in Science,¹ said that although the claims are “potentially dramatic,” caution should be exercised in interpreting the results.  Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project, warned in an AP story printed on LiveScience that “is totally unproven and potentially dangerous territory to get into with such sketchy data” because scientists don’t know when the variants arose or even what the genes do.  The BBC News, however, though admitting that the findings were merely a “tantalising prospect,” titled their version of the story, “‘Proof’ Our Brains Are Evolving.”  New Scientist announced cheerfully, “Human brains enjoy ongoing evolution.”

Evolutionists are hastening to mention that the variants have nothing to do with “intelligence.”  This is apparently to avoid repeating the sins of the early Darwinists, who sought ways to rank humans on an IQ scale that ensured the Brits would remain on top.  But if the “haves” are better musicians than the “have-nots,” this might lead to ranking by MQ, the music quotient.  The world isn’t ready for a new form of Social Darwinism characterized by a battle of the bands and survival of the hittest.  Some of today’s musicians could use a little genetic engineering to reverse the descent of man, but that’s intelligent design, not evolution. 
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Human Body • Dumb Ideas

Your answer can be reprinted here to help other readers visualize what a human might see if shrunk to the size of an mRNA molecule.  The answer will be simplified somewhat since it will not take into account how many twists and turns the molecule must make on its route, nor the amount of traffic and inspections it encounters, but it should be interesting.  One reader estimated 20-60 mph, one 23-66 mph or up to 68 to 200 mph, another 2000 to 6000 mph, and another, 8181 mph.  Give us your best calculation: write here and tell us how you arrived at it.  Hint: an RNA molecule is about 1 nanometer wide (10^-9m).  You need to figure not only the length of an average mRNA, but whether or not it folds into a more compact structure before traveling.
    The reader who seemed to work the hardest on the problem said, “if we use 5 nm as the width of the mRNA folded up on itself, the scaled speed increases dramatically, and would be in the range of 1100 to 3300 mph.”  Additional factors would need to be known, like how compact the mRNA folds, and whether it passively “rides along” in the sap for part of its journey.  Anyway, it was an interesting investigation – thanks to all who wrote in with their calculations.
Next headline on:  Botany • Genetics

Their enormous sail-like wings, made of a thin hair-covered membrane between their two front limbs, allowed them to use air currents to fly with little effort over huge distances.
    “Their flight membranes could be controlled by adjusting the angle of the forelimbs at the shoulder, the elbow and at the base of the hyper-elongated flight finger,” said Dr Martill.  “In addition it could be controlled by movement of the hind limbs at the hips, the knees and to some degree at the ankle.
    “This gave pterosaurs far more flight control than birds of equivalent size.”
    Analysis of fossils has shown the intricate details of its super-strong but light bone structure.  Dr Martill said they could even be used to help with modern aircraft design.
    “They took bone to new limits in terms of making it thin yet strong,” he said.  “Their skeletons were very lightly constructed and most of their bones were hollow and enclosed an air sac system connected to the lungs.”
    “The bone itself was composed of many microscopically thin layers stacked together like a spirally bound plywood tube.”
    “Sometimes the bones had cross-sectional shapes that provided added strength, such as D, T and A shapes.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Engineering is not the language of Darwinism.  The Darwin Party lacks the training to deal with the facts of biology as observed, and the history of biology as read in the fossil record.  The article states, “Indeed, there is still great debate about where exactly they should be placed in the evolution of life forms on Earth.”  The answer is, of course, they should be taken out of the evolution fairy tale book, and placed into the engineering textbook, where “pterosaurs could inform modern aircraft design.”  Were the references to evolution really useful for anything, other than entertainment?  We would like to see the transitional forms between crocodiles and beautifully engineered aircraft, or watch some crocodile gliding experiments.
Next headline on:  Dinosaurs and Extinct Reptiles • Fossils • Amazing Facts

RNA Research Uncovers a Previously Ignored Universe of Genetic Information    09/08/2005  
A slow revolution is occurring in the study of genetic information.  Until recently, the only interesting items in DNA sequences were the genes – the genetic codes for proteins.  Since these usually represented only a small fraction of an organism’s genome, it was assumed the rest of the material was “junk DNA” – sequences that were either mutated leftovers of real genes (pseudogenes), spacers (introns), nonsense strands, or regions that merely provided structural support for the more important genes.
    Indications that something was wrong with this picture have arisen over the last few years.  For one, geneticists were surprised to count only about 30,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome; more recent counts have dropped the number to 25,000.  How could such a complex organism as a human being arise from such a small library of genetic information?  Another clue was the mismatch between messenger RNAs and proteins.  Messenger RNA (mRNA) is the transcript of the DNA template that carries the genetic information outside the nucleus of eukaryotic cells to a ribosome, where it is translated into the amino acid language of proteins.  Scientists found that many mRNAs never got that far.  Were they simply disassembled and recycled?  A third clue was the discovery of vast quantities of small RNAs in the cell (10/26/2001).  Some were found to apparently regulate the expression of genes; what did the others do?  Additionally, the mystery of introns (09/03/2003), viewed as useless nonsense strands of DNA cut out of genes by spliceosomes (09/17/2004), deepened when some were shown to be remarkably conserved (05/27/2004) between primitive and advanced organisms, suggesting they had a function.  Is it possible scientists have vastly underestimated the amount of information in the cell, like walking into a forest and assuming the only living things there are the trees?  Perhaps a kind of “gene chauvinism” has masked the reality of a much higher order of complexity.
    The cover story of the Sept. 2 issue of Science, “Mapping RNA Form and Function,” explored this question.  Of the 18 articles about RNA and its functional role in the cell, here are a few glimpses of the emerging picture that is putting to rest the old notion – that biological information is comprised only of genes and proteins.

1. Parallel universe:  Guy Riddihough, in the introductory article,¹ ventured into the “forest of RNA dark matter” and found a wonderland:

   For a long time, RNA has lived in the shadow of its more famous chemical cousin DNA and of the proteins that supposedly took over RNA’s functions in the transition from the ‘RNA world’ [07/11/2002, 08/23/2005] to the modern one.  The shadow cast has been so deep that a whole universe (or so it seems) of RNA—predominantly of the noncoding variety—has remained hidden from view, until recently....
   The discovery that much of the mammalian genome is transcribed, in some places without gaps (so-called transcriptional “forests”), shines a bright light on this embarrassing plenitude: an order of magnitude more transcripts than genes....  Many of these noncoding RNAs ... are conserved across species, yet their functions (if any) are largely unknown.... (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

   As if that were not enough, he noted that “even the coding and base-paring capacity of RNA can be altered–by RNA editing, in which bases in the RNA are changed on the fly.”  It appears there is much life in the forest than just the trees.
2. Hidden infrastructure:  Matthew W. Vaughn and Rob Martienssen² discussed the probability that vast numbers of small RNAs (sRNA) may be essential for regulation of genes.  Some of these micro-RNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) have already been identified in gene regulation, but many more remain to be studied.  In one plant, 1.5 million sRNAs composed of 75,000 unique sequences were recently found, suggesting that “many more genes may be under the control of sRNAs than had been previously imagined.”  These noncoding RNAs, usually 20-something bases long, keep a bag of tricks up their sleeves:

   They can direct cleavage of other transcripts and can also promote second-strand synthesis by RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP), resulting in dsRNAs [double-stranded RNA].  In addition, siRNAs are implicated in recruiting heterochromatic modifications that result in transcriptional silencing.

   The authors mentioned several ways in which these sRNAs had escaped detection due to the methods used.
3. Pseudo – Not:  Vaughn and Martienssen also noted the relationship of sRNAs to pseudogenes.  Once thought to be mutated relics of true genes because they often contain premature stop codons, pseudogenes might be sources for siRNAs that regulate the true genes they resemble: “they could act transitively on transcripts from paralogous protein-coding genes by promoting cleavage or interfering with translation,” they continued.  “More than half of the pseudogene sRNAs matched sequences elsewhere in the genome, indicating that this may be the case and suggesting a mechanism for coordinated trans-acting regulation of closely related members of gene families.”
4. What Are They There For?  Now that we know large numbers of small RNAs exist, what do they do?  John S. Mattick³ suggested that they are not “transcriptional noise,” but rather “constitute a critical hidden layer of gene regulation in complex organisms, the understanding of which requires new approaches in functional genomics.”  This will be a big task, he warns.  One study of one such small RNA found it acting as a scaffold for the assembly of protein complexes and for coordinating nuclear traffic, helping localize gene products to their correct subcellular compartments.  This one case reveals “a new dimension of organizational control in cell biology and development,” and “illustrates the magnitude of the task that is in front of us, which may be an equal or greater challenge than that we already face in working out the biochemical function and biological role of all of the known and predicted proteins and their isoforms.”  Since cataloging the human proteome is the next daunting task after deciphering the genome, this statement should put geneticists on notice.
5. New Glasses Needed:  One assumption guiding previous research was that if a sequence was “evolutionarily conserved” (i.e., largely unchanged from primitive to advanced organisms), this indicated it was probably functional.  Mattick cast doubt on that assumption: “Notably, evolutionary conservation may not be a reliable signature of functional ncRNAs” [non-coding RNAs].  The conserved ones may act on many substrates, he noted, but non-conserved ones may have few and be less restrained to vary.  Many ncRNAs, Mattock thinks, may be “evolving quickly” and escaping detection by methods that look for sequence conservation.
       Here is another indication that “junk DNA” actually represents information we haven’t yet decoded:

   It is also clear that the majority of the genomes of animals is indeed transcribed, which suggests that these genomes are either replete with largely useless transcription or that these noncoding RNA sequences are fulfilling a wide range of unexpected functions in eukaryotic biology.  These sequences include introns (Fig. 1), which account for at least 30% of the human genome but have been largely overlooked because they have been assumed to be simply degraded after splicing.  However, it has been shown that many miRNAs and all known small nucleolar RNAs in animals are sourced from introns (of both protein-coding and noncoding transcripts), and it is simply not known what proportion of the transcribed introns are subsequently processed into smaller functional RNAs.  It is possible, and logically plausible, that these sequences are also a major source of regulatory RNAs in complex organisms.

   That higher animals should run on “complex genetic programming” should “come as no surprise,” he concluded.  It means, though, that “we may have seriously misunderstood the nature of genetic programming in the higher organisms by assuming that most genetic information is expressed as and transacted by proteins.”  Truly we have embarked on a long road.
6. Mt. Improbable Looms Higher:  Jean-Michel Claverie⁴ echoed Mattock’s estimation of the task, saying it is “only recently that the sheer scale of the phenomenon” of functional non-coding RNA has been realized.  He pointed to research on the mouse genome that half its “transcriptome” (the corpus of RNA transcribed from DNA) consists of non-coding RNA (ncRNA).  He found a eureka moment: “These results provide a solution to the discrepancy between the number of (protein-coding) genes and the number of transcripts,” he wrote.  Missing them has been an artifact of our methods.  “Noncoding transcripts originating from intergenic regions, introns, or antisense strands have probably been right before our eyes for 8 years without having been discovered!”
7. Prokaryotes Say Me, Too:  Claverie doubted that the discovery of functional ncRNA is limited to eukaryotes: “The notion that transcription is limited to protein-coding genes is also being challenged in microbial systems.”  He pointed to E. coli which contains many transcripts from intergenic sequences and antisense strands (i.e., transcribed from the opposite strand of DNA).  His ending paragraph should humble Watson and Crick, who thought they had it figured out 50 years ago:

   The intergenic, intronic, and antisense transcribed sequences that were once deemed artifactual are now a testimony to our collective refusal to depart from an oversimplified gene model.  But what if transcription is even more complex?  Could it, for instance, lead to mRNAs generated from two different chromosomes (Fig. 1)?  A year ago, we would have immediately suspected such sequences as further artifacts arising from large-scale cDNA [complementary DNA, a strand that forms a template for mRNA] sequencing programs.  But now?  Perhaps it’s time to go back to the cDNA sequence databases and reevaluate the numerous unexpected objects they contain.  Transcription will never be simple again, but how complex will it get?

8. The Life and Times of mRNA:  Melissa Moore⁵ provided a more whimsical view of the actors in the genetic play.  Dismissing the simplistic “short obituary” of RNAs as simply a “central conduits in the flow of information from DNA to protein,” she wrote, “this dry and simplistic description captures nothing of the intricacies, intrigues, and vicissitudes defining the life history of even the most mundane mRNA.  In addition, of course, some mRNAs lead lives that, if not quite meriting an unauthorized biography, certainly have enough twists and turns to warrant a more detailed nucleic acid interest story.”  She offered a prècis for her novel, giving us a glimpse into the frenzy of activity in the life of mRNA:

   We will follow the lives of eukaryotic mRNAs from the point at which they are birthed from the nucleus until they are done in by gangs of exonucleases lying in wait in dark recesses of the cytoplasm.  Along the way, mRNAs may be shuttled to and from or anchored at specific subcellular locations, be temporarily withheld from the translation apparatus, have their 3' ends trimmed and extended, fraternize with like-minded mRNAs encoding proteins of related function, and be scrutinized by the quality-control police.

   It turns out the mRNA is not just a carrier of information, but a “posttranscriptional operon” with many roles in the cell.  For instance, some RNAs bind with proteins to form messenger ribonucleoprotein particles (mRNPs): “Individual mRNP components can be thought of as adaptors that allow mRNAs to interface with the numerous intracellular machineries mediating their subcellular localization, translation, and decay, as well as the various signal transduction systems.”  For a sampler, Moore listed a “cheat sheet” of 11 such mRNPs and their functions.  Her article gave some up-close-and-personal vignettes of some of the players, personifying their birth, baptism (entry into the “transcriptionally active pool”), examination, recruitment, retirement, dispatch and burial.

Which theory – intelligent design or Darwinism – would have predicted this complexity?  Is there any hint of an evolutionary sequence leading up to this highly-coordinated, quality-controlled, information-rich system?  (Recall from the 08/23/2005 entry that RNA does not form readily in water, and is highly unstable; its presence in the cell is only made possible by stringent programmed operations with quality control.)  The gap between a mythical “RNA World” and the living world of real functioning RNA in the cell could never have been wider.  As the cloud cover lifts, the summit of Mt. Improbable stretches higher into the sky.
    Darwinism had enough trouble explaining the 4-letter (G,C,A,T) triplet-codon genetic code.  Simple Watson-Crick base pairing and the old one-gene one-enzyme principle, the so-called “Central Dogma” of genetics was taught as The Big Picture till we knew better.  Now that junk DNA is out (07/15/2005), the whole cellular information flowchart appears as complex as that of a well-run city, where each employee has a role.  Each information-rich molecule is born, lives an active life and is retired, as Moore personified it.  It’s time for the Darwin Party to let go of the steering wheel and let the Intelligent Design community drive science out of the naturalistic rut it’s in.  Knowing how to read the signs of intelligent causation, they can help get science back onto the freeway of enriched understanding (see 06/25/2005 entry and commentary).
Next headline on:  Genetics • Intelligent Design • Amazing Stories

For goodness’ sake, comets have nothing to do with life.  They are not storks delivering little replicating biomolecules to the Earth, unless you consider “aromatic hydrocarbons, found in barbecue pits and automobile exhaust” the kind of ingredients you find promising.  Using the L word (life) is a distraction from the very real problems planetary scientists now face explaining the origin of comets.
    “How did clay and carbonates form in frozen comets?” is one such problem asked by Dr. Carey Lisse (Johns Hopkins U).  “We don’t know, but their presence may imply that the primordial solar system was thoroughly mixed together, allowing material formed near the Sun where water is liquid, and frozen material from out by Uranus and Neptune, to be included in the same body.”  That suggestion represents a big change in what was taught as fact about comets just a few years ago.  It’s an act of desperation to need distant materials to mix in the same body for a model of comet formation to work.  The gap between “don’t know” and “may imply” is about 30 AU, or 2.8 billion miles.  It’s a little presumptuous to use Deep Impact’s puzzling data to be talking about how life formed (see 08/23/2005) entry), wouldn’t you say?
    The BBC wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for its entries, “Some experts say such molecules could have kick-started life on Earth” and “Under the ‘pan-spermia’ idea, comets pounded the early Earth billions of years ago, bringing organic molecules that reacted with the Sun’s light and heat, creating a rich chemical soup within which life began.”  If you like your soup diluted to a few parts per quintillion, you might as well just be drinking water; shall we call this the homeopathic theory of the origin of life?  And if life can be kick-started, it’s a machine, not a chance assemblage of molecules.  Kick implies a kicker.  Start implies a program.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

It is understandable that people are concerned about the metaphysical implications; if there is design then there must be a designer.
    But the basic trouble, and the underlying reason this controversy never ends, is that evolution is a creation story; it has huge metaphysical implications no matter how it is taught.  How is it less religious or less controversial to teach evolution as it is now, pretending that we somehow know that there is no design?   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

If we are going to teach students about biological origins we need to help them understand all the issues behind origins science, including evolution.  Why is it controversial?  What worldview assumptions are behind it?  Do we really know that life was generated only by random processes of mutation and natural selection?  What evidence supports it, what evidence is against it?

Not only should students learn that reasonable people disagree about the meaning and interpretation of data, they should learn that scientists disagree, too.  In fact, disagreeing about how data should be interpreted is what scientists do.  That is science.  The history of science illustrates that disagreements in science are the very thing that fuels scientific discovery.
    Evolution as a secular creation story is already being preached from the classroom pulpit.  Teaching the controversy helps keep religion, of any flavor, out of the classroom.

This is another example of a cogent, well-written letter.  Maybe people who agree with her should ask the ACLU to prohibit the Darwin-only dogma on the grounds of separation of church and state.
    Keller makes a good case for the religious equivalence of the opposing views, but a subtext evident in the argument “religion, of any flavor” must be kept “out of the classroom” is that religion is inferior to science and incapable of contributing to debates about the merits of scientific claims.  Perhaps some good follow-up questions would explore the ability of evolutionary theory to make scientific truth claims about ultimate origins, and the ability of theology to prescribe the limits of science – or whether it is even possible for an investigator to be unbiased in such matters.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Education

How does brain size and design influence the survival chances of a species?  A large brain may contribute to an individual’s success irrespective of its detailed composition.  I have studied the size and shape of cerebella in birds and looked for links between the bird’s cerebellar design, brain size and behavior.  My results indicate that the cerebellum in large-brained birds does not scale uniformly, but occurs in two designs.  Crows, parrots and woodpeckers show an enlargement of the cerebellar trigeminal and visual parts, while owls show an enlargement of vestibular and tail somatosensory cerebellar regions, likely related to their specialization as nocturnal raptors.  The enlargement of specific cerebellar regions in crows, parrots and woodpeckers may be related to their repertoire of visually guided goal-directed beak behavior.  This specialization may lead to an increased active exploration and perception of the physical world, much as primates use of their hands to explore their environment.  The parallel specialization seen in some birds and primates may point to the influence of a similar neuronal machine in shaping selection during phylogeny.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

One unexpected observation was that in excellent flyers only the buzzard scores positively, and that several birds with excellent flying capabilities like the swift and falcon score negatively in the principal plane (Figure 1).  This implies that well-developed motor skills per se do not require a large cerebellum, contradicting the common idea that cerebellar size increase in birds is mainly linked to their flying capabilities.
    What could be the behavioral denominator common to crows, parrots and woodpeckers that is not developed in owls?  All of these birds also have large brains; however, their cerebellar designs differ arguing against a simple co-enlargement model.  The enlargement of specific visual and beak-related cerebellar parts in crows, parrots and woodpeckers fits well with their marked adeptness in using their beaks and/or tongues to manipulate and explore external objects.  Their skills are even comparable to those of primates in using their hands.  The tight temporal coupling between motor command, expected sensory consequences and resulting afferents during visually guided hand and beak usage may be the reason why these animals need large cerebella.  The comparative analysis of the birds cerebella reveals that some brains may have enlarged to solve similar problems by similar means during phylogeny.  Furthermore it shows that large brains have a specific architecture with dedicated building blocks.

Sultan uses the word phylogeny three times in this short article.  Anyone see any phylogeny here?  His only observational, scientific data are: (1) cerebellum size and structure, (2) body size, (3) functional abilities of birds for flying and beak manipulation.  The data points are all over the map.  While there are clusterings of similar bird types in some quadrants, nothing in the data suggests any kind of evolutionary trend.  Again, evolutionary biology fails at mathematical formalism (see 08/19/2005 entry).  (This exercise in futility harks back to Broca’s detailed measurements of skull size as a way of ranking humans.)  The point is not that Sultan’s measurements are worthless or uninteresting, but only that they are useless for propping up evolutionary theory.
    Add this to the growing list of Rudyard Darwin’s Just-So Stories: “Why some bird brains are larger than others.”  The short answer is, they evolved that way because they needed to.  Since a woodpecker has to have quick information (“tight temporal coupling between motor command, expected sensory consequences and resulting afferents during visually guided ... beak usage” – how’s that for jargon), well wouldn’t you know it, this may be the reason why they need large cerebella.  Their need is evolution’s command: “some brains may have enlarged to solve similar problems by similar means during phylogeny.”  So off Charlie sends Tinker Bell with her mutation wand and a cheerful response for poor, slow-witted Woody, One big, specialized brain, coming right up!
    It must have worked, because Woody didn’t die of starvation during however many millions of years she took to get it right.  Or, maybe Woody found a way to revive vestigial genes (01/16/2003) from some ancient ancestor: Lignosaurus, the woodpecking dinosaur.
Next headline on:  Birds • Evolution

• D is for Detached:  The D ring (picture) shows dramatic changes since the Voyagers flew by in 1981.  Parts have detached and migrated 125 miles toward Saturn (picture).  It has also grown noticeably dimmer.  See: MSNBC News.
• B is for Bumpy:  Particles in the main B and A rings show a fluffy, airy appearance rather than being hard like ice cubes.  This was determined from infrared thermal comparisons between lit and unlit sides of the rings, which showed a 15° K difference (diagram).  Such a sharp thermal gradient implies that the particles spin slowly enough to cool off when in shadow – an unexpected result considering the density of particles and high probability of collisions.  See: BBC News and News@Nature.
• A is for Animated:  Ultraviolet measurements of the A ring revealed clumps of material continually forming and reforming (pictureEurekAlert.
• F is for Flimsy:  The thin F-ring outside the main rings may be unstable or ephemeral, claim Cassini scientists.  They found an unexpected spiral band wrapping around the planet (picture).  This spiral forms by a different mechanism than the density waves and bending waves observed in the main rings (picture).  It is apparently caused by small embedded moonlets (picture) that pass through the dense parts of the F-ring and pull material out, which follow spiral paths back to their resonant positions.  It is unusual for a moonlet to be able to exist at this radial distance, near the Roche limit of Saturn, where tidal forces are strong enough to tear bodies apart.  See: New Scientist and Science Daily.
• G is for Gossamer:  The F and G rings contain particles the size of dust or smoke.  The tenuous G ring, just outside the F ring, was found to contain a partial ring, or ring arc (picture), similar to those found at Neptune.  See: EurekAlert.
• E is for Enceladus-Fed:  It now appears fairly certain that at least some of the E-ring particles are being supplied from eruptions at the south pole of Enceladus (08/30/2005).  See: Cassini press release.

By scientific consensus now, Saturn’s rings are young.  If so, how could they survive for anywhere near the assumed age of the solar system?  Why should we be “lucky” enough to see them now, when humans just happen to be around to observe them?  These findings have not dimmed such questions that were asked back in 1981, when Voyager 1 and 2 first provided glimpses into the dynamic processes at work.  Rather, they have put these philosophical issues under the spotlight.  If this were the only example of an apparently young phenomenon in a hoary old solar system, it would be one thing, but... keep reading.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Dating Methods

At half the radius and one-fourth the volume of Earth, Mars should have cooled much faster over assumed geologic time.  Mars also lacks tectonic plates.  Yet both Mars, and possibly Venus, show evidence of recent volcanic activity that could be ongoing now.  Where is the evidence for billions of years of slow cooling?  These are not isolated cases.  Cryovolcanic activity has been observed on Enceladus and Titan, and is either extant or recent on Triton, Europa and Ganymede.  Many of the other moons, like Iapetus, Tethys, Miranda and Ariel display youthful surface features.  Earth, of course, has a highly dynamic surface.  The solar system looks much too lively to be an elderly 4.5 billion years old.
Next headline on:  Mars • Geology

Another evolutionary speculation has been shot down.  Keep up the good work.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Health • Genetics • Evolution

Something as simple as a tooth is really a marvel when you consider how it is put together.  It’s amazing to find a dual-purpose gene, for one thing.  The cellular transcription machinery has to know that this particular protein needs to be cleaved into two parts at the right time, and at the right point in the chain.  Then, these paired proteins must work together in a delicate, choreographed balance, like a brickmason and inspector, to be sure the critical junction between dentin and enamel comes out just right without breaking, like glass on a mattress.  How could that evolve?
    When you think of how long teeth can last with good care (barring disease or trauma), they are truly wonders of engineering.  Not only that, their shapes are just right for their functions (incisors, bicuspids, molars), and the uppers and lowers fit together.  In a very real sense, your mouth contains a set of high-tech grinding tools.  On top of everything else, they’re pretty.  Smile! the photographers say, asking us to pronounce whiskey or some other word to get the teeth to show for the camera; those “thirty white horses on a red hill,” as Bilbo’s riddle described them in The Hobbit.  Clean, white, straight teeth are more handsome than stallions, more dazzling than a string of pearls.  Made of the hardest substance in biology, they are arguably the most important and valuable crystals in the world.  What would you rather have: a set of diamonds, or a set of good teeth?
    Evolutionists usually only talk about teeth in the coarsest sense – how they evolved from one animal to another, or how they might suggest some mythical transitional form.  You almost never hear them attempting to explain the details – such as how this important gene and the two coordinated proteins it produces came into existence by chance.*  Bad philosophy leads to truth decay.  It’s time for sensible people to help floss away the accumulated plaque of evolutionary speculation that does nothing but cause flapping gums and intellectual halitosis.
    Many Darwinists are also ingrates.  They like to complain about wisdom teeth, calling them vestigial or poorly designed,* but rarely do they express thanks for the ability to chew that delicious steak or salad on the plate in front of them.  To whom would they give thanks, anyway?  That’s why Paul wrote that God’s wrath is against those who see His wisdom and power in the things that are made, yet are not thankful (Romans 1:21).
    If you are celebrating Labor Day with a barbecue or special meal, take a moment to thank God for your teeth.  Another way to express gratitude is to take good care of your tools and jewelry.
Next headline on:  Human Body • Amazing Stories

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*Dr. Jerry Bergman wrote a paper on the problems with tooth evolution in the Creation Research Society Quarterly June 2005 issue.  Perhaps it will show up online in the selected articles section sometime soon; if so, it is well worth reading.  Bergman is also co-author of the book Vestigial Organs Are Fully Functional, which discusses the function and design of wisdom teeth.  It may be that many of our problems with them are due to poor diet, lack of breast feeding or accumulated mutations among certain people groups.  Why would evolution produce a smaller, more crowded jaw, anyway?  What survival advantage is that?  When wisdom teeth erupt properly, they work well and are helpful.

• Aussie Glossy:  The transcript of an Australian Broadcasting Corporation story aired Aug. 30 featured proponents and opponents of the proposal to permit intelligent design as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in public schools down under.  The report was interspersed with scenes from the ID film Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
• Rusher Flusher:  William Rusher, writing Aug. 31 in Human Events, thinks the label “evolutionism” is too nice.  He thinks “accidentalism” would be more appropriate.  He finds irony in Darwinists referring to the Scopes Trial, when this time it is they who are forbidding the competition to be taught.
• The Case Against I.D.:  Karl Lembke in Opinion Editorials defends the position that Darwinism (as he carefully defines it) is scientific, and intelligent design is not.  He insists that methodological naturalism is a rule of science and claims evolution is falsifiable.
• Albuquerque Quirk:  The school board is trying to come to a consensus on how to teach science now that more and more students and parents are asking questions and complaining about the Darwin-only policy.  Rick Cole, New Mexico Science Teacher of the Year in 2001, who elevated his high school’s science fair from non-existent to award-winning status, taught intelligent design alongside evolution for 11 years.  He used the controversy to help his students learn to think critically about the two positions, until a single phone call from an atheist brought down an order from the department chairmen for him to stop.
• Big Guns:  Big-time Darwin defenders Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne came out swinging in The Guardian, intent on stuffing intelligent design into the science trash can once and for all.  Claiming that there is “no evidence” in favor of intelligent design, but “massive” evidence for evolution, they say, “The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data.  Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.”
      Amidst this bluster, however, they did admit in some depth that there are deep and serious debates between evolutionists that are “genuinely challenging” – such as neutral vs. adaptive selection, group selection, punctuated equilibrium, cladism, evo-devo, the Cambrian explosion, mass extinctions, interspecies competition, the relative roles of natural and sexual selection, the evolution of sex, evolutionary psychology and Darwinian medicine – yet they argue that I.D. is “not an argument of the same character as these controversies” because it is “religious,” not “scientific.”
      David Berlinski, as usual, was quite amused by all this.  He wrote to Evolution News inviting people to read Coyne and Dawkins’ diatribe, “endeavoring not to laugh, chortle, snicker, hoot or whistle,” which he claimed could not be done.  He was gratified to see them finally admitting that “Darwinian theories are simply riddled with problems for which Darwinian theories have no answers,” as critics have been saying for years.  “The list of problems that Coyne and Dawkins have produced could be extended far into the night,” Berlinski says, “but it’s a good beginning.  That they use the deficiencies of Darwinian theory to argue against ID is an added pleasure.”
• Spectator Sport:  Paul Johnson in The Spectator wrote a correspondingly vicious attack against the evolutionists, especially Richard Dawkins, who he called the “ayatollah of atheism.”  He senses a “groundswell of discontent at this intellectual totalitarianism” and predicts its collapse: “The likelihood that Darwin’s eventual debacle will be sensational and brutal is increased by the arrogance of his acolytes, by their insistence on the unchallengeable truth of the theory of natural selection – which to them is not a hypothesis but a demonstrated fact, and its critics mere flat-earthers – and by their success in occupying the commanding heights in the university science departments and the scientific journals, denying a hearing to anyone who disagrees with them.”  Case in point: Iowa State, where Discovery Institute says the “thought cops” and “inquisitors” are leading a crusade against astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez (08/30/2005).
• Red Blog:  Homunculus is trying to get a debate going on ID on the RedState.org blog.  Rob Crowther on EvolutionNews was glad he got the definitions right, but suspects he will be “inundated by rabid Darwinists irked by such an insightful post.”
• Don’t Teach the Controversy:  John Derbyshire on National Review votes against teaching the controversy over Darwinism.  To him, Darwinism is accepted science and ID is not.  Plenty of good scientists are religious people, he agrees, and so are some Darwinists.
• Ho-Hum, Old Stuff:  Alan Cutler reviewed Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature by Keith Thomson (Yale, 2005) in Science¹ and treated the design-vs-naturalism debate like it’s as hoary as the hills.  He pointed out that the question in Robert Boyle’s time was not whether science and God could be reconciled; “It was whether science and atheism could be reconciled, and the answer seemed to be a definitive no.”  By popular consent now, though, Darwin settled the question once and for all; “According to Thomson, it was principally Darwin’s theory that, by removing the necessity of a designer, doomed natural theology.”  Interestingly, Cutler cut down natural theology not as much for its scientific arguments as for its theology.  In his opinion, William Paley’s divine watchmaker is little more than a “compassionless technocrat” –

  Natural theologians had long been criticized for emphasizing God the Creator over God the Redeemer.  Paley’s book nowhere mentions Jesus.  When Darwin grieved over the death of his beloved daughter at the age of ten, Paley’s watchmaker God was cold comfort at best.  It was this, as much as any intellectual argument, that undermined Darwin’s Christian faith.  Natural theology’s theology was ultimately as unsatisfying as its science.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

  (See 09/01/2005 commentary.)  When Thomson devoted a mere few pages to the current intelligent design controversy, Cutler dismissively remarked, “This is enough.  The answers to their arguments are basically the same as the answers to Paley’s.”
• Dumb design:  In a short piece on the evolutionary water-to-land transition, Science Now used the phrase “intelligent design” as a Darwinian counterthrust.  Robert Carroll described the awkward stance of presumed primitive tetrapod Ichthyostega: “It’s not a very intelligent design,” he chuckled.  (For more on Ichthyostega and the evolution of tetrapods, see “Evolution of the Darwin Fish,” 08/09/2003.)
• Friendship Evo-evangelism:  Science editor² Don Kennedy liked the movie March of the Penguins (08/19/2005) so much, he thinks it could provide a teachable moment for Darwinist evangelists to use on the ignorant: “By all means see March of the Penguins.  Better still, you can accomplish a good work by inviting an advocate for ‘intelligent design’ to accompany you.  After the show, buy him or her a beer, and ask for an explanation of just what the Designer had in mind here.”  If that advocate were Paul Nelson, undoubtedly he would have a counter-question ready in response, as he hands Kennedy a Diet Coke.

OK, we’re going to do the Darwin Party a favor, and list all their talking points as bullets.  Readers are invited to print these out alongside our Baloney Detector and exercise their critical thinking skills:

• Evolution is a fact.
• Evolution is science.
• Creationism is religion.
• Intelligent design is just creationism in disguise.
• ID refers to the supernatural, which is disallowed in science.
• Evolution is comparable to the law of gravity.
• Intelligent Design is comparable to alchemy and belief in a flat earth.
• Evolution is supported by massive amounts of evidence.
• ID has no evidence.
• Science must be naturalistic by definition.
• ID only finds fault with evolution and has no answers of its own.
• Evolution promotes fruitful research.
• ID brings science to a halt by saying God did it.
• ID is just another “god-of-the-gaps” non-answer.
• Evolution employs natural laws, not miracles.
• Evolution has been highly successful in explaining living things.
• Evolution helps us understand medicine.
• Evolutionists will solve their problems given enough time (and funding).
• Nothing in biology makes sense apart from evolution.
• ID advocates are religiously motivated.
• The principle of “separation of church and state” precludes ID being taught.
• ID is unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court said so.
• ID can be taught in religion, history and sociology classes, but not in science class.
• “Teaching the controversy” is just as dangerous as teaching creationism.
• There is no controversy over evolution among scientists.
• Evolutionists are motivated only by love of the truth.
• Teaching ID would require teaching every culture’s creation myth equally.
• Allowing alternatives to evolution is like allowing Holocaust-deniers to have equal time in history class.
• Evolution is falsifiable.
• ID is not falsifiable.
• Evolution does not need to explain the origin of life.
• Evolution does not need to explain the origin of the universe.
• ID needs to answer the question, “who designed the Designer?”
• ID is a “disingenuous euphemism” (Dawkins) for religious advocacy.
• Educators and politicians must not give in to the pressure from the ID zealots.

Parents and teachers may wish to print this list in one column, and the types of propaganda tactics, logical fallacies and smokescreens from the Baloney Detector in another column, and have students draw lines connecting them (multiple lines per item are permitted).  Or, they can make a game of the exercise, like a Scavenger Hunt – the student who reads Dawkins’ article and finds the most big lies wins.  Suggested prize: [root] beer.
Next headline on:  Education • Evolution • Intelligent Design

There are thousands of fossils of hominins, but no fossil chimpanzee has yet been reported.  The chimpanzee (Pan) is the closest living relative to humans.  Chimpanzee populations today are confined to wooded West and central Africa, whereas most hominin fossil sites occur in the semi-arid East African Rift Valley.  This situation has fuelled speculation regarding causes for the divergence of the human and chimpanzee lineages five to eight million years ago.  Some investigators have invoked a shift from wooded to savannah vegetation in East Africa, driven by climate change, to explain the apparent separation between chimpanzee and human ancestral populations and the origin of the unique hominin locomotor adaptation, bipedalism.  The Rift Valley itself functions as an obstacle to chimpanzee occupation in some scenarios.  Here we report the first fossil chimpanzee.  These fossils, from the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya, show that representatives of Pan were present in the East African Rift Valley during the Middle Pleistocene, where they were contemporary with an extinct species of Homo.  Habitats suitable for both hominins and chimpanzees were clearly present there during this period, and the Rift Valley did not present an impenetrable barrier to chimpanzee occupation.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

This evidence shows that in the past chimpanzees occupied regions in which the only hominoid inhabitants were thought to have been members of the human lineage.  Now that chimpanzees are known to form a component of the Middle Pleistocene fauna in the Rift Valley, it is quite possible that they remain to be recognized in other portions of the fossil record there, and that chimpanzees and hominins have been sympatric since the time of their divergence.

Part of the reason none have been found in this area before is that paleoanthropologists were not looking for them.  McBrearty said that now we know they are there, researchers “will start looking for them,” implying that the favorite story of human divergence through migration to the grasslands blinded their eyes to the possible presence of chimpanzee fossils in the Great Rift Valley.  Since this was the hotbed of hominid bones that made the Leakeys famous, hunters wanted missing links, not existing species of chimpanzees.
    This announcement will not frustrate Darwinists very much.  They actually enjoy new twists to the plot of their favorite story.  Maybe some will say the Homo neighbors brought the chimp back from a hunt in the jungle and had it for dinner, spitting out the teeth.  Most likely this will give a temporary boost to the internecine heresy of sympatric speciation, but it will be harder to come up with a reason why Pan and Homo diverged so much if they lived in the same vicinity.  Maybe it will also revive the simplistic Larry King question, “If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?”  The answer is, of course, that some of them had a choice.
    Sharp minds will notice that there is no evolutionary evidence here.  The Homo fossils were described in the BBC piece as “probably” an advanced form of Homo erectus, whatever that vague category means (see 07/03/2004 entry).  They “looked like people and were a fairly sophisticated culture with various stone tools and lived in the same environment as humans.”  If they looked like people and and acted like people, why even differentiate them from people?  There are Homo sapiens sapiens today that share that same habitat and match that same description right now.  People come in a variety of sizes and shapes, but are all one species of people.  What’s evolution got to do with it?
Next headline on:  Fossils • Early Man • Evolution

1. Introduction:  Chris Gunter and Ritu Dhand, “The Chimpanzee Genome,” Nature 437, 47 (1 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/436047a.
   “Comparing the genetic code of humans and chimps will allow us to comb through each gene or regulatory region to find single changes that might have made a difference in evolution,” they say, but remind us that the oft-quoted 96%-similar-gene figure between chimps and humans must be seen in context: “At a conservative estimate we share about 88% of our genes with rodents and 60% with chickens.  Applying a more liberal definition of similarity, up to 80% of the sea-squirt’s genes are found in humans in some form.  So it’s no surprise that we are still asking, ‘What makes us human?’”

2. Overview:  Wen-Hsiung Li and Matthew A. Saunders, “The chimpanzee and us,” Nature 437, 50-51 (1 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/437050a.
   After summarizing statistical similarities and differences in genes of chimps and humans, this article hastens to remind readers that a clear picture of evolution does not jump out of the mass of data.

   The question of what genetic changes make us human is far more complex.  Although the two genomes are very similar, there are about 35 million nucleotide differences, 5 million indels and many chromosomal rearrangements to take into account.  Most of these changes will have no significant biological effect, so identification of the genomic differences underlying such characteristics of ‘humanness’ as large cranial capacity, bipedalism and advanced brain development remains a daunting task.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

3. Chimp Culture:  Andrew Whiten, “The second inheritance system of chimpanzees and humans,” Nature 437, 52-55 (1 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature04023.
   A primate psychologist in Scotland, Andrew Whiten presents an overview of a study parallel the genome project, the attempt to understand chimpanzee culture and social inheritance.  He highlights a key difference:

   Ape culture may be particularly complex among non-human animals, yet it clearly falls far short of human culture.  An influential contemporary view is that the key difference lies in the human capacity for cumulative culture, whereby the achievements of successive generations have built on previous developments to create complex structures such as languages and technologies.  Chimpanzees have accumulated many traditions, but each remains sufficiently simple that there is little scope for it to have developed significant complexity compared to its original form.  Hints of cumulation exist, such as the refinement of using prop stones to stabilize stone anvils during nut-cracking, but these remain primitive and fleeting by human standards.  One possible explanation that has been offered for this human-chimpanzee difference lies in the social learning mechanisms available to each species, an issue that new genetic approaches based on the complete chimpanzee genome sequence may help to unravel.

   Actual studies of chimp social behavior are relatively recent.  Whatever the differences, Whiten seems to never doubt they are matters of degree, not kind.

4. Chimp Psychology:  Marc Hauser, “Our chimpanzee mind,” Nature 437, 60-63 (1 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03917.
   Marc Hauser (evolutionary psychologist, Harvard) is quick to justify his “preposterous” title, imagining the rage of Bishop Wilberforce at the suggestion humans have a developed chimpanzee mind.  He means to say that the entire animal kingdom shares mental relatedness:

   ....the bottom line at present is that for each psychological capacity explored, some other animal shares this ability with chimpanzees.  The reason why chimpanzees may be uniquely placed to enlighten human origins is due both to their phylogenetic proximity to humans as well as the extent to which they have accumulated a suite of psychological abilities in the service of solving social and ecological problems that were largely shared with those faced by our hominid hunter-gatherers.

   Based on observations of chimps, Hauser thinks humans share two things with chimpanzee mental powers: “folk mathematics” and “folk psychology.”  In his conclusion, he says, “At the genetic level, the publication of the chimpanzee genome will lead to increased capacity to pinpoint homologies.  However, we are woefully ignorant about how genes build brains, and how the electrical activity of the brain builds thoughts and emotions”, although the situation is more promising than it was five years ago, “owing to the convergence of three disciplines: comparative genomics, animal psychology and developmental neuropsychology.”  The gap between genomics and psychology is shrinking, he is thinking.

5. Brain Evolution:  Robert Sean Hill and Christopher A. Walsh, “Molecular insights into human brain evolution,” Nature 437, 64-67 (1 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature04103.
   Noting that the human brain is twice the size of the chimp brain, Hill and Walsh attempt to explain the difference by evolutionary mechanisms.  The addition of whole new genes lacks support, but there appears to be evidence for changes in gene regulation or coding sequence.  Most studies focus on what goes wrong when a gene is mutated.  Anomalies in the FOXP2 gene, for instance, cause language disabilities in humans, and chimps and other animals exhibit sequence differences in that gene.  This, they feel, is evidence for positive selection toward language capability.  They admit, however, that “linkage of studies of gene function in humans with evolutionary analysis is just beginning,” and much work remains to be done.

6. Chimp Genome: The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, “Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome,” Nature 437, 69-87 (1 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature04072.
   Here is the bulk of the genome report.  They start with Darwin:

   More than a century ago Darwin and Huxley posited that humans share recent common ancestors with the African great apes.  Modern molecular studies have spectacularly confirmed this prediction and have refined the relationships, showing that the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus or pygmy chimpanzee) are our closest living evolutionary relatives.  Chimpanzees are thus especially suited to teach us about ourselves, both in terms of their similarities and differences with human.  For example, Goodall’s pioneering studies on the common chimpanzee revealed startling behavioural similarities such as tool use and group aggression.  By contrast, other features are obviously specific to humans, including habitual bipedality, a greatly enlarged brain and complex language.  Important similarities and differences have also been noted for the incidence and severity of several major human diseases.

   The report highlights similarities but also large and surprising differences (summarized in #2, above).  Many of the differences occur in non-gene-coding regions.  Some sequence differences appear too great to have arisen by mutations since the time humans are said to have diverged from chimpanzees, considering that most mutations would be deleterious or, at best, neutral; in fact, it appears that mutation rates would have had to vary widely from gene to gene.  They indicate evidence for “selective sweeps” in the human lineage, in which all humans share mutations that have become “fixed”.  In short, “Our results confirm many earlier observations, but notably challenge some previous claims based on more limited data.”
       Their ending discussion asks the same question posed in the introduction, and reminds us that not all differences between species can be explained by genetic sequence differences:

   The hardest such question is: what makes us human?  The challenge lies in the fact that most evolutionary change is due to neutral drift.  Adaptive changes comprise only a small minority of the total genetic variation between two species.  As a result, the extent of phenotypic variation between organisms is not strictly related to the degree of sequence variation.  For example, gross phenotypic variation between human and chimpanzee is much greater than between the mouse species Mus musculus and Mus spretus, although the sequence difference in the two cases is similar.  On the other hand, dogs show considerable phenotypic variation despite having little overall sequence variation (0.15%).  Genomic comparison markedly narrows the search for the functionally important differences between species, but specific biological insights will be needed to sift the still-large list of candidates to separate adaptive changes from neutral background.

7. Comparison Study:  Ze Cheng et al., “A genome-wide comparison of recent chimpanzee and human segmental duplications,” Nature 437, 88-93 (1 September 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature04000.
   A third of apparent segmental duplications in the human genome (defined by more than 94% sequence identity) are not found in the chimp genome.  This team compared the two genomes, and figured that this required a duplication rate of 4 to 5 million bases per million years since humans and chimps parted evolutionary ways.  Most of the changes, surprisingly, deal with chromosome structure.  No clear picture emerges for how or why these differences arose: “It is unknown whether slow rates of deletion, high rates of duplication or gene conversion are largely responsible for the evolutionary maintenance of these duplicates.”  A surprising conclusion is that “when compared to single-base-pair differences, which account for 1.2% genetic difference, base per base, large segmental duplication events have had a greater impact (2.7%) in altering the genomic landscape of these two species.”

Data are gems.  The critique that follows is in no way a criticism of the valiant effort to sequence the chimp genome, the human genome, or any other genome.  Like dreams, speculations inhabit the sleep of data darkness.  Data make a good alarm clock to jolt visionaries out of their slumbers and remind them it’s time to go to work.
    You can see how the same data can motivate vastly different interpretations, depending on one’s world view.  The evolutionists are grasping at the similarities, while the creationists are emphasizing the differences.  One thing stands out of these reports: the data are so complex and convoluted, anyone can spin the story almost any way they want.  Yes, there are phenomenal similarities, but there are also profound differences.  There are so many differences, in fact, that it stretches credulity to believe that millions upon millions of base pair substitutions and segmental duplications could have occurred in the time assumed by evolutionists that humans and chimps went their separate ways (see Alan Grey’s blog thoughts on this).  Clearly there is no clear discernible evolutionary trail linking the two as evolutionists had hoped.  That being the case, keep in mind several key points before going data mining:

• Epigenetics:  Genes cannot be telling the whole story.  There’s a lot more going on to make us human than just DNA.  If two mice species that look similar have just as much genetic difference (4%) as humans and chimps, and if dogs, from great danes to chihuahuas, have far less genetic difference (0.15%), then clearly phenotypic difference (outward appearance) is not a linear function of genotypic distance.  Mining just the genome for explanations is an exercise in reductionism.
• Inconsequential Differences:  Why should genes differ so widely that are only concerned with chromosome structure?  Why should there be so many segmented duplication differences, and “neutral” differences?  Evolutionists wanted to find clear evidence of positive selection leading to upright posture, language and culture.  Although such studies are just beginning, they only have a paltry few to suggest so far, and those are ambiguous.  They admit that the picture looks far more complex than expected.
• Phenotypic Revolutions:  Humans exhibit several profound anatomical differences shared by no other primate: upright posture, ability to do long-distance running (11/18/2004), naked skin with thermoregulatory function, prolonged maturation, vocal apparatus suited for language, a very large brain relative to body size, and much more.  Could this much interrelated change occur by undirected, accidental mutations over a few “short” millions of years?  Consider just all the bodily adaptations for endurance running mentioned in the highly-informative and interesting 11/18/2004 story.  It would seem that mutations to multiple systems would have had to conspire together for the end result of producing a marathon runner – but where is the evidence for strong positive selection in the DNA?  This underscores the point that genomics cannot provide a full answer.
• Social Revolutions:  Despite the antics about chimpanzee culture and mind, there is really no comparison with humans.  Take a luxury cruise, enter a national research laboratory, go to the symphony, fly a supersonic jet, run an advanced software program, carry on a discussion about algebra, read a philosophy book – then watch chimps screech and groom and break nuts with a rock.  Impressed?  Can such profound differences be accounted for by segmented duplications, ALU repeats and base substitutions alone?

These points challenge the Darwinian story, but creationists have a challenge, too, to explain the similarities. Some evolutionists are convinced this is a crippling blow to creationism, and establishes evolution as the only explanation (despite their own challenges).  Really?  Let’s attempt a creationist explanation of the similarities between the human and chimpanzee genomes, because clearly the vast majority of the DNA is essentially identical.  First off, lest we overplay these similarities, remember that both human and chimp genomes share many commonalities with mice and even with sea squirts, worms and chickens.  The whole living world is built on the same genetic code and basic toolkit.  But why would a Creator make things similar, especially humans, who were supposedly created to be the stewards of the earth?
    A good first reply to a “why?” question is to ask: “why not?”  A wise king doesn’t send a complete foreigner as ambassador, but chooses one from among their own.  The Old Testament prophets, too, were men, not angels or aliens in spaceships.  Even the Lord God incarnate was born of a woman, laid in a manger as a human baby.  He grew up to live, eat, sleep, and speak as fully man though, according to Hebrews 1:1-2, he was an exact representation of God’s divine nature.  It is a non-sequitur to assume that humans, in order to serve a special God-given role in the world, must be completely genetically distinct from other living organisms in their embassy.
    Human beings, in the image of God, have to inhabit the same biosphere with chimps.  We are creatures as much as they are.  We breathe the same air, require the same bodily functions, eat much of the same food (e.g., bananas), have the same senses and share the same world.  Evolutionists often knock down a straw man by insisting that a divine Creator would have created every species separately and distinct from each other one.  Why so?  If a protozoan needs a peptidyl transferase enzyme, why should the human analog be utterly and completely different, designed de novo from scratch out of other materials?  Why would it not be a good design feature to provide redundancy of basic functions and parts, like subroutines and modules of a complex software suite, mixed and matched for a variety of environments and purposes?  Homology does not prove common ancestry without first assuming it does – a circular argument, as Jonathan Wells demonstrates in his book Icons of Evolution (see “Homology for Dummies,” 05/05/2004).  The nested hierarchy of animal forms, resulting in similarities and differences between groups at all levels, can be employed as an argument for design.  In his thought-provoking book The Biotic Message, Walter ReMine argues that there is enough commonality to falsify polytheism, but enough difference to falsify evolution.
    Look at the new data for a moment through Biblical creation glasses.  This is nearly impossible for Darwinists, and for those steeped in Darwinian education, it requires a painful removal of many ingrained assumptions.  In the beginning, God created a perfect world, filled with animals and plants made to reproduce after their kind.  This does not imply fixity of species, because God would have programmed in variability for robustness against perturbations (see 03/14/2005, 01/26/2005 and 09/22/2004 entries).  Nor does it predict a lack of similarity, because everything came from a common designer.  The creation of man by the hand of God from the dust of the ground does not imply utter and complete distinction from chimpanzees – because it’s not the raw materials that made Adam and Eve distinct, but the genetic program – the intelligent design – that organized the material into the human form.  This program evidently shared many if not most of the “subroutines” and modules God previously used in apes, mice and sea squirts.
    Then, God breathed into the man’s nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.  This is fodder for theologians, not biologists, but most certainly included the spiritual, social, emotional, moral, lingual and intellectual faculties that so distinguish humans from all other animals: we alone were made in the image of God.  We are, as Wernher von Braun worded it, souls cast in animal bodies.  Our physical, material nature had much in common with the animal world, but the human pair alone walked and talked with God in the original “very good” creation.  But that’s not the whole story.
    The world was cursed when man sinned.  The fall is critical to the creation explanation.  Darwin lost his faith in Christianity primarily from two things: (1) Lyell’s persuasion that the earth was millions of years old, too old for Genesis, and (2) the problem of evil.  Natural theology was strong in the early 1800s.  Powerful as its arguments were, it had no answer to the suffering and evil we see in the world around us.  Darwinists gleefully knock down the straw god of the beneficent artificer deity by pointing to evil and suffering, when the Bible presents a God of wrath who judges sin and punishes disobedience – but then offers salvation to the rebels through his own grace.  Only the Biblical picture of creation, fall and redemption gives a logically self-consistent picture of why the world is both beautiful and ugly, both sublime and painful.  (The Darwinians solve the problem by denying the existence of evil – “whatever is, is right” – but our consciences know better.)  There’s still more to the creation explanation.
    A world-wide Flood happened.  The antediluvian world, cursed and decaying, endured possibly thousands of years of human violence and genetic decay.  Humans and many other animals could have varied substantially and, while living in the same times and places, experienced the same genetic pressures and changes.  Then, only 8 human representatives and 2 of each animal survived the Deluge aboard the Ark.  This would have resulted in genetic sweeps and bottlenecks and, again, subjected the animals to similar gene-altering pressures.  After the Flood, a vastly different environment opened up to the survivors.  They have undergone additional variation and genomic pressures ever since.  The varieties of finches, hummingbirds, dogs, cats and human “races” did not require millions of years, only thousands.  These changes are (1) conservative, to maintain the species, and (2) horizontal, not adding new genetic information but just shuffling what was already present (more or less melanin, more or less fur, longer or shorter beaks on birds, accentuated markings on insect wings, etc.).  Since dispersal was not uniform, the differences between created kinds (not species, but groups able to vary within limits) led to the biogeographical differences seen today, including those on the Galápagos Islands that so impressed Darwin.
    Whether you find this account plausible depends on many presuppositions you trust.  It does have two forensic advantages over the evolution just-so storytelling method, though: (1) sufficient causal agency (intelligence) for the spectacular complexity observed in the genomes (10/27/2004, 06/14/2005), and (2) an eyewitness testimony (by the Creator himself).  In challenging Darwinists, we cannot stress that first point enough (they ignore the second one, but cannot ignore the first).  Evolutionists play marbles with diamonds when playing their storytelling games with genes and DNA.  The human and chimp genomes, and all others, are incredibly, stupendously complex, such that we should humbly stand in awe of these evidences of intelligent design.  Remember the complexity of a nose (06/27/2005), or a tiny roundworm (06/25/2005) or fruit fly? (12/08/2003).  If even Richard Dawkins is stupefied by the wonders around him (09/12/2004), it would seem that building on a foundation of intelligent design at least, if not (better) trusting the Word of the designer, is the best starting point for interpreting any vast library of information.
    See Apologetics Press for an initial creationist response to announcements about the chimp genome by Dr. Brad Harrub, co-author of The Truth About Human Origins (2003, 526pp).
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