“The... very goodness of God should convince all people to believe and trust their Creator.  Although they know that sin has separated them from God and that death is the result of sin, they also know that he has not abandoned them.... Men and women should always have known that there is a God of Creation and that he is also a God of holiness who must punish sin.  But they should also have realized that he is a loving God who will somehow provide salvation.  The God of Creation must also be the God of Redemption.”
—Dr. Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God (Baker, 1989), p. 281.

• Spitzer Clusters:  JPL issued a press release stating that the Spitzer Space Telescope, on a “cosmic safari,” found evidence for clusters of galaxies 9 billion years old.  In the standard dating scheme, this was when the universe was a “mere” 4.5 billion years old.
• Swift GRBs:  Astronomers reported in Nature¹ the discovery, by the Swift satellite, of the earliest gamma-ray burst ever found.  The burst “happened 12.8 billion years ago, corresponding to a time when the Universe was just 890 million years old, close to the reionization era,” they said.  “This means that not only did stars form in this short period of time after the Big Bang, but also that enough time had elapsed for them to evolve and collapse into black holes” (emphasis added in all quotes).
• Ubiquitous Galaxies:  A press release from the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics announced “Ubiquitous galaxies discovered in the Early Universe.”  Observations in far-ultraviolet and near-infrared found galaxies at redshift z=6.7, assumed to be within 5% of the birth of the universe.  Most of them were spirals, not irregulars as theory had predicted.

A second area in astrophysics that can be construed as a cloud on the horizon is that recent observations in the years 2002-2003 suggest that – not just suggest, recent observations tell astronomers that when the universe was less than 3 billion years old, there were already galactic clusters [03/12/2003].  Not only were there galaxies... but here we have, astronomers have discovered, a modest galactic cluster (I believe that it has something like 30 some-odd galaxies in it) that goes back to less than 3 billion years after the big bang.  That’s much too much structure to have after only two and a half or 2.7 billion years of expansion.  So that is another problem that astrophysics needs to come to grips with.
    It’s not a small problem, either, because the extent of the structure that we can discover in the universe has implications for whether big bang and inflation are really capable of providing a model of the universe.  So it’s a small – it may seem like a small problem to non-specialists, but within astrophysics it’s a significant challenge.
    And then there’s the question of whether we are in fact reading the microwave background radiation correctly. [03/20/2006]   Because all of this theory is empirically supported by interpreting extremely minute ripples in the microwave background radiation.  And from those ripples, ripples in temperature, temperature inequalities on the order of ten thousandths of a degree Kelvin are – that’s the basis for trying to explain why there is as much structure as there is in the universe.  If we’re misinterpreting the microwave background radiation data, then really we have a whole new picture of the universe that might emerge.  So, that’s one set of clouds that one can anticipate that over the next decade we will potentially be seeing significant modifications in our conceptualization of the universe and its origin, and maybe even of its fate.

Goldman suggested later in the lecture one possible new conception of the universe that might emerge in the years ahead: that the universe might be viewed as “some kind of information structure.”  Sound like intelligent design?  Sound like instant creation?  He asked, “and how will we understand that philosophically and physically?”  Easy: in the beginning was the Word.  Consider creation: an idea ahead of its time.
Next headline on: Astronomy • Cosmology

The evolution of altruism, a behaviour that benefits others at one’s own fitness expense, poses a darwinian paradox.  The paradox is resolved if many interactions are with related individuals so that the benefits of altruism are reaped by copies of the altruistic gene in other individuals, a mechanism called kin selection.  However, recognition of altruists could provide an alternative route towards the evolution of altruism.  Arguably the simplest recognition system is a conspicuous, heritable tag, such as a green beard.  Despite the fact that such genes have been reported, the ‘green beard effect’ has often been dismissed because it is unlikely that a single gene can code for altruism and a recognizable tag.  Here we model the green beard effect and find that if recognition and altruism are always inherited together, the dynamics are highly unstable, leading to the loss of altruism.  In contrast, if the effect is caused by loosely coupled separate genes, altruism is facilitated through beard chromodynamics in which many beard colours co-occur.  This allows altruism to persist even in weakly structured populations and implies that the green beard effect, in the form of a fluid association of altruistic traits with a recognition tag, can be much more prevalent than hitherto assumed.   (Emphasis added.)

Need we say anything more?  Do you get the picture that evolutionary theorists have gone totally wacko?  Thanks, Jansen and van Baalen; keep up the good work.  Anti-evolutionists appreciate the free ammunition.
    The most egregious dumb idea in this story is not the fairy tale of the “green beard effect.”  It is their belief that altruism might actually evolve by a mutation in a gene.  The second most egregious aspect of this story is that Nature would print such balderdash with a straight fuzzy face.  It’s not even April Fool’s Day yet.  “Beard chromodynamics.”  Sad.  Funny, but sad.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

The author is less convincing when he turns to the origin of life (at least he is not afraid to deal with big topics).  Citing the work of Mike Russell² and Alan Hall, Lane states that in order to generate a primitive cell from an iron sulphide vesicle “all that the cells need to do to generate ATP is to plug an [proton translocating] ATPase through the membrane.”  Any bioenergeticist who has followed the elucidation of the extraordinary structure and mechanism of the mitochondrial ATP synthase over the past decade will pause at the word “all,” because the ATP synthase—with its spinning rotor massaging the surrounding subunits to generate ATP—is without doubt the most amazingly complex molecular structure in the cell.³   (Emphasis and footnotes added.)

If a pro-Darwinist convinced evolutionist is this surprised that a colleague would treat the “most amazingly complex molecular structure in the cell” so dismissively, what are the rest of us supposed to think?  This is the perpetual bad habit of evolutionists.  It will prove their downfall.  As the gap between life’s complexity and evolution’s explanations continues to grow, Charlie is going to look more and more like Wiley E. Coyote clinging by fingernails and toenails to both sides of a rapidly-widening canyon.
Next headline on: Cell Biology • Origin of Life • Dumb Ideas

This means Mt. Improbable just got higher, and the evolutionists cannot use their Natural Selection ice axes to climb.  All they have is bare feet to go straight up on ice, now twice as high, with avalanches every few minutes.
    We should actually use analogies that are more realistic.  This is way too generous to the evolutionists (see online book).
Next headline on: Genetics • Origin of Life

In a new study forthcoming in the May 2006 issue of The American Naturalist, Mark A. Changizi and his coauthors, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo, from the California Institute of Technology explore the hypothesis that human visual signs have been cross-culturally selected to reflect common contours in natural scenes that humans have evolved to be good at seeing.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

No hint, now, that these skills might have been designed that way?  As usual, evolution is both the premise and the conclusion.  It is the question and the answer, the approach and the justification, the jot and the tittle, the alpha and omega. 
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

Too bad the Darwinists are in power; they bring science to a halt claiming, “evolution did it.”  (This is called the Darwin-of-the-gaps fallacy.)  Think of how rock climbers and rescue workers could benefit from studying the lowly spider from a design perspective.  If we could just learn a little intelligent design from these lowly organisms, we would advance civilization and bring biology out of the Darkwin Ages.
Next headline on: Terrestrial zoology • Amazing facts

It was such a fun story while it lasted.  It really made for dramatic pseudoscience documentaries on the Discovery Channel and provided animators with a usable motif.  Now, back to the drawing board – or how about this time, as Henry Morris advised, back to Genesis.
Next headline on: Geology • Dating Methods • Fossils

To critics who accuse him of just being up to the same old publicity stunts, the often times contentious brewmeister responds, “Perhaps, but we are really trying to live up to our mission statement, ‘Craft the finest ales and lagers possible.  Achieve a commercial profitability while maintaining the highest level of social responsibility.  And have as much fun as we can legally get away with.’”

If this were intelligently designed product, why didn’t they show the fully-evolved primate with a beer belly?  This guy clearly didn’t get his physique drinking Evolution Amber Ale, and if he were fully evolved, he would be sitting in the pose of Rodin’s Thinker, not pumping glass.
    Thinking of that, it would be fun to see the Discovery Institute donate truckloads of this stuff to the NCSE in a goodwill gesture.  While they’re getting stoned, the real thinkers, fully clothed and in their right minds, could be attending school board meetings, campaigning, writing books and forming IDEA clubs – whatever they can do to enhance the Darwin Party’s morning hangover experience.
    Come morning, ID supporters could even offer them free therapy.  They could tell them that the quickest way out of a hangover is more Evolution Amber Ale.  It not only smothers the depression, they can argue, but enhances mutagenesis, providing more raw material for evolution.  This is the way to kill a strife with kindness.
Next headline on: Darwinism • Intelligent Design • Dumb Stories

Creationists believe Homo erectus were true humans, so this is no issue about evolution, really.  We’ve seen these kinds of claims so many times before.  Now that it has made its splash in the media, a rival will soon be along to discredit the classification, or the date, or the significance of the find.  If their dates are not all mixed up beyond comprehension, there is no way the Ethiopian find could be a missing link if humans were already in Camelot.
Next headline on: Early Man • Fossils

Many botanists doubt the existence of plant species, viewing them as arbitrary constructs of the human mind, as opposed to discrete, objective entities that represent reproductively independent lineages or ‘units of evolution’  However, the discreteness of plant species and their correspondence with reproductive communities have not been tested quantitatively, allowing zoologists to argue that botanists have been overly influenced by a few ‘botanical horror stories’, such as dandelions, blackberries and oaks.  Here we analyse phenetic and/or crossing relationships in over 400 genera of plants and animals.  We show that although discrete phenotypic clusters exist in most genera (> 80%), the correspondence of taxonomic species to these clusters is poor (< 60%) and no different between plants and animals.... Contrary to conventional wisdom, plant species are more likely than animal species to represent reproductively independent lineages.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

How much of what scientists think they know about nature might be subjective judgments based on sampling bias?  How much more fallible might be theories based on these judgments?
    Their ending statement about Darwin is cryptic.  Are they saying that the early botanists poisoned Darwin’s mind and should be considered blameworthy for doing so, or are they joining in the poisoning conspiracy?  Probably the former; they seem to be affirming that plant species are just as much “units of evolution” that can have “reproductively independent lineages” despite crossing and apomixis (reproduction without gametes).  Whether distinct species can evolve is a separate question.  In any case, most plant species seem as distinct as animal species, so any problems with animal speciation apply equally well to plant speciation (see 02/28/2006 entry).
Next headline on: Plants • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionists baffled, not a simple story of descent, natural phenomena more complex than realized, design scientists vindicated; watch this space.
Next headline on: Genetics and DNA

Quotable quote from the blurb: “Despite Jones’s protestations to the contrary, his attempts to use the federal bench to declare evolution a sacred cow—unquestionable in schools and fundamentally compatible with all ‘true’ religion—are exposed by these critical authors as a textbook case of good-old-American judicial activism.”  Jones was only one district judge, and his opinion has no bearing outside that district.  But his lengthy diatribe deserves debate and battle.  Judges do not decide what is science and what is not.  How strange that scientists like Paul Katz are leaning on decisions of lawyers and judges.  Science needs to be judged on the evidence.
    The Amazon listing is already attracting highly polarized reviews.  The toilet talk of some pro-Darwinist reviewers can be considered a success for the book, if that’s the best level of scholarship attainable by critics.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design • Education

Take the thrill ride, and while enjoying the scenery, notice the utter lack of flowing water, trees, deer, mountain lions, wildflowers and sentient beings taking digital photos from the rim.  No Martian national park can compare with our Grand Canyon.  Percival Lowell would have been so disappointed.
Next headline on: Solar System • Origin of Life •

One of the lessons from this talk was how assumptions can subtly influence the scientist’s approach.  Dr. Grotzinger showed conflicting definitions of stromatolites, one that began, “organogenic structures....” – in other words, there was a biological bias built into the very definition of the word.  Interestingly, the NASA Astrobiology Student Focus website says that stromatolites were formerly defined as “laminated organo-sedimentary structures formed by the trapping and binding, and/or precipitation of minerals by microorganisms,” but then does not provide a more neutral definition, and goes on to portray stromatolites as evidences for life.  Biased definitions like these could send a graduate student off in a prejudiced direction to assume they were made biologically, and just as easily influence a TV producer working on a script about the early earth.
    Dr. Grotzinger and his team are to be commended for shaking off this bias and trying to look at the data objectively.  Unfortunately, in other parts of his talk, he accepted other aspects of the geo-biological evolution story without question: the geological column, Milankovich cycles, dating methods, etc.  At least this talk indicated progress away from one evolutionary assumption.  Now, how do we clean up the textbooks, museums and documentaries?
Next headline on: Fossils • Origin of Life • Geology

Alan Boss was fairly frank about the problems and difficulties, but his thinking is enslaved to a larger molecules-to-man world view that assumes everything from the big bang to man can be explained with references to natural causes alone.  The possibility that planets were designed and created is utterly alien to their thinking.  The film and book The Privileged Planet should challenge these modelers with stringent reality checks on the ability of natural processes alone to account for Earth, for the solar system that protects life on our planet, and for the galactic and cosmic systems of which our planet is a part.  Creationists, on the other hand, need to do serious thinking also in the light of the discoveries of extrasolar planets.  Are all planets equally designed, even for stellar systems devoid of life?  If not, did natural processes form them?  If so, how does one differentiate the need for design in our solar system?   Intelligent design theorists argue that it is not necessary to claim everything is designed to make the case against materialism.  To show that some things cannot be explained with reference to natural causes, and that it is possible to discriminate design from chance and natural law, is sufficient to establish ID.  Such questions may forever remain outside the purview of scientific investigation and remain debate topics for philosophers and theologians.  As shown by today’s story, with more anomalies than successes, materialists are in no position to claim the upper hand.  In the meantime, all players can benefit from more observations.
Next headline on: Astronomy • Solar System • Physics

Is that all?  They woke us up for that?  Good grief.  The only inflation here is exaggeration in the media, taking a data point and making a worldview out of it (cartoon).  Theoretical astrophysics is nearly incomprehensible (cartoon), certainly not enough to produce confident pronouncements (cartoon) that violate all common sense (cartoon).  Whatever happened to scientific objectivity and caution?  Not a word said about all the problems with inflation theory (11/02/2002).  In these days of molecules-to-man hype, hubris is the highest virtue.  Are all science reporters from Texas? (cartoon).
Next headline on: Cosmology

We analyzed a very large set of molecular interactions that had been derived automatically from biological texts.  We found that published statements, regardless of their verity, tend to interfere with interpretation of the subsequent experiments and, therefore, can act as scientific “microparadigms,” similar to dominant scientific theories [Kuhn, T. S. (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago)].  Using statistical tools, we measured the strength of the influence of a single published statement on subsequent interpretations.  We call these measured values the momentums of the published statements and treat separately the majority and minority of conflicting statements about the same molecular event.  Our results indicate that, when building biological models based on published experimental data, we may have to treat the data as highly dependent-ordered sequences of statements (i.e., chains of collective reasoning) rather than unordered and independent experimental observations.  Furthermore, our computations indicate that our data set can be interpreted in two very different ways (two “alternative universes”): one is an “optimists’ universe” with a very low incidence of false results (<5%), and another is a “pessimists’ universe” with an extraordinarily high rate of false results (>90%).  Our computations deem highly unlikely any milder intermediate explanation between these two extremes.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

We explicitly modeled both the generation of experimental results and the experimenters’ interpretation of their results and found that previously published statements, regardless of whether they are subsequently shown to be true or false, can have a profound effect on interpretations of further experiments and the probability that a scientific community would converge to a correct conclusion.

There is a well established term in economics, “information cascade”, which represents a special form of a collective reasoning chain that degenerates into repetition of the same statement.  Here we suggest a model that can generate a rich spectrum of patterns of published statements, including information cascades.  We then explore patterns that occur in real scientific publications and compare them to this model.

An evaluation of the optimum parameters under our model (see Model Box) indicated that the momentums of published statements estimated from real data are too high to maximize the probability of reaching the correct result at the end of a chain.  This finding suggests that the scientific process may not maximize the overall probability that the result published at the end of a chain of reasoning will be correct.

Imagine that: the very methodology invented to uncover truth could suppress it.  This could explain the near uniform acceptance of Darwinism and condemnation of intelligent design (and other maverick ideas) in Big Science.  Could it be that publication sets off a chain reaction that gains momentum and leads to erroneous interpretations?  Could scientists sometimes be just as prone to crowd psychology as the rest of us?  And you thought that the scientific method, peer review and publishing were safeguards against collective error.  The Hwang scandal should have provided a sharp wake-up slap (see 01/09/2006).
    Lest we make this one paper a self-fulfilling prophecy and start a new erroneous information cascade, we grant that such things are difficult to model mathematically with confidence.  Thomas Kuhn’s cynical view of science is not without controversy, and many scientists do work independently and interpret their results carefully.  These authors, though, should be commended for alerting us to the fact that scientists and scientific publications can perpetuate “microparadigms” that could be false.

  There is anecdotal evidence to support this claim in the case of evolution vs. intelligent design.  Those who publish in the journals any statements about I.D. tend to cite the standard ID-bashing texts as references: Pennock, Gross, Forrest etc.  It is unlikely they actually read those books, and even less likely they consider the arguments on both sides.  To them, the experts have spoken, and Judge Jones has ruled, so all is needed is to make a short statement with a footnote to the authorities.
    More anecdotal evidence comes from a scientist active in the ID movement, who shall remain unnamed, who stated that, in his experience, scientists tend to be very fair and self-critical in their own narrow specialties, but on other subjects, are among the most dogmatic, closed-minded people he knows.  Time and again he has seen them follow the leader – to merely ask questions like “what does Richard Dawkins think about it?  Well, then I’m agin it, too!”
    On the flip side, pro-evolution scientific papers often reference authorities carelessly.  An author may refer briefly to Darwin’s finches as evidence for natural selection, for instance, passing a lateral footnote to the Grants, merely assuming that the Grants demonstrated evolution in their work, without actually studying their work critically to see whether the evidence is valid or convincing (08/24/2005, 04/26/2002).  These cases illustrate how scientists can sometimes march in lock-step on certain topics, assuming one another’s authority, instead of contributing their own independent empirical findings toward an objective truth.

  Science is an intensely human enterprise and, therefore, is subject to human foibles like crowd psychology.  Our finiteness and human nature limit our ability to grasp natural realities.  One scientist cannot possibly know everything even in his or her own field.  Imagine mastering five million articles in ten years, just in one area (biomedical research), to say nothing of replicating or verifying each paper’s experimental results.  We’re human; we’re limited; it’s so much easier to cite the popular statements of the leaders and follow the chain-of-reasoning gang.  The more controversial the material (e.g., evolution vs intelligent design), the more it would seem that polarized interpretations are geared to maintain their own momentum.  Applying Newton’s Laws to social science, a body of ideas tends to remain stationary or in uniform linear motion unless acted on by a sufficient force.  And – every action to oppose the momentum has an equal and opposite reaction.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Politics and Ethics

• Because they are fully social, ants do not tell us a great deal about the transition from solitary to eusocial behavior.... Regardless of the details of this sequence of events, which of course was played out long ago [sic], contemporary ants offer abundant opportunity for comparative studies of colony life after the eusocial threshold has been crossed.
• The point to emphasize is that since their divergence from a common ancestor [sic] in the Cretaceous, some ant lineages – such as the iconic army ants and leaf-cutting ants – have evolved [sic] quite complex societies while others, such as the ‘primitive’ [sic] bulldog ants of Australia, have remained at a much less advanced level.  The factors responsible for such heterogeneity in the rate of social evolution [sic] have been little explored, and will require a careful analysis of ecological and phylogenetic influences.
• Ants are treated as a single family, Formicidae, in the order Hymenoptera, a large and diverse group of holometabolous insects.... Apocritan Hymenoptera exhibit a unique reorganization of the body parts in which the middle tagma [a functionally integrated set of body segments] is composed of the thorax plus abdominal segment 1, while the posterior tagma comprises the remaining abdominal segments.  It is unclear how this evolutionary novelty arose, but one apparent consequence is that additional constrictions, involving abdominal segments 2–4, evolved [sic] in some apocritans, giving them exceptional dexterity of abdominal movement.
• Ants differ from social bees and wasps in one important respect: the workers of ants are entirely wingless.  This places constraints on their foraging behavior and has probably spurred the evolution of complex chemical communication systems [sic], such as trail and recruitment pheromones, designed for terrestrial (as opposed to aerial) movement.
• There is little doubt that ants are a monophyletic group.  They share a distinctive suite of morphological features, including geniculate (elbowed) antennae, a prognathous (forward-projecting) head, a characteristic configuration of the foretibial antenna cleaner, modification of the second abdominal segment to form a node-like petiole, and several unique exocrine glands.  Yet the closest living relatives of ants have not been unequivocally identified.  Several other families of aculeate Hymenoptera, in a subgroup known as the Vespoidea, have been touted as possible sister groups of ants including Tiphiidae, Bradynobaenidae and the combination of Vespidae plus Scoliidae.  It is a measure of the incompleteness of our phylogenetic knowledge that none of these alternatives has particularly strong support.  In many respects the summary cladogram published by Fredrik Ronquist in 1999, which depicted most vespoid families emerging out of an unresolved bush, still applies today.
• The fossil record helps to explain this impasse.  Most families of aculeate wasps appear rather suddenly in the early Cretaceous, suggesting that there was a rapid burst of diversification once the sting had evolved.  Ants make their appearance a little later, about 100 million years ago [sic].
• A more extensive series of fossil ants has now been documented from the Cretaceous.  The fossils range in age from about 78 to 100 million years, and they include some undoubted crown-group taxa.  Among the more spectacular finds are additional well preserved specimens from New Jersey amber, including representatives of the modern subfamily Formicinae, as well as fossils from Canada, Eurasia, and southern Africa.  This taxonomic diversity and geographic spread indicates that crown-group ants arose some time before this period, perhaps as long ago as 120 million years. [sic]
• One might expect that the phylogenetic relationships among living representatives of Formicidae have been reasonably well clarified.  In fact many uncertainties persist here too, and this is an area of active investigation and debate.  Morphological studies have been helpful in circumscribing the major lineages (subfamilies) of ants, but the relationships among them have largely eluded confident resolution.
• Molecular data, in the form of DNA sequences from multiple nuclear genes, are just now being applied to the problem.  Such data confirm the monophyly of nearly all of the subfamilies, but they also reveal a number of novel and unexpected groupings.
• Another insight to emerge from molecular phylogenetic analyses of ants is that there has been profound morphological convergence in some aspects of worker morphology, to the extent that it misled earlier phylogenetic inferences.  For example, a constriction between abdominal segments 3 and 4, and the formation of a second node-like structure (a postpetiole), has evolved repeatedly [sic] in ants.
• The new phylogenetic estimates, combined with fossil-calibrated [sic] molecular dating analyses, suggest that the history of ants involves a series of sequential diversifications: evolution of sphecomyrmine and poneroid-like lineages in the early Cretaceous, about 100–120 million years ago, followed by a more exuberant diversification of formicoids beginning about 100 million years ago and continuing into the Paleogene.... In short, while the stem lineages of modern ant subfamilies were present before the K–T boundary, the ecological dominance and range of diversity that we associate with modern ants did not arise until later in the Tertiary, about 60–70 million years after ants first evolved. [sic]
• Several commentators have argued compellingly that the social behavior of ants is responsible at least in part for their evolutionary success [sic] and ecological dominance.  Eusociality confers marked advantages in terms of resource acquisition, defense against enemies, and buffering of environmental variation.  The division of labor and flexibility of task allocation that are the hallmarks of advanced social insects enable them to meet contingencies and exploit opportunities much more efficiently than solitary insects.
      But this cannot be the entire story.  Even among social insects ants are especially notable for their abundance and diversity, so additional factors must be invoked to explain their particular prominence.
• One can imagine that if formicoids had not evolved [sic], ants would be perceived as a modest group of tropical wingless wasps (with no vernacular term reserved for them), as opposed to the near-ubiquitous ecological dominants that we know today.  But, then again, maybe another poneroid would have stepped in to fill the void.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

They impose a strong ecological footprint in many communities in their varied roles as scavengers, predators, granivores, and herbivores.  In some tropical forests the biomass of ants exceeds that of terrestrial vertebrates by a factor of four, and their soil-turning activities dwarf those of earthworms.  There is a word for ‘ant’ in most languages, reflecting their ubiquity and distinctiveness to humans.  The ecological dominance and conspicuous social behavior of ants have long engaged the attention of natural historians.  In terms of their species diversity, relative abundance, ecological impact and social habits, ants emerge as one of the most prominent groups of arthropods.

If anyone can find any value whatsoever in Ward’s evolutionary speculations, please write in and explain.  If you subtract the assumption that evolution is a fact, and remove the fictional diagram of millions of years, and erase the supposition that everything evolved from something else by common ancestry, the actual empirical facts speak loud and clear: ants are complex and amazing animals that appeared suddenly on earth and fulfill a variety of important roles in the ecology.  Why does anyone need to be told that they evolved from stinging wasps, evolved their distinctive features several times (05/28/2003), and figured out their complex foraging and navigating skills (the envy of robotics experts) on their own?  How is this speculation helping science?  It serves nothing but to prop up the dead corpse of Charlie at the head of a traditional evolutionary parade.  Worse, it distracts attention from the wonders of nature that should inspire us to observe, study, and think.  Send your local Darwinist a gift and support an industrious entrepreneur: send Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm with a sticky-note saying, “Prov. 6:6-8.”
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Fossils • Evolution

The evolution of biological structures must be studied within an evolutionary framework.  In the case of feathers, a robust theropod phylogeny is the basis for reconstructing the sequence in which feathers evolved [sic].  The distribution of various feather morphologies on the currently accepted phylogeny suggests that simple, filamentous feathers first evolved no later than the earliest stage of coelurosaurian evolution.  More complex feathers with a thick central shaft and rigid symmetrical vanes on either side appeared early in the evolution of the coelurosaurian group Maniraptora; and feathers with aerodynamic features, such as a curved shaft and asymmetrical vanes, appeared within the maniraptors but before the origin of birds.  This inferred sequence of events is supported independently by developmental data.  Gohlich and Chiappe place Juravenator within the Compsognathidae, a group that is ‘basal’ in the coelurosaurian tree (Fig. 1).  So Juravenator should bear filamentous feathers. But it seems to be a scaled animal, at least on the tail and hind legs.
    Why, then, does a member of a feathered dinosaur family [sic] bear scales?  The authors’ answer is straightforward: feather evolution, they say, is more complex than we thought.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Problem?  What problem?  Scales are scales, and feathers are feathers.  Dinosaurs are dinosaurs, and birds are birds.  Before, evolutionists wanted us to believe that scales, a skin feature, evolved into feathers that are totally different and embedded beneath the skin.  They expected us to believe there was a straight line of descent from gray wrinkles on a dinosaur into the colorful, aerodynamic, exquisitely-designed feathers of acrobatic swifts and high-diving cormorants.  They asked us to believe that birds co-opted what appeared to be “integumentary structures” of doubtful utility on the legs and tails of some dinosaurs and turned them into flying wonders, complete with interlocking hooks and barbules that are lightweight, water-resistant and extremely adaptable (compare doves and penguins).  They expected us to believe that at the same time feathers evolved, dinosaurs transformed all their internal organs and completely redesigned their lungs and most other bodily systems.  One only has a “problem” when one has to keep telling new lies to back up old ones.  Check out the whopper Mark Looy found at Chicago’s Field Museum (see AIG report): the $17 million “Evolving Planet” exhibit triumphantly announces to unsuspecting children, “Birds Are Dinosaurs.”  Maybe some day museums will be realizing that evolutionists are dinosaurs, too (see Tom Weller illustrations).
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils

For years—for decades—they have been telling us that comets held the secrets to the early solar system.  Drifting in the dark cold of the outer realms of the sun, comets were supposed to have accreted slowly from the original dust and ice of a molecular cloud.  They only neared the sun when perturbed by a passing star and were flung into the sun’s neighborhood.  This thinking has its origin in Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis of the late 1700s.  Today’s news is a complete turnaround.  Now we have actual material from a live comet, showing that at least some of the material was so hot it was incandescent.  Some of the material looks like it was born in the fires of a rocky planet.  What Stardust has found will rewrite the textbooks and renders many a TV documentary obsolete.  An ounce of data is worth a ton of speculation.  That’s why the public should support sample-return and onsite-reconnaissance missions like Stardust, regardless of their opinions on origins and ages of things, if for no other reason than the entertainment of watching experts squirm.
Next headline on:  Solar System • Physics • Geology

And that is not all: Here we are in the 21st century, and the head of the government himself, George W. Bush, refuses to acknowledge that evolution is a scientific fact!  THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.
    The President claims: “On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth,” and then sits smugly by while Creationists carry out an assault against evolution in classrooms, museums, libraries, government bookstores, and even IMAX movies and science theaters.
    No, Mr. President, the verdict is NOT out on evolution.  EVOLUTION IS A FACT -- IT IS ONE OF THE MOST WELL-ESTABLISHED AND WELL-DOCUMENTED FACTS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE.  TO DENY AND ATTACK EVOLUTION IS TO DENY AND ATTACK ONE OF THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL FACTS ABOUT ALL OF NATURE AND REALITY AND ONE OF THE MOST CRUCIAL FOUNDATION STONES OF ALL OF MODERN SCIENCE.   (Bold added; caps in original.)

Conflating Darwinism with all of scientific progress – the old association propaganda tactic.  Don’t follow the hordes of storm trooper lemmings after that one.  Shouting the big lie “evolution is a fact” in all caps is likely to backfire.  Too obvious.  In fact, that whole quote wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week, or maybe of the month.  If you can tell a politician is lying when his lips are moving, you can tell a Darwinist is lying when he has to use all caps.
    Unless Darwin’s critics tire of the battle and let the empire sweep the field without a contest, these are bad days for Darwin Vader.  It’s the beginning of the breakup of a long Hothian winter (like a Narnian one).  Dembski explains why we should not take their threats so seriously or become demoralized: “We have this going for us, however, which the evolutionary naturalists don’t, namely, the evidence and arguments are on our side.”
    Read Dembski’s whole article and take heart – and keep the heat on.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Education • Dumb Ideas

The smart money is on intelligent design.  The next generation of bright, enthusiastic researchers knows that nanotechnology, biomimetics, genetic engineering and information-based research is where it’s at (e.g., 11/19/2005, 10/29/2005).  Sorry, astrobiology; hope you enjoyed your little philosophical fling on company time (01/07/2005).  Don’t let us stop you.  You can continue all you want – on your own euro.
Next headline on: Origin of Life • Evolutionary Theory • SETI

This work indicates that the chronic expression of a misfolded protein can upset the cellular protein folding homeostasis under physiological conditions.  These results have implications for pathogenic mechanisms in protein conformational diseases.  The human genome harbors a load of polymorphic variants and mutations that might be prevented from exerting deleterious effects by protein folding and clearance quality control mechanisms in the cell.  However, should these mechanisms become overwhelmed, as in a protein conformation disease, mild folding variants might contribute to disease pathogenesis by perturbing an increasing number of cellular pathways.... Therefore, the complexity of pathogenic mechanisms identified for protein conformation diseases could in part result from the imbalance in protein folding homeostasis.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Small perturbations in a highly complex working system can have drastic effects.  Notice how the cell has numerous safeguards to prevent this kind of runaway disaster: mechanisms to prevent misfolding, and procedures to safely capture and dismantle the escapees.  How this system ever arrived at such a high level of complex organization is never described in detail by the evolutionists, but they want us to believe that the escaped convicts are the heroes of the story.  They want us to believe that the mistakes and terror attacks are responsible for all the beauty and complexity of the living world, from peacock’s tails to flight muscles of bees that can flap hundreds of times a second, to the ability of humans to run a marathon.  From all indications, on the contrary, life is in a tenuous balance, and the factors trying to upset that balance are increasing.  The Theory of Devolution would appear to have better empirical support.
    What would happen to science if the Theory of Devolution gained dominance?  Science would go on.  Medical knowledge would advance.  Clever researchers would find ways to reinforce cellular quality control processes and develop means to prevent catastrophes.  Life would be seen as a precious commodity to conserve, with the same earnestness of those who try to rescue endangered species and prevent global warming.  In short, science and medical research would continue to thrive and (we think) sail higher and faster without Darwin’s storytelling baggage that only weighs the Beagle down.  An intelligently designed T shirt asks, “Did Darwin Get It Backwards?”  From all indications, such as the article above, yes: the world is running down, and life is facing an ever-growing genetic burden.  Darwinists are all worked up emotionally about their opponents, claiming that by discrediting evolutionary theory they are going to “destroy science.”  Ask yourself, who is the better sailor: the one trying to patch the leaks on the ship, or the slob leaning back against a barrel and speculating, “don’t worry about those holes, matey; given enough time, they will help make the ship stronger!”
Next headline on: Health • Cell Biology

This is probably nothing but a rock ridge.  The most serious ark researchers deny this object has anything to do with the ark.  It will take extraordinary proof to find Noah’s Ark, even if it could have survived at all.  Still, let the search continue.  Better to know than to speculate endlessly.  Publicity and confirmation are not one and the same.  SETI and astrobiology people need to remember that, too.
Next headline on: Bible and Theology

The first vertebrates to walk and run on land; how do they know this?  Why couldn’t the first vertebrates to walk and run have had two feet?  How do they know that other species that came before this one didn’t vanish?  If these animals can not survive in temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius, how have they survived at all?  In all those 225 million years have there been no droughts and hot spells?  Why have all the other animals, like dinosaurs, died out but this one has flourished?  And where do they get the 225 million years from?  Purely from evolutionary assumptions.
    Evolutionary reasoning goes like this: evolution is a fact, therefore, evolution is a fact.  Because evolution is a fact, all anomalies must be forced into the theory before the gun-toting fundamentalists storm the science lab, otherwise students will be unable to compete in the global economy and the glorious reputation of Charlie (blessed be the name) as the greatest scientist in history will be besmirched (and our funding will be cut).  It is vital to save the appearances, therefore, at all costs.  Here are two more good examples: a rodent virtually unchanged for 11 million years, and a lizard for 225 million, yet both are doing just fine today.  Clearly these animals never went extinct.  In whatever gap existed between the last fossil and the first live sighting, there has been a continuous population of these animals living and reproducing.  Stretching this gap into many millions of years without fossils rapidly becomes incredible.  Imagine, for instance, if only 100 of these rodents lived at a time (very conservative estimate, considering their much broader extent in the past), and each individual lived about 20 years (a very generous estimate).  There would be 500 deaths per century, therefore, and since there are 110,000 centuries in 11 million years, are we to believe that 55,000,000 of these rodents died without a trace?  It becomes even more unimaginable to think that over a billion tuataras died without leaving a fossil, only to show up on some New Zealand islands as if nothing happened.  These problems vanish if the time gaps are reduced to thousands, not millions.
    The raising of Lazarus was a bona fide miracle.  There was a living man, known to have died, who could be seen and touched and conversed with.  The skeptics could not deny it.  Evolutionists, by contrast, are conjuring up images of resurrection from a dead theory.  Both miracles require faith, but the first has one advantage: an adequate cause.  Jesus knew how to apply miracle-working power with intelligent design.  Just as the skeptics in Jerusalem could not deny the raising of Lazarus, so tried to have him killed again, today’s dogmatic Darwinists are attempting to put intelligent design and creation to death, while validating their claims to be the messiahs of science with nothing more than mental magic tricks.
Next headline on:  Fossils • Mammals • Terrestrial Zoology • Evolution

He proceeds to outline three assumptions that underlie thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence from antiquity to the present: the universe is very large or infinite, there are other inhabited worlds, and these other complex and intelligent beings are vastly superior to us....
    As for the third assumption, if we did make contact with an ETI, they would have to be vastly superior to us (since we just recently mastered radio and spaceflight).  On an evolutionary time scale, an ETI species only slightly ahead of us biologically could be millions of years ahead of us technologically.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Isn’t it amazing that whenever other inhabited worlds are discussed, the assumption is that they are always “vastly superior to us.”  Suffice it to say that even if we met an advanced extra-terrestrial being it would be quite easy to distinguish it from God.  God doesn’t need a spacecraft for travel.
    Question: what’s an article advancing atheism doing in a scientific journal?  We thought that Darwinism was perfectly compatible with Christianity.  That’s what they always claim, at least.  Though belief in advanced extraterrestrials has spanned the spectrum of religions and philosophies, Shermer, who abandoned his childhood Christianity when he learned about evolution, made it clear that (in his opinion) atheism is the religion of choice for scientists.  He concluded, “If we do make contact with intelligent celestial beings, all of this speculation and conjecture will fall by the wayside in favor of real science.  So in the spirit of scientific inquiry, the search must go on.  Ad astra!”
    So the radio telescope is his cathedral, the stars are his heaven, and his deities are other evolved beings who will perish in the heat death of the universe.  Whosoever will, may succumb.
Next headline on:  Theology • SETI

There is no question that the court decision in the Dover case was a good one.  The opinion written by Judge Jones is rigorous and thorough—and yes, quite elegant.  There is a substantial dark side to this decision, however, that reflects poorly on the scientific community.  How did it come to this court fight?  How, in a country as “developed” as the United States, have the school system, the media, and the scientific community failed so miserably to educate the majority of Americans about the nature of science in general and evolution in particular?  Too often, scientists do not take their public role seriously enough.  If scientists do not respond aggressively to the need to bring the rest of society along and confine themselves to talking to each other, the scientific enterprise [sic] will likely find itself uncomfortably out on a limb.  Should the United States continue to drift closer to the world’s theocracies and away from the preferable if very flawed secular democracies, science and scientists will suffer.

Johns repeats the usual canards and non-sequiturs of the Darwin Party: viz., if students don’t get Sola Darwina crammed down their throats, then they won’t be able to compete in the global economy (see 02/28/2006 entry) and our atheist utopia will degenerate into a society of ignorant AK47-toting fundamentalists.
    Since many other states and school boards are rethinking their positions in the aftermath of the Dover case, it is essential to understand the Dover decision and its many flaws.  In Dr. Anderson’s incisive critique of the decision, he unmasked its inconsistencies and logical fallacies in an easily readable, medium-length article.  Lawyers and educators should take note of the ways Dr. Anderson has argued that the decision can be turned against dogmatic evolutionism itself.  This is an article to pass around.
Next headline on: Education • Evolution • Intelligent Design

A current consensus on introns would be that prokaryotes do indeed have group II introns but that they never had spliceosomes; hence, streamlining in the original sense (that is, loss of spliceosomal introns) never occurred in prokaryotes, although it did occur in some eukaryotes such as yeast or microsporidia.  An expansion of that consensus would be that spliceosomes and spliceosomal introns are universal among eukaryotes, that group II introns originating from the mitochondrion are indeed the most likely precursors of eukaryotic mRNA introns and spliceosomal snRNAs, and that many—conceivably most—eukaryotic introns are as old as eukaryotes themselves.  More recent are the insights that there is virtually no evolutionary grade detectable in the origin of the spliceosome, which apparently was present in its (almost) fully fledged state in the common ancestor of eukaryotic lineages studied so far, and that the suspected source of introns—mitochondria, including their anaerobic forms, hydrogenosomes and mitosomes—was also present in the common ancestor of contemporary eukaryotes (the only ones whose origin or attributes require explanation).
    This suggests that intron origin and spread occurred within a narrow window of evolutionary time: subsequent to the origin of the mitochondrion, but before the diversification of the major eukaryotic lineages.  This, in turn, indicates the existence of a turbulent phase of genome evolution in the wake of mitochondrial origin, during which group II introns invaded the host’s chromosomes, spread as transposable elements into hundreds—perhaps thousands—of positions that have been conserved to the present, and fragmented into both mRNA introns and snRNA constituents of the spliceosome.

Here we revisit the possible evolutionary significance of introns in light of mitochondrial ubiquity.  We propose that the spread of group II introns and their mutational decay into spliceosomal introns created a strong selective pressure to exclude ribosomes from the vicinity of the chromosomes—thus breaking the prokaryotic paradigm of co-transcriptional translation and forcing nucleus-cytosol compartmentalization, which allowed translation to occur on properly matured mRNAs only.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

A problem of a much more severe nature arises, however, with the mutational decay of group II introns, resulting in inactivation of the maturase and/or RNA structural elements in at least some of the disseminated copies.  Modern examples from prokaryotes and organelles suggest that splicing with the help of maturase and RNA structural elements provided by intact group II introns in trans could have initially rescued gene expression at such loci, although maturase action in trans is much less effective than in cis.  Thus, the decay of the maturase gene in disseminated introns poses a requirement for invention of a new splicing machinery.  However, as discussed below, the transition to spliceosome-dependent splicing will also impose an unforgiving demand for inventions in addition to the spliceosome.

It seems that the protospliceosome recruited the Sm-domain, possibly to replace the maturase, while retaining group II RNA domains (snRNAs) ancestrally germane to the splicing mechanism.  While the later evolution of the spliceosome entailed diversification with the recruitment of additional proteins—leading to greater efficiency—the simpler, ancestral protospliceosome could, in principle, rescue expression of genes containing degenerate group II introns in a maturase-independent manner, but at the dear cost of speed.

Was any of this storytelling useful?  The shenanigans they pulled, couched in biochemical jargon, can be summarized by two principles in their own imaginations: (1) since the cell needed these superbly-crafted machines, it had to invent them somehow, and (2) since evolution is a fact, it had to happen somehow.  Do you catch any hint of a mechanism for actually inventing a 200-protein supermachine that would actually work?  Did you find any hint that any cell any time had a “protospliceosome” that only worked half-way?  All this was pure fiction built on childlike faith in evolution.
    Presenting a hypothesis in science is fine, but how would they ever test something like this?  They offered a few tests that could discriminate between their just-so story and other just-so stories, but nothing that could explain how a spliceosome, or a nuclear membrane with its elaborate pore complexes, or nonsense-mediated decay could have been invented from scratch just because a cell needed these things.
    Would that evolutionists would get off this storytelling kick and do something useful with their lives.  Let’s find a cure for cancer.  Let’s find better sources of energy, and think of ways to reduce risks of disease and terrorism, and use science to improve our lives and our world.  Stringing together uncooperative data into a fictional account of prehistory will accomplish nothing and is wasting time and money in a world desperately in need of the productive possibilities of true science.
Next headline on: Genetics • Cell Biology • Evolutionary Theory

Berlinski’s interview sizzles with contempt and almost goes overboard.  He can get away with it because he is a respected mathematician and not an evangelical Christian.  Most of us had better talk a little sweeter.  He agrees with what we have been saying here, though, that the Darwin Party is mainly an entrenched, power-hungry storytelling society, not a group of truth-seeking scientists.  It’s important to realize that not all the highly-educated, knowledgeable scholars claiming this are “religious fundamentalists.”
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

Suckers.  These are overgrown rug rats, not missing links.  Or else they get dizzy standing up, and thus obey Paul’s Law: you can’t fall off the floor.
Next headline on:  Early Man • Dumb Stories

Whatever their name, these intracellular blobs of triglycerides or cholesterol esters, encased in a thin phospholipid membrane, are catching the attention of more and more biologists.  It turns out these lively balls of fat have as many potential roles within cells and tissues as they have names.  Pockmarked with proteins with wide-ranging biochemical activities, they shuffle components around the cell, store energy in the form of neutral lipids, and possibly maintain the many membranes of the cell.  The particles could also be involved in lipid diseases, diabetes, cardiovascular trouble, and liver problems.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The overall architecture of mammalian FAS has been revealed by x-ray crystallography at intermediate resolution.  The dimeric [two-part] synthase adopts an asymmetric X-shaped conformation with two reaction chambers on each side formed by a full set of enzymatic domains required for fatty acid elongation, which are separated by considerable distances.  Substantial flexibility of the reaction chamber must accompany the handover of reaction intermediates during the FAS cycle, and further conformational transitions are required to explain the presence of alternative inter- and intrasubunit synthetic routes in FAS.  The results presented here provide a new structural basis to further experiments required for a detailed understanding of the complex mechanism of mammalian FAS.

The closer they look, the more wondrous the cell gets.  Who would have thought that blobs of fat would contain machinery with moving parts and reaction chambers?  Who would have imagined their surfaces would be covered with complex proteins that regulate the production inside?  Who would have realized that fat was so important, the cell had complex assembly plants to build it?  Fat is almost a mild cussword in our vocabulary, but it is another class of molecular building blocks we couldn’t live without.  Fats, sugars, proteins and nucleic acids all work together in life, from humans to lowly fungi.  Each class of molecules has immense variety, each is essential, and each is manufactured to spec by precision machinery.  What a wonderful post-Darwinian world.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Human Body • Amazing Facts

The ca. 150 ka age of the Grand Falls flow provided by whole-rock K-Ar analysis in the 1970s is inconsistent with the preservation of centimeter-scale flow-top features on the surface of the flow and the near absence of physical and chemical weathering on the flow downstream of the falls.  The buried Little Colorado River channel and the present-day channel are at nearly the same elevation, indicating that very little, if any, regional downcutting has occurred since emplacement of the flow.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Unless you subscribe to the Creation Research Society, Institute for Creation Research or the Creation Technical Journal, you may have been completely unaware of the quality of young-earth creation research that has been independently published for decades.  Such research is so completely barred from the usual journals, creation geologists, astronomers and biologists have continually published their own work, with a few exceptions making it into the mainstream.  Many of their papers are just as rigorous and scholarly as those in the secular journals.  They would be indistinguishable except for the rags they’re printed in.
    Recently, Carl Froede and Emmett Williams investigated the same Grand Falls area.  This gives you an opportunity to compare one example of OEE (old-earth evolutionist) and one example of YEC (young-earth creationist) interpretations of the same spot.  Publishing in Creation Research Society Quarterly, Froede and Williams found much more evidence for youthfulness of the area than admitted in the GSA paper.  They found delicate structures, very little erosion of the basalt, and lack of evidence of substantial weathering.  Their common-sense approach based on clear, observable features was supported by photographs and measurements.  They challenged,

The flow appears to be of a recent origin by nature of its excellent preservation.  This is empirical evidence.  Why do uniformitarians force the time issue by adopting inappropriate age-dates?.  Unfortunately, they are forced to interpret and skew data in an attempt to bolster an archaic, unrealistic, and nonscientific model of Earth history.

Note that the Grand Falls lava flow does not appear any older than lava flows known to have been emplaced within historic times.
    One other thing.  How many earth science students were told confidently by evolutionary geologists in the 1970s that this lava flow was 150,000 years old?  Did any of the students question the Biblical chronology based on what is now known to be false?  Should any of today’s students trust the new estimate of 20,000 years, when the authors admit that “caution must be exercised in interpreting” dating methods?  When fallible experts cannot agree, when they keep changing their numbers, when they are forced into their positions by a priori assumptions about the age of the earth, and come up with conclusions that go against common sense, shouldn’t new ideas be given a fair hearing?
Next headline on: Dating Methods • Geology

Merrifield and his colleagues derived new formulas and applied them to measurements of M77’s carbon-monoxide-laced gas clouds (carbon monoxide molecules emit finely tuned radio waves, allowing astronomers to precisely measure the positions and line-of-sight velocities of interstellar matter).  Spiral-shaped wave patterns that are just 3,000 light-years (20 arcseconds) from the galaxy’s center whirl around the core three times as often as those 6,000 light-years out, says the team – all but guaranteeing that the galaxy’s bright inner pinwheel is destined to wind itself up into an amorphous disk.  “If this result turns out to apply commonly to other galaxies,” the scientists write, “then intergalactic travelers would be well advised not to use the morphology of spiral structure to identify their homes.”   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Bruce G. Elmegreen (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center) cautions that the composition of M77’s interstellar clouds may differ from place to place, possibly fooling Merrifield and his collaborators into thinking that the innermost parts of the galaxy’s spiral pattern will outrace the outer parts after a few laps around the track.  And while M77’s inferred identity as a quick-change artist doesn’t surprise John Kormendy (University of Texas, Austin), he doubts that M77’s subtle inner spiral can shed much light on the longevity of simple but bold spirals seen in prominently barred galaxies like NGC 1300 and in closely interacting ones like M51.

Merrifield and his colleagues have shown with empirical evidence that spiral galaxies are doing exactly what they look like they are doing: spinning in an ever tightening wind-up that will, in a short time cosmologically, completely erase their spiral structure.  This is anathema to astronomers such as Elmegreen and Kormendy who must at all costs support the 13 billion year old age of the universe.  Elmegreen and Kormendy had no evidence of their own to refute Merrifield, and so resorted to attacking the quality of Merrifield’s data.
    Since the 1930s when this problem first surfaced, astronomers have had to come up with fanciful explanations for how the spiral structures remain in place for billions of years.  Density waves are the current favorite: we are asked to believe that the spiral arms we see are just waves of higher density that propagate through the galaxy in spiral patterns, creating new stars as they progress.  Computer modeling this theory has been challenging.  The models must be creatively tuned to produce the observed spiral structures (see Russell Humphreys’ point #1 for young age on AiG).
This entry was submitted by a reader.
Next headline on: Astronomy • Cosmology • Dating Methods

We presented chimpanzees with collaboration problems in which they had to decide when to recruit a partner and which potential partner to recruit.  In an initial study, individuals recruited a collaborator only when solving the problem required collaboration.  In a second study, individuals recruited the more effective of two partners on the basis of their experience with each of them on a previous day.  Therefore, recognizing when collaboration is necessary and determining who is the best collaborative partner are skills shared by both chimpanzees and humans, so such skills may have been present in their common ancestor before humans evolved their own complex forms of collaboration.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Human beings routinely help others to achieve their goals, even when the helper receives no immediate benefit and the person helped is a stranger.  Such altruistic behaviors (toward non-kin) are extremely rare evolutionarily, with some theorists even proposing that they are uniquely human.  Here we show that human children as young as 18 months of age (prelinguistic or just-linguistic) quite readily help others to achieve their goals in a variety of different situations.  This requires both an understanding of others’ goals and an altruistic motivation to help.  In addition, we demonstrate similar though less robust skills and motivations in three young chimpanzees.

Do you hold the door for shoppers laden with packages?  If you received two copies of the latest issue of Science in the mail, would you give the extra one to a colleague or throw it in the recycling bin?  Do you make donations to charity, serve on departmental committees, recycle bottles, or donate blood?  If you are like most people, you help in these sorts of situations and are motivated by empathy and concern for the welfare of others.  Two reports by Melis et al. on page 1297 and Warneken and Tomasello on page 1301 of this week’s issue contribute to understanding how we came to be such caring and cooperative creatures.

*Sigh.*  Has it come to this?  What fluff passes for science these days.  There is nothing about evolution here.  There is nothing about millions of years here.  A million here, a few million there, pretty soon, you’re talking about real monkey (business).  Wupi.  Some chimps under lab conditions exhibit a little bit of intelligence enough to assist one another under certain circumstances.  No one would ever think that that was behavior designed into their little brains, now, would they?  Obviously, human evolution is proved and the puzzle of human altruism is solved.  Now we know why people give blood and help disaster victims they have never seen.  Mother Teresa was in a long succession of particles that learned unselfishness.
    It seems to escape the attention of these researchers that many other studies have shown contradictory results (01/21/2006, 10/28/2005).  Even if these new studies could be shown to be superior somehow, they prove nothing about evolution.  It could be argued that ants or bees are more caring, because they will lay down their lives for the hive.
    So please show some altruism and help us out.  Your assignment is to determine which statement in these stories deserves to win Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  This is harder than it looks.  Decisions, decisions.
Next headline on: Early Man • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Dumb Ideas

• Utah:  Deseret News called evolution a “fact-backed theory,” put ID into a false dichotomy against Darwin’s natural selection, and repeatedly associated ID (but not evolution) with religion.
• Australia:  The Scoop spoke of ID “infiltrating” schools, a word with sinister connotations.  It quoted an education official treating ID like bird flu: “He called on federal and state education ministers to withhold public funding until these schools agreed to quarantine science teaching from religious dogma” and the “Intelligent Design myth” promulgated by “fundamentalists” but gave no opportunity for the other side to respond.
• Florida:  The Sun-Sentinel spoke of groups that wanted to “water down” passages about Darwin and introduce the “controversial idea of intelligent design.”  It said, “Mainstream scientists have discredited the theory as a repackaged form of old-school creationism” being “peddled” by its supporters.  Buried in the article were responses by Discovery Institute, but an evolutionist got the punch line: “...students are really going to waste their time looking for alternative hypotheses to evolution.  There are none.”  This prompted a letter to the editor from John West (reprinted on Evolution News).
• Pennsylvania:  The Philadelphia Inquirer gave ample space for Judge John E. Jones to answer softball questions about his Dec. decision in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case; the interview portrayed him as a historical hero.  One question began, “Reading through the opinion, it was hard to evade the impression that you were surprised at the weakness of one side of the case,” to which the judge replied, “The opinion speaks for itself.”  Undoubtedly few will ever hear of Dr. Kevin Anderson’s penetrating critique of the decision in a newsletter called Creation Matters.
• Nevada:  an AP story in MSNBC News gave a fairly straight report on efforts by Steve Brown’s petition to introduce a constitutional amendment to correct errors about Darwinian evolution in textbooks and school curricula.  The article began, however, with a hypothetical: “A proposed constitutional amendment would require Nevada teachers to instruct students that there are many questions about evolution – a method viewed by critics as an opening to teach intelligent design.”  The bill said nothing about intelligent design.
• New York:  Evolution News felt it necessary to spill a lot of ink correcting repeated errors by the New York Times, despite numerous attempts to communicate the facts to them.
• Virus Attack:  The cover story of Discover Magazine was titled “Unintelligent Design.”  It announced a strange idea that viruses were somehow responsible for the origin of life.  Yet this radical minority view was posed as a triumphal attack against ID: “This is striking news, especially at a moment when the basic facts of origins and evolution seem to have fallen under a shroud,” it says.  “In the discussions of intelligent design, one hears a yearning for an old-fashioned creation story.... Now the viruses appear to present a creation story of their own: a stirring, topsy-turvy, and decidedly unintelligent design wherein life arose more by reckless accident than original intent.”
• Poison Pens:  The leading science journals routinely censor letters from ID supporters or creationists, but give full rein to evolutionists to speak whatever is on their minds (example: 11/24/2005).  Last week, Science (3 March 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5765, pp. 1240 - 1241) printed a letter from a high school teacher who arrayed scientists against moaning ID supporters: “Many supporters of intelligent design find discomfort in the concept that humans have evolved as a result of ‘mistakes.’  Although it is not an obligation of scientists to address discomfort in concepts, it is an obligation of scientists to present findings in an objective, scientific manner.”  That, by implication, is exactly what evolutionists do (but ID “supporters” do not).  No mention is made of the 500+ scientists on the Discovery Institute list who think Darwinian evolution is inadequate and should be critically examined.
• The Evolving ID:  Sid Perkins in Science News¹ portrayed ID as “evolving” from creationism to intelligent design to “teaching the controversy”.  While he is not the first to use the metaphor of ID evolution, it is a very misleading one, because ID proponents are (hopefully) employing their intelligence toward a purposeful end: challenging what they see as an entrenched dogma.  The metaphor puts ID at a rhetorical disadvantage before its proponents speak a word.  What’s more, Perkins’ reference page listed only staunchly anti-ID sources.  It appears he did not even attempt to do a journalist’s homework and find out what leaders in the ID movement believe.  (Note: this article will be critiqued in more detail in the commentary that follows.)

In any encounter between scientists and the media on the subject of creationism, declare first and foremost that the specific scientific assertions of ID proponents are false.
State unambiguously that evolutionary theory is perfectly capable in principle of explaining the formation of complex biological systems, and, indeed, has done so in practice many times.   (Emphasis theirs.)

In my favorite scene from Star Wars, Luke Skywalker has been transported to an arid wasteland where he is bound and pushed to the end of a gangplank from which he’ll be cast headlong to a certain horrible death.  When asked if he has any last words, he turns to the hideous giant slug and his janissaries and defiantly yells: “I’m warning you, Jabba -- this is your last chance!”

The reporting on intelligent design is a national travesty.  It represents either extremely sloppy reporting, or intentional misrepresentation by leftists with an agenda to stymie all efforts to bring the Darwin Party to accountability.  The article by Sid Perkins in Science News is a case in point.  The spin had been spun before his sin had begun.  Perkins used only hardline Darwinist sources like Eugenie Scott and Robert Pennock.  He presented no evidence that naturalism is correct or even capable of explaining how hydrogen became brains; he merely assumed it is the established truth of Science.  To these people, ID supporters are not even worth listening to, because the sentence is in: all who doubt molecules-to-man evolution must be fundamentalist creationist flat-earth pseudoscientific wackos trying to stuff religion into science.  Well, with that kind of outlook, the only thing to do is load them onto the trains to Ravensbruck and get it over with.
    The arrogance of the Darwinist empire is atrocious.  Do they ever try to explain the complexity of DNA and molecular machines?  No.  Do they explain the fine-tuning of the universe?  No.  Do they really attempt to explain the abrupt appearance of all life in the fossil record?  No.  Can they figure out the origin of life?  No.  They don’t have to, because they have power.  Their absolute power has corrupted what it usually corrupts, absolutely.  When the peasants rage, they pacify them with another bedtime story.  It’ll work, because criticism is against the law.  All they have to do is fool some of the people all of the time, and muffle the others.
    There is not one facet of the scientific materialist philosophy, worldview and story line that is not under stress from the evidence: not the fossil record, not human evolution, not the origin of life, not the big bang, not the origin of language and the mind, not historical geology, not planetary evolution.  You’ve read it all right here for over five years.  The only place where there is complete confidence in the whole shebang is in the imagination of the Darwinists, who are accustomed to believing six million impossible things before breakfast.
    Rosenhouse and Branch, and Olsen with his Dodo film (see LiveScience), are concerned about style.  They recognize that King Charlie’s PR is taking a beating.  They want to spruce up his image with a better coat of whitewash, not to really examine their hearts and confess their sins, but to find more effective ways to shout Long Live the Usurper.  Style is nice, but nothing matters more than truth.  Telling people hydrogen will evolve into brains is a hard sell.  It just doesn’t make any sense to most people.  Intelligent design has the advantage of being straightforwardly believable and in accord with the evidence.  So here is the battle line: a corrupt Darwin Party drunk on power vs. critics who are determined to let the truth come out.
    Since the Darwinists have wrested power over the journals, the lawmakers, the big-science institutions and the schools, they think they don’t need evidence.  They don’t need to be held accountable.  Since they have power, they can portray their myth as fact and force it on everyone.  It doesn’t matter to them that the Kingdom of Science was predominantly Christian for many centuries, and that many of the greatest scientists of history proclaimed overtly essentially the same position revitalized by today’s intelligent design movement.  The Darwin Party usurped power in Huxley’s day, and are not about to give it up.
    How do you treat bullies?  How do you deal with entrenched, institutionalized corruption?  You keep on.  You force the issue.  You stand up to them, and call bystanders to take note of their injustices.  You call their bluff.  You demand they explain why the rules of logic and evidence do not apply to them.  You force them to face the evidence.  You confront them when they lie and sidestep the real issues.  When they slam one door in your face, you run to the next one.  You keep on keeping on, and you never tolerate bluffing and evasion for an answer.  In short, you don’t acquiesce.  What is required for evil to triumph, class?
    Nor do you act like them, because the goal is not merely a shift in power, but a return to righteousness.  That’s a great word that is rarely heard today.  Be righteous, and expect righteousness.  Acting honorably, demand honor.  Acting honestly, demand honesty.  Acting truthfully, demand nothing less than the truth.  Acting nobly, despise all that is ignoble.  But honesty is not incompatible with wisdom, strategy and tactics.
    Perkins and the others are wrong to portray creationists and ID supporters as evolving ideologues, because Big Science today is corrupt, and things needs to change.  The ID minority is not evolving; it is engaging an important issue by intelligence and design.  You would think people willing to call corrupt authoritarians on the carpet for dishonesty and dogmatism would be praised; maybe someday they will be, by historians looking back on this era.  In the meantime, what do the Goliaths expect the Davids to do?  When Darwinists find lawyers willing to lie and influence judges to make fallacious decisions about scientific matters, when they threaten lawsuits to shut off debate, when they threaten loss of tenure and forbid publication, when they promote falsehoods in the media and pull their power plays to ensure their dominance, should they not anticipate that some critics will not take this behavior lying down?  Of course.  They should expect that the critics will dodge, feint, duck and keep fighting, because some people believe their cause is just.  So here’s our challenge, Darwinists: we realize your fat, blubbery monstrosity of evolutionary theory has lots of minions at his command.  You think you have the freedom fighters surrounded, at the mouth of the Sarlacc, but we’re calling you out.  You cannot defend methodological naturalism as a philosophy of science.  You cannot defend hydrogen becoming brains.  We’re warning you, Charlie: this is your last chance.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Media • Education

Why is there geology on Saturn’s icy satellites?  Where did these smallish moons get the energy to refresh their impact-battered surfaces with smoothed plains, ridges, and fissures?  These questions have nagged at scientists since the Voyager flybys in the early 1980s, and the Cassini spacecraft’s recent discovery that Saturn’s Enceladus is spouting like an icy geyser has only compounded the problem.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

• Enceladus: Stoke the Furnace:  Throw some radioactive aluminum-26 into the core furnace; maybe that will help.  Kerr reported that the Cassini team tried this to keep Enceladus warm enough to spout.  Others find this interesting, but are not convinced: “At each stage [of the calculations], there are several knobs you can twiddle,” said Francis Nimmo (UC Santa Cruz).  “There are so many free parameters it’s hard to make a strong statement.”  Why the other nearby moons, such as Mimas (same diameter) are not erupting is a problem, but Enceladus does appear to have higher density and therefore a larger core for storing the hot Al-26.  Nevertheless, the buzz around JPL is that nobody really has a good answer yet.  Enceladus is a problem moon that has scientists scratching their heads.
  Update 03/09/2003: A JPL Press Release says there may even be liquid water erupting, like cold versions of the geysers of Yellowstone.  “We realize that this is a radical conclusion,” said the imaging team lead.  Science Dec. 10 had a special section on Enceladus with a dozen articles from the Cassini team exploring all aspects of the bizarre moon, from images to magnetic fields, from infrared and ultraviolet measurements to in situ particle measurements.  “Finding such active geology on such a tiny moon is a big surprise,” said Joanne Baker in the introductory article.  The only other active bodies in the solar system (Earth, Triton, Io) are larger than Enceladus.  One model was offered to show how pockets of liquid water might form under the surface, but most scientists are saying this is a huge mystery.
• Iapetus: Slam on the Brakes:  The big midriff bulge on Saturn’s yin-yang moon Iapetus presents a different problem.  Scientists are dealing with this by having it start with a high spin rate with a good dose of aluminum-26 to keep it deformable.  If tidal interactions with Saturn forced it to spin down rapidly, maybe the bulge was able to freeze in place.  For more on Iapetus, see 01/07/2005.
• Titan: Hide the Goods:  Planetary scientists were surprised, and perhaps disappointed, to find no liquid oceans of methane on the surface of Titan.  The Huygens Probe landed on a dry lake bed, and the Cassini orbiter has failed to detect liquid on the surface.  At current erosion rates, the atmospheric methane would be depleted in 10 to 100 million years – just 2% its assumed age.  Clearly, scientists who want to keep Titan old need a source of methane to replenish the atmosphere.  A new theory was just published in a letter to Nature this week.²  Jonathan Lunine, who has puzzled over Titan for over 20 years, has moved the methane reservoir underground:

  Saturn’s largest satellite, Titan, has a massive nitrogen atmosphere containing up to 5 per cent methane near its surface.  Photochemistry in the stratosphere would remove the present-day atmospheric methane in a few tens of millions of years.  Before the Cassini-Huygens mission arrived at Saturn, widespread liquid methane or mixed hydrocarbon seas hundreds of metres in thickness were proposed as reservoirs from which methane could be resupplied to the atmosphere over geologic time.  Titan fly-by observations and ground-based observations rule out the presence of extensive bodies of liquid hydrocarbons at present, which means that methane must be derived from another source over Titan’s history.  Here we show that episodic outgassing of methane stored as clathrate hydrates within an icy shell above an ammonia-enriched water ocean is the most likely explanation for Titan’s atmospheric methane.  The other possible explanations all fail because they cannot explain the absence of surface liquid reservoirs and/or the low dissipative state of the interior.  On the basis of our models, we predict that future fly-bys should reveal the existence of both a subsurface water ocean and a rocky core, and should detect more cryovolcanic edifices.

  (See also: ESA report and Science Now.  For earlier stories on Titan, see 12/05/2005, 06/09/2005, 05/18/2005, 04/08/2005 and 03/11/2005).  Cassini just made its 13th pass over Titan on Monday, and has many more passes this year, so we shall have to wait and see.  For dramatic images of the most recent flyby, showing sharp boundaries between dark and light areas, see the Cassini Titan-11 flyby page and raw images: here is a good sample.

Kubo et al. argue that grain size-sensitive creep of Ice I and Ice II plausibly dominates the evolution and dynamics of the interiors of the medium to large icy moons of the outer solar system.  Ice II is considerably more viscous than Ice I.  The transition from Ice I to Ice II, which occurs at depth, is accompanied by an increase in viscosity of four orders of magnitude.  If grain size-sensitive creep does not operate, then the increase in viscosity would be six orders of magnitude.  So if grain size-sensitive creep is not taken into account as a deformation mechanism, estimates for viscosities of the interiors of the icy moons are off by about two orders of magnitude.  Such a difference would have profound implications for interpreting their evolution and dynamics.

No sooner did the word “water” appear in news reports about Enceladus, when reporters started talking about “life.”  The press release twists the evidence for a young Enceladus into evidence for old evolution: “Scientists still have many questions.  Why is Enceladus currently so active?  Are other sites on Enceladus active?  Might this activity have been continuous enough over the moon’s history for life to have had a chance to take hold in the moon’s interior?”  Geological activity is not necessarily related to biological activity.  Enceladus is not a case for OOL, but for YEC.  Who are these spin doctors that write press blurbs like this gem from a Cassini press agent: “A masterpiece of deep time and wrenching gravity, the tortured surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus and its fascinating ongoing geologic activity tell the story of the ancient and present struggles of one tiny world.”  Get real.
    Does a model correspond to reality?  This is an interesting question in philosophy of science.  Some things are too difficult to observe and explain.  A model can provide a “cartoon” of the problem to help make it manageable (or provide comic relief).  Based on the model, scientists make predictions, or open the model to falsification.  Confidence in the model grows if it passes these tests.  Unfortunately, the more switches, dials and free parameters in the model, the more the model becomes immune to falsification, and the more other models might make similar predictions.  Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to know if the model really connects with the real world, or is just a convenient fiction.  What we wonder is why there is a padlock on the rheostat labeled, “age of the solar system.”  Rumor has it the Darwin Party put it there.
Next headline on: Dating Methods • Geology • Physics • Solar System