“Darwinists sometimes claim that their theory helps us to understand which animals are most closely related... on the basis of their genetic and biochemical similarities.  But this is just comparative biology at the level of genes and proteins.  Linnaeus did comparative biology, yet he was a creationist who lived a century before Darwin; Owen and Agassiz did comparative biology, yet they rejected Darwin’s theory.”
—Jonathan Wells, in an upcoming book (see Evolution News).

Funny, honey; none of these articles mentioned evolution, but they seemed to have no problem using the word design.
Next headline on: Intelligent Design • Terrestrial Zoology • Biomimetics • Amazing Stories

Geneticists would have been way ahead of the curve if they had listened to IBM instead of Dawkins.  “The average lab does not have the resources to prove or disprove this, so it will need a lot of effort by lots of people,” said Dr. Rigoutsos.  Not only are Information Technology (IT) people better suited to understanding codes, they might even benefit from imitating nature’s programming tricks.  Life’s code works, doesn’t it?  Look at a bird, or a butterfly, or a human baby.  Most of the time the right parts come out in the right places, generation after generation, for thousands of years.
    Dr. Stephen Meyer used this point to good effect in a debate with evolutionist Peter Ward in Seattle yesterday.  “Meyer countered that neo-Darwinian evolution had been heuristically unfruitful in leading science to think that non-encoding DNA was simply ‘junk’,” an eyewitness said.  “Meyer insisted that design assumptions more readily led one to conclude there was purpose in such ‘junk DNA.’”  Read all about this debate on Evolution News.
Next headline on:  Genetics • Intelligent Design

• The team suggests three species evolved as a single lineage between at least 4.4 million years ago and 2.9 million years ago – an era when humankind refined its ability to walk upright while developing new ways to live (see timeline below).
      The idea is one of the most contentious in palaeoanthropology.  The fossil trove, reported earlier this month (T. D. White et al. Nature 440, 883-889; 2006) has confirmed [sic] some important aspects of the trail towards the genus Homo, which appeared around 2.3 million years ago [sic].  But experts are still bickering over the relationship between the species that have been found.
• Experts have squabbled over the relationship between Ar. ramidus, Au. anamensis and Au. afarensis ever since they were discovered.
• This month’s Nature paper makes a bold argument, and shows the Awash team seeking to put its mark on the record.  Others in the field are impressed.  “When you find 30 new hominid fossils, you are allowed a certain amount of conjecture,” says Bernard Wood, a palaeoanthropologist at George Washington University in Washington DC.  “As always, they have done a fantastic job.”
      But he and others are unconvinced by the Awash team’s conclusion: “This is only the first half of the rugby match,” says Wood.
• Meave Leakey, lead author on the Au. anamensis discoveries in Kenya, is more blunt.  “I don’t believe this,” she says.  “We do not have the specimens to fill the gaps.”
• The existence of other species would cloud or eliminate the argument for a direct lineage.  “My prejudice is there are more lineages rather than fewer – more diversity,“ says Wood.  “I have to concede these new data are dramatic.  But we should beware coming out with a complete explanation when we don’t have all the evidence.”
• This argument frustrates White.  “There were Martians there back then too,” he says.  “And spacecraft all over the Pliocene – we just haven’t found them yet.”
• Similar arguments run for various phases of hominid evolution, for example whether Homo ergaster evolved into H. erectus, or whether they were two coexisting lineages – White advocates the former.  But ultimately, the argument comes down to the point that more fossils could always be found, so it is unclear that the two sides will ever agree.

Didn’t we foretell this?  Go back to April 12 when all the news media were slain in the spirit over White’s holey relics.  We warned that “the field of evolutionary paleoanthropology is filled with rivalry, contradiction, deception, exaggeration and outright fraud.”  Notice that Dalton’s depiction of rivalry applies not just to this case, but to “various phases of hominid evolution” – indeed, all of them.
    We also said, “Too bad the news media are all dupes; they think this is science instead of mud wrestling.”  Our only mistake was getting the sport wrong.  We should have known that rugby is more bloody.
Next headline on: Early Man

CEH leaves this controversy for others to debate, but mentions it for those interested in “shaking the pillars to make sure they’re rigid” (or not) as Andy Fabian (U of Cambridge) is quoted as saying in the article.  Sometimes the most confident things in science become less confident as more knowledge is gained.  If we are not sure about constants of physics, how much less so for shaky, slippery things like evolutionary theory?
Next headline on: Cosmology • Physics

Evolution is both a fact and a theory: the most comprehensive explanation of the features and diversity of living things.  It is the most important theory in biology, yet is surrounded by paradoxes.  Despite the simplicity of its central concepts, evolution has a long history of misunderstandings.  Despite its lack of moral or prescriptive content, evolution has been used to justify social policies that range from the admirable to the appalling.  Despite the increasingly important role evolutionary principles and knowledge play in human biology, evolution is rejected by more than half the American public.  Of all the biological disciplines, evolutionary biology has the most far-reaching philosophical implications and the most diverse applications to society.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Darwin succeeded where others before him had failed in part because he offered the first truly scientific (i.e., purely materialistic and therefore testable) theory to explain the history of life.  He permanently changed the terms on which theories in biology would be acceptable as science.  Yet few of Darwin’s contemporaries or those who followed truly internalized Darwinism into a coherent and consistent world view.  Materialistic science is vastly more important to modern society than it was in Darwin’s time, yet scientists and non-scientists alike still struggle to fully reconcile materialistic science with their personal and social search for meaning in life.  On the one hand, proponents of intelligent design have declared their intention to overthrow “materialism and its cultural legacies”, which presumably would include not just Darwinism but also everything from agriculture to modern medicine [sic].  On the other, many mainstream scientists – both those who claim to be religious and those who do not – have attempted to reconcile their scientific pursuits with their non-scientific personal philosophies.  Can one simultaneously hold two mutually exclusive philosophies of reality – one materialistic and the other not?  If so, how?  And does doing so make one intellectually dishonest?  Is it possible to construct a logically consistent world view that fully accommodates meaningful religious belief with materialistic science?

Notice several flaws, contradictions, and admissions in these abstracts.

• Charlie Worship:  It is always Big D that is the figurehead of everything wonderful in science. 
• Charlie Science:  Notice that Darwin was responsible for redefining science as materialism.  Before Darwin, creationism and design thinking was common and produced no conflict, but Darwin “permanently changed the terms on which theories in biology would be acceptable as science.”  Changing the terms of acceptability is not a matter of science, but a matter of philosophy about science.
• Charlie Morals:  Darwinism knows no morals (as Futuyma admits), so it is illogical for him to find anything “admirable or appalling,” or for Allmon to talk about intellectual honesty and meaning.
• Charlie Truth:  Futuyma and Allmon just shot themselves in the foot (see self-refuting fallacy).  As materialists, they pulled the rug out from under any validity to concepts of truth, while referring to “philosophies of reality.”
• Charlie Logic:  Allmon asserted that attacks on evolution are attacks on agriculture and modern medicine (see non-sequitur).  Those disciplines were doing just fine before Charlie came along.
• Charlie Control:  This Astrobiology symposium was only open to evolutionists.  This shows you not only which bed Astrobiology sleeps in, but how evolutionists rig the game to ridicule their opponents while keeping them out of hearing range.
• Charlie Leadership:  If less than half the population accepts Darwinism, Futuyma should seriously consider the proposition that it would be good for him to get religion, because that apparently confers better fitness.  This would be a win-win situation.  Religion would lose an enemy, and he would necessarily undermine the fitness principle of Darwinism itself – thus burning the bridge behind him.  As a bonus, he might even win Pascal’s Wager.

The only question left is which of the two quotes is winner of the SEQOTW prize, or whether it’s a draw.
Next headline on:  Intelligent Design • Darwinism • Dumb Ideas

...and maybe to prophecy buffs.
Next headline on: Bible and Theology

A four-ton land rover buried in sediment a mile and a half under the seabed – think about it.  Does this sound like the setting described in the article: “dry plains with rivers running through them”?  If the dinosaur lived in that environment, what happened?  Meanwhile, they should look for more down there.  What if the dinosaur fossils we find on the surface represent a tiny fraction of bones buried deep under the sea, all over the world?
Next headline on: Dinosaurs • Fossils • Marine Life

Check out what Ken Ham said on Answers in Genesis about this latest salvo.  If the snake had legs, does the evolutionary claim have any?
Next headline on: Fossils • Terrestrial Zoology • Evolution

The Cambrian “explosion,” or radiation, is perhaps the most significant evolutionary transition seen in the fossil record.  Essentially all of the readily fossilizable animal body plans first appear in the fossil record during this interval (Valentine 2002).  We move from the depths of the Precambrian world, where the sedimentary record is essentially devoid of animal fossils, to the Phanerozoic, where animal life leaves pervasive evidence of its existence, both as body fossils and as disturbers of the sediment.
    Numerous explanations for the Cambrian “explosion” have been posited (note here that I am not considering here in any detail explanations for the precursor to the Cambrian “explosion,” the Ediacaran radiation).  Classification of this rich panoply of explanations is somewhat arbitrary but typically explanations center on one of the following factors: (a) changes in the abiotic environment, (b) changes in the genetic or developmental capacity of the taxa involved, or (c) changes in the biotic environment, i.e., in ecology.  All of these factors must have played a role, but how important was each?  To what extent did the Cambrian “explosion” flow from an interaction between them?  How might we develop a conceptual framework for understanding that interaction?  Developing a coherent explanation for the Cambrian “explosion” faces several challenges....   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

There are five major components of the Cambrian “explosion” that need to be explained: (a) the spectacular increase in animal disparity, (b) the rise in animal diversity,³ (c) why the time of onset of the explosion was some 543–542 mya, (d) why the duration of the explosion was some tens of million years long, and (e) why the event appears unique.
    There are also two problems that emerge once we begin to examine the fossil record in some detail: (f) Where are the (largely) missing fossils of the bilaterian stem-groups, and (g) What are the phylogenetic affinities of the Ediacaran biota?

1. Environmental Explanations:  These look for geological or atmospheric changes that created environments suitable for change.  He says, “There has been a resurgence in this class of explanation, partly owing to increased interest in the Cambrian ‘explosion’ within the wider geoscience community.”  (Who, in particular is interested, and why, is not detailed.)
   1. Increased oxygen?  Were oxygen levels too low for large animals?  Probably not.  Some Ediacarans were large.  Hard to test: we don’t know the minimum oxygen requirements of the first animals, and we don’t know how much oxygen there was.
   2. Snowball Earth?  Did biology’s big bang after the Earth emerged from a deep freeze?  Unlikely; too early.  More importantly, “It is also hard to see how a major environmental catastrophe could have lead [sic] to fundamentally new levels of developmental and morphological organization.”
   3. Carbon shock?  Maybe the Earth underwent some catastrophe at the time, as suggested by carbon isotope anomalies found at the beginning of the Cambrian.  Some compare this with the presumed extinction of the dinosaurs, followed by the rapid radiation of mammals.  Marshall does not feel this comparison is appropriate.  Both dinosaurs and mammals were vertebrates.  The CE, by contrast, saw “a dramatic increase in both disparity and diversity.”  Worse, even though “We have much to understand” about such things, this suffers from the same objection: “it is hard to see how a simple (even if large) environmental disturbance can lead to an increase in disparity.”
   4. Continental shakeup?  Maybe polar wanderings of continents caused “methane burps” that altered Earth’s temperature.  Same flaw: “No explanation is offered as to why an increase in diversity, per se, should have led to new levels of disparity.”  He tries not to be too hard on these suggestions.  “This remains an intriguing hypothesis,” he grants.
   In summary, each of these sets the table but doesn’t invite the guests.  “While it is clear that the environment needs to have been conducive to the evolution of large animals for the Cambrian ‘explosion’ to proceed,” he explains, “none of the environmental explanations address why an environment permissive of complex animal life should necessarily lead to the evolution of complex animal life, and especially why we should see a shift from diploblastic-grade organisms to complex triploblasts.”⁴
2. Developmental Explanations:  These look for developmental or genetic reasons for the sudden onset of evolutionary innovation.  Marshall mentions a key point: “Animals cannot evolve if the genes for making them are not yet in place.”
   1. Bilateral Development?  While the discovery of Hox genes began a “revolution in our understanding of the genetic basis of morphological form,” Marshall admits we still “understand little of how and when the system originated,” but perhaps gene duplication was involved.  But here he uses his first exclamation point.  Noting that all animal groups share the same developmental program, we can make inferences about their common origins: “While we only have detailed genetic data from a very few species (the so-called model systems), the last common ancestor of these species also happens to be the last common ancestor of all the bilaterian phyla!” he announces triumphantly.  This allows us “to make quite powerful inferences about the genetic capacities of animals that lived at the Precambrian/Cambrian transition.”  Disparate animals may look as different as apples and oranges on the outside, but are “genetically comparable” on the inside.  Maybe these developmental programs originated even farther back in time.  Time for a reality check:

      However, the significance of the presence of these shared genes is still an open question (Erwin & Davidson 2002).  Does the presence of the tinman/NK2.5 gene in the last common ancestor of the bilaterians indicate the presence of a heart and circulatory system in that ancestor, or does the gene simply mark a special type of muscle that was later and independently co-opted to initiate the development of fully developed circulatory systems in different lineages (Erwin & Davidson 2002)?  If the latter view is correct then there must have been considerable developmental sophistication on route from the last common ancestor of the bilaterians to the living phyla.

   2. Code Shuffling?  Since genes are combinatorial, like Lego blocks, maybe complexity can arise as an “emergent property” (i.e., an unforeseen level of complexity independent of the building blocks).  He refers to Stephen Wolfram, who wrote about this controversial idea in A New Kind of Science (08/18/2003).  More on this later.
   3. Entrenchment?  This is the “appealing idea” that the first members of a clade are the most plastic, but later on, they become entrenched (canalized) and resistant to change (11/02/2005, 06/25/2002)    Marshall does not think this idea is a winner, either; he thinks it more plausible that “ecological/functional constraints, not entrenchment” led to the fossil patterns seen.
   Like the environmental explanations, this class also comes up short of the dynamite needed for the CE:

   The developmental class of explanation, per se, does not address the question of why the origin of such a system should, ipso facto, lead to increased diversity or disparity.  In fact, if at least one Ediacaran is a bilaterian (Kimberella, Spriggina, Dickinsonia, or Arkarua, for example), then the bilaterian developmental system existed at least a few tens of millions of years prior to the Cambrian “explosion,” suggesting something more than just developmental innovation might be needed to account for the “explosion.”

3. Ecological Explanations:  Suppose some Precambrian animal develops an eye or a mouth (trilobites, after all, already had complex eyes)  Suddenly, the lucky winner is like a burglar with a gun in a supermarket.  To cope, all the other animals all must develop defenses, like shells and armor.  The world is divided into predators and prey.  An evolutionary arms race is on.  Marshall quotes Valentine and others who invented “niche space” models (i.e., the pace of evolution is rapid till all available niches fill up), but doesn’t feel that these ecological explanations explain why the CE was unique, or why it lasted as long (or short) as it did.  What does he think of those who suggest that macroscopic eyes and color perception triggered the CE?  Not much; there are other ways to find food, “so there almost certainly would have been some sort of radiation even if large compound eyes had not evolved in the Cambrian.” 
4. Theoretical Explanations:  Marshall considers Stewart Kauffman’s idea about “fitness landscapes” and the emergence of evolutionary innovation: “the rate of evolution dramatically slows as the landscape is explored.”  So we should expect to see an explosion, followed by a rapid decline in evolutionary innovations, “simply as a consequence of the time it takes to find progressively more optimal solutions.”  Nice math, but we must get real, Marshall reminds us:

   The challenge for this class of explanation is understanding how the theoretical constructs related the real world.  In the case of Kauffman’s NK models, the roughness of the landscape is controlled by K, the number of interactions between the N genes.  However, it is difficult to meaningfully assign a value of K to a set of genes, and it is even more difficult to interpret these landscapes in morphological terms; i.e., the NK model does not explicitly incorporate the phenotype into the calculation of the fitnesses.

There is a little word, presto, with two meanings appropriate here.  In music, it is a very rapid tempo.  In entertainment, it is a magic word that produces rabbits out of hats and beautiful women out of gunny sacks stuffed into tiny boxes.  Marshall has explained the presto tempo of the Cambrian explosion with a presto magic act.  Discerning readers know it is just a trick.
    Theists believe God created the world and life, with good reason: the world looks designed.  We must not be misled by the term Cambrian “explosion.”  We think of explosions as accidents and terror attacks, wreaking havoc and leaving a scene strewn with debris and damage.  The CE was the opposite of this.  It was a sudden, explosive appearance of order and complexity, with tissues, organs, systems and a whole ecology appearing out of nowhere – just as would be expected if it had been created.
    Duane Gish, the veteran creationist debater, never appealed to religious or Biblical arguments when standing toe-to-toe with the greatest evolutionists in debates at prestigious universities across America and Europe.  He didn’t need to, because the science was on his side.  Though he believed in the God of Genesis, he hammered on two scientific nails that shut the coffin on evolution.  He would say, (1) the law of entropy shows evolution could not happen, and (2) the fossil record shows it did not happen.
    Go to the fossil beds and look.  Strata do not come with dates on them, labeled “545 million years old.”  You can go to Mongolia or southern California and you will find rock layers with fully-formed, complex trilobites, and nothing underneath.  Gish might have believed that the strata are young, but he could grant his opponents the geological column and give them the widest possible time latitude in which to work; the conclusion is the same: the fossil record looks like creation, not like evolution.  Each new animal appears abruptly.  There is not enough time in the best of cases for that much complexity to “arise” without design.  None of the precursors on Marshall’s chart, whether the Ediacaran biota, the trace burrows, or the small shelly animals, are precursors in ancestry.  No matter how much the timeline is stretched, each new body plan appears suddenly, without ancestors.  Face it, evolutionists!  This is not what your theory predicts, and no amount of handwaving is going to make this huge problem go away.  To an unbiased observer, it falsifies evolution.  Only dogmatic adherence to a philosophy pushes evolutionists to imagine their theoretical and highly implausible yarns to explain away the evidence of their senses.
    Marshall’s elaborate fairy tale shows that the materialists cannot extricate themselves from miracles.  Creationists readily admit that God works miracles, and that the creation was miraculous.  Evolutionists despise miracles, but find them very handy.  They shield their miracles in “presto!” words, saying such-and-such a complex animal or organ (even eyes!) just emerged, arose or developed.  If you watched carefully, you saw that was exactly what Marshall did.  Though earlier he criticized other explanations for failing to provide an account for the origin of the genetic information required, he just pushed it offstage, and when needed, had a stage hand ready to sneak it in the hat, so that he could claim the rabbit was there all along.  His “Abracadabra!” was the term morphogenetic rule, some kind of unspecified, miracle-working process that builds complex bodies out of nothing.  With that sleight of mind, he distracted the audience’s attention from the fact he had cheated when we weren’t looking.  Rules imply a Rulemaker, and necessity is the mother of invention only when there are intelligent designers around.
    His math is bad, too.  Marshall thinks that a simpler “combinatorial” genetic system in the invisible ancestors is sufficient to produce eyes and circulatory systems and all the rest when the landscape “roughens”.  Any kid can try this with a Lego set.  Scatter them at random all over a trampoline, start bouncing, and see what happens.  The number of useless combinations vastly exceeds anything ordered and functional.  5 million years – 10 million – 20 million – 65 million is pitifully insufficient to hope for anything interesting, and the parts themselves are not sentient beings to care whether they live or die.  No amount of time is going to produce robots and tanks and monsters out of bouncing Lego pieces; but turn a kid loose applying his intelligent design, and you will get all these things prestissimo, along with a complete ecology in which they interact that he will be glad to explain to you.
    Marshall even had a magic fairy in the act: the evolutionists’ favorite goddess, Tinker Bell.  Did you catch her brief appearance?  Marshall referred to co-option, a synonym for “tinkering” with tools and materials that are already there, as a suggestion on how hearts and circulatory systems “developed.”  He repeatedly spoke of evolution in personal terms, as if Evolution were some frontier pioneer, capable of exploring the landscape, deciding where to build a town, then with his “toolkit” setting up the bank, general store, blacksmith shop and saloon by calling whatever materials available to order with the word, “Presto!”  With this tale, Marshall gets diverse trilobites with compound eyes; brachiopods, worms, starfish – even chordates and vertebrates.  No matter that each of these animals had many complex tissues and organs and systems with interrelated parts that had to have existed simultaneously to work.  No observational data are needed in this pagan nature religion.  The Spirit of Evolution, guided by Tinker Bell, does the miracles.
    If anyone was not convinced before now that Darwin pulled off a massive con job on science, this should clinch it.  He knew about the Cambrian explosion but delegated the solution to the future.  Well, the future is here, and the problem is worse.  In place of the holding to the standard of rigorous proof in science, Darwin introduced the power of imagination, one “long argument” (aka story) to support his own personal myth.  To back it up, he claimed he was invoking purely natural causes that were rational and did not depend on a God of the gaps.  Well, here you have the result: all he did was replace the omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise God of creation with Tinker Bell of the gaps, a blind, deaf, dumb, careless fictional deity that his disciples are free to invoke whenever a miracle is needed to patch up the Big Just-So Story.  Out of this mythology, a hierarchy emerged with a set of traditions that stifles criticism, keeps the peasants ignorant, and persecutes any perceptive lover of truth able to read the book of nature without the “official” interpretation.  It’s time for a protestant reformation.
Next headline on: Fossils • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Geology

What are you waiting for?  It’s spring, it’s beautiful outside, life is good – go feel the burn and bulk up those amazing electrical motors (02/13/2004) in your mitochondrial power plants.  The stronger they get, the better you will feel the next time you challenge your body and explore creation.
Next headline on: Health • Human Body

• Royal Edict:  The Royal Society announced in a press release an official “statement on evolution, creationism and intelligent design.”  The upshot: evolution is well-established and an essential part of science education; criticism of evolution is criticism of science; you can believe in a creator as long as you don’t call it science; bacterial resistance demonstrates evolution; creationism is religion and intelligent design is disguised creationism; debate is good in science but undermining students’ confidence in science by distorting evidence is not (and that is what creationists do, by implication); and evolution is an essential part of the rise of a scientific understanding of the world, whereas anything else is based on faith.  (No new weapons, in other words; just more of the same from the NCSE armory.)
• Hear Ye, Hear Ye:  In addition, the Royal Society published a podcast from Professor Steve Jones.  Its title left no room for doubt about the contents: “Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right.”  Prime arguments: (1) science is about disbelief, but religion is about faith; (2) while it is true that a majority in the public distrusts evolution, why do no biologists agree? and, oddly, (3) “creationism does more harm to religion than it does to science.”
      Randy Boswell reported on these two Royal Society statements on Canada.com, titling his article, “Academic Worry Grows Over ‘Intelligent Design.’”
• Sound the Alarm:  In another of a series of anti-ID attack pieces with not an inch granted the opposition, PLoS Biology warned about “Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology.”  Liza Gross associated intelligent design with doubts about stem cell research, doubts about global warming, and doubts about science in general.  Her equation is simple: intelligent design = scientific illiteracy.  Reporting the thoughts and advise of John D. Miller, she quoted his advice: “Scientists need to become involved in partisan politics and to oppose candidates who reject evolution or attack scientific research” – implying that the two go hand in hand.  No intelligent design supporter was given two words, but NCSE Director Eugenie Scott got a big sidebar, complete with big, smiling picture of her.  The end of Liza Gross’ article included the obligatory disclaimer, “The author has declared that no competing interests exist.”
• Hold Your Fire: A Parley!  A conservative group at Cornell, Sounding the Trumpet, announced rather joyfully that Cornell is going to offer a class on intelligent design this summer.  World Net Daily seemed to share this optimistic news, and so did the campus IDEA club.  William Dembski, however, interviewed by Agape Press, sees a Trojan Horse.  The teacher, Allen MacNeill, once called Dembski a “bald-faced liar,” and Cornell president Hunter Rawlings sternly denounced ID last year (see ARN reprint of IDEA Club response).  Dembski is certain the class will have a strong pro-Darwinist bias.  His take on Cornell’s strategy: “the academic mainstream ... is hunkering down, stonewalling, [and] wanting to say there’s nothing of merit here, we’ve got to shut this down – and if we’re going to teach a course on it, it’s purely to debunk it.”
• And, In This Corner... ?:  Evolution News is waiting for Science magazine to let Michael Behe respond, since last week’s claim that “irreducible complexity” had a Darwinian explanation (04/06/2006) effectively admitted that the concept was scientific.  They seem to know that it will be a long wait.  For the expected silence, Discovery Institute provided a stack of reading material on the irreducible complexity argument.
• Pre-Emptive Strike:  Remember Frazier Mountain High School?  the little rural school with its little elective “Philosophy of Design” class that earned international attention when sued and forced to recant? (see 01/25/2006 story).  Well, now that a local church is planning to rent the town hall this Sunday and show the film Icons of Evolution, the Mountain Enterprise local newspaper published a three-page, multifaceted attack on intelligent design, discounting the credibility of the teacher highlighted in the film and the Darwinism-discrediting facts presented by Dr. Jonathan Wells.  In a semblance of balanced reporting, they have also kept a list of their running news stories on the episode, mostly overtly or covertly biased against intelligent design (such as posting teacher Sharon Lemburg’s initial outline for her elective course, which was never approved or even voted on, and had no bearing on the class).  Whether this pre-emptive strike will accomplish the desired result in this largely religious and conservative community remains to be seen.
• Wind Talkers:  Alan Leshner is so keen on the war correspondence, he must be hearing things.  According to Evolution News, he heard “code language” when Oklahoma proposed criticisms of Darwinism in a new Academic Freedom Act.  To the president of the AAAS, “exposing students to all sides of the scientific debate about evolution” is really “code language” for promoting a “narrow religious agenda.”  A blog by Lawrence Selden responds in plain English.
• Quarantine the ID Flu:  A press release from the Hunter Valley, NZ Scoop warned that 2,800 Australian students are at risk of being infected with the ID that is “infiltrating” science classes.  An education spokesperson “called on federal and state education ministers to withhold public funding until these schools agreed to quarantine science teaching from religious dogma.”  Unless students are “isolated” from this “myth,” there will be appalling consequences: “They are at risk of becoming unemployable in many important areas of the economy where scientific method is essential.”
• Battle Tactics Unveiled:  Writing in American Enterprise, Joe Manzari and Seth Cooper discussed the tactics of the ACLU to intimidate school boards with lawsuits.

• Jews for ID:  David Klinghoffer wrote an ID-friendly article for Jews in the Jerusalem Post.
• Getting the Darwinists’ Goat:  Ted Byfield gave his thoughts on “Rebutting Darwinists” in two editorials on World Net Daily.
• Truth or Talk:  True.origin tries to keep a running set of scientific responses to Talk.Origins, one of the pro-Darwinist blogs often cited as authoritative by evolutionists.
• Lone Rangers:  Individuals can always write letters to the editor (if they will print them).  Here’s one by Jonathan Bartlett printed by Tulsa Today answering Alan Leshner’s attacks against the Oklahoma bill.
• Some Isolated Fair Fights:  ID the Future keeps tabs on the isolated instances of open debates between evolutionists and ID proponents.
• Bias and Anti-Bias:  When the mainstream media won’t retract their misrepresentations, Evolution News does it for them.

One of the most intriguing, dynamic and fateful cultural debates in recent history is taking place before our eyes.  No one can afford to be uninformed.
    The Darwinists are attempting to corral all non-materialists into a funny farm labeled “faith” and deny them any voice in matters of science, truth, reality or history, while their opposition are calling their bluff and demanding accountability for 150 years of misdirection and deceit.  Who’s right?  Well, look at the Darwin Party’s behavior.  If their case were so strong, they could state it before a crowd of educated, reasonable people, and easily trounce their opponents.  Since they cannot, and have failed to do so for over a century, all they can do is shore up their castle walls with the same recycled fluff, surround it with a moat of fear tactics, catapult out media bombs of misrepresentations, drug the populace with hallucinations, and desperately cry for reinforcements from the ACLU secret police.  Inside the castle, where the undecided can’t see the enemy, they decorate King Charles’s coffin, as he lies in state, telling the peasants that here lies the Great Leader Who Saved Science.  Now, what does this tell you?
    If you need responses to Steve Jones and the other Royalist propaganda, well, keep reading, and reading, and reading.  We’ve got over five years of antidotes, and unlike the Darwinist Press, you get to hear the very best on both sides make their case.  The next article is a good place to start.
Next headline on: Education • Darwinism • Intelligent Design

• Octopus elbows:  Noticing that octopuses have an uncanny ability to bend their boneless tentacles into shapes resembling vertebrate elbows, EurekAlert says this about how the ability evolved: “The presence of similar structural features and control strategies in articulated limbs (for example, jointed vertebrate arms) and flexible octopus arms suggests that these qualities have evolved convergently in octopuses and in vertebrates, and it also suggests that an articulated limb--controlled at the level of joints--is the optimal solution to the challenge of achieving precise point-to-point movements by a limb.”  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
      The authors of the original paper in Current Biology¹ went further.  “Despite the evolutionary gap and morphological differences, humans and octopuses evolved similar strategies when fetching food to the mouth,” Sumbre, Hochner et al. said.  They even postulated that this ability arose at the dawn of animals, hundreds of millions of years ago:

  Because the hypothetical common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates dates back to the beginning of Cambrian era (about 540 million years ago), fetching appears to be a genuine and rare case of evolutionary functional convergence, where two independent attributes (morphology and neural control) coevolved to achieve a common goal.  We therefore suggest that the combination of a kinematically constrained articulated limb and a movement control strategy with simpler, more stereotypical movements in intrinsic coordinates offers an optimal solution for achieving precise point-to-point movements.

  Commenting on this study in the same issue of Current Biology,² Scott L. Hooper explored the idea that function can give rise to form, by evolution.  Noting that “muscles predate the evolution of hard body parts,” Hooper personified evolution into a creative programmer: “flexibly creating different ‘skeletons’ of stiffened muscles against which other muscles can act may be the mother of all motor control strategies.”
      Live Science picked up on this line, also, stating that “The similarity of structural features and control strategies between jointed vertebrate arms and flexible octopus limbs suggests that these configurations evolved separately in octopuses and vertebrates, a result scientists call an example of convergent evolution.”  In none of these papers or news articles did any of the authors attempt to connect function to form by a series of plausible evolutionary steps.  Apparently, they didn’t have to – since evolution is already a fact.

• Bat digital computing:  With their sonar-guided aerial acrobatics, bats are true wonders of the class Mammalia.  The only mammals to fly under their own power, bats make up one fifth of all mammalian species, said Michael Balter in Science Now.  But how did they get the ability to fly?  Surprisingly, a paper in PNAS³ found a tale in the absence of evidence:

  The earliest fossil bats resemble their modern counterparts in possessing greatly elongated digits to support the wing membrane, which is an anatomical hallmark of powered flight.  To quantitatively confirm these similarities, we performed a morphometric analysis of wing bones from fossil and modern bats.  We found that the lengths of the third, fourth, and fifth digits (the primary supportive elements of the wing) have remained constant relative to body size over the last 50 million years.  This absence of transitional forms in the fossil record led us to look elsewhere to understand bat wing evolution. 

  Since (of course) evolution is already a fact, no fossil evidence is necessary.  What they looked at were genes for finger development in bats and their presumed cousins, mice.  They found that a common gene for bone growth is activated differently in bats, causing the digits to grow much more rapidly, but only in the forelimbs.  “Together, our results suggest that an up-regulation of the Bmp pathway is one of the major factors in the developmental elongation of bat forelimb digits, and it is potentially a key mechanism in their evolutionary elongation as well.”
      In this “suggestion,” no attempt was made to integrate this into a comprehensive picture of how the membranes developed, how flight muscles developed, where the avionics software came from, and all the other parts that would have had to have emerged simultaneously for long fingers to become tools rather than impediments.  Since evolution is a fact, this is not a problem; each attribute becomes a piece of the grand evolutionary picture, something that “suggests” or “sheds light” on a detail of what is already known to be true.
      Michael Balter shamelessly gave his write-up on this paper a Kipling-esque just-so-story title in Science Now: “How Bats Got Off the Ground.”  Calling bats great examples of “Darwinian success,” Balter quoted other scientists who called this a “an excellent paper” that “helps us to understand how evolutionary transformations are achieved by tinkering with the development of individual structures--in this case, the digits.”

• The purpose-driven bird:  Darwinists have often claimed that humans have evolved to the point where they can now take charge of their own evolution.  But can birds do this?  That’s a new line promoted by Katherine Unger on Science Now, a news service of the AAAS.  “Species need not sit around waiting for natural selection to shape them,”  she said.  “According to a new study, a creature’s personality can also be an important evolutionary driving force--one that may give the species some control over its own destiny.”  The study, described in PNAS, showed how some bluebirds can alter their habitats and foraging behaviors based on how aggressive some members get (see also EurekAlert summary).  The odd thing is that no evolution occurred before or after the study; the bluebirds were still bluebirds.  The key finding was merely a suggestion: “By selecting the environment in which they live, animals can actively affect the natural selection they experience.”  Evolution by natural selection is, of course, the fact that (by implication) produced the bluebirds in the first place.

“The ‘evolution is a fact’ claim is awkward for evolutionists.  It makes the man behind the curtain all the more obvious and is empirically unsupportable.  How should evolutionists respond when a savvy buyer starts kicking the tires and asks “Why is this a fact again?”....
The dual mandates that (i) science must adhere to methodological naturalism and (ii) evolution is a fact, serve to diminish the importance of the empirical data.  Monumental evidential problems become mere curiosities when the theory is beyond question.

We’re going to keep holding up this garbage to public view as we have for over five years now, to expose Darwinian research for what it is: institutionalized question begging, assuming what needs to be proved, making up tall tales in the absence of evidence, ascribing exquisite design to dumb processes of randomness, and murdering Baconian scientific rigor.  Once the Darwin Party came to power, they dumbed down the high standards of research, substituted bravado for caution, and brought in the dark ages of speculative biology where facts and data don’t matter any more.  The highest value now is keeping the story line begun by Pope Charlie going ad infinitum.  The usurping Darwin Party elitists not only lounge around, engaging one another in “tantalizing speculations” (12/22/2003) in the institutions once devoted to induction and proof, but then have the gall to condemn anyone who calls them on the carpet for their shenanigans.
    Let this awareness promote a new day in science, where conclusions are rare, where “suggestions” are criticized, where evidence is king, and no principle based on human authority becomes a premise for deduction – i.e., like it used to be when men and women who loved nature and loved the truth (predominantly Christians and creationists – see online book) explored nature as seeking out the wisdom of God.  Disallowing deduction and reinstating rigor might not cure the hard-core Darwinian materialists, but it would go a long way in clearing the fog away from the debate.
Next headline on: Evolutionary Theory • Marine Life • Mammals • Birds

Fossils have long provided snapshots of the human family tree, but a new find in Africa gives scientists a kind of mini home movie showing man’s primal development.
    Because the 4.2-million-year-old fossil is from the same human ancestral hot spot in Ethiopia as remains from seven other human-like species, scientists can now fill in the gaps for the most complete evolutionary chain so far.
    “We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time,” said Ethiopian anthropologist Berhane Asfaw, co-author of the study being reported Thursday in the journal Nature.  “One form evolved to another.  This is evidence of evolution in one place through time.”  (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The species, Australopithecus anamensis is not new, but its location is what helps explain the giant leap from one early phase of human-like development to the next, scientists say. All eight species were found in a region called the Middle Awash.
    “It’s like 12 frames of a home movie, but a home movie covering 6 million years,” said study lead author Tim White, co-director of Human Evolution Research Center at University of California at Berkeley.  Fossils in the region cover three major phases of human development.
    “The key here is the sequences,” White said.  “It’s about a mile thickness of rocks in the Middle Awash and in it we can see all three phases of human evolution.“
    Modern man belongs to the genus Homo, which is a subgroup in the family of hominids.  What evolved into Homo was likely the genus Australopithecus (once called “man-ape”), which includes the famed 3.2 million-year-old “Lucy” fossil found three decades ago.
    A key candidate for the genus that evolved into Australopithecus is called Ardipithecus.  And Thursday’s finding is important in bridging – but not completely – the gap between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.
    In 1994, a 4.4 million-year-old partial skeleton of the species Ardipithecus ramidus – the most recent Ardipithecus species – was found about six miles from the latest discovery.
    “This appears to be the link between Australopithecus and Ardipithecus as two different species,” White said.  The major noticeable difference between the phases of man can be seen in Australopithecus’ bigger chewing teeth to eat harder food, he said.

While it’s looking more likely, it is not a sure thing that Ardipithecus evolved into Australopithecus, he said.  The finding does not completely rule out Ardipithecus dying off as a genus and Australopithecus developing independently.
    The connections between Ardipithecus and Australopithecus have been theorized since an anamensis fossil was first found in Kenya 11 years ago.  This draws the lines better, said Alan Walker of Penn State University, who found the first anamensis and is not part of White’s team.
    Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, agreed: “For those people who are tied up in doing the whole human family tree, being able to connect the branches is a very important thing to do.”

In yet another example of circular reasoning, White and team have assumed evolution, fit the data to the evolutionary just so story, and paraded the result as “proof” that evolution happened.  Evolutionists are so desperate to deal with the lack of intermediate fossils that now the location of a fossil qualifies it as somehow being intermediate.  Arranging fossils in some increasing order of complexity to prove evolution has been around for a long time, for example, the horse evolution series, but it doesn’t prove that evolution happened any more than arranging old cars in a junkyard in order of complexity proves they evolved.
    For an analysis of the human fossil data from a different worldview, read Marvin Lubenow’s classic book, Bones of Contention,  available from AIG.  Also, AIG has an excellent video critically analyzing the Lucy fossil, “Lucy, She’s No Lady,” by Dr. David Menton.
Next headline on:  Early Man

What would bury a group of heavy, agile, strong, mobile, intelligent monsters suddenly?  Think about it.
Next headline on: Dinosaurs • Fossils

Another thing that I think about, which may be more ethereal, is that cell biologists interested in molecular mechanisms should always be reminding themselves that evolution proceeds without any predestined direction, and this is as true for cellular regulatory mechanisms as it is for organismal evolution [sic].  Even if we don’t think too much about evolution in our day-to-day work, it is the backdrop against which everything takes place, and one needs to keep a very open mind [sic], and not be too dogmatic, about how biological systems may be “designed”, because there is no designer [sic].  The best stimulus for this is to watch a few nature programs on TV.   (Emphasis added.)

If anyone can figure out how being dogmatic about evolution is an example of open-mindedness, or how directionlessness produced cellular regulatory mechanisms, or how maintaining faith in purposelessness as a backdrop aids thinking, or how telling oneself there is no designer demonstrates things are not designed, let us know.  Notice two other things he said: (1) scientists don’t think too much about evolution in their day-to-day work, indicating that evolutionary theory is useless, and (2) TV is this evolutionist’s source of inspiration (see visualization in the Baloney Detector).  So producers get their stimulus from the dogmatic claims of the evolutionary biologists, and biologists in turn get their inspiration from watching the resulting TV shows: a vicious cycle, with emphasis on vicious.
    Example: last night The Science Channel replayed The Rise of Man, one of the dumbest examples of evolutionary storytelling ever made for the tube.  In this ridiculous portrayal of made-up history, presented in all seriousness, naked ape-faced actors invent religion when lightning strikes, invent language when stealing ostrich eggs, invent the family when she-ape needs help in childbirth, and invent art when one ape-man sticks a shiny stone on his female’s mud-plastered forehead.  The group all giggles in the mud together at this new sign of beauty.  If this is Sawin’s inspiration, God help him.
    Cave Man was much better.  At least Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach and John Matuszak all knew it was only a spoof.  Let’s offer Sawin and his ilk free unending reruns of all the evolution shows they want; maybe this will keep them in a permanent state of euphoria – and out of the classroom.
Next headline on:  Darwinism • Media • Dumb Ideas

Submarine hot springs no doubt could have played a role in brewing the primordial soup that gave rise to life [sic], Cody said, but other environments must have contributed too.  “If I said it all happened in hydrothermal vents, that won’t move this field ahead,” he says.  “Thinking more globally could open up something.”  Perhaps the real action came along continental margins, he said.  There, prebiotic compounds from deep-sea vents rose to meet drainage from the land’s warm little ponds and fallout from atmospheric reactions triggered by lightning and sunlight.  “This is a very good [sic] approach, quite novel,” says organic chemist Vera Kolb of the University of Wisconsin, Parkside.  “People get bogged down with the particular conditions they’re studying, but he wasn’t pushing his own work.”
    Such a “global origin” scenario, however, would make it less likely that life arose elsewhere in the solar system, Cody says.  The subsurface oceans on the icy moons Europa and Enceladus might not have offered the required diversity of environments.  And Mars may not have had even a short-lived ocean.

There is nothing wrong with asking big questions.  What is life?  What are the requirements for life?  How can we detect life?  When asking big questions, it makes good sense to get input from a variety of disciplines.  Astrobiology, however, has big problems passing itself off as science that deserves public funding.
    For one, it assumes evolution before allowing the evidence to speak.  If there is water, there must be life.  If there are organic compounds, they must evolve into more complex ones.  While it may be true that a substantial number of stars have planets, and that some of those will fall within the temperature range where water can exist as a liquid, thinking that life will necessarily emerge has no scientific support.  (Claiming it evolved here is circular reasoning since the alternative is that it was designed.)  Asking big questions and taking a position without scientific support is tantamount to religion, and imposes a state-funded religious view on a public, the majority of which does not accept evolution.
    Another problem is that astro- has nothing to do with -biology.  Astrobiology is a made-up term, a chimera, a bizarre juxtaposition of concepts like decadent fudge or sexy V6 that is more marketing than substance.  Invent a racy term like “astrobiology,” and you instantly convey images about things of which we have no knowledge, and that may not exist.  Yet it gives artists fodder for portraying DNA molecules unwinding out of Hubble astrophotos.  One might retort that we have astrochemistry and astrophysics – but these are natural subjects for lifeless stars.  We have biochemistry and biophysics, but these are natural to Earth, the one place we know has life.  So far as we know, biology and astronomy have no necessary or demonstrable connection.  There are organic molecules in space, and there are planets, and there is probably water, but none of these conditions are sufficient for life.  Put a planet together with water and carbon, and you may get only dark mud.
    But, someone will object, how can we find out, unless we search?  OK, get in line.  Make a presentation, show your criteria, provide a budget and time limit, and make your case to Congress through elected representatives.  Perhaps you can sell the public on funding it for a little while, subject to other funding priorities.  But astrobiology has become an open-ended program that could never be exhausted, no matter how many targets are investigated.  If we don’t find it on Mars, let’s look on Europa, then Titan, then Enceladus, then other stars, and on and on forever.  Worse, astrobiology was launched on news of possible life in a Martian meteorite that, in retrospect, looks deeply flawed.  Some get the impression the announcement had ulterior motives.  Now that the search is on, though, what are the criteria for failure?  Would committed astrobiologists ever admit defeat?  If not, then it is religion, not science.
    The scientific elite want complete independence from political influence on their spending habits, and become irate when the president or Congress dictate scientific priorities.  They think they alone know what is good for science.  But just like all citizens, scientists need accountability.  As Steven L. Goldman (Lehigh U) said in a lecture series on 20th century science for The Teaching Company,

Science has definitively lost its innocence.  The claim that “we are generating value-neutral, objective knowledge” is hollow.  Scientists may continue to believe it, but from a social perspective, the pursuit of knowledge – even of abstract scientific knowledge – is firmly embedded in social institutions and social expectations.  Science has been delighted to take this public support (and especially the public funding) and the organization of public institutions to allow scientists to do research – take that money and support, because the public perceives that science is a source of technological blessing.  But the flip side is that when there are curses, science is going to have to suffer that as well.
(Lecture 36, excerpt)

Another problem with astrobiology is the implied expectation that the public should fund it.  Why?  What national interest is served?  The public has a right to expect that either national security, health, prosperity or international prestige will be enhanced by the expenditure of its tax dollars.  Unquestionably, astrobiology is driving some interesting technology, such as miniaturization of biological detectors.  Astrobiologists can tout any number of spin-off technologies from its projects, but these beg the question whether those same technologies would not have emerged from other programs, such as medical or military research, or even from private enterprise.  Not every interesting question has the expectation of public funding.  For better or worse, Congress in 1994 decided that a superconducting supercollider was not worth $10 billion just because some particle physicists were interested to find out if the Higgs boson exists (as required by current big bang models).  The existence of life is arguably a more entrancing question, but it does not follow that the public should pay to answer it.
    A rejoinder might be that such projects cost too much for anything but the government largesse.  (This forgets that government is of, by, and for the people.)  Why so?  The Mt. Wilson and Palomar telescopes were privately funded, and so is SETI (once Proxmire laughed it out of Congress; in fact, SETI has rather flourished under private sponsorship).  There are billionaires like Paul Allen, who just funded the Allen Telescope Array for the SETI Institute, and there are corporations, foundations and university alumni that can pitch in if scientists can sell them on the need for their particular astrobiology projects.  If this is not satisfactory, let them think creatively; sell Congress on a Mars or Europa mission for other priorities, and let private sources fund the astrobiology investigations as ride-alongs.  Or, build better life detectors for use on the battlefield, and adapt them for use in space.
    Did you know that federal funding for US science is a relatively recent phenomenon?  In the 19th century, the government steadfastly refused to pay a dime for the AAAS, the NSF, the Smithsonian and other science organizations – they had to solicit funds from donors.  In Britain, also, members of the Royal Society and Royal Institution both had to pay their own way via sponsorships and special public events.  France had its crown-funded Academy of Sciences, but the elite scientists were subject to the king’s bidding.  Only after World War II, largely through the efforts of Vannevar Bush convincing the federal government that it needed technology for national defense, did federal funding of basic research become the norm.  Still, each expenditure needs to be justified to the people who pay the bills.  How will astrobiology aid the poor family on the farm in Arkansas, or victims of the latest natural disaster?  How will it protect our freedoms?  Furthermore, as we have seen with the National Endowment for the Arts, FEMA, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, public funding does not always produce excellence.  Maybe private funding would stimulate higher standards for astrobiology.  These considerations undercut the alarms raised by scientists that funding cuts to astrobiology will necessarily reduce US scientific leadership in the world.
    Of course, it is demoralizing and counterproductive for government to cut back on already-approved programs.  Congress should keep its word.  Once a program starts, it involves careers and livelihoods and plans for potentially many people.  Finishing a job usually provides more knowledge than cancelling one program for something better.  That alone, however, does not justify an endless funding stream.  Each program needs to earn its wings every day.  The public has a right to know what they are getting for their dollars, even when, like with NASA science, the outlays are a small fraction of the federal budget.
    Justifications for research programs do not need to be merely pragmatic.  The Apollo program, for instance, was immensely rewarding for national prestige during the cold war, and contributed to world peace when Americans and Russians collaborated on Skylab.  Space exploration continues to uphold America’s image of scientific leadership in the world (e.g., Mars rovers, Cassini).  What, though, is astrobiology’s marketing line?  Finding the answer to big questions like the presence of life in space would be no doubt interesting for philosophy, but how does one justify public funds in addressing the question?  Think of great conceptual leaps that were made without government funding: relativity, the expansion of the universe, MRI – the list would be long.  Why should not astrobiology, like SETI, pay its own way?  Why does it have to cost tens of millions of dollars?  We have material from space sitting at our feet waiting to be examined – meteorites from Mars even – and plenty of environments on Earth where scientists could get assistance from universities, corporations and foundations.  Existing telescopes are well equipped for much of the needed research.  Scientists throughout history have been inventive and productive without “banging their crutches on the trough of public funding” (09/09/2005).
    Until and unless astronomy and biology get married, the folks at home don’t have to keep funding the wedding plans year after year – especially when they are not convinced the two were made for each other.
Next headline on:  SETI • Origin of Life • Astronomy • Solar System

• Power Plant Sabotage:  Scientists from Michigan State¹ studied FZO, “dynamin-related membrane-remodeling protein that mediates fusion between mitochondrial outer membranes in animals and fungi.”  In the model plant Arabidopsis, they knocked out the plant-specific member of the dynamin superfamily, FZL.  This protein targets to the thylakoid membrane of the chloroplasts, the light-harvesting power plants of plants. Here’s what happened:

  fzl knockout mutants have abnormalities in chloroplast and thylakoid morphology, including disorganized grana stacks and alterations in the relative proportions of grana and stroma thylakoids.  Overexpression of FZL-GFP also conferred defects in thylakoid organization.  Mutation of a conserved residue in the predicted FZL GTPase domain abolished both the punctate localization pattern and ability of FZL-GFP to complement the fzl mutant phenotype.  FZL defines a new protein class within the dynamin superfamily of membrane-remodeling GTPases that regulates organization of the thylakoid network in plants.  Notably, FZL levels do not affect mitochondrial morphology or ultrastructure, suggesting that mitochondrial morphology in plants is regulated by an FZO-independent mechanism.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

  This means that this specific protein was essential for just the thylakoid membrane inner structure, and there must be another essential mechanism affecting the overlying structure.  (Note: the capitalized acronym, FZL, refers to the protein, while the italicized lower-case acronym fzl refers to the gene that codes for it.)  They found that mutating or deleting the gene causes disaster – but so does overexpressing it.  This means that not only is FZL a key player, but the activity of its gene fzl must be regulated by something else.

• Centrosome Attack:  Mitosis, or cell division, has been studied for many decades, but now another essential player has been identified.  Scientists from Japan and Pennsylvania² describe what happened when they played “take off what you don’t need” with a centrosome protein named Su48:

  The centrosome functions as the major microtubule-organizing center and plays a vital role in guiding chromosome segregation during mitosis.  Centrosome abnormalities are frequently seen in a variety of cancers, suggesting that dysfunction of this organelle may contribute to malignant transformation.  In our efforts to identify the protein components of the centrosome and to understand the structure features involved in the assembly and functions of this organelle, we cloned and characterized a centrosome-associated protein called Su48.  We found that a coiled coil-containing subdomain of Su48 was both sufficient and required for its centrosome localization.  In addition, this structure also modulates Su48 dimerization.  Moreover, ectopic expression of Su48 causes abnormal mitosis, and a mutant form of Su48 disrupts the localization of gamma-tubulin to the centrosome.  Finally, by microinjection of an anti-Su48 antibody, we found that disruption of normal Su48 functions leads to mitotic failure, possibly due to centrosome defects or incomplete cytokinesis.  Thus, Su48 represents a previously unrecognized centrosome protein that is essential for cell division.  We speculate that Su48 abnormalities may cause aberrant chromosome segregation and may contribute to aneuploidy and malignant transformation.

Consider the problem this poses for neo-Darwinism.  Natural Selection depends on unfailing cell division – and not just any splitting of a cell into parts somewhere and somehow, but on the formation of highly accurate daughter copies of germline cells.  This is because (according to theory) only the daughter cells can preserve any beneficial variations produced by accident in the parent cell.  Otherwise, evolution comes to a sudden stop (see online book).
    As revealed in the last century, cell division is a highly complex process with numerous players, all of which have vital functions.  Scientists apparently did not even know about Su48, but without it, cell division doesn’t work.  So here is another extra in the play, like a nameless stage hand, without whom it’s curtains for the Darwin show.
    In the first article, plants (and animals, with their mitochondrial power plants), cannot harvest light without FZL.  The sweeping dioramas of evolutionary history that festoon museums and TV shows show photosynthesis and mitochondira just popping into existence (the Popeye theory of evolution, 05/31/2005; see also 03/31/2006 example), without any consideration of where to find all these essential players.  We’ve only provided two or three examples here; there are thousands.  And when you consider that the blind invention of even one protein is astronomically improbable (see online book), cell biologists had better throw off the Charlie sheet before their embarrassment reaches the ultimate.
Next headline on:  Cell Biology • Genetics • Evolutionary Theory

Veteran readers of these pages know the song and dance well enough not to give this more than a yawn.  Do these few fragmentary bones and teeth fill in any gaps?  John Hawks, a pro-evolution paleoanthropologist at Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison doesn’t think so; he said, “The finding of Au. anamensis within the already-known time range of Au. anamensis means that the new fossils haven’t really added much to the question of phylogenetic diversity in early hominids.”  In other words, it’s like claiming, “we found a fossil trilobite within the range of fossil trilobites!  This sheds new light on trilobite evolution and closes a gap in our knowledge!”
    Ann Gibbons in the Science article quotes Tim White as claiming that “testing these hypotheses will require additional fossils from other sites” and Meave Leakey saying, “I don’t think that the published evidence shows [the link between A. ramidus and A. anamensis] very convincingly,”  Gibbons advises, “stay tuned.”  As with Tiktaalik (04/06/2006), the most important missing links lie buried in the future.
    All three alleged hominoid species are members of extinct ape families, anyway, and have nothing to do with human ancestry.  Only wishful thinking and allegiance to Charlie ties these fragments to his icon of the descent of man (illustration).  As Jerry Bergman documented in a recent article for the CRS, the field of evolutionary paleoanthropology is filled with rivalry, contradiction, deception, exaggeration and outright fraud.  Too bad the news media are all dupes; they think this is science instead of mud wrestling.
Next headline on: Early Man • Fossils

Five point mutations in a particular beta-lactamase allele jointly increase bacterial resistance to a clinically important antibiotic by a factor of 100,000.  In principle, evolution to this high-resistance beta-lactamase might follow any of the 120 mutational trajectories linking these alleles.  However, we demonstrate that 102 trajectories are inaccessible to Darwinian selection and that many of the remaining trajectories have negligible probabilities of realization, because four of these five mutations fail to increase drug resistance in some combinations.  Pervasive biophysical pleiotropy [i.e., one modification causing a cascade of effects] within the beta-lactamase seems to be responsible, and because such pleiotropy appears to be a general property of missense mutations, we conclude that much protein evolution will be similarly constrained.  This implies that the protein tape of life [sic] may be largely reproducible and even predictable.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

It wasn’t going to work anyway, so this just makes it harder.  They are’t talking about adding new genetic information or function, but rather losing function (susceptibility to the antiobiotic) in such a manner that each stage doesn’t kill all of the organisms in one fell swoop.  If this principle applies, as they suggested, to larger scales of biological organization, then the neo-Darwinian gig is, for all practical purposes, over.  Try getting a whale from a cow against these kinds of constraints.  This makes “the protein tape of life” predictable?  In whose Tinker Bell tale?
Next headline on: Genetics • Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

The core of the debate, [Wei] Kong [professor of chemistry] said, relates to the behavior of the nucleic acid bases – adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine – which as A-T and G-C base pairs form DNA and ultimately become the blueprint for all living things.  One of the most basic premises of biochemistry is that these nucleic acid bases are very stable, as they would have to be to prevent rampant mutations and make an organized genetic structure possible.
    But studies at OSU, which were done with highly sophisticated electron spectroscopy, showed that the alleged stability of the nucleic acid bases in DNA is largely a myth.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

The lifetime of the dark state is not long – a nanosecond is one billionth of a second.  But it’s more than enough time for DNA mutations to happen, Kong said.  And the existence of this dark state raised questions about how life ever could have begun, given that the genetic carriers were so easily mutated or destroyed during this very brief but very vulnerable time.
    “When the bases of DNA were first being formed billions of years ago [sic], the atmosphere was actually quite hostile,” Kong said.  “It was a period prior to any protective ozone layer on Earth and the ultraviolet radiation was very strong.  So if primordial DNA bases were forced into this vulnerable dark state, they should have incurred large amounts of photochemical damage that would have made the very survival of these bases difficult, let alone further evolution of life.”

The findings suggest, Kong said, how water could have been an absolutely essential compound to allow early DNA bases to remain stable, resist mutation, and ultimately allow for the evolution of life....
“What this is really telling us is that life is a unified process,” Kong said.  “It’s not just a group of DNA bases, but it’s also the physical environment in which they exist.  Later on, as life became more evolved [sic], there were other ways to achieve genetic stability.  But at first, it simply may not have been possible without water.”

The only good news here is that these researchers have not completely obliterated all hope.  This is not good news for the OOL (origin-of-life) school.  They have constrained further a hopeless situation (see online book).  This “radical heresy” removes any possibility of key building blocks forming away from water.  Remember when Steve Benner postulated ribose forming in a desert with boron, because it was too unstable in water? (11/05/2004)  Now, the poor guy has to make the ribose in the desert (hoping that UV radiation won’t destroy it there), then get it into the water where the A, C, T, G or uracil are, hoping somehow that they will join up with phosphates on some clay mineral, and then link into polynucleotide chains that can both code for information and perform enzymatic functions (RNA World), but also find a safe haven in some membrane that is not so tight it becomes a death trap.
    Sounds like a hard story to sell to Congress.  Things are not going too well for astrobiology these days.
Next headline on: Genetics • Origin of Life

What do you expect?  The National Geographic Society of Judas-Lovers (see next entry) has mastered the power of the big lie, half-truth and visualization.  Remember its “Was Darwin Wrong?  No!” propaganda? (02/15/2005).  We hoped Chris Johns would tone down the rhetoric after Bill Allen left, but his biggest lies have been “Always be honest and tell the truth.... Be humble, there is no room for arrogance.”  National Geographic is a lost cause.  It’s been that way for a long time; good for lurid pictures of ethnics in their native dress, but not much else.  If you want facts, get your news from sources that care about the truth.
Next headline on:  Birds • Dinosaurs • Fossils

What a travesty.  Sweep away the acting, religious rituals, special effects, haunting music, breathy narrator, cloak-and-dagger detective story about how the manuscript was found and restored, the suspenseful build-up to the reading of the text, and all the other irrelevant Hollywood tricks, and what is left?  Only the opinions of a few apostate professors.  There was virtually no serious investigation of whether the Gospel of Judas is authentic or trustworthy.  Yet that is the most important point, the only point that matters.  They call it “an authentic ancient text” (a classic half truth, since, in terms of the papyrus it is written on, dating from the 3rd or 4th century, it is), but fail to establish that the content has anything whatsoever to do with the real Judas, or with real historical events.
    If the Gospel of Judas is a work of a second-century Gnostic sect falsely attributed to Judas, then that is all that needs to be said about it.  It would be of interest to historians, but not enough to cause any stir Sunday morning at church.  But no– they have to repeatedly imply that the Gospel of Judas is on par with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  Rather than consider the possibility that it might be completely fictional and unreliable, they imply that this “lost gospel” written by “early Christians” that can “shed new light” and provide another viewpoint on the events of the passion of Christ that is equally plausible.  They put heretical sects on the same level as the faith preached by Peter and Paul.  They make the illogical claim that it is possible to believe the four canonical gospels and the Gospel of Judas simultaneously, even when there are gross contradictions.  At best, they imply that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion about this document; at worst, they promote, in effect, starting a new First Church of Judas-Adoring Gnostics.
    The only redeeming feature of the hour-long farce are reenactments of the martyrs.  Christians should stiffen with both revulsion for the brutality of the Romans, and pride for the steadfast confidence and hope in Christ of those who were beaten, burned and crucified for the faith.  But to suggest that one man, Irenaeus, under a desire to make Christianity more palatable to the Romans, was responsible for arbitrarily deciding which of the “gospels” were in or out, is both illogical and historically inaccurate.  Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, and a host of other apostolic fathers in the theological line of descent from Peter and Paul and John held essentially the same positions.  Note what Dr. Clinton E. Arnold of Biola University says:

Neither Irenaeus nor any church leader arbitrarily selected which books would become part of the New Testament.  From the moment that the gospels were first written, they were circulated throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond and used in the churches for teaching, worship, and devotion.  Lists of New Testament writings were later drawn up by some church fathers and early church councils to recognize and formalize what Christians were using in churches throughout the world.  The formal recognition became essential because some groups were wanting to add to the New Testament and other people (like Marcion) were wanting to subtract from what was widely used and recognized as authoritative.

National Geographic’s mockumentary also completely ignores the statements of the first Christians recorded by Luke (a careful historian) in the book of Acts about Judas, and the well-authenticated 1st-century epistles of the Apostle Paul, that so clearly define Christology and soteriology, that any Gnostic position or any “other gospel” (i.e., inconsistent with that doctrine) is to be utterly and completely repudiated (see Galatians 1, for example).
    The whole NG production is geared to make the historic position look vulnerable, and the radical position brave and enticing.  Conservative scholars are quoted for just a few seconds only to dismiss them, so that the spotlight can be given to liberals like Elaine Pagels eager to substitute imagination for fact (the whole show is basically a decorated pulpit for Pagels and her anti-traditional views).  Imagination – speculation – the power of suggestion – iconoclasm – these are the highest values of this perverted documentary.  Did they take lessons from Art Bell and the face-on-Mars cults?
    It gets worse.  Not only is balanced scholarship utterly lacking, the program turns into a glorification of Gnosticism – “the people who know,” the people of insight, intuition and “the spark of the divine inside.” Such beliefs, of course, are pole-opposite from both Judaism and Christianity.  Repudiating the history revealed in the oldest and best sources—the New Testament canon—the message of this anti-Christian polemic relies on a translation of a text from an unknown date by an unknown author from a weird cult, and on selective, agenda-driven, between-the-lines readings of New Testament passages that conservative scholars would find bizarre.  It makes Judas into a saint.  It suggests that Jesus Christ was a manipulator.  It suggests his followers, many of whom endured torture and died martyrs’ deaths, were power-hungry book-burners holding sway over the minds of the common people.  It questions the authenticity of the real gospels, without providing conservative scholars any chance to refute the claims of the liberals with archaeological, historical and textual evidence.  The discoverer of the lost document is allowed to say, without scorn, she believes Judas is speaking to her, inspiring her to rehabilitate his image.  It even went so far as to suggest that the New Testament is inherently anti-Semitic and contributed to the Nazi holocaust!  What a slap in the face to millions of Christians, and on Palm Sunday even!  How can such folly be tolerated?  What has become of National Geographic?
    It must be from too much hanging around the Darwin Party storytelling lounges (12/22/2003).
    These are times of both danger and opportunity for Christians.  Danger, because the Darwin Party, liberal theologians, the media and political liberals are all attacking conservative Christianity with an intensity unparalleled in American history.  If it were scholarly debate about facts and history, it would be worthwhile; but they are attacking with big lies, half-truths, suggestion, selective authority, and other irrational methods of propaganda.  In another month, the phony history of Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code will send the next salvo.  It is a time of opportunity for Christians, because more and more people will have questions about these things.  Better engagement than apathy.  Christians who know their history and theology can rise to the occasion and become stronger in the process.  The fields are white unto harvest, and Christ will be glorified – if the church is not caught asleep.  The martyrs did not sacrifice for our lethargy.
Next headline on:  The Bible and Theology • Media

What has become of National Geographic?  Right before Easter, they published two reports trying to put Christians on the defensive: the silly claim by Doron Nof that Jesus walked on ice instead of water (04/04/2006), and now passing off this phony gospel with a conspiracy-theory flavor that the church “doesn’t want you to know” the truth about Judas.  Why are they doing this?  Is this objective scholarship, or activism?
    Think for a moment what would happen if they did this to the Koran.  Imagine the consequences that might ensue, considering the some hundred people that died over cartoons of Mohammed.  Or consider if NG made a crusade of debunking native American beliefs.  Only with Christianity is there a continual onslaught to undermine a religion’s historical foundations with impunity, and for added insult, right before their holiest time of the year.  Why the asymmetry in so-called political correctness?
    Since Christians are a forgiving lot, let’s set aside such feelings for now, and talk about the new document.  The Gospel of Judas is merely one of many apocryphal, spurious writings of the 2nd and 3rd centuries.  This is not news; though we didn’t have a copy of this one till now, others are well known from antiquity or from the Nag Hammadi cache of Gnostic texts found in Egypt in 1945.  Scholars have read them, analyzed them and put them in context.  As with any long-lost manuscript, the Gospel of Judas is historically interesting and worthy of analysis.  The scientists who dated and translated this document did exemplary work.  Ancient texts, reliable or not, can shed light on the period in which they were written and on the beliefs of certain sects at the time.  Whether its contents have historical validity is a completely separate question.  Compare, for instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls.  They are of immense value for historians and for textual criticism of the Old Testament manuscripts, but whether the teachings of the Qumran community accurately reflected Judaism is a separate question.  Scholars debate whether they were the Essenes of which Josephus wrote, and what was their relationship to the priestly class of Jewish believers in Jerusalem or to the Diaspora or to other Jewish sects.  The contrast between true Christianity and Gnosticism is more stark.  Sure, there were spin-off churches and various sects, but Christians and Jews have a standard: the Scriptures.  The NT canon (from a word meaning measuring rod) is to true Christianity what the OT canon was to Judaism: a rule, a guide, a trustworthy body of inspired writings that distinguishes the true faith from the false.  Gnosticism is not Christianity, and Christianity is not Gnosticism; their doctrines are poles apart.  We don’t need spurious writings to tell us what Christianity is.  We have the evidence right in front of us; the earlier, more reliable, more credible writings of the real apostles and their companions, and the words and acts of Jesus Himself as recorded by eyewitnesses.  Even unbelievers should acknowledge that you should get your information from the best sources available, not from later writings of doubtful authenticity used by heretical sects.  (Whether these sects considered themselves heretical is completely irrelevant; if you feel six feet tall but the yardstick measures you at three feet, sorry—enjoy your delusion.)
    The canonical NT writings all date from the 1st century, and some from just a few decades, or less than a decade, from the events described.  This is widely acknowledged by reputable historians, both secular and Christian.  There is an embarrassment of riches of manuscripts of these texts: thousands of them, not to mention translations and citations by early church fathers.  Long before the present NT canon become “official” in the days of Constantine, and long before there was a centralized church authority, early Christians shared a broad consensus on which texts were authentic and inspired.  The ones that were written by the original apostles or their close associates (such as Mark and Luke), including Paul’s epistles, were accepted by Christians all over the Roman empire.  There were a few without complete acceptance: documents such as II Peter and Revelation were accepted by some and not others; this may have been due to availability.  On the other hand, some documents like the Didache and Shepherd of Hermas enjoyed wide popularity for awhile but either were not considered inspired like the apostolic writings, or eventually declined in acceptance – not by official decree, but, again, by consensus.  Before there was a Catholic church with a centralized authority, church councils later codified what was already the accepted canon of the NT.  In the councils, there was some debate about the few books enjoying wide but not universal acceptance; the debates concluded with a strong affirmation of the present 27 books (a list nearly identical to those of some apostolic fathers much earlier).  How the NT canon came to be is a fascinating subject that will not be explored in detail here.  The main point is that the NT canon was not some arbitrary decree of a hierarchy trying to suppress minority views within a church, but an affirmation and formalization of the beliefs of Christians from around the Empire about what constituted Scripture – the word of God.
    Into this milieu appeared a number later documents that were either (1) known to be from Gnostic and other heretical sects, or (2) were falsely attributed to apostles or other first-century characters.  These are called pseudepigrapha, or falsely-ascribed epigraphs – i.e., spurious writings.  The Gospel of Judas is both.  As Collin Hansen wrote in Christianity Today (good article), the Gospel of Judas is not a gospel, and it was not written by Judas.  It would “sure change things, if it were true.”  But it isn’t.  It’s a phony document, written by a heretical cult.  So why the media attention?
    That there would be competing documents with the New Testament should come as no surprise.  Look at the copycats that follow any successful movie or book today.  As Christianity spread, so would motivations rise for competing with it or corrupting it with other religious traditions.  This had already begun in the book of Acts (e.g., see Paul’s warning to the Ephesian elders, Acts 20).  There were Judaizers trying to pull it toward legalism, and Roman mystery religions trying to pull it toward secret wisdom, and philosophers trying to meld it with Greek philosophy.  Jesus, Paul, Peter and Jude all warned of false teachers that would quickly arise and mislead many.  Already in Paul’s time there were hints of the Gnostic sects that the early church had to confront (cf. the warnings in Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, and I John).  There have been off-shoot and off-beat sects all through history.  True believers have always heeded the stern Biblical commands to guard against false teachers and deceivers who pollute the word of God with falsehoods out of the imaginations of their own heart.
    Comparison of Gnostic teachings with the core of the New Testament doctrine easily shows the differences.  The New Testament is remarkably consistent in doctrine, though written by men with a variety of backgrounds (fisherman, Jewish scholars, a doctor, a tax collector, and more), whereas the Gospel of Judas is clearly a Gnostic polemic dressed up as a historical narrative.  It is one of many false “gospels” that arose in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.  Naturally, a fake would get more attention if it could be passed off as written by Mary, Judas, Peter, Thomas, Barnabas or other (by now) famous characters.  (This particular fake was authored by the Cainites, a Gnostic sect devoted to praising the villains of the Bible.)  None of these spurious writings had the wide acceptance of the New Testament texts, and many were overtly denounced as heretical by local elders and Christian writers.  It’s easy to see why; they contained crazy ideas, or doctrines clearly contradictory to Scripture.  The Gospel of Judas falls into this category.  Perhaps some copies were destroyed, but more likely, it was not copied because it was known to be phony.  The copy we have now dates from about 300 AD.  Irenaeus knew about it in 180 and condemned it in Against Heresies (notice this is long before any centralized church or official councils), though its original date is unknown.  No serious scholar believes it has any real connection to Judas.  While any new archaeological find is interesting and worth study, a book like the Gospel of Judas, a translation of an earlier work, of doubtful antiquity and likely forgery, should not be put on the same shelf as the more trustworthy and verifiable manuscripts of the New Testament.
    For these reasons, is it not strange that the media are leaping to conspiracy theories that the early church tried to cover up these texts?  Read the New Testament, especially the sources accepted as earliest and most genuine by all reputable historians, and the differences are clear.  What does straw have in common with gold?  Yet NG and other news sources seem beside themselves to find ways to call the teachings of Jesus into question.  This is not scholarship; this is agenda-driven advocacy.
    Let a modern hypothetical case illustrate the point.  Suppose Michael Moore writes a secret biography of George Washington and attributes it to Benedict Arnold.  (Moore is able to maintain his anonymity somehow.)  A few copies get into circulation but are widely dismissed by scholars as forgeries and not worthy of any serious consideration.  The book is a flop; few copies ever get circulated, but it gets notoriety from high-profile book reviews, mostly negative.  A thousand years pass, and some archaeologist finds a German translation of Moore’s book.  For a long time in between, historians had possessed a wealth of primary sources and reputable biographies of Washington.  They had heard about Moore’s book only from reviewers who denounced it.  Now, the German version appears and is translated.  Radiocarbon dating places it somewhere about 200 years after Washington lived.  Scholars read the words of now-forgotten Michael Moore impersonating Benedict Arnold, Washington’s confidant turned traitor, telling new secrets about the father of our country.  Among other shocking revelations, “Arnold” claims that he only defected to the English because Washington asked him to.
    Would it make any sense to give such a book equal or superior standing against the reputable biographies that actually date back to the time of Washington himself?  Of course not; that would make the National Enquirer blush.  Then why all the hubbub over the Gospel of Judas and other apocryphal writings that were known and discounted by the heirs of the true apostles, who knew about and refuted the heretical sects that were putting out these teachings?  What if new writings of David Koresh or Jim Jones were to surface?  Some historians would probably be interested in them, and would benefit by learning details about the beliefs that led them to do what they did.  Most Christians would lose nothing by remaining ignorant of such things and focusing, instead, on the real Scriptures.  Light is more satisfying than darkness.
    If NG, the New York Times and the popular press have an axe to grind against Christians, and if they hold a political and social agenda overtly contrary to the principles of the New Testament, let them say so; it is their right in a free country (as long as they are not getting government funding).  But if they want any credibility, they owe it to themselves to get their facts straight and follow best practices of scholarship.  Then, and only then, can an intelligent discussion take place.
Next headline on:  The Bible and Theology • Media

Read both sides.  Impressed with the Charlie charge?  Kind of like Pickett’s, isn’t it?  On both counts the Darwinists are fighting tanks with feather pillows.  In both cases also, they only give the press their side of the story, and the other side is forbidden access to respond.
    It’s time for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.  For their bluff, bluster, fluff and froth, and for the silly idea that molecules planned ahead to be pre-adapted for later function, the reporters at University of Oregon are the winners:

Thornton’s group then showed that the ancestral receptor also responded to a far more ancient hormone with a similar structure; this made it “preadapted” to be recruited into a new functional partnership when aldosterone later evolved.  “The stepwise process we were able to reconstruct is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution,” Thornton said.  “So-called irreducible complexity was just a reflection of a limited ability to see how evolution works.”

O ye of little faith, they cry, can ye not see how the unguided hand of Charlie hath wrought these wonders?  The incorrigibility of Darwinian fundamentalists knows no bounds.  But what will they say when they have to fight real intellectual armies in public view instead of straw soldiers?  Pull down the the Bamboozle Curtain and public perceptions will change really fast.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Dumb Ideas

• EurekAlert: a “key marker in the evolutionary transition of fish to limbed animals.”
• News@Nature: this is “the fish that crawled out of water” – a true ‘missing link’ that “it helps to fill in a gap in our understanding of how fish developed legs for land mobility, before eventually evolving into modern animals including mankind.”
• BBC News:  “Fossil animals found in Arctic Canada provide a snapshot of fish evolving into land animals... giving researchers a fascinating insight into this key stage in the evolution of life on Earth.”.... Could “could prove to be as much of an ‘evolutionary icon’ as Archaeopteryx – an animal believed to mark the transition from reptiles to birds.”
• Scientific American:  “Newfound Fossil Is Transitional between Fish and Landlubbers.”
• New Scientist:  “IT WAS one of the most important events of the last 400 million years: the moment our fishy ancestors began hauling themselves onto dry land.  Now a fossil from the very beginning of that crucial transition has been found in the remote Arctic.”  Neil Shubin calls it a “a ‘fishopod’: part fish, part tetrapod.”
• AP, via MSNBC:  “Scientists have caught a fossil fish in the act of adapting toward a life on land, a discovery that sheds new light on one of the greatest transformations in the history of animals.  Researchers have long known that fish evolved into the first creatures on land with four legs and backbones more than 365 million years ago, but they’ve had precious little fossil evidence to document how it happened.... ‘It sort of blurs the distinction between fish and land-living animals,’ said one of its discoverers, paleontologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago.”
• National Geographic:  “It’s our closest fish cousin, scientists say.  Millions of years ago it apparently hoisted its croc-like head out of the water—and the rest is history.”
• New York Times:  “Other scientists said that in addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils were a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who have long argued that the absence of such transitional creatures are a serious weakness in Darwin’s theory.”
• LiveScience:  “Fishy Land Beast Bridges Evolutionary Gap.”
• L.A. Times:  “One Small Step for Fish... ” (fill in the next line; at least the LA Times wins cleverest title).  “These exciting discoveries are providing fossil Rosetta Stones for a deeper understanding of this evolutionary milestone – fish to land-roving tetrapods,” said H. Richard Lane (NSF).

Here we report the discovery of a well-preserved species of fossil sarcopterygian fish from the Late Devonian of Arctic Canada that represents an intermediate between fish with fins and tetrapods with limbs, and provides unique insights into how and in what order important tetrapod characters arose.  Although the body scales, fin rays, lower jaw and palate are comparable to those in more primitive sarcopterygians, the new species also has a shortened skull roof, a modified ear region, a mobile neck, a functional wrist joint, and other features that presage tetrapod conditions.  The morphological features and geological setting of this new animal are suggestive of life in shallow-water, marginal and subaerial habitats.

During the origin of tetrapods in the Late Devonian (385-359 million years ago), the proportions of the skull were remodelled [sic; implies intelligent design], the series of bones connecting the head and shoulder was lost, and the region that was to become the middle ear [sic; implies progress] was modified.  At the same time, robust limbs with digits evolved, the shoulder girdle and pelvis were altered, the ribs expanded, and bony connections between vertebrae developed.

Panderichthys possesses relatively few tetrapod synapomorphies [convergent features], and provides only partial insight into the origin of major features of the skull, limbs and axial skeleton of early tetrapods.  In view of the morphological gap between elpistostegalian fish and tetrapods, the phylogenetic framework for the immediate sister group of tetrapods has been incomplete and our understanding of major anatomical transformations at the fish–tetrapod transition has remained limited.

A phylogenetic analysis of sarcopterygian fishes and early tetrapods (Fig. 7) supports the hypothesis that Tiktaalik is the sister group of tetrapods or shares this position with Elpistostege.  Tiktaalik retains primitive tetrapodomorph features such as dorsal scale cover, paired fins with lepidotrichia, a generalized [sic] lower jaw, and separated entopterygoids in the palate, but also possesses a number of derived [sic] features of the skull, pectoral girdle and fin, and ribs that are shared with stem tetrapods such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega.  Tiktaalik is similar to these forms in the possession of a wide spiracular tract and the loss of the opercular, subopercular and extrascapulars.  The pectoral girdle is derived [sic] in the degree to which the scapulocoracoid is expanded dorsally and ventrally, and the extent to which the glenoid fossa is oriented laterally.  The pectoral fin is apomorphic [i.e., derived, more developed] in the elaboration of the distal endoskeleton, the mobility of segmented regions of the fin, and the reduction of lepidotrichia distally.

The pectoral skeleton of Tiktaalik is transitional between fish fin and tetrapod limb.  Comparison of the fin with those of related fish reveals that the manus [hand] is not a de novo novelty of tetrapods; rather, it was assembled in fishes over evolutionary time to meet the diverse challenges of life in the margins of Devonian aquatic ecosystems.

The concept of “missing links” has a powerful grasp on the imagination: the rare transitional fossils that apparently capture the origins of major groups of organisms are uniquely evocative.  But the concept has become freighted with unfounded notions of evolutionary ‘progress’ and with a mistaken emphasis on the single intermediate fossil as the key to understanding evolutionary transitions.  Much of the importance of transitional fossils actually lies in how they resemble and differ from their nearest neighbours in the phylogenetic tree, and in the picture of change that emerges from this pattern.
    We raise these points because on pages 757 and 764 of this issue are reports of just such an intermediate: Tiktaalik roseae, a link between fishes and land vertebrates that might in time become as much of an evolutionary icon as the proto-bird [sic] Archaeopteryx.

Although these small distal bones bear some resemblance to tetrapod digits in terms of their function and range of movement, they are still very much components of a fin.  There remains a large morphological gap between them and digits as seen in, for example, Acanthostega: if the digits evolved from these distal bones, the process must have involved considerable developmental repatterning.  The implication is that function changed in advance of morphology.

Of course, there are still major gaps in the fossil record.  In particular we have almost no information about the step between Tiktaalik and the earliest tetrapods, when the anatomy underwent the most drastic changes, or about what happened in the following Early Carboniferous period, after the end of the Devonian, when tetrapods became fully terrestrial.  But there are still large areas of unexplored Late Devonian and Early Carboniferous deposits in the world – the discovery of Tiktaalik gives hope of equally ground-breaking finds to come.

OK, Shubin, you caught a fish and got your picture in the paper.  Now that you are feeling your oats, take on the Cambrian explosion.
    You didn’t get this much detail from the major news media.  You didn’t hear the discoverers hedge their bets and admit that this fossil is just a tiny piece of a huge puzzle that is mostly not understood.  You didn’t hear the AP (Associated Preach) tell the truth that the fossil record is characterized by large and systematic gaps between groups, with only rare, isolated and questionable transitional forms.  No, you got hype and bluster and far-fetched exaggeration, where the actual bones were incidental to the true goal of making Charlie not look as dead as he is.  Meanwhile, an explanation of the origin of all the genetic information required for such a transition was completely glossed over; and, of course, not a single credible non-Darwinian paleontologist got a word in edgewise over the din of the mainstream media’s Charlie pride parade.  If you got mad last time (04/05/2004) it’s time to get mad again – for the same reasons. 
A reader writes:  “Dear Staff... The April 6, 2006 article on the ‘Fish-O-Pod’ found in Canada is great news... Now we know where all the Walking Catfish in the lakes in Orlando, Florida came from... They actually walk up on the interstate and get eliminated by cars!  FISH-O-POD is nothing new, we have been squashing them for years!”  Another commented on the AP coverage, “I got seasick from all the handwaving.”  To this we add, scientists are not assuming that mudskippers are transitional forms to salamanders, are they?  Or grunion to snakes, or rikshas to sedans?  Let’s play their game and daydream about beavers evolving into seals, and flying squirrels evolving into bats.  Connecting dots is child’s play.
    See also a preliminary response from the Discovery Institute, followed by another by Casey Luskin on Evolution News; also, a preliminary analysis by Dr. David Menton on Answers in Genesis: “Gone fishin’ for a missing link?”  An article by Jonathan Witt on ID the Future has information on the comparison with Archaeopteryx, and contains an apropos quotation made years ago by Henry Gee, editor of Nature, on the feasibility of reconstructing phylogenetic trees from fossils.  The best part: “To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story — amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”  And that’s from the senior editor of the same journal where this announcement appeared today.
Parting thought:  In a private conversation about evolution recently, a friend responded: “I don’t have any doubts about evolution; there have been too many people working on it for too long for it to not to be well established.”  (See Bandwagon, Authority and Glittering Generalities in the Baloney Detector.)  Do you appreciate the value of delving into the details?
Tip:  See this story in Spanish on: SEDIN.
Next headline on: Fossils • Marine Life • Terrestrial Zoology • Evolution

• Hard sponges:  Aimee Cunningham in Science News (03/25/2006; 169:12, p. 184) described the astonishment Joanna Aizenberg (Bell Labs) felt about the Venus Flower Basket sponge   Not only is its silicate glass structure strong enough for a man to stand on, it is intricately woven with cross bridges and organic shock-absorbing glue – “the most perfect design I have ever seen.”  (See also 07/08/2005 and 03/01/2004 about its fiber optics.)
• Tough beaks:  In the same Science News article, Cunningham told about Mark Meyers (UC San Diego) being impressed with the beaks of toucans in Brazil.  Toucans have the largest beak-to-body ratio of any bird; they use them to grip heavy fruit, which they skillfully toss into the air to gulp down.  “The beak must be rigid enough to resist bending and twisting forces, and yet this stiffness can’t come with great weight, or the bird couldn’t get off the ground,” Cunningham writes of Meyers’ findings.  “Indeed, despite its dominating size, the beak makes up only one-twentieth of the toucan’s body mass.”  Materials scientists are very interested in such substances found in sea sponges, seashells, oysters and bird beaks, because they are lightweight and resistant to fracture without sacrificing strength.
• Weird tooth:  Science News (3/25/2006, 169:12, p. 186) also had more details about narwhals, the arctic whales with the big spiral tusks that apparently serve as environmental antennae (see 12/13/2005).  Susan Milius wrote about the difficulty Martin Nweeia (dentist at Harvard Medical School) had in studying the elusive animals.  Little is known about the life habits of these medium-size whales that spend much of their lives under the Arctic ice, but scientists are beginning to follow them with sensors embedded in their skin, which have detected them making record dives to 1,800 meters.  Though some researchers insist the tusks are sexually-selected structures for male prowess, Nweeia felt the 10 million tubules connecting to the nerves don’t make sense if the tusks are mere fishing spears or lances for dueling.  He said, “When you have something so exquisite, you don’t bring that on the battlefield.”
• Bee Landing Gear:  According to EurekAlert, the Society for Experimental Biology found out why orchid bees let their feet dangle under them while flying.  The feet provide extra lift and prevent roll at high speeds.  This principle might help with the design of miniature flying machines for search and rescue operations.
• Rabbit tricks:  A greyhound pursuing a rabbit might give up and call it a bad hare day.  The rabbit has better muscles for jumping and quick turns, says a report on EurekAlert.
• Follow the ant home:  An ant may know the route better than a man with a map and compass.  Ants can remember landmarks, but also have a backup system, says a story from the Society for Experimental Biology reported on EurekAlert.  They have a “path integrator” that “allows them to create straight shortcuts back to the nest even when the outbound part of the forage run was very winding,” by constantly reassessing position with an internal compass and measure of distance traveled.  “Knowledge about path integration and landmark learning gained from our experiments with ants has already been incorporated in autonomous robots,” the article says.
• Follow the ant under the bar:  Ants can do limbo, says another story on EurekAlert.  They can visually judge the height of a horizontal barrier and crawl under it without slowing down.  The ants can sense a barrier with either eyes or antennae.
• Crow puzzle:  Rooks, a kind of crow, passed an intelligence test.  They were able to manipulate a piece of food through a tunnel that contained a trap door.  EurekAlert summarized a series of experiments reported in Current Biology¹ that supported the idea these birds use sophisticated physical cognition to understand puzzles and how to solve them, unlike preprogrammed robots that merely make associations.
• Hummingbird memory:  Another report in Current Biology² last month found that hummingbirds never forget.  Experiments with controlled nectar sources showed that they could remember the location of eight rewards and update the information throughout the day.  They could also remember the timing of visits, so as to avoid revisiting empty flowers until they refilled.  “Not only is this the first time that this degree of timing ability has been shown in wild animals,” report Henderson et al., “but these hummingbirds also exhibit two of the fundamental aspects of episodic-like memory, the kind of memory for specific events often thought to be exclusive to humans.”
• Avionics is for the birds:  Bird watching will never be the same.  Scientists can now attach miniature sensors and miniature 50g cameras to the bodies and wings of birds to learn about how they fly, says EurekAlert.  One group is doing this with eagles to figure out the function of their control systems.
• Fly feet:  A stunning electron micrograph of a fly’s foot can be found on a story on EurekAlert.  Researchers are studying the elegant foot pads to figure out how flies can dance on the ceiling.  To a group presenting their findings at the Society for Experimental Biology today, fly feet provide “inspiration for mimicking locomotion of wall and ceiling walking machines, which use micropatterned polymer feet for generating adhesion.”
• Stargazing lobster:  The UK is building a telescope for the International Space Station based on the design of the lobster eye, reported BBC News.  The Lobster All-Sky X-ray Monitor will mimic what lobsters do: utilize a “huge array of tiny channels that focus light by reflection, rather than by bending it through lenses found in human eyes,” giving it an extremely wide field of vision.  It has taken nearly 30 years for humans to perfect the optics involved.
• The Bug Love:  Hate insects?  Think again.  News @ Nature says, “Next time you dismiss insects as mere creepy-crawlies, ponder for a while on what life would be like without them.  Our six-legged friends might be more valuable than you think – research estimates that they’re worth at least a staggering $57 billion to the US economy every year.”  From agriculture to birdwatching, insects are there to help keep our economy buzzing.  Beetles devour harmful waste.  Flies provide bait for fishermen.  Bees pollinate our crops.  Many species encourage biodiversity and provide essential food for many animals.  (Where mosquitos fit in, the article did not say.)

Most of these stories did not mention evolution, and in those that did, it was more an aftermarket gloss than a contribution to the scientific understanding.  A revolution in animal studies is underway – a revolution based on design principles.  The investigations here presuppose that there are elegant designs in nature that humans can try to understand.  The design principles observed are transferable to human engineering.  Darwinism, a minor Victorian religious sect, has nothing to offer the Information Age.  Think design.
Next headline on:  Terrestrial Zoology • Marine Life • Mammals • Birds • Intelligent Design • Biomimetics • Amazing Stories

As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection – in a word, by evolution.
    The challenges begin at once.
    “Isn’t it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?” sophomore Chris Willett demands.  “‘Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn’t.”
    Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but Willett isn’t listening.  I feel a tail growing!” he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.
    Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal [sic] through two lumbering transitional species [sic] and finally into the sea.  He’s about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: “How are you 100% sure that those bones belong to those animals?  It could just be some deformed raccoon.”
    From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: “Those are real bones that someone actually found?  You’re not just making this up?”
    “No, I am not just making it up,” Frisby says.

“If a teacher is making a claim that land animals evolved into whales, students should ask: ‘What precisely is involved? How does the fur turn into blubber, how do the nostrils move, how does the tiny tail turn into a great big fluke?’” said John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research near San Diego.  “Evolution is so unsupportable, if you insist on more information, the teacher will quickly run out of credibility,” he said.

Frisby promised to show the class several fossils that document [sic] the halting and gradual evolution from apes to humans.  Then he reminded them not to expect equal numbers of human and dinosaur remains, because hominids emerged only recently [sic], while dinosaurs ruled the planet for nearly 200 million years [sic].
    At that, sophomore Derik Montgomery snapped to attention.  “I heard that dinosaurs are only thousands of years old, like 6,000.  Not millions,” he said.
    “That’s wrong,” Frisby responded briskly.  “What can I tell you?.  “You can’t believe everything you read.”

No wonder Mr. Frisby is ineffective.  He’s still using transparencies.  Leshner, don’t waste your money on guidebooks and workshops; give the poor teacher a projector and PowerPoint.
    It takes some reading between the lines to appreciate the significance of what this article represents about the growing cultural revolution over evolution.  Like most reporters in the MSM (mainstream media), Simon is undoubtedly spinning this story to portray a brave, courageous teacher holding his ground against obstreperous mind-numbed students brainwashed by their churches.  There are probably some that fit the stereotype.  If you are one of them, please be advised that disrespectfulness and shallow, joking objections to evolution are shameful and harmful.  Let CEH go on record as strongly denouncing personal attacks, rudeness or disrespect against teachers.  Such behavior will only reinforce the Darwinist stereotype about students who doubt evolution being church-indoctrinated, faith-motivated, anti-intellectual lemmings of their religion.  Let CEH also promote the highest values of intellectual honesty and integrity.  These values are necessary to expose and effectively dismantle the faith-based, mind-numbing religion of Darwinism.
    What stands out in this story are the several references to students bringing “sophisticated questions” that are well-researched and credible.  This is what Dr. John Morris recommended.  Asking good questions is fair game and essential to a good education.  Mr. Frisby pointed to a poster on the wall, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak.  Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen” (probably insinuating that students do the latter when hearing his evolution spiel).  But courage to speak up is praiseworthy when bad science is being presented.
    Challenging dogma does not have to be rude or disruptive.  Look at what Mr. Frisby presented as evidence – nothing but Bluffing Assertions of Dogmatism – the old B.A.D. habit of the Darwinists.  He holds up a paper-tape timeline of 430 million of years of evolution, with humans appearing in the last few inches.  Why not challenge that?  He says dinosaurs died out millions of years before humans evolve.  Says who?  He claims the fossil record is full of transitional forms, and “promises” to bring the evidence.  Where is it?  He says science must be about natural causes only.  Why so?  Simon waxed melodramatic telling a story about the spiritual warm fuzzies Mr. Frisby gets thinking about evolution.  Who cares?  In none of these cases did the teacher demonstrate solid evidence for evolution that would survive honest, critical inquiry.  He only reiterated the official dogmas of the Church of Charlie.  Courage demands that dogma be challenged in the science classroom.
    Calling all students.  Learn Baloney Detecting.  Learn good science.  Know your history.  Respect brute facts, but distinguish between evidence and dogma.  Be well-dressed, well-groomed, sit up straight, listen with vibrant attention, and learn.  Be a model student when it comes to homework and assignments.  But when something B.A.D. comes out of the teacher’s mouth, raise your hand, smile, wait your turn, and then ask that intelligent, pointed question that will leave Mr. Frisby at a loss for words.  Let your classmates see him forced to either quote the Darwin Articles of Faith in retreat, or, better, admit “I don’t know,” or best, “That is a very good question.  Let me research that.”  Ask in such a way that he will not be angry with you, but will gradually learn to become angry with the foolishness with which he himself was deceived.  If necessary, meet privately with your teacher instead of risking embarrassing him or her in class.  Do a good deed.  Enlist your teacher as an ally in the movement against B.A.D. science.
Next headline on: Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Education

Some day, one can hope that this bad habit of evolutionary drunks can be cured.  The drunks get high on methanol, which causes brain damage.  Wallowing in their stupor and verbal vomit, thinking everything is happy happy happy, engaging their fertile imaginations in euphoric visions of nonexistent beings, it escapes their notice that they are overlooking the most fundamental and essential aspect of life.  This aspect is sadly missing on Titan, Enceladus, Europa, Mars, and every other empty stage explored so far.  It is information.  Let rigorous observation and information theory bring some sobriety back to science, and rescue the next generation from a pitiful addiction.
Next headline on: Solar System • Origin of Life

How come scientists expect believers to just sit back and take their weird-science theories without objection, but the moment someone challenges their own weird-science explanations of evolution, they get paranoid and threaten lawsuits?  This hypothesis is so stupid.  To avoid creating irreverent mental images, let’s imagine some Hollywood actors trying to reenact the scene.  The actor playing Jesus is trying not to slip and slide all over a tipsy piece of thin ice.  The actors in the boat playing the disciples are faking a sense of awe looking at their leader wavering and struggling to keep his balance.  Suddenly he plunges through a hole, and the sense of awe turns to laughter.  Cut; take two.
    Once the actor on the ice manages to keep his footing while the cameras are rolling, the actor playing Peter gets out of the boat but his slab of ice slips from under him and he falls in, to the laughter of the other actors.  He swims over to the actor on the slab and yells back at the other disciples that it’s just a trick.  The character on the ice reaches down to pull in the one in the water, and loses his footing, and both wind up flailing around in the drink.
    It won’t work.  Doron Nof tried this before with the Red Sea crossing.  He tries to come up with purely natural explanations for Biblical miracles.  They wind up taking more faith than just trusting the word of the credible eyewitnesses.  Next thing you know he will say the calming of the storm was all just special effects on a sound stage.
Next headline on:  Bible • Dumb Ideas

• Golden Rule at Hahvahd:  The Harvard Gazette held a panel discussion on “How Do We Teach Evolution.”  Richard Lewontin sees the first priority as convincing the doubters that animals do evolve.  Reporter Bob Brustman ended with a surprising quote from Michael Ruse: “Whether you’re a believer or not, the quest to understand this magnificent, frightening, exhilarating world that we live in is just as much a moral demand laid upon us as ‘love your neighbor.’  People who don’t want to know the way the world is are spiritually dead.”  This seems to beg the question of how spirituality could evolve from particles.  Casey Luskin at Evolution News responded to the article with clarifications and definitions.
• Establishment Claws:  When is the government allowed to buck the Establishment Clause and endorse religious views?  Apparently, on the internet.  That’s what Casey Luskin complained on Evolution News after a federal judge threw out a lawsuit by Larry Caldwell accusing a federally-funded website, “Understanding Evolution,” of making overtly religious claims.
• Called Well:  Attorney Larry Caldwell may have lost the suit against the NCSE/UC website, but scored in the Lancaster School District, California, getting them to adopt a policy allowing for criticisms of evolution, reported John West on Evolution News (see also the coverage in a local paper, Antelope Valley Press).  The reaction of Science in its “Random Samples” (March 31) was short and probably meant to be sarcastic.  All it did was quote Alex Branning, “president of a group called Integrity in Academics, after the board of the Lancaster School District, in suburban Los Angeles, voted last week to adopt a policy stating that evolution should not be taught as an ‘unalterable fact.’”  According to the snippet, Branning said, “This is an innovative effort by the Lancaster School District to propel science education out of the 19th century and into the 21st century.”  Science headlined the item with the title, “Undeterred by Dover.”
• Sunday School:  That the previous item was not meant as favorable coverage of Branning was underscored by a larger entry on AAAS Affairs in the same (31 March) issue of Science.  It spoke glowingly of the workshop “Science on the Front Line” that AAAS sponsored at their annual meeting February 19 (see 03/14/2006 entry).
• Sath Keelana:  The South Carolina teaching standards don’t require the teaching of Darwin’s theory, so reporter for The State Cindi Ross Scoppe wondered what the fuss is about.  Whether teachers actually do bring evolution into the classrooms is another question, but her article points out the tension between teachers and students over a theory perceived to be hostile to Christianity.  MSNBC News, however, reported on a 10-6 decision opposing efforts to “critically analyze” evolutionary theory in the Bible-Belt state.
• The Redcoats Are Coming:  “Creationist theories about how the world was made are to be debated in GCSE science lessons in mainstream secondary schools in England,” reported the BBC News.  The subject is being included in a syllabus for biology by one of the three main exam boards.  Around the same time, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams stated that creationism should not be taught in the schools, a story in MSNBC News reported.  British creationist Paul Taylor gave a response about this on Answers in Genesis, while Michael Francisco on Evolution News stressed that his remarks against creationism should not be misconstrued as an attack on intelligent design; the media often conflate the two, he said.
• Play Ball – By Whose Rules?  Paul Nelson on ID The Future argued against the claim of Ron Numbers, often repeated by evolutionists, that the rules of science require methodological naturalism.
• Darwin’s Goliath:  Nigel Williams in Current Biology March 21 gave warm press for Richard Dawkins on the 30th anniversary of his epochal book, The Selfish Gene.  Williams gave particularly favorable treatment for Dawkins’ anti-religious sentiments.  “The gloves are off,” he said.  “Dawkins, in his present role as a professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford is fully engaged in challenging these views, but finds the situation increasingly frustrating.”
• With Friends Like This:  Madeleine Bunting wrote in The Guardian about how evolution foes chuckle approvingly at the anti-religion rants of Richard Dawkins and other hard core Darwinists.  Michael Ruse tries to quiet him down, realizing that his rhetoric reinforces their claims that evolution is a secular, atheist religion.  Bunting writes that the “moral responsibility” to generate light, not heat, escapes Richard Dawkins.  “His book on religion, The God Delusion, is to be published this autumn,” she ends with a smirk; “Dembski and the intelligent-design lobby must already be on their knees, thanking God.”
• Who Needs Enemies:  National Geographic interviewed E.O. Wilson favorably.  Called “Darwin’s Natural Heir,” the father of sociobiology thinks he can bridge the gap between religion and science by appealing to the shared love of nature and sense of responsibility for it.  It will be a hard sell, though; to many creationists, this former Southern Baptist turned secular humanist, who portrays Darwin’s theory as true and correct, is “one of the most prominent enemies they have.”
• Ohio: Feint Praise:  Jonathan Witt on ID the Future gave sarcastic credit to the Darwinists who succeeded in getting Ohio to vote down its “teach the controversy” lessons on evolution.  They found a way to speak out of both sides of their mouth, he says.  In Dover, Pennsylvania, they argued that teaching criticisms of evolution is not an argument for intelligent design.  In Ohio, they argued that it was.  “If the Darwinists can pull that off, I say the sky’s the limit,” he suggested.  This tactic should be extended to expunging all the evolutionary claims in science journals that contain arguments on both sides.
• Kansas: Clearing the Air:  Kansas Citizens for Science has printed a brochure in FAQ form trying to clear up misinformation about its science standards, reported Robert Crowther on Evolution News.  The story contains a link to the brochure.
• Baylor Backlash:  After denying tenure to Francis Beckwith on March 24 (see Baptist Press News), Baylor University (a southern Baptist school) is feeling heat from critics.  Beckwith is a distinguished faculty member who happened to write a book favorable to intelligent design (Law, Darwinism, and Public Education).  The journal First Things wrote a defense of Beckwith, and Evolution News listed a dozen media articles and blogs criticizing the decision.  John West on Evolution News said a scandal is brewing, and Baptist Press thinks this is another evidence of the academic decline of the university which chased away Dembski”s intelligent design center years ago.
• Pep Talk:  To William Dembski, who qualifies almost as a General in the anti-evolution wars, things are looking up.  He told Associated Press (see Kentucky paper Lexington Herald-Leader) that evolution theory is on its last legs, and will likely disintegrate within a decade.  Pro-evolutionists quoted in the article don’t share that outlook, of course; UK professor James Krupa denies that evolution is dying and calls it “the driving force, the foundation of all biology.”  But Dembski feels that just allowing freedom for critical analysis of evolution will be enough pressure.  Evolution is so problematic, he says, it does not need help from intelligent design to collapse.
• Watchmaker’s Clock Ticks On:  Anthony Paul Mator wrote for World Magazine a summary of ID happenings since Dover, saying ID is “Still ticking” and has found new life after the Dover defeat.  Despite recent close calls in South Carolina, Ohio and Utah, the public is getting to hear more about both sides, and the Lancaster, California victory is a “bright spot” on the horizon.

Anyone seeing the Darwinians trying to prove their case with actual scientific evidence?  No: it’s either strategizing to keep criticisms away, or trying to convince the skeptics that Charlie was actually a friend of religion and therefore not a threat to religious beliefs.  Go Dawkins; keep printing those books; thank God.
Next headline on:  Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory • Intelligent Design • Education

This is probably not that unrepresentative of the feelings of today’s leftist-leaning evolutionary biologists about you and me and their fellow human beings.  We don’t see them stepping up to the plate to set an example for the rest of us.  And Carlson, thanks for your moral outrage, but tell us how truth and morality could have evolved.
    As we approach Easter season, choose you this day whom you will trust: a bunch of wacko radicals who think you would be better off dead, and whose actions, if they had the power, would make Hitler’s look almost gentle by comparison – or the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who loved each individual so much as to lay down His life to rescue them from the judgment due their sins, even when they were in rebellion and not even looking for help (see Romans 5:5-8).
Next headline on: Politics and Ethics

If they can get the soap bubble to fossilize longer than a month, it doesn’t follow that it will stay that way for 570 million years.  It’s time for the evidence to throw some serious challenges to the dating scheme of the evolutionary biologists and geologists.
Next headline on: Fossils • Dating Methods • Evolution